Let’s talk a little about the self-marketing tsunami. Because it is huge. It is compelling. And it is omnipresent.

Can you turn your novel into a career, if you’re just willing to do the necessary legwork?

Well, first I’d suggest you look deep in your heart and ask yourself whether or not there’s a tiny little hyperactive ADD OCD bipolar marketer secretly living there.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s marketing video for his book Crush It! is a case-in-point. Vaynerchuk has apparently succeeded in self-marketing to the extent that he’s got a whole book’s worth of advice on it. Kudos to Vaynerchuk! And his video (self-marketing his self-marketing) backs him up: as a self-marketer, he’s good.

You’ll find other writers out there writing and blogging about how they did it, they turned their book into a money-making machine, all through their native pluck and ingenuity and the utter miracle of the Internet. Their angle is always that not only did they do it, but, gosh darn it, you can, too!

On the other hand, there’s Mr. Longevity, Bob Spear over at Book Trends Blog, who has a history of self-publishing that dates back to 1989. Keep in mind that Bob has a highly-qualified specialty he was writing about, it was non-fiction, and Bob marketed his butt off. He was putting in 12-18 hour days for years, touring, speaking, giving workshops on his specialty, spending his own money (including taking out a 2nd mortgage), while simultaneously running a catalog business out of his basement, and, in his day job—yeah, he still had one—running a bookstore (the one with the 2nd mortgage). And, in the process, Bob wore himself down to a shadow. . .until he finally couldn’t take it anymore and had to quit.

Alan Rinzler got a commenter last year who said he’s looking into getting a traditional publisher now that he’s sold 65,000 copies of his self-published book. Alan replied—with what I consider admirable self-restraint, to put it mildly—that 65k is a DAMN RESPECTABLE number of self-published copies! Heck, yes, it is. Just about 55,000 more copies than you need to get a traditional publisher interested, and just about 64,927 copies more than the average self-publisher manages to pawn off on family and friends.

What’s really happening with these people?

Are these stories based on the rising wave of entrepreneurial success being brought to us by the blogosphere, in which it turns out Andy Warhol was right—in the future everyone is famous for 15 minutes? Or are they freak lightning strikes? Is it Reader’s Digest or Ed McMahon? And how can we tell?

Well, let’s crack this stuff open and find the hidden assumptions these stories are based on.

Assumption #1: IF you’re willing to do the work, you can sell 65k (or at least 10k) of your novel. You just have to do the research (read books like Crush It!), put in the hours, and have the desire. Of course, it helps a whole lot if you approach it with dogged, unswayable, death-grip determination. But. . .You can do it!

This assumption sets aside all considerations related to the book itself, as in: is there a sizable market for your subject matter? (teenage vampires) Is that market not already saturated? (whoa—teenage vampires) Are you the best person to write a book on this subject matter? Are you doing a professional job of it? And are you bringing something to this market that nobody has ever brought to it before? This also ignores the difference between marketing fiction and non-fiction. Assumption #1 is not concerned with these issues AT ALL. See Attention Deficit Disorder above.

Assumption #1 is also not concerned with the competition. Believe me, people: you have lots of competition. Way more now than twenty or even ten years ago. The rise of the supposed ease of self-marketing through the Internet has created a parallel rise in hopeful aspiring fiction authors planning to take advantage of it. And the more of you who read those self-marketers’ books, watch those videos, listen to those workshop leaders on self-marketing and believe them, the more of you who are prepping yourself this very minute—long before your novel is done—on how to go about marketing that novel into a smashing success, the more of you are fighting tooth and nail over the very same brass rings.

To paraphrase Mark Twain’s father, “Invest in readers. The blogosphere ain’t actually making any more of them.”

You don’t hear a whole heck of a lot from the people who tried self-marketing and failed. Well, obviously. They don’t want anyone to know that about them! That would mean that they alone, out of all the zillions out there trying to build a following by claiming to already have a following, blew it.

You know what I didn’t point out up above about self-marketers writing books on self-marketing? They’re still hustling to sell their books! TO YOU.

Assumption #2: IF you’ve got a sizable market for your subject matter that is not already saturated, AND you’re the best person to write a book on this subject matter BECAUSE you’re both doing a professional job and bringing something to this market nobody has ever brought to it before, THEN you are automatically qualified to be the best marketer for this book. Assumption #2 blurs the distinction between writers and marketers until it’s—hey!—invisible!

Over and over again you hear, “You are your book’s best advocate.” But are you? Just because you know your material, you know the craft of fiction, and you’ve got something unique to say, does that make you your own best salesperson? After all, sales is an industry. Marketing is an industry. The people who succeed in it (to the extent that you’ll need to succeed in order to sell 2, 10, or 65 thousand copies of your book) did not get there by being good at fiction.

Assumption #2 is not concerned with your personal strengths and weaknesses. It is not concerned with whether or not you’re actually any good at marketing, you love salesmanship, and you have experience as a marketer and education in the field, including a basic, instinctive understanding of what motivates people to act, what fires up that timeless gesture of pulling out the old wallet, as opposed to what simply leaves them flat. Assumption #2 turns a blind eye to the fact that writing fiction and marketing are two completely unrelated industries, both of which require steep, rock-strewn learning curves in order to produce even competent professionals.

Assumption #2 operates on the principle that you are, implicitly, willing to devote whatever you must to exploring this industry to its nether reaches as a newbie, sacrificing all else to the pursuit, including the time, energy, and creativity you used to put into fiction, your family, and, um, living your life.

See Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder/bipolar above.

Assumption #3: You are writing fiction IN ORDER to make a bundle; that is your goal. Assumption #3 overlooks all other considerations of the craft. It overlooks the love of the work, the joy of the process, the reason you chose—and continue to choose—fiction as your medium, as opposed to any other form of writing, such as newswriting, non-fiction, or the far-more-lucrative technical writing. Assumption #3 operates on the principle that loving fiction and loving money are one and the same thing.

Sure, we all need to make a living. I love the craft of fiction. I also have a mortgage. In fact, I live in coastal Northern California—my mortgage would probably make you choke on your writers’ workshop bagel. But loving fiction and loving getting my mortgage paid every month are not the same passion.

Are you in a position to devote the kind of time and energy (and your own money) to self-marketing that others around you do in order to succeed? Do you have kids? A spouse? A home you love? Friendly loan officers at your bank? Friends who encourage and support you every step of the way, taking hysterical collect calls in the middle of the night when you need someone to remind you why you’re doing this in the first place? Friends who stay home in order to take your calls, even if that means they get to steal your ideas and put them in their own novels while you’re out pounding the pavement?

The worst part of the whole thing is that traditional publishers are supposed to solve this dilemma for you. Remember the promise? “You give us your books, and we’ll edit, publish, sell, and promote them for you.” Promote them! They used to do that! But they’re stopping. You know why you hear people in the publishing industry plugging self-marketing everywhere you turn? Because even traditional publishers are saying it now: “We don’t market most of the books we publish anymore. You authors have to Do It Yourself.”

Think about it. Think long and hard. Are you, at heart, a writer? Or are you really secretly an aspiring marketer?

I’ve been watching a conversation this past week over on the Literary Lab about stories. As in: what’s the definition?

I happened to be working on the section of my book on writing that deals with that very subject at the time. There are a couple of well-known angles on it, pointing from different directions. So I’m going to shelve the explorations of exposition and humor for a few more days and get into this right now, while the topic’s still fresh in my mind.

First, there’s Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful discussion of the subject in the essays in Mystery and Manners—collected from her papers and edited by her friends Robert and Sally Fitzgerald after her death—in which she defines a story as a complete action with a point.

Then there’s the canonical example (which O’Connor also discusses, although not in exactly the terms I’m going to):

The king died, and then the queen died. (plot)

The king died, and then the queen died of grief. (story)

Now, this example illuminates several aspects of the difference between plot—an action or a series of actions—and story—a complete action with a point.

One essential thing it illuminates is causality. Cause-&-effect.

Another essential thing it illuminates is character. Story is not just plot. Story is plot plus character.

Cause-&-effect.

Character.

Which are, in some cases, identical. . .

Read the full post on The Art & Craft of Fiction magazine.

So, my sys admin just got back from Community Leadership Summit West, a conference for online community managers. That’s what he does. He manages an online community. That’s actually what I do, too, except he gets paid.

This is important to writers because of the way the publishing industry is morphing from a long-time traditional model—you give us your books, and we’ll edit, publish, sell, and promote them for the lion’s share of the profit—to a new, largely-undefined model—you do whatever the heck you want, working your butt off and spending your own money to do our job for us, and we’ll go spectacularly down the tubes, as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s parent company, EMPG, is doing this very minute.

I’ve been talking to author Ania Vesenny about blogging as a writer’s promotional tool. Does it really work?

Well, that’s hard to say, since the one overriding quality of the Internet is its extraordinary capacity to facilitate LYING. I just read a fascinating piece by Dilbert creator Scott Adams last night on whether or not online reviews should be made illegal.

He uses as an example a book of his based on his blog posts, which some offended readers panned in revenge for him removing the posts and turning them into a book. That handful of people reviewed him over and over and over again to give him ratings of 1 so they could artificially drag his overall rating down and discourage potential buyers. Adams cites other instances in which fake reviewers are known to abuse the opportunity to review in order to market or reverse-market. He suggests that online reviewing is routinely abused now to the extent of making it meaningless.

In the comments on Adams’ article, reader after reader says, “Yeah, I worked for a company that always asked the employees to vote for its products in order to artificially inflate the ratings.”

What does this mean for the average blogging writer?

Well, for one thing the chances are you’ll never tangle with the issue personally. In order for someone to want to discourage fans, you have to have fans to be discouraged, and as Copyblogger recently observed, “No One is Reading Your Blog.”

So something online community managers are wrestling with, in this context, is numbers. For a long time it was all about numbers. How many thousands of hits does your site get? How many thousands are following you on Twitter? If you calculate commenters as 1% of your readership, how many comments does your site have to receive in order to imply the necessary thousands of readers it takes to attract advertisers or, on the other hand, book buyers and, by extension, a traditional publisher?

Take note of that word “imply.” I was, needless to say, shocked when my sys admin remarked recently in a conversation about site hits, “People lie.”

“What do you mean, lie? Aren’t there counters to prevent them from doing that?”

“Counters can be tweaked.”

“Are you kidding me? People lie about how many hits they get? Like, by the thousands?”

“Sure. You can’t stop them. You say, ‘How many readers do you have?’ and they say, “Ten thousand,’ and there is no way on earth to verify or not verify that.”

“Huh.” I was nonplussed. “So all those other sites out there—”

Man, am I naive.

And since the Internet makes it possible to lie about your hits, the only way to guess at a blogger’s real numbers is to look at their comments and extrapolate a formula. Which is still, actually, guessing. This is compounded by the fact that the Internet also makes it possible for you to lie about whether or not you are, in fact, your own commenters. There’s even a term—”sock puppet”—for faking your identity online. Lying about who you are.

And the motivation to lie is proportionally increased based upon what you can gain by lying. People, for all their presumed savvy in this Digital Age, are still quite easily manipulated by the herd, even when it’s imaginary.

It’s kind of touching, really.

So someone came up with the term “kwanzas” to describe sites without the gargantuan numbers, sites where a small handful of people read, comment, shoot the breeze together. . .form human connections. This is now all the rage: focus not on numbers, but on participation. Quality, not quantity.

Well, that’s nothing new. In fact, the dichotomy of quality over quantity has been an issue ever since the rise of advertising and its demon offspring marketing created the potential for false assumptions about quality based on quantity. We’re talking the entire twentieth century.

So what IS the purpose of a blog? And how well does it fulfill it?

For a writer promoting a book, the purpose is to bring in potential buyers. But given that the numbers you read about when you listen to social media ‘experts’ are simply not the numbers you, personally, experience, how does that affect what you hope to achieve with your blog?

Back up.

Because before you can determine what you want out of your blog, as a writer you must first determine what you want out of your book.

And marketers and social media ‘experts’ aside, what you want does not entirely determine what you get.

What is your purpose in being a writer? Are you writing because you love to write? Are you writing because you want to be read by other people (e.g. strangers)? Are you writing to get personal validation from agents and editors and publishers (“You’re better than those other losers who are always trying to get our attention”)? Are you writing to make money? Are you writing to make a mint?

All of these things do not add up to the same thing.

If your goal is to get personal validation from heavy-weights in the publishing industry, well, all I can say is good luck to you and about two hundred thousand others exactly like you. Blog to impress them that you’re willing to do your own promotion. They’ll look at your numbers.

If your goal is to be read by others, hey, throw it out on Lulu and see what happens. Blog to attract the interest of folks out there who are also interested in your subject matter and/or writing style and/or attitude. (Do not underestimate attitude. Blogs that succeed wildly do so to a large extent on their attitude.)

If your goal is to make money, you’re simply going to have to get a real job. But you would have had to do that, anyway.

My goal has been since I was about 18 years old to play with words and language and storytelling and description and dialog and characters, plus fonts and page layout and books and more words. I wanted to open a book and see my own stuff looking exactly the way I designed it to look. And that’s what I’m working on now.

It didn’t turn out right the first time around, with a traditional publisher.

But now I’m spending my days editing and polishing essays on my all-time favorite subject matter, the craft of fiction. I’m writing new pieces to cover aspects I forgot to cover before, playing with typefaces, putting my stuff into Page Preview, and paging through it admiringly. I’m sitting around scratching my head over things like action scenes (how do you analyze them? dissect them? write them?) and word choice (to adverb or not to adverb?) and Bookman italic and bold and what less-technical terms I can use for section and subsection, since I don’t want my book to read like a technical manual.

My book isn’t even published yet, and here I’ve already achieved my lifelong goal!

Oh, BOY.

So, the author Chris Ryan and I have been talking about writing spaces. All the photos on my new website are of my office in the house my husband and I built, not including the subfloor and stacked lumber and unfinished drywall and shims and foam insulation where the trim is missing around the windows and boxes of crap we don’t have room to store anywhere else.

That stuff I spared you.

Annie Dillard has written extensively about her writing spaces, both real and imaginary. She says she can’t write with a view, and has gone so far as to deliberately cover a window next to her desk. She also describes the act of writing as cranking a wheel to keep your desk in mid-air among the tree tops.

P.G. Wodehouse wrote one of his best novels interned in a German camp during WWII. Po Bronson wrote his first novel in a closet. Paul Bowles worked in bed, although that was because he was too lazy to get up. Faulkner had a couch in his office, where he would lie and, as he told his daughter, “make up stories.” (Of course, Faulkner also spent a certain amount of his daylight hours recovering from hangovers.) Both Virginia Woolf and Bob Dylan have written extensively standing up—she had a tall desk in the office of the Hogarth Press, and he kept a typewriter on the kitchen counter. Jane Bowles used to write to Paul how she’d sit in a room at a desk all day long and again after dinner and still only come up with two sentences. She also mentioned staring out windows a lot. Some writers say they have to face a wall or they can’t concentrate.

Personally, I can’t write facing a wall. I simply won’t sit down at a desk with nothing to look at.

I don’t think I’d do so hot in an internment camp, either.

I have worked at dining room tables, kitchen tables, coffee tables, a desk in the middle of the room, on the couch, in cars, trains, and airplanes, sitting on the floor against the kitchen cupboards in the middle of the night. I always think of Jean Kerr (Please Don’t Eat the Daisies) describing the contents of her glove compartment because the only place she could get any peace and quiet to write was in her car.

I actually work in armchairs now, on a laptop on my lap. My neck goes out from squinting at the screen these days if I work at a table. In fact, I had to build a small platform on the floor in the U of the beautiful oak desk my husband built for me so I could put an armchair there and still be able to reach the desktop. I also have a great old battered green leather armchair in a dormer window where I can sit in the sun in the spring and fall. In the winter—like now—I tend to sit in a rocking chair downstairs in the living room all day, feeding the fire.

I find writers’ workspaces endlessly fascinating. At the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop one writer took us all to task for even making an issue of it—she said she could write anytime, bus station, train depot, loud dinner table, anywhere, and she thought we were a pretty spoiled bunch of debutants to say we could only write in certain places under certain conditions. I admire her chutzpah, but I have to say I’m guessing she had a hard time finishing a sentence while she was passing the mashed potatoes.

There’s a whole aspect of a writer’s desk that’s about not just writing, but personal space. Even in the tiniest areas, writers find room to decorate, to stash miniature objects of sometimes mysterious significance, to post cartoons and quotes, to hang on the wall those things they most want to stare at while they zone out. (A technical writing friend who works in an office has been telling me this morning how she sits and zones and it looks like work—-we were laughing that if Dawn of the Dead were about writers, they’d trundle off duly with their blue hands outstretched to find keyboards, even with no words in their heads.)

Where do you guys write? Do you ever wonder what you’d wind up with if you tried working someplace really weird? Did you DO it?

Happy New Year 2010 to you all! I hope you had as peaceful a New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as we did here at our house, ensconced by the fire by a lovely (dying) tree all lit up, towers of new books next to everyone’s chair, sleeping cats on every lap, and Billie Holiday singing “A Fine Romance” over the rumble of an electric model train chugging industriously around and around under the tree.

While I was tipped back in my rocker with my chocolate and Brandy Alexander (thanks to a book called, appropriately enough, Happy Hours by Indian author and columnist Bhaichand Patel—take note of the reference to the novel he’s working on at the end of the interview in the link and ask yourself, “I wonder who he’ll get to edit it?”) reading all five hundred pages of the first ever full-length detective novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (published in 1866 and still RIVETING). . .as I say, while I was doing all this, other more dedicated bloggers than I continued to come up with fascinating stuff about writing, which I will re-direct you toward today.

First and foremost, Mira points out on Mira’s List that from now on the IRS is going to be casting a much more jaundiced eye in your direction. Yeah, YOU. I hope every spec of your taxable writing income is all recorded and properly filed, because they apparently feel you guys have been less than utterly and trustingly transparent in your dealings with them in the past. God only knows why.

Cory Doctorow gave a speech in November on the digitial ownership of books, partly transcribed and posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “How To Destroy the Book.” I don’t necessarily adhere to all Doctorow’s theories on copyright, but he’s doing some very heavily-promoted work in the realm, and I’m interested in seeing how it pans out. We’re all groping blind right now—the ground keeps shifting under our feet—but light is being cast more and more on the issue from different angles by some very smart people. (Except for what he named his daughter. That was kind of mean.)

Wil Wheaton wrote a stirring piece on self- (excuse me, “independent-”) publishing with Lulu. This is important to you, personally, because independent publishing is beginning to earn some real spurs in the industry. This past year has seen in the change, and traditional publishers are now looking more and more to independent publishing as the front-line testing ground for salable books. It is a great idea? It is properly executed? It is WELL-EDITED? And is the author 100% personally invested in marketing it, so that sales are already hefty before a traditional publisher ever has to shell out dime? Of course, like Wile E. Coyote, the next thing they’re going to notice is that if all this is true, independently-published authors don’t actually need traditional publishers. But we’ll keep our lips zipped and let that one be a special little surprise.

This is also important to you because. . .drum roll. . .we are going to independently-publish my first book in 14 years, The Art & Craft of Fiction—that’s all the old in-depth blog posts on writing that you miss so much and wish were still posted, edited into a book! Yay! It should go up for sale on this blog sometime in February or earlier, as soon as I finish getting it cleaned up and writing a few extra pieces to round it out. I looked into shopping it around to agents and, by extension, publisher’s acquisitions editors and, by further extension, publishers and, by even further extension, readers, and compared that to the amount of editing, marketing, and promotions work authors are now expected to take responsibility for even if they get past all those hurdles, and, well. . .you remember the special little surprise.

And on the subject of author marketing, Alan Rinzler re-posted (or else it came to me in a dream) an excellent post from 2008 on what criteria a traditional publisher uses in determining what advance to offer an author, with some eye-opening advice about email “direct mail” and speaking to your Kawanis Club.

Speaking of websites (yes, I have been, a LOT), George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson of the soon-to-be-launched online marketing company MyNextCustomer gave an interview on—not the demise of Search Engine Optimization, as I originally quoted the headline—but the state of online search issues and social media marketing.

On a more casual note, Lauren Leto has analyzed readers by their favorite authors and posted this exhaustive list for those of you too lazy to do it yourselves. Are you on it? I don’t necessarily agree with all of it—I’ve never even heard of some of these authors—but it does appear I should be reading more Jorge Luis Borges. I will be starting my own list for all of us here to contribute to (I think I’ll put Kathryn in charge of the YA section), but not until I get through the rest of my chocolate.

This has nothing to do with writing, but it does demonstrate beautifully that it’s the juxtaposition of essential details that creates action and dimension.

This also has nothing to do with writing, but it does provide a nice excuse for why novels are so much harder to write now than they were ten thousand years ago.

Also, as you’ve probably noticed, we here at A. Victoria Mixon, Editor, have re-designed the website. We have plans—big plans.

• A new interview series, beginning with literary agent Donald Maass and independent editor Lisa Rector-Maass, followed by the second half of my interview with Carolyn Cassady (in which she talks in-depth about making the movie Heart Beat with Sissy Spacek), and then an interview with Guggenheim-recipient, Yaddo artist, five-time O. Henry award-winner, and biographer of both Jane and Paul Bowles, as well as dual-biographer of Isadora Duncan and Mary Cassatt, Millicent Dillon—just to start.
• A new Free Edit event, like the novel HOOKS event of last August, in which I will do Free Edits of your novel CLIMAXES. I hope to start that later this month.
• A secret parallel universe for griping, for those of you who like to gripe, on all subjects relating to fiction, including but not restricted to best sellers that should be lining bird cages, authors who should not be allowed near keyboards, and publishing horror stories from those of you with the scars to prove it. It’s not up yet, but if you keep your eyes open you’ll notice when it does go up.
• More in-depth discussion of the state of the publishing industry, leaning heavily on the way licensing and copyright have already played out in the computer industry, what’s happened in the music industry, how online communities, networking, and marketing are developing even as we speak, and the secret assumptions that lie behind a lot of the opinions being pushed out here regarding what aspiring writers should do to succeed and where and when and how and why.
• And an exciting way to get you some of those old posts back on this blog in a new less-easily-lifted format. They won’t replace the book, but supplement it, as it were. And, as an added bonus, you’ll get to see where I keep my rejection letters.

Finally: the New Year marks the end of my first year of blogging on the craft of fiction.

Thank you, all of you, for reading. Thank you for commenting! Thank you to all the great people I’ve met in this past year. Without you this blog would have gone the way of so many—six months of excitement and then sudden amnesia—but because of you I’ve leaped the abyss from a dead technical-writing career to doing the most fulfilling work in the world (can I still use that word in this decade? yes, I can, because I’m in California): editing gorgeous fiction, discovering amazing unpublished talent, working with dedicated writers who have completely given me back my faith in literature as a living, breathing, life-changing art in this day and age. And you know the condition of modern published fiction.

It’s a miracle!

Thank you—in all sincerity, from the bottom of my heart. Out of the zillions of blogs begun every year, you’ve made this one a success. You guys are my hope and joy. And you’re going to usher in a new Golden Age of Literature.

Dona Nobis Pachem.