This past weekend I put my first two backlist short stories— The Bard Effect and Hole in the Wall—up on the Amazon Kindle store. I've put descriptions of each story on the Home page. Both were originally published in major science fiction magazines some years back, and I'm happy to be able to present them to a new audience.

I had set a project deadline of 21 October, but due to the intricacies of ebook formatting and conversion, about which more below, I frequently despaired of making it. As it happens, the first book was for sale on that date, the second didn't pop up until sometime after midnight. I wasn't awake to see it.

Congratulations! It's a Book!
In the days when my publishing fate was tied in with traditional publishing, I have gazed lovingly at cover flats from my publisher, and held those first precious advance copies of my novels, savoring the the solidity—the sheer physicality—of the finished product. I won't lie: it was pretty glorious. But it was not, I think, more glorious than seeing a book I'd created from words to formatting to cover to sales copy populate its own Amazon page. I'd gone from contemplating becoming an independent publisher about seven months before, to seeing my first two projects available for sale.

Excuse Me, I Really Have to Scream Now
Somewhere between those two points there were months of re-keying published stories from old magazine copies, converting to hand-built XHTML, and figuring out what Kindle's Mobi format really wanted from me, and how I could induce it to create a good-looking ebook. Having some experience with HTML and CSS helped considerably, but I could have picked up what little I needed fairly quickly, if I had not. 

I often joke about the beginning of my writing career: age nine, avid reader and cinema-goer (when your big sister works at a local movie house, you can see Them! and It Came From Outer Space for free, over and over and over), and budding author of books handwritten in pencil in a black and white composition book of the style I still carry to meetings. I’m pretty chuffed that anyone still makes these—they make me feel so writerly!

The books I wrote at age nine were nothing more or less than plagiarism, though of course I didn't know that word. If I loved a movie or a book enough, I’d write my own version of it in my notebook, complete with illustrations. I still enjoy the odd chuckle at that earnest little girl who wrote so awfully, but what set her apart from most kids her age was that she wrote anything at all. My schools did not, that I recall, put particular emphasis on storytelling as a skill. I don’t recall ever being tasked with writing a story; I did it because I had to, and because I loved the feeling of the pencil on the pulp paper, and words emerging from the end of it. Later I switched to a pen, but the magic was undiminished. 

A number of experts on this and that—Daniel Levitin (This is Your Brain on Music) and Malcom Gladwell (Outliers) being only two—have written that something around ten thousand hours of practicing one’s craft are necessary for mastery.  This presupposes mastery as a destination, but my objections to that are for another day.

Certainly the Beatles’ hundreds of eight-hour sets in Hamburg made them one of the tightest bands around, and picking up tennis rackets at age three was as good a way to produce a Venus and Serena Williams as any I can imagine.

So there I was, at the beginning of a long and amazing road with a pencil and a comp book.  It wasn’t long before people started noticing that I wrote, and somewhat more competently than many of my childhood peers. At the tender age of 13 I was encouraged by a school counselor to plan for obtaining a journalism scholarship that had recently been established at a nearby university.  I replied politely that I would, but inside I was digging in my heels at teachers and counselors planning my future for me. Who were they to be telling me what I was going to be?
 
The heel-dragging continued until I was about thirty. One day I heard myself writing narrative inside my head, and decided that must mean I was a writer. In later years I discovered that humans have a species-wide affinity for narrative, and in fact everyone tells themselves stories, though many may not have conscious awareness of it. I’m glad I had no inkling of this on that brilliant afternoon when, having identified myself as a writer, I drove to the nearest library and borrowed some books on the subject, ready to begin a new adventure.

Before a year was out I had made my first two fiction sales and shredded reams of utter crap along the way. One particularly malodorous story was back in my mailbox with rejection note attached before it could plausibly have arrived on the editor’s desk, two thousand miles away. My theory about this is that really, really bad stories can travel in time. Other lost works from that time were perhaps not quite time-travel bad, but never found a home. Eventually, I was able to sell most of what I wrote.

My point is, I suppose, that anything worth doing is worth doing over and over again, and getting better at.

The self-publishing option wasn’t a viable one in those days, so I wrote and sent out and received back and sent out again. The virtue in this, if there is one, is that I got better. That doesn’t mean that today’s new writers who may choose to publish works that have never received a rejection will not also get better; if they care about their craft, and work at it, they almost certainly will. Some of them will put me to shame with the quality of their writing and storytelling. They may not do so with their first attempts, but writing will eventually make a writer, not necessarily in ten thousand hours, but not in ten or a hundred, either.

If you’re new at the game--whatever that game may be, keep at it. If you’re  an old hand with a long string of successes, KEEP AT IT.

Keep at it.

I’d like to give a shout-out to my friend and colleague R. K. MacPherson, whose first novel, Antigone’s Fall, was just released today. The writing team started drinking champagne about 10:30 this morning.

Here’s the description from the page for the Kindle edition of Antigone’s Fall:

“A bond forged in battle...
Home from the deserts of Iraq, Nicholas Cross wants nothing more than to start over as a civilian. Together with his best friend, Thomas Abelard, a former US Army Ranger, Nicholas enjoys the quiet life—until a young actress's suicide is called into question. Nicholas and Thomas peel back the layers of her life and discover a woman in over her head.
A relentless enemy...
For Nicholas, however, the stakes turn personal as the mystery deepens and his past comes back to haunt him. The death toll rises as the two veterans encounter a ruthless foe who'll stop at nothing to protect a dark secret. Nicholas is forced to dodge hostile operatives, the police, and dangerous questions about his identity—and his past—as he tries to piece together the evidence and protect the last witness.
A secret worth killing for...
Nicholas and Thomas find themselves in a desperate race against time as they struggle to uncover the explosive truth behind...
Antigone’s Fall.”


Stop by and visit his blog, Raven's Nest.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the level of bad feelings between people who embrace independent publishing and those who do not. Where there might be a middle ground of the "to publish my own stuff or not" discussion, there seem to be people saying they have nothing against it for you, but a) they wouldn't stoop so low, b) they really like signing away their rights for a tiny percentage of cover price, or c) they might do it after they've paid their dues and become a "real" writer.

Bare-knuckle Boys
Over on Terrible Minds not long ago, Chuck Wendig and Joe Konrath (of A Newbie's Guide to Publishing fame) got into a fine old punch-up over whether or not writers should be pursuing traditional publishing contracts. Chuck likes 'em (even says he likes doing work-for-hire) Joe doesn't. And Chuck didn't care for Joe's attitude. Yeah, Joe's famous for his attitude. To tell the truth, I kind of admire it. He can be blunt, but that's Joe, and I take it into account. I actually thought that for Joe he was on his best behavior over at Chuck's place, but he came out swinging, as he does, and many took exception to it.

I think both these guys are brilliant in their own ways, but I come down on Joe's side about the doom that came to legacy publishing. The publishing industry will continue, but I believe smart writers will avoid it until it removes its head from the exit orifice of its digestive system, and that goes triple for agents.

In fact, Joe Konrath is not a wild-eyed, foam-spitting propagandist for self-publishing, but rather for doing what works to get readers and make a living from one's craft. He and Barry Eisler have had some very clear-headed things to say about authors making choices that work for them. It's just that when you run the numbers, traditional publishing doesn't come out on top in the works for me department. Not for Joe and Barry, and not for a whole lot of other writers, from best sellers to has-been midlist nobodies like me.

But Why Would You...
Dean Wesley Smith, one of the leading proponents of author-centered publishing and the strongest voice I know calling out for staying away from agents until the pub industry dust (and ash) settles, is writing a new blog series asking "But why would you..." In the latest as of this post, he asks "But why would you not spend the time to learn indie publishing?" If you're on the fence, read it. I burdened some poor guy with a reply longer than the original post about not putting his eggs in the trad pub basket, but I won't repeat it here, cos...long. If you don't mind long, feel free to go find it.

As for me, I'm hiking the learning curve to formatting books for e-book and paperback, and plan to offer a free short story here and on the 'net next week. Watch this space for "The Bard Effect," originally published in Amazing Stories, back in the 90s when that publication existed.