Category: Marketing

“Love it when I run face-first into my own ignorance. Will work on another blog post, soon, about something new I just learned I didn’t know.” – me, on Twitter

So, as I sometimes do, I followed someone’s intriguing link to the ISBW site a little while ago.  I haven’t yet been intrigued enough by what I saw there to want to actually listen to the thing.  (I basically stopped listening to podcasts 18 months ago, when I switched from working a boring day job that gave me 40+ hours/week that didn’t engage my mind or give me anything else to listen to … to being a full-time creative.  I can’t listen to podcasts while I work on my podcasts, or while I’m reading (books, blogs, news, et cetera), or while I’m writing, or while my wife is home (because I’d rather not be ignoring her during the few hours we have together, awake, most weekdays), and that doesn’t leave any regular (ie: available every week) time for listening.)

Anyway, scrolling back through the ISBW posts (half of which … I don’t get, because I never listened to Mur’s book, I guess) there was one that included the following:

The fabulous tool Story Tracker is now available for your iPhone/touch. I used this tool a lot when I was actively working on short stories for many markets, and it’s invaluable. It takes a lot of work on the front end (listing your stories, the details, sales, rejections, income made, trunked status, etc, not to mention all the details for the markets you submit to) but once you have all the information it’s so very useful. Highly recommended. (Thanks to Tobias Buckell for blogging about it and alerting me to its existence. You’re reading Toby’s blog, right? RIGHT?)

Immediately my awareness of my ignorance was expanded.  That paragraph is like a list of things I didn’t know.  First:  There’s software specifically for authors’ tracking of their short story submissions?  How many authors need such a software for it to constitute enough a market that people are making iPhone apps for them?  I followed the links to the software’s site and the blog in question and in the comments on the blog post discovered two more software products and two additional web services that perform the same function.  Seriously?  How many authors have so complex a situation re: short story submissions that there are (at least) 3 different softwares and 2 different web services to address that need?  A couple other things here I don’t know: What is “trunked status”?  Who is Tobias Buckell?

In the blog post, by way of explaining why the iPhone app wouldn’t work very well for him, Buckell said “I have an excel spreadsheet with 650+ submission entries on it, tracking 130+ short stories or so, I don’t see sitting in place and keying these in by hand into it.”  — What stood out to me first about this sentence was my inability to think of anything near enough places that even publish short stories to accommodate that quantity of submissions.  I had no idea.  On the Duotrope site they “list 2580 current markets, plus 1246 closed/dead/removed/DNQ markets” – where by ‘markets’ they mean … places that publish short stories (or poetry), I assume.  The list of current markets for fiction includes 2121 listings, right now.  I had no idea.

In addition to which … 130+ short stories?  I’ve written 2 or 3 dozen short stories in my life.  Of course, that might have to do with the fact that I didn’t know there were thousands of potential publishers for short fiction, which implies even more readers – someone must be buying what those publishers are putting out, right?  I had no idea.  I’m aware of maybe a handful of places (read: publications) I might go to if I wanted to read short stories, myself.  Not dozens, not hundreds, certainly not thousands.  As far as I knew, from my personal experience as a reader, short stories were vastly in the minority -both in terms of number of stories and in volume of writing overall- compared to other available fiction, perhaps a fraction of a percent.  Since I didn’t read much short fiction, and wasn’t aware of much short fiction, I’ve never spent much time thinking about writing short fiction.

(Of course, until I started reading through industry reports (ie: after I started my own publishing company, in 2007) I had no idea that fiction was only a small fraction of the overall book market.  Fiction gets all the visibility, most of the press, and most of the big advances…  I just hadn’t thought about it.  I’ve never been very interested in writing non-fiction, so I just didn’t look into it beyond by interests as a reader.)

I just … I guess it comes down to approaching writing not as a profession, but as a calling.  Instead of ever bothering to look into what other writers do to make a living, what markets exist to sell the written word into and what they’re looking for and will pay for, I just wrote what I wanted to write.  I wrote the stories that I had to tell, in the way they wanted to be told.  I wasn’t trying to write to make money, to build a career, or even just to follow in the footsteps of other writers.  So many other people who label themselves as writers are on such a different path from me.  They want such different things.  They write all the time, they write with specific markets in mind, they are aware of and follow genre conventions, they collaborate with each other, they build their “platforms”…  I noticed recently that there is a further distinction being made, automatically by people classifying themselves as such – that people who are writing blogs, writing journalism, writing short fiction for specific markets, writing non-fiction, working on most any commercial writing… they say they are a “writer” (or that they are an aspiring writer).  I am an author.  I’m not in this to write.  Writing isn’t the point.  It’s all about the stories, the ideas.

Also, my perspective on publishing itself is a bit skewed, since I know I can put together a collection of short stories and publish it as soon as I’m happy with it.  I can publish even an individual short story as an “eBook” to the kindle and via Smashwords (which is apparently about to start selling through to B&N and its subsidiaries) as soon as any individual story is done, and not wait until I have enough for a book.  I could even put together chapbooks and sell them by hand & through my site, if I had the urge to sell physical copies of short works – individually or as collections not large enough to warrant becoming a paperback.  I hadn’t thought much about submitting short stories to other publishers, since publishing them myself is so straightforward.  I don’t even really know how much money people are able to make from writing and selling short stories to those thousands of “markets” … and I think I’m only wondering it in the context of “how many copies do I have to personally fail to sell for selling to someone else to make sense,” since I’m not really motivated by money – just curious how the different models compare.  Maybe I’ll look into it, now that I know that the short-fiction-publishing world is so much larger and more complex than I’d suspected.  Perhaps I’ll even start writing (and/or reading) more short fiction.  But I have trouble holding back finished writing because it’s the industry standard way to do things, so … I doubt I’ll ever have use for the sort of softwares discussed above.

There is so much in this world I do not grasp.

I often can’t wrap my mind around the way the human race sees things, thinks, feels.  It seems so distant, so foreign.  I feel so out of touch.

The “can’t see the forest…” concept, while not quite right, can help to illuminate some of my problem:

In many situations, there is a basic, obvious concept.  One that everyone else seems to understand.  To understand so well, so deeply, that they have no idea how to explain it.  Some concept, some idea, some understanding, some feeling, that is so ingrained, so obvious, so clear to them -to everyone else- that no one has ever come up with words to explain it.  So obvious that, usually, people can’t grasp what, exactly, it is I’m not grasping.  And in my noticing that there’s something I don’t understand, in trying to understand it, in trying to break it down and in trying to get people to explain it to me, I’m often able to squeeze out amazing, tiny, yet-ultimately-useless details about it.

I can see the fungus thriving on the old growth.  I can feel the cool of the shade created by the foliage.  I can hear the wind blowing through branches and the birds, insects, & animals all around, and the flowing water of a stream.  I can describe the perennial and diurnal cycles of the topiary.  I can write poetry about my experiences and emotions within the place, poetry that resonates with others and seems to show my deep understanding and connection therein.

All without noticing that it’s a forest.  Or that when people say ‘forest’ that’s what they mean. And perhaps without realizing that the whole point of the thing is the trees – wait, did I even mention trees?

No.

Exactly.  And it goes another way, too.  Sometimes with the same concepts, though usually with different ones:

I miss all the details.  I miss the little things, the “small stuff.”  Stuff that is the totality of what most people can see.  Except that I can see the big picture.  A big picture that other people didn’t notice or -sometimes, it seems- can’t notice.  That seems, to them, to contradict the details right in front of them.  Often it’s the same frustrating situation reversed, where the one who can see the big picture as though it were obvious can’t explain it sufficiently to those who didn’t notice there was any picture to see.  I often can’t find a meaningful way to express these ideas.  These obvious things.  And even while looking at them, I often miss the details that are so obvious to others.

Oh, and then there’s dishonesty.  Willful ignorance.  Intentional injustice.

Even things as simple and everyday as violating traffic laws…  I can’t grasp why people a) do so & b) think it’s okay.  It gets harder/easier to grasp when I try to talk rationally to them about it, because it becomes clear that they’re being willfully ignorant, or don’t believe in justice, which are larger concepts that I have trouble with.  So it’s harder, because I can’t grasp why they would think/be that way, but it’s easier, too, because once I know they’re that way they’re easier to dismiss.  Oh, this person is the incomprehensible way they are because of this larger concept I already know I don’t understand.  No need to try to understand this lone case.  Keep wondering about the endemic problem.

Most of the things I can’t grasp aren’t as awful as those few.  Most of them are concepts that -if I went to good schools for another couple of decades- I could probably piece together from contexts.  Little things like the significance of certain phrases and classifications.  Things that Wikipedia struggles to define just as readily as everyone else struggles – there is no entry for this, because we all assume you already know.  Or: The entry for this doesn’t actually explain the concept it purports to, merely telling you about the history of it, or the people who are known to have been involved, and -again- assuming you and everyone else in the world already understands the core concept so intimately that it need not be said, you just came here to find out about things related to it.

Oh, and then there’s the consequences of not knowing.  Sometimes one can actually violate laws, business practices, or customs by ignorance.  In some cases, ignorance of the laws/practices exists because everyone feels that the idea is so obvious that there’s no need to mention there’s even a law to break or a particular “right” way of doing things. Or to discuss the subject at all.  In any forum.  You are simply expected to know.  And when I have the gall to ask “well, how was I supposed to know?” –The most common answer is something like “There are resources out there, you should have researched it!”  Upon pressing, I’ve never been able to get the people who give me such answers to point me in any helpful direction.  They are sure there must be resources out there, even though they’ve never seen them themselves, couldn’t name one, and have no idea where to start.

More to the point: If I don’t know that “Rule #1” exists, I’ve never heard of it, no one discusses it, everyone else just knows and assumes it is known by all… Then how can I know that I ought to go find out what “Rule #1” is?

How can I even know that there’s research to be done?  I’m just supposed to guess?  “Hmmm… I wonder if perhaps there is a thing about which I don’t know, which no one has ever mentioned, that by not being aware of I might violate [a law|an ancient custom|a standard business practice]?  I shall go research for this unknown thing, and see if I can stumble across it!”  In some cases, in my own life, in my own experience, I’ve come to the point beyond which I’ve discovered -by violating a law, or by conducting business in a nonstandard way-  that there was something I didn’t know, but was expected to know.  That I was expected to know, and that now it’s too late.  I can’t satisfy the law except by being marked criminal.  I can’t conduct business with that company / in that place / in that industry again.  I discover that there’s something I didn’t grasp -perhaps still don’t grasp- about the world, and that even if I’m now able to figure it out (and I often am not), it’s too late for doing so to do any good.

Sometimes I can recover.  Sometimes … Sometimes I don’t want to.  The following, while a current example, was not first in my thoughts when I began this post.  It is only a lone example:

For example, I don’t really understand the concept of “genre,” even now.  It didn’t even occur to me that it was something I ought to even be aware of, to think about, to try to understand, until after I’d already written four or more books.  It just didn’t occur to me.  And it was so obvious to everyone else that they didn’t mention it.  Then at some point I began to try to do “marketing” for my books, and I learned that -apparently- not only to readers assume that every book has a genre, but that authors/agents/editors have decided that every book must have a genre, and be written according to genre conventions, in order to sell.

Even then, after four or five books, even after beginning to try to comprehend the bizarre modern practice of “marketing,” it still didn’t influence my writing.  I just kept writing what I had to write. Turned out that included a book that had zombies in it.  Which, when people read and discovered it wasn’t in the “zombie genre,” really seemed to upset and disappoint them.  And they didn’t like it.  And they gave it bad reviews.  And I didn’t like that.  So I started trying to think about genre.

Apparently there were some rules I didn’t realize existed about how to write books that I’ve been violating.  I still don’t really understand it.  Don’t comprehend it.  Don’t grasp it.  But at least, right now, I’m aware that there’s something about it that I don’t grasp, so I can go looking for the possibly-nonexistent resources about what everyone else assumes I’m supposed to be doing… And… really, what I want to do… What I think I’ll probably end up doing… Is to learn everything there is to know about “genre” and then just keep doing what I was doing before.

But that’s just an example.  And I’m getting sleepy.  And I haven’t been to church in a while -which is a subject that could take up twice as many words again as this post has already- so I ought to go to bed soon so I can get up for church in the morning.  bleh.