Justin C. Louis's Blog

Boy, this has been a year, hasn’t it?

I’m not exactly a bundle of joy regarding the many and varied terrible things that found maximal expression this year, and I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you about them. It can be hard to find a bright spot in all of this, especially in my private life; I have a dear grandparent who is rapidly approaching the end of his long and fascinating life.

And, of course, if you’re a writer? Right now especially, it seems difficult to get noticed by anyone. Myself and my good friend (and co-author) Philip, having experienced the ongoing silliness first-hand, decided to start Dataspace Publishing to bring our book to market. For the moment, we’re only publishing our own works…but that will change. More on that as it becomes relevant.

In any case, this has caused us to learn marketing and book production from scratch. It has very specifically required us to learn online marketing, since face-to-face book clubs, sharing with local libraries and bookstores, signings etc., are simply not an option at the moment.

What have we learned? Well, so far, this is what seems to have worked for us.

Grow an online presence first!

Many authors I suspect want to write their book on their own time, mostly in secret, and then come to market with a product ready to go. I can categorically state that will not work for most people in the modern environment. For us, we built a following with the Deathworlders over several years on /r/HFY, and that has in turn enabled Philip to turn his creation into his full-time living. [disclosure: I am the head moderator at /r/HFY]

The advantage there is a built-in, enthusiastic audience, and there is little better to kickstart a book launch and gain that all-important momentum. Now, obviously you must deliver a worthwhile product to maintain that trust. You should use test readers, find honest and helpful critics, seek the services of a professional editor, all that. That’s a discussion a bit out of scope for now, but we may come back to it at a future date.

First and foremost: you must put words to paper, consistently, every day if you can. Web serials in particular require frequent updates. For us, once a month is our ideal cadence, but that was not the case at the outset. Pre-Warhorse, Phil was updating sometimes every week as words flowed out of his brain. Shorter and more frequent posts builds a following, while longer, meatier posts reward your existing followers. This wasn’t a deliberate strategy for us, but it seems to have worked.

Write. A lot. And embrace failure.

A word about the Deathworlders: it is extremely long, at over 2+ million (!) words and counting. It also has many defects that are not permissible in a finished product. The earlier prose leaves much to be desired, there are numerous dead-end plots, the tendency to wallow in character development over plot advancement (particularly after Warhorse), hammering certain themes a bit too enthusiastically and repeatedly…

And that is something we feel one must simply embrace. Web serials grow with the authors, and with the readership community. In our experience? They will love you for it anyway, warts and all. Do not be afraid to learn your craft alongside your readers. That feedback is crucial to your development as an author. While prior generations needed writer’s circles, seminars and symposia, we have it much easier. Just share your scribblings on Royal Road or an appropriate sub-reddit, and respond to the judgement.

If you want to be an author, you need a thick skin. And you must accept that some readers will fixate on some aspect of your idiom or prose, and never let it go. Just roll with it, accept the criticism, see what can be improved…and move on. Focus on your total readership and the positive feedback.

Your web serial is not a novel!

This is an important point to make. Your three-hundred chapter web serial (with weekly updates for years on end) is a fine achievement, but it is not a novel. It is an ongoing story with lots of unexplored paths, little surprises, evolution of lore, possibly a massive cast of narrators…

You need a great deal more discipline when writing a novel. Remember, books cost money and anything beyond, oh, 120,000+ words will see rapidly-skyrocketing printing costs. There are also production costs: editors charge per word, as do book designers. Traditional publishers will of course do this for you…if you can get them to notice.

They’re not noticing a lot of good, quality money-makers lately. Why is an exercise I will leave to the reader for now. This is of course a market opportunity Phil and I hope to exploit through Dataspace, our own little publishing company…but we’re not ready for that yet. Setup of that company and designing our first book has really driven home one big, key point.

Do not skimp on book design

Put bluntly: you either need to learn how to do this yourself—and it is a complex craft—or you need to pay someone to do it for you, or you need to find a publisher. Badly-made books actively harm the presentation and experience of your novel. Do not skimp! Some topics I’ll maybe cover in the future will cover such themes as:

Invest in good cover artLearn the lessons of typography, know how to identify good vs. badYour word processor is not a desktop publishing appYou’re probably using your word processor wrongTypefaces matter

And so on. At Dataspace Publishing, we use IngramSpark as our global distribution and printing partner. They produce fantastic hardcover and softcover books of almost any shape and size you might need, however: there is no easy button. This sort of thing has been a hobby of mine for a long while, but it’s definitely not for everyone. Good design takes time. It’s expensive. And it’s worth it.

Social media (or: know your tools)

This is my bugaboo. I’m working on it. Hell, you’re here, aren’t you? Phil has been much better about social marketing than I, but I’m catching up now. I’m taking this author thing seriously, and if you want to share your story, so must you. If you look to the right (on desktop, anyway), I’ve centralized links to all my online presences. I’ve also configured these with proper XFN relationships, so our benevolent overlords at Google (and Facebook, and Twitter, and Bing…) can programmatically understand the relationships those links represent.

Yes. It is not enough that you can just write words. The traditional publishing world will not help you, because they’re dying, and consolidating into a rather insular, high society community that, I think, has led to a noticeable decline in popular fiction and prose. Non-fiction seems to remain a bright spot, but if I want a story, I find independent fiction far more engaging these days.

So, know your tools. Know how to buy and place web ads. Learn to think about your writing in terms of its semantic meaning, not how it looks. After all, a word processor doesn’t understand what “big and bold” means. It just knows that’s some formatting. If, however, you apply the Heading 1 style to that text, and then edit the style, well. Now the word processor can understand the organization and content of your writing. You can re-format all your headings at once, use the outline editor (which is easily Word’s most powerful feature, in my opinion) and re-arrange your story in seconds.

Seriously: you gain so much power if you just invest a little time into learning your tools. Don’t hurt yourself via ignorance! Those skills translate, too: blogging software works on style first, and presentation of that style second. Mark up correctly, help your tools help you!

If for no other reason, it will make your book designer’s life much easier when they place your manuscript in InDesign, and it will help Google understand the structure of your text. Help the good little web robots help you!

Odds and ends

I’ve forgotten a lot, and not said many things that need to be said. This is just a Christmas Eve ramble, after all. Can’t expect it to be perfect! I do think I will expand on these points in a more coherent manner down the road.

But, for now: it may be better to go it alone, but have an online community first. Learn your tools, and if you’re allergic to the idea, then quite honestly writing in the modern world probably isn’t for you. You must be your own promoter, and possibly your own book designer, your own typesetter. Your own marketing team. Your own agent.

It’s a lot of work. But, as me and Phil enter month two of this now-published journey…

It’s worth it. Trust me.

And soon, we might be able to help. Stay tuned.

Holidays would seem an odd time to get my social media universe in order, but these are odd times, and I am an odd person.

Hello!

Well, I go by Justin C. Louis, and I am an author of a number of things. Currently I’m most excited about my debut novel, Dandelion, which I’ve co-authored with the wonderful Philip R. Johnson—he’s one of my best friends! I am also co-author of the Deathworlders, a long-running web-serial hosted over on Reddit. We have future plans for that, so more later…

For now, this is just hello. I hope we can have fun together!