Psychedelia Gothique

As I enter the final stretch leading up to the launch of The Human Template , I find myself dropped into the same ocean of doubt and possibility that every other self-published writer faces.  The problem isn't lack of resources, because there is a growing number of resources - most of them useful to one degree or another. The trick is deciding which are the most useful, affordable, accessible, and reliable. Every one of them has drawbacks and advantages. It's hard to judge which way to turn, especially with the marketplace changing and evolving at every turn.  About two years ago I discovered Tim Grahl who is a book marketing guru with all kinds of credits under his belt and a very good overview of how to approach the marketplace with the best chance for success. His two books,  Your First 1,000 Copies  and  Book Launch Blueprint  have been sort of bibles for me as I come into this enterprise. His website,  https://booklaunch.com/ , contains the basic ...

For all the talk about e-books taking over the world, I can’t help but notice what I consider a serious swing in the other direction. When I was lining up beta readers for The Human Template , I gave most of the local readers a choice between electronic or hardcopy versions of the novel.   Only one of the thirteen people asked for an electronic copy. He turned out to be the only one of the beta readers who didn’t actually follow through and read the book. I will say that a number of people since that time have asked to read it and half of the people who received hardcopies still haven’t finished it. But the scales still definitely tip towards the hardcopy side. A good number of the people who read the hardcopy gave it back when they were done, which is quite understandable given the fact that many of them are condo dwellers with very little space to store things like books. Even as a bit of a book collector, I make a point of thinning out my shelves on a regular basis, keeping ...

Do you know the difference between flotsam and jetsam? Flotsam is wreckage - stuff lost at sea as a direct result of a disaster - whereas Jetsam is useful stuff thrown overboard to lighten the load. Flotsam is, at best, useful for keeping survivors briefly afloat, but for the most part it just gives you slivers; while jetsam is the sort of thing beachcombers spend their lives looking for.  Welcome to the Age of Jetsam - where we're all waiting to see what useful things are being jettisoned during the storm we are currently weathering. And what, after all is said and done, might be salvageable.   Even before the pandemic, I heard stories about the sad state of the publishing industry.  Now that retailers in general are in survival mode, with many restaurants, specialty stores, nightclubs, and other businesses surrendering to the economic chaos of the moment, I've started to hear the inevitable stories of authors not getting paid, bookstores and printers going bel...

While sending out query letters to agents, one thing you are expected to supply is a list of books that are similar to the book you are pitching. With The Human Template , this seemed impossible. One thing my early readers consistently told me was that they had never read anything like my book before. I’m a longtime believer in the adage “There’s nothing new under the Sun,” so I didn’t buy into this notion right away. Yet, it didn’t really help me to come up with any real comparisons. When I first started sending queries, my response was usually to mention a couple of   influences - rather than similar books. One of my favourite genre-books ever is The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick. I consider it to have the best opening of any sff book I have ever read and one of my clear goals is to be as good a writer as Michael Swanwick. Rereading his Vacuum Flowers while I was working on my diptych, I was briefly pumped to feel that my book is both stylistically similar ...

Twitter blasts are fun. Lots of people seem to check out the threads. But I don't see them as the ultimate vehicle for communicating with readers. As I enter the home stretch and embark on my last few rounds of drafts of my diptych, my  Avenging Glory  website is moving up the priority list and I’m looking to have some fun stuff on it by Mid Summer. There's a  Web Book Marketing coach/guru named Tim Grahl  who seems to have lots on the ball. I've been shamelessly mining his free advice for the past year or so, regarding how to promote and market a book (and he has an excellent page on creating a author website). Frankly, he has a great track record with getting books in front of eyeballs, and gives really smart advice. The point I'm making by mentioning this is that the absolute core of his advice is the need to build an author platform – supported by an e-mail data-base of people. And one of the best ways to build that up is with an e-mail newsletter. I s...