At the same time…I’m planning to tell a deeply personal story about my life experiences and my successes as a novelist and storyteller. So if that kind of thing is why you’re here, read on. Don’t let the title scare you away.

Refresher: Parts of a Business Letters

I’m astonished to discover I may not have ever written a blog post just on writing business letters. It’s an old and well-established format, so maybe it’s just not needed, but when I taught Technical Writing, I did a whole lesson on why the boring ol’ business letter is still such an important tool.

So let’s do a quick refresher! These are the fundamental parts of a business letter:

• Sender contact info.
• Date
• Recipient contact info.
• Salutation
• Body
• Complimentary closing
• Signature and typed name

Each of those pieces should be separated with a significant amount of whitespace. The exact amount is almost a matter of aesthetics, but it should be at least a full line height.

Writing to Your Boss

For general rules of business letters, you can do a Google search on “how to write a business letter” and find a hundred helpful tutorials. Today I want to talk about a particular (and particularly challenging) scenario: writing a business letter to your boss.

I’ve said before that audience analysis plays a big role in any writing project, and that’s certainly true here, too. The trick is to take full advantage of the medium (the standard “shape” of the business letter) while also adapting its pieces to make sense in this particular context.

So, for instance, the “sender contact info” might seem utterly superfluous (after all, your boss probably knows how to reach you), but the very fact that you’re sending a formal letter indicates something has changed from business-as-usual. Depending on the contents of the letter, it might be helpful to let your boss know how best to contact you concerning the issue at hand. If you’re going to be working off-site, for instance, you might include a mobile phone number or the address of the location where you’ll be working.

Unanticipated Readership

A date is always useful on any correspondence, and the recipient contact info. (or “inside address”) is mostly there in case this letter gets handed around to others than the intended recipient, so that it remains clear to whom it was addressed, and in what capacity. That’s just as important when it’s your boss as when it’s a customer service representative at some company that’s done you wrong.

Of course, the body of the letter is the most challenging here. Since you probably have a regular working relationship (which might be quite informal) with the recipient, it can feel awkward to suddenly accost them with formal writing. Again, bear in mind that you’re writing this letter to your boss, but you’re writing it in the knowledge that it might be read by anyone in the organization.

That might sound paranoid, but it’s really the point of formal communication. When you provide a memo or a business letter to your boss, it’s something that can be put in a file drawer and pulled out again when Human Resources comes around for job assessments or the lawyers come around concerning a lawsuit.

Remember that when you’re writing a letter to your boss: you’re also writing to a widespread, unanticipated readership. What you say (and how you say it) not only conveys immediate information from you to your supervisor, it also suggests all manner of “metadata” concerning the situation under discussion, not to mention your relationship with your supervisor.

An Example for My Fans

Of course, one of the best ways of teaching is by showing, so let me share with you a sample business letter I wrote to my own boss. You can see how I approached each of the elements described above.

2704 NW 109th Ter.
Oklahoma City, OK 73120
aaron.pogue@consortiumokc.com

 

January 23, 2012

 

Steve Bossman
6501 S. MacArthur Blvd., Bldg. 272
Oklahoma City, OK 73169

 

Dear Steve:

This letter will serve as official notice of my resignation.

It has been my honor and privilege to work with the FAA and all our fine contractors for half a decade. I’d anticipated being here far longer, but my personal successes in the last year now call me on to brighter things.

I intend to resign no later than Friday, February 24, 2012.

I deeply appreciate the opportunities I’ve been afforded and the projects I’ve gotten to work on as an employee here. It’s an excellent place to work.

 

Sincerely,

Aaron Pogue

That’s all for now. Come back next week, for a brief tutorial on cover letters for book proposals to high-powered New York literary agents.

I love Young Adult fiction. Most of the time that looks like guys in capes fighting would-be world beaters instead of boy wizards or, God deliver us, sparkly vampires.

But I’m also a lover of a wide variety of genre fiction. One of my favorites is Spy Fi, the genre best exemplified in the past by The Avengers or The Man from UNCLE and, more recently, by shows like Alias and the Middle Man. These two things, YA fiction and Spy Fi, come together in my latest novel.

TEEN Agents in The Plundered Parent Protocol is a novel about three girls, best friends, whose fathers are kidnapped by an evil genius…one who just happens to be ten years old. This is how Elly Mourning, Hea Jung Noone, and Saturday Knight discover the existence of the Teenage Extranormal Emergency Network and how they join its ranks as agents.

There’s plenty of weird gadgets, exciting espionage, and plots for world domination in TEEN Agents. But at its heart, it’s a story about three girls who want to save their dads but have to grow up quite a bit to do it.

Right now, I’m the father of just one kid, a little boy. He and I watch all kinds of adventure cartoons, read comic books, and I continue to take in all that genre fiction I’ve always loved. But now I have an eye as to when I can share it with him.

I’d also like to be the father of a little girl someday. I don’t want to climb a soapbox, but it’s pretty hard to find stuff to excite and empower my hypothetical little girl.

But it shouldn’t be that way.

I should have as much strange and exciting genre fiction with young heroines as I have with heroes. Since I don’t, I decided to do something about that.

So that brings me to Elly, Hea, and Saturday. Elly is sharp and together, a born leader. Hea is a free spirit and incredibly athletic. Saturday has a brilliant scientific mind.

I wrote them to be  the kinds of girls I’d like my future little girl to look up to. They aren’t perfect, but they are as accomplished and secure in who they are as thirteen year old girls can be. And they’re learning and growing as they go.

But I didn’t want to write a “girl’s story.” I wanted to write a spy fi story that starred girls. One that would be exciting for girls…and for their brothers and dads. Which is why I can assure you that the genius is evil, the enemy agent is suave and debonair, the traps are deadly, the lairs are secret, and the plan is diabolical.

This book is for girls looking for exciting fiction that makes them feel good about being girls because it’s a book about heroic girls. Not to mention it’s a fun read.

I loved writing this novel for so many reasons. And my beta readers have absolutely loved reading it. Now you can check it out and let me know how I did. Trust me, if you enjoy reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it, you won’t be sorry you did.

Because I want everyone to give the book a look, Consortium Books has a very special offer for all you potential TEEN Agents. Today is the official “street date” and for the first 24 hours, this book will be absolutely FREE! You’re just one click away from an exciting spy adventure with three of the most fun girls you’ll ever meet. Give it a shot, will ya?

For what it’s worth: I’ve got a great excuse. I’ve just been so busy with the final review and publication of the very exciting book we’re going to be talking about below. But let’s go ahead and talk about it, huh?

Extraordinary Complexity

As I said, last Tuesday I introduced my friend and fellow writer Joshua Unruh, and told you a little bit about my attempts to help him out as a writing coach. I ended the story when he’d just asked me for advice on a new story idea that blended pulp noir story stylings, ancient English linguistics, and deep Norse myth in a package that would make a publishing company sales department wail and gnash their teeth.

And I told him as much. I told him the story sounded too complicated and, ultimately, really difficult to sell. More than that, I recognized a trend.

• He’d wanted to write a supernatural/urban fantasy series, and decided to make it a viable Western (with all the trappings), too (Hell Bent for Leather).
• He’d wanted to write a noir mystery, and decided to make it steampunk, too. (Copper Lincoln, Robot Detective).
• He’d wanted to write a dark fantasy, and decided to make it classically noir, thematically postmodern, and narratively archaic, too (Mythreaver).

I told him my best advice, as his writing coach, was to stop making things so hard on himself. I couldn’t get away with accusing someone of being too ambitious (that’s a defining character tag of mine), but every project he came up with was really complex.

It was all good. I can’t wait to read finished versions of all three of those novels. But I wanted to see what he could do with something simple and straightforward. Just a fun little adventure in a recognizable category. As I’ve said recently, I think the categorical focus of Taming Fire is a lot of reason it was able to find success (while my most complex stories, the Ghost Targets books, are languishing).

The Baseline Challenge

So I challenged him to write a baseline novel. I said it would be a good opportunity for me to see where he was as a storyteller writing something that wasn’t constantly fighting back against him. It would also give him an opportunity to get his own foothold in the marketplace (like the one Taming Fire has given me), and once he was established he could do all the complex, ambitious projects his heart desired.

He took the challenge, and doubled-down with the old NaNoWriMo challenge, and last November he wrote a young-adult spy-fi adventure called TEEN Agents in The Plundered Parent Protocol. In one fell stroke, he demonstrated my special genius as a writing coach.

Fine, fine! What he really did was demonstrate his special genius as a storyteller. The novel perfectly served its purpose. “Young-adult spy-fi” is still playing things a little bit complicated, but at least it was a genre I could reasonably discuss. Moreover, it was a new enough playground for Joshua that he was willing to be a little more open to input.

Writing by Committee

Oh, and he got input. Last December Courtney played the role of Acquisitions Editor while I was still frantically putting the finishing touches on The Dragonswarm. She gave him feedback on every page.

Then he handed the story off to several moms of young teens and got direct reader responses. Then our editing intern Allison started working through the story, pointing out all the awkward edges (and rightly changing “that” to “who” nine times out of ten). And then at last I waded in.

I told him to cut the prologue. I told him to do more to introduce his characters, and then to make those introductions more interesting. I told him to stop building monstrous, convoluted sentences (and showed him over and over and over again exactly which sentences were monstrous and why they were convoluted).

We worked on dialogue attribution and smooth scene transitions. I pointed out places where he used good cinematic techniques that made bad prose.  I questioned his fundamental understanding of physics (although I wasn’t always right on those issues).

And, Haven’s name, we found our fair share of typos. Yeesh.

Making it Better

We did a lot of work to turn Joshua’s NaNoWriMo baseline novel into something we’d be proud to publish. But underneath all that work lay two absolutely critical points:

Solid Foundation

The story itself was good.

The technique needed work, but the story arc, the characters, the motivation…those were all dead on.

That was our foundation, and even with all the cracks and flaws on the surface, the foundation was solid.

Hard Work

And Joshua did the work.

If you glance back up at my slanderous section above, you’ll see that I pointed out a whole lot of problems. I didn’t fix them. I didn’t rewrite the novel for him. I said, “Here’s what’s wrong, and here’s why I think it’s wrong, and you need to make it better.”

And every time I did that, he came back with something really impressive. In the end, I told him, I would much prefer to get a good book and watch a writer respond to criticism and make it great, than to receive a book that’s utterly perfect in the first place.

That’s my position as a writing coach, because it keeps me in business. It’s also my position as a publisher, because it means I’ve got a much better idea what Joshua will be capable of next time.

If this book is successful, it won’t be a mystery how he managed to write something good. I’ll pat myself on the back (and all our editors, of course), and whatever he serves up next time, I’ll know we can make it something we can all be proud of.

TEEN Agents in The Plundered Parent Protocol

In this case, there’s no question. This novel is awesome. It’s fun, it’s imaginative, and it’s just plain smooth. You’ll have to check it out.

It’ll officially be releasing for Kindle tomorrow (Tuesday, January 31), and for the first 24 hours it’ll be available free. But just in case you forget between now and then, you can come back here tomorrow and here a little bit about the novel from the man himself.

I’m a Technical Writer and a grad student. I’m a publisher and a husband and a father. I’m a CEO and an Executive Director and a President. I’m a programmer and a web developer and a blogger. And I’m a bestselling novelist.

That never gets old.

I’m also a writing coach. That’s where this blog started out, and it’s really where my publishing company started out, too. I joined a writer’s group with Courtney three lifetimes ago, and then I started dreaming up ways to start a new patronage, and then I got to know a whole bunch of artists in diverse fields (hoping to help them find ways to master their crafts), and then suddenly I had a successful publishing company.

Joshua Unruh

One step in that unexpected journey was meeting an aspiring writer who happened to have extensive professional connections, a background in marketing and PR, and an unflinching determination to get stuff done. That’s not an exhaustive list of his virtues, but those are the ones that have done the most (so far) to propel the Consortium toward reality.

Of course, I’m talking about Joshua Unruh. He’s my nascent Director or Public Relations (or Marketing Czar, as it says on his business cards). When I met him, he’d finished…one novel? Maybe two, but I think the second one was still in progress. And both of those were fairly recent projects. For most of his life, he hadn’t thought of himself as a novelist.

But he was a storyteller. He knew that much. He had a wealth of experience in role-playing games which made him a natural for dynamic, distinctive, and interesting characters. And he brought a deep and broad familiarity with popular and mythic literature. He was a perfect candidate on paper, and most importantly, he had already finished a novel.

Building on the Foundation

Finishing a novel is the hardest part of being a novelist. If you can do that on your own, everything else can be taught. That doesn’t mean you’ll be brilliant or even interesting, but it means you can be a novelist. With Josh’s other traits, I was confident he could become a phenomenal writer–so confident that I went ahead and penciled him in for a spot on our publishing schedule.

Now, mind you, I did that with a very light stroke, easy to erase. And I put him down for a slot that was just ages in the future. I figured it would give us plenty of time to read his stuff, tear it apart, and make him make it better.

His first book–the one we’d planned to publish–was called Hell Bent for Leather. It’s a Weird Western (that’s apparently a recognized category), featuring a demon-hunting cowboy who has to use a reliquary golden gun to ride herd on a stampede of damned souls (shaped like cattle) to rescue a friend who sold his soul to the devil for the chance to win at poker.

It’s a Weird Western (that’s apparently a recognized category), featuring a demon-hunting cowboy who has to use a reliquary golden gun to ride herd on a stampede of damned souls (shaped like cattle) to rescue a friend who sold his soul to the devil for the chance to win at poker.

Re-reading that sentence…I think I could have saved myself some time and just written that instead of the first half of the post. “Joshua Unruh is a guy who wrote a Weird Western featuring a demon-hunting cowboy who has to use a reliquary golden gun….” That tells you most everything you need to know about Josh.

The story is raucous fun. The characters are vivid. The writing could use work, but it’s a first novel and it’s a NaNoWriMo novel. The phrase “the writing could use work” is universally true concerning those things.

Targeting a Demographic

I read it through, making occasional notes to myself and planning to have some detailed coaching sessions with him over things that looked like persistent style issues to me. I saw some general advice I could give him, but mainly I found myself thinking like a publisher and wondering how the hell (pun intended) I was supposed to sell this story.

We never really got around to that particular coaching session, but Josh and I chatted frequently about writing. I was there (perhaps even an instigator) when he dreamed up some of his more ambitious story ideas, and I helped him find a path through some of the murkier territory in some of his existing concepts.

That had been going on for several months when Taming Fire really started moving, and I started thinking of us (Consortium Books) as a viable source of popular literature rather than a quiet little social experiment. While that was on my mind, Josh and I were talking our way through one of his more recent concepts–a neo-noir retelling of Beowulf as the anti-hero looking for glory in a one-man suicidal war against the gods of Valhalla–and he kept insisting that what it really needed was some genuine eddic voice. The story’s structure and narration needed to be authentically old Geat.

He was cooking up an artistic masterpiece. It was ambitious and beautiful in design, and utterly unmarketable. He’ll probably correct me in the comments, and I’m describing this the way I understood it (not necessarily the way he intended it), but it sounded to me like it would only really be accessible to a tiny cross-section of readers who were simultaneously fans of:

• Pulp noir story stylings
• Ancient English linguistics
• And deep Norse myth

I don’t object to works of art. I certainly don’t propose everything should be dumbed down to a lowest common denominator. But I felt like Josh was aiming for an extremely narrow demographic with that particular work, and I said as much.

The result of that conversation was a challenge, and the result of the challenge was one incredible piece of fiction. I’ll tell you more about that on Thursday.

I said the single line got at the heart of what I learned, but in the end it was a really minor change. Over the course of the semester, I completely rewrote two stories, learning all the way what I was doing wrong. Here’s more:

“Building Plans”

That’s just one line, but it exposes many of the lessons I had to learn. I’d likewise taken for granted that Beth Anne’s crippling dependence would be clear, her real life need to take control (not just to find some money). Because of that, several readers found her entirely unsympathetic and the ending unsatisfying when she chose to run her own business rather than accept an easy payout.

I’d assumed also Beth Anne’s self-aware complicity in and acceptance of that dependence on her husband, but some readers took her for a victim of his bad money management (rather than a housewife willingly uninvolved), so they doubted her tender feelings for her departed husband as well as her desire to keep a property that had meant much to him.

All of that was meant as texture, meant as subtlety, meant as background shades to the immediate conflicts and confrontations I had structured my three short scenes around, as Beth Anne learned she had to sell the land, realized she couldn’t let it go, then decided she wouldn’t (and in the process, how she’d attempt to own her independence).

Unfortunately, none of it came through. It took two rounds of feedback before I even fully understood that. I felt, instead, the readers simply wanted to discuss a different topic (whether it was feminism or fiscal responsibility or parenthood). It took a while before I understood, not that they refused to engage with the topic I’d selected, but that I’d failed to make it clear what that topic was supposed to be.

“Handle with Care”

Of course, my second story went the same. I’d always wanted to write a protagonist with serious social anxiety, as a kind of challenge, and I succeeded just enough that the character’s quirk became the story’s topic.

I’d meant that story to be about connecting with other people. It was about loneliness and friendship. They seemed like easy topics for a character predisposed to avoiding people, but his vividness of trait stole the show.

I made it worse with my scene selection, narrowing my focus to just the scenes that mattered in my protagonist’s arc of growth—that is, his interactions with the pretty girl at the office. But then my readers tried to find the story’s theme of romantic competition or obsession or infidelity.

None of that was actually in the story I wrote. It all came from the stories my readers ended up telling themselves. But lacking clear guidance from me, they took the story in a direction that left it mutilated and left them unsatisfied. I’d picked those scenes in an attempt to solve one problem—my difficulty telling a whole story in such a small number of words—and in the process created a new problem altogether.

I was able to correct that problem, once again, by raising up from subtext some of the protagonist’s desires, but also just by adding a handful of other scenes without Kelly. I used those scenes to show what he was missing in himself, and that tightened reader focus on his actions and motivations in the scenes he did share with her.

Pursuing Mastery

That has been an education. I’m happy with these two stories, even with the mediocre grades the professor gave me, because I’ve done as much with them as I can clearly see. Any other changes I could make would be made blind, guessing what might satisfy.

That’s not to say I’m finished learning or that this is as good as I get, but it’s as much as I can do with these two pieces. I’m hampered there by the twin handicaps I mentioned Tuesday: an unfamiliar format and an unfamiliar genre.

I’ve learned enough now to succeed with short stories, I’m convinced, but if I want to thrive within the “literary” category, I’ll need a lot more practice, start to finish, before further polishing will do me any good. I’ll probably need research, as well, reading other mainstream works to learn the tropes and types and conventions.

Overall, I’m satisfied. I’ve learned to build a story arc in twenty pages. I’ve learned where my long-form instincts will tend to lead me wrong, and I’ve learned tricks to manage that.

I’ve learned (again) the importance of audience analysis in good storycraft, and I’ve learned the outer edges of an unfamiliar genre.

Best of all, I’ve learned enough confidence with the format to practice on my own, to wade through trial and error, and ultimately that’s the only way to grow.

“Advanced Fiction Writing” is an English class. The rest of my Master’s work has taken place in the college of Journalism and Mass Communication. The big difference? JMC focuses on commercial writing, while the English department focuses on “literary” writing.

For what it’s worth, I consider myself pretty well cultured. I don’t consider an opera to be good fun, but I’m capable of getting it. I recently discovered I tend to write narrative in iambic verse unless I consciously avoid it. I know my stuff.

But this English class was brutal. Still, I learned a lot from it. I was required to prepare a self-assessment essay as the class’s final, and figured I should share some of those lessons learned with you.

So, without further ado, here’s what I learned from Advanced Fiction Writing!

Writing Short Fiction

I have been a student of writing for fifteen years now, studying in literary and commercial programs, in formal classes and casual writers’ groups, and in the slow, erratic progress of personal experience. But through it all I’d managed to maintain one huge, glaring gap in my education: writing short fiction.

I’ve now finished thirteen novels I’d proudly share with anyone who asked, but before this semester I had never managed to complete a short story I liked. The beginnings that worked always tended to evolve into first chapters, and when I managed to restrain that impulse, to force completeness in a handful of pages, I generally ended up with something lifeless, dull, and broken.

I mention all this now because it shaped my goals for the semester. I didn’t come to the class hoping to learn how to create a compelling character. I didn’t come to the class hoping to learn how to make up an engaging circumstance. I didn’t come to the class hoping to learn how to manage dialogue or evoke a sense of place or pick perspective.

I only hoped to learn how to do those things in this format. Right from the start I knew the shape of my challenge, and I hoped with feedback, with revisions, with some strict requirements I might accomplish what I hadn’t yet in fifteen years of trying.

Playing with a Handicap

To complicate the challenge, the professor had some rules. The first page of the syllabus said, “No genre fiction, i.e. science fiction or fantasy.” That stopped me cold.

I’ve written all my life in genres. I’m not convinced there’s any other option. I understand the risk with speculative fiction of overindulging in setting, with any adventure tale of overindulging in plot, but every genre calls for characters, and every genre can explore them well.

My challenge there was not to write characters instead of plot and setting; all my fantasy and science fiction work receives high praise for the character work. My challenge was being required to work within the “mainstream” or “literary” category where I didn’t really know the genre conventions.

We started out with three published works hand-chosen by the professor, and that gave me some idea. I learned more in the first two weeks when all my classmates turned in their first drafts. I quickly spotted what kinds of plots and complications were the norm, and tried to build my stories around that.

That was my twin challenge: to craft a story I could tell within an unfamiliar genre in a much shorter space than I normally had available.

“Building Plans”

I started with the story of a woman recently widowed, previously much dependent on the men in her life and unprepared for managing her own affairs.

The simple shape of the story started with limited resources (she and her husband had not been rich before he died) and gained in stakes when I added a young daughter the woman would have to care for as well. The central point of the story, the one I wanted to investigate myself and challenge my readers to engage, was the terrifying helplessness of sudden independence. I had a scene in the first draft where Beth Anne “put on her best grown-up face” before trying to ask a difficult favor of an acquaintance.

That line did not survive the rewrites. The professor complained it “infantilized” the character, but in one line it captured her predicament—and that was a predicament I’d built on personal experience and interviews with dozens of friends, all roughly my age and from roughly the same background.

In my late twenties, with a college degree, a wife, a mortgage, and a steady job, I realized I still felt like I was just pretending to be a grown-up, and astonishingly no one had caught me at it yet. I asked around, and all but one of my peers said they felt the same way, though many of them were quite successful in their fields and certainly mature. That disconnect, I thought, deserved a story.

I learned a lesson from the professor’s objection, though: I was leaning too hard on my own cultural and societal experiences. It clearly didn’t read the same outside my crowd.

I suspect if I’d had a novel—or even a decent chapter’s length—to develop Beth Anne fully within her own context, that line would have survived. If I’d only meant the story for my peers, that line would have survived. But in this class’s context, it assumed too much and said too little. I replaced it elsewhere in the story with wordier, more explicit inspection of Beth Anne’s condition.

That’s just one line, but it exposes many of the lessons I had to learn. There’s more to the paper, and I’ll share it with you Thursday, but that gets you to the heart of it. Even in awful classes, good writers are always learning.

In fact, it’s for a title you’ve probably never heard of before. Ghost Targets: Surveillance.

Near-Future Science Fiction Technothriller Cop Drama

You might have heard of my science fiction series, Ghost Targets. It has no ghosts in it. Not the spectral sort, anyway.

No, the series focuses on a world very much like ours, set about thirty years in the future with all the cool techno gadgetry that might come along by then. The most interesting change is the introduction of total universal surveillance.

Cameras and microphones everywhere record every word spoken, every movement, and do their best to map that data to actual identities and store it all in a massive database.  That information is available to the government and law enforcement, but it’s also available to all manner of services–think of the apps you might install on your smartphone–and even available to the general public.

Something like Gods

So the databases know where you are. They know how much money is in your bank account and (statistically) what you like to have for dinner on a day like today (especially given what you had for lunch today and what you’ve had for other dinners this week). They know the nutrition information for every restaurant in town and they know the results of your most recent blood tests and they know how much you care about that sort of thing.

In my back-cover description for the Ghost Targets books, I always start with this:

We abandoned privacy and turned databases into something like gods. They listened to our prayers. They met our needs and blessed us with new riches. They watched over us, protected us, and punished the wicked among us. We almost made a paradise.

And that’s why I called the first book in the Ghost Targets series Gods Tomorrow. It’s a reference to the databases. They’re almost gods, they’ll be gods tomorrow, but for now there are still gaps.

One of the gaps is that it’s still possible for some people to deliberately hide their actions. Little bits of data disappear from the historical record, and they can get away with murder. When the police try to search through the database records to review the scene of the crime, there’s a big hole where the perpetrator ought to be. He’s invisible. He’s a ghost.

And so the FBI established a special high-tech division to track down these special cases. They called them Ghost Targets and tasked them with doing the impossible. That’s a fantastic premise for a long-running sci-fi mystery series.

Missing the Market

They’re good books, too. They’re action-packed and fast-paced and fun. The technology is pretty well researched but also deliberately accessible to the “Law & Order” crowd. The characters are vivid, and their conflicts are consistently entertaining. I love writing them, and I’ve gotten really positive feedback from everyone who’s read them.

Unfortunately, “everyone who’s read them” isn’t that large a number. I’ve sold some frankly astonishing numbers of my fantasy books, but my sci-fi series is barely moving at all. I think I know why, too. I’m convinced the problem is marketing.

The series is called “Ghost Targets,” but it’s not a ghost story–neither horror nor fantasy, despite the distressingly long list of categories it does fit in. That’s a big problem, too. Taming Fire sold a lot of copies on its own, I think, because it was so squarely set in the very heart of a well-established genre. Everything about that book screams epic fantasy.

But you try screaming “near-future science fiction technothriller cop drama for the ‘Law & Order’ crowd” without running out of breath. It’s a challenge, and while I’m prepared to argue in defense of the slightly misleading “ghost” in the series title, I do have to admit that it doesn’t help offset the marketing problem I’m already dealing with.

And then, on top of that, I titled the first book Gods Tomorrow. It’s a terribly poetic title once you know what it means. But then, once you know what it means, I no longer have to convince you to take a chance on the book. If you  don’t know what the series is (and especially if you accidentally read in an apostrophe to make it God’s Tomorrow), the book looks an awful lot like it’s going to be inspirational religious lit.

I’ve got nothing against inspirational religious lit, but it’s a long way from near-future science fiction technothriller cop drama that’s not about ghosts for the ‘Law & Order’ crowd.

In Defense of Outsourcing

I really think I shot myself in the foot with the promotion on God Tomorrow. It’s a story that could be really, really popular if it could find its market, but even with all the success I’ve had with Taming Fire, I just don’t yet have the marketing muscle to make the Ghost Targets series work.

I’m trying, though. I’ve decided to rename the first book from Gods Tomorrow to Surveillance (so it’ll match the other one-word titles in the series). That doesn’t just eliminate the religious-lit confusion, it also better characterizes the central focus of the story.

We’re working on that now, designing a new cover for the new title. But while I was at it, I decided to take a stab at outsourcing the heavy-duty promotion. I decided to see what a (sort of) traditional publisher could do to build a market for the series. And that’s why I went begging to Amazon’s science-fiction and fantasy imprint 47North. I offered them the chance to find an audience for Ghost Targets.

It could be a very interesting partnership. I’ll let you know when I hear back from them.

In the meantime, if you haven’t ever checked it out before, give the series a try. You can get a free sample on the Kindle app or pick up a rare first-edition of the Gods Tomorrow paperback before it gets re-released as Surveillance and sells a million copies.

Either way, you win. And I get my story told, so I win, too. Awesome.

Submission Requirements for the Amazon Imprint 47North

If you want to submit a novel for consideration by one of Amazon’s publishing imprints (not self-publishing), here’s what you should include.

Proposals and manuscripts should only be submitted to one imprint or editor at a time. We will communicate internally to make sure your work finds its best home. For a full list of Amazon Publishing imprints, visit: amazon.com/amazonpublishing

If you are represented by an agent, please have your agent submit your proposal.

• Submissions should include the following information:
• Title and author in the subject line
• Short synopsis of the book
• Brief bio and bibliography of author
• Full or partial manuscript (Word file, Times New Roman 12)
• Comparable authors or titles
• Any relevant marketing/PR strengths

Info courtesy Amazon Publishing (received via email)

You can follow that link above to descriptions of Amazon’s various imprints, each of which includes an email address for your submissions. The one for 47North (their science fiction and fantasy imprint) is 47north-submissions@amazon.com.

The Story

I had the devil of a time finding that information. Once upon a time, long, long ago, I prepared my share of manuscript submissions. I owned a nearly-current copy of Writer’s Market and maintained a presence on a submissions editor’s website in the hopes of getting noticed.

And as a technical writer, it was easy for me to pick up on the importance of proper manuscript formatting and submission guidelines. It was easy for me to respect the sometimes punitive rules editors and agents laid down when it came to unsolicited manuscripts. Good formatting can convey a whole lot of information before a reader ever starts the first sentence.

So when — for reasons that are a story in their own right — I decided I wanted to submit something for consideration by 47North, the first thing I did was start looking for submission guidelines. Everything kept pointing me back to the Amazon page, which only said:

For proposal submissions or inquiries, please contact 47north-submissions@amazon.com

Helpful, huh? Anyway, I’ve got a fairly compelling case these days, and some unequivocal success has given me a little bit more courage than I might have had in the past. So I sent an email to that address. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Hey! I’m famous. If you want to publish one of my books, I’d love to hear your offer.” I put it in more words than that, but not a lot more substance.

I took a deep breath, reminded myself I’d have to wait weeks for a response, and clicked “Send.” I immediately got a reply email from a noreply address saying, “Thanks for your interest in Amazon publishing. Please don’t make multiple submissions. Here are our submission guidelines.” And those are now pasted up above.

Not extremely helpful. It left me wondering if my first email “counted.” I knew it didn’t have the requested information, but if I followed up with the requested information, would that seem like I was badgering? Or was that initial email address really just intended to trigger these responses?

Fear and Trembling

I gave it three days. I heard nothing back, and decided a black mark against me along with a complete submission package would probably score a lot better than a half-hearted submission and polite self-restraint. So I put it on my To Do list: “Send manuscript submission to 47North.”

I should’ve written “Prepare and send.” I should’ve made “prepare” a line of its own. I considered it a trivially simple process, since so many of the items on the list were things I’d already prepared when I uploaded the book to Kindle.

All I had to do was write an intro paragraph for my cover letter, pull a bunch of material together, and then write out my list of comparables. That was the only item on the list I didn’t have ready to hand. It should’ve taken half an hour, right?

It took half a day. And that wasn’t because the comparables were tough. What I hadn’t counted on was the emotion.

As I said, I’ve done this sort of thing before. I used to write unsolicited submissions to some of the biggest publishing houses in the world. And then to some small and pathetic ones. And then to very slick, almost-famous literary agents. And then to shady and pathetic ones.

I didn’t get a ton of rejections. I only got rejections, but I didn’t get nearly as many rejections as I sent submissions. Mostly they didn’t bother to respond. And often I was waiting months on end before giving up on an answer.

It broke me. I stopped writing. And when I came back to it, I came back to it for me, without any real expectation of ever getting published. I had no intention of sending submissions again. I didn’t expect to self-publish, either. I was just writing because I wanted to, and that was fun.

Then the new digital marketplace arrived on the scene, and self-publishing became this wondrous thing. I found the success I’d given up on completely, without having to get approval from anyone.

And half a year later, following the monumentally successful release of my fantasy sequel, I decided purely for strategic/promotional purposes to see if a publisher wanted to team up with me and leverage my digital popularity to sell some paperbacks. If they said no, it cost me nothing. If they sent me a contract I couldn’t agree to, I could easily walk away. I came to this transaction with independence and power….

But even then, I found myself staring at the intro paragraph of my cover letter, trying to figure out how to say, “You don’t know me, but I matter. You’ve heard this from a thousand people who were wrong, but I’m worth your time. Please care about me.”

Even knowing everything I knew, even with hard numbers to back me up, that task left me feeling very small and fragile. It awakened a dark and distant terror that had already mastered me once before. It was miserable. Querying sucks.

I don’t have a better punchline than that. Querying sucks. Thank Heaven for the new self-publishing.

Honestly…I didn’t realize I had let the blog lapse. I’ve been conscientiously working to improve my presence on social media in general (primarily through Twitter and Facebook), and I’ve been trying to keep our supporters posted through KickStarter. All that has felt like an awful lot of updating, and I only just noticed that my last post here was pre-Christmas.

If I’m regularly posting on Tuesdays and Thursdays (which I still pretend I am), then that’s only a week I’ve missed. But what a week!

Finals Week

As you well know, I spent the first half of the month desperately trying to finish up The Dragonswarm for its mid-December release. It went live the week before Christmas to an immediate position on Amazon’s bestseller list for all Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I spent a heady few days tracking sales and trying really hard not to run any income projections. After all, this was probably just an initial burst of sales from people who’d been waiting desperately for the sequel since they finished Taming Fire, and it would burn itself out, right?

Still, I was pretty excited. For a while there, I had two books in the top 100 for my genre.

Merry Christmas

I woke up Christmas morning, checked my sales numbers, and realized I must have mis-remembered how many I’d had when I went to bed. Because there was no way I’d sold that many overnight.

I went to church and came home to find hundreds more books had sold while I was singing “Silent Night.” Throughout the afternoon, while the family talked and snacked and played games, I just sat staring at my monitor and occasionally calling out numbers. They all had “hundred” in there somewhere.

For most of the day, I was averaging 20 sales per hour of The Dragonswarm. That’s…well, that’s very good.

But even better, Taming Fire was averaging 30 sales/hour. That’s a big deal (and up from a trend around six sales/hour in early December). I’d anticipated it. I’d pointed it out to people, “Good performance by The Dragonswarm should actually drive new sales of Taming Fire, right?”

But it was pretty thrilling to see it happen. That means the success of the sequel is much less likely to be a big spike that quickly drops off. It’s much more likely to have staying power.

And a Happy New Year

That said, Christmas day was a big spike. That was anticipated, too. It was a big spike across the industry, and by Monday morning there was already a significant decline. That decline will continue for several weeks, probably, until it settles at a new plateau (which will still almost certainly be higher than anyone’s pre-Christmas numbers).

But now it’s been more than a week since Christmas, and our sales are still holding strong around 15 sales/hour for both titles. As you can see in the image above, Taming Fire and The Dragonswarm have been keeping each other company on the front page of the Science Fiction and Fantasy list (nervously avoiding eye contact with all the clones of George R. R. Martin).

Amazon sold four million Kindles in December. Apple’s probably about to open up a much simpler (and, with any luck, a much more effective) indie publishing platform for iBooks. Consortium Books is planning to triple our existing library this year, and we’ve got some big exciting projects even apart from that.

2012 is going to be amazing. Stay tuned.

Fantasy is dumb.

That concept rocked my world. I’d spent my whole life devouring fantasy literature (Eddings, LeGuin, McKillip, McCaffrey, Tolkien, and Pratchett), not to mention fantasy games, fantasy movies, fantasy action figures…. Anything I could get my hands on, I fell in love with.

Of course, this was before Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings movies established fantasy as mainstream. But I’d grown up surrounded by fans of the genre.

Then this one experience at a particularly vulnerable time in my life made me reconsider everything. I felt a little bit ashamed that I’d dedicated so much time and energy to…well, kid stuff.

Outgrowing my Own Oeuvre

But I had a finished fantasy novel, so I started shopping it to publishers. I got no response. That was mainly because I was doing it wrong, but I didn’t know that at the time. I took it as proof that I wasn’t meant to be a fantasy writer. I settled into life in my miserable day job and gave up on writing altogether.

I’m a writer, though. It’s in my bones. For several years I didn’t write a word of fiction, but in time I came back. I came back with post-apocalyptic thrillers. I came back with near-future sci-fi cop-drama romances. I came back with a weird story about a sort-of angel/muse who goes around inspiring artists and almost triggers World War III.

But I didn’t write fantasy. And I wasn’t happy. I was learning a lot, and I put everything I had into all those other stories, but I wasn’t really getting anything back from them. Because those really weren’t the kind of stories I loved as a reader.

The stories I loved were the ones I’d stopped writing. I’d mostly stopped reading them, too. I’d cut myself off from one of the happiest things in my life.

Daniel Wood

The story of my life is a character-driven one. It’s made up of the friendships I’ve made (mostly in spite of myself). And one of the oldest and most important friendships in my life is with a dude named Daniel Wood. We met in high school. We played Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons and shared our favorite authors with most of the other fantasy fans out there.

Dan was my best friend in high school. He was in my wedding. We’ve borrowed money from each other to afford lunch at Taco Bell. We’ve crashed on each other’s couches. We’ve shared some exciting experiences and some pretty heavy disappointments. We were friends through it all.

And then one day a couple years back, Dan and I were talking about our futures. I was talking too much about my day job and not enough about my writing career, and he called me on it. So I started talking about my new Ghost Targets series and everything I hoped to do with it, and he said, “What about fantasy?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have any fantasy stories left to tell.”

He hit me with a withering look. He’d been around when I made up all my fantasy stories. Taming Fire was still gathering dust somewhere, but he knew about more than that. He probably could have recited the plot of King Jason’s War or Faithful Jake. He knows the rise and fall of the FirstKing. He helped me design the plot arc of the Brothers War and first suggested the Caleban Knights. He knows what darkness lurks in the heart of Damion Dragonprince (or will lurk, when I get around to that one).

Auric Truefaith and the Godlanders War

But he didn’t talk about any of those. He asked me to help him with a new project he’d dreamed up. He said he wanted to write superhero fantasy–he wanted to get back to the big, exciting fantasy adventures we’d enjoyed so much as kids, instead of the wretchedly stark stuff that’s become so popular since the turn of the century.

So he sketched for me the beginnings of a world. The beginnings of a concept. There would a populist king in rebellion against the tyrant gods. There would be a cloud of superhero-style adventurers who gathered around him–Knights of the Round Table with all the themed branding we’ve come to expect from caped crusaders. And of course there would be villains. Arch-nemeses and super-villains and some of those oh-so-temporary deaths and imprisonments.

And what superhero fantasy would be complete without an origin story? We imagined ourselves a cast of thousands. We made them up and wrote them down. We plotted out a pair of epic trilogies, but decided that before we started on the novels, we should make some short stories to introduce the characters to the world and start generating some reader interest.

Like so many creative projects do, that one burned briefly bright, then slowly faded. We had hundreds of pages of notes, and I even finished rough drafts on several of those short stories and a novella. But they went in the drawer along with Taming Fire, to gather dust for a few more years.

Full Circle

Now Taming Fire is an astonishing success. Now the sequel is already a bestseller. Now I’m writing fantasy again, and discovering all over again how much it beats in time with my own heart.

The world of the FirstKing has an illustrated map! I’m glancing over old outlines and fleshing out new corners of my history. I have fans! I have become the writer I always wanted to be, and I get to do that on my own terms.

And I owe so much of that to Dan Wood, for dragging me back to adventure fantasy. I’m turning a lot of my attention to the world of the FirstKing, but I can never forget the world of Auric and the Godlanders.

In tribute to that, I dusted off one  of those old origin stories, cleaned it up, and published it to Kindle.  “Notes from a Thief” is the first story in the world of Auric, and I dedicate it wholly to my old best friend who knew what I needed far better than I did. I hope there’ll be many more such stories to follow.