My Bogenschießen is best!

The Future of Publishing

2012-01-18T17:17:00.000-08:00

I just advised an aspiring writer to avoid agents and traditional publishers; the opposite of everything they taught me in my writing courses.

You see, I've come to the conclusion that today authors don't need the traditional allies to get published. Not only do we have the resources and opportunities to publish without agents and publishers, we can actually do it better without them. With options like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, and with clever niche marketing, an author can be successful... and not have to share 10 to 15% of that success with an undeserving agent... or watch that success whither and die under the stewardship of an incompetent publisher. Today's Author isn't bound by conventional business practices. His words can reach millions without a drop of ink ever being spilled. Simon & Schuster, Random House, Penguin... they are dinosaurs that have yet to realize they are extinct. And literary agents are ticks with business cards.

Stand tall, authors. Your destiny is in your hands. Let history claim the moribund publishing industry. And make your own history now!

No One Will Love Your Book More Than You...

2011-12-17T18:15:00.000-08:00

If you're a writer like me, you probably invest a lot of time, tears, and tender loving care in your writing. How baffling is it then that the first thing we attempt to do when we complete a novel, play, or script is to turn it over to some soulless corporation whose only purpose is to exploit, plunder, and profit from our precious efforts? Worse, some of us even settle for smaller publishers/agents/producers who operate with just as much greed at a fraction of the competence.

What demon compels us to both create and destroy our work? Is it an overwhelming desire to have our work enjoyed by the masses? A perverse need to simply be acknowledged as a writer? An unquenchable longing to have our names mentioned in the same breath with Rowling, King, and Patterson?

Just 10 years ago, most of us would have had little chance of enjoying success as a published author without jumping through the traditional publishing hoops. Get an agent. Find a publisher. Sign your name in blood on the dotted line. If you were lucky, the publicity machine might do its job and your book would catch on. Movie studios would come calling, and your bank account would swell with success. But your work would mutate into something else. Something you never intended. It would become a franchise... a brand. Something to be exploited... milked like a cow. At some point your mind would sync with the agents, lawyers, and corporate hypnotists. You would forget your craft and crave the cash. You would cease to become a writer. You would become a manufacturer... a maker of prefabricated dreams and nightmares.

And those were the lucky writers. Others would simply find their works stripped for parts, melted down, and recast as something unrecognizable. They might get a pittance for their efforts... but not a price worth their souls.

Still others would be condemned to endlessly wander door-to-door, query letters in hand. Like homeless ghosts, they roamed the edges of the publishing world wailing in agony over unfulfilled ambitions.

But today the smart writer embraces the new technologies, guiding his or her own destiny. You can be your own agent, publisher, and publicist. You can cut out the middleman, and everyone to the right and left of him. Today the writer is in control. No corporation can command him. No merchandiser can contain him. No industry can control him. Self-publishing used to be a dirty word... but only because the traditional publishers deemed it so. Now it's standard operating procedure, with countless authors selling their work through Amazon Kindle, through niche markets, and through pure, beautiful, matchless enthusiasm.

Remember, my fellow authors, no one will love your book more than you. Why then would you put it in the hands of another?

After all, the first step to becoming a true writer is having faith in yourself.

The Writer Wakes Up

2011-12-13T19:16:00.000-08:00

My first short story was published in issue #49 of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine. I've been slowly waking up ever since.

Would-be comic book publishers. Publishers who go out of business before they can cut the check or sign the contract. Agents who are well meaning, yet out-of-their-league. And slime buckets who bully, lie, and hold your intellectual property in a death grip... I've faced all of them over the past 11 years.

But I've finally woken up. I've finally taken control of my writing career. I've finally realized that all of the traditional alliances and contracts the publishing industry has brainwashed writers into thinking they need, are nothing more than hindrances... inspiration vampires that need helpless dreamers to survive.

Well, no more publishers. No more agents. No more letting others guide my destiny. I'm wide awake now, and I have work to do.

In the next few weeks I'll reveal my bold, new plans for the Noggle Stones franchise. The books, archery line, card game, and role-playing game are just the start. Now that I've shed the dead weight, abandoned the false hopes, and set a new course, the dreaming is over... and the day has just begun.