Revolutions and Pitfalls

Seems that this has been coming up a lot lately- authors bypassing the traditional publishing avenues and doing stuff themselves. Now, don’t laugh; of course it’s been coming up, as I and my podcasting peers have been doing it for years. But now some new developments are coming up, and they bear watching.

• Tim Pratt (former guest of this show and an excellent writer) is releasing a “reader-supported novella” called Bone Shop. It’s a prequel to his popular urban fantasy Marla Mason books (first four books on the page). He’s doing it this way for two reasons: he has yet to find a market for it, and his wife, author Heather Shaw, just lost her job. So if you like urban fantasy, check out the Marla books and Bone Shop.

Marla Mason is the chief sorcerer of Felport, a woman who’s tangled with gods and monsters and come out on top (if a bit damaged in the process). But she wasn’t always a formidable engine of brute force and pragmatism; she started out alone, in a strange city, without allies or any more power than the average teenage runaway on the street. Marla was always willing to do anything necessary to survive, and it didn’t take long for her to stumble into a world of magic, danger… and even the occasional moment of grace.

Bone Shop tells the story of Marla’s evolution from runaway to sorcerer’s apprentice to mercenary magician and beyond. Fans of the urban fantasy series that began with Blood Engines will find surprising secrets revealed about Marla’s past, and new readers can meet the character from the very beginning.

• Along the same lines, fantasy author Catherynne M. Valente is writing the free online YA novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship of Her Own Making. She’s using a donation model in order to shore up funds in a crappy economy as well. But she shares another similarity with Pratt in that the internet model works as it’s not a book she felt she had a market for:

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making began as a book-within-a-book in my adult novel, Palimpsest, a part of the protagonist’s childhood, a strange novel for children written in the 1920s, about a young girl spirited away to Fairyland by the Green Wind, and her adventures there, battling the wicked Marquess, befriending outlandish creatures, and growing up. As I traveled to promote the book, readers asked me one question more than any other:

Is it real?

And I said no, no, it’s fiction, just part of the world of the novel. And then, every time, the next question would come:

Are you going to write it?

And again, I said no. It’s impossible—a YA book hidden in a very much not-YA novel. No one would publish it…. [more]

This is fascinating and awesome Some, like Jennifer Hudock, author of the new podiobook The Goblin Market, say it’s a revolution, and that we have a worthy fight on our hands.

… it’s time that we as writers, artists, musicians, creators of all breed, take our careers back into our own hands and make them real. It’s time that we put our energy into our dreams so we can tell our dayjobs to stuff it… and if you like your day job, that’s okay too, but wouldn’t you rather be exerting your energy on the things you really love? I know I would and I actually write for a living–just not about the things that matter to me.

A revolution doesn’t have to be a violent thing, though at times it might get brutal. The world may resist it.

Others caution creators, saying that you have to remember that good content is still the goal here. It’s not just the delivery system. Author and blogger David Niall Wilson agrees that times are changing, but content still rules.

Quality is the one factor you can never count out. Anything you think you can just flip over in a week and make a million bucks on—particularly if you base that assumption on the fact someone else made a million in a similar fashion and you think you can discount disparities in fame, talent, and hard work—is going to get you just as much nothing now as it would have before the Internet and digital content became a factor.

So we all agree that things are changing, and if there ever was a time to try something new, now is that time. But in your rush to be innovative, to be awesome, to be a marketing god, never ever forget that it is what you create when you’re NOT hanging out on Twitter or playing games on Facebook or spreading the word about your new project that makes all of this worthwhile.

Writing prompt for July 1: Your protag finds a dropped full box of popcorn with a diamond ring inside. The popcorn is fresh.