Can I make a small suggestion?

When you stand on the shoulders of giants, you must build higher than they did.

As a matter of fact, some people said that they wished they had seen more of Cliffy’s story that came between his schooling and his employment.

Sadly, these are things which must be explored in time, and I have many projects.

I am planning on writing a sequel, although I don’t know if I would follow Cliffy. To be honest, I’m more interested in Dizzy’s life. I’m working on a short story which involves the mafia’s stake in bear polo, and how Dizzy gets roped into helping them uncover a bear doping scandal.

Google makes a free kick-ass little tool that help uncover hidden correlation. No idea if it’ll work in this case or not, but give it a shot: http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/

And yeah, keep writing and releasing. That’s a common theme everywhere!

And yes, the music is really good. I was lucky enough to work with the Brothers Burn, who made that piece especially for the Hidden Institute.

This is the equivalent of stopping someone on the street and demanding their papers. I don’t think it grandiose to cite Martin Niemoller: “I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t X… Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

There’s that word again . . . worth . . . a beautiful and ephemeral concept that does not bring me any closer to my solid gold yacht.

Trust me, when I’ve sold my cheap books to enough people that my name is a household word, I’ll charge what they’re “worth”. But the way I’ll know how to do that is by experimenting to see what revenue is like at different levels. I doubled my income by dropping my price to $0.99 . . . that’s hard to ignore.

The main element of concern is when the artiste derides the publisher for “undervaluing” their work, and states that the publisher is then diminishing expectations in the market, which hurt his sales. That is a form of control, where one person decides that the other needs to follow his marketing strategy, or face public condemnation and be labeled a villain for hurting the efforts of the valiant artiste.

Denigrate my strategy if you will, but don’t take the victim standpoint, saying that the cheap writer is ruining the market. That’s a passive/aggressive form of control, and the Libertarian in me gets all squinty and mean when that happens.

I think you’re crafting this as a dispute between Artist and Publisher when it’s just as easily described as a dispute over marketing strategies. A writer who isn’t willing to reduce the price of his work to see an immediate upswing in sales *may* be a chin-stroking, brandy-snifting, mantel-leaning artiste; he may not be, though. He may be just as much of a Publisher as the one who drops prices until the work sells the most units. He may just have a different publishing strategy.

I get that you feel your strategy is denigrated. Hell, I’ve denigrated it, and almost right to your face. But swinging back by characterizing writers who use another strategy as precious elitists is probably not going to win the day. I pack a lunch every day when I go to work. I’m as pixel-stained a technopeasant as you’ll find. My choice not to use your strategy may be costing me money. It *certainly* is in the short term. I choose instead to shop stories around and hope to sell them the old school way. If/when I decide to self-publish, I will price my work based on the value I assign it. I’m not scared your high-quality, less expensive stories will expose my work as bloated and overpriced. Honest.

We disagree on strategy, but we’re disagreeing with our Publisher hats on.

If you want some more info on “Hell Hath No Fury”, check out the 2nd half of my interview with http://gowmainframe.blogspot.com/2011/03/gowm-20-interview-with-brand-gamblin.html

That being said, I’d advise starting with the first part at http://gowmainframe.blogspot.com/2011/03/gowm-19-interview-with-brand-gamblin.html

(Or you can just go to my website http://geekoutwithmainframe.com/ & either go to the “Podcast Directory” or scroll down for Brand’s name somewhere on the right side of the page).

I also have extensive links to Brand’s stuff on the show notes. So if you are a Brand Gamblin fan, like me, come by. Where else has he had 2 hours on a podcast just to discuss his stuff?

And regarding the “Save from Word” option: I would recommend that you build a small HTML page by hand, then import it into Word, then tell Word to save it. Chances are, your webpage will be about ten times larger than it would by hand, with hundreds of unnecessary formatting tags strewn about. It’s not really their fault, they gain stability through compartmentalizing their code. But at the same time, it’s incredibly inefficient. Just my $0.02

Thank you so much for this post! I appreciate that you got down into some of the details. I’ve used some HTML trickery with find and replace in notepad to make some of my word docs single spaced for Smashwords submissions, but I never knew about “\r\n” that is very helpful – thanks!

I’m probably naïve with this question, but could you humor me?  Is there a reason that a double is better than putting each paragraph between and or is it just an easier/better way with Find & Replace tools to make universal formatting changes to your manuscript? If you save from Word as “Web Page, Filtered (*.htm; *.html)” then it automatically puts your paragraphs between tags and you can open the doc in Notepad and use Find and Replace to delete the rest of the extraneous stuff Word adds from there. I was just curious if it’s better to have your paragraphs between tags so you can do more with them like indent your paragraphs using CSS or something.

When I heard the news that The Hidden Institute was out I couldn’t find it available as a Kindle eBook on Amazon.com – and I was pretty sure that was the biggest sales generator, so I wondered what was going on Glad to see it’s up and I hope it’s doing well for you. I’d love to see a post about why you chose the price point it’s listed at, but that might be too long of a post for you to spend time on, and we’d all rather have you spending your time writing the next book if that’s the case, so I’ll understand if that’s an undertaking you don’t want to get into. Thanks again for taking the time to share all this great stuff! You Rock!

But this will be very useful information, someday. Maybe.

I’m lazy, I don’t remember to download and then add to my podcast list and sync to my mp3 player

And I now have an entire list of things to keep me intimidated whenever I think about working on my cheesy detective story.

So I would go by sales numbers, not rankings if you’re charting anything over a couple months.

As for losing control of a book forever, I think that’s what they call a really BAD contract. I wouldn’t sign that. From what I understand, most contracts have sunset clauses (or whatever it’s called) whereby the “out of print” terms are defined and the rights return to the author. From reading Dean Wesley Smith’s blog and Laura Resnick’s comments, I’m beginning to think that learning about contracts and utilizing the services of a good Intellectual Properties Attorney is the preferable way to go for me. But I’m still new and I have ZERO career thus far, so what do I know?

For the moment, I need money, and can’t afford to wait 18-24 months to find an agent and publisher, then to publish the book. At the same, a successful self-published novel can only help to build an audience, which would improve my chances on future works with an agent/publisher.

So, I suppose the answer is . . . yes?

And hey! That might make publishers more interested in Steampunk 1984 stories!

I’m glad you went.

I will never forget the look on your face the first time, in a panel or reading (I can’t remember which), that everyone shouted out “Squee!” in unison. I thought you were going to bolt for the door. You might have, but I think we had you hemmed in

I’m glad you stuck it out. Our little creative community is far better for having you in it.

Sounds like someone was looking out for you.

Doc

Thanks for the post, Brand. A most enjoyable read!

Thanks for your help!

Worst case, I’ll just have to work on the newer stories instead. Thanks!

Plus, waiting might not be an option. Don’t the copyright time limits tend to get bumped out further every few years or so?

Either that, or it’ll be one of the “lost stories” . . . like the way they keep finding new Beatles recordings.

BTW, my husband would insist that there’s nothing irrational about a fear of diesel fumes.

Well said, Brand! I totally agree, there’s enough pretentious judgment in the world. They should stop being a buzz-kill for new writers and instead dig in to find the Stephen Kings and Nathan Lowells in the group!

Also, I didn’t mean to insinuate that Simmons had a meeting in the brothel. He was handling his diplomatic meeting during the day. He was out whoring at night, on his own time. I’ll try to rework it, so that the insinuation isn’t made.

Actually, Simmons reasons for being there are more important than the Sebastian’s demise. This scene is meant to set the stage whereby Simmons is found kneeling over the corpse of his valet, on the steps of a brothel. The blackmail is more the story than the actual death.

I’m really glad that everyone likes Sebastian so much. Though a minor (and ultimately tragic) character, I’m glad to see that he is fleshed out enough to have people interested enough in his demise.

And thank you for commenting on the slang. It’s a difficult language for me, because I’m trying to do a futuristic Victorian serf speech, without it turning cockney, or Clockwork Orange.

Thanks again, Doc, for your help.

Was it important to Lord Simmons to visit *a* brothel, or does this particular brothel have significance to him? And is the cover political, or simply legitimate? He had a meeting, it is not his fault that the person he was meeting with wanted to have it in a facility known for assignations of less repute…

It does seem to dwell a bit on Lord Simmons motivations when the goal of the scene seems to be getting to the tale of the valet’s demise.

For the most part it does work for me, however. I like the impression you give of Sebastian’s dignity, and how he didn’t want to be seen in such a low place. The use of slang actually is one of those things that draws me in and makes me want to read more about the culture that formed the slang.

Doc

Doc

I’m glad you liked Sebastian, because I want this to be more than a single catalyst that sets schemes in motion. The story isn’t as full of violence as that first scene, but I’m it will still have adventure and intrigue.

Really glad to hear that Skybo & crew were understandable. That worried me a lot.

As for the language, it is a bit disconcerting. I’m left with the feeling that this is set in Shadowrun or some other cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic setting. I was able to understand what SkyBo meant without difficulty.

By the way, I just told my Russian coworker this joke without the whole Mann Act preface, and he still got the joke immediately.

It’s sad to see that they base their ratings on image click thru’s. Of course you never see the other services commercials with the less attractive matches that they made. Don’t everyone deserve to be happy?

-Jeff

And yeah, I know I’m just nitpicking, but it bugs me when people use the term for hyperbole.