Observation on the Business of Writing

First, I sent off my submission to Cirsova. Fingers crossed. Eyeing a few others that do short stories, so I'll see to sending them something in the near future.

Now, I've been following Nick Cole and Russel Newquist's blogging about the business side of writing, and Russel in particular has had quite a bit to say on marketing yourself and your wares as of it. His most recent post confirmed what I'd suspected for some time, that this is as much (if not more) art than science, and as such I've taken to thinking about how I'm going to go about this thing.

The "do a series" thing keeps showing itself as valid, so that's on the table. Not writing fucking obese tomes of filler is also on the table. I have one manuscript ready for revision into a series, and the new giant robot stories are meant to be a series also; the idea being to come up with stuff that's evergreen for me, and easily forkable should the audience attach itself to something or someone that I did not expect. I'm planning for the unexpected.

But the thing that keeps coming back to me is that novels need to return to the short lengths that they had before the Big 5 had its brains eaten by the first wave of SJWs and suddenly book lengths got fatter than George R.R. Martin. 40-60,000 words is more than enough to tell a complete novel-length story, as Michael Moorcock demonstrated back in his heyday, and as the primary means of book-selling is now digital (be the book itself in print or not), shelf space (the excuse for the fat fucking folios) is not at issue anymore. There's no good reason to not write a lean manuscript. So that's what I'm aiming for. Good enough for Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, so good enough for me.

Time to get on with the outlining.