Category Archives: Publishing Stuff

Blog, Publishing Stuff, writing

When finished isn’t finished

Last night I finished revisions on SHATTERED. YAY!!! However, that doesn’t mean the book is finished and will be released in a couple months. Far from it!

I never understood the process behind getting a book to the shelf before I went through it myself, and there are still parts of the process I don’t understand because they don’t involve me at all, but maybe I can crack open the blinds a wee bit and shed some metaphorical light on the subject…

SHATTERED has been delivered at this point but not accepted. That means I’m whipping the book into better shape with the guidance of my editors. This could go on for a while and it’s a good thing. You want a well-edited book, believe me. I usually do two to five revisions before a book is accepted and I’ve just finished my first one. So yeah, “finishing” revisions really just means I’ve taken a step forward and we’re not even close to publishing. It takes some time for me to write the revisions, of course, and time for my editors to read ’em and get back to me…you get the idea.

A note on my process as a writer: I always add words in revisions because one of my peculiarities is that I forget to describe people; for me, character is revealed more in actions and words than in what they’re wearing or how their hair looks. I’ve tried to get better at that, but I always forget something and my editors have to go, Kev, is this character MALE or FEMALE and DO THEY HAVE EYES and all that. So there’s always a certain amount of that physical stuff I need to add. But sometimes I have to add entire chapters, chop others, and expand plot elements, etc. This was a pretty significant revision for me. I delivered the book at 91,500 words. The revision I just turned in was 104,898 words. Oh, and I cut about 5,000 at the outset. So I wrote a net 18,400 words for this bad boy. If I don’t cut a whole bunch on the next revision, then this will be my longest book so far (and may get longer depending on the notes I get back on the revision).

So can we publish soon after it gets accepted? Heck no! Next we have copy edits, and that takes a couple of months. Then it goes to typesetting, which is another 3-5 weeks, and then we need time for me to approve galleys and spend sleepless nights worrying about commas. After the galleys are approved and fixed, then it goes to a proofreader or two, and then we’re finished with the text. But that still doesn’t mean we’re ready to publish right away!

The non-writing part of the process is a bit more hazy for me because it’s not really my bag of chips, but I can give you broad outlines. In a way, this part of the business determines the release date of a book more than the date the author completes writing it. Weird, huh? It’s because everybody has budgets and they need to plan how to spend them. I’m not talking just about publishers—I’m talking about bookstores and libraries. The publisher has to allocate resources surrounding the marketing of the book and allow time for reviewers to grab early copies and get some buzz going. They also have a sales team that goes out and tries to get your book on shelves around the country. There’s limited shelf space, after all, and whether your book gets there and how many copies get there is determined by this sales team. And they do this by seasons. They’ll go to a bookstore and say, “Okay, Spiffy Booksellers, here’s what we have coming out in the summer of next year. Please buy a gazillion copies of them all.” The bookstores pick what they want on their shelves in accordance with their budget for next summer, and it’s always less than a gazillion. And the same goes for libraries. They have very tight budgets and can’t buy copies of every book that comes out. But they still need to make plans based on seasonal releases, and once they make those plans, it’s tough for them to shift gears quickly for a sudden release. If my publisher said now, “Hey Spiffy Booksellers, we can have Kevin’s book ready by October,” the bookstores and libraries would be like, WHUT. Sorry, we’ve already allocated our funds for October. We won’t be buying any copies. And then I would be doomed. So that’s why the publishers pick release dates so far out from actual completion of the writing—it’s all about giving everybody enough time to get their financial ducks in a row and give the books their best chance for success. Publicity! Reviews! All the things!

Can the publishers move faster if they really, really have to? Yes. It can be done. It just usually isn’t. The example I’m thinking of is Jim Butcher’s last book, Cold Days. He delivered in September and they got it published in November. That’s super fast. But they already had cover art ready, already had a lot of things prepared, and were able to chug through the editorial process quickly because Jim’s awesome and so is his editor. And it’s not insignificant that Jim’s a sure-fire bestseller, so bookstores were willing to make an exception on the normal lead time for ordering. It’s definitely a rare case. Most of the time you pick the release date even before the book is finished, stick to it so everyone’s accountants are happy, and then count on the book getting done in time.

So: SHATTERED is slated for release next summer. The book will be finished before then, but not ready, if that makes sense. There’s a ton of work to be done to make sure that when the release date arrives and you walk into the bookstore or library to pick up a copy, there will actually be a copy there for you to pick up. :) While I’m sorry you have to wait, keep in mind that we’ve been doing this consistently; I finished HUNTED at this time last year and it just came out in June of this year. Most books operate on that schedule—there are 10 to 12 months in between delivery and appearance on the shelf. While you will occasionally run across books that are rushed to the shelf, the vast majority adhere to this kind of scheduling. Hope that helps you understand why there’s a wait between an author saying “I’m finished with these edit thingies!” to being able to buy it.

Happy reading in the meantime, and thanks very much for the kind words regarding HUNTED. Glad you guys liked it!

Blog, Publishing Stuff

The Economics of Tours 2

This is a much-delayed and overdue companion piece to the post I did back in November called The Economics of Tours. That first post spoke of why it’s not so easy for an author or a publisher to set up big sprawling tours—it costs a lot of money to travel, basically, and not enough people show up and buy books to justify the expense.

But hiding on the other side of that coin are the bookstores where events are to be held. Holding a signing is not without its own set of economic risks and headaches. And again, since most people are probably unaware, I’m sharing some basic math in the interest of being helpful, to foster understanding of why a bookstore might not wish to hold events sometimes, and appreciate those indie stores who go out of their way to hold lots of events every year.

Bookstores generally buy books from publishers for 60% of the cover price—or, if you want to look at it a different way, at a 40% discount. Let’s break down a paperback and a hardcover sale and eventually get around to what this means for touring and events.

Most paperbacks are $7.99, unless you have one of those slightly larger ones that are $9.99 and annoying to hold, but let’s go with the $8 example. On an eight-dollar book, the bookstore “keeps” $3.20. That’s if it doesn’t give you a discount or a coupon or anything.

On a $25 hardcover—and I know hardcovers vary somewhat in price, but the math is super easy at $25 so let’s just go with it—the bookstore keeps $10 if it doesn’t discount.

So right there, without going any further, you can see that any rational business person would prefer to sell hardcovers to paperbacks because they make almost three times as much money per unit. To put it another way, a bookstore has to sell three paperbacks to equal one hardcover sale. That has a profound impact on signing events.

Depending on the author, the book, the day of the week, the time of the event, and even the weather, signings tend to draw anywhere from one person to a hundred. Really big authors will draw more, of course—they’ll have seven-hour lines and maybe bathe in Courvoisier afterward—but most signings draw fewer than a hundred people in a big city. Seriously. Plenty of signings are below fifty.

Let us, however, for the sake o’ easy math, say we sell fifty books at each signing. A bookstore would make $160 if those were paperbacks, and $500 if those were the aforementioned $25 hardcovers—provided they haven’t discounted anything. But wait! They don’t actually get to keep all that!

Say you have two employees in the store. Just two. The event lasts two hours, often three, and sometimes the events go past closing time so it’s not like we’re always talking normal business hours here. The employees are paid, what, I don’t know, maybe $10 an hour? I’m afraid to ask, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more or less, honestly, and there are taxes and health insurance and OMG, but I’m trying to keep this simple. So two employees at $30 for three hours eats up $60 of that money. Then there’s the overhead for the bricks and mortar—lights and computers and things. And sweet deity of your choice, they pay credit card companies 8-10% per transaction! And they have marketing costs to advertise the event—signage and newsletters to subscribers and website gurus to do webby things and all the goodies they have to do to coax fifty people in a metro area of one or two million to show up. Thus, if you’re a paperback author selling fifty copies and only bringing in $160 minus a buttload of expenses for the bookstore—even less if they give the customers any kind of discount—there is so little margin there that it’s hardly worth the time and effort to do all that. In fact, there’s a very real risk that the bookstore will LOSE MONEY on the event if the turnout is low, and as I hope I have intimated clearly, turnout is often low. Or you’ll have 75 people show up but only 40 copies get sold because 35 people inexplicably believe it’s polite to show up and not buy anything—they’ll bring in copies they bought elsewhere and contribute absolutely nothing to the local store that has gone to the trouble and expense of hosting the author.

The Poisoned Pen_outsideI know my math is very basic and the devil’s in the details, and I know some indie stores have figured out how to do events well and come out ahead. They build massive mailing lists and do a ton of events and become a vibrant part of the city’s culture. The Poisoned Pen, for example, my local store, does more than 300 events a year. But many stores—especially in smaller cities without a giant mailing list—can’t shoulder the risk of a paperback event and have to turn some authors away. (Yes, even ones that sell pretty well.) And the vast number of indie bookstores that have closed over the past decade demonstrates that figuring out how to do events well (or how to sell paper books, period) is easier said than done.

With hardcover numbers, of course, there’s much more room for error. And that’s why bookstores would vastly prefer to host a hardcover author than a paperback one. At a hardcover event they can pray for a good night whereas with a paperback event they’re praying to break even.

There is probably a desperate plea in here to support your local independent bookstore—yes, please do that if you are lucky enough to have one!—but that’s not why I wrote this post. I wrote it to help people understand why it’s not so simple for me (and most authors) to come visit you wherever you are. There are not only economic limits to what authors can do but limits to what bookstores can do as well. It’s not that authors despise smaller cities or certain regions of the country or tiny island nations, and it’s not as if bookstore owners are actively trying to deny their communities access to authors. It’s that book signings are risky undertakings even in major cities, and everybody has to pay bills. In truth, the only reason you will ever see a signing by someone who isn’t a gigantic superstar is that bookstores love bringing authors and readers together. It’s never a sure thing that a signing will work out but they take the risk anyway and hope it will turn out okay. That’s why I love indies.

I am turbo grateful to the indie stores that have let me come by so far and to those who will be hosting me this summer, and super-turbo grateful to the readers who take the trouble to come out and see me and support those stores. I do wish I could see everyone—and I think most authors of a sociable bent would feel the same way—but yeah, for innumerable reasons, it’s just not possible. Like the famous eHarmony cat lady, I love my readers, I want to hug you all and I want you in a basket, so please don’t feel slighted if I (or another writer you dig) can’t make it to your neighborhood soon. We totally would if we could.

Blog, Publishing Stuff

Special promos and stuff

Gadzooks, a bunch o’ stuff is happening! I’ve mentioned a lot of this stuff separately somewhere in the land o’ social media, but I figured I should collect it all in one post. Here we go:

1) For a limited time, the eBook of HOUNDED is only $2.99 in the USA! If you’ve been wanting to get some friends or family hooked on IDC so you can trade Oberon quotes with them, here’s your chance! Kindle, Nook, whatever…it’s $2.99 until May 3!

2) My next big public thingie is Phoenix Comicon May 23-26. Incredible lineup of authors and other famous peeps there. But kind of blown away that there will be a hardcover, con-only special edition of UNFETTERED available, featuring stories by Terry Brooks, Brandon Sanderson, Peter Orullian, and myself. Only 250 copies will be printed, and we’ll all be there at the con—in fact, there will be an UNFETTERED panel!—so you could have a signed, turbo-rare edition if you want. Ain’t gonna lie: I WANT.

3) I don’t consider myself a guru of writing wisdom or anything—if I was a genius, I would have figured stuff out a lot sooner than I did. But I said a few things on Twitter yesterday in an effort to render what assistance I can. I collected it on Storify and if you’re an aspiring writer I hope it helps! Speaking of Storify, I really dig it. I’ll be collecting more Twitter conversations, blog posts and the like there, so if you’d like to give me a follow you won’t miss any of my shenanigans. You can go through and check out past Stories too.

4) If you want to say hi and get a signed copy of HUNTED this summer, there are OODLES of ways to do that. First, check out my tour dates—I’m visiting California, Portland, Seattle, and a couple o’ places in Colorado and would love to see you! If you’re not nearby one of those places, however, you still have options! First is a special early release shindig on Sunday, June 23, at 5 pm at Nando’s Mexican Cafe in Mesa. No reservation needed—just show up! $15 gets you a book and a drink and we’ll hang out. Extra copies for friends are $8.50. If you’re on the east coast or out of the country, you can preorder a signed copy from The Poisoned Pen by giving them a call or using their website. I will sign all preordered copies before I take off for the tour, and they’ll ship it to you wherever you are, military addresses included!

5) There are still ten tickets left for Atticus & Oberon’s Elevator Ride! It’s a Taco Hootenanny in Encinitas, CA at the end of July with me and new sci-fi genius Jason Hough. You’ll get signed copies of both our books, a pint glass, lots o’ food and lots of love when you hang out with us!

6) If you missed it, I have an Iron Druid novella coming out May 7 called GRIMOIRE OF THE LAMB. Atticus & Oberon go to Egypt! FUN!

In writing news, I’m about halfway through the first draft of book seven, SHATTERED, and hope to have it finished before I go on tour for HUNTED. We’ll see!

Blog, Publishing Stuff

The Goodreads snafu

I’ve been getting some questions about an email sent out by Goodreads about the release of a novella called THE GRIMOIRE OF THE LAMB. People are understandably confused when Goodreads says “It’s out!” and then they go to Amazon or Audible or wherever and can’t find it. The short answer is: Goodreads is wrong. THE GRIMOIRE OF THE LAMB hasn’t been released yet. But it will be!

I should be able to give you a release date and a US cover soon—the cover Goodreads has is the UK cover—but until I’m allowed to show and tell, I can tell you this:

1) Atticus & Oberon go to Egypt, and heck yes they get into trouble.
2) It’s a bit longer than TWO RAVENS AND ONE CROW.

Sorry about the confusion. I didn’t realize Goodreads would be doing stuff like that. I think at one time March 1 might have been a release date, but it’s shifted around quite a bit the way things will in the publishing business. Don’t have any more information I can share right now, but I promise to tell you ALL THE THINGS when I can. Pinky swear!

Blog, Publishing Stuff

The economics of tours

I thought I would share a wee bit of math here since it’s not something I figured out myself until after I was published. It simply never occurred to me to think of it this way, so in the interest of being helpful to people who may be in the same boat now: There is no economic reason for most authors to tour. In fact, bookstores often lose money on author appearances too, but for now we’ll focus solely on the author’s side of things. Apologies in advance for the length. Here we go…

I’m in Arizona. Let’s say I want to visit people in Boston because I have yet to visit Massachusetts and there might be a few people out there willing to come see me. Cool! First, I have to plan my visit months ahead. The bookstore needs time to get the appearance on their calendar and send out emails to their newsletter subscribers and so on, doing what they can to publicize the event locally, and they also need to order copies of my books. But once the date and time is set, I have to pull out my credit card.

Round-trip flight to Boston from Phoenix: $365 according to Orbitz
Hotel in Boston: $100-$200 depending on where you stay
Rental Car or Taxi: That will cost a nice fat stack
Food: Should probably eat some
Transportation to the airport: Necessary and not free

So let’s say we’re super-duper cheap and manage to do this whole thing in one day & night for $500 just to keep the math simple. Can I write all this off on my taxes? Heck yes. And I will. But it’s still $500 out of my pocket right now, and of course that write-off is a deduction on taxable income, not a credit. I won’t get it all back by any means. So what’s in it for me?

In financial terms it’s pretty small taters. It’s standard throughout the industry for authors to get about sixty-four cents per mass market paperback, and quite honestly, not a lot of people attend book signings. There are authors out there who will draw a couple or few hundred people, of course, but I’m not one of them. Most of the time authors will sell 30-60 copies at an event, depending on the city and the day of the week and the weather. Let’s say for easy math purposes, however, that Boston rocks hard and I sell 100 copies. That means I make $64.00. (I’d need to sell 800 copies to break even!)

My hypothetical visit to Boston, therefore, with a cheap estimate of costs and a generous estimate of sales, would put me in the hole $436. Clearly, the math tells me I cannot visit every place I’d like to go. It’s simply not possible if I would like to continue to do things like pay my mortgage and feed my kid and avoid calls from bill collection services. And the same holds true for the vast majority of authors.

“But wait!” a random straw man interjects. “Doesn’t your publisher pay for all that stuff anyway?” Nope. Publishers have budgets and bills to pay too. And airlines don’t give them discounts on author flights. The economics don’t work out in their favor either. Tours are simply not good for the bottom line—unless you’re one of the very, very few superstars who can sell hundreds of hardcovers at each event. That’s not me and that’s not most authors. That’s dudes like Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin. Publishers do pay for some tours, of course, but that’s for mondo huge bestsellers, and people might erroneously assume that it’s like that for all authors. It’s definitely not.

The reason I bring this up is that I recently announced on Facebook that I’d managed to get an appearance arranged in Cleveland. The comments immediately began to fill up with very sweet people urging me to come to their city in Florida or Wisconsin or California or wherever. And that’s when I realized they probably didn’t know what they were asking. They probably didn’t realize that I can’t afford to go wherever I want. Most of my appearances—and most author appearances, honestly—happen only if someone subsidizes them, either a convention or a conference or a publisher.

Here’s how the Cleveland thing happened: Nicole Peeler (who is a ridiculously smart professor in addition to being one of my favorite authors) invited me to come teach for a wee bit at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, which is about an hour outside of Pittsburgh. The university is flying me out there for the gig, but of course while I’m there on their dime I’m not going to be doing anything else but what they want. Still, I thought, maybe I can get something arranged out there for readers since I’ve never visited that part of the country. So I asked Seton Hill to schedule my return flight out of Pittsburgh a day later, and they were cool with that. Awesome! I got a hotel room in Pitt for my extra night and then set about trying to find a place in Pittsburgh to have an event. That turned out to be far more difficult than I anticipated. For various reasons that are no one’s fault, I couldn’t get a store to host me in Pittsburgh. My publicist in NY stepped in to help by finding a spot in Cleveland—Rocky River, actually, which is just to the west of Cleveland.

So now I’ll be driving a rental two and a half hours to Cleveland (probably uphill in the snow both ways!), and it’s definitely not for the money. I mean, if Cleveland rocks like the hypothetical Boston scenario above, I might break even on my rental car since the flight was taken care of. But I’m not worried about that because I’m not doing it for the economics anyway. Instead, authors who aren’t mega best sellers tour for these reasons:

1) Writers are full of neuroses and foremost among them is a desperate need to be loved.
2) People who read books are really cool and who wouldn’t want to meet cool people?
3) We cling to a hope that maybe the appearance will pay dividends down the road, as in spiffy people might spread the word about our books to their friends. Maybe we’ll break even on the trip in some distant future and there will be chocolate.
4) We like to get off our asses and away from the computer for a while.
5) Some readers would actually like to meet me and chat and I want to make them happy.

There are probably more reasons than that. I simply can’t think of them right now because I haven’t had my coffee.

Anyway, the point: I’d love to visit your town because I love to travel and see the country and meet people, but I can’t afford to do very much and neither can my publisher. And I hope this doesn’t come across as a woe-is-me sort of thing or a complaint; it’s merely an explanation of How Things Are for darn near everyone and maybe a wee plea: If I don’t come to your neck of the woods, please do not take it as a personal insult. I basically go where I’m invited or someplace near me because math says that’s all I can do. If you would like to see me (or any other author) in Florida or Wisconsin or wherever, the easiest thing to do is to convince either a geek convention or a writer’s conference to invite me as a guest. In a sense, you might have more power to make it happen than I do.

Bookstores, by the way, lose money on author appearances more often than you would think—or make such a slim profit that it’s barely worth their time. The reasons why are for another post. But like authors, they do it anyway because they like readers and they want people to enjoy reading.

I’m not touring at all for TRAPPED; I’m having a single signing locally at The Poisoned Pen on December 2. I will tour, however, in support of HUNTED next summer. It will be the west coast, basically, with stops in Montana and Colorado on the way back. I’m driving the whole way and Del Rey is being super nice and helping out. If you’re on the west coast and would like to see when I’ll be in your neighborhood, the dates are on my Events and Appearances page. Store locations and times will get cemented later, but those dates and cities are pretty solid.

If you made it all the way down here, thanks so much for reading it all! Hope it helped you understand the touring biz.

Nerd Cred, Publishing Stuff

New York Comic Con 2012!

Finishing a novel isn’t something that happens every day; it’s even more rare that you finish it and hand it to your editor in New York less than 24 hours later. But I got to do precisely that today, and it was cool. I finished HUNTED, put it on a Darth Vader USB flash drive, flew to New York, and gave it to Tricia! That felt good. It was especially awesome though when she ripped off Darth Vader’s head to reveal the USB thingie. Somewhere, James Earl Jones cried, “Noooooo!”

I got to see both my editors today, actually. They are the brilliant people I keep thanking profusely at the end of my books. They’re so much fun to work with. Look! Here they are!

Tricia & Mike, NY’s Finest Editors

A few people have asked, so here’s the scoop: HUNTED is book six of IDC and comes out June 25 next year. That is not to be confused with TRAPPED, book five, which comes out soon—November 27. Turning in a book happens waaaay before it gets put on the shelf. I turned in TRAPPED back in March. :)

I also ran into the legendary Anton Strout, author of Alchemystic, arch nemesis of Patrick Rothfuss, and guardian of the giant new Jim Butcher cover!

I like how there’s a man in red tights kneeling on Anton’s shoulder. I also note that there is not a man in white tights on his other shoulder. He may be doomed.

Logan and Sarah are a couple o’ young up-and-coming editors at Del Rey and they TOTALLY trust me. Nobody warned them about shenanigans or anything! You can tell:

“WHAT ARE YOU UP TO, HEARNE?”

I also got to meet Tom the Intern, who was kind enough to do my Wikipedia page this summer and who flatly refused to wear the Promotional Underwear they were handing out at the Con. Those things are not related.

Promotional Underwear would be a great band name. Think of the merchandise.

So what else happened at the Con today? Well, Batdog was there, the vigilante hound! And he was giving interviews to MTV! You can’t really see it here but that dude is holding a microphone to his jaws and they were recording.

“Catwoman must be brought to JUSTICE.”

More goodies later—I’ll take some more cosplay pics over the course of the weekend and post them for you guys. If you happen to be attending the Con, here’s my schedule, hope to see you:

FRIDAY: Signing from 5-6 PM at Del Rey booth #1120
SATURDAY: Myth Mixology Panel! 12:15-1:15, room 1A08.
SATURDAY: Panel signing with all the UF authors, 1:45-2:45, autograph tables 2, 3, 4
SATURDAY: Signing from 6-7 pm at Del Rey booth #1120

Blog, Publishing Stuff

Publicity Do-Dah

Whew! What a difference a year makes!

When HOUNDED debuted on May 5 last year, I wasn’t sure how things would go, or that I’d even get to write book 4, but thanks to your support I will technically have four books published inside of a single year! I’m stupidly lucky to be here. Thank you, sincerely.

So what have I discovered in a year of being a published author?
1.) You don’t need to hire social media experts unless you are truly incapable of human interaction. They’re not selling anything you can’t figure out yourself—or if they are, it’s probably something akin to spam. I might be able to sell a few more copies here and there if I reeeeeally wanted to, but I think it would involve a Faustian bargain. Like most people, I’d rather keep my soul, thank you very much.
2.) If you write about your favorite sports team in your books and portray them as struggling mightily, they will open the next season by sweeping the San Francisco Giants 3-0. True fax.
3.) I vastly prefer interviews to guest posts. Vastly. The chasm is wide and deep, people. Even when the interview questions are repetitive, and they often are, that’s totally

    okay. I prefer interviews because book bloggers usually have a good sense of what their audiences want to know, and I’m happy to provide that. With guest posts I’m constantly thinking I’ve either already written what I’m writing or else I’ve read it somewhere before. I can’t keep from second-guessing myself and I wind up spending way too much time on them. However, I have recently written a very spiffy post with my editor about the revision process for novels, and if you’re an aspiring writer I’m sure you’d find it educational and perhaps even entertaining.
    4.) Some authors, in addition to being excellent writers, are also excellent human beings.
    5.) I geek out pretty hard when I meet an author I admire. Sorry, Mr. Rothfuss. I couldn’t help it.
    6.) My dogs really don’t give a damn that I’m now a published author. I get absolutely no credit with them for unlocking that achievement. They still climb right up to my face while I’m sitting on the couch, turn around, and let one rip.
    7.) My readers are frickin’ rad. They send in pictures of my books with action figures and stuff to create Nerdscapes. They tell me about cool beers they’ve had and neato tabletop games they play with their geek friends. They create amazing sausage recipes and take pictures of them with their dogs. And so far I’ve gotten some beautiful fan art for Atticus, Oberon, Leif, Granuaile, and the Morrigan. I’m kind of waiting for someone to do Vainamoinen and the sea serpent… :)
    8.) Indie bookstores are super cool! Plus: libraries! Also: book bloggers!
    9.) Social media is kind of hard to keep up with and I don’t think I’ll ever get the hang of it and be a deity of Twitter. I’m following under 100 people and I can’t even keep up with that. I just try to say howdy to the people who say something directly to me via @ replies. If you do follow me on Twitter, don’t be shy, I’m happy to chat. Facebook seems to be my biggest social doohickey but I’m not sure why. It’s a mystery. Can’t even consider joining Google + and LinkedIn and Amp My Orifice. (That last one isn’t real, but wouldn’t it be fun? There wouldn’t be friend requests. Instead you’d get this: “Kevin wants to amp your orifice. Will you amp his?”)
    10.) Yeesh. I’m still pretty immature.
    11.) Publicity is sooo much different than I thought it would be. I thought publishers spent all their money on ads and lunches with agents, and sometimes they do. But most of their budget these days tries to generate word-of-mouth. They give away lots of free copies to reviewers and bloggers and hope that they build buzz and stuff. There are probably nifty marketing words I should have used instead of “buzz and stuff,” but if I did use them you might think I knew what I was talking about.

    I actually think I learned much more than that, but some of it is Sekrit and some of it I can’t remember right now. I’m kinda tired so I’ll hit the hay, but thank you again for reading IDC and spreading the word so I can write more. We’re only two weeks away from the release of TRICKED (squee!) and I’m so glad that you’ll finally be able to dig in!

    May harmony find you,
    Kevin

Blog, League of Reluctant Adults, Publishing Stuff

The Disclaimer

If you’re an aspiring author, perhaps (I hope!) you are already aware that you should never, ever pay an agent or a publisher to be published. The way the business works is, legit publishers pay you; therefore, anyone offering to get you represented, published, or copyrighted “for a small fee” is a Dishonest Hole of an Unsanitary Nature.

Alas! We live in a world full of such Dishonest Holes—people willing to prey on other people’s dreams and laugh about it—or, in one case, get angry about it when they’re called out. Writer Beware and Absolute Write, both excellent resources that I highly recommend, have been targeted by a website called The Write Agenda. (I’m not linking to it because Dishonest Holes deserve no traffic.) Since The Write Agenda is anonymously operated, poorly spelled, and they are attacking/boycotting authors who are legitimately trying to help aspiring writers avoid scam artists, it’s pretty clear that The Write Agenda is a front for those same scam artists. We at The League of Reluctant Adults expressed our outrage that we weren’t boycotted too—because we are all proud to stand beside John Scalzi, Victoria Strauss, Jim Macdonald, et al. in their fight against Anonymous Dishonest Holes. That was on Oct. 7. I pulled out my big guns and called them cockwaffles.

The response of the cockwaffles has been to put me and some other authors on their brand-new “Recommended Authors” list. All of the authors are sci-fi/fantasy, and while I haven’t checked, I’d be willing to bet that all of them either commented on the League post of Oct. 7 or otherwise annoyed the cockwaffles with blog posts of their own. Ha! Aren’t they clever, recommending us instead of boycotting us? Whatever.

Now, part of me wants to respond precisely the way my fellow author Ari Marmell did. But he did it extremely well and I’m not sure I can say it any better. So I will confine myself to saying one obvious thing and one perhaps not-so-obvious thing:

1. Obviously, I do not want to be one of The Write Agenda’s “Recommended Authors,” because I despise everything they stand for.
2. Their use of Amazon sales rankings as if they actually mean anything demonstrates that they a) either don’t know jack about how publishing really works, or b) are assuming you don’t know jack about it, and regardless of which is true, you can’t trust a damned thing they say.

Blog, Publishing Stuff

It’s in da can! Sort of.

TRICKED got accepted today, so that gave me an excuse—if I needed one—to bust open some cider and quaff a proper flagon. This particular book was a tougher one to write and revise than the other three, from outline to end product, and I think it had quite a bit to do with the fact that it’s a “bridge book” as the good Dr. Nicole Peeler calls it: A book that ties off all the loose ends of one particular story arc while launching a completely new, batshit insane one. (That definition is mine, not hers, by the way. Hers would sound much more academic yet leave you feeling inexplicably titillated.)

This may inspire some of you to say, “Great! Ship it tomorrow, dude!” But oh, no. You don’t really want that.

I’m going to write a joint post on the revision process with my editor and post it in a couple/few weeks, because lots of people are probably unaware of how much revision goes into a book before it hits the shelves. And that brings me to the “sort of” part: “Accepted” doesn’t mean the book is finished and can be shipped tomorrow. There are still copy edits and then galley proofs to go through, and then there will be at least one, maybe two “cold” proofreads to do before they finally greenlight the text as approved for printing. And then, yeah. There’s OTHER STUFF. Like, the cover. I haven’t seen any sketches for the cover yet, though there’s still plenty of time. There is a completely über-nice lady at Random House who gets books ready for NetGalley and Amazon and Barnes & Noble and other electronic retailers. There are sales people who talk to buyer people over lunches drizzled in pork fat and they laugh heartily together and then decide how many copies they’re going to buy for their stores…which impacts visibility and sell-through numbers. (Is there a formula correlating the ratio of pork fat in these lunches with sales numbers? Only the mysterious people in Accounting know the truth.) There are people who smell of ink and paper and glue who print the books and pack them into boxes. Their fingers have fine white scars on them from years of paper cuts and for some reason, in my imagination, they all have mutton chop whiskers on their faces and tattoos high on their right shoulders. Anyway. There’s a lot of stuff to do still. And because there’s a lot of stuff, you’ll have to wait until April 24 to read this bad boy.

To make the wait happy: You will also get to read Chapter 1 of TRAPPED when you’ve finished TRICKED. Also, if I can manage it (emphasis on IF), there will be bonus content for the e-book version of TRICKED, just like there was for HOUNDED and HAMMERED.

Why can’t we print bonus stuff in the paperback version too? Excellent question! Well, it’s because getting stuff ready for print takes MONTHS, which is why you won’t see TRICKED until April 24 even though it’s close to being spiffy here in September. And it’s because I haven’t written the bonus stuff yet. :) I have, however, finished chapter 1 of TRAPPED, so it can be included.

That bonus story for HAMMERED, “A Test of Mettle,” told from Granuaile’s point of view while Atticus was in Asgard, wasn’t written until April of this year. I hadn’t even thought of it until then. By that time the book had been completely typeset, and there was no way I could include it in the print version. But the flexibility to include it electronically was so cool I couldn’t stand not including it, and the peeps at Del Rey were helpful with editing and formatting it for me. (I’ll include that story for free on my website in December, by the way.)

Someone asked me on Twitter why the bonus stuff wasn’t included in the audio versions—another great question! Again, it’s a question of timing, but also pesky things like money and contracts. When I slip that bonus stuff into the e-book versions, it’s truly a bonus for readers. I haven’t been paid diddly squat for those stories, and I’m cool with that because I just want to share some goodies about the Iron Druid world that wouldn’t get published otherwise. But if the audio company wants to include those stories in their releases, you can bet they won’t be able to get their reader to read it for free or get the studio to donate the studio time. That’s basically what it boils down to: e-books allow me to give stories away, but various realities of print and audio don’t.

Anyway—want to thank you for all the comments on the previous post regarding the store! I will be getting to work on those ideas soon. :) Thank you, too, for your patience waiting for the book! I’ve already started work on TRAPPED. You’ll notice the word meter over on the right-hand side.

Cheers!

Blog, Publishing Stuff

Del Rey wants more Atticus!

Del Rey has signed me up for books 4-6 of The Iron Druid Chronicles, and I have YOU to thank for it! Thank you all so much for buying Hounded! If you hadn’t done so, then quite frankly, the series wouldn’t have continued. Much as a publisher may like a series or an author, they simply don’t make their decisions based on anything except sales, and since you not only bought Hounded but pre-ordered Hexed and Hammered, the business decision wasn’t hard for them to make. I am very grateful to you, because now I get to write more Atticus n’ Oberon! I assure you that  it’s as much fun for me to write as it is for you to read!

The books will be called Tricked, Trapped, and Hunted, and I have outlined all three. Tricked is halfway complete; you can see my progress bar over to the right-hand side of the blog.

As you might expect, I won’t be able to deliver these to you in the next three months. The release schedule for these books will be a bit more like what you’re used to. I can give you extremely tentative release dates now, with the caveat that poo happens and the guarantee that I will keep you informed when I know something more concrete.

Right now we are looking at a May ’12 release for Tricked, a December ’12 release for Trapped, and a summerish ’13 release date for Hunted.

In terms of the entire series, the answer to your question is yes, I do intend to write more after Hunted, and I know how the series will end. But whether I get to finish it or not depends (again) on sales. There are plenty of promising series out there that never get finished, and rare is the case where the author was unable or unwilling to finish it; nearly every time, it’s because the bottom line wasn’t attractive enough on the business side. So again, I’m extremely grateful to you for embracing Atticus n’ Oberon. My flagon is raised in your honor, and if Oberon were here, he’d share his sausage with you! Cheers, friends!