I had a wonderful English teacher in high school, Mr. S. He was my English teacher for junior and senior year, teaching English literature and then AP English. I think he was a genius. He was always an enigmatic figure. He habitually wore dark navy suits and there were rumors that he had survived a tragic loss of his whole family. We suspected he wrote gloomy poetry in his spare time and published it under a pseudonym. It was clear that he loved teaching and he showed a genuine joy in his work every day. (This is not the beginning of a eulogy, by the way. As far as I know, he is alive and well.) We used to hang around in Mr. S.’s room after school to talk with him, or during 7th hour when he didn’t have a class and us seniors didn’t, either.

The level of learning we had in that English program in my underfunded, troubled urban high school was far beyond anything I’ve ever seen in college or even at Clarion. Mr. S. managed to teach us to diagram sentences and to appreciate Shakespeare. He taught us to write a research paper and he gave us time to freewrite in the classroom with music playing in the background. Every year, he made each of us memorize the prologue to The Canterbury Tales and recite it in front of the entire class. In some kind of accent. It could be in some semblance of a middle English accent, “Whan that Apreeel, weeth hees Shooress sowtah, the drokt of mayrch hath persed to the rowtah.” But he also accepted presentations in any other type of accent we might fancy. People stood up and recited the prologue in French accents, German, Russian, whatever.

He motivated us to memorize the piece with this story:

Once upon a time a professor from Oxford spoke at an American university. I think it was Columbia. He began talking about the superiority of the English public school system. (Public being what we call private.) He said that American public schools couldn’t match the excellence of the education students received there, and as an example, he smugly asserted that in those English schools, each student memorized the prologue to the Canterbury tales.

This was not well-received by his American audience, but one student, a former student of Mr. S., answered him in the best possible way. She stood up, and belted out, “WHAN THAT APRILLE WITH HIS SHOURES SOOTE THE DROGHTE OF MARCHE HATH PERCED TO THE ROOTE AND BATHED EVERY VEYNE IN SWICH LICOUR OF WHICH VERTU ENGENDRED IS THE FOUR; WHAN ZEPHIRUS EEK WITH HIS SWETE BREETH INSPIRED HATH IN EVERY HOLT AND HEETH THE TENDRE CROPPES AND THE YONGE SONNE HATH IN THE RAM HIS HALFE COURSE Y-RONNE AND SMALE FOWLES MAKEN MELODYE THAT SLEPEN AL THE NIGHT WITH OPEN YE (SO PRIKETH HEM NATURE IN HIR CORAGES THAN LONGEN FOLK TO GOON ON PILGRIMAGES, AND PALMERS FOR SEKEN STRAUNGE STRONDES TO FERNE HALWES COUTH IN SONDRY LONDES; AND SPECIALLY FROM EVERY SHIRES ENDE OF ENGELOND TO CAUNTERBURY THEY WENDE THE HOLY BLISFUL MARTIR FOR TO SEKE, THAT HEM HATH HOLPEN, WHAN THAT THEY WERE SEKE. ”

We were all tremendously inspired by this story, and determined to memorize it well when surely we, too, would be challenged by an Oxford professor to prove our worth by reciting this piece of literature from memory. (Note: it hasn’t happened to me, yet, but I should probably brush up, just in case.)

In addition to all the learning and mentoring, Mr. S gave us the single best piece of writing advice I’ve ever had. “Take the personal, and make it universal,” he said.

I’ve known other bits of writing advice that come close. “Bring on the jets of semen,” is in the right neighborhood. (An apocryphal quote attributed to Gardner Dozois.) “Open a vein and bleed on the page,” is another one, but makes it sound like writing must be painful, or that what you write is only valuable if it exposes something bad or hurtful. I think Mr. S.’s words have the most truth.

In our lives, those experiences and observations that seem most unique, most internal, most strange–those are the very things that connect us together as a whole. It is not the bland, generic experience of going to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk that interests others. It is the story about how you arrived home a different person afterward because of something unique that happened to you along the way that people want to hear.

This advice has also been the most difficult for me to master. It’s so much easier to stay “safe,” to not tip my hand to the reader about what I think and believe and what is important to me by pouring so much of myself into the story. But, in the end, that is all the reader really wants.

Last I saw Mr. S., he told me that he had kept some of my papers. Never returned them to me, and had kept them all of these years to read over occasionally, because they were so good. I was touched and flattered. But I think I’m still learning from him. I am still traveling down the road he set me on.

We’re nearing the end of March, and it is time for the final tranche of Nebula 801 assignments. Hugo nominees haven’t been announced, but I’m pretty sure if you’ve read the Nebula ballot, you will have also read at least part of the Hugo ballot. Keep going, keep going! Be an informed voter! Let your voice be heard!

I am consistently surprised by how challenging it is to fit this reading in. Maybe other writers have more time for reading or are better at using their time, but I am waaaay behind on this, and kind of worried that I won’t have given each item a chance before the March 31 voting deadline.

Read this week:

Novels (first three chapters)

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)

The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

One of the advantages of having been around so long is that I’ve learned a lot about networking, specifically about how to exploit those networks and “friendships” (scoff quotes, because writers aren’t really capable of befriending other writers due to our fierce competitive natures) for personal gain. The process of stealing a major award is very simple, but it’s surprising how many new writers are too bashful or self-conscious to try it. Here, let me walk you through the process.

1. Identify nine friends to form your core voting block. (Or, let’s call it a bloc. It’s more impressive that way.) Many people don’t realize that you don’t need a lot of votes to get on an award ballot. In most cases, ten votes will get you on the ballot, so you and your nine friends are enough to get started. You can find ready-made voting blocks in some of the writing networking groups you participated in, like critique groups, workshops, and so forth.

2. Make a pact with your core voting bloc that each of you will take a turn winning the award. You go first, of course. This means your agreement will last ten years, so make sure these are good and loyal friends.

3. All ten of you vote for your story and get it on the ballot. Hooray! You made it past the first step. Doesn’t that feel good?

4. The next step is also simple. Each of the members of your core group must now recruit nine additional members. Ten votes won’t be enough to actually win you the award, but in many cases, 100 is plenty. Because you are already committed between now and 2022, the ten core bloc members must agree to return favors for the ten years after that, from 2022 to 2032. (Also keep in mind that this means the core bloc will split up after 2022, but it’s fine because everyone will have their award by then and you were only “friends” to begin with.)

5. Sit back and collect your awards.

Note: if your calculations show you need more than nine votes to get on the ballot, or more than one hundred to win, just increase the number of “friends” you recruit and the number of award cycles for reciprocity.

In conclusion, it’s very easy to win awards this way. You can tell other writers are doing it when you see a story or a novel win a major award that you personally do not like. If you do not like the story, then the story must be objectively bad, and the only way an objectively bad story could win an award is if its author were engaged in the time-honored practice of log-rolling. So come on in, the water is fine! All you need are ninety-nine friends who have the business savvy to work together for the good of all, and who do not have any belief that an award should be given on the basis of merit.

Having a story published in October 2011 in an issue labeled Jan/Feb 2012 results in a very confusing situation regarding award eligibility. I remember being confused by this a number of years ago when trying to figure out what to nominate, and thinking that I’d better avoid being in the situation myself, but here I am. Anyway, after researching the matter, I’ve concluded that my Analog story belongs to the 2012 award cycle, so if you really really loved it, hold that thought. Hold it…hold it…hold it…

I’ll have other stories out in 2012 (at least two more in Analog), and I’m hoping that 2011 is the last year I’ll have nothing published.

One thought I had, since that Analog story is a humorous story, is how hard it is to get a funny story or book on the award ballots. Last year’s award ballots were full of worthy stories, but if you sat down and read them all in one sitting, you’d be ready to jump off a bridge when you’re done. Somehow when we think of award-worthy literature, we think of sober and serious and sad.

But why should we? If something made you really laugh, if it brightened your day, then isn’t that worthy of consideration? In fact, I submit that humor is harder to write. Much harder. There’s the whole business of getting the right joke and the right timing, and even when you’ve done all of that, you bump up against the vagaries of taste and mood. If your reader isn’t in the mood for a funny story, you’re going to annoy him.

So when you’re doing your award reading this winter, I hope you’ll keep an open mind to the funny stuff, because dying is easy, but comedy is hard.

During my previous life as a short fiction author, I seemed to have a review curse. Every time I had a story coming out–oops–it was the reviewer’s month off. Or something! Or if I did get a review, it was a very brief mention. So it’s nice to find this review of the Jan/Feb 2012 Analog by Sam Tomaino at SFRevu.

Tomaino called the story “amusing” and “a little hard to swallow but fun.” Fair enough, Tomaino. Fair enough. And thanks!

Jim Hines mentioned Improving Slay Times in the Common Dragon on his blog yesterday, and, playing ninja to Scalzi’s pirate, overtook and surpassed the Scalzi effect on downloads. Hines sold about 17 downloads yesterday compared to Scalzi’s 13 on Dec. 6.

Now, one could say that a direct mention in a blog post does not compare with a passively permitted comment, but we all know the real reason. It’s Jim Hines’s awesome leather jacket. All bow to the jacket!

 

If anyone else wants to test their marketing influence by promoting ISTitCD in their blog, I would be pleased to provide the data. For science, naturally.

One nice thing about Smashwords is that they give you charts of your page views and sales. It gives you great data for how various marketing efforts are working. Since publishing my two stories over there, I’ve been watching the trends with interest. I thought I’d share the data and some of the conclusions I’ve drawn from it.

For context, there are four marketing “events,” I’ve tracked in the past couple of weeks. 1) First day appearing on Smashwords. You get a good bump of traffic and downloads the first day because people are watching as they come up and checking them out. 2) “Scalzi”–John Scalzi invited people to promote their self- and non-traditionally published books on Dec. 6 in his blog, Whatever. I mentioned both of my stories in a comment there, and saw a modest bump in views and downloads. 3) “Review”–as an experiment, I searched for a story I could review favorably (this took a while) and reviewed it. Each review includes a link back to your Smashwords page. I saw a bump in views and downloads from that, too. 4) Finally, today I posted a link to Long Winter’s Nap on my blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter. There are some interesting conclusions to be drawn from that last experiment. Note: today is not over, so I may be jumping the gun on collecting the data, but I think there’s a good snapshot here.

First, Improving Slay Times in the Common Dragon. The first graph is page views. The second downloads.

On the first day, there were about 100 page views, and around 17 downloads. The second day brought about 80 page views, and 25-30 downloads. (The story went up late in the evening, which is why the initial surge is spread out over a couple of days.) Those are some good quality “sales.” About 23 percent of people who viewed the page downloaded the story. Not bad!

The second event, the Scalzi comment posting, brought about 25 page views, and around 14 sales, for an even more impressive 56 percent rate of closing the sale. (The price is free, so the numbers are high.) You can also see a bit of a bump starting on the 5th when I posted the next story, Long Winter’s Nap, where about 15 people checked out the page, and about 5 downloaded the story.

After that IST got about 15 sales out of another 25 page views from the single Smashwords review I wrote.

Lastly, and this is where it gets interesting, there are around 20 views from today, when I promoted LWN all over the social networks. That resulted in no sales at all, as of the writing of this post.

You can see all of the same patterns in the data for LWN. For this story, the Scalzi event merged with the first day surge, so it’s harder to disentangle the two events.

For today’s event, there were about 40 views of LWN, and about 5 downloads, for a “sale” rate of about 12.5 percent.

This has been a very instructive exercise. Some conclusions I’ve drawn:

1. Releasing a number of smaller pieces periodically will probably bring more sales than releasing one larger collection every six months or something.

2. If you get a chance to promote your book on Scalzi’s blog, either in the body of the post or in comments, take it. It seems to attract high quality SF fans who may be interested in your work. The handful of his 50,000 daily readers who viewed and downloaded my story were a tiny fraction of a percent of the total, but I wouldn’t have found them otherwise, nor they me. (And I hope they were happy with the stories they read.)

3. Writing one single review of another smashwords book, by an author I’d never heard of and who does not seem to be high profile resulted in equally high quality viewing and downloading to Scalzi’s blog, although the numbers were lower. I can’t control how often Scalzi invites me to promote my work in his blog comments, but I can control how much time I spend reading and reviewing at Smashwords. That seems like a good investment of time. (And like I said in another post, you can go at it like slush reading. It’s sort of a public service.)

4. Here’s the shocker. Social networks did not provide high quality views. I got a lot of lookers and very few takers, in spite of the fact that LWN is a story that has not been available for free ever before. My takeaway from that is that while it’s not worthless to promote your work on social networks, that if yours is mostly friends and family like mine is, they may be somewhat inoculated against your promotion efforts–even if you’ve had a very light hand (which I have)–making it not the best investment of time and effort. Right now my blog foot print is maybe 1000 monthly readers at my main hosted site, and, I don’t know, some greater number than that at LJ–possibly. I don’t pay for LJ service, so I can’t install an analytics widget. I’m judging by the greater number of comments. To me, that suggests that flogging your blog and social networks would yield diminishing returns and might possibly annoy your “friends” enough to scare them away.

Lastly, another strategy I experimented this week was the email signature. Through my regular daily activities, I send a lot of email. I created a set of signatures customized to the business purpose of the email (I have one for friends, even), and I’ve been using them whenever I initiate a new email thread. The signatures include a link to one of my stories on Amazon, and I’ve made a couple of sales in the past week since I started doing that. Sales at Amazon have otherwise been pretty dead.

My Christmas story from the December, 2006 edition of Analog is available for free now on Smashwords, and for 99 cents on Kindle if you, say, have a credit card balance of $99.01 and want to make it an even $100. Note that Smashwords has .mobi formatted files for viewing on Kindle, and I’m told there’s a way to get that file from your computer to your Kindle, so if that kind of manipulation is easy for you, there’s no reason to pay for it from the Kindle site.

I am working on getting it up at Barnes and Noble. The Pubit system seems to work slowly on the weekend. Again, properly formatted .epub files are available on Smashwords, and it is pretty easy to sideload those onto the nook straight from your computer (no helper application or emailing required), so the only reason you might want to pay $1 for the story there is if you wanted me to have the 30 cents. Which, if you do, is very kind.

I’ve also posted Improving Slay Times in the Common Dragon on Smashwords for free, so if you haven’t read that yet and are inclined for something silly and cynical, check it out. (People who have been to grad school seem to appreciate it quite a lot.)

I’m finding the self-publishing process to be interesting and fun. For me, at this point, it’s not going to be my primary publishing path, particularly not for longer works, but I can definitely see how it can complement traditional publishing. I also don’t think it would be that hard to launch an original novel using self-publishing outlets. I’ve spent some time “slush reading” at Smashwords, and I’m convinced that well-written, well-produced works would stand out like a sore thumb.

You can filter quite a bit just by reading the descriptions of the stories. They typically start with some kind of genuinely interesting McGuffin, and then deteriorate to uninteresting vagueness.

“Bob Smith is a bounty hunter for fairies gone bad in a futuristic New Orleans. When he falls in love with one of his targets, he is faced with the greatest challenge of his life, and must do a hard thing in order to prevail against evil. Please check out my book you will love it.”

And there are actual readers at Smashwords and in the Kindle community, so books that stand out get discovered, and get read.

That said, I’m still looking for a traditional publisher for my novel, and am still marketing my short stories to pro magazines, because the exposure I can get through those outlets is still much greater than the 100-200 word footprint I currently have in the self-publishing channels. That may change in the future.

My husband complained today that I had not been updating my blog, and therefore he was bored. I’m so sorry, Intarweb, that you are boring without me. Mea culpa, mea culpa!

I’ve been in freelancer jail, catching up on work I got behind on while Mom was in ICU and in November when I was burying her and dealing with the emotional backlash and such.

In truth, there’s a larger catching up that I am beginning, as well. There’s 6.5 five years of cancer fog that I’m emerging from. During that time, to varying degrees, I took a hit to both my motivation and my literal IQ.

And, in fact, there’s one more level we could go down, and that’s 34 years of schizophrenia fog. I feel that clearing as well. It’s a hell of a thing. I’ve been doing a lot of work, for a long time, of ever increasing intensity, running my Mom issues as a CPU intensive background process in my brain.

And now I’m coming back. I’m not all the way there. I still feel that I’m mentally suboptimal. I can see so clearly the mental effects of stress, especially over the last couple of months. In October, during the worst of it, I declared myself brain damaged and used it as an all purpose excuse for anything absent-minded or forgetful or just plain stupid that I might do. And there was much occasion to play the brain damage card.

So here I am. I have a huge amount of work to do, and I’m going at it like a chipmunk on crystal meth. I’m like an avenging goddess of productivity. That has resulted in some neglect of the blog, but as you can see I was able to blather into wordpress even after being in freelancer jail all week.

This is just a weekend pass. Monday I have to go back into the lock up. But at least I get a weekend. Yay! I intend to spend it socializing with family, celebrating with friends, and writing.

Mary Robinette Kowal has a great post about award promotion for new writers. I agree with everything she says, so I don’t need to write my own post about it, but apparently I am anyway. I used to be someone who was too shy and self-conscious to promote. You know where it got me? Nowhere. But don’t go the other way, either. That’s the bad place!

One thing I would add to Mary’s recommendations is something I learned last year while I was doing my best to participate fully in the Nebula voting process. As a reader, I found it wasn’t that easy to find stories by writers I wanted to consider, even when I knew they had posted the information in their blogs. Without being a total obnoxious jerk, I recommend unobtrusively giving people multiple opportunities to discover your work.

Making an official blog post is good, but those blog posts scroll away, and at nomination deadline time, they’re not so easy to find. So what I’ll be doing this year, and what I would recommend you do with your own blogs, is create a sticky post or put a link somewhere on your main blog page that clearly says, “Award eligible works for 2011,” so that people can come back later and easily find it.

Another thing that people failed to do was to upload their stories into the SFWA topic forums designated for Nebula consideration. As a Nebula voter, I had to email a couple of people with works on the final ballot and ask them to make their work available. There was also one book on the final Norton ballot that I never read because the author didn’t provide it in any form. (Needless to say, as a Norton juror, I didn’t read it for the ballot, either, because I didn’t get around to tracking down a copy.)

I’ll be making an official post about my award-eligible works for 2011 next month, probably. Since I only have one, my current story in Analog, “An Interstellar Incident,” it’s not going to be a long or complicated post, but it’s something I never did for any of my prior stories, and so any hurt feelings I may have harbored over being snubbed for awards in the past are probably my own fault.

(See what I did there?)

Speaking of awards, I strongly recommend to other writers participating in the nomination and voting process as fully as you can. It’s a lot of work to do all of that reading, but you learn a lot from it, both in terms of craft, and also some perhaps cynical lessons about the business which will both make you feel more philosophical about awards, and may also increase your odds of reeling them in in the future.