How Much Editing Should A Writer Do?

I was recently asked, "How much editing should a writer do themselves?" It's always hard to answer any question with a "should" in it, because the answer is different for everyone. We also need to know what the goal is? To send the work to an agent? Or to self-publish?

I'll describe what I do when writing novels.

1. I write my first draft. For each book I've written (I'm wrapping up my third), my first draft has become much better. 
2. Then I make a first editing pass on screen. I'm looking for a bunch of different things, including:
1. obvious typos and grammer mistakes
2. places where I did too much telling and not enough showing (one of my chronic issues)
3. obvious continuity errors: I changed a characters name, or their occupation, or where some characters were, etc.
3. Individual chapters are shared with my critique group after my first pass. On average, my critique group sees about a third of my chapters for any given book. I fix any issues the critique group identifies, which can be about clarity, character motivation, excessive exposition, etc.
4. Then I print the whole thing out, marking up the pages with corrections to small errors and identifying bigger issues to address. The things I tend to notice on the printed page:
1. More typos and grammer errors
2. Repeated use of words
3. Continuity errors. 
4. Flow of the story.
5. Then I let it sit for at least a month, and work on other writing.
6. Then I reread the whole thing again, primarily focusing on bigger story issues and more places where I need to show instead of tell. I'm also addressing plot issues here, character motivation and development, etc.
7. Somewhere around here, I pass it around to my beta readers. They are a half a dozen people who read it and give me feedback. I correct issues they identify. These are different than my first readers: I have two or three people I give it to very early on, just for encouragement. They do give me some feedback, which I welcome, but I'm not dependent on. By the way, unless your mom has some special credentials as a writer or teacher, consider your mother a first reader, not a critical reader.  Of course she's going to say it's great. :)
8. At this point, I'm comfortable sending it off to agents/publishers.
9. If it's not accepted by anyone, and I'm going to self-publish, then I keep going:
10. I then send it to a copy editor, and correct issues they identify. I don't have the budget for a professional copy editor, so I pay a friend who is a creative writing major with about six years of solid writing experience.
11. Lastly I give it to a proofreader. Again, I don't have the budget for a professional, so I pay a different friend, someone who is extremely detail oriented and focused with a good command of English.

I count seven editing passes:

1. first editing pass on screen
2. critique group feedback
3. printed editing pass
4. second printed editing pass after a month away
5. beta reader feedback
6. copy editor pass
7. proofreader pass

That being said, it varies greatly on how polished the first draft is. My first novel went through ten editing passes before it even got to a critique group in step 2. A new writer may well have a dozen or more editing passes.

What To Do To Prepare For Publishing

I was recently asked "I'm writing my first draft of my novel, and I'm planning to self-publish in about six months. What should I be doing now that I might not know about?"

After some thought, I composed the following, which you may also find helpful:

After I finished my first draft, I several months editing. If this is your first novel, expect that you'll be a better writer by the end, and you'll probably want to go and rewrite quite a bit. I made ten complete passes through my book before I thought it was ready to be published.

Hire an editor and/or a proofreader if possible. I didn't have the money for a professional, so I hired a creative writing major who had extensive writing experience and paid $10/hour. It took roughly 2 hours per 10,000 words.

If you can't afford that, solicit friends for readers and divide them into two groups. Use half for an early draft, correct all the mistakes they find, and then use the other half to review the next draft. Be explicit to them about the kind of feedback you need: typos vs character feedback, etc.

Stop here: Are you interested in trying traditional publishing? If so, send it out to literary agents. Agents take simultaneous submissions, so you can send to 20 to 50 agents, and find out in a few weeks if anyone is interested. By comparison, publishers want non-simultaneous submissions, and take longer to respond, so sending to publishers takes years. After you've been rejected by everyone or if you decide to forego the pain of rejection, proceed. (I'm being flippant here, but personally I do solicit agents before self-publishing.)

You can work on your cover design in parallel. You should probably hire someone. Books are judged by their covers, and will be a major factor in whether people decide to buy it.

I made the choice to do a print version as well as an ebook version. Expect that the print version will take a lot of time if you choose to do it. Generating a 95% perfect epub version takes 2 to 3 hours. Generating a 95% perfect print version takes 2 to 3 WEEKS.

You will want to have a blog or website. Have a user-friendly URL to give people. Look at the websites of authors you like, and see what they are doing.

Have a user-friendly title for your book. I thought Avogadro Corp was a great name for my book because it gives great search results. Until the first time I tried to tell someone in a crowded room what the title of my book was. It turns out that it's hard to verbally tell people "Avogadro Corp" and have them remember it. They usually think avocado. Not helpful. You want something that is meaningful, easy to remember, easy to spell, and will get good Google search results.

The very last page in your book after the story ends should be a call to action: If you enjoyed this book, take a minute to tell a friend or post an Amazon review.

When you launch, think about some of the following ways to promote your work:

• Friends and family appeal: This is where you ask friends and family to buy your book via Facebook, email, and more. Even if you think that everyone is on Facebook, email more effective. It sits in front of people, in their inboxes, and causes far more action than just a Facebook post. Family and friends will be far more likely to buy print versions than ebooks. If you happen to launch near Christmas, remind people they can buy a book as a gift.
• Facebook ads: If you are similar to other authors or your book will appeal to readers with a very specific interest, you may be able to reach them cost effectively through targeted Facebook advertisements. I wrote a blog post on targeted Facebook advertising: http://www.williamhertling.com/2012/01/promoting-books-with-targeted-facebook.html
• Depending on where you live, particularly if you live in a smaller town, you may be able to get local media coverage. Send review copies to newspapers.
• Send free review copies to friends who have blogs with any reasonable amount of traffic. (Buy them the kindle version or send them an epub or send them a print copy. They'll almost always reciprocate with a blog post.)
• Offer to do guest posts for other blogs.
• Do book blog tours. (I don't really get this one, so search it out.)

Any other ideas that you'd share with a new, unpublished writer who plans to self-publish?

William Hertling
http://www.williamhertling.com

Promoting Books with Targeted Facebook Ads

My first book, Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears, came out in December. It was a great book launch, but after the holidays passed, as you might expect, sales slowed. 

The feedback I was receiving told me the book was good. One friend said she had nightmares after reading it (it’s a techno-thriller). Another reader sought out the coffee shop where several scenes were set and took photos of himself with the book. A local tech blog in Portland posted a very positive review. Amazon reviews are overwhelmingly positive.

So the real question was how to let more people know about Avogadro Corp.

I decided to experiment with Facebook ads. if you haven’t used Facebook ads before, here’s a quick overview:

• Go to http://facebook.com/ads or click on the advertising link at the bottom of the main Facebook page.
• Ads consist of an image, a title, a small amount of text, and a destination link.
• You pay per click, so it only costs you when someone clicks on the advertisement. Ads can be targeted by age, sex, country, region, and interests. 
• You can set spending limits so you’re in control of how much you spend. You can conduct a useful ad experiment with as little as twenty dollars.

I knew my own writing would appeal to fans of Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, and William Gibson. I write about similar subjects in a similar style. So I ran a series of Facebook ads specifically targeting fans of each of those authors. 

Here’s a typical ad:

Facebook’s advertising console tells me how much I’m paying per click. For example, in the last seven days, I had 96 clicks on my Charles Stross targeted ad, and paid $0.34 per click.

The advertising console also tells me the CTR (click through rate). For my author-specific ads, the CTR has been 0.2% and higher. That tells me that out of every 1,000 times the ad has been shown, it’s been clicked on 2 times. That might not sound very high, but compared to loosely targeted ads (e.g. people who like read, or people who live in a certain geography), it’s anywhere from 10 to 100 times higher than those more general ads.

The URL for a Facebook ad can be any page on the Internet or even your Facebook author page. I use avogadrocorp.com which is the homepage for my book. I’m specifically trying to drive sales of the book, as opposed to getting people to follow me, or any other objective. You could also send people directly to an Amazon.com page for your book, but I prefer that the URL should in the ad also reflect my book’s brand.

I use statcounter.com to keep track of hits to avogadrocorp.com. I can see who referred visitors to my site, and the overwhelming majority are from Facebook, so I know it’s the ads accounting for most of the traffic.

The tricky part is determining exactly how many books you sell as a result of those visits. The standard industry term for this is conversion. By checking my site traffic through statcounter.com and my book sales through the Kindle Direct Publishing reports daily, over time I’ve found that about my book sales tend to be 10 to 15% of my website traffic. I can’t be sure that all of those sales are generated from my website, but by watching the correlation, I know that most of them are.

Here’s where we have to do a little math.

1. Since 15% of my website visitors buy a book, then I need to send about 7 (100 / 15 = 7) visitors to my site for each book I want to sell.
2. Since it costs me $0.20 each time someone clicks on my advertisement, then it costs me $1.40 ($0.20 * 7) in advertising to sell one book.
3. I normally make about $3.00 on a book, so after advertising expenses, I still clear $1.60 per book.

As you can see the key variables to pay attention to are: cost per click, conversation rate, and profit per book.

If it costs you less in advertising than you make per book: congratulations! You can conduct a successful targeted advertising campaign. Now you can choose to spend more on ads to sell more books, always earning more than you spend.

If your conversion rate is low, you may need to better target your ads to find people who would be interested in the book, or you may need to redesign your website to make buying the book easier, more obvious, or more compelling.

Good luck!

Why Agents Reject So Many Submissions

I happened to notice a writer ask the question of "Why do literary agents reject so many good submissions?"

The answer is simple mathPhoto credit:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ktheory/21905281/

The answer is simple math.

A literary agent get anywhere from 25 to 100 submissions each and every day.

The agent themselves has to represent each work to publishers. Just as it takes the author time to send out their manuscript and cover letters, so too will it take the agent time to try to sell each work to publishers.

Maybe they can take on one or two new projects, if that, a week. If they get 200 submissions in a week, but they can only take two on to promote, that's the simple answer: they must reject 198 submissions and they can accept two.

On a related note, a few words about pitches:

At first I was really bothered by this notion that I needed to be able to describe my book in less than twenty words to pitch it to an agent.

Then I heard an agent speak at Willamette Writers Con. The agent's job is to take the book and pitch it to publishers. They have a minute or two on the phone with the publisher. They need to be able to describe it in just a few words, and then leave time for questions.

If the publisher wants it, they'll need to pitch the book to distributors, book stores, and readers. If the publisher can't put a twenty word blurb on the back that describes the book, then it won't sell.

So if you, the author, can't come up with a twenty word pitch, how can you expect the agent or the publisher to do it?

Once I realized all of that, my resistance to the short pitch evaporated.

Doctorow: The Coming War on General Computation

Cory Doctorow recently spoke on The Coming War on General Computation, which I think will be one of the most important issues of the coming ten years: more important even than the impact of dwindling oil or water, because what's at stake is corporate control over what we as citizens are able to do and not do, what we are able to make or not make, what we can invent or not invent.

Here is the full text of The Coming War on General Computation speech by Cory Doctorow, transcribed by Joshua Wise.

Here's a small excerpt from near the end of the speech:

1576.3 And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.

1627.8 As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won't be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body. So when I get into a car – a computer I put my body into – with my hearing aid – a computer I put inside my body – I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests. [vigorous applause from audience] Thank you.

1669.4 Thank you. So, last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal of trouble, because it was caught distributing PCs to its students, equipped with rootkits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the computer's camera and network connection. It transpired that they had been photographing students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, mics, and GPSes on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices.

1705.0 Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

If you care about these issues, please donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Christina Katz: Five Flabby Writing Habits To Lose

Willamette Writers 

January 3rd, 2012 Meeting

Christina Katz

author of The Writer’s Workout: 366 Tips, Task & Techniques From Your Writing Career Coach

Five Flabby Habits to Lose & Five Healthy Habits to Keep

• Pitched at the Willamette Writers Conference. Stood up in front of 50 people. The editor from writer’s digest was there. Gave her pitch. Now has three published books. Big advocate for WWCon.
• There’s never been a better time to be a writer.
• In the past, things were much more divided. There was something of a gap. As a self-published author, it was difficult and not fun to feel that gap. Conversely, to land the traditional publishing gigs, authors had to work overtime and keep working overtime to land those gigs.
• Now, things have turned. Every author is a publisher to some extent. And every writer will have a range of publications from traditional publishing to self-published and in between.
• The longer you work in a niche, the better you are going to get. The more you will know, the better you understand your readers, and the better the connections you will make. 
• I would like to see more writers thinking about writing as a lifetime pursuit. Than you can build up traction, and successes start to pile up, even if they are small successes. People start to recognize your name.
• The Writer’s Workout is about finding your momentum. Not anyone else’s. It’s not about imitating anyone else. It’s about finding your unique style, voice, and projects, and allowing yourself time to go for excellence.
• Excellence takes time - it doesn’t happen overnight.
• Five Flabby Habits to Lose
• Is there were 7 deadly sins for writers, these would be them.
• The talent to be your own publisher is everywhere. There’s copyeditors and proofreaders and cover designers.
• Why wouldn’t we be publishers, when it’s wide open right now?
• You can be self-published and traditionally published at the same time
• #1: Negative Thinking
• Like colored lenses that makes everything darker than it really is
• When it interferes with your optimism, then it blocks you from taking any steps.
• You can debate all day: but what about X? What about Y? But then you never do anything.
• Maybe you can write a 50 page ebook and get it out there.
• It might only make you $50/month. But if it makes $50/month every month for the rest of your life, then you can write more ebooks.
• #2: Perfectionism
• If you’re only going to do it if you know it will be perfect, and if it isn’t going to be perfect, then you aren’t going to do it - then you’ve killed it before you started.
• Excellence is not perfection.
• Excellence allows mistakes. It’s a process. It’s a first draft followed by a second draft followed by writing feedback followed by more work and more research.
• Excellence invites mistakes and messiness as part of a process.
• Perfection does not allow mistakes as part of the process.
• “I’m going to write a crummy ebook until it’s not crummy anymore.”
• Perfectionism doesn’t allow you to be present in the process because it’s too focused on the outcome. 
• #3: Ego
• When our self-esteem isn’t the highest; maybe because we have high self-esteem elsewhere in our life, and we don’t yet have it in writing. 
• We want to hear “That’s an amazing sentence.”
• We want to hear people say good things about it.
• Those first compliments give you a contact high.
• But as you go along, you eventually realize that it isn’t someone giving you back superlatives, but someone really getting what you wrote... Giving back the intention behind the work.
• It’s everything to be able to connect with your audience. 
• #4: Victimization
• What’s so great about these times is that we’re leaving the “I’m a victim because no publisher wants me”. 
• Now everyone makes their own success.
• This is really how it has always been: publishers have always make their own success, and self-published authors have made their own success. 
• All authors have always championed their own cause, their own career.
• Am I a victim or am I the champion of my own career?
• #5: Envy
• It’s easy to fall into the belief that someone else has everything locked up. No one person can own an entire genre of writing.
• Every single writer, even very successful writers, are simply hard working people who are working to build success every day. 
• You build your own success.
• Envy is representative of your own inability to execute.
• #6: Distraction
• Distraction is a big reason she wrote The Writer’s Workout.
• You can now spend all day online.
• Instead of going out there, you want to go inside yourself.
• If you are going inside yourself, and writing every day, and saying the things you really want to say, then excellence will come, and you will not get distracted. In fact, you’ll be annoyed if you have to go online because you’d rather be writing.
• So the solution is to go deeper inside yourself.
• Research has shown that spending more time on the Internet makes your thinking shallower. If you want to get deep thoughts, big things, then you have to go deeper inside yourself
• #7: Starving Artist
• The focus on the lack: that writing is a path to poverty. 
• That everything else is the path to money.
• This will block you from investing in writing.
• It’s like hearing your grandmother say “you’re doing what with your time?”
• The focus must be on inner wealth.
• That we have things of value inside of us.
• That we write to share that value.
• Then people pay us to get that value.
• You can’t have external wealth unless you have internal wealth.
• Unless you believe you have some of value to offer, then how will you make money?
• It takes a lot of effort to keep my daughter’s creative spirit alive. Because there is a lot of pressure for kid’s to grow up. We work hard to keep her imagination games alive, to keep her creating.
• We have to do that for ourselves: we have to honor our creative spirits and nurture them. 
• There has never been a better time to be a writer
• The stigma of self-publishing is finally gone. If not now, then certainly by the end of the year.
• Discussion (This was both people from the audience speaking as well as Christina Katz)
• Learn what you can do yourself and what you can’t. I can do an ebook cover, I can’t do a print cover.
• Know your audience. 
• When writing fiction, your audience is more nebulous. The best sales technique for fiction is to publish more fiction. Because when people buy one thing you’ve written, then they’ll buy more.
• The more books an author has, the more sales.
• When/how much do you write?
• It’s cyclical.
• I love the period from 4am to 8am. Everything is quiet. Even the pets aren’t moving.
• I work full-time on my writing, and it’s more than full-time when I’m writing a book. 

Avogadro Corp -- Kindle Fire Part 2

A few days ago, Jason Glaspey, a prominent member of Portland's tech and startup community, and the man behind PaleoPlan,  approached me and said he would be doing a review of Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears on Silicon Florist.

Avogadro Corp is my first novel. It's a techno-thriller about the accidental creation of an artificial intelligence at the world’s largest Internet company and the subsequent race to contain it, as it starts to manipulate people, transfer funds, and arm itself.

It's set almost entirely in Portland, Oregon. Readers have enjoyed the references to Portland's coffee scene, imaging a 10,000 employee tech company in downtown Portland, and the realistic portrayal of AI emergence. Some early feedback includes:

• "jaw-dropping tale about how something as innocuous as email can subvert an entire organization"
• "a terrific, and stunningly believable, account of how the first sentient artificial intelligence might accidentally arise"
• "HAL, the self aware CPU from 2001 a Space Odyssey is a kitten compared to ELOPe"
• "a startling, feasible examination of the emergence of artificial intelligence"

It’s available in paperback, for the kindle, and inepub format for a variety of other e-readers. And so far it's doing great - averaging 5 star reviews on Amazon.

Jason knew I had been offering a Kindle Fire and some Amazon gift certificates in exchange for help promoting Avogadro Corp. He asked if I would keep it running a little longer until his review came out. That didn't seem quite fair to people who had already done so much to help get the word out.

So instead I'm going to give away a second Kindle Fire.

Here’s the deal:

1. Spread the word in the next week! Send people to this blog post or the Avogadro Corp page on Amazon. Here are some ideas: Facebook “like”, Facebook sharing, retweets, Twitter, e-mail, e-mail signature, blog posts, or a review if you’ve already read it. You can sing about it from street corners too, but this may get you funny looks. (Please stick to appropriate sharing to audiences who will appreciate learning about a good book. I don't want to encourage spammy behavior.)
2. By 9am PST on Dec. 31 (ya know, the last day of the year), leave a comment on this blog post telling me what you did. If possible, quantify the impact (clicks, page views, etc.).

I’ll consider the first 20 submissions, if I get that many, and from the 3 that I think did the best job (subjective, I know), I’ll pick one to receive the Kindle Fire. The 2 runner ups will receive a $25 Amazon gift card. Void where prohibited, robots and artificial intelligences under 21 not allowed, no prize awarded if the AI apocalypse occurs before the contest ends, etc., etc. Recipients will be announced within a few days after the 31st. (If you don't want the Kindle Fire, you can donate it to a school or non-profit.)

Most of all, I hope you enjoy Avogadro Corp.

Thanks,
Will

Avogadro Corp Published (Plus, a Free Kindle Fire)

For those of you that haven't heard, after a two year journey, my novel Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears is published!

Avogadro Corp is a techno-thriller about the accidental creation of an artificial intelligence at the world’s largest Internet company, and the subsequent race to contain it, as it starts to manipulate people, transfer funds, and arm itself.

It’s available in paperback, for the kindle, and in epub format for a variety of other e-readers. 

If you've already bought a copy - THANK YOU! It means so much to me. 

If not, I hope you’ll buy a copy and enjoy it, or consider giving it as a gift to someone who loves techno-thrillers or science fiction.

The Next Step

Writing Avogadro Corp was incredibly fun, and the path to publication was a great learning experience. But now that it’s published, the next challenge I face is to help it rise above the noise of thousands of other books. 

Here’s just a few of the things that help a book get noticed: sharing it on Facebook or twitter, buying it or giving it as a gift, providing a review on Amazon, blog posts that link to it, emails to friends about it.

Anything you can do to help support my book would be tremendous!

Bonus: A Free Kindle Fire

If you don’t yet have a Kindle Fire and would like one for free, I’m giving one away. This is a thank you for all the feedback and help I received over the last six months. (As usual, I was inspired by Tim Ferriss to do this, and in fact won the Kindle Fire from Tim in his own book promotion contest.)

Here’s the deal:

1. Spread the word in the next 7 days! Send people to this blog post or the Avogadro Corp page on Amazon. Here are some ideas: Facebook “like”, Facebook sharing, retweets, Twitter, e-mail, e-mail signature, blog posts, or a review if you’ve already read it. You can sing about it from street corners too, but this may get you funny looks.
2. By 9am PST on Dec. 18 (next Sunday), leave a comment on this blog post telling me what you did. If possible, quantify the impact (clicks, page views, etc.).

I’ll consider the first 50 submissions, if I get that many, and from the 5 that I think did the best job (subjective, I know), I’ll pick one to receive the Kindle Fire. The 4 runner ups will receive a $25 Amazon gift card. Void where prohibited, robots and artificial intelligences under 21 not allowed, no prize awarded if the AI apocalypse occurs before the contest ends, etc., etc. Winners will be announced next week.

Again, even if you don’t want the Kindle Fire, anything you can do to help promote Avogadro Corp is still awesome!

Resources

If you take this on, here’s a few links that might help:

• http://amzn.to/avogadroprint : use this as the main Amazon link.
• http://avogadrocorp.com : my homepage for the book.
• http://www.williamhertling.com/2011/12/avogadro-corp-published-plus-free.html : this blog post
• Two different cover images you can use if you like:
• http://avogadrocorp.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/avogadrocorpcr1.png?w=350&h=646
• http://avogadrocorp.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/avogadrocover-final-300.jpg?w=584

Happy holidays!

Tim Ferriss's new book, 4-Hour Chef, is coming

By now you must know I'm a big fan of Tim Ferriss. His lifestyle design book The 4-Hour Workweek and his fat loss, muscle building health book the 4-Hour Body were both ground-breaking, best-selling books.

His third book is called the 4-Hour Chef. And it's like no cookbook you've ever read. Using cooking as an example, he actually teaching the skills and tools to learn and become an expert at anything. It's up for pre-order now on Amazon at a greatly reduced price. I've already ordered my copy. :)

Singularity Summit Talk Videos

The Singularity Institute has posted a comprehensive list of all Singularity Summit talks with videos of each talk. A few that I'm particularly interested in:

• Ray Kurzweil. The Singularity: a hard or soft takeoff?
• Cory Doctorow. Singularity or Dark Age?.
• Ben Goertzel. Nine Years to a Positive Singularity – If We Really, Really Try.
• Paul Saffo. Machines of Loving Grace: Anticipating Advanced AI.
• Vernor Vinge and Bob Pisani. Conversation on the Singularity.
• Ray Kurzweil. Exponential progress in information technologies.
• Ray Kurzweil. The ubiquity and predictability of the exponential growth of information technology.
• Ray Kurzweil. Critics of the singularity.
• Ray Kurzweil. From Eliza to Watson to passing the Turing Test.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky. Open problems in friendly artificial intelligence.
• David Brin. So you want to make gods. Now why would that bother anybody?

OryCon 33 Summary

I attended OryCon 33, a regional science fiction / fantasy con in Portland, Oregon. This is my second time attending OryCon. As a writer, it's a great opportunity to get questions answered about professional writing and the publishing industry, learn writing craft, and to meet authors, editors, and fans.

Like most conferences I go to, I take a lot of notes. Here's what I took during OryCon. The links take you to a full post on my line by line notes from the panel.

• Author Influences: Who most influenced the panelists? Answers ranged from Ray Bradbury to Kelly Link. I've already bought a dozen books based on what I heard here. 
• Self-Publishing: The New Vanity Press? This controversial sounding panel actually turned into a great discussion about how an author can be professionally successful self-publishing. Annie Bellet is great, and even surprised the other panelists with the success she's had, and the counter-intuitive discoveries (such as finding that author platform had no impact on sales).
• Getting Your First Professional Sale: Tips, tricks, and personal experiences from five published panelists including E.E. Knight and Mary Robinette Kowal. 
• How To Promote Yourself as a Writer Without Being Obnoxious: This panel discussion promoting the writer vs. the book, how to use social media, and when to push back against the publisher. 
• Self-Publish Write Note: Hands on panel by Robert Plamondon on the mechanics of self-publishing, including print books.
• Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: This panel included Robopocalypse author Daniel H. Wilson. The discussion including our ethical responsibility towards A.I. (is it OK to kill them?), our responsibility to ensure that A.I. behave ethically (how do we keep them from killing us?), lovebots, and robot nursing aides.
• Using Social Media to Get Published: The use of social media, author platform, and self publishing to help achieve getting traditionally published.
• Writing Formidable Women: By the end of this panel I learned how to spell formidable. Great discussion about what makes women formidable. Victoria Blake (editor, Underland Press) said "wanting to do something other than please someone else." Also discussed how a formidable woman is inherently more complex than a formidable man because of social, physical limitations. There's a broader palette of tools for a woman to be formidable.
• Structure of Writing: A writing craft discussion of structure as a tool.
• Playing God: Apocalyptic Storytelling: Another panel where I learned how to spell a word through repetition. 
• Gender and Writing: Discussion about male and female characters, different styles of problem-solving, and how the Buffy effect (kick-ass female characters) causes a lack of other, more feminine stylings of addressing conflict.
• Internal and External Change in Writing: The important and effect of internal character change in additional to external (action) change. It's not a story unless a character learns something or changes in some way.
• Use of Description in Writing: self-description, adverbs, the view paragraph - what works and what doesn't. 
• Ken Scholes Evolution of a Writing Career: Published author Ken Scholes gave an overview of his twenty year career in writing, and how what appears to be sudden success is actually the outcome of many years of practice and networking. Then he addressed audience questions about writing and publishing.  

SciFi / Fantasy Author Influences

A touch of Farmer, a pinch of LeGuin

Ann Wilkes, Claude Lalumière, Ray Vukcevich, Andrew S. Fuller, Amy Thomson

OryCon 33

My apologies for any misspellings or butcherings of names.

• Ann Wilkes: Writes science fiction and fantasy, mostly short stories, one novel, compared to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Science Fiction and Other ODDysseys. 
• Amy Thomson: Author of Virtual Girl
• Andrew Fuller: Short fiction, scifi, fantasy, and horror. Also edit online magazine 3lodedeye.
• Rat Vukcevich: Last novel is Boarding Instructions. Writes around the edge of scifi and fantasy. 
• Claude Lalumière: writer, editor. 

• Influences?
• Claude: As bookseller back in the 90s, I was amazed by certain authors. “How did they do that?” So I would read and reread these authors to figure out what they did. Primarily their short fiction. J.G. Ballard. Bob Silverberg. R.A. Lafferty. Also Unquenchable Fire
• Ray: My influences reflect my discovery of reading. Back in the 50s and 60s. Boy engineer and Boy scientists. Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series. Ray Bradbury -- he opens your eyes to what can be done with language. J.G. Ballard - his structure and vision. Precise and elegant. He can take big concepts like in Crash, and little things like Concrete Island. What you can do in a novel - I cannot recommend it too highly.
• in school, in the 60s, protesting the war. kurt vonnegut turned out to be a major influence. Slaughterhouse Five.
• R.A. Lafferty. 
• Daemon Knight’s ...
• Typed in an entire manuscript, just to understand what the author was doing. 
• Ann Wilkes:
• when I was a kid, I was watching TV when you guys were reading.
• Douglas Adams. In the later books, the humor began to run thin. To keep doing the same tongue in cheek in the same voice without changing, it was too much.
• David Brin: 
• Practice Effect by David Brin: “How the hell did he do that?” He takes physics and turns it on its head. You take materials and the more you use them, the better they get. [This was one of my favorites too - Will]
• Uplift Wars
• Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game. The scope of the cultures
• Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
• The Void trilogy by Peter Hamilton. 
• Andrew Fuller
• as a kid, it was steven king, lovecraft.
• I have to thank a teacher who said “stop reading steven king and just read other stuff”
• Ray Bradbury.
• the nostalgia, the atmosphere.
• Collection of short stories called Blow Up. The House Takeover. This family has to keep moving from room to room because there’s something taking over the house. 
• Forever War
• Mind Bridge
• Octavia Butler
• Wild Seed
• short fiction by Ursula LeGuin
• hardboiled: Hammett, Chandler.
• Amy Thomson
• I was like a lit match and gasoline: I took off with reading.
• I read the entire Time Life science series because I could only get six books a day from the library.
• Hans Christian Andersen. 
• I would get $10/month to buy books from my mother. Back in 1971, 72, 73 that was a lot of f...ing money.
• Ray Bradbury
• where I discover prose style
• Dunseney
• Everything in the Ballinetine Fantasy series
• Anne McCaffrey
• Wilhelm and Sturgeon.
• Read ton of Darkover
• Every female superhero comic
• After college, Gene Wolfe, Delany, Joanna Rush
• Got  job as a Locus reader for short fiction. Jeff Reinman, ...
• Octavia Butler
• Travel books: My Journey to Lhasa
• Who most influenced us that doesn’t write genre
• Andrew: Mystery and hardboiled writers.
• The History of Salt book. Kurlandsky. Cod and salt drive the British Navy and allowed them to colonize the world.
• Ann Wilkes
• Madeline Lingal
• Eugenia Price: Atmosphere. Wrote a book set in islands of south carolina.
• Spy novels: great for learning pacing. Jack Higgins. Leon Yuris - reluctant spy. 
• Ray Vukcevich
• William Burroughs: Junkie and Queer. Naked Lunch. Steamrolls over you with its honesty.
• Italian: Dino Buzzati - The Falling Girl
• Sudden Fiction collection. 
• Ron Carlson
• Bigfoot stole my wife
• Can nail the emotional content right into the structure in a fascinating way
• Truman Capote: his short fiction
• Claude:
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s
• Jack Kerby - unbridled creativity. more ideas per page.
• Major films of David Lynch - master of storytelling. What to reveal and not to reveal to properly tell a story. Blue Velvet. Mullholland Drive. 
• LeGuin: 
• Always Coming Home. Reverse archeology. She digs for a society that doesn’t exist yet.
• A sense of yearning that is so powerful.
• story of a fictional european country. very subtle stories. Learn how to leave at the right moment. Don’t overstay your welcome.
• Influence writers active right now:
• Interstitial Arts Foundation
• Ray Vukcevich
• Kelly Link (mentioned by several panelists)
• Robert Reed
• Matt Hughes
• Jasper Fforde
• Ted Chiang