I’ve been doing some soul-searching for the past month and I want to share my results. My apologies to the TL;DR crowd, but this one’s going to take a while.
This month I sprang for some job search coaching from an outfit called Work It Daily. The package came with a free month of email coaching and unlimited access to several online video courses centered around such things as resumes, interview prep, personal branding, networking, and more.
My coach showed me how to rework my resume and LinkedIn profile and create what they call a disruptive cover letter. This alone was worth the price of admission, and I’m eager to see if it nets me any interviews. I’ve applied for a few remote and freelance content writer positions since revamping all of my materials, but it’s too early to tell.
Anyway, I was talking things over with my wife, aka She Who Must Be Obeyed, and I’ve decided it’s time to focus on my writing and publishing and just retire from my current day job when the time comes. This July will mark my 21st year with the company, so it’ll be here soon enough. And I want to have some padding for our income so I don’t have to go be a door greeter at Walmart. At least, that’s the plan.
It’s a tactical decision based on all of the ageism and passive-aggressive B.S. that has become de rigeur in job searching since around two recessions ago. Somewhere between “read my lips” and “covfefe” job-searching became exactly like Tinder dating, with all of the ghosting and dealing with casual narcissists and sociopaths that that entails. And I’m at an age where I’m out of fucks and don’t have the patience for that nonsense anymore. Companies and corporate taskmasters want to eat their cake and have it too. They want us to have done the work they need on our own for months or years for free to show our “passion” and that we’re not just about a paycheck, while also drilling into us that every second of our lives should be monetized and driving up rents. They won’t hire anyone over 40 but want everyone to work until they’re 70. Suffice it to say I’m done.
So, let me rub my hands together like a supervillain who has the hero hanging by his toenails over a vat of hungry piranhas and divulge my entire evil scheme:
A Quarterly Schedule
I know. I’ve said this before, but I’m doubling down. A few months back I replaced my two-month dry-erase wall calendar with a three-month dry-erase wall calendar. Three months feels a lot easier to keep track of and doesn’t feel as constrained as a monthly schedule, which was making me feel frantic and desperate. There’s never enough time in a single month to do everything you want to do, but three months feels just right.
Now if I can just stick to it. I’m focusing on shorter works–stories and novellas–for now to get into the swing of things.
Kickstarter for Book Launches
This one comes next because, if all goes according to plan, each quarter will culminate in a Kickstarter campaign for whatever big project I worked on that quarter. It’s going to be a challenge to get out book series and trilogies that way, but for single projects, it’s perfectly doable. I don’t think quarterly Kickstarters will oversaturate my market, and the money can be used for the covers and Amazon ads. To date I have run four Kickstarters, the last three of which were successful, and the last two of which were fully funded within 24 hours. I’m not making Brandon Sanderson, Russell Nohelty, or Michael J. Sullivan money. At least not yet. But anything at this point is a welcome start and helps me keep things running.
Going Wide
Putting one’s books into Kindle Unlimited is no longer the magic button that it once was. KU page reads are going down across the board, and I never made that much from them anyway. So in the coming months, I’m going to be pulling all of my titles out of KU and going wide with them, putting them into other stores like Draft2Digital. I’m also going to be playing around with IngramSpark now that they’ve done away with their book setup fees. At the very least, I might use them for my pre-release Kickstarter books.
Kindle Vella
I’ve been intrigued by serialized fiction for quite a while now, and Amazon’s platform for publishing serialized stories looks intriguing and fun. I’ll still serialize longer stuff for my patrons on Patreon, but it’ll go here next, provided it’s of the right length. It’s simply another avenue, another outlet, another potential audience I might not otherwise reach.
Patreon
I truly believe that subscription models are the future of damn near everything. I’ve already been on Patreon for a couple of years (see my hyperlink above), and I want to focus on building it up. I’m doing pretty well for the few subscribers I have, but I want to do so much better.
To that end, I’m reading up on the platform and looking at successful Patreons for ideas of what I can offer or do better to drive more subscribers to my page there. I post weekly updates and free stories and ebooks as I have them, but I’m always on the lookout for suggestions and new ideas.
Segmenting My Mailing List
Kristine Kathryn Rusch recently reported that she segments her mailing list by series and I thought, what a great idea! The conventional wisdom says to build up a ginormous email list with thousands of names and email addresses, and the law of averages will lead to maybe a couple thousand of them buying from you. But that’s if you’re writing quality books and doing a good job of converting them into customers. If your signup consists of a free Kindle giveaway, then you’ve got a huge list of folks who only wanted the Kindle and don’t care about you or your books at all.
Plus, all those names cost money to host. And if they’re not buying anything from you…well, you get the idea. It’s better to have a smaller, responsive list of a thousand or so true fans who buy almost everything you write than fifty-thousand folks who only signed up on the off chance they’d win an iPad.
What that means for me is that moving forward, I will need to segment my list as I put new things out, especially if I can write a trilogy or series that becomes popular with a lot of people. Just because they like my space opera books doesn’t mean they’ll plunk down coin for my Kris Kringle: Monster Hunter stories. And vice versa. List segmentation. It’s where it’s at.
Conventions?
This one has a question mark because I’m not sure if or how much this will become a factor in my business moving forward. I’ve already been turned down for three shows (a couple of them multiple times) that I’ve attended as a guest in the past, so I think relying on them for part of my income at this point is haphazard at best. Conventions have always been a bit of a Catch .22 for me anyway. I don’t go to enough to build brand recognition, so I don’t go to many of them because I don’t have brand recognition. It’s hard to justify the expense, especially for out-of-town cons, when I might not sell many if any books. They sure are fun, though, and I’ll be at Dragon Con as per usual. I won’t be able to participate in the Friday Night Fantasy Gather, but I will get some signing time after a panel in the Horror Track and will bring a few titles to have on hand. It’s not ideal but it’s better than nothing, and Dragon Con is not a con where I want to be stuck behind a table all weekend.
Nonfiction
My first paying writing work was for nonfiction. I’ve worked as a freelance copywriter and currently have a blogging client, so it has always been my fallback strategy when all else turns pear-shaped. I don’t see any reason to quit cold turkey, and as I have ideas for stuff I’ll crank them out. I’m currently working on a nonfiction book about multiple income streams for authors. We’ll see what else I can come up with, but fiction is the main focus.
Short Fiction
Short fiction is a tougher sell than it used to be. From the 1930s and into the 80s there were hundreds of magazines catering to every taste. Now there are less than a handful. But with self-publishing, we now have another avenue for our short stories, whether we successfully place them in a magazine or not. We can put out single stories ourselves as an ebook, give them away to our patrons, or slap a bunch of them into a collection and publish that. And getting your story in a magazine is basically like free advertising they pay you for, which could lead to other opportunities.
So I’m trying to work in as much short fiction as I can. They’re not as time-consuming as a novel and make for a nice palette cleanser in between larger projects.
Signature Series
A signature series is a particular series an author becomes known for. Think Dune or Foundation. The problem is, we don’t know what is going to be a hit with readers, and we can’t know. Something we put a great deal of thought, planning, and worldbuilding into might sink like a stone with barely any notice, while something we wrote in an afternoon on a lark becomes a fan-favorite bestseller that has movie producers hounding you for the film rights. You can’t plan for it. You can only endeavor to write the best book you can with the best that is in you at the time and hope for the best. That’s what I’ll be doing.
Playing the Long Game
As Uncle Chuck Wendig once so famously put it, writing is a long game, not a short con. I’m OK with retiring from my current employer even though it can best be described as an amalgam of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Hee-Haw. I don’t need this stuff to pay off tomorrow. I don’t need my next book to sell three thousand copies on the first day (although that would be nice). This is a long game I’m playing. I’m not selling books so much as building a big backlist by the time I retire.
Yearly Anthologies
I said after League of Monsters I wasn’t going to do any more anthologies. The editing and production time takes away from writing. But I also said that after I finished up The Complete Monster Earth. And after I finished up War of Monster Earth. And Betrayal on Monster Earth. And…you get the picture. But they’re fun, and I keep getting ideas for them. So you’ll probably see maybe one a year from me going forward, more or less.
Podcasting?
Fortunately, I know a fuck-ton of podcasters, so I know the kind of work that goes into creating them. I don’t have the time to devote to my own podcast right now, but it will become a possibility once I retire. I’ll be co-hosting one later this summer that I can’t talk about just yet, but I won’t be producing it. And I can still take advantage of appearing on a few shows here and there.
Taking Care of Myself
I put this one dead last but it’s arguably the most important and must be done concurrently with everything else, riding herd on all the others. I need to lose some weight for medical reasons and to be able to keep doing this for as long as possible. Going to cons, especially Dragon Con, kicks my ass every year, and I’m tired of it. The older we get–the older our stupid meat suits get–the more health should be made a priority.
The Future?
Who knows what the future will bring? My wife and I might travel the country in an RV, making money from our YouTube channel about the RV life while I continue to write and publish. We might also be fighting for our lives inside a totalitarian nightmare that makes The Handmaid’s Tale look like a day at the zoo. Or trading barbs with our sentient octopus allies inside the last mushroom city. Or hanging by our collective toenails over a vat of hungry piranhas.
But whatever the future holds, I’m ready to embrace it, grabbing it by the hair if necessary. I hope you are too. No one knows what the future holds. But I have a plan, and that’s enough for now.