S L Flynn

An author's blog

Category: Behind the Scenes (Page 1 of 2)

An AI's take on a lifting body spaceship in a starport hangar. Not the Duck.

Interlude with Ruler and Compass

January 29, 2024 /

Untitled Science Fiction Project features two teams of hero characters. Each character is cool in their own way, and I want to introduce them with a short scene (or two) so that the reader “gets” them and likes them. I was making good progress on this when I hit the wall with the last three characters. Consternation!

I decided to take a break from the writing and work on the designs of some key locations. Just as writing the main characters’ mini autobiographies will inform their choices and dialog, getting the details of the important settings will inform the action that takes place and help to make them believable “characters” in their own right.

Attribute it to failing memory or naïve optimism, but I thought I’d get this done in Campaign Cartographer’s Cosmographer module. Readers of this blog may remember that my previous attempt to enlist the considerable power of this tool in my worldbuilding project ran into its own wall in the form of CC’s steep learning curve and idiosyncratic user interface. Giddy optimist that I am, I thought that by starting with something simple—the floorplan of Blue Team’s mission pod—I could ease into using the tool before tackling the bigger settings. I can be such a sweet summer child…

Mission pod in Campaign Cartographer.

With some difficulty, I got this far before banging my head bloody against my monitor. I wanted to use a premade graphic to represent the fab(ricator). In any other drawing program, I’d select the graphic from the palette and click where I wanted to place it. Then I would be able to move and resize it as desired by dragging it and adjusting the little handles on its borders, respectively. This is not how it’s done in CC. How is it done? Damned if I know. Something about selecting it (can be tricky), then right-clicking on it, then selecting a command from the pop-up menu, then…??? I just didn’t get it. Per the worldbuilding post, amazing things can be accomplished with this program by a skilled operator. That’s not me. Sigh.

Frustrated, I retreated to what I know: ten-to-the-inch graph paper, a mechanical pencil, a ruler, and a compass. Ahhhhhh. The Good Old Days of drawing up maps and deck plans for D&D and Traveller.

Familiar tools enabled me to sketch out the mission pod with more erasing and less frustration. Yay!

It’s crude. It’s sketchy. It is littered with my handwriting. But it is done.  Enough for my purposes. I’ve accounted for the space and the key features. The textures, decorations, sounds, and smells will come later, as needed.

The Mahaan Batakh (Hindi: Great Duck. Grif insists on calling it Mighty Duck for…reasons.) is our hero spaceship. The Duck is an independent trader captained by a friend of Grif’s from his days with K-A Interplanetary, one of the larger military-security corporations. I had envisioned it as a decidedly non-sexy cargo ship with a general lifting body design. Scenes and actions I scripted during NaNoWriMo, and others that were still in my head, dictated certain features. The worldbuilding around spaceflight in my imagined future dictated others. So, I built the ship from the inside out. The cargo bay is big enough to hold the mission pod and…other…items. The crew and passenger deck connects to the cargo bay via a companionway just so. Cargo loads and unloads through clamshell doors near the bow. The fusion drive pivots downward in spaceflight mode so that acceleration is perpendicular to the decks. There’s room in the right places for the reactionless gravitic thrusters and their gimbals. Etc. This all involved numerous applications of the eraser. (D’Oh! I put the aft gravs where the yoke for the fusion drive needs to go!) Some of these verges on overthinking the problem. I found that some of the overthinking in the worldbuilding phase has been paying off, so better over than under. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

The net results are also crude.

The larger scale drawings (one small square per 0.5 meters) are things only an author could love. And I’m probably the only one who can interpret them. Let’s hope I remember what all those overlapping lines are about.

My inside-out construction resulted in a spaceship with similar overall dimensions to Serenity, the hero ship from Firefly. This isn’t a coincidence, as Firefly is an important influence on Untitled Science Fiction Project. Mahaan Batakh and Serenity are also products of convergent/parallel evolution. Just enough spaceship for the characters and their adventures, but no more. The Duck is more aerodynamic and can carry more cargo. I like it and look forward to welcoming you aboard for the voyage to Nordlys.

Mammoths, mountains, auroras. AI generated by Juggernaut XL v5

Untitled NaNoWriMo After Action Report

December 2, 2023 /

By the numbers

NaNoWriMo 2023 is OVER! On the afternoon of November 30th, 2023, I crossed the 50,000-word line to complete the writing challenge. Yay me!

50,000 words in 30 days requires an average of 1,667 words per day. I…averaged that much. My daily word count totals were all over the place. Some days, life intrudes on writing. Such as Thanksgiving.

Writing 1,667 words per day is challenging, to be sure, but it’s below the 2,000 words per day of productive, professional authors such as Stephen King. Sorry. I’ll try harder.

What does 50,000 words mean? Publishers look for at least 60,000 words in a commercial fiction manuscript. Beyond that, it goes up by genre. Raether’s Enzyme is rather large for a thriller at 117,000 words. The Gray God is a healthy 85,000-word horror novel. For a new author’s adult science fiction or fantasy novel, 100,000 to 120,000 words is a good target range. For established authors, these rules are relaxed, as the author has an audience who trusts the author to make whatever word count worthwhile. Translating word count to page count is tricky. Format and typography play a big role. So, 50,000 words of Untitled Science Fiction Project is half, or less, of the final manuscript length. Or it would be if I hadn’t cheated.

Per my pre-NaNoWriMo post, I went into the challenge intending to finish my main character autobiographies and begin work on the story in screenplay format. This is what I did. Ha-ha! I cheated and I’m glad I did it! I regret nothing! At the end of the month, I had about 16,000 words of autobiography and 34,000 words of screenplay.

The bios will continue to inform how I write the characters. Portions of them may surface in the manuscript where appropriate.

What does 34,000 words of screenplay mean? In this case, the 34,000 words print out to about 158 pages. The film industry’s rule of thumb is that each page is about one minute of screen time. My incomplete Untitled Science Fiction Project screenplay is already over two and a half hours long. That’s the length of Dune (Part 1), which covers half of the 188,000-word novel.  Yikes! A more charitable comparison might be the adaption of the first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes (144,000 words). The story there plays out over fifteen 45-ish minute episodes (approximately 675 script pages). Not an entirely fair comparison, as the show brings in characters and events from later in the book series before it wraps up the Leviathan plot line. The point is that a long script may still fit into a reasonably sized science fiction novel. That’s what I’m telling myself.

Evolution is a process.

Seasoned authors have a process, if not a formula, for writing their novels. My process is still evolving. With more seasoning, it may converge on something I can prescribe. Like so much in this blog, what I’ll do here is describe. You may scratch your head, stroke your chin, or laugh your ass off.  I’m not recommending you try this at home. I did, and time will tell if it worked.

So far, it never starts in the same place. Raether’s Enzyme started with wanting to tackle the themes of a previous superhero screenplay in a form that could be produced with a sensible budget. The Gray God began with a word picture of cultists worshiping a strange god in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Untitled Science Fiction Project was born of a desire to write a story whose movie trailer would have epic music. I want it to be big and fun.

For this project, I’m bringing together my favorite parts of prior processes and tossing in a few new ones.

Raether’s Enzyme The Gray God USFP
Incubation Screenplay NaNoWriMo NaNoWriMo-ing a screenplay!
Drafting Planning Pantsing Plantsing
Word Processor Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 and Microsoft Word Scrivener Scrivener
Notebook OneNote Scrivener Scrivener, Campfire
Workshopping Helium Exchange (screenplay) Scribophile TBD. Maybe none.
Self-editing Tools Word and Grammarly Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit TBD. Probably: Word, Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit

 

I’ve decided I love working through the zeroth draft in screenplay format. I got much more of my story fleshed out during this NaNoWriMo than I did working on The Gray God in a previous NaNo. Bonus: It was easier to hit the word count goals. Once I get characters talking, the words just flow by the hundreds. These people just won’t shut up. In a screenplay, dialog can just be CHARACTER NAME followed by what they say.

QILIN taps his specs and casts a new holo that floats above the map. We see a herd of woolly mammoths grazing on the steppes. Snow-covered mountains rise in the background. The image crossfades to a similar scene at night. Now auroras shimmer and dance in the sky.

QILIN

Guys, they have woolly mammoths! In the south of Yo-tun-whatever. I want to go mammoth hunting!

SPHINX

Qi, they didn’t bring those animals back from extinction just so you could shoot them.

QILIN

Okay, I’ll play fair. I’ll make my own spear.

SPHINX

That’s how they went extinct the first time.

GRIF

There will be no hunting of megafauna until after we finish the mission. Understood? Can I get back to the briefing?

No dialog tags (said, asked, whispered, etc.). Bits of action to frame the conversation. All those things will come in time, but here we’re trying to keep up with what’s being said. This does result in Tarantino-esque talking scenes that seem to go on forever. That’s okay because I’ll come back and trim things later. For NaNoWriMo, I wanted the words to flow. It was fun and I made progress in refining the characters’ voices.

Where do I go from here?

I plan to continue to work on the screenplay until the story is complete. It is much less expensive to rewrite or discard a screenplay scene than the equivalent scene in novel prose. The completed screenplay is something I can share with very intrepid early readers. This worked for Raether’s Enzyme. Two friends read the whole script in single sittings, and one of those was on the john. If the script can excite readers and pull them through the story, then you have reason to hope the novel will do the same.

For grins, I asked ChatGPT to adapt the scene fragment above into prose.

Qilin tapped his futuristic spectacles, initiating a holographic projection that materialized above the digital map. The hologram revealed a sprawling expanse of steppes, where a herd of woolly mammoths peacefully grazed. Majestic snow-covered mountains provided a stunning backdrop to the scene. The visual seamlessly transitioned to a nocturnal setting, with the same landscape bathed in the soft glow of auroras dancing across the sky.

Excitement bubbled within Qilin as he shared his discovery with the group, exclaiming, “Guys, they have woolly mammoths! In the south of Yo-tun-whatever. I want to go mammoth hunting!”

Sphinx, ever the voice of reason, countered Qilin’s enthusiasm, “Qi, they didn’t bring those animals back from extinction just so you could shoot them.”

Undeterred, Qilin proposed a compromise, “Okay, I’ll play fair. I’ll make my own spear.”

Sphinx, with a hint of sarcasm, responded, “That’s how they went extinct the first time.”

Attempting to restore order, Grif intervened, “There will be no hunting of megafauna until after we finish the mission. Understood? Can I get back to the briefing?”

Fear not, dear readers. I will be adapting Untitled Science Fiction Project by hand.

And I’ll let you go early. This post is only 1,267 words long.

The Fractal Dimension of a Half-built World

March 18, 2023 /

All the world’s a stage

Every story requires worldbuilding on the part of the author. The stage must be set, and the lights hung, before the audience files in. For historical fiction, the author reconstructs the world of the past such as the story demands.  Contemporary stories also require research. Readers are distracted by flaws in 1:1 scale models of subjects they know well. The audiences for science fiction and fantasy don’t demand realism per se, but they want a measure of consistency that respects the effort they put into suspending disbelief. They reward the crafting of fantastical worlds that exceed their expectations.

Untitled Science Fiction Project (USFP) requires worldbuilding on my part. I’ve been working at it for a while now and think I’m where I need to be to shift my emphasis toward the characters and plot of an actual story set in the world. This post outlines how I came this far and owns up to some of the mistakes along the way. More experienced writers may notice unowned mistakes.

Genesis Vector

My previous two projects, Raether’s Enzyme and The Gray God have been described as dark. (I like to think Raether has a dazzling and beautiful light at the end of its tunnel.) While I was writing The Gray God, the red band trailer for Hellboy (2019) dropped. When I realized it was a reboot, I lost interest in the movie. But I’m a sucker for epic trailer music, and the cover of Smoke on the Water by 2WEI got its hooks into me in a good way. I knew then that I wanted the next project to have an epic score. I wanted it to be awesome and fun. That’s all I knew. Was it science fiction or fantasy? Didn’t know. Just knew that it would be cool.

Spoiler: It’s science fiction

Yeah, you knew that already. USFP. I didn’t know it until The Gray God was off with the developmental editor. I just have more science fiction in me than fantasy. To honor the original intent, I set some stakes in the ground early on.

  • It’s not hard science fiction. Well, not The Martian levels of hard. Meeting that bar and leaving room for epic Rule of Cool shenanigans is, well, very hard. So: reactionless thrusters and faster-than-light travel are in play. Aiming for 3-4 on the Moh’s Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.
  • Adventure is possible. So, no 1984 levels of dystopia.
  • The Singularity hasn’t happened. The emergence of godlike AI or similarly godlike post-humanity rewrites all the rules and dominates the world. By its very nature, the world after the Singularity isn’t one we can anticipate. There’s room for recognizable stories among the still-human survivors, but my last two stories had eschatological overtones. I need a break from that. Maybe you do too.

I strive to tell interesting stories that are fair to their characters and worlds. Towards those ends, I’ve set additional constraints.

  • Humanity tends to make a muddle of things. The future holds progress, but we’re still a bunch of primates prone to screeching and flinging poo. Nation-state conflict is still a problem, but systems of cooperation have prevented Armageddon.
  • It’s not your utopia. Or mine. We all make mistakes. Sorry.
  • People are still people. Genetic engineering and cybernetic augmentation are enabling technologies, but they operate on the periphery of what it is to be human.
  • People still fight. Yes, there are killer drones and robots, but their hackability has prevented warfare from being completely automated. Attempts to do so ended badly.
  • No near-peer aliens. The odds of encountering intelligent life that happens to be technologically on par with us is too low. It could be rationalized somehow, but to be fair, I think the odds favor our finding Precambrian swamps and/or being found by aliens that operate in Clarke’s Third Law territory.
  • No force fields. This one’s really arbitrary. A line drawn between USFP and free-wheeling space opera. This is a tough one that I may revisit. Characters and ships having ‘shields’ allows for more spectacle, but it seems like a technology that would permeate its world. I want to see if I can pull my adventure off without relying on this trope.

The sum of these constraints suggests the science fiction space inhabited by The Expanse. Sure enough, it does. I dig The Expanse. An interesting (and certainly deliberate) feature of that world is how it downplays computer and information technology in human space. People use computers, but they remain the sole agents of change before the arrival of the alien protomolecule technology. I respect that choice. It keeps the story centered on people and allows the action to be driven by human nature and human politics. Writing in today’s world of emerging AI applications, I feel that pending a Butlerian Jihad (Frank Herbert’s way of factoring AI out of his Dune universe), a future world should have forms of machine intelligence. That pulls us toward the kaleidoscopic virtual worlds of cyberpunk.

So, one more stake in the ground:

  • Artificial intelligence, robots, and networking are prevalent, but not dominant, in human affairs. We’re somewhere short of the Singularity and our interaction with the machines hasn’t transformed us into something unrecognizable.

Science Fiction is home to numerous subgenres. My constraints exclude some and contain others. Choosing among the available subgenres further informs the worldbuilding by highlighting tropes that characterize the subgenre. Within limits, you can blend subgenres in a way that pleases readers. As The Gray God embarked on its journey through the submission process, the component genres coalesced in the space bounded by the constraints. USFP would combine military science fiction with (post-)cyberpunk skullduggery.

Then I thought of an entertaining way to bring the two subgenres together. I’ll leave it at that, for now.

Exploring the Trope-iary Maze

Genres all have characteristic tropes associated with them. I read many of the foundational works of military sci-fi and cyberpunk over the years. In the lead-up to USFP, I read more recent works. I saw which tropes carried their weight across the years and I had a good time. Too good. There are legions of books, movies, anime, comics, and video games that play in these genres. I risked cheerfully chasing tropey knowledge across source material indefinitely. It was time to cheat.

The internet abounds with communities who delight in building encyclopedias or wikis. Wikis exist for anything that has a fandom. There are wikis for tropes. TV Tropes started with the modest goal of cataloging the tropes of television shows. Over the years, it expanded to cover all media with an emphasis on science fiction and fantasy. It names tropes great and small and provides positive and negative examples from books, movies, television, games, and more. If you love stories, trivia, and encyclopedic scope, it is as glorious as it is dangerous. I spent untold hours of my youth studying The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, The Star Trek Concordance, and the D&D sourcebooks. That joy in disappearing down a rabbit hole came back in force as I plunged into TV Tropes to explore my genres. It’s light, fast reading. You can argue with some of its examples and make note of others as source material that demands attention. And you can wander off course chasing the patterns of themes and ideas in unexpected directions. I did all these things and had a great time doing them. And I wasn’t getting a world built. I had to stop, or I’d need an intervention.

It was time to start filling in the space whose borders I’d defined. Thanks to the TV Tropers, I had a wealth of blocks to fit between the lines and a better sense of how they might fit together. And I found peace with the certainty that whatever I came up with, it probably already had an entry in the trope wiki.

Fire and Anvil

Organizing a worldbuilding project has come a long way since the days of notepads and graph paper. For Raether and The Gray God, I relied on OneNote and Scrivener to record the research and imaginary elements I was adding to our present-day world (Pacific Northwest Edition). USFP is all imaginary elements. Organizing the planets, technologies, governments, megacorps, and history could be done with the previous tools, but it turns out there are better ones for the job. I experiment with my writing process with each new project. USFP’s experiment includes using the new tools.

Worldbuilding–whether in service of story development, RPG campaign planning, or for the fun of it–created a market for specialized software that is up to the task. Two of the big players in this space are WorldAnvil and Campfire. Both offer a suite of modules to support maps, encyclopedias, timelines, character development, and more. So much more. Both are fundamentally web-based and have a subscription business model. Being web-based permits you to share your projects with other people in their worldbuilding community and collaborate on development. Subscription levels determine access to features.

Both products offer a rich feature set and showcase the users who have done amazing work with the tools. Two things tipped the scale for me.

  1. WorldAnvil is a purely online service. Campfire has a desktop client that can work offline.
  2. WorldAnvil projects default to public. Campfire defaults to private.

Call me old-fashioned. I’m just not excited about all the things being in the cloud all time. I also don’t think I should have to pay for a baseline level of privacy. So, I went with Campfire.

Fits and starts

The shape of the story world was bounded and a constellation of tropes floated about waiting to be placed in the puzzle. I had ideas re the characters and story in very general terms. My thinking was that by fleshing out the world and its history, I’d have a substrate that would inform both the characters and the action.

I jumped into the Campfire timeline module to sketch history over the several hundred years to come. Some combination of my thinking, the process, and the tool didn’t click. I set dates for key technological development and First Contact. The latter marks the end of Earth, Inc. and the beginning of the Probationary Era. And then I stalled. I couldn’t identify how granular I needed to be. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t patient or clever enough to build a history that delivered the world I wanted for my story. It was time to cheat again. I would build the world that suited me and write as much of its history as I needed to rationalize it.

The encyclopedia module would capture a snapshot of the story world. Tropes would find their homes among its articles. This clicked. Articles spawned other articles. Tropes were embraced or discarded. Technological limits came into focus. Research ranged far and wide. Ecological succession. Fusion power. Wabi-sabi. Terraforming. Torchships. Principal classes of naval ships. Intermodal cargo containers. Synthetic biology. Multinational corporations. NGOs. PMCs. Drone warfare. Cyberwarfare. Transhumanism. Corporatism. Social credit. Keiretsu. Lines extending from the present to interesting places in the future.  Each new article brimming with potential for more detail and suggesting related topics, demanding their own research.

It was a process that wanted to branch and grow forever. I realized that I don’t have forever. It was time to stop. For now. The systems of the world exist in sketch form. Political and economic ecologies provide opportunities for conflict and cooperation. Mysterious alien benefactors offer humanity new worlds for an unexpected price and threaten us with extermination for a specific transgression.

Mapulation

One of the joys of old-school worldbuilding was sitting down with some graph paper and mapping out planets, continents, kingdoms, cities, towns, and dungeons. As you might expect, the modern era has software to help you out with that. Campfire (and WorldAnvil) have tools to integrate maps into your worldbuilding projects, but both defer creating the maps to third parties. For good reasons. It turns out that a fantasy map-making program is a complex drawing tool in its own right. Two major players in this market are Worldographer and ProFantasy Software. They offer feature-rich packages that enable dedicated users to create rich maps ranging in scale from astronomical to humble abodes. I decided to take them out for a spin.

Fractal Terrains 3 from ProFantasy. The use of fractal algorithms to generate realistic rugged terrain goes back to the 1980s, famously starring in the Genesis planet sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Fractal Terrains harnesses that magic to create worlds with intricate mountain ranges and crinkly coastlines that you can zoom into from a global perspective down to a tiny island off the coast. (There’s a certain point in the zoom spectrum where things start looking strange.) You can control a wide variety of parameters: climate, sea level, tree line elevation, map projection style, and color scheme, to name a few. It’s pretty neat and there’s a free trial version to play with.

Campaign Cartographer 3 from ProFantasy. This will let you do any sort of map you want. In the hands of a skilled artist, it enables the creation of fantasy maps that are worthy of publication or inclusion in a AAA video game. It is incredibly powerful and flexible—to a downright daunting degree. For a newbie, its complex palettes of tools and customization options are labyrinthine. Everything you need is there…somewhere. YouTube tutorials are a must to even get started.

Worldographer has its own complexities, but like Fractal Terrains, it will offer to make a map to start you out. You supply the parameters, and it conjures a map for your world in the style of your choice. I found it simpler and more approachable. With my background in worldbuilding for Traveller, Worldographer’s process for setting up an icosahedral planet hex map was straightforward. This simplifies a globe into twenty flat triangles. You don’t have to worry about whether Greenland is bigger or smaller than it appears.

I set my parameters–I’m looking for an Ice Age world with more land relative to ocean than Earth—and rolled the world-making dice in Worldographer many times. The results were interesting but not satisfying. Part of it was that I had a vague notion that action on the planet would be split between a more temperate equatorial continent and an unsettled polar land mass. Rolling the dice wasn’t delivering that. No problem I could do that on my own. The other thing was the map was, for a lack of a better word, arbitrary. It wasn’t completely random. There was a system in play. It just didn’t feel right. I got it into my head that what was missing was plate tectonics. There were no great mountain ranges thrust up by colliding plates. It bugged me. More than it should have.

So off I went down a geological rabbit hole. It turns out that plate tectonics is hard and not thoroughly understood. The number of plates in play on Earth changes depending on who you ask and how close you look. And their movements are…complicated. So, I spent some time trying to build my world from the plates up and failed. A cool online simulator tried to help me, but still I floundered. Ultimately, I wound up drawing my world’s equivalent of Pangea, breaking the supercontinent up and utterly faking it.

With my continents in place in outline form, I iced things over from the poles based on Earth’s last glacial epoch. It turns out that my North American perspective made my idea of how icy Earth was rather exaggerated. Sure, Canada and much of Europe were unrecognizable. Many other areas weren’t that bad. It made sense when I thought about it. There were still tropics and hot deserts. It’s not like those ecologies evolved after the glaciers retreated. With that in mind, I tried to fill every hexagon on my map with something that made sense. It also turns out that climates and biomes are…complicated. I was obsessing over details that could inform my story, but they probably wouldn’t.

The mapping process had gone over budget. Just like the encyclopedia. It was time to put it on hold until I could focus on regions that the story needed. I wouldn’t know which until I had more of the story in mind.

How long is the coast of Britain?

By the light of fractal geometry the answer is: It depends on the length of your ruler. The coast “gets longer” the closer you look at it. If your ruler is 200km long, then the length is 2400km. With a smaller ruler, say 50km, you can trace out the details of the coastline more precisely and get a result of 3400km. We see increasing complexity as we zoom.

In each phase of my worldbuilding adventure I had no good idea what the right size was for the ruler. I kept zooming in and finding/inventing ever-increasing detail. My trope research, timelining, encyclopedia writing, and map-making overshot what I likely needed to make my story work. If this story leads to a series, I might recoup my investment. As it is, I won’t be able to work in all the detail I’ve come up with, but I’ll have plenty of things to choose from.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s to set a time budget for your worldbuilding and stick to it. You can always come back a fortify your imaginary world later. Better a half-built world and a story than an exquisitely built world where nothing ever happens.

Moving forward, I plan to focus on characters and story and build whatever else is strictly needed. Like hero spaceships and villain lairs. Such fun!

The Gray God’s Editing Odyssey

April 11, 2022 /
Witch's Jelly/Butter.

Absolutely not from outer space.

Almost three years ago, The Gray God reached its Narrative Complete milestone.  I had a story with kids, cults, and monsters. It was okay, but very much an early draft. I put it on the back burner while I prepared Raether’s Enzyme for submission to literary agents and then self-publishing. My mushroom monsters simmered all the while, getting varying amounts of editorial love, evolving into something that you might want to read. This is the story of that evolution.

Reader Zero

A good friend volunteered to read the Narrative Complete draft. This was a generous offer given that he has negative interest in stories featuring young people making bad decisions. He returned with numerous useful notes and keen observations, the most important of which was that my main character was playing hard-to-like too well. I had intended Pete to be rough-edged. You don’t get into his sort of troubles by being a shining beacon of humanity. Nonetheless, the reader wants to either feel for the character, look forward to his downfall, or secretly revel in his transgressions. Fixing Pete to Reader Zero’s satisfaction wasn’t in the cards, but I resolved to smooth and soften some of the kid’s rougher edges.

The Real First Draft

The Gray God sim-sim-simmered. I reread it and studied the distribution of word counts across its chapters and acts. Some of the chapters ran long. I identified new chapter breaks, which gave scenes more room to breathe. When I look at the chapter breakdown now, it seems like it’s the way it always should have been.

The ending was too short. It wasn’t strange or horrible enough. I had teased monsters, alien horrors, and certain conflicts, but the pay-off was perfunctory. I split the final chapter in two and did my best to deliver blood, gore, madness, and cosmic horror.

As I made these changes, I kept an eye on the growing word count. The sages of the internet recommend that horror novels weigh in at 80,000 words or less to have the best chance of acceptance by agents and publishers.

My second courageous early reader took The Gray God home and returned with helpful notes and positive feedback. The characters worked as I’d hoped, as did a plot twist I was particularly happy with, in an evil way.

Wise of the Machines

Bad writing is noise that obscures the signal of the story. Computers can’t identify plot holes, weak characterization, wooden dialog, or a host of other story flaws, but they’re pretty good at spotting typos, misspellings, some grammatical errors, and overuse of words. Playing to the strengths of the machines, I enlisted Word, Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and AutoCrit to filter out some of the bad writing noise than was fuzzing my story. None of these tools plug into Scrivener, so the process included exporting (compiling) the Scrivener project into a Word document for analysis. Errors and improvements then had to be made in the Scrivener project.

At the end of the process, I had a reasonably clean 80,000-word manuscript. I was ready for the next step in my insidious plan.

The Voice of the Outer World

Reducing the noise to expose the story was important for the next step: Developmental Editing. In a developmental edit, the editor is looking at how well the story works and provides feedback on the plot, characters, tones, themes, and general story quality of the manuscript. Any editor you’d want to hire for this service should have industry experience. That means they’ll have a keen eye for writing errors. It will probably be difficult for them to silence their inner copyeditors. To make it easier for them to focus on the story, it behooves one to deliver as clean a manuscript as practicable.

Developmental editing was a step I skipped for Raether’s Enzyme. It was important to me that Raether be my story—sink or swim—from beginning to end. I’m not as protective of The Gray God. It’s a more conventional—and possibly commercial—story. I went into the developmental edit intent on improving it in the direction of salability.

I returned to Reedsy to find a freelance developmental editor who worked with horror.

Ambitious amateur tip: Line up your developmental editor well in advance.

Of the three best matches for my project, one couldn’t take on a new project and the other two were booked months out. After toying with the idea of enlisting the other two, I settled on one and arranged for The Gray God to pass under her red pen later in the summer.

Once the ball was rolling, I soon had an editorial assessment, matching developmental notes for the manuscript, and some quality copy edits (she said she couldn’t help but fix errors when she saw them).

Her assessment highlighted what worked in the story and outlined areas for improvement with specific examples drawn from the text. It was well-written and full of actionable insights that I’ll apply to future projects.

Her manuscript edit was thorough and clear. I know what scenes and passages worked well for her. She flagged each point where the plot, setting, or character motivation was unclear. All the issues summarized in the assessment were noted in the Word comments with precision and the encouragement and coaching I need to make the story better for readers.

There was much to think about and to do. Specific issues called for delicate surgery in situ. The editorial assessment called out general patterns of weakness. I was light on character and scene descriptions. The longer dialog scenes drifted out into voids, unanchored by place or motion. It was a fair cop. I needed to fortify the descriptions and break up the dialog with meaningful actions. My inner screenwriter had delegated those details to the set and costume designers, and the actors, respectively. It was a problem I needed to fix.

Plot complication: The manuscript was already at the upper end of the word count for my genre. I consulted the editor and she said I could cheat it up to 85,000 words if I did it well. Doing it well (I hope!) and under budget required finesse. And removing a whole scene. Five hundred words mattered. The final total was just under 85,000 words. I won’t lie. I kept tinkering until I hit the limit.

The Chicago Way

The winner of a Clash of Copyeditors had an opening in her schedule and I jumped right in. She worked her diligent, painstaking magic to cleanse my manuscript of error and bring it into the light of The Chicago Manual of Style. She noted where things were unclear and offered improved word choices. The Gray God is mightier for her efforts.

I had come into a new pattern of error, which I will blame on Word. Word had been encouraging me to omit commas before conjunctions where the clauses were short. This may be what’s hip for business writing these days, but it is not the Chicago way. And given the alternative of sticking with Word’s suggestion or the corrections of a professional editor, I had to go with my editor. I spent a good long time porting commas back into the Scrivener project.

Another place where Chicago and my manuscript differed was on capitalization. Chicago has deprecated the capitalization of Marine, Army, Navy, and Air Force as stand-alone terms. That doesn’t strike me as right. And it would likely…disappoint…friends of mine who are veterans of those services. As used in the story, these words are short for United States Marine, United States Army, United States Navy, and United States Air Force. Those are capitalized.

Chicago has also chosen to not capitalize God’s pronouns and epithets. I get the idea of not capitalizing these words as a matter of secular style. When they occur in dialog from religious characters, I think capitalization should apply.

If I wind up self-publishing The Gray God, I’ll have the last word on these controversies, at least within the scope of my book.

My editor also informed me that in the interest of inclusivity, words from other languages are no longer set off in italics. There are always trade-offs.

The Package

A clean, polished manuscript is a fine thing to have, but delivering it to an agent or publisher comes after you pitch the book via a query letter. The Gray God needed a short, punchy query letter to intrigue the industry folks, or at least let us all know that the book isn’t what they can risk their time championing before gatekeepers further down the line. Some agents also want to see a short synopsis that lays out the main beats and ending of the story. Spoilers be damned! The manuscript, query letter, synopsis, and author biography form the package of documents you need to have ready before you submit your first query.

The Gray God’s package is complete. It is time.

Raether’s Kindle Countdown

August 16, 2021 /

Having run a series of experimental Facebook ads and enrolled Raether’s Enzyme in KDP Select, my next step was to turn up the voltage and lower the resistance. The voltage took the form of Facebook ads targeted at my three most promising audiences with a much higher daily budget than the previous experiments. To lower the resistance, I ran a Kindle Countdown Deal that discounted the e-book to $0.99. For the price of a very cheap cup of coffee (vs. a fancy coffee drink), a reader could explore the world of Raether’s Enzyme. Such. A. Deal. Or, for the price of a bottomless cup of Kindle Unlimited, they could read as many pages as they liked. The big fantasy was that lots of readers would see the ad, buy the book, and cost of the ad campaign would be recouped in sales. The little fantasy was that some small fraction of the readers would love the book and tell their friends. This is not a fantasy story, but the results were interesting. To me. YMMV.

The Audiences

The most promising ad audiences in my stable were: fans of Gillian Flynn, readers of Hard Science Fiction, and readers of Speculative Fiction. If you dig deep into Facebook’s Ads Manager, it will happily estimate the overlap of your audiences for you.

Speculative Fiction covers the majority of the Hard Science Fiction audience. I kept HardSF in the mix because it brings a few more guys into a combined audience that otherwise leans female.

The Voltage

I increased the ad spending by an order of magnitude. For the previous experiments, I set the spending limit to $5.00/day. During the Countdown Deal, I upped the total to $100/day. That big (by my puny standards) chunk of change was not distributed evenly. I bet $50 on the Gillian Flynn fans, $25 on the HardSF crowd, and the remaining $25 on the Speculative Fiction aficionados.

The Resistance

A Countdown Deal can have multiple stages where the price changes (goes up) over the course of the promotion. It adds a bit of urgency/excitement to the deal. Hurry! Only 12 hours and 41 minutes until the price goes up to $1.99! I debated whether to use those stages to try and determine a better price for my e-book. If sales (books sold X price) peaked at $2.99, then I should consider lowering the price from $4.99 once the sale was over. The counterargument was that if the price was changing, I couldn’t include it in the Facebook ad. There is no way to synchronize a change in the ad copy with the Countdown Deal’s pricing stages. In the interest of keeping it simple, I set the price to $0.99 for the duration of the deal and called that out in the Facebook ad.

The Countdown Begins

If you’re looking for ways to avoid the hard work of editing your next book, it’s hard to beat running ads and monitoring the resulting sales. Facebook and Amazon provide all sorts of numbers and charts. Refreshing the various dashboards and reports can be addictive. It was for me.

The Results (Ads)

Short version: The ads did not perform as well as the experimental approach to the same audiences.

Long version:

Outbound clicks are what take you from the ad to the Amazon product page. The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) dropped by more than a percent for each audience relative to the experiment. And it took more impressions per viewer to inspire a click. Since Facebook sells ads based on impressions, that means that the cost-per-click was much higher than in the experiments.

The Results (Sales)

Short version: 155 books sold during the countdown. That’s five times as many in August as the rest of the year combined. An estimated $162 of royalties for August ($0.99 e-books sales and Kindle Unlimited page reads) vs. $152 in royalties before August suggests that the value of the Countdown might not be measured in dollars.

Long version:

By commercial publishing standards, this is nothing to brag about. But if sales in the ones and twos have brought a smile to your face, seeing days with twenty-something books sold makes you happy indeed. In the first half of August 2021, the number of people who have a copy of Raether’s Enzyme quadrupled. The number of pages read via Kindle Unlimited more than doubled. The royalties earned increased by more than 50%. The numbers are still small, but they’re bigger small numbers. In some ways, it was a good week.

The Results (Visibility)

Ads on Facebook make your book visible to readers on Facebook. Readers on Facebook buying your book on Amazon make your book (more) visible to the algorithms on Amazon. Attracting the attention of the algorithms nudges them to make your book more visible to readers shopping for books on Amazon. The strength of that nudge depends on the number of sales. As a KDP author, your insight into that strength comes through changes in your book’s sales rank.

The formula for the sales rank is part of Amazon’s secret sauce. It’s not simply the number of books sold. That would result in a best-sellers list dominated by a few established titles. To keep things fresh and interesting, Amazon takes other factors into account. Outside observers have deduced that the value of a given sale (for the purpose of sales rank) decays over time. Sure, you sold a million copies five years ago. What have you sold in the last sixty days? Are your sales ramping up or dropping off? We may never know how Amazon calculates its sales ranks, but it does so fairly regularly. So, if you’re running a promotion and an ad campaign, you can include refreshing your product page every hour or two to your list of things to do instead of editing your next book. I did.

Books that aren’t selling float in the deep abyss of sales ranks greater than one million. Books that sell a couple of dozen copies a day over several days rise from the murky depths to a level where they can begin to imagine there might be a thing called light. Over the course of the Countdown Deal, Raether’s Enzyme floated up into the realm of four-digit sales rank.

No one is going to stumble upon the book ranked 6,802 while browsing the Kindle store. Where there is a little more hope and light is the sales rank within the various specialized categories/genres that the book is filed under.

Someone in the market for Disaster Fiction (a category suggested by a marketing consultant (definitely out of the box I had considered for the book)) would see #11 in the first page of results.

A reader looking for a technothriller might click over to page two of the results and see #54.

Hey! I’ve heard of Blake Crouch before! And for a brief time, Raether’s Enzyme was right there between two of his (older) books. How about that?

The glimmer of sunlight was nice while it lasted. After the Countdown Deal and its ad campaign ended, sales dropped off and Raether’s Enzyme began to sink back into the gloom. Sigh.

Inconclusion

There isn’t a space missing there. I’m still processing this exercise.

On an emotional level, the fantasy was dashed, but I’m happy the book reached more readers.

By the numbers, I’m not satisfied with the returns vs. the ad spending. 6.48% of the Facebook readers clicked over to Amazon and only 10% of those readers wanted the book enough to spend the price of a cheap cup of coffee. This must be attributed to my marketing and my book. I own them both. I know I’m weak at the former and fear that I’m weak at the latter.

At the same time, major publishers (and movie studios) have marketing and advertising budgets that are a substantial fraction of the overall cost of production. My $562 ad spend is well below what I’ve invested in bringing the book to market. The marketing consultant threw out a $2000 ad spend figure during our discussions. Playing the advertising game (vs. alternatives discussed here) may require better investments and more of them.

The Countdown Deal is over. The story continues.

Raether’s Pronunciation

June 26, 2021 /

Emails sent to me via the contact page on this website all have the same subject: [S L Flynn] Contact Me. They are mostly spam. Yesterday was a special day. I received a [S L Flynn] Contact Me email from a real person with an interesting question: Where did you get the idea for “Raether”? In particular, the real person wanted to know how I chose the title of the book.

The old Raether’s Genesis post told the story of the story as it began life in screenplay format. It did not reveal how I chose the surname Raether to attach to the mysterious ‘enzyme’. Outside the fictions, I strive to be honest and transparent within the limits of discretion. Telling you everything would bore you or break confidences. Here’s the honest and transparent story of how I picked that name: I don’t remember. I think I ‘made it up’. Years later, I googled the name and learned that it was a rare name of German origin.

The name stuck because I thought it played well with the Z in enzyme. More so if it’s pronounced raythe-ur. A bit less if you pronounce it ray-thur. I bounced back and forth between pronunciations when talking about the book. I didn’t know how it was pronounced. Until yesterday.

The real person who wrote me was curious because that was their last name. In the spirit of honesty and transparency, I told them what I’ve told you. Perhaps I should have made up a more interesting story to justify the effort they went to in reaching out to me. As it is, they got the equivalent of a ¯_(ツ)_/¯ from me. They graciously told me how Raether is pronounced.

It is pronounced Ray-thur. Now I know.

Thank you, Real Person!

Selecting Select

May 28, 2021 /

KDP Select, that is. From May 28, 2021, until August 25, 2021, Raether’s Enzyme, the e-book, will be available exclusively through Amazon. Not Apple. Not Barnes & Noble. Not Kobo. Not Smashwords. Just Amazon. The paperback edition will continue to be available on Amazon*, at Barnes & Noble’s online store, and whatever independent bookstores order it from IngramSpark (ISBN: 9781735183909).

“Whoa,” you say. “What happened to ‘going wide’ and ‘meeting readers on whatever device they like to read on’?”

Yeah. The thing is, near as I can tell, the only e-book copies I’ve sold outside of Amazon have been to Tensile Press. That’s me. I purchased the e-book from each store to verify that it worked on their reader apps. Absent amazing success at marketing, my book will remain unnoticed, unpurchased, and unread in the non-Amazon portion of the commercial e-book ecosystem. So, for the short term, no one would be missing out if I unpublished the book to those outlets. I did this. But why?

If you checked out the link to KDP Select, you know part of the answer. For the non-clickers out there, KDP Select offers the following:

Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read as many KU books as they wish for a fixed subscription fee. Authors get paid a share of the KDP Select Global Fund based on how many pages of their book(s) are read. For independent authors, the per-page compensation is very, very, small.

During the KDP Select enrollment period (90 days), you can either run a free book promotion or a countdown deal. Pick one. I think Raether’s Enzyme is a screaming deal at $4.99. For the price of an extra-fancy coffee drink, you get tremendous entertainment value. As the work of an unknown author, many people might not see it that way. Discounting the book, or giving it away, might overcome that uncertainty and help connect the story with readers who will love it.

If they love it, they might tell their friends. They might leave a positive review. Word-of-mouth and abundant online praise are two of the strongest allies a self-published book can hope for. You might not make any money on books you give away or heavily discount, but you can prime the pump of reader interest and build a foundation of (hopefully) positive reviews. After the give-away or sale is done, readers that find their way to the book’s Amazon page via word-of-mouth or (gasp!) paid advertising, might find the confidence they need to justify the already low-low price of $4.99. That’s the theory, anyway.  We’ll see.

The other factor that motivated me to put all my e-book eggs in the KDP Select basket was something I discussed in Stalking You on Facebook. I’m still interested in experimenting with Facebook ads, but my last experiment sent the people who clicked on the ad to my blog’s Raether page. From there they had to click again to reach the merchant who could sell them the book. That extra step was taken by about one-fourth of the people who reached the page. Focusing the marketing and advertising directly on the Amazon page removes that step and makes it easier to a reader to buy the book. That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see.

The 90-day experiment has begun. We’ll see what the future holds.

  • At this writing, the paperback is heavily discounted on Amazon.

Stalking You on Facebook

April 27, 2021 /

Not you-you specifically. Not you, [FIRST_NAME] [LAST_NAME], who lives in [CITY], and likes [FAVORITE_THING]. Stalking you would be creepy. I am referring to a more abstract you: the potential audience for the things I write, such as this blog post and my fiction. That you. Facebook’s built its bazillion-dollar empire on helping people like me stalk people like you.

Spoiler: This post will not tell you how you should set up and run a Facebook ad campaign.

Customer vs. Product

If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

This is the essential fact of Facebook and multitude of “free” media sites, social and otherwise. If you are not paying a dotcom for its services, it’s a safe bet that someone else is paying that dotcom to access your eyeballs. There is nothing inherently sinister about this. The hippest alternative free weekly newspapers of the 20th Century had ad-supported business models.  Facebook took this model to a new level by promising to put the right advertisement in front of the right eyeballs by exploiting what it learned about a user/product-unit’s demographics, tastes, and interests. This makes the customers (advertisers) salivate and the products (users) cringe.

Marketing is an acquired skillset and an acquired taste. Having matured enough to respect and seek the skills of a marketer, I decided to try a taste of Facebook ads. Come with me now as we cross Facebook’s product-customer barrier…

Set the orbital mind-control laser to…

Knowing—or at least deciding on—what you want your ad to do is the first step to conquering the world. I chose to Get More Website Visitors. Sending clicks straight to the Amazon product page was not an option and might have lost folks who get their books elsewhere. There is another benefit/hazard to inviting potential readers to slflynn.com which I will discuss later in this post.

The goal guides the ad set-up process. I went with the default daily budget. As a sub-experiment, I changed the graphics from what you see on this site to feature a blue biofluid background. The idea there is that the red biofluid of the book’s cover will pop. What do you think?

The biggest question remained. Who are you? You, the reader whose eyeballs I want and need to rent.

Know your target audience.

Or take a wild-ass guess and see how it works. Amazon lets you target keywords (including other books) or lets you trust-fall into the magic of its algorithms. Facebook has you describe the products (users) whose eyeballs you want to rent. Therein lies the art and science. Facebook will provide hints about the science. For this experimental ad campaign, I used the following audience profile.

At my most grandiose, I want everyone, everywhere, to read and enjoy my novel. This audience profile narrows the scope of the campaign a bit.

Location – Living In United States

Age 20 – 65+

Language English (UK) or English (US)

People Who Match Interests: Speculative fiction, E-books, Thriller novels, Suspense or Fiction books, Education Level: College grad or Some college, Undergrad Years: 1980-2025

Note: I know for a fact that readers outside of this profile have enjoyed Raether’s Enzyme.

The science-y part of Facebook says that these parameters successfully whittle the ad targeting from 2.45 billion global users and 225 million US users down to mere 120 million users. Focused like a laser!

Or not. As the little gauge at the bottom suggests, this is still rather broad. Part of what makes it so broad isn’t visible above. It turns out that the interests are combined with a logical OR. If you remove ‘Fiction books’ from the equation and leave the remaining sub-categories of speculative fiction, thriller, and suspense, the audience contracts by 35 million. That refinement is something I will test in another experiment.

One week

Over the course of the ad’s one-week run, results trickled in. The first evidence was in my own Facebook news feed.

The rest of the story played out on various dashboards.

Traffic to my blog (which, as of this writing gets very little) rose during the week with referrals from the ad.

The peaks on April 14th and 15th are…interesting. Wednesday and Thursday. Was Facebook placing my ad more vigorously on those days and saving the weekends for bigger advertisers? Or are those just days people are more inclined to explore books from unfamiliar authors?

There was a corresponding (small) uptick in book page views on Smashwords.

At the end of the week, Facebook had many graphs to share with me. They had shown the ad to 2,360 people. The eyeballs they found for my ad tended to be older. The older the audience member, the more likely they were to be female.

Within the various United States, the audience shook out along the lines predicted by the states’ populations, with Texas nudging California out of first place for unknown reasons.

My own use of Fb is limited, so I was surprised by the number of places Facebook found to slide my little ad into.

Tucked away in a different corner of Facebook, the Ads Manager, I found one of the juicier graphs.

Of the 2,360 people who saw the ad, 52 people clicked on it. That’s almost two percent, which doesn’t sound like much, but is actually pretty good. Amazon showed my ad to nearly 43,000 people to get the same number of clicks. The cost-per-click was much better on Facebook than my various experiments with Amazon Advertising. On Amazon, I had spent $123 for 52 clicks. The Facebook ad had netted the same number of clicks for $35. Facebook covered $20 of that with an ad credit. Thanks, Facebook!

So, Facebook ads are better than Amazon ads, right? Not so fast. The Amazon ad clicks went straight to the Amazon product page. The Facebook ads came here to slflynn.com. Of those visitors, 16 clicked a link to the Amazon product page and one clicked over to Barnes & Noble. It cost about $1 to get Facebook eyeballs to the point where they might buy the book. This is better than $2.37 I paid for Amazon eyeballs. But it is not a matter of better. It is a matter of less bad.

NaN

Computers are great at working with most numbers, but there are various semi-exotic classes of numbers where CPUs must throw up their hands and walk away. These “numbers” are Not a Number (NaN) as far as the computer is concerned.

An important metric of success for an advertising campaign is what Amazon calls the Advertising Cost of Sales (ACOS). It is amazingly easy to calculate. You divide the cost of your ad by the amount you made in sales driven by that ad. If you sold zero goods, then the ACOS is NaN, because dividing by zero is a flavor of mathematical infinity that computers really do not like.

My Amazon and Facebook ad campaigns resulted in zero book sales. Their ACOS is NaN. I spent less to fail on Facebook, so that campaign was less bad.

Abandon all hope, ye who advertise here.

Nah. These are early experiments. 43,000 and 2,360 seem like big numbers, but they are small samples in the scope of Amazon and Facebook audiences. Less than one hundred people reaching the sales pages and not buying is disappointing, but the general statistics suggest that only a small fraction of people that reach the page of an unfamiliar author and book proceed to buy it. Now is not time to panic. Not yet. But it is time to experiment some more. Perhaps the current blurb is not closing the deal. Perhaps a more refined audience or better keywords will connect the book with the readers who will enjoy it.

I may yet grab your eyeballs.

Okay, that did sound creepy.

Seeking External Validation

March 24, 2021 /

Dice, chips, and cards

Image by Tom und Nicki Löschner from Pixabay

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Reviews and ratings play an important role in lives of books. They help readers decide which of many books to pick up next. The wisdom of the crowd is something we’ve come to rely on in an age of superabundant choices. A positive and articulate review from a trusted source will make a better case for readers investing their time in a book than the best advertising copy.

For the purposes of this post, reviews and ratings overlap but are not the same thing.

Ratings

Ratings are a simple score of how much a reader enjoyed the book. Four-point-three out of five stars! They provide a reader with a flash assessment. Being numbers, they are easy for a computer to file, rank, and analyze. Authors smile at high ratings. It’s nice to see that people like or value your work. Low ratings are a mix of disappointing, depressing, and frustrating. Failing and not knowing why you failed makes the world seem that much more arbitrary and cruel.

Stellar ratings suggest that all the pieces fit. This time. Do the same thing again. If you can. And it might work as well.

Terrible ratings suggest that one or more of the pieces failed catastrophically. Did you write a bad book? Market it to the wrong audience? Is it time for a new pen name? It can be hard to tell.

Reviews

A book review can go into greater depth. The reviewer offers a mix of insight into what they read and how they felt about it.

Prospective readers risks encountering plot spoilers and having their experience of the book colored by the review, but they learn more about what the story is about and why the reviewer liked or disliked it.

Authors should find reviews—positive or negative—interesting. The reviewer is opening a window into their experience of the book and many important questions might be answered, including, but not limited to…

Did they follow the plot?

If not, where did you lose them? Authors are free to play games with intricate plots, flashbacks, flashforwards, unreliable narrators, and a host of other devices with the potential to confuse. Readers may enjoy the story being a puzzle. They may appreciate how confusion conveys the chaos of the characters’ lives and world. They expect it to be intentional. For the most part, they expect the design to be revealed by the end of the book.

Did they feel the way you hoped?

And intended. It is mortifying to have what one has written in all seriousness read as comedy. It is frustrating to have what one wrote as satire taken seriously. It is best to know when these inversions have occurred and to adjust the marketing plan accordingly.

Were they the reader you imagined?

Whether an author is writing to market or not, they have expectations as to the type of reader who will be interested in their story. A reviewer from outside those expectations is promising or perilous from a marketing perspective. Promising if the book got a positive review from an unexpected quarter. There’s an opportunity to reach out to a whole new audience. Yay! Perilous if the book’s marketing landed it with someone whose tastes and sensibilities are incompatible with its contents. Now that reviewer is saying harsh things about how a cerebral examination of a family in crisis fails as a psychological thriller. Ooops!

Ratings vs Reviews

As you might guess, I find reviews more interesting than ratings.

Aggregate ratings such as Amazon’s can lead you to stay the course, try something different, or pull the plug on marketing a book. That’s something, and not a small thing. But it’s not meaty. Positive ratings from celebrities or authoritative sources can be folded into advertising to good effect. At least that’s what I suspect. I haven’t had any experience putting such into play.

Reviews can highlight strengths and weaknesses in your craft. They can lend weight in support of or against decisions you made while writing your story. Those lessons can be brought to bear on future writing projects. A sweet pull-quote from a favorable review is free quality advertising copy.

There aren’t many ethical ways to solicit ratings independent of reviews. Paying someone to give your book a high rating is straight-up wrong. Paying someone to honestly rate your book is problematic. Asking for ratings is considered tacky and you’ll probably get what you pay for. In either case, most rating aggregators won’t tell you who provided a simple rating, there’s no way to know how or if the rater did their job. Attributed ratings lack proof of work.

There are legitimate channels to solicit reviews (which may include a rating as a form of summary).

Some channels do not involve a money changing hands. A robust social network or diligent research can connect you with book bloggers who are intrigued by something about your book. Terms vary, but you are generally hoping for positive exposure and the blogger is hoping for the chance to write an interesting blog post. This is akin to querying literary agents. Bloggers are looking for what they’re looking for and even if you have it, their dance cards may be full.

The modest scope of my (excellent) social network and unhappy memories of the query-wait-hope-wait-wait-hope-wait-rejection cycle led me to look for alternatives. To date, I have tried two.

Reedsy Discovery

For a modest fee, Reedsy’s Discovery site will make your book visible to a pool of reviewers who might or might not choose to review it. Ideally you post it to Discovery as part of the build-up to your book’s launch to create buzz and win pre-orders. Discovery recommends posting weeks in advance of your launch date. I did not do this. I submitted Raether to Discovery on its actual launch date and set the Discovery launch date five weeks later. During that interval I hoped that some of the discovery readers would find it, read it, like it, and review it. They did not do this. Sigh.

Grumpy

The nice folks at Discovery offered to extend the (potential) review period. I took them up on that offer. Nada. Zilch. I oscillated between despair and anger, as one does, before settling into a grumpy curiosity. How much weight should I put on this failure? Who was it that wasn’t responding to the awesome cover and intriguing premise? Would it make sense to approach some of the reviewers directly?

Heigh-ho!

Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go. Off to the open-bit mines. I made my way through the directory of thriller reviewers (link goes to the current directory), dipping into each profile to see what mix of ratings and reviews each had done overall, in the last year, and in the last six months. This was slow-going, as Discovery only lists twenty per page and bounces back to the top of the first page when you return to the list from a profile. After examining the first forty-seven thriller reviewers (out of about 200), a pattern began to emerge.

Ratings Reviews 6 months 12 months
21 2 15 21
2 2 2 2
385 0 51 126
1 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
513 0 41 89
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
14 0 11 14
318 0 25 59
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
215 0 21 60
1 1 1 1
0 0 0 0
16 2 2 6
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
149 1 48 55
0 0 0 0
1 1 1 1
3 3 3 3
0 0 0 0
2 2 2 2
768 0 49 108
9 9 9 9
0 0 0 0
218 1 6 23
1 1 1 1
6 6 6 6
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
4 0 4 4

 

My read on these numbers was: Most of the reviewers are not engaged in the Discovery review process. The ones that are posting skew heavily toward rating vs. long-form reviews.

My impression from scanning the profiles was: Most of the reviewers are book bloggers, aspiring book bloggers, or the YouTube equivalent of book bloggers. Discovery reviewing is an adjunct to their book blogging platform and probably an experimental one at that. Reviewers follow each other and import their reading lists from outside, suggesting that for them, Discovery is a social media platform which is likely secondary to Goodreads.

Genre Shift

Someone from Discovery reached out to me during this second interval of quiet failure with a generous offer to review the cover and blurb and make suggestions on how to make them more appealing to the site’s reviewers. They weren’t able to suggest a change in wording but proposed moving the book into science fiction. Perhaps the reviewers there would be more receptive. This was a reasonable and good idea. The story has a science fictional component to it, as does the cover art. This did not work.

Down on Discovery?

Do I have a negative opinion of Discovery? A bit. I think it’s an interesting idea but that it lacks transparency with respect to odds making. It’s not an easy equation to figure and your odds certainly improve if you’ve written a book that people want to read. I may not have done that. But I get the sense that success on Discovery is also sensitive to the distribution of reviewer interests across genres and your timing relative to potential reviewer’s availability for engagement. Alternately: You need certain amount of luck place your book when and where it will get a review. This is not a bug from Discovery’s perspective so long as they have enough material coming in to interest readers and fill their newsletters.

All is not lost.

Raether emerged into public view on Discovery. A few people have seen it there.

Kirkus Reviews

Chances are you’ve seen Kirkus Reviews cited in book advertisements, especially their starred reviews. Kirkus has been around for a long time and is a known quantity in the world of book reviews. For indie authors, their deal is that for a fee, they will match your book to one of their reviewers. In four to eight weeks, they’ll get back to you with the review, which is by default private. If you want to move forward with the process, you tell them so and they publish the review on their website. You are then welcome to quote it subject to their guidelines. If you aren’t happy with the review, it remains private.

The fee will give some pause, but it is fair. You’re hiring a publishing industry professional to read novel and write a review. If the reviewer assignment process did a good job, the reviewer might well enjoy the read, but it is still work. They deserve to be paid for it. Amazon estimates that Raether is a nine-hour read. If you take out a cut for Kirkus and add in the time required to write the review, the reviewer isn’t making big bucks. It’s probably a freelance side-hustle or entry-level gig.

The fee didn’t give me pause. It’s a marketing expense. I have made peace with risking speculative investments in my book’s success. As a sensitive and insecure artistic spirit, I dreaded the possibility that this stranger would dislike my story, a dread I knew from querying agents but more acute and grounded by the fact that here it wasn’t my pitch or first chapter that was being tested, but the whole of the actual story. Any fault across those hundreds of pages could sink it. A minor irritation with the style would accumulate across 114,000 words and erupt in a caustic condemnation of the whole work. Yeah, I came up reasons not to enlist Kirkus. In the end, pride and curiosity won out. The promise that I could bury the review if I didn’t like it helped. I paid Tensile Press’s money, uploaded the manuscript, and began the wait.

Kirkus took their full time, two months, to deliver the review. During that interval, I was sanguine. It was going to be okay. When the email arrived saying I could download the review, the butterflies in my stomach took flight again.

It begins.

A Kirkus indie review begins with a short description of the premise.

Raether’s review does a good job of this.

And continues.

Next comes an in-depth paragraph that touches on characters, plot, highlights, and lowlights.

The reviewer starts with a light synopsis the story’s first act, which is mostly accurate and only a bit spoiler-y. The highlights and lowlights that follow are fair and more focused on characters and tone than plot. The review warns that the tone becomes dark and cites examples in a mix of specific and abstract terms. My first reaction was that this was entering spoiler territory. And it is, but in a way that I’ve come to understand and respect. The reviewer is cautioning the reader that there are nasty surprises lurking between the covers. Cruelty and violence that are outside of what some thriller readers may enjoy. Startling trope subversions. Readers seek out reviews to make informed buying decisions. This review’s warnings balance that purpose with preserving most of the reader’s experience of discovering the tale for themselves.

Then ends.

The review ends with a one-sentence summary judgement.

Raether’s review ends thus:

“A plausibly chilling what-if tale with a smart, sensitive hero.” — Kirkus Reviews

Well, there it is…

If you read the Kirkus excerpting policies, you know that for me to use that quote here, I had to release the review for publication on their website. Click here to read the whole thing. I sat on the review for a full day before pulling the trigger. It took a couple more days to get the cover art to display with the review. It isn’t the rave, starred review I wished for, but it is on the whole positive and that pull-quote may prove useful. I’ve added it as an ‘editorial review’ on Raether’s Amazon product page and will seek other opportunities to use it in my marketing efforts. Kirkus sent me a follow-up email with details about who to contact there about promoting the book on their site and in their magazine. I’ll pursue that in days to come.

Questions answered?

I suggested (above) that a review could answer questions an author should ask. Did the Kirkus review supply any of those answers?

Did they follow the plot? Yes. The reviewer synopsized the first part of the story accurately and didn’t note tripping over anything later.

Did they feel the way I hoped? I think so. They found the premise intriguing. They loathed the villains and liked Megan and her friends. They found the disturbing things disturbing. I’m not sure they liked being disturbed in those ways, but their response was appropriate. The ending worked for them on an emotional level.

Were they the reader I imagined? Yes, but…

One of the agents I queried required submissions to include a description of the story’s audience. It was a fair thing to ask and something I hadn’t thought through before I wrote the manuscript. Working backwards from the manuscript, I came up with:

Raether’s Enzyme is looking for adult readers who enjoy a provocative premise but may not be willing to enter the alien worlds of science fiction. They appreciate the brisk pace of a thriller but not at the expense of humanity and theme. They are intrigued by imperfect characters making (and avoiding) hard choices in a world where personal and societal ethics are in turbulent flux. They are comfortable with modern technologies and aware that there is a dark side to our connected world. Their reading tastes are eclectic enough to embrace a full-on geekfest colliding with the machinations of a brutal mercenary within one story. They may not have use for superheroes, but they are willing to cheer on an ordinary person as she struggles to master a power that Superman would envy.

Experiences with early readers expanded that envelope to the point where I think the Kirkus reviewer was akin to readers I already knew.

Place your bets.

And take your chances. It’s not a game of complete information.

My small bet on Reeds’ Discovery crapped out.

If I can translate my Kirkus review into a few hundred sales, it will pay off.

Time will tell.

The story of my story is still being written. Stay tuned.

Marketing Monday

March 17, 2021 /
Raether's Amazon Ad

Raether’s Amazon Ad

“So, you have a new novel for me?”

“Yes, sir, I do. It’s a thriller/sci-fi/superhero mash-up with an amazing premise, a smart, sensitive hero, bounty hunters, dogs, aspiring supervillains, monsters, hackers, magic, secret identities, gunfights, and a cure for cancer!”

“Wow-wow-wow!”

Raether’s Enzyme is a story I like. The design of the paperback and eBook are excellent. Readers from my circle of family and friends enjoyed it and wanted to talk about it. I remain confident that there are many more people out there who would like it too, but that confidence is largely a matter of faith.  Sales so far have been scant, but the handful of ratings that have trickled in have been good.

The new challenge is to connect my book with readers who might enjoy it. The name of the discipline that encompasses this endeavor is: marketing. I am now consciously incompetent at marketing.

Cosmic Justice

I spent most of my adult life being unconsciously incompetent at marketing, and proudly so. As an engineer, I disdained the marketing department. They were foolish, superficial people who brought nothing but confused “customer requirements”, suspect “market research”, and undue authority to the product development process. Any failure of our efforts in the marketplace were obviously attributable to the gross incompetence of the marketing department. It is right there in both words: market. Case closed. Engineers rule. Marketing people drool. Any Dilbert fan knows this.

Yeah. About that…

Now that I am responsible for both producing the product and marketing it, I regret my former arrogance and apologize to any marketers out there who are reading this. I’m sorry. I should have had more empathy and respect for the people who work hard to identify potential customers and divine their wants and needs. I should have been more curious about how that side of a business works. Having failed in these ways, I have made a thing—a good thing—without a plan or clue as to how I might show the right people that it exists. There are infinitely many ways to fail at marketing and a small number of ways to succeed. My inability to tell the difference may doom my book to obscurity. If I can’t up my game to a baseline of conscious competence (or get very, very lucky), I fear that I will have squandered the contributions of the friends and collaborators who helped Raether’s Enzyme get this far. I will own these manifold failures from end-to-end. It will be my own damn fault.

Beyond doom and gloom

Recognizing you have a problem is the first step to solving it. As a young engineer, my next step would have been to come up with my own definition of the problem and set about solving it. Asking an actual customer for their input would only have constrained my immense creativity and innovation. As a more mature person working in a domain where I am consciously incompetent, I knew that I would need to learn, experiment, and fail repeatedly to make progress. In the months since Raether’s release, I have divided my time between marketing tasks, drafting The Gray God, and playing Cyberpunk 2077. I won’t claim to have found the optimal balance here, but I have committed one day each week to turning the learn-experiment-fail crank. I call it: Marketing Monday.

Learn

An older post offered a high-level, author’s-eye view of the landscape of the traditional publishing ecosystem as I understood it. I went with self-publishing. That landscape is similar, but there are distinct features that I should document at some point. For the purposes of this post, I’ll call out one such feature. I’m not sure if it fits my para-publishing or para-marketing categories. Let’s just say that there are many people out there who offer insight, advice, plans, and coaching for indie book marketing. Many, many people. Since I haven’t successfully employed any of their advice yet, I can’t make a recommendation as to who one should listen to or pay for. There are some common themes I’ve picked up on.

Marketing begins months before launch.

I launched Raether prematurely. I knew this at the time but didn’t want 2020 to find a way to kill me and/or destroy civilization before I had published at least one book. A prudent and planful book launch includes building buzz on your mailing list and social media, seeding influential reviewers with advance reader’s copies (ARCs), and other networking efforts. All of which require a marketing plan to identify receptive parties and shape advertising copy (which is an art distinct from fiction prose).

The Amazonian Gambit

Amazon wants to sell books. It doesn’t necessarily want to sell your book. If enough customers buy your book for it to rise in the sales and popularity ranks (in general and within the book’s category), your book will earn a position of visibility to book browsers. It falls to the indie author to bring readers to Amazon for your book or to find readers within Amazon via well-placed Amazon advertisements. Making the latter work requires insight, a bit of data science, a good cover, and a great blurb. Marketing and sales stuff. Raether has a good cover. I am working on the rest.

The insights you need include a list of books and authors whose readers are likely to enjoy your book. This list allows you to bid for ad placement on the pages for your targeted books. Then, if your cover is good and your tagline is great, a reader might just click on that sponsored product link and consider your book as well. These kindred books may also lead to further insights as to how to best categorize your book. ‘Thriller’ is a broad category. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense\Thrillers & Suspense\Technothrillers is a more specific category that gets you closer to readers who like a little science and technology in their thriller. Fortunately for Raether, which includes elements of thriller and science fiction (in the most general ‘what-if?’ sense), Amazon will let you file your book under multiple categories.

Amazon will also let you associate keywords with your book. These are invisible to customers but not to Amazon’s search engine, which may use them when a customer isn’t searching for a particular book but is in the market for a story with a ‘strong female lead’ or ‘dystopian fiction for adults.’  You only get to assign seven keywords to your book in KDP’s self-publishing system, but you can use many more in an advertising campaign. Picking keywords starts with your own ideas as to what readers might be looking for when they don’t yet know they want to read your book. You should test your ideas by searching for them on Amazon and seeing if your book fits in with the rest of the results. Alternately, tools like PublisherRocket will mine Amazon for you. This process may result in additional insights regarding similar books and authors.

With the right categories and keywords, you can, in theory, become visible to readers. If some of them buy, enjoy, and rate/review your book, the odds of it creeping up the sales ranks improve.

Finding your book’s Facebook friends

Your friends read your book because they are interested in you. Who is inclined to be friends with your book? Advertising on Facebook is a test of how accurately you can describe your ideal reader. What age range do the fall in? What educational level do they have? What interests do they pursue? Those interests can be genres (categories), authors, or specific books. They can also be medieval Scotland or space exploration. Facebook will use its creepy insights into strangers’ lives to target your ad without those strangers having expressed a desire to buy a book about a medieval Scotsman travelling to Mars. On the plus side, you can reach readers who didn’t know they wanted a book like yours. On the downside, they may not be in the market because their to-read stack is already full, thank-you-very-much.

Organic crops are labor-intensive.

I confess that I harbored a ridiculous fantasy. I told myself it was nonsense but deep down I hoped that I’d tell two friends and they’d tell two friends, and the miracle of exponential growth would popularize my book by word-of-mouth. 100% organic success. I wouldn’t have to work for it and could put all my energy into the next project. This didn’t happen. Duh. Not that my friends let me down. They helped me and my book with generous plugs and the book launch was much stronger for their contributions. I am heartened and thankful.

The book marketing coaches say that authors—and new authors in particular—benefit from being recognized contributing members of bookish communities. If readers (and writers, who are also passionate readers) know who you are, you’re not some unknown author to them. If you’ve entertained, enlightened, or encouraged them, they already value what you write. This needs to be a long-term relationship. You can’t just parachute in, flood the zone, and pitch your book.

As someone who burned out on the dramas and politics of online communities before many people knew such things existed, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make this work.

Another approach is to build an author platform. Make yourself known as an interesting person. Your platform can consist of a blog, a podcast, a Facebook page, general recognition of your expertise, all of these, and more. Having earned an audience in this other domain, you have potential readers who will trust you when you say, “Hey, gang, I’ve got a book coming out. I think you’ll like it.”

Having a platform is critical to non-fiction authors. It answers a reader or publisher’s first question: “Who is this person and why should I care what they think?” Having a platform works for new fiction authors who can say something like: “If you’ve enjoyed my articles on medieval Scotland, check out new novel. It’s set in medieval Scotland.” Established fiction authors have their prior work to build their platform on.

As someone whose labored in obscure bowels of tech behemoths until recently, this platform thing has a chicken-and-egg flavor to it. Building the platform entails the same work as marketing my book.

Experiment

So far, my experiments have all been baby steps.

Raether Zero

The simplest Amazon ad campaign you can run is to set automatic targeting. Amazon will use your categories, keywords and whatever secret sauce seems appropriate. If a customer clicks on the ad, you pay for the click based on a bidding range you set. My automatically targeted campaign named Raether Zero generated 7,780 impressions (it was shown to that many customers), 7 clicks, no sales, and had cost me $15.85 by the time I turned it off and scratched my head. The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) was low and the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) was high. This can be attributed to poor placement or a bad ad. The problem is that the ad is the book cover and a short bit of text. I’m committed to the cover and will need to scratch my head some more to improve the tiny blurb the ad allows you to work with.

Raether’s Kindred Books

The next experiment involved targeting the ad at two books I think are related my story. Raether overlaps in style, setting, and plot elements with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. Raether’s dystopian aspects and concern with a young woman losing claim to her body relate it Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Perhaps readers interested in these successful books would show an interest in my unknown novel. 11,202 impressions, 16 clicks, no sales, and $10.73 later, the answer appears to be no. Again, it may be that the ad doesn’t cut it. It may be that the book itself, as reflected in the cover and short blurb, doesn’t appear to be relevant.

Rocket 1

After pouring through How to Market a Book and Amazon Decoded, I decided to revisit my book’s categories and keywords and build a new campaign with a longer list of keywords and targeted books. PublisherRocket was my friend here. It allowed me to quickly test new keyword candidates, explore the categories of related books, and cross-reference books, keywords, and categories. I launched Rocket 1 and turned it off after 2,819 impressions. Most of the keywords were generating no or few impressions. There were only two clicks. Back to the drawing board. I may start it up again after revisiting the ad blurb and fortifying the book’s page.

The first one’s free…

Facebook kindly offered me a $10 credit to apply to advertising for my page. I had prepared an ad based on the assets supplied by my designer prior to launch, so taking Fb up on this offer was easy. I set up a (crude) audience profile and pointed the ad at Raether’s page here on my blog. Seven hundred or so impressions later I had not one nibble. This could be my ad. Or the imprecision of my audience profile. Or both. Or neither. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I am deeply ambivalent about Facebook. I enjoy seeing the good things my friends and family choose to share. I understand that employing programmers and keeping the servers running costs money and that Facebook needs to make that money somewhere. It makes it by selling advertising opportunities based on its creepy insights into its users’ likes and lives. And that bugs me on a gut level. I haven’t made peace with engaging with the ads they show me. Does it make sense—is it even right—for me, with my attitudes, to pay them to insert my ads into strangers’ feeds? I haven’t solved this conundrum, so I’ve been ignoring Facebooks endless notifications about how I can improve traffic to my page with their ads. A $20 credit with my next $10 of ad spending is generous, but I don’t want to give them my credit card number.

I must move past these blocks if I’m going to use Facebook advertising. I’m told it can be quite effective.

Fail

I cannot correlate any of my advertising experiments with a single sale of my novel. Bummer.

If at first you don’t succeed…

Repeat

I plan learn more about modern indie book marketing and experimenting with these channels and others. I expect I’ll fail again. And again. And I’ll repeat the process as needed. I owe it to my book and that’s what one does on Marketing Monday.

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