Aug 20, 2010 Daily Writing, Life
I love the “new world,” this place where everyone is connected all the time, this thing that the internet has gradually morphed into that allows such close and constant contact. It’s a glorious place.
But it’s also a major time sink. And given that time sink, it’s also a major worry. that worry being this: if I’m not participating, I’m not succeeding.
As you can tell, I’ve been away from the keyboard often recently. The day job has been monstrously huge for the past six weeks or more, and there have been vacations and events and travel both within the US and international. I barely have enough time to write a little, better yet read, and better yet keep up with the blog and my fledgling attempts to absorb what Twitter can do for me. And that’s the order of priority–family & work, then writing, then fitness, then reading, then socializing, then anything else.
I admit that I’ve gotten a bit worn down the past couple weeks, and allowed the “anything else” to step in front of socializing–just because it’s easier to sit like a lump on the couch than to actually think.
Regardless of any particular order of priority, I wanted to take a moment to say that one of the things I don’t like about this new and wonderful world is the aspect of competition that seems to be inherent in this social element of the game now. By that, I mean that by stepping out of the blog for a week or two, I find myself feeling that I’m losing ground to everyone else–that going silent is akin to not swimming in the tides required for success as a writer in today’s new world. The intellectual side of my brain says that writing a good story is still the main element of success in this field–that if you write as well as you can write, the rest will take care of itself. But that’s not what the emotional side of my brain says (and I’m apparently one of those weird people who is not dominated by one side of my brain or the other, instead they just bicker back and forth until settling on some compromise).
The intellectual side of my mind says this world of writing fiction is not a competition, but my emotional brain looks at the intellect and semi-calmly calls bullshit.
This is my current little paranoia as I settle back down into something that almost resembles a normal cycle of life and working. I’m sure I’ll recover just fine, and be back to it around here in no time flat.
In the meantime, I suppose I should not that I’ve been progressing moderately well with my efforts on the latest novel. I have one issue that needs to get resolved before I can say I actually know the full story, but these things have their ways of working out.
So fear not, those few of you out there still wandering around here, my silence does not mean that progress has stopped. Only that time is in short supply.
Aug 9, 2010 Other Writers, Science Fiction
A quick link to one of the first attempts I can remember to use the Web in ways that only it can be made to work.
Things change so quickly, but I enjoyed this quite a bit at the time. Very different way of experiencing a story.
Aug 8, 2010 Life
I haven’t posted about it, of course…but I’ve been in India for the past ten days or so for business purposes. Got lots done, experienced a truly different culture, and had much fun meeting its people on their “home turf.” I’ll write more on this in the future, I suppose. We shall see.
And, yes, managed to do some writing, too. But not a ton.
Returned home Saturday, and have basically slept from that point forward (I don’t sleep well on airplanes, so I had been awake for about 48 hours when I got home).
After three weeks of travel and hosting the parents and whatnot, it looks like life will get back to normal starting tomorrow.
Definitely nice, I think.
Jul 26, 2010 Business
I have only a few minutes today, so I’m going to stay roughly on plan and talk about the differences between physical books and ebooks as marketing devices. They are very different, and these differences seem to me to be important to us newish writers.
The book itself (or I should say, the cover) is basically an advertisement, and its placement in a store can be a big deal. I was recently listening to a podcast that included a quote from a major SF publisher who said he considered a single book to be a 50-cent poster, and if he was allowed to he would send 20 or 50 to every bookstore and have them paper the walls with them because at that rate they are super-cheap advertising.
This is something an ebook can’t do.
Of course, us newbies don’t really care much about that, because last I checked I don’t see many of us getting huge bookstore space anyway. Still, as we move forward in our careers, it’s important to understand what’s being giving up along the way.
Cover art is most likely going to be important for ebooks, too. But most artwork for ebooks is going to be tiny, and click-throughs for new writers are likely to be impulse processes.
On the other side of the fence, an e-book goes viral a lot easier than a physical book. And a viral e-tide can be a powerful thing. However, most viral e-tides are connected to things that are free, hence, obviously, the big push for some folks to give some of their content away in order to create this tide (in hopes that it bleeds over into actual cash flow.
At the end of the day, similarities exist in that you still need to get in touch with the right people. An author needs the publisher to get his or her work in the right places in bookstores and whatnot, and if you want to advertise ebooks, it seems important to get the right sites buzzing about your work. The big deal here, of course, is that it’s far easier for new writers to network in e-space than deal with the publishing industry. It’s still a lot of work, of course (something I’ll probably talk about later), but it’s achievable. And we actually have the ability to market our own ebooks cheaply, but would generally struggle to market physical books. I mean, I could be selling ebooks from my site with probably a half-day’s work.
The question is whether that’s a great idea, and whether I want to keep up that effort … something I’ll talk about in another post or two.
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