Category Archives: writing

writing

Primary Colors

I have just discovered that I am not too old to be motivated by primary colors.

Or maybe I’m already old enough to where I’m going through my second childhood. Either way: YAY COLORS.

What I’m talking about is this progress bar thingie I found in Scrivener for Mac. If you haven’t heard of it, Scrivener is a writing app that lots of folks use these days. It has a learning curve and I’m still trying to get ahead of it, but there are definitely benefits here. One is that it’s much more stable than Word is. Once you get into the 60K-range and up on a Word document, it starts having trouble with the word count and taking forever to paginate on opening and so on. Scrivener, though, is like BRING ME YON EPIC TOME AND I WILL CUDDLE WITH IT. Since I’m trying to write an epic now that’s precisely the attitude I want in a writing app. It also has lots of neato organizational tools that I’m finding helpful, but right now I want to focus on the primary colors.

In Scrivener for Mac, under the Project menu, there’s a Show Project Targets window. Looks like this:

Screen Shot 2014-05-04 at 12.26.14 PM

You get to set your goal word count for the entire manuscript and then you can also set a goal for your daily work, and it’ll give you handy-dandy progress bars and a running word count for both. It starts out in red and then it CHANGES TO GREEN AS YOU GO OMG.

(By the way, I just put in 150K for my manuscript target because it sounded cool. I actually have no idea how long this thing is gonna be.)

So I’ve tried some other stuff like WRITE OR DIE which some of my author friends swear by and I am super glad it works for them. It just doesn’t work for me. An app that screams at me if I don’t write fast enough will put me on the path to the Dark Side and forever will it dominate my destiny. But wow, this shiny silent bar that changes color as I make progress? THAT’S RAD. And honestly maybe a little embarrassing that I can be manipulated so easily. But I have words to write and I need help getting ’em done sometimes, so I’m not going to overanalyze what works.

Screen Shot 2014-05-04 at 1.47.18 PM

I was gushing about it on Twitter and Harry Connolly told me that I could open up the options of that Project Target window, type in my deadline date, and then the app would just calculate how many words I have to write each day to make it. So I did  that and WHOA HOW COOL.

Screen Shot 2014-05-04 at 6.41.47 PM

It changed my goal of 2,000 to 1,567. Do that every day and blam, I’ll be finished in 87 days! I mean, I would be if I was going to write exactly 150K words. Well, I hit that target of 1,567 and kept on going. I really liked that green bar of progress there. It made me feel turbo productive. So if you blow past your target, that’s awesome, at midnight the app recalculates and the next day you have a few less words to write each day to finish your book on time.

Screen Shot 2014-05-04 at 8.04.02 PM

Don’t make your target? Same thing—it recalculates at midnight and gives you new numbers. I dig how it keeps you on track.

I know lots of you probably already knew about this and it’s old news; I’m just sharing for people who haven’t heard about it yet and might want to look into it. I hear tell (but have not personally checked) that Scrivener for Mac is currently 50% off. It honestly has more to it than spiffy progress bars. Worth investigating if Microsoft Word has ever curdled your guts with rage. :) Happy writing!

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, writing

New Anthology

I’m very pleased to announce I’ll be contributing to a new anthology coming out in August 2013 from Pocket: CARNIEPUNK.

Every story will feature some dark urban fantasy set at a carnival. Brace yourself for some horrifying shenanigans deep fried in grease and coated with powdered sugar. Aw yeah!

The lineup is frakkin’ amazing, folks. Check out who’s contributing:

Rachel Caine
Jennifer Estep
Seanan McGuire
Rob Thurman
Kevin Hearne
Delilah Dawson
Kelly Gay
Mark Henry
Hillary Jacques
Jackie Kessler
Kelly Meding
Allison Pang
Nicole Peeler
Jaye Wells

If you haven’t heard of some o’ them, well, that’s why you buy anthologies. :) You get to sample the work of some great writers and maybe find a new favorite. But five of ’em are already NYT Bestsellers and the rest of them deserve to be there—they’re all outstanding. My story is called “The Demon Barker of Wheat Street” and takes place a couple of weeks after the events of TWO RAVENS AND ONE CROW. It features Atticus, Oberon, and Granuaile…in Kansas.

Where the hell did this come from? Well, Hillary Jacques and I dreamed it up one night on Twitter, and once I pitched it to some author friends—”Hey, you guys, let’s write some fucking crazy shit at a carnival!”—they couldn’t wait to mess around with the idea.

While you’re waiting for the anthology, you might want to try some of these authors ahead of time if you haven’t heard of them before. They write great series and you can’t go wrong. Turbo excited—I’ll update with cover art and all those other goodies as it comes in! Yay!

Blog, writing

Wee note o’ progress

Gadzooks, I haven’t blogged for a while! In case you’re wondering what I’ve been up to…

Mostly, I can’t tell you. Mostly.

I finished a short story for an anthology that hasn’t been announced yet. I signed a contract for another project I can’t tell you about. And there are a couple of other things in the works that I won’t be able to announce for months.

But I can tell you a little about HUNTED, book six of IDC, which is what I’m working on right now! But first I’m going to back up a bit.

I finished TRAPPED in mid-March and then wrote very little for two and a half months apart from some outlining. At that point, I’d been writing pretty  much non-stop for three years; I was a wee bit fried and I was also dreadfully behind in my work for school. I needed to catch up, so I did. After school was out and I went to Phoenix Comicon over the Memorial Day weekend, I threw myself into writing TWO RAVENS AND ONE CROW, the novella coming out Sep. 4, and also a short story called “The Chapel Perilous” for an (announced) anthology called UNFETTERED coming out next year. That was June. Then I started in on HUNTED, and whoa. It’s a tough one. Things that I’ve been setting up since HOUNDED are triggering and the doo-doo in which Atticus is wading is pretty darn deep. There was a string of chapters where I was a mess and telling my laptop “I’m so sorry!” and hoping that my surviving characters would hear me. I call them The Crying Chapters. But, fearing that maybe I was having issues (I mean, more than normal), I sent them to my editor and she confirmed they are The Crying Chapters. Those are going to be difficult to edit, but I’m past them for now and moving on.

Today was a pretty cool day because something unexpected happened. An old character walked into the story and introduced a new character, and neither was in my outline. Wauggh! I’m off script! Watch out!

Neckbeards: Slaying people since then. Rated M for Mature.

This is honestly an excellent development. The Hammers of God walked into HEXED like that, which allowed me to create deadly beards and make fun of extremists. Those are two of my favorite things. When you combine them you get neck beards. Why? Because neck beards are extreme and can scare people unto DEATH.

So, the old character was Leif Helgarson, who, believe it or not, was not going to appear in the book at all save for a mention in one chapter. I was glad to have him back; I missed some of the wordplay he typically engages in with Atticus. And the new character he introduces is a villain. A VILLAIN, I SAY. I will tell you one thing about him and give some clues about what he is by telling you what he is not.

1) His initials are W.D. —no relation to WD-40.
2) He isn’t a vampire, werewolf, demon, or member of the Fae. He’s not an angel. Not a human. Not a god. He’s not a Timelord, nor is he a neck beard. And before you ask, he is not a bowl of beans. Beans are often villainous, I agree, but I’m not sure they’re right for my series. I may have to face reality and accept that I will not be the first UF author to feature a bowl of beans as a villain. Several other authors are already working on it in any case, so I’m tardy to the party and will have to watch as everyone else cashes in on the latest trend. 2013 will be the Year of the Beans and I will be left out.

HUNTED is about halfway complete now and when it releases next June this blog post will make a lot more sense.  Excepting, perhaps, for that bit about the beans. If you spent a half second or so thinking that bowls of beans would be the next big thing in UF, I apologize. I was just bein’ silly. :)

Grateful to you as always for reading. Peace n’ carrots,
Kevin

Blog, writing

The Vampire Derailment

Sometimes writing is like spelunking; you go down what seems to be a perfectly sound passage, there are cool little stalactites and bioluminescent organisms and micro-evolved blind fish and everything, and then suddenly it just gets too weird or it goes nowhere and you have to turn around.

That happened to me while I was writing Hammered. Thought I’d share this little episode for writers (and for readers, too) to illustrate how you can write something that sounds okay on the surface, but has to be jettisoned because it doesn’t work for the story.

WARNING: if you haven’t read Hammered yet, what follows is going to be full of spoilers! It’s best to actually bust out  your copy of the book to fully appreciate what’s going on here.

What happened is that I wrote 3,700 words that I had to chuck because the plot was going in a direction that made no sense for the overall book. I took bits and pieces of the material and worked it into the book later on—you’ll recognize some passages about the nature of vampirism, Atticus taking Leif to a baseball game, and even Oberon’s professed love for The Boondock Saints. Basically, when Leif asks Atticus to go with him to kill a bunch of vampires in the Phoenix metro area the night before they leave for Asgard, Atticus agrees instead of protesting that he needs to stay fresh for the coming journey. So here’s this story about Thor and Asgard, and I have my main character dropping everything for an extended session of vampire slaying, going out to University of Phoenix Stadium and laying about with Fragarach. The passage ends very abruptly, because that’s when I asked myself, “What the fuck am I doing? He’s supposed to be going to Asgard!” There were too many other things Atticus had to do before I could get him to leave and confront the Norse, and this was an unnecessary episode that I could simply have Leif report on later.

If you’d like to follow along, turn to page 84 in Hammered. Two thirds down the page, you’ll see Atticus say to Leif: “I see. And you’d like my help? As in, tonight?” Leif says “Yes.” Instead of continuing with “That was precisely what I’d been afraid of,” because that’s obviously what I wound up writing instead, continue reading from the PDF below. Have fun spotting the bits that made it into the book, but you’ll also see some more stuff about Phoenix that I’m kind of sorry I couldn’t work in somehow.

Vampire Derailment

Most writers (I can’t say all) have probably dealt with something like this—some of them many times, on a much larger scale. You can spend days and days on something and then realize that it’s not going to work, and you have to chuck it all and start over in the service of the story. Occasionally people get the impression that writers just sit down and the novel flows out perfectly from beginning to end, but that’s even a bigger fantasy than the collected works of Tolkien. Writing a novel is a never-ending series of cock-ups and happy accidents supervised by our own private collection of neuroses and occasionally our editors. You have to respect that process in order to produce something worth reading. And sometimes that process can take a while.

I’m currently revising Tricked and working through issues that I didn’t see as I was writing—my editor is brilliant and I’m so glad she can see all of my blind spots. We still have a way to go in the process, but right now it’s looking like Tricked will be a bit longer than Hammered. (A friendly observation: telling an author to “write faster” is akin to telling a baby to “gestate faster!” Novels and babies can only grow as fast as nature allows.)

If you’re in Arizona, please check out my Events & Appearances page. I’ll be appearing at the Teague branch of the Glendale Public Library on Saturday, September 17, so I’d love to see you there if you can make it!

Nerd Cred, writing

Origin Story

I get asked semi-often where I came up with the idea for The Iron Druid Chronicles, and I respond, quite truthfully, that it started out as a webcomic based around a guy who could talk telepathically with his dog. I was going to call it American Druid. It was always about Atticus and Oberon, and all the worldbuilding and mythology came into it much later. Until now, however, I’ve never been able to “prove it,” because the computer on which I was doing all my illustration died abruptly with no possibility of recovering a damn thing. Did I have backups? Nope. Damn damn damn. But I always figured, hey, it’s no big deal, because I abandoned that project anyway after six pages and started writing Hounded instead. BUT GUESS WHAT!

I was cleaning my house (I know, right?) and tucked away in a box were the paper-and-pencil layouts for my webcomic! It was such a trip to find them, especially since I haven’t seen them since 2008 and now here we are with three novels about Atticus and Oberon out on the shelves. For me, it’s fascinating to see what made it into the novel and what didn’t. The first four pages show Atticus and Oberon hunting bighorn sheep at Papago Park without Flidais. Page 4 is the big splash page, where Atticus shifts from hound to human and you see him standin’ there nekkid with all his tats on display. Page 5 is where we really get introduced to them as characters and see their relationship, so I’ve scanned it for you and included it below. You can click to enlarge. Be warned, however, that I kind of suck at drawing dogs, and even though I’m a bit better at it now, arrgh. It’s a good thing I didn’t try to pursue the comic any more after this! I think you’ll have fun recognizing some stuff from the books, though!

Fun, huh? On page six they kind of sneak into the kitchen and find Flidais there trying to figure out how to make a strawberry smoothie. So much of this made it into the book in one way or another—the story arc that I had planned for several issues of the comic just got absorbed into the novel. Keep in mind that this was drawn two or three months before I decided to write a novel instead; I did a lot more research once that decision was made, and obviously I chose to begin Hounded inside Third Eye Books & Herbs instead of at Papago Park. Different mediums suggest different ways to tell stories. I also don’t draw Atticus this way anymore; my image of him changed as I wrote the book. Anyway, I made a copy of page 5 and wrote some comments on it for funsies.

So glad I cleaned my house! I loved finding these old pages :)

Blog, writing

Backstory

Careful where you point that sword! Available June 7.

Since Atticus O’Sullivan is about 2,100 years old, he has one hell of a backstory. (That’s most of our recorded history, right? At least the parts that were recorded without hieroglyphs?) Though his adventures are firmly rooted in the modern day, occasionally his past has to come up, and when it does, I have to make sure it’s at least somewhat plausible.

Without giving anything away, I had to do quite a bit of research on the World Wars for HEXED. I was trying to confine it to WWII, but then found out that certain details required going back to their roots in WWI. Most of that research didn’t make it into the book, but I enjoyed educating myself nevertheless.

One of the things I learned in the course of doing research is never to tell people it’s for a novel. They never react like you hope they will.

If you’re a nerd who’s into fantasy, you hope they’ll find you vastly interesting and want to buy you a beer in exchange for a story. And I mean a good beer, too, not “the Banquet Beer”—I’m talking something with a craft name like Chocolate Oak Aged Yeti from the Great Divide Brewing Company in a flagon.

Sadly, no one ever does that. I will cling to the fantasy that it could happen, but experience has shown me that the odds against it are pretty high. You will never get a free beer for telling someone you’re doing research for a novel. You will get polite indifference, outright disbelief, or glazed eyes. On the upside, you do get all of those for free. Free is good!

I think I was talking about backstory.

Researching a huge backstory like Atticus’s can take an inordinately long time. It’s so easy to get distracted. Did you know that the ancient Celts used to charge into battle naked? The idea was that they’d terrify their opponents because they weren’t afraid to let their naughty bits go flappity-flap. It’s not a bad idea, honestly. If I saw a few hundred naked men charging me, I would RUN. But then the Celts ruined the effect by wearing golden torcs around their necks; it was concentrated wealth and it tended to focus one’s gaze. Dudes would squash their terror of floppity man meat long enough to get a shot at scoring the gold.

Wait. Was I talking about backstory or distraction?

Once you realize that you’re sinking time into research you should be using to write, you might think it would help to ration your research or schedule it. You can do that, sure, but you might wind up missing something that way. Free association can lead one to spiffy discoveries. I recently discovered this band called Dark Moor on Pandora, by the way. They do this rocking version of Vivaldi’s Winter and their album cover has a bitchin’ squid dude sitting on a throne with a Corinthian helmet. I’m going to put a link to the video on YouTube below. Only about the first 3:36 or so is the real song…bunch of bonus track nonsense after that, but it’s brilliant up to there.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txwlKqt01TQ[/youtube]

Anyway. Backstory. It’s tough stuff. Rewarding, though, if you don’t let the research consume you. :)

Blog, League of Reluctant Adults, Publishing Stuff, writing

Release Day Shenanigans!

HOUNDED is now available! I'm a real author! Squee!

Well, I’ve only waited twenty years for this day. What shall I do first?

Coffee! Ahhhh.

Right. Next, how about a handy-dandy list of all the places I’ll be on the Internet(s)?

1. John Scalzi’s Whatever blog, where I’ll be featured on The Big Idea sometime today.
2. Many o’ my friends in The League of Reluctant Adults graciously let me guest blog in their spaces about various doodads, and the next six are they: first, I’m at  The Biting Edge talkin’ about the query letter that got me my spiffy agent. That’s the blog of Mario Acevedo and Jeanne Stein, both of whom write excellent vampire series.
3. Over at the blog of urban fantasy author J.F. Lewis, I share my looong path to publication to give toiling writers hope. If a day like this can happen for me, it can happen for you.
4. Some time ago, author Kelly Meding challenged me to insert something into a book of mine and I manfully made it happen. I return the challenge on her blog and she has NO HOPE of meeting it. Mwah-ha-ha-haaa!
5. I discuss my back-to-back-to-back release schedule at Stacia Kane’s blog because she went through a very similar schedule last year with her Downside Ghosts series.
6. I want to start a flagon revolution. Jaye Wells, author of the Sabina Kane novels, shares this passion, so I’m talking about it over at her blog.
7. Because I’m a nerd, I’ve been working on a card game based on the events of my books. It’s the kind of thing that makes nerds happy. I spill the beans and give a sneak peek at the game over at the website of Dr. Nicole Peeler. She’s also doing a giveaway for me, so check that out!
8. I think I’m supposed to be on the blog of The Guide to Literary Agents today. If not, oh well, it’s a cool blog anyway!
9. I have an interview up today at the spiffy book blog called The Qwillery. There’s a giveaway going on there too! I think. I’m having trouble keeping track of this stuff.
10. My run at Babel Clash continues with Chris Wooding. Have you seen this yet? We started on April 26.

In all likelihood I’ll be elsewhere as well. I think I’m supposed to have something on the RTBookReview blog, but, um…not sure. Some reviews might pop up too, and I’ll do a roundup of those in a couple o’ days. Aside from the web, I’ll be tweeting more than usual today. Part of what I’ll be tweeting is my manic drive around the valley going into bookstores and signing whatever they have in stock.

Something else I will most likely tweet is a 140-character SQUEE! HOUNDED is finally published! To my editors, Tricia and Mike, I give you an uncomfortably long virtual hug! Thank you so much for your expertise and your enthusiasm for the Iron Druid! And to my agent, Magic E, you are the disco to my fries.

To the book bloggers and reviewers who have been so kind to me with your reviews n’ interviews—Jessica, Kristin, Mihir, David, Gail, Sally, Kat, Joanne, and more—can I just say how grateful I am that you take the time to promote genre fiction? I didn’t realize how many bloggers were out there or how awesome they were until I kind of got into this gig. I hope I get to meet you someday. Literate people rock.

For the celebratory dinner, I’m headin’ to Rúla Búla, the best darn Irish pub an Irish lad could wish for, either real or fictional. I go there in real life, and Atticus goes there in fiction—often. You should too, if you can! Cheers, my dears; my flagon runneth over. I hope you enjoy the adventures of Atticus n’ Oberon. :)

Blog, writing

Switching Teams

Since I’m not a “trained” writer, but rather a self-taught novelist, I never took the class where the teacher made me write outside of my comfort zone. I always “wrote what I knew” and “wrote what I wanted to read,” because I figured doing that well would be challenging enough without adding any extra obstacles.

But now I’m outside the ol’ zone. There are no sports. What I’m wearing suddenly matters. My beer is wondering what the hell I’m doing with that wine cooler in my hand. For reasons my conscious mind does not want to explore too deeply, I’m writing a short story from the first-person point of view…of a woman.

Now, maybe it’s not that big a deal for you, but it’s undiscovered country for me. I have plenty of female characters in my books, but they’re all filtered through my main character’s POV, and he’s male. I’m comfortable inhabiting his headspace. But the head of this new character is really different. I feel challenged, horrified, ebullient, seductive, empowered, and depressed all at once. Thinking like a woman is hard. Has anyone else tried switching teams like this? Is there a trick to it? How did it go?

Not sure how this one is going to turn out yet. If it goes well, you’ll be able to see the results at the end of June. :)

Publishing Stuff, writing

To Thine Own Brand Be True

Dr. Nicole Peeler (also known as Nicole Peeler) asked me to whip up a blog post for her students about my experiences with author branding since I’m a newb to publishing, so OF COURSE I said yes. The fact that she threatened to shiv me in my sleep if I refused had no bearing on my decision to do it RIGHT AWAY; I want to make it clear that I’m doing this because I genuinely want to help aspiring authors. In fact, I have a wee series going called “Stuff They Never Told Me About Publishing,” and in the first post I talked a little bit about the author platform thing. Curiously, I now feel the need to expand upon that at length…

The truth is I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and I am deeply jealous that you get to take a class with Dr. Peeler. (She will give me chocolate for that later.) I’ve been told I need an author platform, and I’ve been reliably informed that I need an author brand, but neither of those terms has been defined for me and in my befuddled mind they’re sort of interchangeable. I seriously need to take Dr. Peeler’s class. So here’s what I was told to do by Del Rey: “Blog and tweet.” Okay, sure. What about? “Just be yourself. Look at what other authors do. Take advantage of social media.” And that was the sum of my instruction (or at least it’s all I can remember now—this conversation took place in October of ’09). I thought said instruction was a bit dangerous and bordering on irresponsible, because if I knew anything about how to be social I wouldn’t be a nerd. Still, I gave it my best shot, because if you get an opportunity to be published by the people in very tall New York buildings you don’t do things half-assed. So I started a blog, got myself a Twitter account, joined Goodreads, and created a Facebook author page. Then I sat down with a piece of paper and one of those really nice gel pens and tried to figure out what it meant to be myself. Those two minutes were the most introspective moments of my life. Here is what I discovered:
1. I like beer.
2. I am socially awkward.
3. If you don’t believe number 2, I’m 40 years old and I still collect comic books.
4. I like to make art and design jokes—usually absurd visual ones.
5. Once in a while I can’t stop myself from geeking out or being silly.

It’s not a very impressive list, is it? “Bugger me,” I thought, “if that’s all I’ve got, I’m bloody doomed.” But I didn’t have any choice. I had to go forward. So out of that list emerged some of my regular features. My “Still Life” series was inspired by all of those, and then I decided I’d kinda document what happened to me along the way and share my experiences with other aspiring writers (I won’t technically be published until April 19, so yeah, I still count myself as aspiring, and it’s taken me twenty years of trying to get on the shelves—I’m by no means an overnight success and I EMPATHIZE with the struggle to learn the craft).

I’ve been blogging and tweeting now for about a year and a half, not really sure if I’m doing it right, and then last month, BLAM, my editor surprised me by writing a really complimentary post about my social media efforts on Suvudu. I was flabbergasted. Like, WHOA. Did I go and build myself an author platform or brand or whatever? And did I do it using these things called channels? I guess I did. I don’t feel like I have a legion of followers or anything, but maybe they’ll start to show up and say howdy once the books come out. Here’s the funny thing: my most popular post by FAR is this one I did in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep; I was only half-conscious and loopy as hell. I get hits on that post all the time, though, and it’s nothing but pure silliness.

I confess that I made another list back in October ’09 when I sat down with that paper and extremely nice gel pen, but I never wrote it down, because that list was about things I would never write down. What you won’t see on my blog or my other channels (Look! I’m using the correct terminology now!) are comments about political or religious issues. You will have to decide for yourself what’s right for you and your brand—I’m certainly not an authority on what you should or shouldn’t do—but I will share my reasoning behind that decision.
1. I’m a public school teacher, so in many ways the decision makes itself. As an employee of the state, I’m not supposed to talk about such things. Make a First Amendment argument if you wish, but in practice, public school teachers don’t get to say what they want.
2. Apart from number 1, as writer of fiction—specifically urban fantasy—I’m supposed to be providing people with an escape from whatever’s stressing them out. My observations of human behavior indicate that many people get stressed out when confronted with ideas that don’t match their own. So why would I risk stressing them out (or pissing them off) when I’m supposed to be entertaining them?
3. These days, it seems like you’ll offend half the country no matter what you say. I’m sure some readers will like you MORE if they know your views agree with theirs, but some readers WON’T BUY YOUR BOOK if they know your views contradict theirs. In terms of raw practicality, the readers who like you more are not going to shower you with the remainder of their disposable income, but the readers who actively decide not to buy your book based on a comment you made are depressing your bank account. If I am ever going to earn the money I need to pay tuition for Dr. Peeler’s class, I can’t afford to offend people by spouting off on this issue or that.

So what can you take away from this? Well, um, you’re kinda on your own in terms of marketing yourself. Did you SEE all that stuff my publicist is doing to create my author platform/brand thingie on multiple channel doodads? Nope, you didn’t, because it ISN’T THERE. My publicist sends out review copies to people who request them and he was nice enough to arrange my launch party for me. He might be doing other things on my behalf—I’m still over a month away from publication, so maybe he’s planning a party around the base of a volcano that erupts champagne—but if so he hasn’t told me yet. I’m extremely grateful for everything the publisher does for me—good reviews are invaluable, and the fact that they let me post on Suvudu is HUGE!—but the simple truth you need to know right now is that no one will ever build your platform or your brand except you.

If you need to know other simple truths later, feel free to contact me. No, wait, that’s not worded strongly enough. The fact is, friends, I desperately want you to ask me questions, because if you don’t then Dr. Peeler will confiscate my spleen. Email me at kevin@kevinhearne.com or simply comment below. I hope (for my sake as well as yours) that this was somewhat helpful; I wish you all the best and look forward to picking up your book in the store someday.