Work continues on Book Two.
The paperback for Reavers comes next month.
I will post excerpts from the draft manuscript in the coming weeks as previews, with the caveat that these are Works In Progress and may be very different in the published version.
ArtAnon has been in touch. When there's more art to share, I shall.
Dragon Award winner and nominee Brian Niemeier (and my editor) put this out on Twitter today.
There are 2 main challenges facing content creators who dissent from woke media.
— Brian Niemeier (@BrianNiemeier) July 21, 2019
1. Creating high quality alternative content.
2. Exposure.
He goes on to talk about the necessity to read the people who could be part of our respective audiences, but haven't found us yet. In short, visibility and discoverability. In both respects, these are issues of marketing that most of us as authors are ill-equipped and ill-mannered to handle without going through some painful shifts of mindset. These are also issues that are too big for any one of us to handle by ourselves, despite some of us trying valiantly to do so (and to far better success than you'd think), so we have to get over this atomization and come together to be a team.
This is going to involve reaching out to people who are not authors, not publishers, not even in the business we're in at all. Instead they're in the businesses that get to those unaware audiences, but are already friendly to us for one reason or another; they're our readers, our friends, interested allies intervening for their own reasons, etc. Maybe they're celebrities with compatible followings (e.g. Adam Baldwin, Dean Cain), or they're connected to a bigger media outlet looking for fresh material (Bandai, esp. your team for Super Robot Wars, looking at you). Artists looking for clean material for their portfolios mutually benefit by working with us to make covers, posters, etc. for our properties- and I know as well as you do how often people do judge by the cover alone.
Fortunately we have the means to brainstorm how to go about this in real time now, try solutions, see what works, and then implement working solutions quickly. Let's get to it.
I have an appearance on the Superversive Livestream on August 11th. Jim Fear will have me on when he's ready to resume his podcast. That, along with loreposting on the main blog, is all I've been able to do for now to keep the word out. Working with a budget of zero, and no expertise, this is what I have to work with for now so I have to make the most of it. Time is split between working on the book and learning about the business.
At this point, I can't do much more than this. I don't have the means to do what even Brian Niemeier can do, nevermind Jon del Arroz, and until I get to the point where I can the best thing I can do to build the brand is to focus on maintaining a public presence and producing good product to the audience. I need to lean on my most loyal readers to tell others about my stuff because my reach is actually rather limited. I need to resume working on the newsletter, sending something out weekly.
On a related note, I will need to run another crowdfunding campaign this year. I'll be shamelessly copying the successful things Brian did with his, with the goal of financing the production--mainly, hiring Brian to edit--of Books Three onward. I will settle on the goals of the campaign in the next few weeks, but the aim here is to begin building up to the capacity to shamelessly copy Nick Cole's approach.
Galaxy's Edge co-creator Nick Cole appeared on The Business of Writing with Craig Martelle & Joe Solari on YouTube.
This channel on YouTube, along with the 20BooksTo50K channel, are good ones to subscribe to if you're looking for more on the business of writing fiction. Nick's interview here follows on to his well-known previous promulgation of his business model aimed at exploiting Amazon's automatic functions to maximize the machine's operations in his favor, revealing how he's refined the method since putting it into operation.
Long story short, I'm not in the position necessary to make the fullest use of it at this time, nor will I for at least a year. It's where I will build to, not where I start from.
