So What's It Like To Have Your Book Released? (Plus: An Online FLEX Read-Along!)
The “book birthday” is a lot like an extended drug trip.
“I’m used to bad reviews,” I shrugged. “I’ve had like forty short stories published! I’ve read lots of criticism on ’em. I’ll be fine.”
Then my first book review was three stars, and I flipped out all evening.
See, there’s a big difference between a short story dropping and a novel from a traditional publisher landing. (It’s almost certainly different for self-published people.) A short story is a tiny thing; you get the acceptance, you make the OMGYAY announcement, a couple of people link to you, the magazine publishes, and Lois Tilton tells you you suck.
A novel is like a rumbling freight train. There are hundreds of book bloggers discussing whether they’re going to read you. Hundreds of websites announcing your book is inbound. Goodreads has this nice little page reserved for you, and it fills up. People you don’t even know are expressing firm opinions about you.
Short story PR feels personal. Novels feel like God is looking down at you and She is expecting damned good things.
And the thing I foolishly hadn’t considered is that a novel is all you. If people don’t like my story in Asimov’s? Meh. It’s sandwiched between six other stories, and surely they’ll like one of them. I’m not gonna take out Sheila Williams’ editorial career in one fell swoop.
This novel? That’s my name. People bought it entirely based on what I produced. If they don’t like it, all that dislike falls on me, and it affects my career, and so about two weeks into the process I was huddled under the covers meeping and asking Gini my God why did I do this.
Fortunately, I got some early reviews that told me that some people got what I was trying to do. Which let me breathe. I never expected Flex to be a massive hit, but I did hope that some segment of people would love it for what it is. It’s not trying to be great literature, but it’s got a piece of my soul in it and I hoped that soul-fragment resonated with at least somebody. Which, even if this thing tanks utterly now, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Still, having your first book is a lot like having your first kid. You pay way too much attention to every flutter. You check on it way more often than you should. (Please don’t ask Google how many times I’ve looked up “Flex Ferrett Steinmetz.” Their servers are embarrassed on my behalf.) It seems huge, swelling to fill your world, and like a newborn really it’s one of thousands out there – you just hope it’s something special.
Just get to your release date, I said. If you can make it to 3/3/15, you’ll be okay.
And there again, I was marvelously stupid. 3/3/15 was the release date. That was when all the PR I’d scheduled would peak, but…
3/3/15 was merely when most of the largest PR-fireworks would go off.
That was the start of when people would read the book.
So last night was a happy flurry of texts and Tweets from people saying, “I’m halfway through!” “I’m 23% in!” “I loved the intro!” And that was good, but I realized that the book birthday was merely a start and now I get to watch it grow. More reviews will come in. The attention will be more diffuse – thankfully – but I’ll be getting reactions for months afterwards, and that’ll be cool. As it is, the reaction from folks who read my blog has largely been of the “ZOMG” variety, so I’m pretty sure at least you people reading this blog here will like it.
And speaking of reading it…
If you haven’t yet, I found out today that Dirge Magazine is holding a FLEX read-along. @IAmKatyLees will be reading Flex and chronicling her reactions on Twitter, and then post weekly reactions on Dirge. And if you haven’t bought a copy yet, they’re even holding a giveaway! So if you’re making your way through Flex, you can do so in good company.
An Interesting Small Flaw In FLEX
Your background helps drive your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. If you grew up in the Deep South, you’re probably going to have a good handle on describing the Appalachians. If you grew up in lily-white Connecticut and never explored, you’ll probably have issues capturing a multicultural environment.
And my novel Flex has an interesting small failure, created by my own background.
Now, if you’re not familiar with Flex (and why would you be? It just came out yesterday! Get reading!), there’s three people who are the central family: our lead character Paul Tsabo, his ex-wife Imani, and their daughter Aliyah.
I’m getting some preliminary confusion as to what ethnicity Paul is.
Aliyah, his daughter, is clearly described as black: “His daughter appeared in her bedroom doorway, clad in her pink-and-green Kermit-hearts-Piggy nightgown. She clutched the prosthesis protectively against her chest. She had her best pouty face on, somehow adorable beneath her mop of tangled black curls – a messiness Imani would have combed flat, but Paul liked to see his daughter’s wildness made manifest. Against his daughter’s soft brown body, his artificial foot’s sharp carbon-and-titanium profile looked like a blade.”
That’s pretty clear.
Things gets wobblier when I describe his ex-wife Imani: “Imani, stylish as always, wore a long tan coat with seven onyx-black buttons. It looked both businesslike and regal, which suited her – an Egyptian princess’s stiff bearing.” In this case, Imani’s probably black thanks to a Swahili name and an explicit call to her Egyptian heritage, but… I don’t explicitly reference that. It’s a lazy inference.
So what’s Paul?
Paul’s ethnicity is not described. (Well, there’s one brief referent about a third of the way in to “Paul’s hairy Greek skin,” but that far in you’ve already got your own image of Paul Tsabo, bureaucromancer.)
There’s plenty of description of Paul’s body – he’s an amputee, he’s scrawny – but I don’t really reference whether Paul’s black, or white, or what. Which is a failure mode of me being a white guy, and buying into a culture where “white” is seen as the norm: I went “Well, most people have both legs, so I should mention that Paul is missing his right foot.” I went, “Well, most ex-cops are pretty burly, I should mention that Paul’s kinda short and not muscular and had to work his ass off to pass the physical exams.”
And buried in a tangle of assumptions I should prooooobably unpack further was, “Well, most people are white…”
Now, that confusion only exists in the first place because I believe in multiculturalism, and as such I put a multiracial family at the heart of the book. Honestly, if I’d just had a family of three white people, nobody would have been confused – and there’s a thought that fills me with discomfort.
Now, this flaw is subtle and doesn’t torpedo the book – mainly because the characters are written as people, with strong personalities, and race takes a back seat when the opening scene involves Aliyah stealing her father’s artificial foot because he’s fallen asleep on her again. But it is something I’ve gotten some questioning on, and though Flex is a professionally-published novel that’s been getting some very strong reviews, that doesn’t exempt it from me going, “Hrm. Coulda done that better.”
I’m a white guy who grew up with white guys. I’m not used to explaining my own heritage; it’s kind of a trivia fact for me. Hey, I’m Irish and German! That means I drink a lot, ha ha! Doesn’t affect my job chances at all, though, and the cops still love me. But that means that when I write about race, even in the quasi-idealized racial world of Flex (and that’s a whole other essay in and of itself, on choosing to write a fantasy-ideal version of racial dynamics versus a more realistic version, and how that all boils down to the effect you’re striving to achieve in fiction), I often miss a beat. I should have realized that Paul, too, needed his own identifier early on, because I’d established two black characters in a family and then left this nebulous gap when it came to Paul.
That causes some mild confusion, and regardless of how you feel about racial politics, “Confusion” is never anything you strive for as a writer.
That’s a weakness in my style injected straight from my background. I’m not going to flog myself over a detail like this – I’ll just put it in the large hopper of “Things Ferrett needs to improve upon,” and move on. A lot of writers are all like, “I don’t wanna write about race. What if I get it wrong?” Well, here I am, botching it up a bit, and most people still seem to be enjoying my book. The complaints, if you can even call them that, boil down to “So what’s with Paul…?”
So. In case it comes up, Paul is Greek, his ex-wife is black (actually a mixture of Egyptian and Swahili ancestry), and Aliyah is biracial but for all visual intents and purposes is black. But if you read Paul as black? I wouldn’t be offended. And in the next book, I’ll do a little better at explicitly establishing ethnicity (and hopefully do it without anything as clumsy as “Paul examined his swarthy Greek skin in the mirror…”), and as such level up.
That’s all there is, man.
My Novel FLEX Is Out Today! Here's What To Do If You Liked It. (Or If You Didn't.)
After many long months of waiting, my Breaking-Bad-by-way-of-Scott-Pilgrim novel Flex is available for purchase at just about any bookstore you can name! Which means that for the first time you, dear reader, can actually read it. Thanks to the easy availability of Kindle books and poor impulse control, some of you may well have finished my dang book by the time I post this.
So what now?
Well, if you liked Flex and would like to help it along in its book journey, there’s a couple of things you can do:
Write A Review.
‘The two standard places that reviews help authors are the book social network GoodReads and Amazon – not that Amazon is superior to any other bookstore, but I’m told they are more likely to show a customer a book in search results if it gets over a “critical mass” of reviews. (No, I don’t know what that number is. And neither does any other author.)
But writing a review on your blog is also good! Even just a Tweet or Facebook status that says, “I liked Ferrett Steinmetz’s book Flex” helps get the word out – and believe you me, “Word of mouth” is the most important part of selling any book.
Yet please don’t hype up the book. I don’t want fake reviews with engineered enthusiasm. Be honest.
Come To My Book Tour.
I’m showing up all over the East and West Coast over the next month, and I’ll be mighty lonely at some of those stores unless you show up to keep me company. I will be thrilled to see you, I’ll hug you if you like, and afterwards I’ll be all too ready to head out for drinks. So if you’re nearby, drop by!
Tell A Friend.
I’m getting lots of extraordinarily kind reviews for Flex. Yet all of those blog-posts won’t sell nearly as many copies as repeated versions of this conversation:
“Hey, have you read Ferrett’s book?”
“Yeah.”
“How was it?”
“Pretty damned good.”
Feel free to lend Flex out, if you liked it. Give it to someone you think would dig its vibe. If my words spoke to you, then speak to others when the topic of good books come up. Because really, if you’re not talking to your friends about the books you liked – not just mine, but in general – then what the heck are you doing with your life?
(Also, he says, sharing this post wouldn’t hurt.)
Buy The Sequel.
The sequel The Flux, which beta readers have largely agreed is way better and more intense than Flex, is coming out in early October. The ending of Flex has a bit of a game-changer, and The Flux rides that to new levels. So if you liked Flex, I’m about 90% sure you’re gonna enjoy the continuing saga of Paul Tsabo.
And if you like the idea of Flex, but for some reason have yet to purchase the sucker, may I suggest now is a good time? I’ve written about why buying as close to the release date as possible benefits the author – and since the release date is today, that’s as close as it gets.
So What Do I Do If I Didn’t Like Flex?
Here’s the trick:
Do the exact same thing.
I want honest opinions on my book, so if you didn’t like it, write a review, tell a friend why you didn’t care for it, and if you still like me but not the book I’ll totes hug you at my book tour regardless.
(Maybe don’t buy the sequel.)
The value of most reviews is that they tell people whether they’re likely to enjoy a book or not. Elucidating your reasons why Flex didn’t float your boat is every bit as valid as squeeing over why it hit you deep. And if you’d like to help Flex find its natural audience, indicating that this audience is not you may alert other like-minded people that this isn’t their bag. And that’s fine! There’s plenty of beloved books that I didn’t like, there’s plenty of classic movies that I didn’t care for, and even Shakespeare is loathed in some circles. The idea that everyone will love me and despair is the author’s egotistical quicksand.
So: I hereby free you from any obligations to like this book.
But.
I will say that Flex is the most purely me thing I’ve ever written. All the other novels I wrote – you know, the endless list of ones that never sold – had these Big Commercial Elements where I thought people would like it. Flex was written to please an audience of one – namely, the guy writing this here blog here. It’s about kinky, chubby, confident women. And parental love. And turning obsession into beauty. And the struggle to be seen as more than your handicap.
And donuts. God, so many donuts.
As such, I feel comfortable saying that if you like the sentiments and style presented in this blog, there’s a damned good chance you’re gonna like my novel.
And I hope you do. I hope you love it enough to press it into your friends’ hands and go, “Man, I loved this, and you will, too.”
Now. Let’s see whether that actually works.
The FLEX Book Tour Is Finalized! New Dates in San Diego And San Francisco!
Okay. This ridiculous book tour/vacation is now finalized, so many of you people on both West and East coasts can meet a Ferrett.
And what a strong ending! Two of the best science fiction bookstores, one I thought I’d never get to sign in! San Diego and San Francisco!
In any case, I should stress that this is a book vacation, not a book tour per se – in a book tour, the publisher pays to put you up in a hotel, whereas Gini and I are treating this like “Let’s drive up and down the West Coast and see friends and oh yeah, do some signings.” So if there’s anyone in the Seattle or San Diego area who would be willing to let us crash at their space for a couple of days (and be okay with us getting in late as we see other people), then please let me know. (We have Portland and San Francisco covered, thankfully.)
(Which also should answer your next question of “When are you coming to my town?” When you pay my plane fare and a hotel, I’ll cheerfully go anywhere. Alas, this is on my dime, and more for fun than profit, so I’m surprised I have this many dates.)
(And extra-special thanks to fellow writer and Angry Robot PR man Michael Underwood, who did most of the legwork for this tour. He is the official fairy godfather of Flex, and you should buy his books.)
Saturday, March 28th: Mysterious Galaxy, in San Diego
5943 Balboa Avenue, Suite #100, San Diego, CA 92111
2:00-3:30 p.m.
Saturday, April 4th: Borderlands Books, in San Francisco
866 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110
3:00-4:30 p.m.
And in case you’re going “Aw, man, I wanted to hang out Ferrett!” and you live in New York, Boston, Seattle, Portland, or – strangely – Cleveland – then remember these dates:
Friday, March 6th: Loganberry Books, in Cleveland (register at the Facebook event here!)
13015 Larchmere Blvd., Shaker Heights, Ohio 44120
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Friday, March 13th: WORD Bookstore Brooklyn (register at the Facebook event here!)
126 Franklin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 14th: Annie’s Book Stop Of Worcester (register at the Facebook event here!)
65 James Street, Worcester MA 01603
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Friday, March 20th: University Book Store, in Seattle
4326 University Way NE Seattle WA 981105
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 21st: In Other Words, in Portland, Oregon
14 NE Killingsworth Street, Portland, OR 97211
4p.m. – 6p.m.
Tearing Beloved Characters Apart Like Scrap Paper: Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings
Stephen King once demonstrated the mastery of his craft by killing seven people in short succession.
That makes it sound like Stephen King is a serial murderer, a statement I’m not backing off of. What he did in Under the Dome – which wasn’t even one of his better books – was to do the impossible for most writers. Which is to say that Stephen would create a fully-fledged character in under 800 words, a grungy and real and believable and likeable hitchhiker with a backstory and a need to get out of this damned town that had blackened his eye and got the local police chief on his case. The ideal lead for a book because even knowing them for this little time you wanted to follow him through the next 1,000 pages to see what happened to him –
– and WHAM, he got killed by the eponymous Dome.
So you got to the next character, a pilot who’s trying to wind up a messy love affair but dealing with the complexity of still being in love, and WHAM, killed by the Dome.
And the next character, what a lovely person, and WHAM, killed by the Dome.
It was like watching a masterwork artist flip through his sketchpad, scribbling in heartbreaking portraits in loving detail in less time than it took you to swig your coffee, and then he’d rip them up and toss them aside. And it was all to good effect, ultimately – after watching that many people killed by what was an admittedly-ludicrous plot device (an alien Dome dropped over a small town!), it felt like a tragedy. And that callousness made you jumpy for everyone else throughout the rest of the books when the true lead characters finally survived long enough for you to say “Howdy.”
But if you’re a writer, you know how damned hard it is to create someone who feels real, and is sympathetic enough that you want to see what happens to them. Some people spend decades trying to pull that off, and never achieve it once. And there’s Stephen King, creating people so utterly believable that he might well have crushed them personally in a car wreck, and he’s doing it so effortlessly that he can just do it at will. As a toss-off.
I never thought I’d see anyone else do something comparable until I read Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings.
Which is not to say The Grace of Kings is like Stephen King at all – it isn’t. It’s been compared to an Asian Game of Thrones, which is a marketing shorthand I crawl at, because Game of Thrones feels like a purposely shitty world, whereas Ken’s world has moments of genuine hope and love, it’s just ruled by increasingly dysfunctional people.
And Ken does not create characters in the way that Unca Stevie does. Stephen King creates his characters in the moment – a blackened eye, a rustling pocket with only a crumpled dollar bill, a hopeless wave at a passing car. Whereas Ken repeatedly stops the story and says, “Have a flashback to this character’s entire life history, from A to Z.”
Which sounds stupid and clumsy and amateurish. According to every writing manual in existence on this planet, it shouldn’t work. But Ken is a master writer, having won literally every science-fiction award possible for his short stories, and when he sets out to break a rule he shatters it like cordwood.
Because Ken has mastered the essentials of story. In a few sentences, he can tell you about a character who has experienced something where you go Yes, I understand this person, I would do the same thing, and so when you hear about the second-best philosopher at the school, the one who’s studied so hard to be the best and yet is repeatedly outdone by the shining student who never works for anything and yet is just genius, you feel that tug. And then Ken deepens this sketch by outlining the awkward ways in which people try to compliment this poor second-best schmuck, complimenting his fine form without once ever expressing any enthusiasm for the work he’s spent years creating, then suggesting he study the golden child of the school for inspiration, and you understand yes, okay, I get why this man would be seethingly obsessed.
Then you hear about how he mastered politics because philosophy wasn’t working for him, and rose high in the bureaucracy to be the second-hand man of the King himself, and when he got the opportunity he undermined his old golden boy, disfavored him in the palace, got that stupid jerk thrown into jail – and yet the Golden Boy never blamed this second-rate philosopher, in fact seemed to adore his old friend, welcomed him into his cesspit of a prison, never suspecting who was causing him all this trouble at all…
Then the second-rate philosopher gets his head chopped off by an invading barbarian force, and you find out the story is about what happens to the Golden Boy.
At least until something bad happens to the Golden Boy.
Grace of Kings is an epic fantasy saga, but I tend to think of it as “Poor management techniques backed up with swords.” With so many characters, time and time again we see rulers distracted from the details that actually allow empires and armies to function – focusing on revenge instead of politics, focusing on politics instead of provisions for the army, focusing on provisions instead of strategy, focusing on strategy instead of discipline. Running an empire is a hugely complex task in the world of Grace of Kings, and while there are a lot of idiots in the mix – as you’d expect – the challenge of the characters is getting everything right, and you can’t quite blame people for not realizing what’s important until the blade is about to fall.
More importantly, people’s mistakes and their triumphs are deeply rooted in character. Yes, the vicious warlord may be causing problems for himself by burning the cities he conquers, thus creating greater resistance, but on the other hand if he didn’t have that ruthless willingness to drive his army into the teeth of unspeakable violence, he’d never have won any battles. It’s a complex balance of people creating politics, and Ken pulls it off with – *cough* – grace.
Now, for me, this story was new, because it’s based on an Asian saga I am not familiar with – much like Western stories tend to be based around King Arthur. But I’m told by people who know the original that it’s still a worthy and unique take on it. And I enjoyed the heck out of it, because yes, like Under the Dome, there are characters who do survive – but like Game of Thrones, you’re never entirely certain which ones will make it.
It’s out in a few weeks, and I might contemplate reserving my copy now, if I were you.
On Nimoy, The World Shrinking, And Growing
So Leonard Nimoy died, and I almost called in sick and took the afternoon off.
And I worry about other people.
Me, I’ll be fine, though losing Leonard was a great loss to me. I remember being ten and going to my first Star Trek convention – a shameful thing back then, to be held in back rooms of Shriners’ clubs, things only children and stunted adults would desire. And my Uncle Tommy, ever fearless, went with me, and I bought Spock ears because Spock, like all of us, seemed baffled by these huge desires that swept through him. Spock wanted to be calm and logical, but he wasn’t – and yet somehow, he was the most capable of all of the crew for that.
Now he’s gone, and that part of my childhood goes with him.
Yet I know too many people who attended those conventions, and never bothered to find anything else to love. I have a good friend who only sees remakes of things she already knows, stuck in the past, endlessly buying deluxe versions of 1970s and 1980s movies and not acquiring anything new.
For her, Leonard Nimoy’s passing is a great loss because all her beloved heroes are so old, they can do almost nothing but die.
For me? I’ve had lots of new and wonderful fandoms. The Flash is a delight. I adore Better Call Saul. I’m still flying high on Avatar: the Last Airbender. I am so ridiculously enamored of new shows and movies that yes, Leonard Nimoy’s passing is a great loss but I still look to the future, confident that there are still things as wondrous as Star Trek yet to be created.
For my friend? Spock is a grave in a yard that will fill with nothing but more holes. As she ages, the bottom will drop out for her – Shatner and Takei will pass, and she’ll complain bitterly that there’s nothing like the old days, and it’ll be like the world is crumbling around her. Because it is. Because she’s mired in a past where the only good shows where the ones she knows, and that sad land will only grow stonier over time.
But I think Leonard was delightful at embracing new things as he got older – he certainly seemed to love his time on Fringe – and me? I’d rather be like Leonard. It’s a huge world, full of wonderful things. There are new characters to to fall in love with – maybe not filled with the same history of childhood nostalgia as Spock, but delightful nonetheless. And no one can replace Leonard, but I have far more fictional worlds to hold fast in my heart, some of them new and blossoming, all of them exciting.
When I think of Star Trek, I think to the future, and the future is one glorious now.
Don’t get me wrong: His loss is profound to me. I haven’t stopped crying for half an hour. But there is still such beauty in the world.
Thank God I have the eyes to see it.