FULL BLEED: THRONES AND DOMINIONS

Hey folks. Trying to settle into the pre-vacation routine again. Working on it. It’s easy to keep just slacking when you can get away with it. And I’ve done a lot of that of late. Sure, I was busy with the Kickstarter for Fake Believe, but not -that- busy, dig? Promotion for that boiled down to doing 4-5 posts a day on BlueSky, doing a couple blog posts a week, little outreach to folks who I kinda know but have to gin up the confidence to ask to take a look. Oh, and the survey of the blogging/influence/bookstagramming culture around genre fiction.

Did a big look around and then series of cold emails. Got a pretty low reply rate. Now, I get it. My work does not shout horror. There’s no skulls or blood or weird tooth monsters made of trauma. There’s no werewolves or vampires. Though there kinda are, but this will involve making a connection that I haven’t explicitly made between work I did fifteen years plus ago and what I’m doing now. Folks who’ve known me that long might have an idea what I’m talking about. Maybe they won’t. I’m pretty good at working from angles best described as obtuse. But back to matters at hand. My work doesn’t slide right into the whole horror as lifestyle industry. And I get that people are not under any compulsion to cover anything that they don’t have to. Or haven’t been compelled to (more on that later on.) I’m grouchy enough about genre that it’s probably miraculous that anyone looks at my work, really. Particularly in this age where genre consumption as identity basis is, ah, endemic.

And there really aren’t many blogs that cover crime but from a magical realist/fantastic angle. I learned this awhile back when I did a weird western series that was horror set in the last days of the wild west. People who like westerns like westerns. People who like horror might read something set in the wild west. So instead of a Venn diagram where I could dip into both circles, it was just the little bit of overlap. Worse yet, I did those as comics, in a time where the number of weird western comics could be counted on one hand with a couple of those fingers chopped off. So yeah, the lack of interest makes sense in one regard. I guess. If you’re worried about genre purity. Which apparently a lot of folks are. Makes for easy conversation and easy clicks. “Is [title] really even horror? Here’s a two-hour video where we dissect that.” Boom. Done. Works better if you choose a big name and a book that you could argue genre classification over.

If you had nothing better to do with yourself, that is. Or if you were making hay from it.

And making hay is where it’s at, right?

Okay, before I go any further, please let me be clear. I’m going to say things about ways that artists make money these days, say Patreon, Substack, subscription models, mailinglists, paywalls, Kickstarters (hey, wait a second) and even Discord servers (wonder how long those will last.) Please do not take this personally. These are not directed attacks on any one artist or creator. I have friends who make use of these. It took me more than a literal decade to get to doing a Kickstarter and that was a desperation move on my part. I, instead found that I wish I’d done it for all of the Hazeland books (The Queen of No Tomorrows I just dumped out on the market and that was an unfortunate mistake.) Again, this is not me trying to kick anyone in the shins. We live in a shattered art/commerce landscape. Shattered enough that it might not recover in a way that works for anyone other than the internet service providers. Pivot to internet wrecked a lot more than folks thought it would.

Note that we never really had one centralized internet. Not unless you were on it in the eighties (and I was.) But even then there were BBSes and special interest USEnet groups and other likely less savory places to hang out if you worked to find them. Then we got chatrooms and AOL and Web browsers and gopher servers and FTP repositories and metamorphosing into the Monetized Internet where publishers dumped tons of money into sites and hoped that advertising would float it all. Then we got to where we are, with a broad landscape of pretty safe content, often paywalled, sometimes from big publishers and more often than not, paywalled behind Patreon posts and subscription based Substack newsletters. Yes, we have the vast shoals of social media that are largely unsearchable and ephemeral, literally surfing on the current of whatever’s happening today.

Hey, sometimes that’s enough to make contact with folks and get them interested in your Kickstarter. It can happen.

But locking content behind paywalls? Yeah, I don’t know about that. Sure, folks can get a following and hopefully enough money to grease the skids regularly. Money’s a good lubricant like that. I mean, maybe I’m leaving money on the table by putting these posts up for free. Maybe I could turn them into twenty five dollars cash per month. Then I could have a captive audience. Thing is, unless you keep subscribers coming in, that’s just a road to stagnancy. Yes, I’m well aware I could be there too in terms of audience for Hazeland books, which is why I’m doing outreach (more on -that- later, even though I briefly touched on it.) Besides, then, the way I’m seeing it, you’re posting for money. Which is nice, I guess. I was hoping that maybe it would work out like that for me when I was writing about comics. Instead I wrote all these posts for free while someone else was collecting the ad revenue (if there was any.) Sometimes things don’t work out the way you wanted.

Now, though, we could all have little dominions with thrones of varying levels of jewel-encrustation upon them. “Everyone had their own show” as one of the wise old women in Fury Road wistfully recalled. Only the world is a television with a billion channels now, to torture a metaphor.

No, I have no idea how to replace those income streams or even if it’s possible, aside from something like UBI. Nor am I suggesting that people should only give their work away for free. I’ve long outgrown that particular delusion. Just seems like there’s more walls going up than coming down these days. Yes, I realize that if you want to read one of my books, I will ask you for money. I’m a hypocrite. Indeed.

But what’s one to do with work that isn’t really commercially applicable? For which traditional market categories are insufficient or downright hostile? Yeah, I don’t know. I’m sitting on a bunch of it. The only straight genre thing I’ve ever written was my first novel. Everything else has been trying to break the forms and that goes down to the short stories that I was hired to write for other people (hint: they’re horror stories, even if they’re set in the world of Starcraft or Diablo.) I don’t have an answer to feeling like Substack and Patreon is necessary. It just seems to me that all you can do is advertise that you exist and beyond that, it’s pay to read. But I’ve a limited imagination and I was brought up in a world where you could maybe make a living just writing novels and Maker knows we’ve fallen from that light a long time ago. It’s big Demiurge hours now. So who am I to say? My only concern is that it’s harder for audiences to get to your work is all. Or I’m stuck in a purely transactional mode.

It does make me wonder about the futures of publishing though. Folks in comics are trying to figure out how to replace monthly single issues which are rapidly pricing themselves out of existence. One of the ideas is going back to the old ways, that is to say, ads on pages and you can’t simply skip them. (They’ll probably be as effective as those ads for live monkeys shipped through the mail or any of the videogame ads in the 90s, but who knows?) I toy around with the idea of doing a writing/culture magazine that just free with ads. I doubt it can be made to work though, even if there’s no paywalls and sharing is encouraged. Then I wonder about microtransactions. Pay a dime to read this story, that sort of thing. That way the reader can contribute to the well-being of the writer/publisher and not feel like they’re in for fifteen bucks a month or whatever. But microtransactions end up being surprisingly expensive, so the monthly eat-all-you-can model gets used. Or abused.

Of course, that does fuck-all for my chosen mode (and the only one I’m any good at), that being full-length novels. AKA standalone or series books. Sigh.

I do know that when I come across links to paid Substacks or paywalled Patreon posts, it’s… frustrating. There’s maybe a handful of writers who I’d pay to read their monthly blogs, and they’re all dead. But hey, WS Burroughs would have been a hell of a blogger or poster. That’s entertainment right there. The rest of the field out there? I’m sorry folks who I know who run on these platforms, but I won’t see what gets put up there. If it works for you, that’s wonderful, but will it get you more readers for the books? Yeah, dunno.

Speaking of getting more readers for books, my latest foray into the influencer sphere has been, what’s the word? Depressing? Deflating? Yes, those were feelings that came up. Irritation. Upset. Bafflement. Yes, those too. But there was something past all that.

Liberation.

These people are not interested in reading what I’m writing. They’re not interested in even looking at it. So far as I can tell, the overriding concern in book coverage on social media is getting the hook-up to become a publishers publicity arm. When book bloggers are showing off their new hauls of fifty books, I have to ask, “how many of those did you actually buy and was it more than none?” But we already know the answer to that. There’s a whole lot of publicity sites that will give you the time of day if you buy banner ads or straight-up buy one of their coverage packages. But when a site comes out and says that, then what’s the value of even reading it? That smacks to me of a phantom economy and best and, quite frankly, pretty open fraud.

But then you can buy reviewers by the hundreds even though that practice will get you banned from Amazon. Not banned enough, apparently.

Now, are there outlets and blogs that are actually on the up and up? Of course there are. They’re also backlogged forever or have publisher relationships because only the publishers in an area are really moving whatever notions of genre forward. I know. If I were published by a bigger indie and not a self-publisher, I’d probably get more coverage. Only I didn’t get coverage when The Queen of No Tomorrows was an actual indie-published book. I got the blurbs for it. I got the coverage for it (such as it was.) Locus review? Naw, dog. Maybe next time.

Would I like to get more coverage for my books? Absolutely. Is it worth the swimming uphill and constant string of auditions only to get a vast wall of silence as a reply? Absolutely not. Particularly when my work is either genre-agnostic or downright genre-antagonistic? Yeah, pretty much no. Again, this behavior is fine for a writer who’s established in the field and can do whatever they want. That’d be excused. Less so for someone who’s just been doing it a long time and has a limited reach. I’m comfortable with where the rule has led me. I couldn’t do anything less. And by that rule, I’m not buying reviews. I’m not buying placement. I won’t buy coverage.

Look, I’ll make you a deal. If you’re a reviewer, let me know where you review and where those reviews get posted. If it’s for real, I’ll get you books. They’ll be ePub. Maybe even PDF. If I see you at a show, I may have some old ARCs sitting around. Otherwise, it’s ebooks. If you want to review them, go ahead. I’m fine with this arrangement. Being a nobody and paying for NetGalley? Yeah, naw. That’s not going to get any attention and everyone involved knows it, but they’ll take your money just the same.

So I’ll do a final pass of people I haven’t hit up about the books yet, but I’m no longer sweating it. They likely don’t even cover what I do and I’m not about to change what I do or how I do it. Will I be able to get more readers? I dunno. I honestly don’t. But I don’t think I’d be moving the needle on a blog tour for folks who are enthused about traditional urban fantasy, because it’s not what I do. If I were interested in it, I’d do it. Things being where they are, I’m not being paid well enough to do work I’m actively disinterested in. I also gave up the dream of being a Big Time Writer some time back. Instead I’m where I am and the folks who are coming to my work are interested in it not because it’s a hot new something, but it works for them. I’d rather have that than a disconnected indie career where I’ve got to get four books a year out to barely pay the bills (let me know if there’s four indies who are surviving who’d be interested in my work. I already know the answer.) My dominion is small. It’s not even a dominion. Barely room for a desk chair much less that throne. I’ll work with that.