On Promoting Your Works During Awards Season

If you’ve got a bunch of science fiction-writin’ friends, you know this is That Time Of Year: it’s when all the nominations for the Hugo and Nebula awards are coming up.  So every author is putting up the obligatory post reminding you what they wrote this year, just in case you feel like nominating it for the ballot.
I’m not doing it this year.
Partially, it’s because 2013 feels like a loss to me as a writer.  I lost several months due to my triple-bypass, and then mostly spent the year working on novels that are, as of now, unrepresented.  (I’m flogging those to agents, I assure you, but it’s a slow process.) All my good stuff feels locked away.
But mostly it’s because I don’t see the point this year.  I used to flog copiously, gratuitously, and never got nominated for anything.  Then I did some flogging in the right places (putting copies of Sauerkraut Station and “Run,” Bakri Says in the SFWA Boards and in Codex for the first time ever), and got nominated for Sauerkraut Station in 2012 for both the Nebula and BFSA.
That sort of flogging is, I think, is the right level to do it at.  (Which is not to say that this is a magic guarantee, as hundreds of other people did the exact same thing to lesser results, but rather that SFWA and Codex are the places where the highest concentrations of Nebula nominators lurk and as such it’s the proper place to start to be seen.  You still need a lot of quality, and the years I was blogginfloggin most vaingloriously was when I was at my weakest as a writer.)
Yet this year’s been a difficult year.  My best story, Black Swan Oracle, was in a Kickstarted anthology – which, though the anthology was of high quality, comparatively few people read.  My second-best story, The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Olizewski  (which did wind up on Tangent’s “Recommended” list as a two-star story) was behind a paywall. Of all my original stories this year, only Shadow Transit was freely available (and if you like creepy kids fighting Cthulhu, by all means, take a look – I’m quite proud of that one).
I’m pretty sure that a big factor in the reason Sauerkraut Station got nominated was because it was easily passed around – it was, as it still is, available for everyone to read it, and so it could be read with a link.  Which was a significant advantage that put it ahead of better tales that were locked in books that people had to pay to read.  Sauerkraut Station was stickier because if someone loved it, they could post that love on Facebook or Goodreads or Twitter, and there was no barrier for someone to go directly from someone’s “I loved that!” to “Well, why did they love it so much?  Oh!”
Which is not to say that works behind paywalls can’t get nominated – obviously they can, and do!  But I think to a certain extent, reminding people of those paywall works is a thankless exercise – either the stories were good enough to stick in your head, or they weren’t.  You have to be that much more above the curve when you’re behind that paywall to get the nomination.
So I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that it’s worth doing the “Heya, try this!” during awards season when the works out in the open, where you can just point people at ’em and say “Go,” but it’s of less worth for things where you have to personally send people PDFs of your stories over and over again.  I think the web-published works benefit from having people link to them so that they achieve a greater mass of love shot towards them.
Note: I could well be wrong.
Now, what some people get upset about is the idea of promotion, as if authors – particularly girl authors – shouldn’t be so tacky as to remind the world that they’d like to be nominated.  To which I say, fuck that.  An author’s job is to promote their work, and if you get bent out of shape by a blog post and an accompanying Tweet, the author is probably better off without you as a fan.  Nebula and Hugo nominations help them sell more books, and I say yippee to that.
But for me?  Perhaps it’s a year I feel I’ve spent hibernating, banking away words in the hopes of a strong 2015.  But I’m not sending tales out this year.  If I get nominated, I’d be thrilled, but I don’t feel like investing the hope this time around.  Perhaps next year.

Do You Want To Meet A Ferrett? We'll Ride Our Bikes Around The Halls

So if you’re in Michigan, I doubt I have to tell you about one of the best conventions in town: that would be ConFusion, which has become the literary convention of the Midwest winter thanks to stunningly good programming and a thriving barcon.  (I.e., “Get your drinks and chat ’em up, folks.”)
ConFusion takes place not this weekend, but next weekend, and if you’re wily and careful, you may spot a Ferrett in the wild.  (I’m the chap in the hat with the colored fingernails.)  Or, if you’re more of the planning sort, you can see me on these panels:
Everything I needed to know about writing I learned by reading slush
Ferrett Steinmetz, Sarah Gibbons, Elizabeth Shack, Nancy Fulda, Patrick Tomlinson, C. C. Finlay
1pm Saturday – Erie
This oughtta be a good panel, as the writers are smart and oh my God I learned so much from slushing for Apex that I sort of miss the whole writy-thing.
Choose Your Own Augury
Ferrett Steinmetz, Cindy Spencer Pape, Wesley Chu, Peter Brett, Peter Orullian
6pm Saturday – Southfield
Expect gratuitous mentions of my story Black Swan Oracle (the best thing I published in 2013), in the book that was all about auguries, What Fates Impose.
Does my world need an economy?
Rae Carson, Cherie Priest, Ron Collins, Brian McClellan, Ferrett Steinmetz
7pm Saturday – Southfield
The short answer is “yeah, almost certainly,” but I expect we’ll get a little more into details than that.
Reading with Lucy A. Snyder and Ferrett Steinmetz
12pm Sunday – Erie
This will be a reading of the darkest story I’ve ever written, “The Cultist’s Son.”  It’s the tale where the death of an infant is literally the third worst thing in it.  And yet it’s a strangely cheerful thing.  Drop on by, if not for me, then for the award-winning Lucy, who will be reading her tale “Antumbra.”

Jerry Seinfeld Could Be Talking About Writing

Speaking of “Ask Me Anything,” I love what Jerry Seinfeld had to say here, which was in response to a question on comedy but could be about writing:

I chose comedy because I thought it seemed much easier than work. And more fun than work. It turned out to be much harder than work, and not easy at all. But you still don’t have to ever really grow up. And that’s the best thing of all.

Jerry’s answers create perhaps the greatest Ask Me Anything I’ve ever read – consistently interesting and articulate.  Check it out.

Head Colds Inspire The Usual Brain Death: Ask Me Anything!

I’m staring at a screen trying to make sense of things, my head swimming with disease.  My concentration is shot.  I’ve somehow got to try to program things today, but that involves actually comprehending systems, and that is not going to go well.
(I also owe a couple of short story reviews, as I read two of them last night but cannot put my head into order yet to sift out my thoughts upon them.  Though spurred by a thought from a friend, I may try to write an urban fantasy story in a Patrick Rothfuss/Quentin Tarantino mashup later tonight, which may just be the head cold talking.)
So let’s do the usual “Ferrett needs distraction” post, which is to say:
Ask me a real question. On any topic. I’ll do my best to answer honestly. 
(Fake questions like “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?” are neither clever nor useful.  You can do it; it marks you as the kind of person who doesn’t realize the joke is so obvious it’s been done a hundred times before, and I’ll think less of you for being tedious.  Hey, I told you I’d answer honestly.)
All other questions will be answered politely, and to the best of my ability.  Go, if you please.

Ferrett, At Various Places About The Internets

I wrote an essay for The Good Men Project the other day on Penny Arcade, called Why @Cwgabriel Will Keep Being A Jerk (And That’s Okay).  The excerpt is:

If you’re at all inclined towards women’s rights, the name “Gabe from Penny Arcade” (a.k.a. @CwGabriel) should inspire an instant face-palm.  Not only has he been magnificently intransigent on the Dickwolves controversy (top tip: if you’re going to apologize, don’t take it back), but his belligerent statements on transgendered women were cringeworthy.  Which, given that his bawdy humor has made him an idol to millions, is a little terrifying.
Then, on January first, a heartfelt blog post.  He admitted he had become the kind of bully he loathed, and vowed to change.  It’s a magnificent blog-post, full of honest self-introspection and a merciless examination of his behavior.
I’m here to tell you that Gabe still has a few feet left to stick in his mouth.
Before 2014 ends, I’m pretty sure we’ll see at least one more collective Internet head-desk, courtesy of an insensitive statement by Mr. Krahulik.  Which is not to say that Gabe doesn’t mean well, but… well, he’s had the epiphany.
The epiphany is not the solution.

Also, if you’re a fan of my fiction writing (or are attempting to, in which case I laud you), I had an essay up on the process of writing my story The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Olizewski, which was published at Intergalactic Medicine Show last month.  The essay, which can be found here, has some bits like:

The hardest thing to get about this story was, weirdly enough, the voice. Because the initial draft was 2,800 words, very tight, and almost character-free – more like a news report than a story, focusing on Pawel. I soon realized a tale with no character arc is really hard to do unless you’re Ted Chiang, and so I wrote a 5,000-word version of this which focused on the Nameless Narrator (or, as I took to calling him, the NN) but lost a lot of the oddball details that people found compelling. It felt bloated, and the NN really isn’t interesting enough to carry the tale.
Yet I loved the internal arc of this – and why wouldn’t I? If you think about it, the tale is really about me spending twenty pre-Clarion years writing and making the same old mistakes over and over again, hoping like heck that I’d somehow ignite my inner spark. Yet I struggled to find a narrative tone that matched. People loved this one, asking about it more than any other Clarion Echo story that I’ve written – “Did you finish it? Did that one sell?” – but I didn’t feel I’d really nailed it yet.

The story itself (still available to read) got a nice review from Tangent Online, which said, “[His story] leads to some interesting thoughts on the nature of work and art and is a fine story in its own right.”  Which was nice.

In Which A New Razor Makes All The Difference

This is what Gini bought me for Christmas:

Look at the beauty of that razor!  The lush wood handle.  The gold(ish) filigree on the blade.  And the feel of it is different than the starter razor I got, which has a plastic handle that wobbles more; this has a heft and stability to it that’s just breathtaking, if you like using raw blades to push hairs off your face.
And my God, does it shave.  On the old razor, I was up to four passes to try to get a good close shave – one down towards the jaw, one up towards the ear, and one each going east and west.  With this new blade, one up, one down, and it’s smoother in two passes.
The interesting thing is that I’m not sure if that’s the blade, or me.  If you’ll recall, I started shaving only last Christmas, so when I set out I was horribly inefficient at it.  I’d cut myself all the damn time and wasn’t using the right kind of shaving cream (Jack Black Supreme for me), and wasted about two months learning how to do an efficient shave.
I’ve since purchased a razor-sharpening kit, but it’s entirely possible I suck at razor-sharpening.  So it may well be that the old cheap plastic-handled blade was just fine; I didn’t know how to use it, and it’s dulled to a face-grinding bleed.  Whereas this newly-purchased blade is superior because it’s off the shelf, and will slowly turn awful over the next few months.
The other interesting bit is that I shave less with a straight razor.  Part of that’s my job; I get a half-hour for lunch, which I use to bathe and read, and so shaving has moved to a separate activity – whereas it used to be part of the bathing process.  (I am not getting naked in a tub with a straight-razor near me jimmies.)  And it’s a ritual, not a habit, so I shave maybe every four days now – when I’m about to go out.  I’m actually stubblier on average than I was before the straight razor, with intervals of purest clean-shavenness.  I’m not sure how Gini feels about this, and don’t quite want to ask.
And before you ask – I shovelled the bees out from under the snowpocalypse the other day, and heard them buzzing in the box.  I hope this doesn’t mean I accidentally knocked them loose, which would indicate a fatality (breaking the cluster of body warmth they use to generate heat would be a Bad Thing), but we did see them making cleansing flights on a warm day in December, so they’ve lived for now.  Let us hope for survival.
That should bring you up to date on all the outstanding questions of my bizarre hobbies, but feel free to ask if I’ve left anything open.