New Year's Resolutions 2012

Another year is lurking in the background, waiting to pounce upon us and devour our souls in the night. ...possibly. For this year, 2012, I have a lot of great resolutions for myself. You can consult the Five-Year Plan, for the things that'll certainly happen, but these are the Goals. The One-Year Goals, if you will. All the folk call them resolutions, though.

Let's review:
Old Year's Resolutions 2010
New Year's Resolutions 2011
Success Rate:
I've still got that girlfriend, so I'll be sure to keep her happy.
I still don't have a Kindle.
I did, indeed, write like the wind. A rather languid, breezy wind, but a wind nonetheless.
I'm in slightly better shape now, and I use the Internet slightly less.
Prognosis: Negative. (Which is, of course, good.)

Here, in no particular order, are the 2012 resolutions:

Drink Wine
Beer's too easy, esp. this low-alcohol but delicious Thai beer (cf. Singha). I figure if I celebrate every Saturday with a $20 bottle of red wine as opposed to a $20 box of twelve bottles of beer over the course of a week, I'll be in better shape, mentally and physically. Perhaps some mixture of those two items, using linear programming to determine optimal configuration. I don't know. I'm never drunk in Thailand, I just don't want to get gout. That'd be...embarrassing.

Never Volunteer For Anything Again
In case you hadn't figured it out by now, I've been in Thailand these last twenty-seven months as a Peace Corps Volunteer. That's the first and last I'll mention it on this blog, but I have to say (1) I recommend it and (2) I've done my time. Henceforth I am a Man of Business, and I think I can save the world a lot more effectively if I have a Lot of Money, rather than, say...not.

Dave Frost will be taking charge of any further political and economic discussions along those lines, so don't ask me. (He'll be writing an MBA blog, even.)

Eat Less, Better
It turns out I really, really like fish, to the exclusion of just about every other food, and my health has massively improved since I became a de facto pescatarian. I doubt I'll make it official, but I will avoid non-food obsessively, and eat for taste. Damn you, Michael Pollan, and your stupid consciousness-raising. Now I've turned into a 'picky eater'. If you're confused, just consult Food Rules.

Oh, and
Also Less Coffee
oog

Apatheism
Not going to make a big deal of this, but as of 2012, I'm going to act as if religion doesn't exist. For those of you who practice personal religion, that won't make a big difference. Those with a political religion will need to take note. Here's a handy guideline: If your proposition depends on religious belief, it is no longer admissible in my court of evidence for argument, and I will shut it down/delete/ignore it with all due haste.

This is purely for my Creative mental health...and also I'm bored with the discussion. I'm too lazy to be an Atheist. Just leave me alone. I've got so many other interests that I can afford to be rather dull on one topic.

I will continue to make my regular contributions to the ACLU so that everybody—at least in America—can argue out in the open, and if your religious-affiliated charity/NGO has stripped all mention of religion out of its primary charitable goal (I've worked with loads of NGOs, I can assess), I'll contribute to that too.

Don't Be Isolated
Living in the jungle for two years has given me an appreciable window on my mental health, and it turns out I like to have lots of people around to absorb my Creati-Babble. Facebook and blogs just doesn't cut it. I'm going to cut a swathe through whatever social scene I can find.

Play a "Sport"
I've been using Fitocracy (follow me!) for a while now, and it's been super-helpful. I hate the gym, so it would seem the best way for me to get in shape is to pick up a sport, and a pick-up sport at that. Maximum one piece of equipment, so basketball, soccer, 'ultimate frisbee', whathaveyou. More on that as it develops.

Play more Settlers of Catan
Pretty self-explanatory, really. I like human contact, and trading, and board games, all in convenient 30-minute increments. Let's make it happen, people.

Write Lots of Short Stories
In 2012, I'm going to compulsively write a lot of short stories and put them up everywhere. I've pretty much determined that I love writing short stories most of all, and it's an Exercise in Focus. They'll all be entered as part of the (H2NH Stories 2012) series, then split up into collections (with real cover art) by fives and fifteens (for eBooks) and thirties (for POD). Fun!

Fifty of these stories will be under the auspices of Write1Sub1 "Reloaded", but as you can see from my cover art template, I'm anticipating triple digits. You'll be able to follow the progress via the page I'll set up, accessible by clicking on the cover art template in the side-bar. That's the challenge, people.

-daB
feel free to comment

Challenge Story #1: "The Peacock's Tower"

"The Peacock's Tower" is the first story in my incredibly well-named Short Stories Challenge Practical (SSCP #1, if you like.) I'll make a graphic for the challenge when I get back from vacation.

Bonus: Amazing Cover Art! WOW!

You can pick it up via:
Smashwords Free!
...until I put SSCP #2 up.

Obviously, the challenge itself is patterned on Dean Wesley Smith's more interesting 2011 Challenge, so I'm not going to get all fancy.

The Writing of "The Peacock's Tower"

This story developed in the same fashion as all the others. First, I had some Batshit Insane Dreams with a peacock and an adobe looking thing. Purple and green throughout, a sea wall...snow. Tests. A girl. Your basic disorganized lucid dream. I woke up and made a 'bracket outline', putting all the images down on paper like so:
[peacock, purple and green]
[an adobe looking thing]
&c.
and adding a few extras as they came up.
[tower in the snow]
&c.
Then I called it The Peacock's Tower, because why not?

Once I had about ten images, I proceeded, in the finest traditions of storytelling, to Throw It All Together, starting with the line (and blurb):

The walled town of Hugfast, at the edge of the Shining Sea, within sight of the Peacock’s Tower, across from the Other End of the World, was a meritocracy

Which was pretty spooky, so I sat on that for a couple minutes, drank a coffee or two. Then I sat back down and typed at high speed for about three hours until I was called away to PARTY. I came back at midnight, typed a few sentences (although they were quite good) before I fell asleep. Then I woke up at about 3AM and finished the story after a couple hours.

The next day I rolled through and corrected some typos, but it was remarkably clean copy, then I sat on it for a week before reading it again and deciding it didn't suck. Good enough for me! I'd genre it as "Fantasy with SF characteristics".

I made the cover using the template I made for the challenge, then formatted the story up in Word and put it on Smashwords. Once I have five or ten such stories, I'll format them all up in a collection with fancy cover art and put it up for sale on Amazon and B&N. And then I'll invite you to go buy that.

Summary
probably six hours produced
"The Peacock's Tower"
about 5,000 words
Smashwords Free!

I'll be on vacation this next weekend—paid for by eBooks, and that's cool—so I might not have the next challenge story done by next week. That's OK. That just means you have a longer time to get this one free.

-daB

feel free to comment

Short Stories Challenge Practical

This was going to be a quick addendum to my Business: Short Stories article, but it snowballed. Think of that article as the ‘Theory’ and this one as the ‘Practical’. Apply it to your life, if you dare. 

Will this happen? Probably.

To summarize the previous article, I laid out why I wasn’t going to sell individual short stories anymore, based on the Amazon 35% Royalty on $0.99 vs. the 70% Royalty on $2.99. That point still stands so far as I’m concerned, but I left out a few nuances, craft and business.

Craft: I Like Finishing Things

Short stories get the creative juices flowing. Using scientific tracking methods, I’ve found that my word count per day on books increases if I’ve written and completed a short story in the near past. And I’ve also got a new short story to sell for everybody to admire, which is nothing to be sneezed at. I suspect I just like finishing things, and so when I do it gets the adrenaline up, but there’s also the Middle of books to be considered. That’s the most dangerous part, creatively (that is, where I tend to get bored and try to start a new book unless I chain myself to the text document)...and taking a little break to write and finish a short story reenergizes the mind. 

Business: Smashwords

My standard complaint about Smashwords is it makes my books look ugly, but it’s still a good place to sell short stories. There’s not that much formatting in a short story to mess up or for Meatgrinder to mangle, and Smashwords sends them all over the place and pays somewhere around 50% royalty. I’ve had especially good success selling short stories on Kobo via Smashwords, so I think it’s a good idea to use it as my ‘short story distributer’. This meshes well with the Theory article, because Smashwords makes it incredibly easy to make a story Free, whether via price control or via coupon. As we speak, Smashwords’ sales tracking is improving, and I suspect at some point soon they’ll work out the deal with Amazon. If I can just upload a short story DOC made from a template and watch the cash flow in from five to ten markets every quarter...well, I’d say Smashwords has earned its 10%. 

Short Stories Challenge

For business and craft reasons it’s desirable that I write and finish a short story on a regular basis. Well and good. Dean Wesley Smith declared a fancy challenge with a One Year time limit and everything, but it’s already October, and I’m too lazy to wait until January to officially challenge myself. I’ll just ask how often is the optimal regular basis? Science Says: every weekend. 

So, every weekend I’ll write a short story. Start on Saturday, finish by Sunday. Stick it up on Smashwords for free until the next story goes live, after which it’ll be a buck everywhere fine eBooks are sold (once it’s gone through the Meatgrinder). I’ll even do a little blog post about it, whynot? I’ll do this for five years, give or take. Probably. 

I’ll write books on weekdays.

Story Covers

I’d rather make my own cover than buy some ‘generic art’, but because this is a short story challenge, not a crappy-slappy cover art challenge, I made a template for my short story cover art. Remember, I’m lazy.

So lazy...

That should do it. Big author name, big title, an inconspicuous number, a logo, and clearly labelled “Short Story” so nobody can possibly be confused. As noted in the previous article, I’ll spend the big bucks on the collection covers, but whatsay for a popular short story? If it comes down to it, I’ve one idea that may or may not be reasonable.

Sketch Covers

I provide a two-sentence cover description, give an artist $50 to sketch it, add the title and author name and save it as a 600x800 jpg. I’d expect the total working time to be about an hour, so I wouldn’t expect it to be fine art or done to a deadline. Just a quick art project between big jobs, wham-bam-done: fifty bucks later, I’ve got a short story cover. Fair? Sounds fair.

Heck if I know, I’m making this up as I go.

-daB

feel free to comment

Business: Short Stories

Executive Summary: I’m not selling short story singles as eBooks anymore. To avoid ‘juggling too many sea-shells’, all my eBooks will be priced between $2.99 and $9.99, except for some free short stories for promotion. 1500 words. (Yeah, I just HBR’d your collective asses. feel free to comment, bitches.).

Since this is a reversal of my previous sexy business plan, “The Short Story Octopus”, I’ll deploy some arguments to support my new, sexier conclusion. Since this is a business article, most of them will be made with my publishing hat on, but there’re a few more drawn from other hats. There may be pictures. Also, I wish I could come up with an equally awesome nautical name, but I’ve already rejected “Big Mussel Barnacles” for sounding too ocean-porny, and my morale is low.

Publishing

Background: Amazon pays a 35% royalty on eBooks priced between $0.99 and $200 sold throughout the world, but pays a 70% royalty on eBooks priced between $2.99 to $9.99 sold via Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon FR (and more coming). The best price for an individual short story is $0.99 (yaknow, like music). Short stories do, indeed, sell. Great! But...

$0.99 @ 35% Royalty = Lame

Everything else in this article is going to build on a “juggling too many sea-shells” metaphor (and not just because it fits the ocean-porny theme.) Every story is a sea-shell, because every sea-shell is different...but most people would rather have one great sea-shell on their mantle than a big pile of good sea-shells. It’s more organized! Likewise, a savvy sea-shell seller’s shelves (say it out loud!) should be filled with those sea-shells that can be sold for the most. Selling ten one dollar sea-shells to get a quarter is not as good as selling a three dollar seashell to get two bucks, because you have to spend about the same amount of time fiddling with the one dollar sea-shells as you do with the three dollar (or the five dollar or the seven dollar or the ten dollar) sea-shells.

I’d rather sell a collection of ten short stories at 70% than 10 single short stories at 35%. Thirty-five cents is lame, esp. when I have to track it (and promote it, and manage it, and, even more basic, remember it.) It’s just better business: The official H2NH price point is “one dollar per ten thousand words plus a buck”. The $1 per 10k is to get the $100/hour I, the publisher, pay myself, the writer, while the extra buck is to pay for the formatting and cover art, whether it’s me doing it or somebody else. I can calculate how many books I’d have to sell to cover those expenses, after which it’s all profit. ‘Getting to Profit’--to bust out the HBR lingo again--takes significantly less time when I, the publisher, am getting 70% of every sale. Under the current Amazon-style royalty system, I’ll not price any eBook below $2.99 or above $9.99 again.

A few extra publishing arguments, to let me expand on the ‘plus a buck’ a bit:

Sexy eBook Formatting

Good formatting takes time, but, if you follow the H2NH workflow (and/or Paul Salvette’s excellent guide) it doesn’t really take all that much more time to do a full book or collection than it does a single short story. You have to make a more robust table of contents, and scroll through longer checking that nothing mysteriously broke in the converted files, but that’s about it. I would say two hours, maximum, if you’re comfortable with your workflow. Average it as an hour, because any less and you probably didn’t do enough checking. (No need to rush, it’ll be on the Internet forever.) Since I’m almost certainly doing it myself, I bill myself, publisher, for two hours and pay myself about a dime per sale from the ‘plus a buck’.

I Like Cover Art

It’s not professional cover art unless it has characters from the book on it, and H2NH is still seeking professionals, but, as usual, I assume ‘professional rate’ is $100/hour. Later on, especially for print books, I’ll need a professional to do my cover art. Something around fifty cents of that ‘plus a buck’ will go to that end, and it’s obvious that a collection of short stories is a more cost-effective use of a professional cover artist than a single story.

For the moment, though, I make my own cover art, and I like it, I enjoy it, and it gets the job done. Some of it is even artsy, and it only takes me about an hour, even counting taking the pictures. So, until I fire myself as cover artist, prepare for such masterpieces as

*almost definitely not by David Barron

Writing

So much for business. Let’s talk about me!

WWdaB...er...D?

It doesn’t really flow as an acronym, but what would I do? I’ve only bought two individual short stories ever, The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke by Lawrence Block and Ur by Stephen King (which, I suppose, is technically a novella...). On the other hand, I’ve brought a whole bunch of anthologies, fiction magazines, and collections. I prefer to have a whole bunch of short stories all in one place, so that I can skip around. In my reading experience, there’re always a couple lame (by which I mean, of course, ‘not to my taste at that time’, not ‘sucky’) stories in any grouping, and buying only one story is an annoying risk of that experience. Anyways, it’s more organized, I don’t want to deal with lots of files on my eBook reading device, and it’s easier to recommend a collection than to recommend a single short story. So...daB would buy a daB collection.

I’m Prolific

I write a fair amount of stories, as you may know. I’ve somewhere around fifty stories for 2011, and I’ll probably get about ten more out in between all these books I should be writing. Some of them are wandering around the pro markets, and the rest are selling on Amazon. Because I don’t remember most of them (for the simple reason that I’m always writing the next one), I’ve completely lost track of them. Just picture what it’ll be like if I had eight-hundred short stories, like certain long-time writers. And I use ‘will’, because it’s just a matter of time. (I write a lot now, and I’m not a full-time writer yet.) So, you know what? For my sanity, I’m only doing collections:

Science Fiction A Future Darkly

Fantasy To Another Shore

The Language of Ice Cubes (i.e. ‘the Alan stories’)

Undoubtedly, I’ll do various ‘themed’ collections (yaknow, like music albums) and, soon enough, I’ll put together a big ‘super-collection’:

Science Fantasy Romance

which will be fifty or so stories (including some of the ones in A Future Darkly and To Another Shore, but obviously not the Alan stories). It’ll be fun? It’s my super-genre, it’s awesome, it’ll be a nice thick print book, and, bonus, I’ll never have to think of another super-collection name again: My next fifty stories will go into “Science Fantasy Romance II”. Just consult the Wikipedia Roman numerals page for each fifty stories after that.

Synergy

Let’s stick both sides together and see what it looks like! We could call this part “Promotion”, I guess, but we’re doing it Harvard Business Review-style this time. It’s a theme, and you have to respect themes or what, really, is the point?

Pro Sales!

Let’s face it, it’s just a lot more fun to submit stuff to fiction magazines than to put it up on Amazon.. I love rejection letters (not that I bother to read them), because it means I can send the story somewhere else, and when a story is accepted, they give you money and you get to write an About the Author blurb and everybody visits your website and buys one or all of your many books. Then, after that run’s done, you can put the story in a collection. Really, there’s no downside.

I regularly read, often submit to, and have been rejected repeatedly by pretty much every fiction magazine that pays pro rates (according to Duotropes), but the only magazine I’m absolutely obsessed with being in is Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Sorry, all others: it’s focused!

Free is Fun

All that said, I think short stories make great promotions. They’re craft pieces, showing off my awesome writing in a convenient, no-hassle package. Leaving aside the argument against free (hypothesis: many download, few read), I think it’s a good strategy, as well as just being fun. I recently made my steampunk short story “Timpani the Ostrich Rancher” free on Amazon, and, last I checked, more than two-thousand people have picked it up. Since it doesn’t suck, I like to think that’ll lead to sales in the long run. I figure if I make one short story free for each collection, and put links to every other H2NH book and collection in the back of the free eBook, it’s as good a promotion as any. Or, at least, incredibly low-maintenance.

Which is just as good for the busy publisher.

Sexy Conclusion

I’m not selling short story singles as eBooks anymore. To avoid ‘juggling too many sea-shells’, all my eBooks will be priced between $2.99 and $9.99, except for some free short stories for promotion.

-daB

feel free to comment

Writing Short Stories

Enough about business already! It bores me, because it’s just not that complicated. Simple but hard, it appeals to my battering-ram mind. Yah, yah. Why don’t we chill out? With something complicated but fun: Writing a short story. The allure of the short story is easy to explain. For the reader, it’s a neat chunk of story convenient for reading on the go or in the course of a busy day. For the writer, it’s a great way to get a single concept on the page and get on with life. As a reader, I don’t read all that many books, but I boil through short stories like a boiler that is boiling on...extra boil? What? Leave it, the point is I Like Short Stories, and here’s exactly how I write them when I’m on top of my game (Why did he say boil?) Shut up. 

Step the First: Titles

Yes, I’m using the plural. We aren’t LITERARY (heaven help us), we’re in this for the long haul and we’re going to be writing a passle of stories, sirs and madames. You’re intelligent folk, so you’ve got a big slew of literary and pulp references swirling around in your brain, just combine that with the world around you and come up with five sexy evocative titles. Trust me, you’ll eventually use them all. Or if you don’t Ben Godby will steal them and sell the story that results to a magazine. Everybody wins!

So, here’s the first five titles that pop into my head:

-Beer Anchovia, Titus, and Thou

-The Fake and the False

-Leave Now and The Truth Will Follow

-Moorsian Invasion

-The Knives of Iceland

If your titles aren’t as Sexy as those five at first, don’t worry. I’ve had a lot of practice with titles. And sexy. Still, any title you made up will be evocative for you, and that’s all we need right now. You can always change it after you finish the stories, which is what you’re trying to do, remember? (Close the porns and get back here.) 

Part the Second: Ready Set

Now the fun begins. Create five blank documents in the text editor of your choice. I use FocusWriter because it has a convenient sessions feature so I can hotswap between documents. Name them according to the five titles you just came up with, and put the title at the top. LOOK AWAY FROM THE SCREEN! And do not think about Word Count or how long any of these stories are going to be. They can be any length, cats, so long as they’re Finished. And they will be, later. For now, we’ve got to prepare. Look at your titles and write down the first image that comes to mind in the appropriate document. By ‘image’, I mean Character, Blurb, Setting, Dialogue, Sentence, or Plot. Whatever floats your boat, just write it down as you come up with it. Remember that nobody’s going to see this.

Here’s the five titles with the images I came up with as I did this:

Beer Anchovia, Titus, and Thou

Planetary siege in a desperate war, aboard the requisitioned and hastily repurposed spaceliner Anchovia, a ragtag crew attempt to construct a still and keep their sanity amidst a steadily disintigrating chain of command.

First person?

The Fake and the False

Gentilia Lake, the unfortunately named con artiste, competes with the Grim Ghast for the souls of the gullible people of Lambutan. Can she save them from Hell by giving them heck? 

Leave Now and The Truth Will Follow

Gentilia Lake appears again, amongst the sheeple of Nazawrath. But when a wolf in sheep’s clothing strikes terror in the hearts of the people, she discovers that serial killers are harder to fool than she expected.

Bloody belt.

Moorsian Invasion

The Moors descended on rhinoceros-back, pillaging as they came.

The Knives of Iceland

King Jeoffrey the Ironhearted had yet to complete his submarine the day the water disappeared.

So...so thirsty. But hey, a series!

Part the Third: GO!

That’s really all you need to do. Just keep brainstorming in images until one of the titles grabs you by the balls and forces you to write it, then just sit down and actually write it until it lets go. Clear a space, don’t drink any beer, eschew sugar of all varieties, eat healthy, and just roll into the tappity-tip-tip-tappity-tap-tap until your fingers stop of their own volition. You know where the story is going, and know why you’re leaving if you stand up from the keyboard. If it’s because you’re scared, sit right back down and face the words you’ve brought into the world. They’re looking up at you with their big eyes pleading for FOOD and mommies. Do not leave them to starve in the computer. When they grow up they’ll kick your ass. 

I’d start with the Gentilia Lake story, myself. 

The dank swamp glittered in the rising sun as Gentilia Lake crawled out of it, her hair hanging down in tentacles of slime...

This version of Professional Edition will last until April 6, 2012, updating every Friday. Site design subject to change as I learn by doing. Like what you see? Spot something unprofessional? Feel free to comment!