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.

Marketing Soulwoven Part Two: The Kickstarter Launch

Okay, time for part two of the ongoing series of posts on how I'm marketing Soulwoven (you can read part one here).

The second stage of marketing Soulwoven came with the Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter, like Wattpad, was a thing I found out about via the news. I started backing projects on it in 2012, with Amanda Palmer's album Theatre is Evil. Over the next year or so, I backed several projects and got a chance to see firsthand how they worked---what was exciting about the process, what wasn't, what other people did well and poorly, etc.

Kickstarter, for those who don't know it, lets people pledge money to support a creative endeavor. For authors, it's a way of funding all of the many expenses related to publishing a book, like editing, marketing, and cover design. In the traditional publishing world, your publisher foots those expenses in return for a large slice of the profits of the book. When you Kickstart, your audience foots those expenses in return for various backer rewards and the fun of being a part of your creative process.

Launching the Kickstarter was the first time I began actively marketing Soulwoven to anyone. I knew from backing other projects and from reading up on it that having a good video was extremely important, so I turned to a friend of mine from high school who runs a small video production company in Denver. He did a bang-up job on the video, which more than paid for itself.

I also reached out to my Wattpad followers, of which there were several thousand at the time, and asked them what they'd be interested in getting as rewards from a Kickstarter. I built a survey using Survey Monkey and asked them to rank my ideas in order from most exciting to least exciting, and then to write in any ideas of their own. I didn't get a ton of responses, but I got enough to correct some misconceptions I'd had about what would be the most exciting. I also realized that I wasn't likely to have people from Wattpad pouring thousands of dollars into the Kickstarter.

So I set my goals low. I knew I couldn't adequately copy edit a book of Soulwoven's length (because I'd already copy edited Three Dances myself, and it was a bear of a job even for a book so short). So I told myself I needed $550 to hire a copy editor I'd worked with through my freelancing for Carina Press, and I set up my reward tiers pretty aggressively to hit that goal. I was reasonably certain I could convince 25 people to pledge $25 each to back to the book, and I filled the $25 reward tier with all the goodies my survey respondents said they wanted most. I also set a number of stretch goals for the campaign, which would add interior artwork and additional editing to the publishing process if they were reached.

It worked well beyond my wildest dreams. My core fans were extremely excited to back the book, and I hit my funding goal about 12 hours after the Kickstarter went live. I eventually received 660% of my goal, allowing me to bring on an interior artist and developmental editor, as well as to launch with a pretty significant marketing budget.

There were a few other marketing tricks I pulled out for the Kickstarter that are worth mentioning. I noticed that being part of a successful Kickstarter was a lot more fun than being part of one that wasn't going very well. I also knew that if the book funded quickly, I'd have another flashy hook I could dangle in my marketing copy. So I set my funding floor low with that in mind. I also set up my reward tiers in a way that encouraged interaction between me and my backers. I wanted to get to know these people, who were making my dream a reality. I also knew that the more contact we had, the more likely they were to remember me.

This is getting long, so I'm going to break it off here and talk more about the process of fulfilling the Kickstarter in another post. But first I want to mention another marketing caveat. It's true of anything you do marketing-wise on the Internet, but it's especially true of Kickstarter:

It's never about what they can do for you. It's always about what you can do for them.

Marketing actively to people can make you come off as a sleazeball at relativistic speeds. The world is full of people and companies trying to separate readers from their money. Don't do that. Don't be desperate. Don't be needy. Don't be pushy. Your needs are unimportant to people who have never met you, and if you put your needs above the needs of the people who have met you, you'll start to push them away pretty quickly.

So find out what your readers want and what you can give them. Then offer it to them. When you ask for something back, do it humbly and with a smile on your face that says, "I'll still like you whether you help me out or not." Let the money question ride quietly and unobtrusively in the backseat of your relationships with readers and fans, because that's where it belongs.

And watch Amanda Palmer's TED talk. It will help you put things in perspective.

Marketing Soulwoven Part One: Wattpad

I realized after I promised another marketing post on Friday that talking about the commercialization strategy for Soulwoven was going to take up several posts' worth of space. Figuring out how to share this book with the world has taken, literally, years. Not as long as it took to write it, but a long time.

The story starts in 2012.

If you've read any of the promo material for Soulwoven, you've seen me trumpeting the success it's had on Wattpad. For those of you who don't know, Wattpad is a story-sharing site. You sign up for an account, and you can post stories on there and read the stories that other people post. The whole thing is free. I'm not sure how they make money, or if they are making money (it's a tech startup; they often go a long time without making any money).

I heard about Wattpad through Publisher's Weekly, a trade publication I used to read every day and wish I still had time to read every day. They ran an article about an author with a huge Wattpad following in late 2011. Shortly thereafter, she got a huge deal. I took notice, signed up for a Wattpad account, and started lurking and thinking and thinking and lurking.

At the time, I wasn't sure how to use it. I still wanted to publish Soulwoven traditionally, and I was afraid that putting it on Wattpad might trounce its chances. So I started asking around. Six months later, after I asked several literary agents about Wattpad and they asked me back, "What's that?" I decided that this was going to be The Next Big Thing and I ought to get involved before it hit that point (I was partially right; it's bigger now, and I think it's much harder to catch their attention).

So I started revising Soulwoven and posting chapters of it on Wattpad. I had enormously high hopes, as I always tend to. The results didn't live up to them. People read it. People liked it. But it didn't go gangbusters and generate huge word of mouth and suddenly shoot to the top of Wattpad's rankings (it did crack the top 25 at one point, but it dropped off from there pretty quickly).

I blogged about the experience though, and my blog posts caught the eye of a Wattpad community manager, and she contacted me and asked if I was interested in having Soulwoven featured on the site.

One of the principles of book marketing (and writing, for that matter, because it enters into how you construct your first page) I cottoned on to pretty early on in the process was the importance of setting reader expectations. I noticed that I gave authors extra slack if I had seen their work before or it came with laudatory quotes from authors or reviewers I trusted (or best yet, from friends). Neil Gaiman's American Gods took most of the book to hook me, but I stuck with it because it was Neil Gaiman, and I had faith it would get there. I put A Game of Thrones down after the first chapter because I didn't like it, only to pick it up later, read farther, and fall in love with it after it was recommended to me repeatedly by friends.

Marketing a first novel, especially if you're self-publishing, is difficult because you don't have any of that credit with readers. They bring no positive preconceptions to your book, which means you get very little slack from them. I wanted to do as much as I could to set readers up to enjoy the book before they even opened it, and having Soulwoven featured on Wattpad let me do that.

It worked in two ways: first, I could plug the fact that it was featured. A lot of readers haven't heard of Wattpad, but they know the word "featured" and that it's a good thing. Second, before I launched Soulwoven, it generated over 500,000 reads on Wattpad (Wattpad's "reads" are essentially page views; Wattpad is cagey about how it calculates things, but as far as I can tell, it counts a read anytime a user opens a new chapter of the book). Again, you don't have to know Wattpad to see "half a million" and think "good thing." When it came time for the Kickstarter campaign, I could point to my success on Wattpad and say, "You should fund this book because people already love it," and that was immensely helpful.

But on top of giving me some means with which to make myself sound good, having the book up on Wattpad gave me a wealth of useful information about it. I got to see who was reading it and liking it (at least as much as they shared with me), and I got to see what people were saying about it and what they liked about it. I learned that about half of people who were starting the book weren't reading past the first chapter, and I could compare that to the numbers of other successful books on Wattpad and see that it stacked up pretty well. I could also see that Soulwoven wasn't the kind of book that people JUST HAD TO SHARE OMG. I eventually concluded that it was a middling success on Wattpad and was likely to be a middling success commercially. So far, that's exactly what it's been.

I still have the book up on Wattpad. The sanity of that decision has been questioned, but I'll talk more about that when I get to the pricing part of this series (much in the future). But put shortly, all the evidence I've seen shows that Wattpad users aren't big book buyers, and that big book buyers aren't Wattpad users. The ecosystems exist more or less independently, and I benefit immensely from having Soulwoven up. It crossed 750,000 reads this weekend. When it hits a million, I'll update my promo info with the new, flashier number.

Plus, people are reading it who otherwise wouldn't be, and in the end, that's more important than anything else. I don't write fiction solely to make money. I make a hell of a lot more money writing things that aren't fiction. I write fiction to move people and make a positive influence on the world, and the only reason I'm after money for it at all is because if I can make a living at it, I can do more of it and do it better.

And that's worth keeping in mind whenever we talk marketing. There are dueling goals of art and commerce for every author, and I do my best to privilege the artistic over the commercial whenever I can.

News for the Week of 10.21.13: Soulwoven Comes Together, and All Hallows Write is Soon

Hello, friends and readers!

I was up until 1:00 a.m. last night reading the second book of Soulwoven to my fiancee, so I’m exhausted as I write this today. But it was worth it. The book’s coming together very well. It’s darker and deeper and harder than the first one was, but I think readers liked those things about the first one, and if you did, you’ll like the second even more. I hope to start posting chapters of it on Wattpad around the same time the first book launches commercially (February 2014).

Speaking! Of! Which! The commercial edition of Soulwoven is starting to look really exciting. The new cover is approaching a finished state, and it’s going to blow the doors off the one I’ve got now (especially in print). I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to handle page design and layout, and I’m really excited about the way the whole package is coming together. I’ve always thought of books as pieces of art, of which the text is just the heart. And I think that Soulwoven is turning into a piece of art, and it’s incredibly satisfying to watch.

More news! On Oct. 31, I’ll be staying up all night with a couple other authors for a scary story writing marathon we’re calling All Hallows Write (more info at allhallowswrite.com). That means I should have a new short story up here for you guys on Nov. 1. It’ll be a bit of a departure from my usual style, but I think it’ll still be recognizable as mine, and it’ll still be good. Hopefully. I’ve never tried anything like this before, and that’s half the fun.

Finally: Nadya. Nadya’s mired in the muck of the traditional publishing process, searching for the needle in the haystack that will be the agent who loves her. I’ll know in a month or two whether that’s going to happen. I’ve gotten lots of nibbles so far, but no bites. Everyone has been in concurrence that it’s a good book. It’s just a matter of finding the right home for it.

So there’s more coming from me to you shortly, in one form or another.

Stay tuned, thanks for reading, and if you want to give me a wonderful birthday present, head on over to Amazon and pick up a copy of Three Dances. :-)

Yours dearly,

Jeff

News for the Week of 10.4.13: Soulwoven and All Hallows Write!

Hello, dear friends and readers!

Sorry for the long time between updates. I’ve been busy!

Thing of note number one! I went to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers conference in Denver and had a blast. I met lots of cool people, like indie bestseller Laura Kreitzer and fellow Kickstarter alum TravisHeermann, and I saw some old friends and made some new contacts with people in publishing doing interesting things. I also gave a workshop on how to write cover copy, which I’ll be presenting again online for Delve Writing on Oct. 15. As far as I’m aware, you can log in and watch as a guest. If you’re thinking about checking it out, let me know and I’ll double check.

Thing of note number two! I finished my last round of revisions on Soulwoven before it goes off to my editor Rose Fox. It went well. I’m confident that I’ve written a good book. And really, that’s all any author can ask. New cover art for it is in the works, and I can’t wait to share it with you. And mark February down in your calendars, because that’s when the print version comes out. It’ll be available worldwide on Amazon, and you should all buy a copy.

Thing of note number three! Maybe most exciting for the Wattpad audience, I’ve started the Cass round of revisions on Soulwoven: Exile, in which the story of Litnig and Cole and their friends darkens and broadens and spreads out. This is always the most terrifying round of revisions for me, because it’s the first time I share it with anyone, and it’s such an intimate experience. I always find flaws, and they always make me feel like there’s more work left to be done than I can possibly handle and that I’m a terrible writer. But when it’s over, the book is approaching a state of readiness for sharing with a wider audience. I want to start getting chapters out around the same time the print version of Soulwoven comes out. Fingers crossed I can hit that deadline.

Thing of note number four! All Hallows Write is coming up at the end of the month. I’m excited about the story idea I’ve got cooking for it, which involves thunderstorms and a creature from another dimension and bad parents and loving brothers and a level of gore somewhere between moderate and “yuck.” The aforementioned Travis Heermann will be joining me on the adventure, and I’ll be contacting some other indie writers over the next month to see if I can’t con anyone else into staying up all night with me and writing scary things.

Thanks for tuning in, thanks for reading, and thanks for believing,

Jeff

News for the Week of 9.13.13: All the Things!

Hello, dear friends and readers!

I cannot believe two weeks have passed since the Kickstarter closed. It's been a crazy last month and a half for me, and I am late on informing the world of several things.

First: I will be at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Conference from September 20-22. On the 20th, I'll be one of many authors signing books. Come on down! You don't need a conference registration to come buy books (or you didn't last time I went). On the 21st, I'll be giving a workshop on cover copy for the indie author. You DO need to register for the conference to attend that. :-)

Second! One of my authors' first books with Carina launched in August (link here). It's called The Adorned, and it's a male/male fantasy romance. I won't apologize for that, because that's what the author writes and loves, but I will say that it is to me first and foremost a great fantasy, with incredible world building and beautiful prose. Yes, there's a love story (and it's a great one), and yes, that love story is between two men. But this story deserves to be read without preconceptions, because it's extraordinarily well written (if you don't believe me, read the reviews). If you're into fantasy, amazing prose, and great books in general, you should check it out.

Third! Wattpad BLEW UP for about the last 30 days before finally cooling off last night. There are now nearly 14,000 people following me there. That number boggles my imagination. I do not understand what it is to be able to click a button and send a message to 14,000 people, other than very, very cool. I have a lot of thoughts bubbling on Wattpad, but they deserve their own post. I'll share them soon.

Fourth! I have fun projects on the way for the fall. Last year I wrote Nadya Skylung and the Cloud Pirates during NaNoWriMo, and I think it's my best work to date. I owe The Unlikely Candidates a debt of gratitude for inspiring this year's crazy fall project, which I'm very excited about and which I have been doing a boatload of reading in preparation for (and which, I should note, will not impinge at all on the schedule for Soulwoven---this is a necessary precondition of its existence). I don't want to say too much for fear of jinxing it (and also because I may fail entirely in executing it---that's part of the magic of the crazy fall project). I'll also be writing a scary story in a marathon on Halloween, possibly alone and possibly at the same time as other writers.

So in short, I should have more good stuff for you soon.

Much love and thanks for your patience. I now have to go catch a plane to Wyoming.
-Jeff

P.S. The front range of Colorado is flooding. I grew up there and it means a lot to me. You can help it react and recover here.

For New Readers

Note: I wrote this post originally to reach out to several thousand new followers of mine on Wattpad. But once it was written, I realized it might be worth sharing with a wider audience as well. So here goes!

TL;DR Thanks for taking a chance on me. I mostly write fantasy for young people. You can find a lot of my work on Wattpad. I appreciate your support and love talking to readers.

Hello friends and readers!

This post is mostly aimed at my new followers. Those of you who’ve been around for a while can feel free to carry on with your Wattpadding uninterrupted. :-)

But to the rest of you: a special hello! Many of you are completely new to Wattpad, and I want to thank you guys for choosing me as one of the first authors you’ve followed. I know a lot of you haven’t had the chance to read any of my work yet. That’s cool with me. I want to earn your support and readership, and I figure I’ll start by extending a welcoming hand and giving you a brief introduction to what I’ve posted here.

NADYA SKYLUNG AND THE CLOUD PIRATES is a fantasy steampunkish adventure written with middle-grade readers (11-14 or so) in mind. Judging by early reactions to it, it is by far the best thing I’ve ever written. There are only three chapters of it up on Wattpad, because I’m waiting to introduce it to the world with a bang, but it’s a good place to start and get an idea of what I write. 

SOULWOVEN is the reason most of you are here. Wattpad spotted it when I started posting it last year and asked to feature it. It’s an epic fantasy about brotherhood, friendship, young love, saving the world, losing your identity, and what we have left when everything is taken from us. It’s ambitious, and it’s a little dense, and it’s aimed at lovers of fantasy and literature ages 15 and up. 

Finally, THREE DANCES is a short story collection I published earlier this year. It’s five literary fiction stories done in a magical realist style that deal with tricks of language and myth, gender and sexuality, and growing up. It’s aimed pretty squarely at adults, but it’s a good read if you like its niche. 

I hope you find a book you love on my list. And if you do, I hope you take the time to let me know by voting and commenting (ed: or by buying Three Dances or backing the Soulwoven Kickstarter!). Those things are what make the world go round for us authors. And if you just want to say hi, drop me a line for that too. I’d love to talk to you. :-) 

Cheers, Jeff

Why I'm Doing the Kickstarter

Hello all!

Since I announced the Kickstarter, I've been fielding questions about it from friends, family, fans, and other writers. The biggest (what is it?) I hope I addressed in my last post. But the question I receive next most often is "Why are you doing this?"

So I've been mulling over the best way to communicate that. And then yesterday I got a message on Wattpad from a reader named Sarbjot, in response to a "Hey, thanks for reading!" I'd sent to him months ago. I got his permission to share it with the world, and it reads:

@realjeffseymour I'm not sure if I replied to this yet but I've read it before :), I will go back through and site on all the chapters that I liked I might have missed; and I would fan you as an author anytime, you have amazing writing skills and an very intriguing book to boot; which is why I will donate 30$ for the kickstarter, I don't want anything; honestly, I just want to see this book go public and want to see you make it in the writing industry! Have a good one! See you next book :)

This is what Kickstarter looks like. This is what indie art, these days, looks like. The world is full of people like Sarbjot, who just want to be a part of making a book, a musician, an author, or an artist successful.

Soulwoven is a project for that tribe. If I sent it out to publishers, it would fall into a great sea of fantasy books that are "good but tough to market" and drown there.

But through Kickstarter, I can give all the people who believe in Soulwoven, believe in my writing, and believe in me a chance to stand up and be counted. And when people do that, other people notice, and so on and so on until a book reaches as many people as it can.

I am nervously awaiting the video for my Kickstarter and wondering if I'm going to have to call Kickstarter HQ in a panic to try to get my project's review expedited. In the meantime, I'm making revision notes on the book. The next time you see it, it's going to be tighter, more polished, and ready for widespread consumption, and I think you're really going to love it.

Thanks for believing,
Jeff

News for the Week of 6.12.13: Renaissance and The Craziest Summer

Greetings, dear friends and readers!

Ahh. It’s summertime, and I dunno about you, but I can feel it. Both in the ridiculously high temperatures outside and in the big jump in activity on Wattpad. Hello new followers and readers! Welcome to the party. I’m so glad you’ve come.

Soulwoven has experienced what is, for me, a very gratifying resurgence over the last couple of weeks, I assume as schools get out and people are looking for new things to read. It feels like a new lease on life for the book, and I’m thrilled that even seven months after I posted the full thing, new readers are finding it and loving it. Feedback and edits on the sequel are next on my to-do list, just as soon as I finish final revisions on Nadya, which should happen shortly (yay!).

Planning for the Kickstarter is going well also. The team and cost estimates are almost in place. The video should be shooting at the beginning of July. Shortly thereafter, as I move across the country, I’ll put it up.

Oh! That means it’s now time to line up PR for it. So if you have a blog, or you know someone who has a blog, or you’re a journalist or know someone who’s a journalist who covers these sorts of things, let me know. I’d love to send you/your acquaintances some information or do a guest post about just about anything you like.

In the meantime, I am working like a madman and the love of my life is thousands of miles away. So this is not my favorite summer of all time. But it has been an exciting one, and I’m glad you’re all along for the ride.

Cheers and summer fun,

Jeff

News for the Week of 5.16.13: Kickstarter Survey, Homebuying, Soulwoven: Exile, and Nadya Revisions

Dear Friends and Readers,

It’s survey time! I’m building the skeleton of the Kickstarter for Soulwoven, and I want your help! I’ll talk more about it below, but for now, link here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XR6QC6G

Here’s the deal with the survey. Kickstarter lets people like me fund projects they don’t have the scratch to pay for themselves, like buying professional services for long books. It also lets people like you support the creation of art by pledging money to a project. In return, you get special, one-of-a-kind rewards. The survey is going to help me figure out what to offer as those rewards. I’m choosing to publish Soulwoven this way because I want to make you guys as big a part of the process as possible. And I want to make sure that there are backer rewards in the Kickstarter that you’ll get excited about.

So please drop in and share your opinions. It’s a four-question survey, and well worth your time if you want to help this thing get off the ground and get some awesome stuff in return.

In. Other. News!

My fiancee and I bought a house. The process of that has been taking up a great of deal of time that would have otherwise been spent writing. You have my apologies for that.

But!

I’ve finished a full draft of Soulwoven: Exile, the sequel to Soulwoven. It’s now waiting for me to finish some work revising Nadya so I can get Nadya back to an agent who showed some interest in it. Once I’ve done that, I’m going to take one last look at Exile and start sharing it with my trusty team of early readers. Hopefully it will be on its way to you guys by the end of the summer.

I’m extremely excited about the stories I have coming up for you guys. If you haven’t yet, check out Three Dances and buy a copy via the links on Wattpad or my website. The more books I sell, the more time I get to spend writing.

Cheers and springtime love,

Jeff

News for the Week of 4.18.13: Fall-Down Tiredness, Three Dances' Warm Reception, and Potential Kickstarting

Hello, Dear Friends and Readers!

I write to you today completely and utterly exhausted. It’s been a heck of a week. The Three Dances launch party went off well last weekend; I’ve been posting snippets from my speech there up on my blog all week, if you’re interested. Tomorrow I’ll post a reading from “The Jazz Festival” as well.

Three Dances itself is getting a much warmer reception than I expected. I thought of it as quite a weird book, but people are saying wonderful things about it on Goodreads, and Amazon, and Wattpad, and also in private messages to me. And that makes me wonderfully happy.

Meanwhile it’s off to the next book! I’m finishing up revisions on Soulwoven: Exile---just ten chapters left, and I’m getting into the real meaty, pulse-racy, everything-changes-forever sort of material. I feel sort of like I’m dancing drunk, because by the time I get to the book every night I’m so tired I feel like falling over, and then I have to try to put words on the page in a way that makes sense and tells a story, and that’s hard.

But I learned in college that sometimes I dance pretty well when I’m drunk.

Anyway, the wonderful reception that Three Dances has gotten has me thinking more about Soulwoven and how to best launch it this summer. I’m thinking about a Kickstarter, because the book is long enough and serious enough that I’d love to buy some professional help for it (copy editing, developmental editing, and line editing, in that order), but I have nowhere near the funds I need in order to do so. And I like the idea of letting fans fund the book in return for little treats like signed copies and marked up manuscript pages and doodles in the margins and critiques or edits or phone calls or visits from me. I want to reach out and make you guys a bigger part of my writing and my life, and that seems like a great way to do it.

Oh, and as I’m finishing up on Exile, I’m noodling final revisions for Nadya. I think it’s going to be good. I was a little rushed getting it out to agents last month, and I think giving it another pass or two will do good things for it.

So that’s me, so tired that I forget to feel excited some days.

Hope all’s well with you, too.

-Jeff

News for the Week of 4.10.13: Three Dances is Live, and I Am Still Writing Soulwoven: Exile

Greetings Friends and Readers.

Three Dances. Is. LIVE! You can go buy a copy at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or CreateSpace or my website right now. The commercial editions come with illustrations and extras, and the knowledge that you’re supporting the creation of more stories like the ones you enjoy. For the next couple of weeks, I’m probably going to get a little proselytize-y about this book, so fair warning. But I’m very proud of it, and I want to get it into people’s hands.

So buy a copy, please. Or buy one for someone else. The print version is only $5.99 and the e-book version is available on my website for whatever you think is a fair price (as long as it’s at least $1; that’s as low as the fulfillment people will let me go).

Thanks.

In other news: Soulwoven! And Nadya!

Something rotten seems to be afoot with the read counting machines on Wattpad, but you guys have been amazing in your support for the book lately anyway. There are squillions of new votes, lots of people are tuning in and following, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Work on the sequel is going well. I’m also buying a house and launching Three Dances and planning a move and a wedding, all on top of my day job as a freelance writer and editor, so things have felt a little hectic.

But every day I’m taking an hour or two, whether I have the time or not, to keep telling stories for you. I’m a little over halfway through this draft of the book, which broadens and shifts focus a bit. You’ll learn a lot more about Tsu’min in it, for instance, and Leramis takes center stage for longer than he has before. Some terrible things that lead to wonderful (or maybe even more terrible) things happen to Ryse.

I think you’re going to enjoy it.

Once this draft is done it goes off to my trusty inner circle of early readers and critics, and then I’ll start final review and posting chapters of it. In the meantime, I’m going to cram in one final revision of Nadya before she goes back out into the world of traditional publishing submissions.

Thanks again for following, all.

And please, check out Three Dances. :-)

Yours in ink and sleepless nights,

Jeff

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:

--

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.

--

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.

News for the Week of 4.2.13: Icy Roads, Encouraging Things, and SOULWOVEN Coming Out Soon!

Greetings Friends and Readers!

Apologies for the late newsletter. I spent the weekend dodging semis on icy roads in the mountains and have only just recovered from the shock (and the Easter meal that followed).

So, to the news:

Work is picking up on Soulwoven: Exile, the sequel to Soulwoven. I’m about a third of the way through it now, and while I’ve hit a few sticky points, and I’m also really starting to get into my groove. It still has to go through a few more rounds of reads and revisions before it will be ready for mass consumption, but I hope to have it finished soon.

Nadya has been getting a decent response from the agents I’ve submitted it to. So far it’s still all “no”s, but they’re the “loved this, didn’t love this,” or “thought it was strong but just didn’t connect with it” kind of “no”s. As an editor who writes letters like this, I know how close this means I am, and I take a great deal of comfort in it. I plan to sneak in another round of revision on it based on some agent feedback after I’ve finished this draft of Exile and then send it out to a broader swath of agents this summer.

And speaking of summer, I’ve decided to self-publish Soulwoven in the summer as well! I’m shooting for a June release date, which is a bit ambitious, but hopefully will be manageable. What that means for you is that you’ll be able to get a print copy, or a prettied-up digital copy, or a bundle of both, within the next few months.

Finally, Three Dances has hit the home stretch! I’m waiting on the final proof copy of the printed version, and as long as I don’t find any problems in it, it’ll go live either this week or next.

The fourth story in the collection, Birdcage, is up on Wattpad now. It’s about an ordinary human being who encounters something he can’t explain, and a supernatural being caught in a cycle of death, rebirth, and predation she doesn’t particularly enjoy.

It is also, despite what one early reader said to me, decidedly NOT erotica.

Happy spring, friends! It snowed AND rained here today, so surely the world is yawning and stretching and waking up for another round of rabid growth.

Jeff

News for the Week of 3.25.13: Proof! A New Challenge! Soulwoven to Be Pubbed This Summer!

Dear Friends and Readers,

Apologies for posting late! I have been busy with things that are Not Writing of late, but they’re wrapping up shortly and I’m very much looking forward to spending a lot more time creating things in the near future.

There is, nevertheless, some news:

My proof copy of Three Dances arrived today! I was less enthused than I’d hoped to be by the quality of the printing. It’s exciting to have a book in print, but there’s definitely a homespunness to CreateSpace that I wasn’t expecting. It suits Three Dances well, actually, but I was a little underwhelmed all-in-all. The electronic editions are definitely better.

I also discovered a need to tweak the cover in a couple of places and a couple of interior problems, so there will be a new proof coming my way soon. Perhaps it will be made of sterner stuff than the first one was.

I shall post the third story in the collection, The Glacier, on Wattpad as soon as I’m done with this letter. It’s longer than the rest and forms the backbone of the collection. It’s about a man who falls into a glacier. It’s also about his friend, and about the glacier itself, and the mountains, and a dance in the time of myth that shaped the world.

In Soulwoven-related news, the book has almost hit 250,000 reads! I can’t tell you how excited I am about that. I’ve decided to publish the book this summer (probably in June or July), and as I cook up ways to promote it, I’ve run across one that sticks out. Wattpad has a (hidden) rank for its books called “All-Time.” Right now, Soulwoven is somewhere around 275 on that list. If it breaks into the top 100, I should be able to write some pretty compelling copy for it.

All it needs to do that is your votes.

Seriously, if all 178 of you vote for every chapter in the book, it’ll get there in the blink of an eye. So if I’ve moved or entertained you, do me a solid and throw some votes my way. To those of you who already have, thank you. :-)

Nadya is still waiting for agents to respond. Soulwoven: Exile has my (nearly) full attention this month; I hope to have the first chapter ready for you soon.

Thanks as always for being the wind in my sails,

Jeff

News for the week of 3.16.13: Three Dances in Print, PWYW, and Soulwoven Keeps on Rollin'

Hello Dear Friends and Readers!

It’s been another exciting week! Soulwoven has continued its resurgence on Wattpad. On Monday, it shattered its old most-reads-in-a-day record, and a lot of new readers have been voting for it as well! Thanks a million to those who’ve done so. The votes mean a lot to me, and to the success of the story.

And there’s GOING TO BE A PRINT VERSION OF THREE DANCES! I finally cracked some last, lingering problems in InDesign, and I’m reviewing a galley proof of the book this weekend. It’ll go out to CreateSpace on Monday, and if all proceeds according to plan, it should be ready for the book launch on 4/13!

Speaking of which, I’m throwing a party for that. I wish I could invite you all, but since I can’t, I’ll do my best to get some video of it up the next day.

Three Dances has really dominated my week. There’s going to be a pay-what-you-want option available on my website, as well as a bundle that includes both ebook versions (there’ll be one for black and white Kindles and one for every other kind of ereader), a .PDF, and a signed copy of the printed book for you superfans out there. Keep an eye out for more info on that as the launch date gets closer.

In the meantime, I’ve posted “Shoes,” the second story in the collection, on Wattpad. It’s about a girl with something of a wandering sexuality who wakes up hung over in the bed of a goddess.

I told you these stories would be a bit more adult than Soulwoven, right? ;-)

In the background, I’m hammering away at Soulwoven: Exile for you. I think it’s coming together nicely so far.

Best St. Patty’s Day wishes to you, my dear friends. Thanks so much for coming on this ride with me. It’s all been amazing so far, and I feel like the rocket’s still just launching.

Yours in words,

Jeff

News for the Week of 3.7.13: Big F-ING Week

Dear Friends and Readers,

This has been, in the parlance of our times, a BIG F-ING WEEK. I hit three major milestones, one of which was on schedule, one of which came as an early surprise, and one which I had to crank through a major weekend of work to hit a month ahead of schedule, because opportunity knocked.

Without further ado, here they are:

Milestone #1: Three Dances exists as an e-book.

I finally finished design and production work on my upcoming short story collection. It now exists as a .PDF, an ePub (the file type every e-reader but the Kindle family uses), and a MOBI (the Kindle file type). I cannot tell you how exciting this is for me. All that’s left now is proofreading on as many reading devices as I can possibly squeeze it onto, distribution to prepub reviewers, press releases, a launch party to plan...y’know, the usual.

And I’m going to go ahead and announce a release date: Saturday, April 13^th! I’ll start putting stories up on Wattpad this weekend. In the meantime, if anyone wants to help me out by proofreading an advance copy, e-mail me at jeff at jeff-seymour.com. (I need your help. I only have access to a Samsung Galaxy S3, an old Kindle, and an iPad, meaning I can’t verify that the file will work properly on a Nook, a Kindle Fire, an iPhone, or any other devices without you).

Milestone #2: Nadya is out on submission.

I was planning to spend March line editing Nadya and send the book out to agents in April. But last weekend I got a newsletter from an agent I’ve done editorial work for, and she mentioned that she has editors knocking her door down for mid-grade fantasy with sweet romance. Or, as I like to think of it, for Nadya. So I marathoned through the line edits in two days (it’s my job, remember?) and sent the manuscript off to her on Sunday night. I’ve since sent it to a couple other agents as well. I queried most of them for Soulwoven last year. And I can’t thank you all enough for your support on that book, because I was able to tell them that since they last saw Soulwoven, it’s gotten massive support on Wattpad.

Which brings me to Milestone #3: Soulwoven has hit 200,000 READS!

I can’t explain the sudden upswing in support for the book this month, but it’s been huge---50,000 reads in 28 days. Thank you, thank you, thank you for everything you’ve done for this book. This is how books get big. This is how careers launch. This is how stories spread their tentacles out and grab hold of lives and shake them, or hold them, or innervate them.

Stick with me, and tell your friends, because we’re just getting started.

Happily yours,

Jeff

News for the Week of 2.28.13: Pushing on Publishing, Wing Stretching, Page Design, and SocMedPromo

Hello, Friends and Readers!

Welcome to the last day of February! Or, for some of you, the first day of March *wave to Pakistan*. Beware the Ides.

Anyway, things are clicking along quite well. I’ve been stretching my wings a bit this week---I sent a short story to a contest, applied to a writing workshop in Seattle, and entered a pitch contest with Nadya. We’ll see what comes of it, but it feels good to be spending more energy pushing on the publishing world.

Interest in Soulwoven has picked up again on Wattpad, and I’m pleased as peaches. At this rate, it’ll hit 200,000 soon and get the coveted bold, shiny red text for its read numbers. I’m very excited about that. Wattpad and I are also working on some social media promotion for it, which should be cool as well. And most importantly, when going back through it to pull quotes for that, I realized I still totally love it.

That matters a lot. It doesn’t always work that way once you call a book finished and move on to the next one.

Speaking! Of! Which!

I’m starting line edits on Nadya. The feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive and has helped me make a few last tweaks, and I think it’s almost ready to fly. I hope to start sending it around to agents in the next few weeks.

And once that’s done, I’ll get back to work on Soulwoven: Exile, I promise. I have all my ducks lined up for it now, and it’s just a matter of grinding through and doing the revisions, so hopefully that will be ready for mass consumption sooner rather than later.

AND I’ve started doing page design on Three Dances. I have a few technical hiccups to overcome, but I expect the Digital Deluxe Version, with enhanced artwork, to be ready very soon. Which is SUPER EXCITING, because then I can set a launch date and start doing promo work and generally kick things off.

I have another free Saturday this week, so I’ll be doing first-page critiques at 1:00 PM on Wattpad again. As always, the first two slots go to followers, so message me if you’re interested. Or if you have a friend who might be interested, tell them to do the same.

Thanks, thanks, thanks for all your support. This writing thing is going to fly sooner rather than later.

I can feel it.

-Jeff

Some Thoughts on Publishing and Rejection

Today as I was doing first page critiques on Wattpad, I ran across a message from a follower of mine asking how I deal with the constant threat and reality of rejection as a writer. My response to her got a bit longer than the standard e-mail, and I think it's got some points that other people will find interesting as well, so I'm going to share it here.

My response below. Thanks to @fairyfree on Wattpad for the question. :-)

As for your question: Yes, rejection is common and brutal. And I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt. Despite having put twelve years into this, holding a college degree in creative writing, and working as an editor, I've had people talk to me like I first picked up a pen yesterday. Some of them have the best of intentions, and some of them don't. Either way, it still hurts. 

For me, that's harder to deal with than rejection. Rejection can happen for so, so many more reasons than bad writing. It can be because a publisher already has too many books like the one you're submitting, or because the editor dislikes something about your writing that another editor might love, or simply because they were tired and grumpy and not in a mood to cut you any slack when they were reading your submission.

Publishing is an incredibly subjective business. Every piece of writing has an audience, and just because something isn't likely to be commercially successful (Soulwoven, for instance), doesn't mean it's not good. But publishers are businesses, and they can't afford to acquire things they don't think will be commercially successful, so not everything gets acquired. 

So don't despair over rejection. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're a bad writer or that you're doing anything wrong (though I certainly had bad novels of mine rightfully rejected early in my career). In the end, if you're writing books that you're proud of, you're winning, period. Readers are a remarkably varied and forgiving group of people, and if you love your work, someone else out there will too, even if it's not a publisher.

Happy Saturday, folks. Everyone is out of town today, so I'm working through the weekend. Wish me luck. :-)

News for the Week of 2.22.13: Soulwoven's Rebirth, More Crit Sessions, and Lots of General Excitement

Hello, Friends and Readers!

It’s been an exciting week for me. In my day job, I’m deliriously happy about a couple of projects with amazing authors that are coming my way, one of whom is already a star in his own right and one of whom I expect will be soon.

More importantly, things have been clipping along with my books! My first-page critique session last Saturday was a smashing success, and interest in Soulwoven has positively skyrocketed since I did it. I can’t tell you how gratifying that is to me. Almost 2,500 people have read the book in its entirety on Wattpad. That’s solid, midlist-level success, and it’s only the beginning!

Also, I’ve finally cracked the egg on Soulwoven: Exile, the second book in the series. I’ve been experimenting with outlining the story, which is something I didn’t try for the first book, and it’s really helping me wrap my head around things. The beginning still needs work, which is why it isn’t up yet, but the middle is in solid shape and I have a good feeling about the end. I’ve reworked the first chapter into a shape I’m happy with, and I’ll aim to put it up in the next few weeks.

And Nadya is almost ready for line editing! It’s seen additional attention on Wattpad this week as well, so I’m going to put up the second chapter. I’m extremely excited to finish up work on it and get it out into the hands of agents. I think it’s going to sell, which is a feeling I never really had about Soulwoven.

I’m still waiting for copy edits on Three Dances (I was promised them a week ago) and have decided that if they don’t come in by tomorrow, I’m just going to forego them and do my best to copy edit the book on my own. It’s hard to copy edit your own work, but I’ve done it professionally, and I’ve reached the point where I just want to get this monkey in the air.

So lots of exciting things! I’ll be doing first-page critiques tomorrow (Saturday 2/23) at 1 p.m. EST. As usual, I’ll reserve the first two spots for followers, so if you’re interested, send me a private message linking me to the story you’d like critiqued.

Happy winter, dear friends. There’s snow on the ground, and it makes me feel that all is right with the world.

-Jeff