Posted on
by

These are notes from Ken Scholes’s presentation at OryCon 33 on Evolution of a Writer Career.

Ken Scholes
Evolution of a Writing Career
OryCon 33
  • Evolution of a career
    • Wrote as a teenager, got a dozen rejection letters.
    • World Fantasy Con – the big business con: agents and editors
    • Took three years of serious, solid writing and seventy rejections before selling his first short story
      • Having written 10-15 in high school and 15-20 in later life
      • Probably published ~50 stories by now
    • Took Swenson’s writing class in 98, learned about Tale Bones.
    • Sold first story in 1999 — to Tale Bones. 
    • Second one in 2000. 
    • In 2001, sold another story. Met Jay Lake. Became good friends.
    • Norwest Con
    • 2002: sold 4th story – his 2nd story for the 2nd time.
    • Didn’t sell another story until 2004.
    • Then in 2004, something happened. Sold a bunch of stories
    • In 2005, won third prize for one of his short stories
    • L. Ron Hubard Writers of the Future
    • In 2005, decided he would not longer treat writing as a hobby. started tracking receipts. took a different job that took less of his brain, left him more for writing. took writing more seriously.
    • In 2006: people taunting him to write a novel. Jay Lake said “if you have a first draft by World Fantasy Con, I’ll introduce you to everyone I know.”
    • Jay Lake introduced him to his agent.
    • In October 2007, Tor said “We want all five books”.
    • In 2009, Lamentation came out, started selling well. earned out by third book.
    • In 2011, have novels out in many countries. Doing quite well.
    • Still has a day job.
    • His career is making years in the making. What seems like a lot of success in 2009-2011 is really the result of 14 years of serious writing plus lots of history before that.
    • Make friends in the industry. Spent time in the industry.
  • Questions and Answers
    • Q: How to transition from writing short story to novels
      • Same tools you use to build, but the process is different (e.g. like building a shed vs a house).
      • Don’t write a novel. Instead, practice writing a novel. See where the practice takes you.
      • Or… don’t spend time thinking about it. Just do it as quickly as possible.
      • The biggest part is: don’t quit. Even if it feels like the shittiest book ever, don’t give up. He thought Lamentation was the worst book he ever read: flat characters, action happens off-screen, etc.
      • Most of the time we quit too fast.
    • Q: How do you decide what Con to go to?
      • My first was World Fantasy Con. Then OryCon. Then Norwest Con.
      • World Fantasty Con is really business driven. The agents and publishers all go.
      • Depending on where you are in your career, go for what you need. To learn craft, etc.
      • But go to make friends. Those friends will be really helpful throughout your career. Build relationships.
      • Now that he’s progressed in his career, he goes to the bigger cons to do business and network.  WorldCon, WorldFantasyCon.
      • It’s easier to sit down and talk to people, even big people at the smaller, local conferences. 
      • Send thank you notes and follow ups to everyone you meet.
        • “Greet meeting you at…”
      • Find out the publishers and editors that you love, and where they go.
    • Q: Agent recently said “not enough creative and unique manuscripts being sent”. Any thoughts?
      • It takes about a million bad words before your own voice really emerges.
    • Q: How do you assure you’ll get pay
      • You can report it through SFWA
      • If it’s a short story, the publication credit may matter more. Don’t worry too much about it.
      • Even the pro markets are very slow in payment: He has books out around the world, three novels, since 2009, and he still needs a day job and struggles to pay the bills.
    • Q: For short stories: How do you end it, and when is soon enough?
      • What’s the promise at the beginning of the story?
      • You start with a person that feels believable. They are in a setting. They are given a problem, always on the first page in a short story.
      • When they have solved the problem, and received whatever it is they get for solving the problem, that’s the ending.
    • Q: Finding agents
      • Willamette Writers
      • Suri
      • Cascade Writers 
      • you can meet editors more easily than agents
    • Q: How do you balance research, deliberate practice, and action creation of new content?
      • Follow my muse.
      • Sometimes the research leads to a story.
      • Sometimes I just fly by the seat of my pants.
      • I’d rather have my muse push me in the direction of production. 
    • Q: How do you figure out where your prospective readers are online?
      • Absolute Write
      • I tend to build my community at convention.
      • Mary Rosenblum’s panel on social media on Saturday.
      • Use Facebook because it’s easy.
    • Q: How do you know when your novel is ready to submit?
      • Get it as good as done you can get for that moment, then it’s ready.
      • Don’t spend your life revising one book.
      • As soon as some people who are not your immediate family say it’s good, then it’s ready.
      • You need to have some writers who can give you critical feedback. You also need to have some people who are just readers, not writers, who can simply say “good” or not.
      • You have to have a next thing to get excited about it. 
      • You will not grow by simply rehashing old stuff. You have to write new stuff.
      • If an editor says “do this”, then do it, because they’ll pay you.
    • Q: What if the most effective marketing program for selling your book?
      • Knowing what you want, where you want to go. Ken knew he wanted to go with Tor.
      • Go to cons.
      • And keep writing new stuff. Don’t fret about the stuff that’s out there. If you keep writing new stuff, it’ll build over time.
    • Q: Motivation
      • I write so I can know who I am.
      • I write so I can share a story with people that they might enjoy reading.
      • I write because I have daycare bills. If I finish this book, I can get a check.
      • Now Ken’s career is at a tipping point: Wouldn’t it be great if Ken didn’t have to have two jobs? 
    • Q: How do you convey non-human characters to readers without losing characteristic of non-human? (e.g. dragons)
      • You don’t want to have something so far from human that they aren’t enjoyable. People want to read for both the unique stuff as well as human qualities.
      • MSU: the great university of writers. Make Stuff Up.
    • Q: How do you effectively edit a novel?
      • I write good clean first drafts. The story is intact. It’s just spelling and word choice.
      • That’s the product of practice: lots and lots of words written, lots of short stories. In short stories you learn to make each word do three or four things.
      • Don’t spend years and years making it right.
      • Crank out a book a year.
      • If you want to make a living doing this, you can’t do a book every five or six years. You have to write faster than that.
      • Don’t take more than one or two or three passes through a novel before putting it out to market.
      • Effectively == quickly.
      • Figure out the strengths of the people who are reading it. Are they plot people or character people or what? If they are a character person and they complain about the plot, then don’t worry about it. If they complain about character, then listen carefully.
    • Q: Does speaking in front of an audience help you write?
      • I was a quiet introvert in high school.
      • I expanded – to choir, to music, to being a preacher.
      • If you are able to hold your own at a party, teach classes, give presentations, it gives you more opportunities.
      • But in the end, a writing conference is going to take a great writer who is a mediocre speaker than a great speaker who is a bad writer. So focus on writing.
    • Not willing to self-publish. Willing to do small presses for short story. Short stories are a reasonably small investment of time. For novels, it is a big investment of time. I wrote enough in the short story world that my first novel was good enough to be marketed.
    • Start at the top, and work your way down.
    • There are people who would have been with big publishers, and they settled for small publishers.
    • For people who have some readership, then self-publishing may work.
    • For small publishers, they don’t have the money to distribute you effectively.
      • Then you become a person who has to self-promote. Then you don’t have the energy to write.
    • Go through all the pro markets first.
    • Q: Mind hacks to keep writing
      • Music
      • Access to water and food so I don’t have to leave
      • Audience: the progress bar in scrivener
    •  Q: Does writing short stories help you improve as a writer faster than writing novels?
      • Yes.
      • Q: So if you are not inclined to write short stories, should you do it?
        • No.
        • But, what would it cost you to try? If you are used to writing 100,000 word novels, what would it take you to write five 5k-10k short stories? Try it.

      Posted on
      by

      I love Apple Pages. It’s a clean, fairly minimal word processor. Compared to Microsoft Word, it has approximately 10,000 less buttons.

      It has a few shortcomings however, and if you’ve ever tried to take a .pages document, export it to .doc, and then upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing, you may have found that you couldn’t generate the table of contents that Amazon wants. Namely, they want a list of chapters, and those chapters should be enabled as hyperlinks. Apple Pages can’t do this automatically, and neither can Microsoft Word on the Mac.

      However, it is possible to do manually with Apple Pages. It takes about ten minutes. Here’s how to generate a Kindle table of contents or TOC on the Mac, using Apple Pages:

      1. Go through your document, and for each chapter title, select the text, and then click Insert -> Bookmark. After you do this the first time, a small link popup window will appear. This is the Inspector, on the “Link” tab. Keep this open. You can click the + button on that window to add subsequent bookmarks once you have the chapter title selected.
      2. Create a new page near the front of the book. Put “Table of Contents” at the top. Then manually type the chapter names, one per line. My chapters are unnamed, so I merely have “Chapter 1”, “Chapter 2”, etc.
      3. While we’re making bookmarks, let’s also generate the two Amazon required bookmarks:
        1. Select “Table of Contents”, and click Insert -> Bookmark, and name it “TOC”. All uppercase, just those three letters. (You can double-click the bookmark names in the popup window to rename them.)
        2. Go to the first page of your book – the actual start of text. Place the cursor before the first character of text. Again click Insert -> Bookmark, and name it “Start”.
      4. Go to the Inspector window, and click the hyperlink tab instead of the bookmark tab.
      5. For each chapter title in your manually created table of contents
        1. select the text. 
        2. In the Inspector, check the Enable As Hyperlink. 
        3. In the Link To: dropdown, select Bookmark. 
        4. In the Name field, select the name of the bookmark – your chapter title.
      Note: if the small link window closes, you can get back to it by clicking View -> View Inspector, and then clicking the second to last icon that looks like a arrow. 
      When you’re done, of course, you’ll want to export your Pages document as Word, and then you can upload to Kindle Direct, and it will convert it into a Kindle ebook with a valid table of contents, with the required Start and TOC bookmarks that Kindle insists on.

      Posted on
      by

      Gene Kim and I were discussing how to reach an audience of readers, and he referred me to 1,000 True Fans:

      A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

      The premise is that with 1,000 True Fans, it’s enough to support a writer or artist. If they each spend $100 per year, buying everything you produce, then that’s $100,000, which is enough to provide a living.

      One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate. 

      The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

      One of the key principles is that creators don’t need to strive for a best seller or #1 hit, nor do they need to settle for languishing somewhere in the long tail. 1,000 True Fans will sustain a happy medium:

      Young artists starting out in this digitally mediated world have another path other than stardom, a path made possible by the very technology that creates the long tail. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum hits, bestseller blockbusters, and celebrity status, they can aim for direct connection with 1,000 True Fans. It’s a much saner destination to hope for. You make a living instead of a fortune. You are surrounded not by fad and fashionable infatuation, but by True Fans. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.

      Check out the full original article.

      Will

      Posted on
      by

      Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing Fiction:

      1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
      2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
      3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
      4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
      5. Start as close to the end as possible.
      6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
      7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
      8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

      The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

      From Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

      Posted on
      by

      Sometimes people wonder how much they need to write each day in order to finish a book each year.

      Assume:

      * You write six days a week for 50 weeks a year. (300 days.)
      * You spend half of your time writing, and half of your time editing (150 writing days).
      * You have a target of 90,000 words  – the publishing minimum for scifi/fantasy, but this is really genre specific.

      That yields 600 words per day needed.

      But of course, there are days you are busy, unmotivated, sick, underproduce, etc. So 1,000 words per day may be a better target.

      Some writers believe that they need to overproduce, and then cut it down to size. This situation is not a great place to be. If you need to cut, then you are basically doing wasted work. Better to find a way to not write things you’re not going to use.

      If you use an outline, even if that outline changes, you will reduce the amount of wasted work you do, simply because you start out with an idea of where you’re going.

      Similarly, if you ask yourself, as you are writing, what purpose is served by the scene you’re writing, then you’ll naturally start to focus on the things that have high value, and start to drop out the things that don’t have value.

      Writing novels is like permaculture. Every scene and every character should serve multiple purposes and work hard to bring the book together.

      Posted on
      by

      Someone on reddit thought that they’d start a blog as a way to build the motivation to write their novel. 

      I think it’s unlikely that anyone will find motivation by starting a blog. The more likely case is that they’ll be distracted.


      It’s always going to be easier to write a blog post than to write or edit a chapter of a book. The blog post is shorter, simpler, and self-contained. If someone is having problems with motivation to begin with, they’ll naturally gravitate toward the easier thing – writing a blog post instead of writing their book.

      Then at the end of the week they’ll have a bunch of blog posts and no progress on the book.
      Here are some of my ideas for motivating progress on writing. 
      • Give yourself a reward to get started. For example, if you’ve been wanting a new (monitor, computer, car, clothes, etc), make a commitment that you’ll get it when you’re done with your fifth chapter.
      • Make a personal commitment to work on your book for exactly one hour each day, six days a week for one month. Anyone can do anything for a month, right? This can include outlining, note taking, and actual writing.
      • Find a friend or family member who will hold you accountable, and check in with them weekly. Set realistic goals: “I will finish a first draft of a chapter each week.” Then schedule a meeting with them every week at a set time to discuss your progress. You’ll find yourself working toward the deadline.
      • Don’t set out to write a book, if that seems daunting to you. Instead, set out to write 1,000 words instead. Keep writing in chunks. In a month, when you have a bunch of chunks, organized them into a book.
      • If writing at all seems daunting, start with writing a one page synopsis. What is the book about? See if you are clear on the story. If so, then take your synopsis and expand it into a chapter by chapter breakdown of what happens. Spend 3 to 6 sentences on each chapter. Are you clear on what happens in each chapter? If so, then move on to writing the chapters according to the outline. 
        • The outline can change! It is not fixed. As we say here at work, the plan is the plan until it’s not the plan anymore. If your characters do unexpected things – hurray. When you finish the chapter, go revise the outline based on what really happened.
      • If your problem is distractions, then try changing the setting. I find it easier to write in a coffee shop than at home. If I am at the coffee shop, I try to imagine that everyone will laugh at me if they see me doing email or surfing the web.
      • Another other trick for distractions is to remind yourself that the only person you are cheating is yourself. If you are distracted at work, it’s your employers loss. If you are distracted when writing, it is your loss. You can spend an hour writing, or you can while it away and end up with nothing. Your choice, your outcome. Reminding yourself of this can often give you the drive to get it done.
      Good luck!

      If you try any of the these techniques, and they work (or don’t), post a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.

      Posted on
      by

      I read a great article today by Thomas Baekdal called The Myth of the 99 Cent Book. An excerpt:

      Another example is if you write a book for a nice market, totaling 20,000 potential readers. And you predict that for the price of $9.99 you will reach 35% of that audience. 

      35% of 20,000 = 7,000 * 9.99 = $69,930 

      Then using the same logic, lowering the price to 99 cents will increase sale by a factor of 10 …or cause you to sell 70,000 books and reach 350% of your total audience.
      But that is not possible. You cannot exceed your total audience–you cannot even get a 100% penetration rate (not even if you gave it away for free.) If you lowered the price, you might reach 60% instead of 35% 

      60% of 20,000 = 12,000 * 0.99 = $11,880
      There is something catastrophically wrong with how people perceive the price of content.

      Posted on
      by

      This has been a busy couple of weeks for writing. Here’s just a partial list of what I did:

      Last week I finished laying out Avogadro Corp for printing on Lulu. I’m not self-publishing, but I did want a few nicely printed copies for people I need feedback from. This turned out to be a great exercise. In the process of running the manuscript though the spell checker and grammer checker “one last time” I discovered about more than a hundred errors that had made it past ten rounds of editing by me as well as one round of copyediting. This really does speak to three things:

      • Changing formats, even if it is just from one page size to another page size does open you up to seeing the work in a new way, and spotting issues you didn’t notice before.
      • The spell-checker and grammer checker in your word processor does have value, even if it is insufficient.
      • There really is a tremendous need to hiring a professional copy editor and a proofreader.
      Then this week I received back the three printed copies, and immediately noticed a half dozen additional errors and formatting issues. The lesson learned here is to order just one copy after making changes.
      I also received a list of thirty literary agents from Writer’s Relief. I sent off email queries for Avogadro Corp to fourteen of them. I was surprised that as many as sixteen preferred hardcopy queries. I took my existing query letter, turned it into a mail merge document, and put the other sixteen into a spreadsheet. Now I need to print sixteen (16!!) copies of my manuscript.
      I learned that on average, it takes about a hundred submissions to get one acceptance. I think this is based on agents accepting about one percent of what they receive, so it doesn’t really account for the quality of the work, but it does give you the idea that a great deal of submissions are necessary. Fortunately, agent submissions are usually done in parallel (as opposed to publisher submissions which are non-simultaneous.)
      Printing the manuscript for those hardcopy submissions is sure to drive me insane. Here’s why: I used Apple Pages for my first novel. It’s a word processor similar to, but nicer than Microsoft Word. Like Word it has styles for fonts. But what both Word and Pages fail to have is the equivalent of .css files. For the web, you could have one content pages (.html), and you could style it as many different ways as you want by simply switching the .css file it refers to.
      The problem is that there are many unique styles I need to get my manuscript into:
      1. For on screen use while I am writing and editing it.
      2. For printing it on 8.5×11 paper to read it myself or give it to my critique group.
      3. For my copy editor for her to mark it up and give me feedback. (typically it’s double-spaced with wider margins.)
      4. For printing in a book (typically everything changes: margins, fonts, font sizes, insets, page handling, page size, etc, etc.)
      5. For submissions – and this can be any of many subtly different formats.
      In my experience, it takes anywhere from two to four hours to change from one of these output formats to another. It’s detail oriented and error prone. 
      Since my last manipulation of the book was to print it on Lulu, and since I made a number of corrections to it for Lulu, I will now need to restyle for submitting to agents. 
      Sigh. I just want to be able to define all the style information in a table, and then auto-apply a given style.
      I also worked on integrating the feedback from my copyeditor for AIpocalypse, my second manuscript. We’ve done three chapters out of sixteen. It feels as though I have about half the amount of red marks as for my first novel, so perhaps my writing has improved somewhat. She’s headed back to college for the Fall semester, so progress there may be dropping off.
      That’s probably a good thing, as I start a new writing workshop on Tuesday. To prepare for that I wrote a one page synopsis of my third novel. I’m four chapters into that work. While I have a general outline of where I’m going, there was a lot of hand waving to write the synopsis: “Group A and group B will then meet up in San Diego in some way as yet unknown.”
      I’m somewhat nervous about this third book. I’m much more ambitious in what I’m tackling: my protagonist is a woman, the motivations of the characters are far more complex, and the characters themselves go through more development, I have several major subplots, and I’m describing a far different society than the one we live in. It’ll either be great, or a crashing failure. I’m voting for great.
      I know that my writing instructor will make it a requirement of the workshop that everyone writes daily. I’m close to this now, but not quite there. My plan is to get up at 5am three mornings a week, use my usual Saturday morning writing time, and then also write two evenings a week. (I did the early morning thing many years ago when I was in grad school with a newborn, and found that while it worked, I also was severely burnt out after a few months of it. So I’ll use it, but limit it to a few days a week. Hopefully that will avoid the burnout.)

      Posted on
      by

      Great article on slate.com about the risks of robots:

      President Obama visited Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center to announce up to $70 million to fund theNational Robotics Initiative. In his remarks, Obama quipped, “You might not know this, but one of my responsibilities as commander-in-chief is to keep an eye on robots. And I’m pleased to report that the robots you manufacture here seem peaceful—at least for now.”

      We all love a good robot-apocalypse joke. After IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing computer Watson beat the game show’s reigning human champions, Fox News declared, “Our robot overlord isn’t named HAL or SkyNET—it’s Watson.” The same jokes cropped up in 2007 when robots began to take the place of child jockeys on the camel-racing circuit, learned to juggle, panhandle, and buy scones. But not many people actually believe this is a threat. For all their advances, robots are still generally able to execute only those tasks that they are specifically programmed to carry out. But as the speed of robot advances increases—and with Obama’s new National Robotics Initiative, the developments will, he hopes, come that much quicker—there are genuine robot-safety discussions that we need to have—not about them working too well and taking over civilization, but about them not working well enough.

      Hope over and read the whole article.