Today I saw a thread on Twitter, authors half-jokingly griping about the doubt and despair that often accompanies “marketing efforts.”
I get it — I’ve been there. There are an infinite number of things you could do to promote your book, but every approach requires time, money, and/or social capital, and it’s easy to get frustrated and discouraged and to wonder if your efforts are producing zilch.
The Guardian in John Scalzi’s advance reading copy pile
I should say up front that this post is a book plug. But it’s also an honest account of what’s been going on in my head since the orange menace was elected and the stock market graph of human progress took a sharp dip.
Three years into the Trump administration, I’m learning how to manage my emotions around the fact that a narcissistic man-child is systematically dismantling everything good about our country (human rights, environmental protections, voting rights and fair elections, a relatively good standing in the international community, etc.), while simultaneously worsening our preexisting national issues (racism, gun violence, massive wealth inequality, expensive healthcare, etc.). It’s an awful situation that has negatively impacted my own well-being (and I’m a relatively wealthy, privileged white male, with plentiful resources; most have it much worse).
With the pending release of my second novel this week (The Guardian comes out Sep. 26th on Flame Tree Press), my emotions are in turmoil. I’ll just go through them, as a way of clearing my head, and maybe my emotional laundry list will offer insight to those of you also on the writing path, or entertain those of you who enjoy knowing how the sausage is made.
Spencer Ellsworth generously volunteered his time as my SFWA mentor and taught me a thing or two about the publishing business. Like me, he’s a fan of Octavia Butler. Unlike me, he’s writing from 4:45am to 6:45am, hours in which I prefer to be soundly asleep.
Word Craft is a deep dive into writers’ methods and practices. Please welcome Spencer Ellsworth, author of The Great Faerie Strike (just released on Aug. 5th) as well as The Starfire Trilogy.
-J.D.
Tell us a little about yourself and what inspired you to become a writer.
A little bit… Well, I sometimes dream of climbing on a war mammoth and forging a path northward, where the sky lights up from the battles of the gods. That good?
Seriously, I’m one of those who always wrote. I made picture books before I could string sentences together. I have a vague memory of working on an Ewok story at age 5, sitting in church with my family penning an epic sequel to that unappreciated cinematic gem The Battle For Endor.
For the past few months I’ve used Duotrope to track my fiction submissions to various markets. Previously I was using Google Sheets, with different sections of one large spreadsheet to track stories and submissions, markets, and responses. The sheet worked great for a long time, but once I had over twenty stories, hundreds of responses from publishers, and dozens of markets to track, the spreadsheet solution became unwieldy. I started to miss things, and in one cases submitted a story twice to the same publisher. I also started to submit fewer stories, simply because of the difficulty in using the spreadsheet. Time for a new solution!
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