Clarion West Write-a-thon Progress: How Deep Is Red

This week sees the book getting officially launched on Wednesday. This week I’ll be doing a series of five posts about the interior art. Comment on a post to be entered to win one of three pieces of Near + Far jewelry; comment on all five posts and you’ll be entered five times.

Here’s the second row of pieces. I was talking to someone last night about why it made me so happy to use Mark’s art: he’s been showing it to me for close to two decades and I’ve always wanted to use it to illustrate something.

So, left to right: Image #1, which has a funky little seahorse feel. When looking at Mark’s pieces, I tended to use the older stuff for “Near” stories and newer for “Far”. This one went with VocoBox ™, an early story about what would happen if cats could talk. (And I think it’s fairly accurate in that regard.) My cat is named Raven, much like the cat in the story, and this is my way of preserving him, because he’s been a great cat. 🙂

Image #2 has a sparse feel to it, and there’s one of those funky little eyes peering out at you. It accompanies the story “Not Waving, Drowning” (a title shamelessly taken from Stevie Smith, because it’s so terrific), which is about the harder side of telepathy, which always seemed to me like a terrible, terrifying superpower.

Image #3 is another earlier one, and it makes me think of the idea of spaceships as living things. It accompanies RealFur, a story about the relationship between people and objects, a theme which gets explored in “Therapy Buddha” as well.

Image #4 accompanies a story that appeared in Talebones, “Memories of Moments, Bright As Falling Stars”. It’s a cypberpunk-influenced story, and one I like a lot for its grungy and sometimes eccentric world.

Image #5 also accompanies a story influenced by the cyberpunk movment, “10 New Metaphors for Cyberspace.” It’s a flash piece, or perhaps a prose poem, depending on your definition, trying to think about how we might have seen cyberspace if Gibson hadn’t shaped it so definitively.

If I picked a favorite from this batch, it would be either #2 or #5. We still haven’t seen the one that I have as a tattoo yet, or the one that I’m thinking about for a new tattoo. 😉

I have several maxims that I have developed over the course of my writing career. One of them is, “If Kris Rusch invites you into a project, you say yes.” Because Kris is one of the people who understands independent publishing and its possibilities, and she is a savvy, savvy marketer.

When Kris came and asked about including my book Creating an Online Presence in a Storybundle, I was thrilled and also a little panicked, because I knew it had to be updated before it went in there. Too much had happened on the Internet in the two and a half years since I’d first put it up. I was also flattered that she thought the book was worth including, because I value her opinion.

And the truth is, if you’re a writer, you do need to at least think about this stuff enough to make an informed decision. If you’re being traditionally published, your publisher will probably expect you to be helping out with the marketing in the form of social media or other Internet efforts. Every book launch, for example, seems to involve a slew of guest blog posts and similar promotions.

If you’re small press published, again the publisher will probably expect you to be helping out with the marketing and I would regard a lack of such expectations as a possible danger sign.

And if you’re going indie, there’s no way around it. You’re going to have to think about this stuff, and the more you do, the more it will pay off — IF you are writing good stuff and making that the focus, not the marketing.

The world is changing rapidly in many aspects; publishing is definitely part of that change. Writers must stay informed of that if they want to make a living at it. Look at this Storybundle. E-bundles are easy to do and even easier to download. Storybundle and Humblebundle have both been making big strides in this area. Kobo lets you bundle your books, I found out in talking to Mark Lefebvre from Kobo last weekend at the Nebulas.

Here’s what you get beside the brand new version of Creating an Online Presence:

• The Rational Writer, Nuts and Bolts by Mindy Klasky
• Weinberg on Writing – The Fieldstone Method by Gerald M. Weinberg
• How to Make a Living With Your Writing by Joanna Penn
• Heinlein’s Rules – Five Simple Business Rules For Writing by Dean Wesley Smith
• How to Negotiate Anything – Freelancer’s Survivor Guide by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• Stages of a Fiction Writer by Dean Wesley Smith
• Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel by Lawrence Block
• Business For Breakfast Vol 2.: The Beginning Professional Publisher by Leah Cutter
• The Writer’s Business Plan: A Plain English Guidebook by Tonya D. Price, MBA

Part of the success of such bundles is using online marketing like this very blog post. So please — help me out by spreading the word of this excellent bundle (which might make a great graduation gift for a new writer) and its contents.

#sfwapro