Reinvigorating This Blog

I’m ensconced in my favorite office-away-from-my-home-office at The Octopus Literary Salon. It’s the day after my Mechanics’ Institute Indie Publishers Working Group where I learned a lot about positive and negative strategies for self marketing/self promotion. First, blogging is still a thing, and so I’m going to get regular about posting to my blog Playing for Keeps. Second, display advertising deals offered by Kirkus Reviews and others are a bad deal and ineffective in generating sales let alone self promotion. Third, I should seriously consider doing my 10,000 word prequel to my novel as a taste of the novel proper and should be giving it away for free. Lots to think about.

I’ve just submitted my next MRR column to my copy editor, but in doing so I’ve depleted the column reserve I keep as a cushion dangerously low. So this weekend, I’m working on columns. The one about defending the left of the Left is going slowly. Instead I’ve got one about comparing countercultures, from beatnik and hippie to punk. I’m only covering those countercultures I have a working knowledge of, but I hope to draw some conclusions that can be universally applied.

Adventures in Finishing School

A week into my 6-week Finishing School project, I have re-evaluated. I’d intended to write 2-3,000 words a week for the next 5-6 weeks for a total of 15,000 words in order to augment an already existing 17,000 word novelette into a suitably sized novella. But I’m barely managing 1,000 words a week in a slow and painful process that’s like pulling teeth.

I still intend to work on the novelette, but I have another idea. I have a 10,000 word short story, sort of a prequel to my novel 1% Free, that needs work and maybe another 3-5,000 words. I spent yesterday working on it. The writing is much easier and more straightforward, smoother and cleaner. I’m giving myself 6 months to rewrite, get edited, and format the story into a “book” for digital distribution.

There are scores of digital publishing platforms out there nowadays, unfortunately in a constant state of flux. Pronoun recently went belly-up and Amazon’s ClearSpace is changing it’s terms of services, so I’ll wait until I’m further along with the story to chose the right platform. However, because almost anything can be deemed a “book” in digital publishing terms, the idea is to publish new work in different formats to keep up a digital presence, promote and publicize myself and my previous books, and “grow my brand.” I prefer to call it building my empire, but hey, it’s just a slight difference in emphasis.

I have a 10-11,000 word short story that’s just shy of a novelette. It’s also a prequel to my novel 1% Free, or with minimal rewriting it’s become so. I’ve set it in San Francisco in 2023 and I’ve managed three riots in under fifty pages, double spaced. It’s a long way from finished—dozens of rewrites, a professional editing and copy editing, a snappy cover illustration— before I do a super cheap, entirely digital publication using some the platforms out there. I estimate six months and I’ll link it to boosting the novel.