An Ostentatious Display

The topic is eBook Covers. Two writers of my e-quaintance released short story collections recently: Annie Bellet's The Spacer's Blade & Other Stories and Jeff Ambrose's Shattered Wonders, and the covers are pretty slick. Check 'em out, those are the links to Amazon. Anyways, that got me to thinking about my cover art strategy and whether it needs to be changed. Short-term answer: No (but keep reading).

I'm a solid INTJ personality, so I never judge a book by the cover and I'm not really suited to produce spin, but I demand that what spin I do notice and produce be well-crafted. From this, I can derive two basic principles. First, book covers are advertisement, and as such should be lavished with all the attention advertisement requires. Second, I'm trying to become an efficient  writer, which means there are some things to take into consideration.

I'm not a graphic artist, nor can I draw beyond stick figures. I am, however, a good writer because I've focused almost entirely on words. So I'm faced with the choice: Do I spend the time and practice I'd need to spend to become a semi-pro cover artist, or do I stick with my pro specialty-of-practice and find a pro cover artist when the time is ripe?

I run the numbers, and they tell me it would take me a solid working day to make a semi-pro cover with my rudimentary skills just by muddling through, whereas I've actually watched a pro make a pro cover in less than an hour (from a solid design proposal), and it's better than anything I could make. Because she's a pro. Likewise, I can write a great story in five hours, whereas the pro cover artist would probably take a while to finish a good story just muddling through. Because she hasn't put in the writing practice, and I haven't put in the art practice, neither of us are efficient moonlighters, but both of us together can churn out quality in our respective areas of expertise.

What does that mean in the here and now? Three things + exciting future thing:

(1) I'll continue to make my simple covers for short stories, at one cover every 15 minutes (not counting wandering around time to get the pictures) until I have 100 buck e-chaps.
(2) I'll collect these stories into 5-packs @ $2.99, using a "[Feature Story]...and other stories" format and using the feature story title. That's 20 5-packs. This will allow me to test out how much covers matter to sales. (Hypothesis: I'm sure it'll be important, but not excessively so for the <$2.99 market.)
(3) THEN I'll collect these stories into 10-packs @ $4.99, using a "[Feature Story] and Other Stories" format . That's 10 10-packs. I'll come up with a great cover art proposal for each feature story and get a pro cover artist to art all 10 covers up. Those 10-packs books would then be my "feature" items, the head of the octopus, with the rest of the books the tentacles that draw bargain-hunters in from all corners of the Internet.
(Future!) Once I see how sales are going, I'll start to figure out POD. As with cover artists so it is with layout designers, so I'll use the cover guy for the print cover art and a layout guy for the print layout, and release these 10-packs as anthologies. What I'd really like to see, and I'll know how crazy this is once I get a more firm grasp of the budget, is some interior B&W art for the first page of each of the stories in the collection, like in classic magazines. Then it'd look pretty awesome, the same as (or better than) any anthology one'd find in the bookstore @ $14.99

And once I figure out how to do boxed sets, the world is my goddamn oyster.

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Run, run from the glitzy future! FOR IT IS NOW.

Wait, is that ermine?

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Story:?

Story "Title"

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Reading - ?

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Well-Earned Relaxation

So you've written 50,000 words this week? Time to get yourself some rest. Which could mean several things:

Drink, Wait, what? NO!

Watch TV, if you want to ruin your outlook on life by muddying up the medium in which you work.

Read a book, if you have 12 spare hours to kill. Still, not a bad idea, especially if you're writing a book. Can't hurt to check it out.

Read a short story or two, now we're getting warmer. Bonus points if it's current and not in a style you normally write. Picking up piles of short story anthologies from all eras is also advisable. This is known both as market research and fun. 

Write Some More. Repeat until you can afford to take a vacation or die. Don't die.

Whee! Fun!

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This is not to say that you shouldn't spend some time with your girlfriend engaged in stress relief activities, that's just good work habits. You have a job, don't you? She understands.

It's like cooking, except it takes less time away from your busy writing schedule.

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Story:?

Story "Title"

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Reading - ?

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Climbing the Stairs

Step 1 - Stop Drinking Alcohol and Eating Meat, Replace With Water and Vegetables. You'll be healthier over-all and you'll probably be in a better mood in the morning. Also you'll have more spare cash; Just make sure to drink clean water.

Step 2 - Exercise, nothing fancy, just walk around more. You'll be better in tune with your surroundings and you can prepare yourself for later adventures. Take a camera and snap a million pictures while you're wandering around. That'll always come in handy.

Step 3 - Get a girlfriend. Ver' important to the whole step process.

Step 4 - SIT DOWN AND FUCKING WRITE

Steps 5-9 - ???

Step 10 - The World

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Mental Hygiene is very important, but there's no real substitute for some solid exercise. That's why running up and down the stairs is fun when you've nothing better to do.

Even if it messes up the carefully constructed metaphor. Just pretend a new one started.

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Story:?

Story "Title"

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Reading - ?

*188

With What Shall We Cover The Floor

There's something we can cover the Bare Floor of Unproductivity with, to wit: the Carpet of Maniacal Over-Achievement.

ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN

Over-achievers are made, not born. Any jackass can be born a genius. I mean, look at me. I'm a genius by any measure, and the only way I can accomplish anything is to trick myself into remembering to do it at an earlier date than this sentence will never end, will it damn. Ahem. Over-achievers are made in one of two ways:

Panic, Blind
One day a fellow wakes up and realizes that his time on the Earth is limited, and he either figures out a way to get off the Earth or he decides to devote his limited time to something more useful than Television. Unless he has a successful television show, which is good enough.

Inspiration, Drunken
One night a fellow has imbibed so much intoxicant that he moves from mere drunkenness to a higher state of being. If you've never inhabited this glorious land, you haven't been intoxicated enough. It takes practice and dedication to reach this sacred land, but not for nothing do I call it the Field of Memes. Suddenly you see everything, connected, a memeplex of didactive discource calling your name.

"David, David," she says "David, Write Us Down, Use Us As You Will, Excessive Capitalization Is Allowed."

I fell to my knees and said "Yes, Miss, I WILL! And I'll do it with style."

Fine, technically it wasn't "one of two ways" but rather "both nigh-concurrently separated by naught but a single night's sleep between a great party and a terrible hangover."

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This is a picture of the terrifying world before child labor laws were enforced in any meaningful way.

"Don't step on the carpet, little girl, 'lessen you want I should sell it to you."

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Story:?
Story "Title"
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Reading - ?

*187

To Arms And Face The Day

Fighting with myself isn't going to help, except when I'm being a lazy little whiner loser bag of sack-crap. Then I've got to engage in Trench Warfare, by which I mean punch myself in the brain until I sit down and type continuously. Sooner or later, I'll have to punch myself less and less to type more and more, thus forming a "trench" of habit. Get it? That probably should have made the title of the post.

Anyways, there are three ways that I've come up with to punch my brain, with exclamation points added:

Self-Mockery! Always effective in measured doses, there's nothing that I can say to really bring myself down from my perch of boundless self-confidence, I just have to remind myself that I'm actually perched up there and that I'm actually competent.

Think About MONEY in a FUTURE of STABILITY! those three keywords have never failed to make me excited. I've spent a good long while one way or the other not existing in a future, existing instead in a present where I have very little money to dispose of towards ensuring stability. Writing is a way to ensure some semblance of stability, or at least a slush fund for pursuing my other interests.

Wait, This is FUN! Just remember how much I enjoy just sitting down and producing stuff, working hard every day at something that is entirely mine. I am a natural entrepreneur and it's not really a hard matter to trick myself into being my own hardass boss if I remember that I'd hate being an employee. This is the most effective way, really.

So, yeah, that's the trick of it. TRY IT AT HOME

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Be Honest With Yourself would also have made a better post title. This one is over-titled and under-capitalized, but Come Now, here's what we're going to do:

Accoutrements was presumably the code phrase for "trench foot". Yeah, take that, recruiting poster! Punch somebody else in the brain, I'll be over here winning the war with SCIENCE!

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Story:?

Story "Title"

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Reading - ?

*186

Extruded Book Product

I'm spending a lot of time getting into the zone, so it's important that I believe that what I'm getting into the zone for is worth doing. What I'm trying to do is write a lot, write continuously, and write whenever I have time. Is this a good idea?

Here's how we test it: How do the works of other people, written at a furious pace, stand up. The only classics I can think of off-hand are "Candide" and "The Three Musketeers", which are pretty good, but there are plenty of others. As far as I can tell, the writers whose fiction I've read my whole life are those writers who produced a bunch of fiction and managed to hit the gold with some of it, possibly by pure chance. It helps that they also made a good living, the ones who didn't blow it all on hookers and booze.

My goal then is to write as fast and as much as them, but also invest judiciously so that I can have booze pretty much continuously without worrying about dying in poverty. That's pretty classic. 

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Pulp writing is half the fun of writing. If you pretend that what you're writing is ephemera, there's a pretty good chance you'll let yourself be creative enough for it to pass the test of time. Just don't think of it being compared to "Twilight" while you're writing it, and it just might work out that it'll be compared to "All the King's Men".

Oh, and all pulp is literary fiction by default. I'm declaring that now, because if this works out I'll be able to afford to start a literary magazine and define what literature is for the next generation.

Here's a hint: Literature is Good.

Oh, the title of this post came from TV Tropes' Extruded Book Product. So there's that.

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Story:?

Story "Title"

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Reading - ?

*185

Oh Come On

Allow me to paint you a picture of my Mindset. For 20 days, I'm a manic pile of short-term energy, which is good for the word-count. The next 20 days, I'm a depressed sack of big-picture contemplation, which is good for business strategy. Repeat the Sack/Pile rotation indefinitely. At the moment, I'm a Sack.

But, um, I've already got a business strategy for the next six months: "Write 100 Stories and ePub Them." Pretty simple: clear-cut goal, reasonable time frame, looking to a future data set. It doesn't really leave much space for useful big-picture contemplation, so I'm sacrificing word-count (i.e. Accomplishing the Strategy) in exchange for...well, nothing.

Unless you count "IN FIVE YEARS I CAN HAS MONEY?"

Needless to say, I don't.

So, thus begins the next phase of the Writing Experiment. I've pretty much figured out how to work Manic, or, more flavorfully "pile-write". Now it's time to figure out how to work Depressed, or less flavorfully "sack-write". Then it'll be time to make both sides work harder, longer, and consistently.

Fortunately, Sack is good at coming up with strategies...

Let Science COMMENCE!

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Hey, I totally ditched Q10 in favor of FocusWriter. It's cooler and runs on Windows, Mac & Linux. Try it!

Anyways, this is an inside joke between me and some editors:


I...I was not aware this song existed.

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(Oh, and don't worry, I'm fine.)

I like old-style art. I need artist friends who can make cool posters for me to hang up on the bare walls of my house.

Then I can have a proper house party, with ladies and a wet bar.

Screw the posters, THAT's my new dream.

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Story?
Long Story "Players of the Nuclear Theremin"
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Reading - ?

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