Why Wattpad?

I get a lot of questions from other authors about why I have work up on Wattpad. The most common is, "What do you get out of it?"

I've answered that in bits and pieces before. I get encouragement and feedback. I get to test stories before I decide what kind of a budget to set when I publish them. I get fans.

But Wattpad recently rolled out a new feature that will let me show you the primary thing I get in a way I haven't been able to before.

This is a map that shows where the Wattpad readers of Soulwoven are from. Darker countries have contributed a greater share of readers. White countries have contributed none.

And this is what I get.

Not the map. Bla bla business intelligence, yes, there's some information that's economically useful there, but it's not important.

The darkest country on this map is a place I can (and do) reach by self-publishing. But there are also a lot of countries on this map that I can't reach that way. Maybe most importantly, there aren't that many countries on this map with no shading.

Think about that for a second. Someone has read my writing in almost every country on Earth.

How many people in human history have ever been able to say that?

So the next time someone asks me, "Why Wattpad?" I will point them here with great happiness.

On Sunsets

I'm away right now. Not doing normal things, like working and writing and e-mailing and whatnot. Really, I shouldn't even be blogging. But I had a thought yesterday, and writing it down will help me remember it better. So I'm going to do it here where I can share it with you.

Watching sunsets is important.

For me, anyway.

I used to do it a lot. Like, whenever I could. And I've had a lot of great ideas while doing it. Somehow over the past few years, I've been doing less and less of it. Yesterday was the first time in recent memory that I sat down and watched a sunset. I had nothing else to do during that time. No one to talk to. No task that needed to be completed. It was just me and the world, reenacting a human ritual I suspect is an ancient as anything that could even remotely be called humanity.

And I felt more at peace and connected with the world than I have in some time.

So, sunsets. Stop and enjoy them. Even SANDMAN's Lucifer got something out of it. You will too.

Thoughts on Kickstarter

So let me be perfectly honest here: I'm cheating a little bit with this blog post. Shortly after my Kickstarter finished, I wrote a short essay on some lessons the process taught me about publishing, writing, and life, and how everything came together to make Soulwoven a reality. I shared it with my backers. What follows is adapted from that.

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Several Big Thoughts occurred to me while the Kickstarter was up. I’ll try to get through them all here.

The first, and probably the most powerful, is what it means to say “yes.”

I have made a habit, in life, of going where the doors are open. I did not expect to enter publishing through the doors of a midlist romance publisher. But they said “yes” to me, and there I went. I did not expect to become a freelance writer and editor, but freelance clients said “yes” to me, and there I went.

I did not expect to become an indie author, but readers said “yes” to me, and there I went.

Publishing is organized around saying no. It has to be. As an editor, I get more submissions than I could possibly publish, even if I loved every one of them. As it happens, I don’t love every one of them. So I say no to the ones I don’t love, or I pass them on to others (who will also probably say no to them) if I think they’re very good but I still don’t love them.

This is a terrible thing to do to authors. We ask people to pour their hearts and souls into learning a craft and creating art with it, and then we ask them to come and seek our approval. Then we tell them “no” again and again until they reach the minuscule cross-section of people who would love their book and people in the publishing industry with the power to publish their book.

And then we wonder why some authors are unbearably arrogant or unbearably neurotic.

At any rate, I spent the first decade or so of my writing life being told “no,” over and over and over again. In the face of that, there comes a point where you honestly stop expecting to hear yes.

The first day of my Kickstarter was incredibly emotional for me. I was reasonably certain that, over the course of a month, I could get 25 people to pledge $25 each and get the book funded.

But the number of people who came right out of the gate not just to pledge, but to pledge big, absolutely astonished me. After ten years of being told I wasn’t good enough (or sometimes that I just wasn’t a good fit), I discovered in half a day that people believed in me who I didn’t even know were paying attention to me.

That was an incredible feeling, and it has kept me going for a long, long time.

Second, the Kickstarter taught me that there really is a revolution occurring in the world of arts and music and letters, and that it’s an honor to be a part of it.

I’ve read lots of articles proclaiming that digital publishing is ushering in a new era of something or another. I’ve always taken them with a grain of salt. Every prophet of the new seems to have something to gain from ensuring that it comes to pass. So I never drank the Kool-Aid.

And then, as I started to answer questions about the Soulwoven Kickstarter, I realized something.

The best music I bought in 2013 was all independently produced.

To be sure, I bought some good albums from music labels too. But the best? The most striking? The most inspiring? The most unusual and artistic? Indie. Or at worst, started indie and got picked up by a label after.

I’m not a part of indie music fandom. I know very little about bands, or scenes, or music in general. I have next to no sense of what I should like and what I shouldn’t. I just hear songs (usually on the radio), and then go buy the album if I like them enough.

So if the best songs I was hearing on the radio, which were succeeding against all odds in the land of Clear Channel and label dominance, were indie, that meant something.

I’ve long contended that music is about five years ahead of publishing. Up to now, indie publishing has largely been the breeding ground of the most commercial of commercial fiction. Fifty Shades of Grey, etc. Not authors who claim to be making great art.

But that’s going to change, and I’m excited to watch that wave hit the shore from the inside rather than the outside.

My third and perhaps most contentious Big Thought came about because of who my backers were. I know, personally, 51 of them. And those 51 contributed the lion’s share of the book’s funding.

In my head, I have a voice that tells me my success is therefore invalid. That my book was a pity case. That it was only what personal popularity I possess that motivated anyone to back me. The voice began speaking to me before my Kickstarter even launched.

And you know what? It’s full of it.

On the day the Kickstarter went up, another voice spoke up in my head, and it said, quite clearly: Who did you think your first fans were going to be? The staff of the New York Times Book Review?

That voice knows what it’s talking about. To be an author requires a certain amount of arrogance. You have to believe that you can write something worth reading. If you want to make a living at it, you have to believe that you can do it better than almost everyone else who’s trying the same thing.

That’s enough arrogance. You don’t have to believe you’ll be so good at it that you won’t need the help of your friends and family to succeed.

A lot of success stories start with “Using money borrowed from family and friends.” I didn’t even have to borrow. I’m giving things back, and they’re experiences and objects, for the most part, that no one else will ever get to have.

My fourth, and by far my most important and far-reaching Big Thought, involves the proving of an idea I had two years ago.

In early 2012, I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, and I realized as I watched people fail and fail and fail trying to put up new climbing routes or face death on 8,000-meter peaks that I was jealous of them. Because they weren’t worrying about marketing or careers or star makers or success. They were doing what they thought was awesome. And success, if it came, came later.

That, to me, is what being indie is all about. More importantly, it’s what leads to good art and a sustainable career no matter how you publish.

So I decided not to worry about how I was going to succeed. I decided to just do things I thought were awesome and to trust that, if other people agreed with me, success would follow.

Now it has, and I am immensely honored to have had the support of so many wonderful people in making it happen.

Kickstarter Success!

So as you all can see from the widget over that way ------>

The Soulwoven Kickstarter successfully funded at midnight last night. It's going to take me a few days, I think, to fully process my thoughts on this, because there are a lot of them.

For now, I just want to share a couple of pictures.

This is what Kickstarter success looks like when you're facing a computer screen.

And this is what Kickstarter success looks like if you're a computer screen looking out.

I'll be back soon to tell you what it feels like to be an author who just successfully completed a Kickstarter, but we can start with the following:

It feels great.

-J

Countdown to Three Dances: Do It Now

I don't cry often.

It's not so much because I think I must be manly (although I sometimes do) as because I think I must be calm. I don't like letting my emotions get the better of me. When things get hard, I try to get rational and quiet and thoughtful.

But I cried last weekend.

Those of you who have been following the Three Dances posts will remember that I talked about a subject that made my stomach churn and my eyes tear up. This is it. And I am now three paragraphs into talking about it without having talked about it at all. That's how hard it is to write about for me.

One of my grandmothers did the art for Three Dances. She is an amazing, wonderful woman; donated her time and art to the book; and has been a mentor and a guiding light to me in ways I don't think she fully understands, because she is also a humble person.

But she's not the grandmother who has been most supportive of my writing over the course of my life.

Since I was a teenager, my other grandmother has encouraged me to be a writer. When she visited, she asked how my writing was going. When I was in college, she was thrilled to hear that I was studying writing, even though everyone knew it was never likely to be particularly remunerative. When we talked, she always, at some point, said, "Now, you're still writing, aren't you?" She was never pushy, but I always knew that she thought it was amazing that I was writing, and that she would be proud as a peach when my first book came out.

After my grandfather died, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, or something so much like it that nobody other than a doctor is likely to care about the difference.

But still, she knew I was a writer. During the times when the disease was just taking hold and she would only forget my name and not my face, she knew I was a writer. When we spoke, she still wanted to make sure that I was writing. It was very important to her. That's one of the funny things about that disease; you get to see what's important to people, because they talk about the same things over and over again.

In the last year, her disease has gotten much worse. I don't think she really knows who I am anymore. When we see each other, she gives me a huge smile and a hug and a kiss and says, "Oh, what a good-looking young man!" because, even as her brain wanders away from her, she is still just that kind of a person.

Last weekend I brought the proof copy of Three Dances to my parents' house so that I could share it with them and my grandmothers. And as I sat a table and waited for her to arrive, I realized that the grandmother who for years had encouraged me to write books would never really know that I had finished one, and that it was being published.

So I cried. And I'm crying again now, as I write this.

Because I could have done better. I could have done sooner. I could have published Three Dances, or Soulwoven, or something very much like them, while she was still capable of recognizing me and truly, deeply knowing that I had done something she had always wanted me to do.

So my advice to you is this: whatever thing you want to do with your life, do it now. Don't wait. There are people to whom your dreams are more important than you yet realize. And if you wait too long to make things happen, you may lose the chance to share wonderful moments with them.

I will never know what my grandmother's reaction to my first book would have been if it had come out five years ago. When I was younger, she was a very deep and thoughtful person. I wish I could know what she would have said and done.

Last weekend, her reaction was "That's wonderful! You wrote this? Where can I buy this? [pause, during which conversation moves on a little] I will give you two dollars for this!"

I told her her copy was on its way, and I laughed, because that reaction was so much better than what it could have been.

But still. Do it now. Whatever it is. Don't wait. We all only get so much time.

-Jeff

You can buy Three Dances here, here, or here.

Countdown to Three Dances: Images

Various versions of Three Dances are under final review at Amazon and B&N. The print version, actually, is live here: you can buy one (or ten, or a hundred) if you want, and I will get paid for it.

For some reason, this is terrifying to me.

So in order to stay clear of being afraid, I'm going to put up a blog post I wrote months ago with the plan of posting it in the runup to the Three Dances launch, mostly because I thought it was interesting and also because I thought it might drive some attention. Warning: It's long and gets a bit technical in places.

Anyway, here goes:

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Today I want to talk about the art for the collection, and the interesting challenges it has presented for me-as-publisher.

I decided to include art in the collection because I wanted something to help it stand out from the crowd. There's so much being self-published right now, and it's so easy to just chuck something up on Amazon as an e-book, that I wanted to provide my readers with immediate proof that I had not just chucked the book up on the Internet. That, in fact, it had been planned and plotted and slaved and sweated over, and was going to be worth their few dollars of money and few hours of time to experience.

Including custom art seemed to be a good way to do that.

Originally, I was going to have a friend of mine who does amazing things with spraypaint and stencils and letters make the art, but his schedule got too crazy, and he had to back out. I then approached my grandmother, who has been making art for the better part of a century, about helping out.

Luckily for me, she was excited about the project, too.

Working with her has been a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime experience worthy of its own blog post, but one of the upshots of it has been that I'm left doing the digitization of her artwork completely on my own. Computers are not her thing.

I'm using a free program called GIMP, which was introduced to me by the folks at Wattpad, to do it. Process breakdown below:

First, I receive the finished art from my grandmother. It's not exactly in ready-to-display shape, but we're on deadline here, and she's working for free, and I'm happy just to have it at all.

Next, I wait for good, natural light in my apartment, take a digital photo of the artwork, and shovel it onto my computer. It looks something like this:

Next, I crop and rotate the photo in GIMP.

At this point, it's still far from ready for production. The whites aren't white, and there are a lot of extraneous lines left to be cleaned up. My first thought was to attempt to go through and clean everything by hand, but that very quickly proved to be an untenable amount of work.

Luckily, GIMP has a tool called "Color Select" that selects everything in an image that's the same or a similar color. The tool has been a godsend for me. So next I create a new image with the same dimensions as the original, select everything that's black in the source image, and copy it over onto the new image. It gives me something like this:

Pretty big improvement, right? But we're not done yet. It looks a little washed out, like it's been copied poorly on a machine. So next I go after the gray tones.

It takes several steps, but eventually, I get this:

Still not perfect, but it's getting closer, and we're now at the point where manual touch-up becomes feasible. So I go in with my GIMP paintbrush/pencil tool (they work kind of the same) and eraser, and I blacken in lines that I think are meant to be blacked and get rid of lines that I think were not meant to appear in the final product. It takes some fiddling and a little artistic interpretation on my part, but eventually, I end up with an image that looks more like this:

Finally, I print off a test page, which includes the image and the text roughly as I think they'll appear in the finished version. I then put it under a good light and circle areas of the image that I think need further retouching, like so:

Then, after I go back through and do some more image correction, I come out with what's approaching a final version:

Now I still have to get it laid out for real and wait for proofs, and there's a chance that the image will need some tweaking at that stage, but for now, it's done! And in much less time than one might think, as well. This one probably only took me three or four hours of work, and I was figuring everything out as I went. Future images should take even less time than that.

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The image I used as an example here is one of the black-and-white ones that appears in the print and basic digital (for black-and-white ereaders like the basic Kindle and Nook) editions of the book. Creating the Digital Deluxe Edition's colorized images was a bit more fun. I'll pop back on the blog to talk about that sometime next week.

I also have a Three Dances-related blog post in the back of my head that churns my stomach and brings tears to my eyes to think of. I will write it when I think I have the mental space to do it justice, and I will share it with you before the book's official launch on the 13th.

I promise.

Letter to a Younger Me

Lately, I've been trying to respond to as many Wattpad readers of mine as possible about Soulwoven, and to interact with them however I can. I do it in part because it's "best practice," whatever that means, and in larger part because I genuinely enjoying connecting with readers. It's the first time in my career I've had a chance to do so, and I'm really having a good time with it.

Yesterday, I ran across a reader of mine who's a college student. He was asking for advice on writing from the Wattpad community. There are several things I would really like to be able to go back in time and say to my college self on the subject, so I told him so and let him know what they were.

It occurred to me later that the advice might be useful to more college writers than just him, so I am now posting it here:

Write every day. Make it a priority. You may have a lot of excuses not to, like classes and college life and trying to remain sane in a high stress environment. You may even tell yourself it will be better to wait until after college to start writing seriously, because you'll be better then. You would be wrong to do so. Write now. Write often. Write whenever you can, on top of everything else you're doing. It will never get any easier to do it, and you will kick yourself down the road if you don't.

Signed,
An Older Jeff

Always Dance

...particularly at concerts.

You never know when some guy in a camouflage jacket will come up to you and ask if you want to pilot a giant robot puppet.

Thank you Black Seeds and Rubblebucket for making this happen.



...I'm the one with the blue eyes and the C-shaped robo-hands.