The road to becoming an established, known, financially stable author has never been paved. Hell, I'm not sure it's ever been more than a dirt path, overgrown with thorns and the occasional marauding beast. But, even so, in the past, the road was different. Before the 80's, books were often prohibitively expensive to print. Publishers took great care in making sure the books they put out were something that had an audience. They didn't want to loose money on printing a bad book. They did this (in sci-fi/fantasy/horror) by picking authors with audiences they'd established in the pulp magazines. Authors had to mail typed manuscripts out, an expensive hurdle (one that often eliminated the casual authors), over and over to get into these magazines. So, there was a gauntlet to run. There was a standard to reach. Publish with the magazines if you could, hope for fan reactions, and build a name for yourself. Once you had one, a big book publisher might "graduate" you into the big league, and provide you with an editor and marketing. As long as you kept writing you were "in". There are plenty of authors who pulled this off in the 60's and 70's who are still "in" and producing fiction to this day. It's a filter process that weeded out a lot of crap and forced people to improve to compete.
It doesn't work like that anymore. In the 80's printing costs shifted and publishing a book became cheaper. Publishing a magazine became more expensive. The book publishing houses became the test ground, not the magazines. Publish a small run, see how it does, if it fails, blacklist that author. Rinse. Repeat. Hopefully, eventually one will "stick". Then the rise of email took away financial barriers to having your work seen by these publishers. They got buried in submissions. Suddenly it was more financially viable to publish a book based on a video game, with a known audience, than it was to wade through the thousands of submissions that were, for the most part, only ever seen by the author before they went out. And just when you think the crap landslide can't get any worse here comes the internet. Anything anyone wants to say can be wrapped in a blog, webpage, or ebook. The amount of writing out there is insane. Literally tens of thousands of authors trying to be known.
So how do you climb to the top of that pile and get noticed? Good writing? No guarantee. We've all seen awful bestsellers. Flamboyant personality? Sure, they get some attention, but in the end do they sell more books? Honestly, I don't think there is one sure-fire way anymore. That dangerous tiny trail that led to authorial success has branched into a dozen trails, in a swamp, with alligators. So, what do I do?
It all comes back to this: why do I write? For me? For you? For enjoyment? For money? How I answer that changes what I write and how I act. So here's why.
I write because I love the ideas I come up with and want to share them.
So, with the goal of getting you the insane fiction that's in my brain, here's what's gonna happen.
- February 1st I launch a new website.
- I'll be regularly releasing mini-stories and a weekly serial novel on this blog.
- I'll be doing audio stories on Youtube with voice actors.
- I'll be posting pics of the things that inspire me to write, and my own photography, on Tumblr.
- I'm going to start doing public readings again.
- I'll be finishing up my horror story anthology and releasing it by Summer.
- I'll be starting my first novel as soon as the anthology is done.
- I'll be writing for Griot Enterprises working on the Horsemen and possibly Jigaboo Devil (can't wait!)
- Mostly, I'll be sharing these daydreams I love and seeing what you think.
