trying out a new cover

The first book I put up on Kindle, a hardboiled sci-fi novelette called The ElectroLive Murders, has been available for over a year now. I think around 30 copies have been purchased, and more than 500 copies have been downloaded for free, but I still feel like the book hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. A lot of the successful self-publishers I read about emphasize the importance of changing things around with books, and trying new ideas, even after those books have been released to the public. So, in the spirit of experimentation, I'm trying out a new cover.

Here's the old cover:

And here's the new one:

It should be showing up in the Kindle store within the next 24 hours. I'll be sure to follow up with details if the new cover impacts sales in any significant way.

Also, I feel it's worth noting that the images used on the new cover were found through an image search of files marked as Creative Commons material. The Creative Commons website is a pretty incredible resource, grouping millions of photographs, songs, drawings, and other stuff together--all of which have been labelled as free to use (with certain restrictions) by their creators. The photos I used, of the monkey and the circuitry, were taken by Antony Grossy and Dom Pates, respectively.

P.S. Today and tomorrow my horror novelette Cool Blue is available for free download on Kindle.

reassessing self-publishing

I've kicked into a higher gear with the fantasy novel, trying to finish the first draft before mid-August, when I'll be leaving the country for a few months. I'm currently at 76K words (about 250 pages), still hoping to wrap up somewhere around 100K, though throughout the process of writing this book it's taken more words than I'd predicted to carry out certain events. Maybe it'll take 120K to tie off the plot, in the end. If it does, I'm not sure how I'll manage to write that many words before my mid-August deadline.

Anyway, assuming I do, somehow, manage to finish the first draft, the plan is to let it rest for the months when I'll be out of country, and then come back to revise and polish it into a more-final draft. After that... I don't know.

When I started this blog on February 24, I'd just taken a heavy dose of J.A. Konrath's cool-aid. Read his blog and you'll feel like the money starts raining down the moment you self-publish on Kindle. The guy's had incredible success with his own self-publishing efforts, and he preaches that the eBook revolution is Shangri-La for authors.

There are several other high-profile cases of self-publishing success to bolster Konrath's position--it was Amanda Hocking's story that initially got me all excited--but even the idea of several dozen authors earning a living from self-publishing seems a bit less impressive when you start to consider the hundreds of thousands of other authors who have thrown their hats in the ring. And research is starting to emerge showing that 50% of all self-published authors never even earn $500. Furthermore, a lot of the people who are benefiting most from self-publishing already have a fan-base developed from previous books that were traditionally published--J.A. Konrath himself being a good example.

But traditional publishing still seems like a pretty shitty deal, too. The average advance for a debut novel in the fantasy genre is supposedly about $5K, and advances aren't always a good thing, anyway, as you can be held liable if you fail to earn out. If you're earning 6-8% percent of the cover price on a book that sells for $6.99, earning out that advance might take a while (you'd need to sell 10,000 copies, at 50 cents a copy, to do so; and keep in mind that if you do sell those 10K copies, the book has made as much as $70K, and you've only been given $5K of that money). Worse still, traditional contracts usually compromise authors to the point where they no longer even own the book they've written. If the publishing house fumbles your book and you want it back, you'll probably need to lawyer-up and prepare to go to war to get it.

So, while I'm working away at the novel, I'm also wondering what I'll try to do with it when I'm finished. I don't imagine that I'll find Shangri-La by publishing the book with a traditional press--assuming I'd even find one interested in taking it--but the experiences I've had with self-publishing, and the more-balanced view of it I think I'm getting now that I've looked beyond Konrath's blog, make me wonder if pursuing the traditional publishing venue might be worth considering.

poor returns

So far I've made my novelette THE ELECTROLIVE MURDERS available for free on 5 days, and a total of 576 free copies have been downloaded. Since the first free day, 11 copies have sold, and two new reviews have been posted. While I'm happy to think that more than 500 people thought my novelette looked interesting enough to download, I wish more of those downloads resulted in reviews.

How do you get the ball rolling with a kindle book? How do you pull lightning toward it, and make it catch fire? I'm still trying to find out.

The free downloads seem to be the most effective thing I've found so far, but they're still not especially effective. And trying to get bloggers to review the book has resulted in a lot of work with virtually no payback (of the 15 blogs contacted, only one blog wrote a review).

zombies

Still at work on the fantasy novel. About 67K words/217 pages in, thinking the first draft will finish at 100K words/320 pages--so I'm guessing I'm 2/3 done with the first draft. Hope to finish by mid August, then let it rest for a few months before revision.

Already imagining the next project. I'm thinking zombie apocalypse. Lurchers, not runners. Zombie condition provoked by stimulant-use to deal with chronic overwork amongst upwardly bound young professionals--tainted caffeine pills, or energy drinks, or something. So: yuppie zombies. Looking forward to a chance to splatter some yuppies.

The two novelettes I've currently got up on Kindle both have zombie-elements, though neither is a classic zombie-style story. The idea of dead or brain-dead people cursed to continue walking the earth, unable to rest, has deep resonance for me. And not just for me. Lots of people are fascinated by zombies.

Lots of horror ideas relate to zombies, or un-death, too. Vampires are sort of like zombies. Robots can also be like zombies--moving and acting without life.

Recently, in the news, a story of zombie-like behavior in our world. Horrific, scary stuff.

Grant Morrison and uninhibited imagination

About a month ago I put up a post about a book I like called Writers on Comics Scriptwriting. The book is a collection of interviews with people who write for comics, and it brings together perspectives from a lot of really great writers. One of the most entertaining interviews in the book is Grant Morrison's, who wrote The Invisibles and We3 and All-Star Superman. Like the other writers, Morrison's got a lot of useful info about the peculiarities of writing for the comic book medium, the challenges and rewards of working with artists, etc., but the interview gets really interesting when he starts talking about how he was abducted by aliens, how he uses the comics he creates as magic sigils to affect his real life, and other far out stuff like that. The guys an interesting character, to be sure.

He's so interesting, in fact, that some guys made a movie about him called Talking With Gods. Here's the trailer.



I watched the movie a few weeks back (you can watch it free on Hulu), and then I checked a whole bunch of his comics out from the library, and I've been reading Grant Morrison like crazy since then.

Not all of his stuff is perfect, but at his best Morrison's stories are exhilarating and intriguing and--to put it plainly--a whole lot of fun. Probably the work I liked best was All-Star Superman, which is all the more significant because I normally am not interested in the Superman character at all--he's just too boring-ly perfect and omnipotent to interest me. Morrison's story, though, manages to take the omnipotent, uber-grand scale of Superman, and frame a story to meet those dimensions. What I mean is: Morrison deals with Superman as an archetype, as an idea more than a person. The world Superman exists in, consequently, is a fantasy world, a place to explore ideas about our reality--and about the values and perspectives we develop to help us deal with that reality--without attempting to recreate something that feels authentically real. The story becomes a parable, but a parable of epic scale. And, partly because of that, Morrison captures some of the wonder and optimism we feel as kids, but he does it with a story that has no taint of immaturity.

Reading All-Star Superman, and watching the Grant Morrison movie, has helped remind me of how much fun it can be to just dream big dreams, to let my imagination run wild. It's easy to feel obligated to write stories that try to stay true to reality, but that can be inhibiting, too. Why not go all in for fantasy? There's joy to be found there, sometimes.

free download days

I'm not sure if it's solely due to the day of the week, but last Wednesdays free-downloads of The ElectroLive Murders only reached 23 in number, which is less than ten percent of the download numbers from the Friday and Saturday before. Maybe putting it that close to the first day hurt the numbers, too.

update: still ain't paid

Last month, after finally making some sales on the Kindle titles I've got up, I finally reached the sum of $10, which means I've finally earned enough to get paid. Unfortunately, Amazon is no longer issuing paper checks for any amount less than $100, so in order to receive my earnings I'll have to give them direct access to my bank account for a transfer. And then it'll take 60 additional days before their system disburses on the monies earned earned thus far.

I haven't entered my bank info onto their system yet, though I probably will despite my unease with having one more hackable place with my private information on it. Or maybe I'll just keep waiting, and hope that in another couple of years I'll actually reach the $100 mark, and be able to request a paper check.

I'm not overly cynical about any of this, though. I've had stories and poems published by more than a half-dozen other groups, and haven't seen money from any of them either. Obviously, I know that writing isn't the best way to use your energy if making money is the goal.

But I do wonder how much money Amazon has made through selling titles on Kindle, and never had to pay any portion of it out, either because the author never reached $10, or wasn't willing to add account info to the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing site. I've heard that over a million titles have been published on the Kindle. If even 10% of those titles never sell enough copies to earn $10 (and I bet the percentage of sub-$10 sellers is a lot higher than that), that's 100,000 titles that have earned money that Amazon gets to keep all for itself.

Other news: despite having 350 copies of ElectroLive Murders downloaded during last week's two free days, the end result has been just one review and 10 additional sales. I've also logged 2 sales of Cool Blue since that drive, so possibly those are the result of people wanting more after having read ElectroLive, but in the end it hasn't started the snowball rolling downhill after all.

I figured I'd put ElectroLive up for free again today, to see how it'd do on a Wednesday. We're 75% done with the day, and there've been less than a dozen downloads so far.

Oh well. None of this is a particularly big surprise, and none of it will put a significant damper on my mood. I'm used to it.

my successful attempt

A few weeks ago I put up a post describing ways I've tried to promote my novelette "The ElectroLive Murders," figuring that other authors self-publishing on Kindle might be interested--even though none of the methods I'd used had been very successful. Last Friday, I finally found a strategy that seems to have resulted in at least some success, and I figured I'd mention it here. The strategy is, basically: give it away for free.

Most Kindle authors probably already know that Amazon has a Kindle Select option. What it means for Kindle owners is that they can pay a special annual fee to gain Amazon Prime status, which allows them to "borrow" certain books on their Kindle, and watch certain movies, and listen to certain music, without additional charges. What it means for authors publishing on Kindle is you promise to make your book available only on the Kindle for at least 90 days, and in return your book is made available for borrowing by those customers enrolled in Amazon Prime. If someone borrows your book, you get a portion of a monthly fund set aside for books signed up for Kindle Select. For the past several months, the money a "borrow" earns has been higher than what many authors actually earn for a sale.

That's all well and good, but the reason I'm mentioning Kindle Select now is because of the other benefit an author gets for signing their title up--they gain the option to make the book available for free for up to five days during each 90 day period. After putting a second novelette up on Kindle--my horror story "Cool Blue"--I decided to make "The ElectroLive Murders" free for a day, in hopes that people would download it and then, if they liked it, go on to buy "Cool Blue" as well. Originally, my plan was to make it free on Saturday, April 21, but at the last minute I decided to make it available for Friday, April 20 also. I did this because I wanted to compare the number of downloads on Friday and Saturday, to see which day had more people looking for free books.

In the end, I didn't actually check up on how the free days were going until after they'd both passed--I generally try to avoid computers and the internet on weekends--so I'm not sure what the counts were for each day. I do know, however, that in 48 hours 350 copies of "The ElectroLive Murders" were downloaded; and that at its best the book reached #4 of the top 100 free High Tech Science Fiction books, and #10 of the top 100 free Hardboiled Detective Mysteries (for the Friday and Saturday time period). And since then, four copies have sold, and one new review of the book has been put up.

Obviously, none of these numbers are especially impressive when compared to what lots of other people are selling, but for me this has been the single most successful promotion attempt I've made so far. I'm guessing that many of the free copies won't ever actually be read, but I'm hoping that eventually at least some of the people who picked up a copy will read it, and I think that a lot of them will like it when they do. And maybe, just maybe, they'll look up my name and consider buying other titles I've written, if they like the first thing they've read.

I put "The ElectroLive Murders" up on Kindle over a year ago now, and even though I haven't sold enough copies to earn any sort of payment for it yet, I'm still confident that it's a fun story, and that all I really need to do is get the word out to people, and they'll buy it. Finally, after a series of failed attempts to get the word out, I've found something that actually does produce some sort of positive result. And even if this free promotion doesn't result in any significant sales, just getting the book out there to more people--and having a larger audience for my work--feels like success to me. In the end, I'm writing because I love to write--getting paid would be a bonus.

COOL BLUE is live

My horror novelette COOL BLUE is now available for download on Kindle. I'm not sure what specific type of horror it would be. Creature Feature? Infection Story? Bad Bromance? Here's the teaser:

Jeff Jones is new to San Francisco, and he's eager to explore the city. After two weeks of sun-shrouding fog, the weather finally takes a turn for the better, and Jeff decides to go on a walk. He stumbles across the "Mystery Ocean" fish store, and what he finds inside changes him, in a horrible way.

Manny Ramirez is Jeff's roommate, and he counts his blessings every day. He's part of an awesome community of young Christians, he's recently met a wonderful girl, and after two weeks of heavy fog, the sun is shining brightly on his city. The only problem he's got is his roommate Jeff, who's starting to act very strange.

San Francisco is famous for its fog. Unfortunately for Jeff and Manny, a heat wave starts today.

The cover features photos put up by people on Deviant Art several years ago. I've tried to contact them through email and through the Deviant Art webpage, and I haven't had any success so far. If, by some rare miracle, you are one of the two photographers whose pictures are featured on the cover (and credited on the first page within), please contact me. I want to give you part of the gazillions of dollars this Kindle book is sure to earn!

Also, now that I've got a second novelette up on Kindle, I'm planning on making the first one (The ElectroLive Murders) available for free download this Saturday, April 21st. Do a Kindle search for "electrolive murders" that day, and get yourself a free e-copy!

Writers on Comics Scriptwriting

Back in the early 90s, DC comics started its Vertigo imprint, which was aimed at 'mature readers' and mostly devoid of superheroes. A pack of British writers were brought over to script different titles in the series, and the results were pretty damned incredible: Neil Gaiman delving into classic myth with The Sandman; Grant Ennis exploding both the Western genre and Catholicism with The Preacher; Warren Ellis attacking cultural norms, and celebrating muck-raking journalism, with Transmetropolitan; Grant Morrison incorporating some of the most far-out mysticism and magic I've ever encountered into a secret-agent story. In my mind, the early Vertigo years rank as one of those golden eras in storytelling, with supremely talented authors and artists working together, feeding off each other, and pushing their arts to inspired levels.

A number of the old-school Vertigo authors, as well as other brilliant storytellers like Frank Miller (creator of Sin City and 300) and Jeph Loeb (one of the best writers to ever take on Batman), are interviewed in this book. It's a great peek into the minds of a group of very talented people, and it offers a lot of interesting thoughts on the nature of imagination and creativity. The book is out of print, but if you ever stumble across a copy, its definitely worth a read.

my failed attempts

As I mentioned in a previous post, I put my novelette The ElectroLive Murders up on Kindle over a year ago, and still haven't managed to sell enough copies to get paid. It's not for lack of trying, either. Just in case any other self-published authors out there are curious, I figured I'd summarize my failed promotion attempts. But before you dip into what follows, beware: this is crass business talk, and pretty long winded, and it chronicles a series of failures. You might not want to read it after all.

Failure #1: Review Blogs. The article I read that got me excited about self-publishing on Kindle was a profile of YA author Amanda Hocking. She attributed her massive success to book bloggers, saying that her sales took off once bloggers started reviewing her books. Hoping to emulate even a fraction of that success, I began researching and contacting review blogs. Early on in my research, I stumbled across the Reviewer List on Step-By-Step Self-Publishing's website, and I started working through it. In the end I probably contacted at least a dozen reviewers--and I made sure that the current information for those reviewers stated that they were open to submissions and interested in the type of book that The ElectroLive Murders is. Of those 12+ submissions, three responded, and one ended up reading and reviewing the story. No sales resulted. Statistical summary: ~6 hours of effort, 0 sales.

Failure #2: Amazon Presence. When I first opened a Kindle Direct Publishing account, Amazon sent me a welcome email with tips for newcomers. I read those tips and tried to follow them. The main one I remember now is this: put together an Amazon Author's page. So I did.. I also realized that hundreds of Kindle authors were lurking around the Amazon forums, hoping to connect with readers. The most blatant way this plays out--relating to authors flogging their books--is the creation of topic threads in the Meet Our Authors section. Basically, authors post comments mentioning their books in threads that group together books by topic--99 cent paranormal romance novels, for example. I was pretty skeptical of the likelihood of any of that sort of effort resulting in sales, but hundreds of people seem to think it's worth doing, so I figured I'd give it a shot--I posted comments on a few threads, and I started a few threads too. Guess what--my skepticism proved warranted. Statistical summary: 2 hours of effort, 0 sales.

Failure #3: Swag-bribery for reviews. Besides the writing I do as Don Broma, I also publish other projects under different names. I'm trying to create a distance between Don Broma's work and my other writing, so I won't mention it by name here (though I'm sure you could figure it out pretty easily, if you wanted to), but a few months ago I felt so eager to get the ball rolling with Kindle sales that I tried to harvest readers from my other projects. On a blog I've set up for my self-published zine, I posted an offer to give a free copy of the newest issue of the zine to anyone who was willing to read and review The ElectroLive Murders. It wasn't a very effective offer, in the end, which didn't surprise me--the audience for my zine is probably pretty different from the audience that might be interested in Don Broma's writing. Only one person took the bait (thanks Brady!). Statistical summary: 2 hours of effort and $2 invested, 1 sale.

Failure #4: Out-of-the-box promotion. Realizing that more conventional forms of ebook promotion are already pretty saturated with the efforts of desperate fools like myself, I decided to explore less traditional promotion ideas. I also figured that people who like mysteries (The ElectroLive Murders is a mystery/sci-fi story) might be receptive to and/or appreciative of "intrigue-oriented" encounters. With those thoughts in mind, I came up with two out-of-the-box promotion ideas: writing on dollar bills and placing business cards. The writing on bills idea--which consisted of writing "Who killed Franklin Moore? Kindle Search: electrolive"--made me a little nervous, though I couldn't find any specific law stating that such actions were illegal (there are laws saying you can't destroy a bill, or make it unsuitable for circulation, but bills with writing on them circulate pretty freely, so I figured it wouldn't rank as a crime). In the end, I didn't go very far with it. The other idea--of printing up business cards for a character in The ElectroLive Murders story, and then placing those cards in locations where they might be found by Kindle owners--was a bit more time consuming, and involved a minor cash investment (lots of places print cards for free, but you still have to pay shipping and handling to get the cards delivered). I went forward with it anyway, printing up 250 cards, but I sort of lost interest (notice a trend here?), and have only placed around 30 of them so far. Still, I'm guessing that a fair amount of people have seen either a marked bill or a card, and there haven't been any sales since I put them out. Statistical results: 3 hours work, $5.50 invested, 0 sales.

Failure #5: This blog. Blogging as a means of self-promotion is widely practiced, and a lot of people swear by it. Hoping to take advantage of anything with a decent chance of helping sales, I've started this blog. So far, after 5 weeks of posting, I'm getting an average of 2 hits a day. Not exactly widespread effect. My guess is that the easiest way to start increasing the size of your blog audience is by commenting on other people's blogs, but I'm not interested in just spamming people's sites, so I've been trying to find like-minded authors who've posted something I honestly want to comment on. So far, I haven't found much. Statistical results: 10 hours work, 0 sales.

Obviously, I haven't gone very far with all of the above attempts, and I'm guessing that more effort would produce more results. You haven't really failed until you've stopped trying, right? On the other hand, dumping lots of time and energy into promotion isn't especially attractive to me--I'd rather use what little free time I have for writing. So for now I'm musing about other promotion options, in hopes that something else I come up with has a better ratio of time/energy invested to sales produced. The main thing I'm thinking about doing next is temporarily making The ElectroLive Murders available for free, but I don't want to do that until I've got my next novelette Cool Blue on Kindle, too, and I'm still waiting on the cover for that. I'm also open to other suggestions, so if you're one of the 10 people who will stumble across this blog post, feel free to make a suggestion in the comments section.

MFA or nay?

Just got back from a trip to the local grocery store. The checker who rang me up is in the undergrad creative writing program at SFSU (the local college--same program I got my BA from about five years ago). We had the following conversation:

Me: How's the writing going?
Checker: Well, I've been pretty busy with school stuff, trying to finish up my bachelor's this semester, so I haven't had much time to write.
Me: This is your last semester, huh? Congratulations.
Checker: Well, my last semester as an undergrad. I'm going on to graduate school.
Me: Gonna get an MFA?
Checker: Yeah.
Me: Where you gonna go?
Checker: I'm gonna apply to USF and Mills [both private schools], but I wanna get in to the program at [SF] State, 'cause it's cheaper.
Me: What do you write? Poetry?
Checker: Nah. Fiction... about being Mexican. It's pretty boring, but nobody else is doing it.
Me: Oh. Well, good luck.

I walked out of there shaking my head, and holding my tongue.

The checker is a nice guy, and I wish him nothing but the best. Because of that, and because I've got pretty strong opinions about MFA programs, I had a powerful urge to NOT hold my tongue. But I reasoned that he sounded pretty sure of his decision, and I reasoned that he didn't want a relative stranger pissing on his parade. I mean, I hardly know the guy. If I was a close friend of his, if I knew him outside of our superficial checker-customer relationship, maybe I'd feel more of a right to tell him what I really think.

And what I think, to put it plainly, is that he's thinking like an idiot.

Let's pass over his completely clueless statement that there aren't any people writing about being Mexican (I mean come on! It's such a ridiculous idea that I don't even know how he could come up with it. Do a Google search for 'Mexican American authors' and you get 8,950,000 results in .18 seconds. The top hit is for a Wikipedia page titled 'List of Mexican American writers,' which lists more than 140 names, many of which are the names of bestselling authors. No one writing about being Mexican American? Come on!). Let's just pass over that statement completely, and focus instead on why he's thinking like an idiot for considering an MFA.

Well, shit. Getting into the MFA topic is opening up a pretty big can of worms, too, and plenty of people have already been there and done that. So let me try to boil my thoughts down to a few brief points:

1. MFA Programs are fucking expensive. (My checker friend was considering both USF [estimated cost: $50,000+] and Mills [probably even more expensive than USF], but hoping to get into SFSU [estimated cost: $22,626, and with the way the CSU system is raising tuition costs to offset reduced state support, it'll probably be a lot more than that].)

2. MFA Programs will not give you a degree that helps you earn any kind of money. (The money consideration is important mainly because of the cost of the degree itself--you're going to build up a significant debt in the pursuit of that degree. But the principle job an MFA makes you suitable for, as far as I can see, is teaching MFA courses, which doesn't earn any money for any significant number of people. On a side note, this little catch-22 actually leads us toward another idea I have: that the writing school industry is inherently cannibalistic. You want to make a career out of your writing degree, but your writing degree doesn't qualify you for any career other than teaching writing, and so you need to find students who want to take writing classes, and then those students will need to find more students to teach, so they can charge them money, so they can use that money to pay off the debt they incurred while obtaining their degree. It goes on an on, a snake eating it's tail.)

3. MFA Programs don't necessarily help you write, and likely will make it harder. (My checker friend admitted that he's been 'busy with school stuff' recently, so he 'hasn't had much time to write. I had the same experience when I was at school, and the writing I did find time for was rarely the type of writing I wanted to do--I was so busy with class exercises and projects that I hardly ever had time to work on even short projects of my own, let alone longer works. Maybe that changes once you get into the MFA program, but I doubt it.)

4. MFA Programs will stifle your creativity. (My theory about school is this: it depends upon the idea that you don't know what you're doing, that you can't figure it out on your own, and that consequently you need someone to teach you. I mean, if you can figure it out on your own, what do you need school for? And so built into the system, as a self-preserving device, is the prerogative to find fault in your efforts, in order to offer you guidance. This effect is especially sinister when it comes to writing, which is already a quixotic quest.)

I could go on, and probably will in a later blog post, but I'm going to end this one here.

P&W thinks you're an idiot

It's funny how this happens with a lot of magazines: after you decide to stop paying for a subscription, they offer you two years for $5 (or some such ridiculous deal that makes you feel like you were getting ripped off all along). That's what happened to me with Poets & Writers. I signed up for a year, lost interest and didn't renew, and then I got an offer for a two year subscription for practically free. Like a sucker, I took the bait.

Well, after reading the November/December 2011 issue, I think I've finally decided that 'practically free' isn't free enough.

What bothers me is this: P&W consistently reveals a bias for the 'established' publishing market--a market that I think is seriously flawed and imminently doomed to a shake-up reminiscent of what the music industry went through in the early 2000s--and they're so blind to that bias they often come across as pretentious idiots.

Witness, for example, the interview of Richard Nash, in which Gabriel Cohen (the interviewer) asks (and I'm paraphrasing here, since I don't have a copy of the issue in hand): How will readers know what's good if they don't have editors there to tell them?

Seriously, that's what he asks. As if readers are too stupid to know if they like something or not. As if readers only read because editors tell them something is worth reading.

Really, the attitude revealed by Cohen's question (and the level of delusion that attitude depends upon in order to persist), is ridiculous. It's a classic example of putting the cart before the horse.

The way I see it, there are two key players in writing--the reader and the writer. Everyone else is of secondary importance. I believe this is true in every industry--the most important people are the people who make the product and the people who buy it. Anyone else who finds a way to insert themselves into that transaction, to make money from a product without making the product itself, is of peripheral importance. They might provide a valuable service, their efforts might be of benefit to the producer and the consumer, but they aren't essential, and they aren't irreplaceable.

When editors forget that, when they start considering themselves more important than the readers and the writers both, their future looks grim.

And the same can be said for magazines.

writing in an airport

I've heard a lot of opinions about 'where to write.' Some people do their writing in a closed room, monk-like, hoping to minimize distraction. Some people seek out quiet public places, like cafes and libraries, where they can be amongst others but not distracted by them. And some people--though this group seems to be fairly small--say they can write anywhere, no matter the crowds, no matter the commotion.

Generally my preferences put me in amongst the second group. I like to be able to sink into what I'm doing without distractions, but I also like to be with other people doing the same thing. Having other people around me who seemed engaged in their work helps me feel engaged with my own. But it can be difficult to find a place that offers that feeling. Libraries don't let you eat or drink, which limits how long you can stay in them, and cafes get noisy. For the thousands of hours that I've spent writing, nearly all of those hours saw my attention divided between the writing itself and the distractions of the place.

With the project I've been working on recently--a horror novelette called COOL BLUE--distraction hasn't been an issue. I've found myself so drawn into the story that I become deaf and dumb to the outside world while I'm writing. Nowhere else has this proven more remarkable to me than in the SFO airport last Thursday. My flight was delayed by more than two hours, so I sat down amidst all the other pissed off passengers, pulled out my laptop, and dropped into the story. It almost felt like opening a portal to another world.

I finished the first draft of COOL BLUE just today, cranking through the coda at work--another place full of distraction, what with the phone ringing every few minutes, and clients constantly walking in the door. I suppose that means something too--me being so caught up in the story that I'll keep working on it even when my attention is diverted every 30 seconds. And now that the first draft is done, I've passed it on to some of preferred first readers. Here's hoping they find the story as engaging as I do.

Getting Lost

One of the things I most love about writing--really, it's the one thing that makes me keep sitting down and banging out words--is the way that writing can take you out of the wider world, and bring you somewhere else entirely. When the writing is really going well, when you're caught up in the world of your imagination, the Real World sort of drops away. It's like a veil get's put up around you, and everything outside of your own mind fades, becomes indistinct. During those moments when you're fully immersed in what you're writing, it's like you're living in two worlds at once.

I spent a lot of time there yesterday, in that in-between space. I took a break from the fantasy novel to work on a horror novelette I'd started years ago--it's actually one of the projects I'd begun around the same time I wrote The ElectroLive Murders--and I got so wrapped up in it that I didn't break free for six hours. And then, later that night, I sat back down and got sucked in again.

I'm hoping to have the horror novelette--which I'm calling "Cool Blue"--finished and up on Kindle in the next few weeks. But because I had such a good time there in the "otherworld" yesterday, I thought I'd post a piece of what I brought back:

Jeff walked to the curtain, pushed the beads aside with the back of his hand. It was darker behind the beads, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust. Little by little, details came to him.

The room was long and narrow, like a hallway. Aquariums lined the walls, in three tiers on either side. Nearly every aquarium was lit up, and the dim glow coming from them provided the room’s only illumination. It was a dreamlike light, shimmering and blue, filtered through water. The air in the room felt moist, cool, and heavy with the sound of liquid—dripping, splashing, rushing—all deadened by the hum of a hundred pumps.

A mop and bucket sat on the floor, the head of the mop in a dirty puddle, the handle prone, pointing toward Jeff. It looked like someone had dropped it and left the room.

“Hello?” Jeff called out again. He stepped in, letting the beads fall into place behind him.

Something flashed at his head, and he spun toward it and threw his arms up to shield his face. It was a fish in a top-level tank, darting at the glass. “Shit,” Jeff said. “You’re a bold one, aren’t you?” The fish, thick-lipped with a fat lump above its eyes, backed off and then charged again.

He walked past its tank, looked in another tank teeming with a school of silvery fry. They massed together, the shape of the school shifting and changing, individual fish occasionally dipping onto their sides to reflect the light. It looked like a single living thing, broken into a swarm.

Farther down Jeff came to one of the darkened tanks. He put his face up near the glass, peered inside. Hidden amongst a pile of rocks, something glimmered. Jeff rapped his knuckles against the tank’s front. The glimmer turned to a dim red glow. Beneath the glow were dozens of dagger-like teeth.

“This place is a trip,” Jeff said to himself, and proceeded down the row.

When he got to the bucket and the fallen mop, he stopped. Why would somebody just drop the mop and leave it? Wouldn’t they worry someone might slip on the puddle and sue? There hadn’t been anyone to guard the register, up near the door, either. Where had everybody gone?

“Hello” Jeff said aloud. “Is anybody here?”

He wasn’t surprised when nobody responded. All the same, a funny feeling had begun to creep along the back of his neck, and to stretch on spider legs out toward his ears.

Jeff looked around the dim room again, back toward the way he’d come in. The beaded curtain was still swaying lazily, and the sunlight glimmered beyond it. On the other side of the room were two doors, one at the end of either row of tanks. The door on the right wall stood ajar, a black ribbon of darkness all that could be seen of the room within. The door on the left was closed.

Jeff turned to the beaded curtain, watched the strands sway. Then he turned and walked toward the door on the right, put his hand on the cold knob, and pulled it open.

It was a closet-sized bathroom, with a toilet, a sink, and a single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. Jeff’s hand crawled along the wall, searching for the switch. He found it, flipped it, and flooded the little room with glaring light.

The floor and the walls were covered in white tile that magnified the bulb’s harshness. The grout between the tiles had gone dingy gray. An old mirror stood above the sink, black eating away its edges. And in the sink, and the toilet too, was a greasy red mess that stank of brine and blood.

Time to get serious.

I've been into DIY since I was a teenager going to punk shows. I've been into writing since I realized I could make myself heard better with the written word than with the spoken. I've been fascinated with the idea of self-publishing as a DIY approach to getting my work out there since reading this article on NOVLR about Amanda Hocking, back in March of 2011. The same week that I read that article, I put my story "The ElectroLive Murders" up on Kindle, and started trying to spread the word.

Apparently I didn't do a very good job. During the first few months that ElectroLive was up, it sold a little over a dozen copies, almost all of which were bought by friends and family. During the three-quarters of a year since then, only one copy has sold. I've got several theories about why ElectroLive isn't selling, but probably the biggest reason I've come up with is this: I didn't didn't put enough effort into promoting it.

Truth is, I've never been very into self-promotion. For the most part, I'm a pretty introspective guy, and I don't like blathering on about myself and my work. That's part of what lead me to writing in the first place: if the writing speaks, I don't have to. But I'm coming to the conclusion that not many people will buy a book if they don't even know it exists. Consequently, I'm becoming more committed to the idea that I should put more work into promoting myself.

And that's where this blog comes in.

It's been about a year since my stillborn attempt at epublishing. It's been about a year since I first heard about Amanda Hocking and other authors getting their work out on Kindle, and finding readers for it. I just reread "The ElectroLive Murders", and I still think it's a good read. I've got several more stories in the works, including a novel that's more than 70% complete, and I'm still attracted to the DIY approach to publishing. So I'm making a commitment, here and now, to work harder at succeeding with this endeavor.

What that means for you, dear reader, is this: I'm so eager to have you give my writing a try that I'll let you have it free. If you're interested in reading "The ElectroLive Murders," send me an email (don.broma[at]yahoo[dot]com), or comment on this post, and I'll send you a free PDF. Or, if you're subscribing to the Kindle Prime service, you can borrow the book on your Kindle for free. If you like the story, please help me spread the word. If you hate the story, I want to hear about that too. Email me.

Thanks for reading.