Year of an Indie Writer: Week 4

By
Scott D. Parker

One of the best things about being independent is the ability to change on the fly.

BLOG POST TO READ

Ever since I read this post by Dean Wesley Smith, “No One Cares,” I’ve been giving it some thought. It’s churned around in my brain, off and on, for two weeks now. And it’s allowed me the freedom to change—potentially—my publishing schedule for the year.

What I’ve said from New Year’s Day on is that this is the year of Calvin Carter. Yes, I will be publishing at least the five novels I’ve already written. Each of these six books will be published on the odd-numbered months. EMPTY COFFINS on New Year’s Day. HELL DRAGON on 1 March.

But what y’all didn’t know is my plan for the even-numbered months. I had a whole other schedule planned out.
What I realized this week—early on, actually—was that I wasn’t ready for 1 February. At least, not for a novel.

So I’m preparing a couple of short stories. They are modern crime fiction featuring a character named Anne Chambers. She’s a homicide detective for the Houston Police Department. One of the stories was originally published as part of Do Some Damage’s COLLATERAL DAMAGE anthology (2011). The latter was originally published at David Cranmer’s Beat to a Pulp blog. Now, they are paired together in a short collection.


In other words, when you are an independent writer and publisher and you haven’t made public your schedule, you can do whatever you want...because your company is agile.

ALWAYS LEARNING - INSTAGRAM

I’m a member of Western Fictioneers, a writing group dedicated to western fiction. I’ve been a member since the group’s founding in 2009. We are a great group of folks who read each other’s works and collectively promote western stories and books.

We also help each other figure out how to promote our stuff and share marketing techniques. No matter how your stories are published, you simply must do the lion’s share of your own promotion. It is a constant learning process. For some, this process can be frustrating. For me, it’s a challenge, but one I actually enjoy. As much as I would love for there to be a “set it and forget it” solution, there simply isn’t one.

Which circled me back to Instagram this week.

I’ve been on Instagram for a few years now, but did nothing other than follow a graphic designer friend of mine, Mark Hamill, Neal Adams, and Kevin Smith. But after reading an internal Western Fictioneers email thread, I’m turning back to Instagram. I even uploaded my first...post? What do you call individual Instagram posts? Who knows? But I did it. And I plan on doing it more often in 2019.

Follow me on Instagram here. And if you’re of a mind, follow S. L. Matthews.

DEAL OF THE WEEK...AND ANOTHER LESSON

Do Some Damage alumnus, Kristi Belcamino, has a terrific deal.

I’ve subscribed to her newsletter for a few years now. She has forged ahead as an independent author and she is rocking it. She’s got her newsletter, her Facebook group, and her video channel where she talks about books, her own works, and the utterly charming “Coffee Talk Puppy Talk” series. You should subscribe to her channel. She’s at 95 subscribers as of yesterday. Let’s get her to 100 this week.

She’s got six books in her Gia Santella Crime Thriller series. With those six books, she has lots of options for promoting and selling them. And as of today, you can get all six books...for $0.99.

A dollar! Six books. Are you kidding me? You should buy that on principle. It’s a remarkable deal. Over 1,000 pages of crime fiction. And, as of today, she ranks as #1 in her fields. That’s how you marshal your books to your advantage.

If you are not following Kristi, you should. She’s a leader in what you can do as an indie writer.
Website
YouTube

ALBUM OF THE WEEK

I’ve got an early favorite for my song of the year.

When it comes to melodic hard rock and metal, Frontiers Music is leading the charge at keeping legacy acts in the public eye while showcasing new artists. To start 2019, they have a free sampler when you join their email list. It’s a list of twelve tracks by bands I’ve never heard of (save one: One Desire).With a hashtag of #RockAintDead, how can you go wrong?

You can't.

If you like hard rock with a melodic edge, go now to this site, sign up, and download this music. It is really, really good. How good? There’s not a bad song on this sampler. And how about this: I’ve already purchased two albums by artists featured on the sampler. One Desire’s self-titled debut and ALL RISE, an album by the band Perfect Plan. Both of these bands sit right in that wonderful pocket of taking old songs and styles and making them their own.

It is “In and Out of Love” by Perfect Plan that I find myself singing while washing dishes or folding laundry. Want to hear it?


That’s the update for Week 4 of 2019.

How has your 2019 been going?

Bundy's Back, Baby

Awhile back the sparse details of the Zac Efron fronted Ted Bundy move came out and I wrote a little about my concerns here at DSD. Reading that, you may have thought I had no intention of giving the movie a fair pass, but the trailer came out today and...

Fuck me, it actually looks good. Like, really good. The title is still absolutely stupid, but I'm a little excited to see this. My big concern with the movie is the same thing that excites me - and its that it's going to show Bundy as the charmer, the loving boyfriend and father figure. On the one hand, stuff like this can serve a purpose. Elizabeth Kloepfer probably stayed up nights wondering how she let this man into her life, into her daughter's life. People in the circle of monstrous criminals are often saddled with an unfair guilt. I like the idea of showing how even the people Bundy was kind and loving to were victims.

What I don't like is the uncomfortable knowledge that, as I predicted in the first post, this will almost certainly revive the Ted Heads. Ted Bundy fan girls have existed from the moment he was arrested. Everything from women who believed his innocence to women who were seduced by the knowledge he was a killer. The younger Ted Heads bother me on a deeper level though. He's been dead longer than most of the young women who see the movie because Zac Efron is hot and it looks entertaining have been alive. He'll be a character like Joe on Netflix's YOU. While everyone was writing think pieces about whether  its okay to have a crush on the character, the main element was often forgotten. Joe is a character. He's not real, his crimes never happened, and his victims didn't exist. Ted Bundy is real. People affected by his crimes are real. The little girl in the movie, that he raised as his own daughter - she's real. 

I don't have a profound statement to make on why that should matter to the masses, and it's definitely not a call to pass on the film (I'm going to see it), but I'd like it so much if we started treating true crime a little more carefully. 

Newsletters and podcasts, revisited

By Steve Weddle

I don't know how you ingest your news. How could I? I know so little about you.

As you may know, we have a podcast called "7 Minutes With," in which we chat about the big screen, the small screen, and music. (sevenminuteswith.com)

If you have listened -- or haven't -- and have some ideas about what you'd like in the next season, please let me know, either her or via your email machine.

We've had various other podcasts in the past, a series in which three of the OG -- Russel and Dave and Jay (all gone) -- chatted about Doctor Who.

We've also done many, many interview with author podcasts.

One of the ways we fed that out to folks was through RSS, via Google Reader, also gone.

In my own life, since you were wondering, I've replaced Google Reader with Feedly.

Feedly instead exactly the way you want to consume your podcasts, of course.  Feedly is one of the two big ways I get my news. Email newsletters are the other.

If you're a reader, you might subscribe to authors' newsletters. For all I know, you might read some of them. As I've said, I know so little about you, which is fine.

Feedly aggregates news for you, and many folks went over there when Google Reader died.

If you want to have the morning (or evening) newspaper delivered to you, you might want to use an aggregator such as Feedly.

Of course, you might want to get your news via Facebook and Twitter. Who knows about you?

In Feedly, you pick your sources and the feeds are refreshed throughout the day, peppering you with all the news from io9 and hacker2600 and the Los Angles Book Review and whatever else you want. Your mileage may vary, of course.

That's the way I get a couple dozen new sources into my brain mass throughout the day. You probably do something similar.

But let's get back to newsletters. We joke about author newsletters -- and not without reason. The publishing world thinks authors will be more successful with a large newsletter base. They think authors will be successful if they have a name for their fans. Sweeties. My Darlings. Weddle's wankers. Whatever. Mary Oliver's Army. Who knows about such things? They think authors will be successful if authors push out reading schedules and edit updates and little person tidbits about the author. Someone decided that if readers see that authors are real people, the author can sell more books, making the author another dollar per sale and the publisher another nine dollars. Isn't publishing wonderful? Why did you purchase the new novel by Anne McAuthorface? Well, she's been sharing these videos of her and her cat and I love cats. Yes, that makes perfect sense. Wonderful plan. Keep it up.

from this morning's Axios newsletter

Warren Ellis, for example, has an amazing "author newsletter." You can read a sample here. While he might talk about his own writing, he more often talks about his own reading. Or listening.

There's more to life than just author newsletters, of course.

In addition to using Feedly more for news, I've been getting a good deal of my news through newsletters. Chances are that your favorite news source already has at least a half-dozen newsletters available. I get the Axios newsletter, delivered between 6 and 7 eastern (US) each morning. I dig the Washington, DC news, and this is a good source to start with. They've added a sports one this month, as well. Casey Newton over at The Verge does a good tech newsletter, which you might like if you like things like that. NY Mag also offers a number of newsletters. I've found the Intelligencer to be perfectly readable.

I have a few rules for email newsletters.

1. I use a dummy email account to receive the newsletters, and have them forwarded to my main email account. That keeps them segregated, so that I can easily locate just newsletters, as opposed to updates from LinkedIn and Indeed, which otherwise dominate my main email account, much like a CVS receipt. Also, this keeps my main email address out of the hands of those who might monetize spam.

2. If I skip reading two in a row of any newsletter, I unsubscribe. This is for much the same reason I give up on a novel if I'm not grabbed after 20 pages.

3. I delete the newsletter immediately after I've read it. It's still in my email trash for six days if I want to go back and remind myself of something, but it's best to keep my email inbox down to zero.

I was going to tell you about some podcasts I'm enjoying at the moment, such as Dan & Eric Read The New Yorker So You Don't Have To, but I've lost interest in my own nonsense. Maybe you have, too. I don't know what your tolerance is. How could I?