I do my writing in between the cracks of a fulltime job, four dogs, two horses, and the renovation of our house, in which a lot of the work is done by my husband and myself. So yes, my writing time is precious. Very much so. However, most evenings, at least one hour of my time, and sometimes more, is not spent drafting, revising, or editing. Not exclusively. That time is spent in an online writing community, where I am one of the founding members.
For some people who, like me, live in a part of the world where English is not a prevalent language, where cons are few and far between and writing groups even more of an oddity, these online groups are pretty much the only opportunity we have to interact with other writers on a regular basis.
When we first started out, our community had a whopping ten members, give or take, and already we spanned the globe. We had several members living in the US and a strong contingent of at least four people in Europe and Asia, jokingly called the night shift.
But as we built a website, ventured onto Twitter and Reddit, and started promoting our community, our ranks grew and our modest little Discord server sprouted channels left and right. And one thing we always agreed on is that we want to be welcoming to new members.
We want no one to feel unseen, unheard, or unimportant.
I think we’re doing something right, as our membership continues to expand. As of now, eighteen months into our collective journey, we have just over two hundred members. And what I love the most about them is that they are so so wonderfully diverse, and they feel absolutely comfortable talking about their similarities and differences.
We are a home away from home for members of the PoC community, for those who identify as LGBTQIA+, people for whom English is a second language, neurodivergent folks…
If you write, or if you want to write but are struggling to find the courage, then you have a place with us.
As a group, we have a large number of activities going on all the time. We trade critiques, but we also brainstorm when one of us needs help, and we have word sprints to help you get that draft out on the page. Sometimes, it’s as simple as listening to music together in one of our voice channels while you’re writing. Experienced rejectomancers are always at hand to engage in this fine and honorable art. We commiserate when a rejection comes in and cheer for every acceptance.
We laugh together, cry together, and most of all, we are there for each other, constantly pushing each other onwards and upwards.
Nothing makes me prouder than to have stood at the cradle of the INKubator, and to be at hand when a moderator is needed, though that is rarely the case. Nothing brings me more joy than to see a 15-year-old writer’s happiness over an accepted drabble, or to see one of our members adopting the pronoun roles we implemented on the server to avoid misgendering and show that we actively work at being allies.
And so, the writing time I sacrifice doesn’t feel like a sacrifice at all. It’s a joy and a treasure that I hope to have for a long time to come. If you’re considering starting up a similar initiative, I can only advise you to give it a try. It enriches you and your writing in more ways than you thought possible.
If that thought overwhelms you, why not join an existing community? Not every group is the same, and neither is every writer. Gods know we can play and banter as hard as we work and some may find that a bit overwhelming.
There’s only one way to find out whether the water is too hot, too cold, or just right, and that’s by dipping your toes in.
If you’d like to learn more about the INKubator, you could have a look at our website, but the best way to get to know us is by stopping by for a visit.
BIO:Â Writer, poet, and narrator Jasmine Arch lives in the Belgian countryside with two horses, four dogs, and a husband who knows better than to distract her when she’s writing.
She grew up devouring her brother’s collection of sci-fi and fantasy novels, and her love of the written word in all its incarnations goes back further than her memories and knows no rivals, except the long-suffering husband, though coffee and shoes come pretty close.
Her work has appeared in Illumen Magazine, The Other Stories, and Quatrain Fish, among other places. Find out more about her at jasminearch.com, or connect with her on Twitter @Jaye_Arch.
This was a guest blog post. Interested in blogging here?
Assembling an itinerary for a blog tour? Promoting a book, game, or other creative effort that’s related to fantasy, horror, or science fiction and want to write a guest post for me?
Alas, I cannot pay, but if that does not dissuade you, here’s the guidelines.
Guest posts are publicized on Twitter, several Facebook pages and groups, my newsletter, and in my weekly link round-ups; you are welcome to link to your site, social media, and other related material.
Send a 2-3 sentence description of the proposed piece along with relevant dates (if, for example, you want to time things with a book release) to cat AT kittywumpus.net. If it sounds good, I’ll let you know.
I prefer essays fall into one of the following areas but I’m open to interesting pitches:
Interesting and not much explored areas of writing
Writers or other individuals you have been inspired by
Your favorite kitchen and a recipe to cook in it
A recipe or description of a meal from your upcoming book
Women, PoC, LGBT, or otherwise disadvantaged creators in the history of speculative fiction, ranging from very early figures such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wollstonecraft up to the present day.
Women, PoC, LGBT, or other wise disadvantaged creators in the history of gaming, ranging from very early times up to the present day.
F&SF volunteer efforts you work with
Length is 500 words on up, but if you’ve got something stretching beyond 1500 words, you might consider splitting it up into a series.
When submitting the approved piece, please paste the text of the piece into the email. Please include 1-3 images, including a headshot or other representation of you, that can be used with the piece and a 100-150 word bio that includes a pointer to your website and social media presences. (You’re welcome to include other related links.)
Or, if video is more your thing, let me know if you’d like to do a 10-15 minute videochat for my YouTube channel. I’m happy to handle filming and adding subtitles, so if you want a video without that hassle, this is a reasonable way to get one created. ???? Send 2-3 possible topics along with information about what you’re promoting and its timeline.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
Everyone says that indie publishing is the wave of the future. Avoiding gatekeepers, who are often prejudiced against particular ideas or demographics, and putting your work out there to see if it will sink or swim on its own, puts the power (and the money) back in the hands of the writers. I had an unusual idea and format that I realized would have difficulty finding a home because of its experimental nature, so I though I would give it a try.
Here’s the problem: It’s not free.
Amazon and others try to make you believe it’s free, but only if you want to give away a significant royalty chunk, and only if you don’t hire an editor (bad,) don’t hire a cover designer (worse,) don’t hire a formatter (fine if you have lots of time on your hands and are handy with computer programs; awful if not,) and don’t do any marketing or ever buy a copy to sell to your friends or at cons. If you do decide to go for it without any resources, people will dismiss your cover as tacky, your prose as terrible, and no one is ever going to see it in the sea of newly available titles anyway.
Not to mention there’s still the whiff of vanity publishing about it, so no matter how good you are, or how well you do, some people will never take you seriously.
If you want to succeed at indie publishing, you have to be seen in the vast herd of new titles appearing every day. It takes money. That’s fine if you can afford it, but I found it daunting. So I asked myself, “How can I publish a book without defeating the purpose? How can I find capital that doesn’t eliminate my bottom line?”
I launched a Kickstarter to bring my Wyrd West stories to print. I budgeted for cover design, formatting, editing, marketing and stock purchase. And I asked my readers to contribute.
The response was better than I could have hoped. The Kickstarter was successful. The end result was a beautiful, professional book I had every right to be proud of, many of which were going directly to the readers that funded them.
But can this said to be truly self-published? I don’t think it can. This is a new way of doing things, in which readers choose to fund what they want to read. It puts the power directly in their hands. As it should be.
Even the backing of the Big 5 doesn’t guarantee a book’s success. It has to find an audience. It has to have resonance with the people who read it. Readers aren’t going to fund bad ideas, and if you’re a bad writer, they’re not going to support you more than once. So rather than being vetted by small groups of people on the top of a big pyramid of status and business acumen, Crowdpublished projects are vetted directly by the public.
As a writer, here’s a look at the differences I’ve found between being traditionally, independently, or Crowdpublished:
Traditional Publishing
Indie Publishing
Crowdpublishing
Getting the Book Published in the First Place
You may not be able to get a publisher interested. Chances are you will have a long wait. If you try something that’s too far outside of the mainstream in subject or presentation, don’t count on it. The publisher covers all publishing expenses and pays you a royalty.
You can get the book published whenever you want. You are entirely responsible for expenses & getting people to read it. On the other hand, you get to keep a larger share of the royalty.
If your audience will sustain your idea, you can publish the book whenever you want, and you know they, at least, will read it. Chances are they’ll get their friends to read it too, because they wouldn’t have invested if they didn’t think it was a good idea. If you’ve budgeted correctly, the expenses of printing some of your books, at any rate, will be covered. You receive indie royalties.
Editing
A professional editor who works for the publishing house will be provided to edit for you. Sometimes this leads to personality conflicts, but ultimately, it is the editor’s job to make your book into a marketable product, and that’s what they’re going to try to do.
There are good editors and bad editors out there in the indie world, and you have to pay one. Some charge very good rates, others higher ones. Unless you’re dealing with a professional service with multiple editors, rate doesn’t necessarily indicate quality. However, most writers have no idea what makes a good editor, and it’s not just whether they can copyedit your spelling mistakes. A good editor will also be trying to make your book into a marketable product. That means they have to know what that looks like, and in my experience, the vast majority of indie editors haven’t a clue.
You have all the innate disadvantages of indie editing, except that you can budget for that in your crowdfunder, so you can spring for the professional firm or someone you trust right away.
Cover Design
Your publisher decides on the cover, but will pay artists & designers to make it for you.
You have the final say over the cover, but either you have to figure out Cover Design 101 or pay someone to do it well.
You have the final say over the cover, but your readers cover the expense of creating it.
Creative Control
Your publisher has the final word on what will & will not go in the book.
You have complete creative control.
You have creative control ““ provided your readers will support your idea.
Marketing & Promotion
Your publisher expects you to do more of this than they used to, but they will still do a lot of it for you. They’ll market to bookstores and contact radio shows and podcasts. You will still be expected to use your own platform (especially online) to market, and you’ll probably still have to pay for your own book tour. They will decide much of how you and your book should be presented to the public.
You are entirely responsible for the way you market yourself and your book. You’re also entirely responsible for the expenses. You probably don’t know as much about doing it as a professional publicist does, so there will be a lot of trial and error. Often, some of the places you’d like to promote to won’t talk to you because you don’t have a publisher’s clout.
You still have many of the inherent problems of indie marketing. The exceptions are a) you are NOT entirely responsible for expenses (you can budget for that,) and b) a crowdfunding outlet is already a marketing platform. If you succeed at your goal, some shows who wouldn’t have talked to you as an indie will, because it’s a heartwarming success story and it’s apparent you do have an audience.
I realize that Crowdpublishing is a bit like being PBS instead of MSNBC. You know that you have an audience. Although it might not be as easy for you to reach them as it is for corporations, that audience is dedicated enough to supporting your work that they are willing to ante up, sight-unseen. It’s “Funded in part by readers like you.”
It’s a godsend for SFF story markets. Many respected pro- and semi-pro markets use the Crowdpublishing model, including Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, the entire EscapePod family, Third Flatiron, and more. And most SFF writers I know use the Crowdpublishing model, at least as far as setting up a Patreon, whether they’re just starting out or just shy of the New York Times bestseller list. I think this should be a point of pride.
I don’t believe that indie-publishing deserves its “lesser” reputation, because garbage gets published in all fields, and a big imprint is by no means a guarantee of quality. But I think when we’re asked if our project was self-published, we should smile and say, “No, it was Crowdpublished.” I think it’s a selling point.
I believe that any path a writer takes to success is a good one. Some people are really successful in the traditional or indie-publishing models, and regardless of which path they’ve taken, it’s hard. These are accomplishments worth taking pride in. But I think we should start thinking of Crowdpublishing as a third path within the literary market. There’s traditional publishing, and indie-publishing, and Crowdpublishing.
If you’re a writer who produces your own books, or a magazine editor, and you have a Kickstarter, GoFundMe or Patreon for the purpose, your work isn’t indie-published; it’s Crowdpublished. It’s not self-funded, or funded by shareholders; it’s funded by the public. And I think we should start talking about it that way.
Diane Morrison in an emerging neo-pro writer who just successfully ran a Kickstarter to publish her book, Once Upon a Time in the Wyrd West, available this month. She’s also appearing in Third Flatiron’s Terra! Tara! Terror!. This fall she will be offering a class through the Rambo Academy on finding time to write when you have none. Under her pen name Sable Aradia, she is a traditionally-published non-fiction author and blogger. She lives in Vernon, BC, Canada and she manages the SFWA YouTube channel. Right now, she’s doing a giveaway to support her Patreon membership drive. You can catch her on Twitter as @SableAradia, which means she’s not writing when she should be.
Guest Post: Tiffany Meurat Talks About Two Reasons Day Jobs Are Good For Writers
I sat at a desk that I shared with two other people as a piece of paper was handed to me from my boss. I was nineteen years old, my boss was my dad, and the paper was an estimate for repairs for one of our clients. I don’t recall for what repairs exactly or even the cost, except that this client was going to be pissed at whoever was unfortunate enough to deliver the expensive news.
“You need to call them,” I was told. And that was that.
My father had started his pool company from scratch one year before I was born. I had worked a few jobs before joining the family ranks, but eventually landed there out of convenience and a false notion that it would be a simple job””answering phones, taking messages and the like. Perhaps even a little filing. Having just dropped out of university that year, just having any job at all was my only career ambition at that moment.
So, the estimate in hand, I called the client with zero idea just how to properly approach the topic of “I know money is tight for you, but here’s an estimate for lots of money and, oh, your pool won’t work until it’s fixed”. It did not go well. I said something stupid. Then I spent the next hour or so apologizing to both the client and my boss/dad. And right there in that moment of customer service hell, I also began to understand the cunning power of words.
I continued to learn through multiple failures, out of self-preservation to not get yelled at. I learned about words through phone calls and faxes and emails, through hirings and firings, through employee reviews and business acquisitions. I learned by drafting proposals and contracts. I learned while attending conventions and conferences and pool industry galas (yes folks, this is absolutely a thing).
Being the poster child for introversion and working in one the most customer facing industries on the planet, I taught myself how to articulate properly in order to get people out of my personal space bubble as quickly and efficiently as possible. This meant knowing how to talk to them, knowing how to manipulate the situation, how to arm myself with just the right word at just the right moment to mitigate shit blowing up in my face.
At nineteen I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a “real” writer yet. I was still in the mapping-out-battle-scenes-in-my-journal stage of writing. I hadn’t even the faintest idea of how to structure a basic scene, let alone a novel. Yet there I was, getting a crash course of the versatility of words, whether I wanted it or not.
At a speaking event I attended recently, author Kim Stanley Robinson touched on the benefits of day jobs for writers. It was a refreshing take, considering the engagement was hosted by Arizona State University and attended in bulk by students, of which I was not. Nothing makes you feel more like a flame out loser than surrounding yourself with a room full of MFA candidates, and as I was shrinking into my seat, feeling woefully outclassed as a full time pool lady, part time writer, Mr. Robinson began to speak about yet a second creative benefit to day jobs””mining the work place for inspiration.
I immediately perked up, piecing together all the ways I was already doing just that. How I used the eccentricities and flare and dynamism of the people I work with, incorporated so many of their quirks, their smiles and their hair styles, to turn my characters paper skin to flesh””The grandfather that kept a dedicated drawer in his work desk for Hillshire Farms meat, the coworker that interrupted a work meeting to announce the name of his car (Trixie), the mother (me) whose kid brushed his teeth with a highlighter one day when brought to work with her.
Authors sometimes see a day job as a hindrance to their writing life. The goal is to eliminate it, but in actuality it can be fuel. It’s life, it’s robust and strange and frustrating and chaotic. The characters are literally kicking down the doors, smashing their faces against the windows, and begging us to buy some girl scout cookies from their kid.
I always joke that the second I could make a living wage off of my writing all you’d see is a me-shaped cloud of dust in my office where I used to sit. And maybe I would dial it back a bit, work part time, but I’m finding more and more that to ditch the day job entirely is not part of my ideal future. It’s far too lucrative.
Or perhaps I’m just saying that to convince myself that it’s totally cool that I haven’t sold a book yet. Time will tell.
Author bio for Tiffany Meurat: Tiffany is a writer and desert dweller from Phoenix, Arizona. Her work can be found or is forthcoming with Four Chambers Press, Eunoia Review, Collective Unrest, Martian, and others. She is most often found wasting time on Twitter as @TMeuretBooks