New fiction up for you to read!

My story "Precipitation" is up at Everyday Fiction today. This is another one I originally shared at a read-and-critique at the Writer's Symposium at GenCon. I hope you enjoy it!

Making it and giving it away

Yesterday we went over some common issues with "free downloads" being equivalent to "making it". There's two that deserve some special attention: How putting your work up for free impacts your chances of being published and how it impacts publicity.

Publishing: The few people who have had that happen (offhand: John Scalzi, J.C. Hutchins, Christiana Ellis, Scott Sigler, and Mur Lafferty) are the exceptions, not the rule. Each of them busts their ass in a dozen different ways to help make them the exception - and even that wasn't enough for Mr. Hutchins. Mr. Scalzi has said publicly that he did not expect for the novel he put online to be bought - that's why he put it online. Putting the entirety of your work online for free was never a guaranteed success. It's even less so now. Look again at the people who had it happen - they all were putting work up five years or so ago. I don't know of a current (2009-2010) example. Why? Because if you put the book online, it's becoming more of a substitute for the "professionally published" work than ever before - and that's going to keep happening.

Publicity: Yes, the greatest danger to a writer is obscurity. Putting a novel on the web - or making a podcast of it - was new and novel through the mid-naughties. I remember when simply putting fiction online for free got you a near-automatic mention on boingboing. That hasn't been the case for a long, long time. There's simply too much of it out there. (This is why the "busting their ass" in the above matters so much.) But there's still room for free-to-read fiction - just maybe not your novel. You put some of your work out there as a sample. This doesn't mean part of a story - though you can do that - but perhaps a short story set in the world of your novels. Something to get people associating your writing with your name. You get fans, they get to try your fiction out at no risk to them (see Mike Stackpole's Chain Story project for another example of this).

This kind of sampling is also how I became a fan of Jim C. Hines' work. I heard two short stories (one an all-new story, another an adapted first chapter) on free podcasts and really enjoyed them; when I saw him at GenCon, I bought the entire series of those books right then. (You can find that same free fiction right here).

I think that's a lot more common than the other way around - that is, I'm more likely to buy a novel from someone whose (free) short fiction I liked than buy a short story from someone whose (free) novel I liked. But there's another story here - in that there's still a gatekeeper, a central clearinghouse of things to sample, try, and enjoy. Whether it be one of the free-to-read magazines like Strange Horizons or Clarkesworld, a "regular" magazine like Asimov's, or a project like the Chain Story, these clearinghouses mean that I don't have to go find everything myself, and that there's some kind of quality control in place. Just putting your own book on your own website, however... well, yeah. You get the picture. Who is going to know that you're out there? And why are they going to think you're any good?

Yes, this is part of why my weekly drabbles are free to read on the blog.

Honestly, I like getting paid for writing. It lets me exercise my writing (and convention) habit more frequently. These Are Good Things - and I can't be convinced that not getting paid for all of my work is a good way to, um, go about getting paid.

Avoid following this advice

Recently, some other authors have been talking about how there's no such thing as universal mid-career advice. I'd like to take that one step further.

There is no such thing as universal business advice.

Okay, well, maybe things like "work hard" or "develop a business plan or goals", but that's not what I mean. Let's use writing and publishing as an example. It's fairly easy to find people who will offer Pronouncements From On High:

• Write every day.
• Write short stories first.
• You need an agent.
• Always be professional (e.g. don't ever talk politics or religion in public)
• You have to blog/twitter/facebook/lj/whatever.
• Giving stuff away free is always a way to "make it".
• Giving stuff away free is never a way to "make it">

Okay, the first one's good. The next two were busted by Jim Hines (and further analyzed by me. I think the "professional" one is conditional (and that's another day's topic). I want to concentrate on the last two - whether giving stuff away for free lets you "make it" as a writer.

You can find proponents of each side fairly easily. Both sides have very valid points...sometimes. Sort of. They sure aren't universal ones.

You have to define "making it". Does that mean getting your manuscript just "out there"? Does it mean getting your manuscript read by as many people as possible? Does it mean being able to supplement or even replace your income so you have more time to write? ¹ Those lead to some very, very different priorities.

Recently, a writer released her entire novel for free in both Second Life and on the web. (Her name escapes me at the moment.) I heard that she bragged of getting over 50,000 downloads, and an offer for someone to translate it into Farsi for her. That might sound good, but...

• A download does not mean that someone read the book.
• She gave away rights to her own book, to someone she doesn't know.
• Publicity? I can't remember her name. (More on this later.)
• The book is almost certainly not going to be bought by a publishing house.

The last two are important enough to look at separately - and I'll do that tomorrow.

¹ Yes, Virginia, THIS is why that filthy lucre comes up. Writing for the "art" of it is great... but it also tends to mean you have to work other jobs in order to eat, which leaves you with less time to create your art.

GenCon Planning

I talked a bit about GenCon earlier (you can still register for the Writer's Symposium!), but I realized I didn't explicitly say where I was going to be! Silly me!

There's an easy way - I'm putting all my public appearances into a Google calendar (this is the iCal link), and below should be the embedded agenda showing the events I'll be a panelist or something important in.

That's not counting where I'll be slouching around, which will be the rest of the time. :)