FULL BLEED: EIGHTY ONE EIGHTY TWO EIGHTY THREE EIGHTY FOUR

Points if you can name that one. The points won't be worth anything, but they're still points.

Okay, so the Fake Believe fundraising campaign is done. It continued a bit for late pledges and all that, but there was no action on anything and I wanted to get things moving towards fulfillment eventually if not sooner. So I've got the final list of backers and their rewards and all that. To that end, I did a final proof of the paperback and should get that soon.

Got a day of writing in on The Missing Pieces, that next Hazeland book. Okay, a couple hours. It went okay. I'll work on it some more this week and hopefully get a good chunk started, kind of the nucleus of a whole pearl which will take many layers of accretion and development. Mostly just hours standing at the desk and trying to make things happen an effort towards having them happen without me thinking about it too much. That's why the outline narratives are so long, so I don't have to try and keep all those plates spinning. I more or less know where I'm going with the book.

Now that doesn't mean there isn't room for surprises. There is. There has to be, otherwise it's kind of a dead thing. I know the stuff that needs to happen, but not necessarily how it happens explicitly. I'll know there's a scene that exists to deliver exposition but I know I can't just type out stuff in the simulacra of a back and forth conversation that manages to cover what the book requires. There has to be character stuff driving that and that's the sort of thing that reveals itself in the moment. So I have a basic roadmap, but there's not a whole lot of detail sometimes. That's the real work. Well, that and making the prose on the page do something more than just lie there. Which is a real challenge sometimes. Then you gotta decide how much you're actually putting down and how much you need to hold back to let the reader put things together instead of just dumping it on their head.

I should probably be spending more time on talking up Fake Believe, however. At least, that's the conventional wisdom. Hell, according to that, I should have been talking it up months before the Kickstarter campaign and then every day for the six months leading up to the publication, to the treasured book birthday.

Please let it be known that I'm old and have no sense of humor or whimsy and hate the idea of book birthdays. If there's a book birthday, it happens every time someone new picks up the book and gives it a read. The book is a physical object or collection of electrons that approximate a text that we can similarly decode by reading into something like an experience. By themselves, they're things. When they hit a reader's brain and the brain goes to work, that's something that's alive.

Anyways, I'm supposed to be doing another campaign of getting readers and reviewers and blogs and blog tours and cultural organs of whatever genre I'm writing in interested in the book and getting people to type "SHOOT IT INTO MY VEINS" and other performatively fannish turns of phrase out there on social media, on every platform and... I'm not gonna. I've talked up the book on the one social media space I can stand. I've gotten most of the Kickstarter support from that same source.

I can't face trying to get a bunch of podcasters and bloggers and culture outlet writers interested in Fake Believe. I'm opting out. I refuse to play. I do not consent to this. I will not let it have power over me. The book is done and it's good and it doesn't fit any neat category and I don't have a publisher with a budget behind it. And, unfortunately, that budget is a big part of what gets covered and what doesn't. Those banner ads don't pay for themselves. Hell, getting a place to consent to cover your book doesn't always just organically happen. Okay, maybe it does if you're Stephen King or Joe Hill or the hot new something. If you're worth covering, you get coverage for nothing. If you're not, then you gotta make yourself worth covering.

So the whole pre-launch and figure out which category you're going to slot the book into, which overlapping non-genre but classification on Amazon will yield the best possible ranking. Work those keywords. Just like your ads, you know, all those ads that are run by effectively one company which just got its knuckles rapped for running a monopoly (aside - this will be appealed on both sides and there will be political donations from one side outweighing any other consideration and business will continue as usual -- book it, done.) You gotta permeate the consciousness and trick the algorithm into boosting your book. Go ahead and look at books on how to self-publish. There's plenty of dudes out there who are telling you how to, in a foolproof manner, get your book on the top of whatever Amazon category. Trust them.

But there's not nearly as many books for sale on how to actually write a book worth reading. And I think I got that problem solved, so I'll pass on either category. Hell, these books about gaming Amazon have been written as long as there's been an Amazon to game. Just like there were for blogs or how to get a billion Facebook followers or rule Twitter or now how to Monetize Your Substack so that you can live that dream. You're seeing how these things are repeating cycles, right? Primarily constructed to prey upon the hopes and dreams (and weapons-grade insecurities) of writers and artists and musicians, etc? Right. I've said that for the most part when people are saying they want writing advice out there in the online world, they really want success advice. And I get it. If there was such a thing as success advice, I'd want it too. There isn't. Just like there isn't One Weird Trick to getting on top of the algorithm.

Which is scary, right? I mean, I'm actually expecting you to go out there and write a book for a year or more or however long it takes and then put it up with the understanding that there's very little chance of it hitting in any significant manner on Amazon or any other bookseller. I'm telling you this because it's true. Not because I'm mean or because I want you to quit. I'm telling you this horror story because it will happen to you. It'll happen to you even if you have a publisher. It might happen to you even if you have a big publisher.

Which is why the Kickstarter thing has been good. It's not bill-paying, but it is good knowing there's non-imaginary people out there who are willing to jump in on this with their money and eventually finite time on this planet. Granted, this won't be enough for everyone.

It's a hostile landscape out there. Yes, there's welcoming people, other writers and readers. But otherwise? Yeah, it's hard. This isn't a flex or proof that I'm a tough dude. It's a fact of going out and doing this sort of thing today is all. Look, there's authors on Kindle Unlimited upset that they can only load 8 AI-generated titles in a day. Or maybe they're running teams of writers pumping out words at a rate that would make the pulp masters blanch in fear. These guys want to be able to post more, faster. There's a bunch of "authors" who are putting up content-free books and getting them listed on Goodreads. You're not competing with that, because you'd have to be insane to do so. Probably because you want to write an actual book. Or I do. Which is also an insane proposition today.

But trying to climb the charts? Chasing awards? Yeah, I don't know. I really don't. Seems like an attempt to tack your own satisfaction on the decisions of others and, my brothers and sisters and those who are more on a continuum, that path leads only to heartbreak. This isn't a cheery "chase your bliss" cheer. This is a warning. You're going to have to depend on yourself, which is a scary proposition for a guy like me. I don't know how you feel about you. Worrying about getting in with the right crowd or right publisher or right coterie of bloggers or commentators? I thought we left high school behind. That was the whole point of high school, right? To get the fuck out, not to internalize the prisons we learned to build there.

So write. Find your people. The folks who really get it. Stick with them. If that's within you. I still have to fight the urge to go totally feral and destroy the blanket and bowls of kibble and water out by the furnace in the garage that people have been kind enough to set up for me, metaphorically speaking. Find people who you can be around, maybe even work with. Again, I came up feral and self-taught so I'm beyond hope in terms of being changed or shaped or molded. But I'm also looking down the wrong end of the barrel we call aging. (And yes, there's hella ageism out there in publishing. If you believe different, well good for you. But publishers want people who are ready to go with minimal polish and energetic enough to promote themselves because publishers have better things to do now.)

Find folks you can at least be around. You don't have to do this totally alone. Yes, you have to write alone. Just you and the universe. The rest of the time you don't have to be.

I'd dovetail this into other subjects but I've gone long and rambling as it is. Remind me sometime and I'll talk about role models maybe. That'll be a popular one, I'm sure.

In the meantime, it's back to life stuff. Waiting on that proof and get that locked then finish the ebook and decide whether or not I'm going to put Fake Believe out in April or May or June because the plan is not the thing at all.

Until next time.