Spontaneous ∂erivation

The Cart Before the Horse

Or, why I’m writing this:

• a Tor.com interview with Gordon van Gelder, wherein he discussed print versus the Internets;

• the discussion in the comments of said interview, including Ellen Datlow, Nick Mamatas, Jason Stoddard, and more;

• and John Scalzi’s response.

Yes, it’s a bit of a stew.

One of the topics touched upon by van Gelder and Scalzi involve what it takes to make providing free online fiction work, and how marketing at various publishing houses have been a bit clueless about it with respect to new authors, in that they think this will garner instant accolades and eyes.

The problem is that this doesn’t work when said author has no audience. Even before Agent to the Stars and Old Man’s War were put online for free, Scalzi was already building up an audience of readers—and a large body of non-fiction work as well. I’d say the same for Stross and very much for Doctorow. But conversely, that’s when it does work.

Something I Don’t Talk About Anymore

Dirty secret time.

I used to study blogging. Not so much about the art of blogging, but the art of blogging that sells; in other words, online marketing and brand-building. This used to get me some serious amount of hits, a lot of Stumbles, and so on. (Moving to SF/F really tanked that, which should tell you something depressing.)

But this is not something I want to talk about in writer circles ever again, because people suddenly get these weird ideas about online marketing.

Rather than bore you with a summary of some of the discussions I’ve had about this, here are some posts I’ve written in the past, that may be of interest to you, dear writer who wishes to speed your fame through teh Intertubes.

Back to the Past

• 6 Myths about Blogging, Glory, and Fame.

  Know what blogging doesn’t get you. If you read nothing else at my site ever again, read this one.

• Where Seth Godin is Coming From: Re: Free Content and Publishing.

  If you’re going to and/or put free content up there anyways, you need to think about the philosophy of free in relation to brand-building. This is not simple at all.

  I never thought about it until recently because I had a day job. These days I do get paid for some of my writing, and this definitely has caused me to think more about this kind of thing.

• 4 Principles for Packing a Punch with Unique Content.

  If you’re going to try to go down this path, you need some kind of methodology to hit big numbers; this is one simplified template, and likely needs serious tweaking before being applied to fiction. This is the skeleton of Internet marketing and, frankly, is what a lot of traditional publishing marketing guys are missing, much less the heart and other important internal organs of Internet marketing.

  Success stories using this method:

  • The article itself. Over 15,000 hits.
  • Looking for Love in All the Wrong Bounce Rates. Over 8,000 hits.
  • Getting the Most Out of Entrecard. Over 5,000 hits, 59 comments.
  • HTML for Dummies, Part 3: Effects with Borders, Padding, and Replacing Tables with Divs. Due to the last part, over 20,000 hits.

  My failures are all sub-2000 hits, sometimes embarrassingly so, but always because they don’t hit the 4 principles, one of which is more or less out of my control.

In Four Little Words

Build an audience first.

The unholy marriage of writing and blogging.

You probably don’t know that this blog used to be about blogging, not SF/F, and certainly not about the Kindle.

A couple posts from April 2008—the only two posts, in fact. It was a light month, but I was trading some 16k visits in traffic that month. These days it’s perhaps 5k a month if I’m really lucky.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen, etc etc etc.

As you may discover, these posts are full of irony, given where S∂ is now versus where it was a year ago.

April 24: Blogging for Writers: Bring Focus to Your Blog by Discovering Your Inner Authority

April 26: A Personal Discovery of Authority

However, I currently enjoy my blogging as much as I did back then. We change and all that.

When we reach October is when the real fun is going to start. Or perhaps even earlier, in July.

I’ve been trying to come up with a summary of S∂ for a while, and it didn’t help that the focus kept changing.

Things became much easier when I just let it settle on the subjects that I love.

And by the way, Public Domain Clipart is a very handy site to have around. It even has a book with an owl on top.

I haven’t yet decided whether I should enjoy this as schadenfreude or not. EntreCard hasn’t really ever pissed me off, but then again, I left some months ago¹ before the drama and excitement.

Click here to read more »

1. July 18th. I wasn’t mad or upset at EntreCard. S∂ was switching focus, and I didn’t feel that an EC widget would be a great idea for a while. And as it turns out, I didn’t really need or want it anymore (and became much too busy). [↩]

GenderAnalyzer claims that S∂ most likely written by a man—specifically, a 71% chance.

My Sherlock Holmes blog (which sorely needs updating) is also 71%-possibly-written-by-a-man. Not too much of a surprise.

And my fiction blog, surprisingly, is 74% likely to have been written by a man. And I thought my fiction was a bit effeminate. Okay, it is a bit effeminate or else it would have hit strong 90s.

I wonder why it thinks I’m only in the range of 70% a guy?

Actually, the really funny bit is that my LiveJournal, which is more or less a 100% mirror of my main blog, is in the range of 70% a gal.

I guess it must be my About pages, because they’re not present on my LiveJournal. And if they’re strong enough to swing the vote from 70% one way to 70% the other way, I think… well, that’s interesting, anyways.

There’s been a bit of fuss made over Seth Godin’s interview with HarperStudio about free content and how it can help publishing.¹

Oh, let’s go right ahead and say it: Seth Godin advocates the idea that spreading ideas is more important than money:

[Publishers are] in the business of leveraging the big ideas authors have. There are a hundred ways to do that, yet book publishers obsess about just one or two of them. Here’s the news flash: that’s not what authors care about. Authors don’t care about units sold. They care about ideas spread.

As you can imagine, this led to some hue and cry.² Many writers write for money. It’s how they make their living (in some cases, how they wish they could make all of their living). And heck. I feel that way too.

But there’s some context missing here that may not be obvious to writers of a more normal bent. And that’s Seth Godin is a blogger. Not just any blogger, for many writers blog these days; he’s a professional blogger, and also a highly successful one. His brand sells, and the way he made his brand was through his blog. And not only does it sell his blog (and its ad space), and his online writing, but also his offline writing, his books.

And he started out with nothing. No one knew who the hell Seth Godin was nor cared, until they discovered that his content was what they wanted and needed.

Now, there’s a conceit among bloggers that through hard work you can achieve anything³, a sort of American Dream of Blogging. But it’s also a matter of selection of subject, quality of writing and content, and as always, moving with the zeitgeist. Seth Godin hit quadruple aces on all three. Obviously some of this he controls, and some of it he does not.

Nevertheless, his brand was based on free content, freely given (albeit copyright held). What many writers forget is that, at one point, they also started out with free content, freely given (albeit copyright held, most of the time). For instance, your manuscript is submitted to agents and editors without them paying you if they don’t like it or need it—although there is a distinct difference since the audience is restricted to agents and editors. If a writer started as a fan fiction writer, they also gave out content for free.⁴ And when we’re still older, we give away stories and books to people so they know who we are.

The point is that we don’t give everything away completely gratis⁵. And as an addendum to that point, what we do give away, we give away because we’re brand-building (even submitting manuscripts is, in essence, brand-building with a more limited audience).

And that’s what Seth Godin is trying to say. You need to spread your ideas and your brand so that people know who you are, before you can make money. This is, incidentally, why marketing is so important in publishing, and indeed it’s why you go with a publisher in the first place if you’re not as efficient, whether through subject matter or luck or skill, as Seth is at brand-building.

What Seth is also suggesting is that a free content approach is more appropriate these days. When he compares books to music, people are correct in pointing out that this is apples to oranges; what they forget is that apples and oranges are both fruit. Books are information as much as music is; indeed, you could argue that books are more coherent information. People have far less patience and if they can sample a kind of information for free, they’re much more likely to buy future work from said author or musician. The interwebs will not wait for you. You must prove yourself.

At the same time, you need to be wise about balancing truly free content, free but paid-for content, and content that people pay for. Playing these against each other is how bloggers work and make money.

Now is where people will demand, “so when does it actually work?”

It’s worked for Seth Godin, obviously. It’s worked for Cory Doctorow. It’s even worked for John Scalzi. On a much, much smaller scale, it’s even worked for me⁶, and if I want to and have the time and the desire and the drive, I can actually build from there.

The thing to remember about bloggers who make money is that most of them are insane. That kind of drive, when you’re not getting paid and often for years⁷ , is the kind of drive you need to maybe make a blog that pays you; otherwise you don’t get anything, even with the zeitgeist.

Mind you, the writers who make money are also insane. I think, actually, you have to be pretty nuts to make money from words, because they take a lot of effort to come up with, especially good ones.⁸

Anyways: such is where Seth Godin is coming from. Money is nice, but ideas spread is necessary to get money, and ideas spread widely is necessary to make lots of money, and one way to do the latter is to give away content for free in our busy-ADD-internet-super-connected-with-pirates-anyways world.

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1. Hat tip to Andrew Wheeler, since I was only peripherally aware of this. [↩]
2. Why yes, I do tend towards understatement. Why do you ask? [↩]
3. Indeed, like most bloggers who are extremely successful, Seth has been blogging for years [↩]
4. Ignoring the really illegal cases where they try to sell work not in the public domain and that they don’t have license to. [↩]
5. Ads. Paid-for but released for free content. Etc. [↩]
6. Caveat that I am very much aware of: in no way can I be considered at all either a successful writer or blogger, and if you want to point out that you are much better than me for being published in more real places than just Tor.com, and anyways I shouldn’t be using Tor.com as a resume due to my general lack of worth and weight in the field, I will simply bow my head and say: you are entirely correct, sir or madam; I am not as worthy or as good as you, and I did say “much, much smaller scale”. Yet even peasants can advise kings, if only because they have the time and are close enough to the ground to make some observations, which may or may not hold up, but nevertheless, some which may prove useful to our betters. [↩]
7. I’ll note that some people will say, “But there are bloggers that make money in months!” To which I note that such bloggers usually have a high level of experience in the area which they blog, which itself takes years to accomplish, so the story is incomplete if you simply look at their history as beginning when they first landed on Blogger or whatever. [↩]
8. Cue argument from folks who argue there are people who write bad words and still make money. I count ideas as part of writing, so unless you’re actually prepared to write a celebrity biography—and trust me, it’s sometimes really not worth it—or put your neck out and write anyways even if your words do not float like delicate swans in a lavendar-hued pool while the sun sets over the misty winter snow—I don’t think this is a great argument. [↩]

A lot of people freak out when they wake up in the morning and see that their subscriber numbers have hit 0. Or their site statistics.

This is what you need to know about the wonders (and non-wonders) of Feedburner. Putting the rest of this article under the fold since it descends into geekery.

Click here to read more »

And we’re back to a non-election style for the wondrous Simple Balance theme, which is easy to style and yet still easy to configure through a set of bodacious options offered in its configuration page.

You know, I’ve been having fun contemplating Simple Balance styles for winter.

Of course, the fun isn’t limited to YouTube (which we’ll return to as well). College Humor regularly puts together well-produced skits and shorts.

Like this instant Election ‘08 classic:

I first became aware of College Humor through their hilarious Font Conference video.

Yes, it is! And it’s a book review! Of a Terry Pratchett book! With footnotes!¹

This is the first time I’ve ever written a review of a certain… quality. I’m familiar with doing short reviews, the kind that go on a blog and enthuse! when you’re trying to blog up a storm. They’re fun but they can be a little shallow, even if you enthuse! for 400 words.

Most bloggers do that. I’ve seen reviews at 20 words. That’s fine and all, but it’s not the kind of review I can exactly put up at Tor.com. While it is a blog, it’s also a blog for a company, so technically I’m now a professional blogger.

So now I need to add in more context and craft and themes, y’know, go into significant detail about why the book is great² without going into full plot synopsis, which is about the worst thing you can do in a review. It’s boring as hell. I banged my head against the wall a good long time³ before I managed to get something out that encompassed the first two but ditched the last.

I’m actually proud that I didn’t need an editor to tell me that. Although I did wander over to Miss Snark’s to see what she had to say about good book reviews. She’s very to the point. I love her. Good old Miss Snark.⁴

In the informal world of blogging, people may ask why the hell would you do that?

I write to be read. Which means I try to reach. Even in my short reviews I always try to cover a little craft, a little context, blah blah, but I’ve always been lazy on them compared to my other posts because reviews are much harder for me. Much harder.

In other words, Twittering on the Global Frequency wasn’t unusual, and is the kind of post that usually gets my blog Stumbled. I’m good at that kind of thing, except when I over-reach (after all, that’s why I’m not writing about meta-blogging anymore). In other words, I’m good at writing about and learning about blogging; I suck at reading for comprehension. I have to read books twice before I can write even a short review with context.⁵

Fortunately, Tor.com gets me reaching. It’s not strictly a pay thing; if I’m writing for pay, I want to write something I’m proud of and that people will look at and say, woah, that chick deserves to be on Tor.com. I come into the game with zero credits, so I must earn some.

And all this gives you guys decent reviews and decent articles. I could actually reel back my dedication to the blog articles over there. I could just blast out my post about vampires: the demon lovers right now, with nothing fancy but stark and direct words. That would be enough.

But I can’t do that. It’s not me. I didn’t even do that on my own blog for the stuff that I knew I could hitch up in quality, and when you wander off and write things like this for free⁶, you are a sick person.

I write to be read. It’s not about gaining audience any way I can. It’s about gaining an audience that wants to read my words. And for me, that’s been very clearly about quality; for others, it can be humor or philosophy or whatnot instead. There are useful things to learn from social media when it gets applied to your blog; that is definitely one of them.

1. Those were really fun to do. I can see why he does them. You can add deeper asides that don’t interrupt the flow of the article/review/narrative/whatever. Like a discussion of Small Gods. Or this one. [↩]
2. Or, you know, not. Hopefully I’ll keep running into great books to blog. [↩]
3. Which is why, mine editors, you did not see a Thursday post. And might not see a post this Thursday, even though mining the values of Tuesdays and especially Thursdays is something that my blogger mind is strongly attuned to, as waves of the ocean might to oysters. Or… something. [↩]
4. I never did figure out who she was. Doubt I ever will. [↩]
5. As you can imagine, this slows me down somewhat when it comes to learning to write via reading, but I think that reading is the most important part of learning to write. After all, it’s reading and digesting that got me into the position to actually blog about certain topics well. So many people ignore this in favor of getting words out, which if you’re starving is fine, but if you’re not writing for your supper, like me, it’s kind of silly. [↩]
6. Not even ads. Do you know what HTML for Dummies would have netted me on a blog that paid decently per ad view? I could have paid my mortgage for one month. [↩]