Self-Publishing Strategy and a New Project Maybe (Patreon)

Hi all,

This is a bit different from my normal essays. Today, I'm sharing some of my behind-the-scenes thoughts about where I am right now as an author. It's less a business essay and more a condensation of the type of conversations I've had with writer friends at the bar at ConFusion or online in the past couple of months. 

So here's your peek behind the curtain:

I've been working on a Big Thinky SF novel, which is currently on my agent's desk in a very early partial form to discuss soon. If my agent likes what I've been doing and we both decide that the concept has legs, it will probably be the next novel I write. I'm excited and intimidated by the project, which is kind of new and definitely scary. I want to keep growing as a writer, but I'm also a little leery of writing something so far outside of my comfort zone. Which is why I wrote the small partial and will be talking it through with my agent.

One of the results of the Big Thinky SF being so taxing to work on is that my brain set itself to finding a distraction via contrast. Aka "I've been working hard, give me candy now!" Which for me means "Let's write something fun and breezy and filled with action and banter."

I've been studying what's up and working in the self-publishing space, and one of the things I returned to was the idea of writing to market to maximize your chances of success in self-publishing.

Writing to market gets a bad reputation from a number of sources. And when you're talking about traditional publishing, I think it makes a fair bit of sense. If I started a novel today writing with the current market in mind, managed to get it done and revised by June, and then went on submission via my agent, we might have a deal by September or October, and the book might come out 15 to 18 months after that.

By then, there's a very good chance the market will have moved on.

In self-publishing, you can act a lot faster. I could do more revision and production work on that novel done in June, the publish the book in August. Only 6 months after the evaluation of the market. And there are writers that can draft a full novel in much less time than even the fast time-frame I give above.

Even that still might be slow enough for micro-trends to have shifted.

But not every part of the market changes all at once, and not everything changes at the same speed. And while the self-publishing part of the book marketplace overlaps with the larger book market in terms of trends, there are some differences. If Space Opera is hot, it will probably stay some version of hot longer than a few months, at least in a broader sense if not the sense of "10 of the top 20 books on all of Kindle are Military SF this month" (just a made-up example).

Here's what I did to find a happy overlap between a project I'd be excited to write and one that could have good commercial prospects. I thought about the sub-genres that I both love to write and think about and am confident that I can write well and write quickly.

I looked at those sub-categories on Amazon to see which sub-genres had strong sellers in the top 20 of that category but where books 80-100 in that same category were also selling strong, but not so strong it'd be impossible to break in to the category charts.

My method was adapted from Chris Fox's book Write to Market, which I read last year. If this idea is interesting to you, check out that book, though be aware that *a lot* of people have used it lately, so it's likely to be less effective than when he first published the book.

This process gave me a few options, and from those, I chose the one I was most excited to write *at that very moment*. Which was superheroes.

I've already written a superhero novel (Shield & Crocus), and I'm proud of what I did with that book, combining the supers genre with the new weird and using each genre's positive aspects to address what I saw as the downsides or limitations of the other. However, my writing has changed and grown quite a bit since it was published almost five years ago. And I still have more things to say about the superhero genre. 

Reading Batman: White Knight sealed the deal for me. That book introduced cool ideas that build on the growing criticism about aspects of the Batman character that are troubling, but it didn't go far enough or in quite the right direction for me (your mileage may vary).

Looking back at my career, a number of my projects have come from reading or watching something and thinking to myself "That was interesting, but it needed X" or "That's bullshirt. You're wrong, and I'm going to prove it."

This is a part of what people mean by talking about speculative fiction as The Long Conversation.

Since I have a novel to edit and another project already underway and still want to work on Genrenauts, I'm not sure if/when I'll actually get to writing this supers project, but it's been a fun break to think about what I want to say with a new supers idea, from the thematic/conceptual aspects to considering lessons about structure that I've taken from working on Born to the Blade at Serial Box.

The micro-trends may have changed by the time I get to this superhero idea, but that's honestly okay. I have a lot of things to say about the superhero genre, and it's very hard to publish superhero comics to any substantial market outside the Big Two. And the Big Two (Marvel and DC) are invested in keeping the supers genre within certain thematic and content bounds. They are the establishment, and a lot of what I have to say about supers doesn't necessarily fit in that model.

Superhero fiction has had a hard time selling above a certain level in prose, but that level is still high enough to make a decent commercial prospect, especially in self-publishing. I'm not in a place where I have to be purely mercenary in my selection of writing projects, but I would like to get to a point where I'm making a decent living from my fiction - to save for retirement, take cool trips with Meg, and so on. So I'm trying to find those overlap spaces between my creative interests, my capabilities as a writer, and where the market presents opportunities. It's a process, and an imprecise one, with lots of reflection and adjustment and rolling with the punches.

The other big factor in determining what projects I work on will be time management. Can I work on the Big Thinky SF and revise the space opera and work on something all back and forth over the course of this year? 

Only time will tell.