World Building

Our Topic of the week: spending time on world building vs. actual drafting – what’s your balance?"

It's a good topic I rather like the notion. My simple answer is: I have no freaking idea. I'll explain. I don’t outline. Not on paper, just in my head. I have notions of what I want and what I need and I incorporate those as the urge comes to me.

Now, that said, I still have an actual answer for you. I spend as much time as needed, as I go along. When I’m writing I consider the setting as much a character as the characters. The world shapes the people as surely as the people shape the world.

That means I give about as much detail. So I might say that Roathes is at he southern most tip of the continent, but until I get to Roathes, that is all I know. I’ll design the landscape that I need just as soon as I get there in the story.

I spent most of my years as a writer working in the real world. That is to say a world just like this one we all inhabit, give or take a few sideways trips into the Weird Zone. A ghost, a werewolf, strange things from beyond, the Fae making a trip into our realm. That sort of thing.

It can be a challenge, but it’s also a slightly easier route to take. How do I mean? Well, first, it can be a challenge because there’s research to do, isn’t there? Let’s say I want to set a story in London. I need to have a decent map or at least a few good reference guides. That’s a good starting point but it can’t actually give me the details of London that will cement the reality of that city in the minds of readers who have been to London. There are details that remain hidden away, like the scents that are common in certain areas, or the fashions that might be happening at a certain time. Say I want to set a book in the seventies. That’s going to be a very different section of London than it is today. More research.

Now if I want to take that same London and make it as real as possible, I need to talk to a few people who are either in London or visit frequently. I’ve been there exactly once, you see, and I loved it, but the entire trip is a blur of fond memories and could provide very little that stands out without some feedback from a few of my compatriots who know the city far better than I do.

What does it matter?

Someone, somewhere, reading my book has been to London. If I do my job the wrong way, if I get enough facts incorrectly assembled in my tale, they can no longer enjoy whatever story I am telling them. The suspension of disbelief has been broken and that sucks. I want to entertain ANYONE who reads my book. I know I will not always succeed, but I have to start by trying to get it right.

Another example for you: I know that the outbreak of Spanish Influenza was devastating. I can find statistics with ease, thanks to the Internet. What I can’t do is tell you what it was like. Not as big a problem as there aren’t that many people left who were alive when the outbreak happened, but I want to get a proper feel for the era, then I need to do my research and use my imagination in equal parts.

Now, let’s say I decide to do near future pace exploration. Time to pony up some serious research hours and figure out the details of space travel in the modern era. From here I can decide what leaps in technology have happened and I need to be able to make it all make sense to a complete layman because, frankly, no one wants to read a book for entertainment that requires a few doctorates in math, computer sciences, jet propulsion and astrophysics. And if they DO want to read that, I can pretty much guarantee they’ve come to the wrong place.

It’s a lot of work, especially if you want to get into more details about the world as it was or will be or the world away from your comfort zone. I cannot honestly describe the Vatican. I have never been there and I can guarantee that the culture is as alien to me as medieval China.

So, research, research, research.

I don’t need to do any of that for a fantasy world. The laws of physics are mine to shape. Do I want dragons in my world? Okay, sure, why not? How do they work? How big are they? Is the fire they breathe from the bowels of hell? Is it a naturally produced gas that they can only expel occasionally?  Is it a sorcerous fire that generates only as they need it? I may never state which version of a dragon’s breath is accurate, but I need to KNOW which one works in my world. I need to work out the details if I’m going to use it, because if I fail to at least have a notion about that fact, then I can confuse myself on the way it works and contradict myself later.

Let me give you an example: I’ll not mention the author or the book, but while reading a very hefty apocalyptic novel by a British writer I know, he took me clean out of the story on two separate occasions by changing the skin tone, hair color and eye color of one of the leading ladies. Not a major crime, but it was something neither the author nor the editor ever noticed. She was dark-haired, fair skinned and freckled with green eyes. That detail was given to the reader. Later she was blonde, blue eyed and deeply tanned. I could have accepted the tanning, because we’re dealing with an end of the world scenario here. But later still she went back to dark-haired, fair skinned and freckled with green eyes. Again, it’s a quibble, but it was enough to remove me from the story and make be go back and double check that it was the author making the changes and not me.

If I decide that a world like Fellein is set with certain technologies and flavors, it has to be consistently set that way unless the transformation is part of the plot.  Most of the soldiers in Fellein wield crossbows. Their enemies use bows of differing shapes and sizes because they make their own weapons as part of their culture. The soldiers from Fellein all use standardized shields and armor. Their enemies among the Sa’ba Taalor also make their own armor or sometimes wear none at all depending on their plans. The Fellein all go through the same training. The Sa’ba Taalor have a religion that stresses martial skills above all else.  Their differences are designed to show the ways in which they have been raised.

I made a new world and that means knowing the rules it works by just as surely as I know the rules of modern warfare if I’m writing about how the US Army fights against its current enemies.

The difference is that I have to make the rules as I go along and I have to remember them consistently. The Sa’ba Taalor have seven gods. I know their names and the philosophies that their followers employ. I know what each god demands and what each follower is expected to do. I HAVE to know that, regardless of whether or not it is stated in the actual manuscript, because, again, internal logics must apply or the story cannot hold without causing confusion. 

I need to know the socio-economic status of my characters. I need to know something about how sorcery works in the world I’ve created and just as importantly how it doesn’t work. I have to make the rules and then not break them.

James A. Moore.

Worldbuilding - Foundation Process or Procrastination?

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven - one entirely appropriate for science fiction and fantasy authors - is "spending time on worldbuilding vs. actual drafting – what’s your balance?"

I've included a map here that first appeared in THE MARK OF THE TALA, the first book in the original Twelve Kingdoms trilogy. (For those who don't know - I didn't before I drew the map - the split down the middle is to accommodate the book binding.) Quite notably, I didn't draw this map until after the book had been written, the next books sketched out (very sketchily), and a couple of levels of editing completed with my publisher. At that point my editor asked me for a map of the world in the story. He thought it might make it easier for readers to follow the travels of the heroine, Andromeda, the middle princess.

So, I drew a map. Before that, the world had existed only in my head. But I'd envisioned it in vivid detail, so the task of drawing it out ended up being fairly straightforward. I spent most of my time figuring out how fantasy world maps should be drawn, and fixing logistical details like putting the split down the middle.

Later, however, I discover that most people thought I was crazy to do it this way. In fact, many SFF authors spend considerable time, even years, detailing their world maps and building out the details of the society, before they start writing.

Some of this approach, I think, comes from storytellers emerging from role-playing game experiences. In those, a great deal of effort goes into creating the world and rules before the game can be played. This is not me.

I also think that worldbuilding can be a form of pre-plotting. By creating the world and the details, the writer creates a kind of framework or outline for the story to evolve in. This is also not me.

So, it could be that I worldbuild the way I do - which is discovering what it's like by riding around in my characters' heads and observing it - because I write for discovery. That's how my process works on all levels, and faithful readers know I always say the most important thing is to own your process.

There's another reason, however, that I don't do worldbuilding before I write. I decided long ago that the only way I'd get a book written was to put down words. That sounds self-evident, but the decision is a profound one. I made a choice that NOTHING mattered more than putting down words - which includes things like drawing maps and other worldbuilding exercises.

When aspiring writers ask me about worldbuilding, when they tell me what they're doing to create their worlds, I'll say those things are great but they don't count as writing.

Only writing counts as writing.

Talking Book Marketing and Promo

Our topic this week is some complicated thing about the concept behind the movie “Moneyball” and the One Thing To Rule Them All when it comes to book marketing.

Okay.

Yeah.

I have seen the movie “Moneyball” so I’m familiar with the concept – instead of picking new players based on the gut instincts of a scout with baseball in his or her blood, the team does all these gee whizzy statistics and picks guys for the lineup no one ever heard of but they can throw a killer slider when the humidity tops 80% or the shortstop who can catch 97% of the pop flies in the 8^th inning when the moon is full.  I know the real life team in question (whose name escapes me) did have success with this but I came away from the movie feeling like they’d lost the heart of the sport. People aren’t statistics and they will surprise you. But hey, pro football is my preferred form of couch potato athletics.

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Obviously applying all this hifalutin math-heavy strategy to book promo and marketing is far beyond me. I HATED my college marketing and statistics classes. It’s so not my thing. I glaze over in the various author groups when people start talking about how they ran 250 ads and did A/B testing and tweaked this word or that phrase and then ran 900 more ads….I DO NOT BEGRUDGE THEM THEIR MAD SKILLZ AND SUCCESS.

But I’m not them.

Nor do I have $10,000 a month for ads and promo, which is an eye opening number I saw thrown around in one discussion, as regards what it takes to keep someone’s books reliably in the top 10 at Amazon in their genre. (These were people in a strata far FAR above mine but it was illuminating to see numbers and to even think about trying to play that game. I assume these people – who are not all in romance – have assistants.)

If my Fairy Godmother dropped a fat promo budget bag o gold on me and gave me a team of elves to manage my ads, would I be excited and would I use said services? Of course! Unless she wanted my firstborn in return…

But failing that I muddle along.

Fortunately for the Pets In Space scifi romance anthologies, we have a fabulous PR person who does all of that for us and more. She’s been generous in trying to coach my co-founder and me on some techniques but again, I glaze over.

So what do I do for promo? I write the new books.

I do have a personal blog, I’m in a number of Facebook groups with readers and other scifi romance authors, I blog for various platforms as part of making my Veronica Scott ‘brand’ more visible. I tweet. I do snippets and weekly memes. I actually had good success with Amazon ads for a few months (turns out I’m good with picking key words) but then the Zon changed everything up as they so often do, and suddenly my ads weren’t working. Again.

I buy some ads during the year, principally to support new releases.

I send out a newsletter when I have a new release.

Maybe there’s other stuff I do on occasion but pretty much that’s it.

I write more books and I don’t obsess or stress over the things that I’m not good at. Writing is a long game and I have over 25 books out there. Even in this currently overheated, jampacked publishing marketplace, readers will find books they want to read. I sneakily figure if I can get them to read one or two, they just might go for my entire backlist. (Shhh, don’t tell anyone my secret ploy LOL!)

Book Marketing Rage

I am sitting at my kitchen counter watching a trio of not-so-little-anymore black kittens lose their minds because the landscape crew are here trimming bushes right up against the house. The kittens are dashing from window to window to alternately watch and freak out when the hedge trimmer revs.

This is book marketing in one tidy metaphor.

Authors race from thing to thing, claws scrabbling for traction on the hardwood in their desperation to abandon FB ads for Amazon ads. Or BookBub. Or whatever else is au courant. Sixty seconds later, the scramble is on again.

It's interesting to watch. Certainly someone is making book marketing work for them or the rest of us wouldn't be chasing around trying to replicate their results. And with that sentence, you can surmise that I have no idea how to play Moneyball with book promotions. What you may not know is how much it annoys me. The whole point of the movie, Moneyball, was using hard data to drive decisions. Not instinct. Not heart. Not gut. Numbers. That's possible in baseball. It is almost entirely impossible with books. Especially if you're traditionally published. It is not possible to trace a customer from ad click thru to a purchase. I should imagine customers would be annoyed if we could track them like that. I would be. But it does make the entire book marketing thing a bit of a black box. Somewhere inside of it, weird magic happens, and we don't get to observe it happening.

Yes. You can run A/B ad tests. But unless you are direct selling through your own website only, you cannot possibly track sales. You can only track impressions and click thrus. You can infer from your click thru rates which ad drove the most buys should you see an uptick in sales, but you cannot prove which ad actually drove the spike.

You may now picture my little SQL database-driven heart trembling in rage.

My take away is that if you want to play Moneyball, you need to change to a career with actual, trackable metrics, cause this ain't it. We're all of us dancing on the edge of the volcano with book marketing - basically pleading with the gods and offering to sacrifice pretty much anything for just one shot at selling enough books to make the mortgage next month.

I comfort myself with the adage that your best marketing for your last book is your next book.

Trying to play Moneyball with Book Promotion

The publishing business is pretty strange. There's plenty of money being made, tons of books being sold, and if you scratch the surface, you'll see that no one really understands what works and what doesn't.

For real, if you go to a bunch of writers-- successful ones!-- and ask, "How does one sell more books?" you tend to get a bunch of shrugs. You will get that occasional person who talks like a marketing guru, but more often than not, their advice is not particularly useful.

This is, in part, because the ground is always shifting, tragedy-of-the-commons style. If someone comes up with a Great New Way to promote books, soon TONS OF PEOPLE are all doing that same Great New Way, and it's just so much screaming into the hurricane.

There's also the factor that book promotion just feels like ugly business. None of us know what's right, but we do know when someone's doing it wrong, and it stands out. Badly. For example: book trailers. There was a period when everyone was trying them, and most of them were terrible. Mostly because they were made by people who didn't know the language of film or the language of commercials. Too long and used that time badly.

Is there some Great New Secret, some perfect formula to get readers interested, to get books in their hands? I don't think there is, but maybe-- as how the Moneyball idea changed baseball-- there's something out there that requires a line of thinking from a different industry completely. Maybe there is, and I don't have the mindset to see it.

I've got a friend who talks about books having "stickiness", that when someone reads it, they "stay" in the book. They want to live in there, think about it all the time, tell others about it. And, he thinks, if you get enough people to "stick" into a book, they create that natural marketing machine for you.
And maybe he's right? It's an interesting idea, but right now I don't know how one might implement it. So, for now, like everyone else in this business, we're throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.

(Which, for the record, is a stupid way to check if your pasta is done. Just eat it, that'll tell you. No need to throw it against the wall.)
(And maybe that's a metaphor for this whole endeavor.)


All right, back to work. Do good things, people.

New Release: WARRIOR OF THE WORLD #Fantasy by @JeffeKennedy

2019 is a-hoppin' with new books from SFF Seven Authors! Jeffe follows James's bangin' New Year release with Book 3 in her Chronicles of Dasnaria #HighFantasy series.



WARRIOR OF THE WORLD
Chronicles of Dasnaria, Book 3

Just beyond the reach of the Twelve Kingdoms, avarice, violence, strategy, and revenge clash around a survivor who could upset the balance of power all across the map . . .

Once Ivariel thought elephants were fairy tales to amuse children. But her ice-encased childhood in Dasnaria’s imperial seraglio was lacking in freedom and justice.. With a new name and an assumed identity as a warrior priestess of Danu, the woman once called Princess Jenna is now a fraud and a fugitive. But as she learns the ways of the beasts and hones new uses for her dancer’s strength, she moves one day further from the memory of her brutal husband. Safe in hot, healing Nyambura, Ivariel holds a good man at arm’s length and trains for the day she’ll be hunted again.

She knows it’s coming. She’s not truly safe, not when her mind clouds with killing rage at unpredictable moments. Not when patient Ochieng’s dreams of a family frighten her to her bones. But it still comes as a shock to Ivariel when long-peaceful Nyambura comes under attack. Until her new people look to their warrior priestess and her elephants to lead them . . .

BUY IT NOW:  Amazon |  B&N | IndieBound

Book Marketing - What's the Trick?

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is: Trying to Moneyball Book Marketing: Is there One Simple Trick we’re all missing?

"Moneyball" refers to the movie with Brad Pitt and Robin Wright - and an early career Jonah Hill. It's an excellent movie, well worth watching, and one we happened to recently rewatch. (Although I'm not the one who suggested this topic.)

In the movie, "moneyball" is actually employed in a snide sense, because Brad Pitt wants to implement a new system for choosing baseball players. Apparently based on real events, as general manager of the team, Pitt hires Jonah Hill to run the statistical analyses on past performance of players to compose a winning team. The old guard, particularly the scouts and other team managers, fiercely resist this system because they believe in going with their gut about players. Also, the statistics tend to disregard the glamorous and high profile players, instead favoring the workhorses who turn in consistent but not necessarily spectacular results. Because Pitt is trying to maximize team composition on a lean budget, they accuse him of being interested in moneyball instead of baseball.

I mention all of this because I hear "moneyball" used in the sense suggested in this topic quite a bit, and I don't think that's what people necessarily mean. Really, we should be talking about if there's a way to moneyball book-writing. That would be a more direct analogy.

The real question of the week - is there a simple trick to book marketing that we're all missing? - gets a "I really don't think so" from me. I'm not a marketer, by profession or inclination, but there are plenty out there and I don't see any of them using any particular tricks beyond pouring a lot of money into broadcast advertising.

Could be the other folks here have other suggestions!

But I do think there are ways to moneyball book-writing. At the risk of sounding like the intransigent scouts in the movie, I don't much care for that approach. I know a lot of self-publishing authors scan the top 100 lists on Amazon, see what kinds of stories are selling  hot and write those. That's not something I want to do. Arguably I am being like the old guard of baseball, waxing on about the art and heart of the profession, but that's where my values fall out. I'm a writer first out of love. If I wanted to play the odds, I'd do something else.

There is a lesson to be taken from the moneyball concept that does harmonize with how I approach writing: the long game. Most of my books are slow and steady performers. I have not (yet?) had the glamorous bestseller that everyone talks about. But my books sell decently. They earn out the advances I'm given or the money I invest in producing them. Like Jonah Hill, I run the numbers on my sales and track which do well, which have increasing or decreasing sales. I know which are my steady performers, and I value them. With each new book, I gain readers for the backlist and see nice bumps in sales.

In fact, if there IS a marketing trick that I've heard passed around and that has worked for me, that's to write another book. It really does work.

Speaking of which, WARRIOR OF THE WORLD releases on Tuesday, January 8, 2019!

As We Head Into 2019

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Our topic this week isn’t actually “resolutions” (per our Google calendar), it’s whatever is on our mind. I guess for most of us in this time frame, it would be our plans for 2019, however, so here goes!

For 2019, my personal watch word is going to be ‘mindful’.

Yes, I do have a strategic plan and specific goals and I revised that in late December. (Learned to do strategic planning in my long career at NASA/JPL before becoming a fulltime author and the habit stuck with me.) I update my plan every December for the coming year, besides looking at it once a quarter to check on my progress.  I don’t do fabulous spreadsheets like Jeffe (because no one else can remotely approach her level of expertise!) and the longer I’ve been gone from the old day job, the more informal my strategic planning process has become.  Also much quicker to do!

The choice of one word as my theme, however, is to ask myself to focus on whether the activities I’m spending time on are really advancing what I’d said were my priorities for the year, and if not, to evaluate if I need to revise a goal to respond to a new development. OR to consider whether I’m simply indulging myself in too much time on social media and letting that soak up too much of my energy, for example! Yes, I connect with readers there but I also have a tendency to dive into rabbit holes of discussion on the current hot topic or research. I’ve also been a little too quick to say yes to too many things in the past few years as a fulltime author and ‘mindful’ reminds me to really think through the time commitment and opportunity cost (“if I do X, I won’t have time to do Y”). I’m getting better at not doing magical thinking that each day contains 48 hours of time to write and Do All The Things. Being mindful is a further enhancement. Look before I leap.

And of course very shortly after doing my plan and priorities I was unexpectedly invited to participate in a new scifi romance project. Plans are made to be changed, as they say! In this case, I pondered long and hard and decided the project didn’t fit with my established author brand in SFR, although it was lovely to be approached. I even tried out a few book concepts to see if my Muse took fire with going in a slightly new direction and….no. But it was a good reminder to be open to new possibilities and to stay flexible.

I’m sure there will be more changes ahead in the indie publishing world and I’ll have to adapt to those. I believe an author needs to stay nimble and adaptable. Being a successful author is a long game and takes time and fortitude to build a solid backlist and a readership.

I released seven books in 2018, all SFR, and hope to do the same this year but perhaps squeeze in one or two more titles. I’ve committed to my readers to write at least one of my ancient Egyptian paranormal romances this year, while continuing to add new adventures to my award winning, bestselling Badari Warrior  SFR series. We’re also doing the fourth Pets In Space anthology so I’ll be writing a new Sectors novella for that. (And the new project I mentioned above would have severely altered the overall plan, without knowing if my existing readers would follow me to the new shiny thing or if new readers found there would have enjoyed my backlog of other titles.)

I also have a fantasy world which I’m dying to write new stories for, but unfortunately I can only work on one book at a time, according to my Muse, and my writing speed works out to a book about every other month. A bit more if I avoid that social media black hole and buckle down on the writing!

Having chastised myself on overdoing social media, I do want to become more of an Instagram person in 2019. It’s not at the level of a goal, but more of a strong desire. I have an account but to date I’ve only done a few videos and shared pictures of Jake the Cat (always popular) and blingy earrings. 

Bookstagramming is so big now that I feel I need to try my hand at it.

One significant change for me is that USA Today shut down the Happy Ever After blog as of December 31st, where I wrote the SciFi Encounters column, focusing primarily on SFR. The loss of the HEA platform means more time for me to devote to writing novels. I always try to find the most positive spin, can you tell? But…not so fast, I’m exploring a couple of possibilities to keep my hand in on doing author interviews and special posts elsewhere. And of course I’m happy to be on the Amazing Stories Magazine blog and Love in Panels! (And here…)

A few trends I foresee for SFR in general in 2019 - the romance subgenre will continue to be popular with readers. I don’t see any loss of enthusiasm in the various places and groups where I interact with the community. I do see the traditional publishers moving away from romance (or calling it something else) now that indies are so dominant. I see some authors continuing to move back and forth between trad and indie. Some of us are firmly committed to being exclusively indie and it’s wonderful that there are so many opportunities now for getting books into the readers’ hands. Or on their e-readers. Or released as audiobooks, another huge and growing market.

Cyborgs will continue to be a popular trope for the SFR hero (and sometimes for the heroine as well. Starting to see a few female cyborgs.).

Dragons and dragon shifters are still popular but I think their momentum is slowing a bit. Some authors have been trying to switch to griffins but I haven’t seen that catch on in a major way.

There was something of a move to writing standard ‘Harlequin type’ plots for SFR novels in 2018 – the billionaire dragon shifter alien’s secret nanny’s baby kinds of things but again, I haven’t noticed a huge wave of best sellers along that line.

Colorful barbarians on various icy planets are still being written and enjoyed but that’s not a cutting edge trope any longer. Still fun, many good stories releasing every week for your reading enjoyment, just not the ‘new thing’.  Nothing wrong with that! Ruby Dixon published her first one in 2015, which really put energy into the concept. I wish I knew what was going to take its place as the HOT trope to write! Keep your eye on Ruby because she’s very good at identifying and writing the ‘next new thing’.

I’ve been seeing more prison planet tropes of late…

MMPREG (featuring male pregnancy) is a thriving SFR subgenre…

Reverse harem (RH) is still selling well for romance in general. I haven’t seen too many SFR RH novels as yet though – most seem to be in the fantasy or paranormal genres and are definitely a hit in the Kindle Unlimited market.

Diversity in the stories being told will continue to increase…as will the number of “own voices” authors…

Series continue to be the way to go, versus standalone novels. No cliffhangers, please. Or if you do write them, let us know up front in the book blurb. (My personal preference here - some authors swear their readers eat cliffhangers up and call for more. Myself as a reader=a hard NO and I'll probably never read you again. Shrug.)

Many authors who were early trail blazers in SFR and who had published traditionally are getting their rights back now to older novels and are updating and re-releasing those titles independently, which is exciting. I think many of the current readers have come to the genre in the last few years and may not have seen the older titles by popular authors (Susan Grant, Kim Knox et al) before. Of course a flood of those titles may temporarily depress the market a bit but romance readers are voracious consumers of books (yay!).

So, there you have it – what do you foresee coming in romance or scifi romance for 2019?

(Portions of this post appeared on the Amazing Stories Magazine blog on January 3, 2019.)

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