I May Have a Reading Problem

Enemy Storm is available for preorder from Amazon. We should see more preorder links come available shortly. We all know the 'zon likes to beat everyone else to the punch. This is book three of the Chronicles of the Empire SFR series. Unlike Enemy Within (book one) and Enemy Games (book two) this one hasn't been published before now. Official release date is June 10. 

Reading

I love to read. Always have. I hope I always will. I love it enough that when I was in sixth or seventh grade, I made a pact with my best friend. We signed up for a speed reading course. We then spent several days in a cramped, dark room with a bunch of airmen learning to not subvocalize while we read. However, I have a pretty serious problem with reading, too. Once I start a book that's good, I don't stop. You know all those memes that go around about what kind of person you are based on how you mark you place in a book? I laugh. Cause I rarely need to mark my place in a book. I read. And read. And read. To the detriment of sleep. And chores. I will grudgingly get up to feed the cats and scoop their boxes. But other than that, the rest of the world can just take care of itself for the few hours it's going to take me to get through whatever I'm reading. 

So I try to save reading for rewards. I finish writing a novel, I get to binge read a book or three. I'm like most other people are with Netflix series. Don't get me wrong. A book has to hit my reader buttons in order to merit that kind of attention. A book either makes me turn pages like a freak, or I DNF. There is some gray area in there, but it's not much. Life is too short to finish meh books. The biggest fun I get to have is beta reading other writer's books. Second to that, is finding an author whose writing lights me up. I really don't care what the genre is. Right now, I'm still reading my way through all of the new-to-me, under-represented authors who were promoted in the midst of the last RWA crisis. Some have been really good, and some have not been my cup. But that's the way with everything, I feel. At least I'm still reading. When I'm not on deadline.

What book have you read that surprised you into liking it? (My example - I thought I would hate To Kill a Mockingbird because we *had* to read it for school. Ended up loving it. What's yours?)

TBR

TBR (noun): to be read. 

The entity that is the TBR comes in various forms. There’s the TBR list; which some keep in spreadsheets, some use Goodreads, and others *gasp* keep a list in their mind. There’s also the TBR pile. Piles really, because honestly, where there’s one there’s certainly more. You can also toss in the TBR stack, TBR shelf, and TBR cart.

Currently, I have 1,278 books on my Goodreads TBR list, 57 in my physical TBR stacks around the house, 6 waiting in my Kindle’s TBR queue, and 1 in my TBR-carry-along, aka my purse.

Clearly, I have a book hoarding problem. But that’s not the topic of the week, this week it’s all about reading. 

Reading’s an escape, a hobby, a pastime, a chore. It’s a hundred other things that can change by the moment and is also a necessity if you’re an author. Yet, I see many writers posting comments that they don’t read. 

A writer who doesn’t read is like a movie producer who doesn’t watch TV or motion pictures, like a chef who never eats out. A writer who doesn’t read is like a marketer who never studies another’s successful launch, like a product engineer who never uses or tests another company’s items. A writer who doesn’t read will never be as great as they could be.

“If you don’t have time to read, 

you don’t have the time or the tools to write. 

Simple as that.” 

~Stephen King, On Writing

I’m addicted to reading, always have been. And when there's been too much time since cracking open a book I start to crave the escape. Yes, as a writer there are times you have to buckle down, editing cave anyone, and reading takes a backseat.  

Editing Cave (noun): a place where time and space are suspended. 

When one enters, they are unable to leave until such a time when they can produce a finished product. Warning; food and beverages that pass into the editing cave never return.

But after a time of famine you have to refill the well, as we’ve blogged about before, which you can read here, and binge on reading. Reading will stimulate the imagination. Reading will draw you down new paths you didn’t know you needed in your own writing. Reading will give you the mental break you crave after a trip to the editing cave.

I have a book hoarding problem, but I don’t merely collect them. I read them. One or five at a time, I read them, and sometimes re-read and re-read them. 

A romance gives melts my heart and makes me more cuddly. A fantasy leads me to the woods and lets me dream. A sci-fi takes my imagination places I’d never believed I’d find. A thriller makes my heart pound. A mystery makes my mind question and seek answers. And all of these allow me to see people through their eyes, to feel the agony of their lives, to understand what drives them and is important to them. 

Tell me, what have you been reading? Have you recently read something that gave you an ah-ha moment? Or maybe a book that took you away from your daily stress? 

Time to read but no brain for it

I used to think, if only I had more time to read, I'd cut a canyon through my to-be-read pile. (The metaphor works because it is and has long been a vast mountain of a thing.) Every time a book that checks all my boxes comes out I'm all, YAY and one-click it and get really excited... and then it goes on top of the mountain, often never to be seen again.

Part of the problem, or so I thought, was lack of time. But right now, stuck in my house all day, every day, and no things to drive my kids to or appointments for dogs or husband or moms or self or grocery shopping or errands of any kind, I kind of do have time.

I just don't have the brain for it.

Like, I keep pulling books off the top of the mountain and cracking them open with glee, and they keep being well-written and engaging, but I just. Can't. Focus. I can't care. I surreptitiously side-peek at a news story or a think piece about the new normal or the endless Twitter feed of people freaking out.

I check my email.

I do the taxes.

But this week, I had a mini-breakthrough. My kids have a reading assignment for remote-learning school, and they have to sit down and read books for the project. Like, literally, butts in chairs, eyes on pages. So, in order to encourage this behavior, I told them I'd read with them. I started to reach for the peak of my mountain to pull down a much-longed-for piece of gooey fiction, but then I paused. Thought about it. And then grabbed a nonfiction book instead. To my surprise, it held my attention for hours. I zoomed through it, and for a little while, it was like old times, books and me, OTP.

So I'm thinking that's my strategy going forward. I'm on the lookout for nonfiction that can keep my attention off the news. Recs in comments, please!

Oh, and as a footnote, the topic of the book that brought me back to reading? The plague of 1347-1351. Because of course.

We get through this however we can, people.

The Reward Is Other People's Stories

Reading. As a writer, you should be doing a lot of that. Dirty secret? Once I started writing as a career, how much I read along with my storytelling expectations changed drastically. Once upon a time, my weekends were 3-book weekends, gleefully losing all concept of self and time in someone else's world. I didn't care about the style so much as I cared about the story.

These days, my reward for finishing a book I'm writing is a 3-book/300k binge of stuff not written by me and not in the genre of whatever I just finished writing. Like any bibliophile, I have stacks of TBRs. I employ a 3 chapter enjoyment test; if I'm not looking forward to chapter 4, I stop reading the book. It's taken me a long time to permit myself to DNF a book. I used to feel like I owed it to the characters to finish their story. Now I look at all the books I have yet to read, and figure I owe it to those characters to at least give them the chance to ensnare me.

Sometimes, when the words I need to write are being elusive, I turn to the graphic novels, comics, or illustrated stories to unstick my imagination and remind myself of the wonder waiting to be shared. Bite-sized tales give me a swift kick in the ass and scream "you can do it!" Novels pat the fluffy pillows and hand me a bourbon, whispering, "Congrats. You did it. Enjoy the escape. You've earned this."

Making Time to Read

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is reading! Do you set aside time for it each day? How do you decide what to read next?

Like most (all?) writers, I have always been a reader. My mom tells stories of me learning to read from Sesame Street when I was four, and how she stopped reading aloud to me before bed - a nightly ritual - because I started reading over her shoulder and correcting her mistakes.

So, yeah, I was one of THOSE kids. The ones whose parents yelled at them to get their nose out of the book and look around. The ones who carried their current book to class and snuck reading from it while the teacher was talking. The ones who read widely and deeply.

This continued into my adult life. My husband remarked once that he'd never known someone who read EVERY DAY. No matter how busy things got, I always got in some reading.

The only time this changed was when I began writing fiction.

For some reason, writing books took up the same space in my brain that reading books had occupied. At first I was kind of thrilled, because writing a book gave me the same joy and sense of enchantment that reading one had given me - and it lasted so much longer! And it was MINE! But then I began to see how dramatically my reading had dropped off - and I knew I had to fix that.

So, yes, I set aside time to read every day. At first it wasn't easy to rebuild the habit. I had to make myself observe that one hour of reading. It also took time to resume the habit of picking up my current read during spare moments. But now I read for usually a couple of hours every day.

As for how I decide what to read next? Any of you who've followed me for any length of time should know the answer to this! I have a spreadsheet, OF COURSE.

Author Finances - From Gold Rush to Tidal Wave to Steady State

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Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is writer finances and such issues as how do you budget for uneven income? What’s your biggest expense?

First, a little history. I sold my first book to Carina Press in late summer 2011 and Priestess of the Nile was published in January 2012. It obviously wasn’t the first book I ever wrote, but it sure was the first one I ever sold. I also self-published my first science fiction romance Wreck of the Nebula Dream in March 2012. At that stage of my career as an author, I was thrilled to have actually been published, to have readers and reviews, and to be able to say “I did it!” Lifelong dream of becoming published – realized.  I was immersed in my day job as NASA/JPL on the business side of the house and I knew next to nothing about the publishing or the self-publishing world. I was happy just being published.

My career path lay at NASA/JPL and I had no expectations as far as the books.

In 2013 Carina Press published the second and final book of mine that I would be doing for them and we amicably parted ways. I self-published a second scifi romance and started to believe hey, maybe I could chuck the day job (no offense to NASA/JPL) and be a fulltime writer. Day dreaming commenced...

2014 – self-published two more scifi romances, was much more involved in the online author world, had been to conferences (what a rush on so many levels), won several awards for my books, was contributing to the USA Today Happy Ever After blog and a few other places…the world was my oyster, I was sure. The day job, in an office dealing with contracts, audits and process improvement and the like was less and less what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be. I decided to go for the new dream. Serious planning ensued...

2015 – I left the day job to become a fulltime author. I had a best-selling scifi romance that went to number one in its category on Amazon.  I chaired a panel at a big conference…I thought I had it made and wow I was sure my decision was the right one.

Umm, guess what I was totally and blissfully unaware of? The whole ebook self-publishing situation was a gold rush and not only had I come into it at the tail end, the entire industry was about to be rocked by the tidal wave that was Amazon Kindle Unlimited (KU).

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Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written several excellent blog posts about the gold rush situation and the effects of KU, if you’d like to read them. Here’s the 2015 post and then a follow up in 2017 after a major outlet for indie ebooks (All Romance eBooks) had just gone out of business. According to KKR, the gold rush actually began tapering off in 2012 and pretty much crashed in 2015, when available content caught up to the demand and then KU hit. Note the amazing alignment to the fledgling career of yours truly.

One of her key points is that an indie author must stay flexible because the situation is always going to change. You have to adapt. You also have to write good books that the readers want to read.

So, to back up a bit and track to the original SFF7 topic for the week, in the beginning my day job salary supported the books. Even when I went fulltime as an author, I was still using my savings to support the writing. A big no-no by the way but I was naïve. I thought that was temporary and I could absorb the costs for a while and surely my royalties would skyrocket and cover everything. I might not ever become a J. K. Rowling with theme parks and movies but I’d be doing okay. Right?

I also blithely expected the arc of my writer career to be like the arc of a more classic career (the one I had at NASA/JPL), where each thing leads to a bigger thing, more responsibility, a better office and title and oh, more money. Well, the author world really doesn’t work that way for most of us, as it turns out.

I see you shaking your head and telling me I ought to have done a whole lot of intense and focused research before I jumped. Well okay, but it was a gold rush even if I didn’t know it and the mentality of the moment grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I have a tendency to succumb to magical thinking at the drop of a hat. It was the chance to live that glorious fulltime author dream life, people!  No more commuting on the freeways, no more staff meetings, no more scrutinizing of fine print in the tech specs for spacecraft… And I did do a certain amount of financial planning but I didn’t know what I didn’t know and I probably didn’t want to hear it anyway by then.

I had a LOT of fun though. I truly have no regrets about the choice I made to go fulltime as an author.

Things began to look brighter for my author career right on schedule in 2015 with that big hit, Star Cruise: Marooned, which is the book I mentioned above. My sales continued to be strong while a lot of other people’s sank. I think I got about three extra months of great royalties before the inevitable happened and the tidal wave hit me too. (Yes, we used to get 90 days of sales ‘lift’ from a new release – wow, those were the days. Now it’s a week, maybe.)

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Soooo….I began cutting back. And back. I stopped doing audio books. Too expensive and they didn’t earn out the costs for me. I quit going to conferences. I stopped doing the big pretty promo in magazines and on prestige romance sites. I cut back on some of the things I’d been spending time on that were so much fun but took away from the writing time (like being a TV blogger for USAT/HEA, recapping episodes for several scifi shows, interviewing the actors, etc.). “Does this pay the rent?” became my mantra. I made other adjustments in my personal life, including downsizing my living space. Out of necessity I also got more efficient at writing the books and had seven new releases in 2017, one of which was Aydarr, the first book in my very successful Badari Warriors scifi romance series. (Thank you, readers!).

The end of the gold rush really forced me to become much more serious that the writing was the thing. Plant myself in my chair and get the words onto the paper.

I have about forty books published at the moment, released 11 in 2019 alone. I was on track to do about the same this year until we all got hit with the pandemic. It’s proving to be hard for me to focus on writing in this stressful time, although I am managing about 1K a day on the new book. Thank goodness for the extensive backlist.

Amazon accounts for about 85% of my sales, although I remained ‘wide’, keeping my books at all the major ebook sellers, versus going into KU. I personally don’t like having all my eggs in one basket. Your mileage may vary. Amazon pays royalties every month, which does amazing things for me paying my bills, and the amount is from the sales 60 days ago. I check my dashboard every single day and monitor my royalties closely, so I can budget ahead and know pretty much what I’ll have to work with in two months’ time. It's a rolling balancing act.

Household expenses and bills come first, then the cost of the books. I set aside a fixed amount every month in the budget to cover certain book-related expenses. When I was writing on the 9 to 11 new books a year schedule, I knew what the monthly book-related income and expenses were going to be pretty reliably. Right now sales are down and since I’m not turning out books as rapidly (which could be a self-perpetuating loop because readers want new books but pandemic happening and my Muse is struggling…) it’s balanced out, although I am continuing to commission book covers. I know what my next few books will be and it helps incentivize me to write if I already have a gorgeous cover from Fiona Jayde to stare at.

My biggest expense is editing, followed by covers, with the formatting third. I’m not techy and can’t do my own formatting. I use the wonderful Formatting Fairies who work for Marie Force and they’re very calming to my anxiety and so helpful in general! Worth every penny.

(My high powered CPA is a once a year expense and I’m thrilled to pay that fee because I can sleep at night thanks to her, with no nightmares about the IRS.)

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I’m doing very little paid promo right now. I did just put my Badari box set on sale and paid for some promo this month in connection with that, plus generous author friends helped spread the word. The SFR community is a really good place to be, pretty supportive of each other.

I have a newsletter and a blog. I’m active on social media and in various author and reader groups for my genre. I write about scifi romance for several national outlets (USAT/HEA sadly is no more.) I don’t get paid for those posts, which I know many people say is a no-go but I feel the exposure to potential readers in the SFR genre is definitely worth the time I put in. You never know what other opportunity may arise because of a post going viral. And a big part of my efforts is always spreading the word about the entire SFR genre. I believe the more readers we have for our SFR novels, the better it will be for all of us who write them. Romance readers are wonderfully voracious!

I have a strategic plan, which I’ve been working to since 2015. I update it once a year and then review it every quarter and make changes as needed. It’s an important tool for me to stay flexible and to watch out for changes that I need to make in my thinking and my author activities to respond to the industry itself. It's the opposite of magical thinking but reassuring in its own way and  makes me feel more in control. I feel like I'm in a steady state right now as far as income and outgo but I need to get back to regular new releases pretty quickly and I'm counting on the readers to want more books in my various series.

The writing is the writing, thank goodness. Once I sit down and focus, the words flow and the stories tell themselves to me. If I can just keep myself from spending too much time staring in bug eyed disbelief at the news or going down social media rabbit holes – or binge watching TV shows and movies – I’ll be okay.

Always assuming the readers continue to enjoy the stories I offer!

Amazon     Apple Books     Kobo     Nook

Harsh Financial Realities

Author finances are, for me, a long series of wrenching trade offs. My balance sheet bleeds. I've been operating at a loss for enough years that I can no longer file with the IRS as an author. I've been relegated to hobbyist. Also, I've picked up a day job to help get the family through some of the current nonsense because there can never be enough employed people in a household during an economic downturn. At least I'm technical writing, I guess.

This all amounts to me having to make decisions about how and where I publish material based on cost. For the moment, that means that self publishing is out of my reach for the foreseeable future. Professional editors are worth their weight in gold. I prefer not to publish without an editor looking over my stories and calling me out on my bad habits. It's just I don't currently have the gold for that or for good cover art. That can all change at a moment's notice. But the more likely scenario is that I can change that with hard work and book releases. So I'll favor small presses (thank the heavens for The Wild Rose Press) and querying agents about getting back into traditional markets, maybe. Whether I like it or not, this is the way it is for now.

So what convinces me to part with my pinched pennies? Marketing. Low investment ads that allow me to play a long game to build an audience slowly as I finish up the SFR series this year. I committed the cash to join an authors' coop so I could learn from people who are out there in the trenches really doing a good job with marketing. They're being super generous with their knowledge. Learning new skills is always worth the money. Up to the point that you can't pay the mortgage, obviously, but so far that's not at risk. Knock wood.

I don't mean for any of this to come off as a complaint or a plea for any kind of sympathy. I want to be transparent. There are reasons people stop publishing. I won't because I can't. And I have just enough ego mingled with spite to keep throwing my pages out into the aether.

At least with most of the world on lock down, it's not like I'm missing conferences this year?

Y'all stay safe out there.

Writer Finances and the Myth that all Authors are Millionaires

When you’re start out in this crazy business you decide which publishing track is for you. 

There is:

Traditional - publishing with an established publisher (think Orbit, Tor, or Angry Robot)

Self-Publishing - publishing on your own without an established publisher

Hybrid-author - publishing both with an established publisher and independently

Sounds great! Right? Except you may, or at the very least nearly everyone you tell about your decision to be an author will, assume that means $$$.

So, how do you budget when you don’t have a clue about what you're facing? 

Very…carefully? 

I wrote my first novel in 2013, the one that earned me my Golden Heart in 2018. See that 5 year spread? There was a lot of internet searching and learning happening in that time because I knew I needed to decide what to do with the thing. 

Self-publishing in 2013-2014 had a bit of a stigma for being sub-par, but I checked it out anyway. I’m a laboratorian at heart, I can’t make big decisions without a detailed pro/con list. For information, I attended a couple small writer conferences and attended sessions targeted at traditional and self publishing. There’s so much to that that I could fill your screens for days, or you could check the archives of my fellow SFF Seven’s posts, there be goldmines there. And recently the Fantasy Inn did a great survey on self and traditional publishing, check it out here.

Jim C. Hines did a nice survey in 2010 about first novel deals and earnings. But in all the Publisher Weekly announcements there was cryptic wording on the deal amounts. Thankfully, the Nelson Literary Agency puts out an excellent newsletter and blog, a great follow if you’re in the trenches. Kristin Nelson shared deal-reporting lingo translation. 

Finally! A way to decipher those press releases and find out how much traditional authors make! 

*cue laughing*

Back in 2014-2015 I was enjoying a very successful career in the medical field and determined that the time needed to be successful at self-publishing wasn’t something I had. That left the traditional path, hybrid author really wasn’t a thing back then, and I needed even more info to formulate my ten year plan. 

You read that right, TEN YEAR PLAN. If you don’t have one, you should make one. Being an author is a long road, no matter which path you take. And planning is part of figuring out that elusive author finances.

My ten year plan was to have one book published within five years and subsequently two books per year after that which would allow me to retire from the corporate world and become a full-time author by year ten with ten books on my backlist. 

Best laid plans and all…

I still have a ten year plan, though it looks very different from what I started out with. Due to my chronic disease, I chose my health over my job and walked away from my career in 2018. Unfortunately that means my family is now single-income, my husband is absolutely wonderful in case I haven’t mentioned it recently, and my healthcare takes up about 20% of it. 

Remember the planning carefully part I mentioned above? 

Even after all that, I still have a plan. Technically I have a one year, five year, and a ten year plan, and I’m still collecting information because the most important thing I’ve learned concerning author finances is the need to be flexible. 

Flexibility is key for which ever publishing path you choose. Make goals, set timelines for yourself, and be flexible. Yes, that means flexible with your income as well. 

In the past couple of years there’s been a movement to be more transparent about author income and a number of authors have voluntarily posted about it. There’s been some shared on Twitter, sorry I can’t find the tweets to link to. And Susan Dennard, author of the Witchlanders series, did a post on author income along with her agent (scroll down to the bottom section: For the Daydreamers).

None of this is to bum you out about your future prospects. But if you’re committed to being an author for the long haul, you’ll need a plan for your finances. Otherwise you’ll end up like poor Rob…

But he always looked on the bright side, which sounds like a good idea to me! 

Are you starting out and vacillating on which publishing path you want to take?