Five Years Later

I’ve been writing professionally for 5 years now, more or less. A little more, truth be told, but I’ll round down. The point is, that feels like a long time. Not including the current book I’m writing, it’s 4,184,000 published words worth of time. That’s a lot of keys being slapped around.

What have I learned? A lot. Unfortunately, a lot of the lessons require unlearning something I learned the month before. For example, just this morning my wife got an email from an ARC reader stating she loved her book, but she was worried at first because of the details and backstory. She wanted to skip past the potato salad and get to the meat right away.

When I saw that I stiffened in my chair and stared at the screen in a serious WTF moment. I’d been criticized by readers in the past for not providing enough potato salad! My only consolation is the disparity in genres. I was chastised for short sci-fi novellas at the time. My wife’s market of choice is paranormal romance. A different breed of reader to be found there. Not better or worse, in my opinion, just readers expecting different things.

So I’ll step back from the tactical and strategic help and focus instead on helping with the writing. As for my work, I’m doing my best to keep it light and fun. Entertainment that turns the pages and makes my readers want to see what crazy stuff I can come up with next. Or at least that’s my current book.

What is my current book? It’s the sci-fi book I’ve been talking about on and off. I still don’t have a name, but I have a lot of ideas and plans. I’ll tease more alien races soon too. Maybe some technology and other random bits of interest about the universe too. It’s the beginning of a setting that, like Vitalis or Voidhawk, could span into an amazing number of stories that just keep building and building.

But I digress. Five years and over 4 million words is a lot of entertainment. I have 11 series of stories out there (most of them ongoing), and over 65 books. I write in multiple genres and have been included in group projects by writers far more financially successful than I am. I’ve even hit the USA Today and NY Times bestseller list this year with an inclusion under a pen name in a group project. By myself? Not a chance! But with others that can afford the promotion necessary to get us there – easy as cake.

The two things writing has boiled down to, for me, are financial success and the ability to be a writer. I am a writer. A prolific and well regarded one, to hear people talk about my work. Financially, however, it’s a rough road to follow. I have a day job and it looks like I won’t be leaving my day job for a very long time. Amazon’s ever changing marketplace keeps knocking me around and, especially lately, dropping me into pretty shaky sales territory. All those titles and it’s still a struggle for me day to day. Not to write, but to see the lackluster copies sold. It’s demoralizing, to say the least.

But that’s what makes a writer a writer. The stubborn mulishness necessary to push ahead and write another chapter. To put ourselves out there when the whims of the market and perhaps even common sense would dictate otherwise. It’s a gamble, you see, but a gamble with nothing but positive side effects. So my book doesn’t sell – I still wrote it. I still lived the adventure. I still explored characters, concepts, and topics I hadn’t thought of before. I may be out the cost of editing and cover art and perhaps a few other things (including time spent), but I learned something, damn it. I made myself a more educated and well-rounded person. I’ve learned more from writing all those books than I learned obtaining three degrees.

That’s the sum total of five years. I’d hoped to have a sports car, a nice house, and time to spend with my writing and my family by now. Well, there’s no car and no house, but I still get my family and the voices in my head to keep me company. It doesn’t matter if the sports car rolls in or not, I’m happy to work on hitting the 5 million word mark and enjoying what I’ve got. There’s a lot of things in my life I can’t control, such as whether or not people buy my books. I can control my happiness though, and I choose to find a way to be happy even when the royalties dip and bills begin to loom. Why would anyone want to live any other way?

 

To learn more about Jason Halstead visit his website to read about him, sign up for his newsletter, or check out some free samples of his books at http://www.booksbyjason.com.

You Can’t Fight Crazy

In addition to my day job and writing I also own Novel Concept Publishing with J.E. Taylor. Jane is primarily the editor and person who determines the thumbs up or thumbs down on submissions, but she defers to me when it comes to science fiction and fantasy stories. Thus far we haven’t had a lot of stories in those genres submitted to us, but one early one came from Marc Hamlet and I jumped at the chance to help him out and publish The Capable Man. Great sales on it thus far have reinforced my decision. But that’s just filler and an attempt to drive a little more traffic Marc’s way. Now onto the crazy…

The nature of the game is that for every one title that is accepted, there are a greater number that get turned away. It’s not out of spite and it’s not because we’re afraid to take on the work. It’s because the manuscript just won’t work or it is need of so much editing that we don’t feel we can take it on. In some cases that disappoints me, because I see some potential in a story but I know it’s going to take too much work to bring it out and make it shine. Between my schedule and Jane’s we wouldn’t be able to devote the attention it requires. I had one of those just recently, in fact, and I’m hoping that writer takes the feedback I gave him to heart and acts on it.

Then there’s other submissions that won’t work because they read like a plate of spaghetti. Nothing makes sense, there’s no proper flow to it, the sentences are jumbled, and perhaps even accepted formatting standards are blatantly ignored. I had that recently too. My first thought was to suggest the author try writing it in a version of English I might understand, but I realized that might sound inappropriate. After all, writing a novel is a lot of work and putting that much effort into something deserves a degree of respect, even if it does read like a randomly generated spam comment.

So I sent a respectful rejection letter. There’s no such thing in NCP’s library as a form letter, everything we do is hand written and tailored to each person. We want to help out even those who aren’t ready yet, such as this case. I offered some feedback and suggestions, even a direction I thought the writer should take. At no point was I rude or belittling. The almost immediate response I received from the writer was:

“Piss off and get lost!!!!!”

My reaction? A moment of shock, a moment of sadness, and then laughter. What else can you do? I shared it with my wife, who went through the same emotional process I did, then I shared it with Jane. Her response turned into the title of this blog.

The lesson for writers everywhere is to keep an open mind. Take feedback in every form and use it to improve yourself. Equally importantly, act professional. Burning bridges and flying off the handle doesn’t get you far in the world. Unless this particular would-be writer can open their mind and learn to accept feedback, they’ll forever remain a would-be.

To learn more about Jason Halstead, visit his website to learn about him, his books, sign up for his newsletter, or check out some free samples of his books at http://www.booksbyjason.com.

Writing the Catholic Style

Nothing religious about this post – rather it’s all about the lack of birth control endorsement and encouragement to reproduce. So, too, should a writer be prolific. The more material a writer has out, the better the chance of income. More work means more exposure, which means more people interested, which means more sales. Of course it goes without saying that it should be quality work, but unless you’re Will Smith or Warren Buffet, the odds of predicting what’s going to be successful and writing something that matches the timing is a long shot, at best.

Don’t take my word for it though! I don’t have anything to back this up, other than a slowly increasing volume of books sold. There’s plenty of other sources that support this, from other writers suggesting the most important thing a writer can do is write to rough stats that show the more lines you have in the water the better your chances of catching a fish.

Something I stumbled across last night on the topic gave me quite a kick in the pants. The suggestion was relating to back lists, or pieces written that never left the hard drive / were retired from public consumption. Why are they were they are? In the age of ebooks there is no shelf-life, just a steady stream of new people looking for things to read. Is it because you, the writer, feel that it’s poorly written? Are you ashamed of it? Or perhaps it’s something you wouldn’t want your mother knowing you wrote. That’s not much different from having a money tree grow in the back yard but insisting on not plucking the fruit from it because you’re afraid it would hurt the tree. The answer? A pen name!

Branding is a key part of being a writer, and a lot of work goes into establishing and perpetuating that brand. We blog, we tweet, we read / review, and we write. We do other things too, hopefully most of them keeping us out of jail. But if you write something you feel may not be good for the brand you’ve been establishing, then put it out there under a pen name instead. Don’t focus so much on creating that brand, just let it do its thing on its own. Sure, maybe it’s slower, but our focus should be on writing and on doing what we enjoy the most, otherwise writing isn’t about living the dream, it’s just another job. And trust me, there are plenty of jobs that pay a decent salary out there that are a hell of a lot easier than being a writer.

So go forth and multiply! Or at least let your writing do the multiplying. Write like bunnies that got into a bottle of Viagra.