FULL BLEED: THE DISCOVERED COUNTRY

We're in a weird place right now. I know, you don't need me to tell you that. Just that I gotta start on things somewhere. Acknowledging that we're in a very weird time in writing and publishing is at least a little mote of something to crystalize the rest of this around. It's something that we all know and recognize and are probably even living in a day to day kind of way. Everything out there sucks. Unless you're one of the big names and you've managed to set up a presence outside the big publishers, those who are big enough to get books out to people and make people want book because they have enough advertising reach to make that whole thing work.

Note. You don't have that reach. I don't have that reach. It's okay. We're not meant to. Perhaps there was a time that weirdos from the outside were able to grab onto these tools, before all the value got squeezed out of them by the dudes in charge. Before advertising became such a huge component of every single webpage being served up, whether it's search results at Google or an Amazon page, or Maker help you, searching for a product out of the blue on Amazon where there's ten or fifteen makers of that product but none that you recognize and you'll be swarmed by those ads no matter where you go. The advertising is so pervasive that people just brush right over it. They can recognize it for what it is and don't even waste cycles taking it in. "Oh, but they're doing it subliminally so it's important that you're in those first five ad results," say the people who are serving you the ads and yeah, that's simply not true.

Possibly, "People who read that read these" might move the needle, but that's a touch more organic than "ads stuck into this page because of keywords stuck into the ads and not any basis in reality." Influencer recommendations matter more than that, but again, those are largely just paid ads. Either way, the amount of ad spends that you need to undertake in order to get any kind of critical mass put these right out of the hands of any indie writer who actually wants to make a bit of money on any sale. I've lost count of indie writers I've talked to who said "Yeah, I sold a lot of books on Amazon but I spent so much money on ads that I never actually made any money" and the choice to do that is between you and God, I suppose. If you believe that it's getting enough word out that the ads matter, go crazy.

But then there's supermassive names that don't need them. They're actually making enough money to not really need them (yet can afford actually spending on them.) Them what has gets. Sorry if this is upsetting or against whatever advice you've been getting over on YouTube or through your ad rep. And the fact is that 99.95% of all authors simply aren't in that category and aren't going to be able to swing it. Well, unless they're just dumping books on Kindle Unlimited and racking up shavings of a penny on page views. But that's not actually writing anything, is it? That's just dumping words at a rate to make the old pulp paperback era blanch at those figures. There's not enough hungry SF writers in the postwar era, nor are there enough truckloads of reds to keep them fueled to keep up with these people. And good luck existing in that ecosystem unless you're one of them. So yeah, these are two different sets of massive gravity wells that are distorting the market.

Some, maybe even most, authors just wanna get read, y'know? Maybe the contract is a definite marker on the path to there. Depends.

And there's so, so many people out there who are ready to sell people the tools they need in order to jump from aspiring to author. Sometimes just purchased with time and a like and subscribe, or a drop in the tip bucket maybe. Sometimes through a volume of work that if you read and absorb will guarantee publication. No, really.

Sometimes those people have even written books themselves. But I do wonder about the advice-givers and mongers and their output versus the expertise that they try to sell off. I'm sure the numbers are appalling. Came across a YT channel which I won't name, but he's got a ton of videos, including one I'll loop around to later, about things that you MUST do in order to not be a bad writer. Bad in this case meaning "amateur". You know. Aspiring. A wannabe.

But this guy with four, count 'em four, short stories published, is going to set you straight.

And that's just upsetting. Dude hasn't even really had time to develop his own voice or method or track record. But here he is offering expertise and direction and a way to avoid pitfalls that he can't have possibly experienced.

Anyways, that was a lot to run into. And it made me wonder how much of this stuff out there was just like that. Folks who tapped the same source of information which for all I know was Save the Cat or whatever, and are walking around like they've been bestowed authority to speak widely on this subject. That they can save you from obscurity and open doors that have been yet closed.

When instead you could sit down and get an hour or more of Alan Moore talking about the process of writing and steps you can take, both concrete and abstract, to change your approach to fiction and engaging with the world, which is the whole goddamn basis for fiction in the first place. Anyways, if you're looking for inspiration, go there. Don't listen to these other dudes who will give you tips on plot and delivery and worldbuilding but won't touch the subject of voice because they don't have an ear for it. They can learn the mechanics, but not the rhythm and wordplay and inversions and when to hold back or when to unleash. Sure, you'll get a plot out of it. But a plot isn't a book, not a satisfying one.

I've read a couple, several even, books from new or independent authors as I've wandered out back into the world of self-publishing, post Kickstarting books and the like. And I really want to like these books. Nobody wants to spend money on a book they're not gonna like. Nobody. Even if it's going to support new writers. (But then I spent twelve bucks on a book from a big writer, actually a couple of 'em in different genres that I don't know I'll ever finish.) And one thing I ran into these books was that they all had plots, some more fleshed out than others. But they didn't have voice. They didn't have swing. They didn't dance around on the page at all. There wasn't a distinctive voice.

Now I know a lot of things come and go and are fads or trends. Particularly in the world of social-media-driven sales and visibility. If enough people decide that a transparent, non-present authorial voice is the best, then that'll get around. And maybe some new writer who doesn't know any better will say "Yeah, I just need to deliver what's happening on the page in the most efficient way possible and then the reader will make up the rest" and... Yeah, the reader makes up the book in their head. I've believed that for a long time. But the instructions can't be dry. They can't just be the instructions. They can't be just the action on the page that the characters are going through. If there's no voice, then it's going to feel like a mechanical replication or reproduction of a series of events. (And that can be an approach to a narrative voice but it's a lot, lot harder to make interesting than you'd think.) Without voice, it's un-buttered factory-produced bread.

But hey, maybe Booktok said that "transparent voice is best, the other stuff is for the olds" once and it stuck. If so, I'm so sorry for your loss. Voice is what makes your work stand out. At least for me. The word choice. What is described and what is avoided. How things are staged. Is there any poetry in the prose? How else are you going to appear as anything new or different? I don't get it. But again, maybe people are shooting to get their books a contract which gets them in Barnes and Noble and there's a system for doing that. It's shaped by tastes and appearances and whether or not someone believes they can make any kind of return on the book's costs of production. That's it.

But if you want to do your book and this is the way you want to do it, don't let me stand in your way. I'm just one guy. You do you. I'll do something different.

That said, there's also been a bunch of books that have sold thousands upon thousands of copies and they're all filled with really just absolutely dull prose and voiceless, not a spring in any step. It doesn't matter. People found something to identify with in the book and went with it. Good for them. Just that I won't be one of the folks reading 'em. Then again, if you look at my sales, then maybe that's contra-evidentiary to this whole thing. Sure. You can do that.

Oh, something else I wanted to touch on. There was that video I mentioned a couple pages back, from the guy who'd published a handful of shorts and was dispensing all manner of free advice? Yeah, him. There was a video where he was working very hard to identify a new genre of a thing he'd noticed in some fiction of late, across a variety of different fields, but mostly SF. Only what he was describing was what I'd call a mode. And honestly, I'd call it a tradition.

But he was insistent that it was a new genre or subgenre. It was a new way of looking at brand new things (from the last ten-fifteen years or so, some older works swept up in it). It hadn't been seen before. And he got to name it. He discovered that country. Stuck his flag in it. Now, that's how you get famous, right? You claim that territory and you get to be the guy who invented XXXXXXX XXXXX, the fabulous new way of looking at things. Original genre do not steal.

But noting that the things that make up this brave new genre, and instead suggest that it might've been part of the SF/F/H/W/S/whatever genre-set, intergenre playground, that it was part of these things all along? Well then, nobody gets exclusive rights. Everybody loses. So maybe you make a bad call, Ripley. No, not what that guy did was remotely close to Carter J Burke consigning some two hundred colonists (and a bunch of colonial marines) to gruesome deaths. You're right. I'm overstating. But the impulse? That's there.

And it's something maybe easier to do now than it was in the past. Used to be, given the Long Nows we used to experience before the internet could speed up mimetic transmission, that new (often periodizing) terms could be slapped on stuff while they were still sorta current and that would stick. They could be argued back and forth and consensus took some time to form and shape. (This whole theory pointed out by William Gibson, made explicit in a video talk I saw of his from about ten years ago, but certainly implicit in nearly all of his work.)

Only now we can do that in days if we're fast about it. Okay, maybe weeks, maybe even months. But we can try out new genre labels and periodizing terms and if we've got any manner of pull, we can get those spread around. People who are trying to get into a field will have their idols inside and glom right onto those terms and boost them. It's so fetch. So yeah, these things can spread fast and become quite sticky. This is a thing I've been thinking about more and more, probably owing to my own experience in fitting into the genre marketplace (hint: I do not except in the outliers) and thinking about critical theory (which I studied in the eighties and the nineties) and the history of various movements that got flensed down to easy aesthetic markers and shorn of their original meaning. Is that Barthes or Baudrillard? Both maybe.

Still, the thrill of being that first guy to plant a flag in the moon, in that white and unmarked space on the continents, opening up new possibilities, new vistas.

New markets.

But if you look at what's being described, it's often old wine shoved into new bottles with some new vocabulary in a period-appropriate typeface on the label. And, honestly, I'd rather deal with these as traditions, as veins that other writers have worked with, have seen and analyzed and burned up as fuel for their fiction. The new feels like trends and territory to be claimed, to be owned. Maybe it's better that it's all part of things that have come along before, that humans to some level have always experienced. Yes, the Current Situation is different in intensities and degrees, but not necessarily in the fundamentals. Living in a world of out of control technology? You mean golems that we've created and have instead gone wild? I suppose one could be written off as fantasy but the other is so reaaaaal, maaaan. That we've never imagined systems shaped by human hands that have become strange and alien and at a remove from everyday life yet exert control over it? Yeah, no fiction at any time has ever addressed that. Franz Kafka to the white courtesy phone, please. There's a machine that needs soothing.

Yes, yes. The urge towards making something novel and appealing on that basis is a mighty one. There's no points scored by saying otherwise. If it's simply a new phase or aspect of what's come before, then what good is it? Traditions? We're over it. Only we're not. History is still going on, boiling up through into the present if you know where to look. I think that's a vastly preferable platform to engage with things than pretending that there's reinvention, if not startling originality with no precedent and that's somehow better. If you're original, your voice will carry that, even if you're talking about human experiences older than recorded time.

In other news, I'm apparently working the local bookstore scene as best I can, trying to get Hazeland books onto shelves. Maybe even appearing at local author fairs. Even if I don't feel like I don't belong at all. Even if I'm used to being feral because that's what got me through a whole lot of lean years. But as I found out yesterday, my experience doing hand-sales of books at comic shows has come in handy. Pick that hook, thread the line, cast it at the yet-to-be reader who's lingered in front of the table or even better has asked you/me to tell them about the books. That's an opportunity and you don't always get 'em. Make 'em count.

Until next time, folks.