Thanks! I wish it fully encapsulated the ridiculous plot.
First of all, congrats and good luck!
Second of all, when you bring copies to the con, how many is a good number? You donāt want to be caught short, but you donāt want to get stuck with boxes of copies. How many is right? 50?
Thatās a good question because I regularly get the number of books wrong. I try to bring a dozen of my better sellers, then 5 to 8 of my other stuff just in case. If I have a new book in a series out, and Iām heading to somewhere like Dallas (where I seem to have a fan base. Weird) I know to bring about 20 copies of the latest.
Iāve done conventions where I sold out before the weekend was out. Iāve also done cons where I brought 75 books, and came home with 55 of those - yep, boxes of books! Plus the cost, ugh. I was a guest at a local comic con back in early November. I loaded up on my science fiction/superhero book and it sold really well. I wouldnāt bring that amount to a horror con.
This new convention Iām trying in a week, I have no idea what kind of traffic they get. But itās a new con for me so Iām bringing about 100 books. Just never can tell.
Trumpās tiny hands - wonderful. Best of luck with it.
Iām catching up on this thread today - havenāt posted since middle of last year I think - and thereās a LOT of good news here.
As a relative stranger, will you suffer my adding to it briefly? This isnāt a bragging post so much as a description of the state of indie publishing in the UK (and beyond no doubt) and a call to keep going, and to keep going your way, to those who are lacking faith.
Any achievements I have scored are pretty tame in comparison to going full-time and making a career from your writing. Iām still a ways away from that.
However, itās been a productive year for me, publications-wise. Iāve gone from practically zero credits to a scattering of pieces out there including a couple of paying gigs, hard copy journals and various online postings.
This is a result of:
-
Using social media to āfind my tribeā. By this I mean, before I started using Twitter I thought there was no audience for my work at all, let alone any publishers who might take it on. Wrong - indie presses create an audience for you, an audience who are willing to accept more singular pieces from the presses who are small and agile enough to take more risks. The indie scene in the UK is pretty strong at the moment - it must only be stronger in the US. The internet makes this possible.
-
Not giving up on my style of writing, or tailoring my themes to a given market. I couldnāt write any other way, so why try?
-
Not giving up, full stop. The longer you go, the luckier you get.
End result: Iām now āout thereā. People are reading my weird little pieces, and Iāve come out of 2016 with a nomination for the British Science Fiction Society Award (shorter work).
Itās complete surreal and I guess testament to the old phrase, you miss 100% of the shots you donāt take.
Regards,
Peter Haynes
Oh and not forgetting @Crusis - congrats on the survival man! Youāre not first person Iāve heard wrote a book while under the influence of medical opiates. You Are Writer!
Grats on the achievements!
Over in ElGuapo/Guapās āIām Creating An Animation Studioā thread, his animation studio has evolved into a program that, he says, quickly generates animatics. He says heās gotten it to the point that it can scrape and parse screenplay format, and was looking for sample work. I dusted off a screenplay for a short I wrote about ten years ago and posted it.
Back then, I was fascinated by those amateur lightsaber videos that made the internet a more interesting place. Most of them involved kids running around a forest near their housing development, and their stories went no deeper than āguy fights other guyā. I wanted to write something that would culminate in a lightsaber duel but provide an interesting context as to why guy A and guy B were fighting. I thought noir would be the perfect genre, with a flawed hero that isnāt as smart as he thinks he is, isnāt as suave as he thinks he is, and is acting in ways that will bring heaps of trouble on his head. While it wouldnāt explicitly be Star Wars fan fiction, and would try to avoid outright violations of intellectual property, there would be aliens and ray guns and laser swords and desperate people on the edges of civilized space.
I never got around to making it with my friends like we planned, and never finished writing a part two and three that would wind up bringing the protagonistās story to feature length. But if you guys could take a look at The Two-Timer (itās in Word) Iād really appreciate any feedback on plot structure, characterizationā¦anything. Iāve been meaning to get back into writing screenplays.
Thanks! The great thing about threads like this, and connecting with writers on the internet in general, is not only I get to read a load of great new stories but I get to find out about new markets too.
I started using the Submission Grinder to find places, but the choice is almost too large (despite the advanced search) and when youāre not even sure yourself what ātypeā of thing youāre writing, it can be tough.
Very happy to announce another short story sale, my weird-west/vodoun fusion Thirteen Bullets, to Podcastle where it will be read professionally for podcast as well as published online. Iām especially pleased because I think this will let me upgrade my SFWA membership from associate to full.
Awesome, congrats!
Yes, congrats!
Excellent, Full Fellow.
I wrote a book in 15 days. 70K words. Itās on itās second round of revisions before I ship it to my editor. Sometimes a story is so compelling, itās all you want to work on. I spent upwards of 8 to 10 hours a day on this beast. Nanowrimo got nothing on me. ;)
Congratulations! Iāve had that happen with shorter work, like about 20k words. Itās a huge rush!
The book itself was actually pretty good, but then the guy who does my marketing (me, heheh) dropped the ball. It still sold fairly well despite that limitation. :)
Sure, blame it on the marketing guy.
@crusis thatās crazyā¦I canāt even fathom writing at that pace.
Yeah, excellent work, crusis!
My story Dragonfly Tea has been included in Event Horizon 2017, an anthology of short stories from Campbell-award-eligible authors. That isnāt a very significant thing, it just means first pro SF sale in 2015 or 2016. But itās still kinda cool.
http://dl.bookfunnel.com/c7adzdd31h
ETA: Yet another sale today, a MG fantasy story Shadow Stalker to British publisher Aquila Magazine for Ā£90, which somehow feels very fancy due to the currency.
It is significant and more than kinda cool because it puts you into a very very small group of writers, and you deserve to be proud. Congrats.
Agreed. I know how hard being a writer is. Every achievement is worth celebrating, no matter how large or small.
Doing some freelance VO writing for ArcadeCloud, makers of goofy YouTube listicles. The first one I wrote went up recently.
Hey, itās a gig!