This is just a quick note to say that I’m still hard at work on Book 4. I’m staying as focused as possible on getting the first draft done while I’m still able to write on a daily basis. During the summer school break, I can write every day. Once my kids go back to school, I only have two good writing days per week.
The good news is that I’m making great progress and the end is within sight.
Now let the quiet resume.
I’ve launched a Patreon campaign! Please consider supporting my writing with a small recurring donation.
What is Patreon? It’s a relatively new crowdfunding platform with some key differences from Kickstarter and its many competitors.
Kickstarter is about raising the funds for a specific project, like making a movie, or bringing a physical product to life. But Patreon is about supporting ongoing creation, like a webcomic, series of YouTube videos, or in my case, a series of books about the near future, artificial intelligence, and the singularity.
Patreon supporters, or patrons, make a recurring donation: either monthly (as in my case), or per piece of content.
Why support me?
Naturally, there are patron benefits. All patron supporters will receive a free digital copy of each book as much as a month before it’s published. There will be occasional bonus material, such as unpublished chapters and short stories. You’ll receive thanks, of course, and at higher donation levels, also receive signed copies of physical books, and at the highest level, an exclusive one-off patron creation.
But I hope you’ll also consider the benefits to my writing and my career:
Each new book requires an outlay of several thousand dollars in editing, proofreading, and design. In the past, I’ve made tradeoffs between keeping cost low and quality. With greater support, I can make each book the very best quality possible.
I would also like to write full-time. Today I juggle a family and full-time job, and squeeze writing into the little leftover nooks and crannies in my schedule. I’d like to give each book the full time and focus it deserves. Writing income is also lumpy: much of it comes when I release a new book. Monthly patron donations on Patreon will help level out my income.
If you loved Avogadro Corp, A.I. Apocalypse, or The Last Firewall, become a patron and help me create more works of even higher quality.
Using Social Media to Engage Younger Readers — Willamette Writers Con 2014 (#WillWrite14)
Kiersi Burkhart
@kiersi
Amazing talk by Luke Ryan (@lukeryansays) on The Future of Media at Willamette Writers Conference. #WillWrite14
From Inside the Artificial Brain That’s Remaking Google, a Wired article:
[P]erhaps half of the teams now using the Google Brain software are simply downloading the source code, tweaking a configuration file, and then pointing Google Brain at their own data. “If you want to do leading edge research in this area and really advance the state-of-the-art in what kinds of models make sense for new kinds of problems, then you really do need a lot of years of training in machine learning,” says Dean. “But if you want to apply this stuff, and what you’re doing is a problem that’s somewhat similar to problems that have already been solved by a deep model, then…people have had pretty good success with that, without being deep learning experts.
And:
“Google is not really a search company. It’s a machine-learning company,” says Matthew Zeiler, the CEO of visual search startup Clarifai, who worked on Google Brain during a pair of internships. He says that all of Google’s most-important projects—autonomous cars, advertising, Google Maps—stand to gain from this type of research. “Everything in the company is really driven by machine learning.”
According to both 2006 and 2009 studies published by Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, those who read fiction are capable of the most empathy and “theory of mind,” which is the ability to hold opinions, beliefs and interests apart from their own.
They can entertain other ideas, without rejecting them and still retain their own.
Cory Doctorow spoke at the Beaverton City Library on July 8th, 2014
The Case of the Wilted Broccoli, my first detective novel for kids age 7 through 12, has been out for a few weeks now. If 
you’re one of the early buyers, thank you so much! If not, I hope you will give it a try or let a friend with kids know about it.
One of the unanticipated joys of publishing this book has been the emails I’ve gotten from parents. One said their son, who normally had to be required to read twenty minutes a day, spent an entire morning reading the novel. Another said their daughter was glued to the pages until she finished. As I kid, I loved books more than almost anything, and so hearing these stories is really rewarding.
If you (or your child) likes The Case of the Wilted Broccoli, it would be a tremendous help if you could post a review online. Reviews help prospective buyers decide if a novel is worth purchasing. And some outlets where I’d like to advertise have a minimum review requirement of twenty reviews or more. It takes just a few minutes, and can be written from the child’s or parent’s perspective, whichever is easier. A star rating and a sentence or two is all that’s needed.
Thanks,
Will
Mike R. Underwood has a nice piece up about 25 Secrets of Publishing Revealed. If you’re a writer, go check it out. I know Mike from an online writers’ community we’re both part of, and I enjoyed his novel Geekomancy.
I don’t disagree with anything Mike said, but I do think his article comes from traditional publishing viewpoint. So after you’ve read his article, come back here and read a few of my reactions. (I’ve only addressed a few of his 25 items. For the most part, I think he’s spot on.)
3) GATEKEEPERS: YOU KEEP SAYING THAT WORD
Mike says that gatekeepers aren’t there to keep you out, but to find content of the right fit for their publisher. He gives brief mention to the option of self-publishing.
I want to emphasize: self-publishing is a very viable choice that has a whole set of advantages and disadvantages compared to traditional publishing, and shouldn’t be seen only as a fallback alternative. Self-publishing gives you the control over the creative, production, and marketing processes. Want to hire your choice of talent to edit, design, or create a cover? Want to keep a greater percentage of the royalties? Want to develop business skills? You can when you’re the publisher.
Evaluating traditional versus indie publishing is asking if you want to be the employee of a big company (little control over what happens, but lots of people to back you up) versus an entrepreneur starting your own business.
5) AGENTS ARE FREAKING KEY, BUT YOU CAN GO IT ALONE IF YOU REALLY WANT
They’re key if you go the route of traditional publishing, but less important if you’re indie. However, even if you’re indie, you’ll still want an agent to help you sell foreign translation rights, film rights, etc. It’s especially challenging to reach out to publishers in other countries without an agent. If you are indie, make sure you’re agent is indie-friendly and understands you’ll be pursuing a mix of traditional and indie publication. Your contract should clarify that the agent does not get a percentage of royalties for those titles you’ve indie published.
7) BOOKSELLERS ARE AWESOME, BUT THEY HAVE TO BE PROFITABLE, TOO
In this point Mike argues that sometimes a bookseller will screw over (his words) a particular author or genre, and “that’s why we, as authors, are well-advised to develop a diversified publishing portfolio for ourselves and to support a diverse bookselling landscape, so that no one part of our business, no one retailer, no one project, has too much control over our overall publishing fate.”
I agree heartily, and this is an even bigger danger for indies, most of whom get the majority of their royalties from Amazon. I get more than 90% of my book income from Amazon. If Amazon changes their royalty structure (and they’ve given hints of doing so), my royalties and those of other indies could drop in half. They’ve already taken steps to drive exclusivity, reserving the highest royalties for those people who do Kindle-exclusive ebooks, and preferring Kindle-exclusive titles when doing promotions.
It’s also challenging for indies to get into bookstores, but that’s a topic worthy of a whole post by itself.
9) THE TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING JAEGER
Mike said about this: “If you sell a book to a major publisher, you’re agreeing to give over a big chunk of the book’s income in order to hire an army to go to bat for your book. If you sell to a smaller publisher, you’re hiring a smaller, more focused army. A traditional publisher includes the following people helping to make your book amazing and to sell it: editor, publicist, sales representatives, sales managers, marketers, library representatives, book designers, artists, layout artists, inventory staff, finance & royalties workers, and hundreds more positions in a bigger house.”
Yes, but… That big army can on occasion be an army of mediocrity. That can happen if everyone at the publisher is just so-so in their talent and skill, or because the A-team got put on someone else’s book, and you got the B-team or the C-team, or the just-hired intern who has no idea what they’re doing. (Surely we’ve all experience the pockets of abyss that can exist inside bigger companies.)
This is my biggest fear with traditional publishing compared to the indie world. In the indie world, you can pick the people who work on your book, whether that’s hiring a great editor, an amazing cover designer. Or you can choose to do the work yourself, taking charge of social media, advertising, and marketing. The danger here is that indies often don’t know what they don’t know. You might not know you need a proofreader after your copyeditor, or you might have hired an inferior editor and can’t judge that yourself. But in the indie world, if you do make a mistake, because you’re still in control, you can fix it: hire someone better, or reedit the book after it’s already gone out. It’s very rare to find that in the traditional publishing world: forget about saying “let’s try a new cover” after the book has been out two months.
10) TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING IS SLOW FOR A REASON
Among other points, Mike says, “The reason publishing is slow is that it’s big, and it’s powerful. In order to align the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of employees behind a book as part of a publisher’s season, there’s a ton of coordination and steps to go through to make it a powerful butt-kicking sales machine.”
Yes, there are reasons it’s slow, but they aren’t all good, and they aren’t all necessary. I’ve personally experienced this, working in large and small companies. Large companies have huge amounts of overhead as they task-switch between projects, wait on constrained resources (maybe the one interior-layout designer), or just drop the ball. In fact, the best teams inside large companies are usually the smallest, most focused ones. A small, nimble, focused team can do in a couple of months what might take a large organization a year to do. And they’ll usually do it with higher quality and better results.
11) COVERS ARE FOR THE PUBLISHER
Mike argues that covers are for the buyer, not the author, and that it’s best to turn that over to the people who know best: a designer with experience with book covers. With a traditional publisher, authors get zero input into the cover design.
I agree that an author should never design their own cover (unless they happen to be a talented book cover designer). But an author should be familiar with their genre and know enough to be able to pick something that matches their genre and yet stands out.
Many long-term cover designers are thinking first-and-foremost about how a cover will look as a 6×9 paperback. But if the majority of your sales will be online (as they are for many genre writers), then the cover must be amazing not at 6″ x 9″, but at 100 pixels by 150 pixels: less than an inch tall. That requires a whole other set of design principles.
I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but it’s not a given that a traditional publisher will give you the best cover. You might be allocated a cheaper cover, or an designer who isn’t designing for icon-sized covers, or someone who doesn’t know your genre. You must become educated enough to know what works and doesn’t work and involve yourself in the process of approving the cover. (Of course, as an indie you’ll get total control, and with a publisher you’ll have only minor influence.)
13) MAKING FRIENDS IS THE BEST MARKETING
I completely agree with what Mike said here, and just want to add that it’s fun, too!
Unless many other types of work, writing is innately a solitary activity. So you must take steps to make it social. Find a local community and an online community. Take writing classes to meet people, attend your local conventions for writers, and tell people about what you do.
16) YOU HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO PITCH YOUR BOOK
In this point Mike talks about the art of hand-selling: talking to people one-on-one at conventions and bookstores to convince them to buy your book.
I think handselling is great, but I’d be cautious about getting too distracted by it. I see a lot of authors put a tremendous amount of time into conventions or bookstores, and then go on to sell anywhere from two to five copies. Investing a weekend of work to sell a few copies isn’t a great ROI. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fine to do this and it might be fun. But I see it’s as something you do mostly for the fun of it.
If you want to sell books, I think it makes more sense to focus on activities with a bigger return-on-investment. If you had a weekend’s worth of time, could you sell a hundred or a thousand books? Probably not at a convention handselling to one person at a time, but you could do it with online advertising, clever promotional strategies, and so forth.
Focus on what scales, because your goal is to sell thousands of books, not dozens.
20) GOTTA GET PAID – HOW ADVANCES AND ROYALTIES WORK
Mike explained how traditional publishers work. Most of the money you’re likely to earn comes from advances, which are paid out in thirds when the contract is signed, the final manuscript is turned over, and the book is published. Royalties (if you earn any) will usually get paid either annually or semiannually. You typically won’t know how many books you’ve sold until you get these annual or semiannual reports. Which means that if you want to know whether you should be celebrating you won’t know for a very long time. The long feedback times also make it difficult to determine the effectiveness of promotional efforts.
With indie-published books, all of the money you earn will come as royalties after the book is sold. You’ll typically get paid monthly (except for Smashwords who pays quarterly), and royalties will lag by about two months: so you’ll get paid at the end of March for the books you sold in January.
You’ll see your sales in real time, so that you can know by midnight how many books you sold that day. This means that if you run an advertising campaign, talk about your book at a convention, or get a big blog mention, you’ll immediately know the sales impact. This kind of continuous feedback helps you optimize what you to do market and promote your books. (And it’s very rare to find a big publisher who is doing this kind of continuous optimization.)
24) IT TAKES A LONG TIME TO GET GOOD
Mike argues that one downside to the indie world is that it takes a long time to become good and that new authors can put work out that is bad. Hence, maybe it makes sense to write for six or seven years, and get a couple of novels written before publishing the first one.
I agree that we get better by writing, but sometimes a first novel is good-enough. It might not be great, and it might suffer from many first-timer mistakes, but it also might contain just enough to good bits to really resonate with an audience. Avogadro Corp was my first novel, and although it went out with errors and poor writing, it’s also been very, very popular. Should I have stuck in a trunk and not published it? I think that would have been a mistake.
I come from a software background, and in particular use agile and lean methodologies. That means getting out a minimal product and then getting user (or for books, reader) feedback on it. In the case of Avogadro Corp, I received feedback after it was published, and then made improvements to it. Two years later I’m still making improvements (this last round of revisions took six months and included both copyediting and proofreading improvements).
In sum, I liked Mike’s article and agree with nearly everything he said. I hope you’ll find these additional points from the indie-perspective helpful.
Doh. Extracto coffee, where I wrote most of my books, stopped carrying carmelita bars, my favorite coffee shop pastry of all time. This could put a serious crimp in my ability to write.
