Since the publication of The Digital Sea back in January, I’ve been rather busy.  I finished the first draft of my alt-history novel The Fires of Alexandria, gotten my YA speculative fiction novel Gamers ready for publication (hopefully to be released in a week) and started on book two for The Digital Sea trilogy – The Godhead Machine.  The second book in the series was actually half done from last year.  I had switched to a different project to get ready for a workshop.  But getting back to the TDS world reminds me how much I enjoy writing about Zel Aurora.  And I’m sorry to say, as always, I’m putting her through hell.

Being so busy allows little time for promotion.  But that’s okay as I’m a firm believer in the Dean Wesley Smith idea that writing more good books sells books.  I have allowed myself to submit The Digital Sea to few review sites, but beyond that, I’ve been focused on writing the next novel.  So far, the reviews have been quite nice and sales are exactly where I expected them to be, which pleases me greatly.

Here are the reviews I’ve received so far with the essence of the text repeated here for ease:

The New Podler Review of Books

“Besides Zel, there are several other characters that figure prominently in the story. I wondered how well Carpenter was going to tie their individual storylines together, but he pulled it off. Even though he shifts around a lot, at no point did I forget who any of them were. Carpenter deftly shapes and defines all of his characters, providing us with a diverse group. He deserves credit for writing a story where one major character is an amputee and another suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, yet neither falls prey to stereotypes.”

Literary R&R

“From the beginning to the end, The Digital Sea dragged you into its depths and drowned you with a futuristic reality that threatened to overload your senses. With its action-packed storyline, it will keep the reader turning page after page until the end. I would recommend this story to anyone who appreciates future-based story lines mixed with surrealism.”

TicToc Reviews

“In the Digital Sea, Thomas Carpenter has put together an extreme technological futuristic thriller. Fast paced, the action keeps you on the edge of your seat. It is important to follow the action closely because every part has a reason. The interplay is amazingly intricate. Because of the scope of the novel, the characters are numerous. Mr. Carpenter has put together an amazing group of characters, and tied them together with verve.”

If those reviews intrigued you, The Digital Sea is available for purchase at Amazon in ebook ($4.99) or paperback ($14.99).

Whew.

Today I’m an exhausted but happy writer.  Last week I had the pleasure of being involved with two Dean & Kris workshops on the Oregon coast.  The atmosphere, learning and people were fantastic.

The week was nothing short of mind-blowing and I was honored to be a part of that group for a week of dedicated learning.  And when I say dedicated, I mean the long days and no-sleep-nights kind of dedicated.  Besides all the activities for the workshop, I managed to hit my goals on writing for the week during the rare downtimes we had.  I can’t wait to go back again.

In other writing related news, I made the first cut in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest in the YA fiction category.  Four thousand manuscripts were eliminated from the field of five thousand and the next cut will occur on March 22nd.  Wish me luck.

It used to be that every industry had its gatekeepers.

Music had the fat guys with cigars that Pink Floyd loved to sing about.  Factories had foreman that slapped each other on the back.  Corporations had bosses that controlled resources.  Political parties had precinct captains and party leaders.  And for the last decade, publishing has had agents acting as the gatekeepers.

All these industries still have and will have gatekeepers that control people and products not based on their merit, but on the connections and favors owed.  That will never change completely.

But now there are other ways.

I’m fond of reading Seth Godin, both his blog and his books.  I would recommend Tribes and Linchpin to everyone, regardless of the industry, even someone tending the house and kids on a daily basis.

For years, he’s been teaching how to get past the gatekeepers of the world, even when that gatekeeper is one’s own fear.  Gatekeepers were a necessary tool in the age of the Big Industry.  In Big Industry, economies of scale provided the economic boost.  Favors worked when there wasn’t much competition and information was scarse.  Now those lumbering dinosaurs are too large to function in this nimble mammal world.

The publishing industry, one of the last of the great white behemoths, has just started to come to this realization–cue Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The last few years, Dean and Kris, have been speaking online about taking control of your career as a writer.  They’ve been talking about this privately at their wonderful workshops for a long time before that, but we’ll stick with what’s in the public record.

This honest self-reliant tone struck well with me and it reminded me much of Seth Godin, albeit specific to the publishing industry.  Now that the e-publishing market is available; many authors, old and new, are debating the usage of such systems.  Dean and Kris are leading such a debate on their dual blogs.  Instead of the big bad gatekeeper in the huge conglomerate buildings of New York, we only have our own fear holding us back.  No longer is the holy grail of an agent required to get a book sold (not that it ever really necessary, but that’s a different discussion all together.)

Seth Godin’s book Tribes talks about how to build a movement one person at a time, slowly, leveraging technology and using our passion and skill.  The old way was to get picked by the elites, sudden and full of heady success.  The new way is to build deliberately, slowly and full of frequent failures.

Seth says it best as:

“Does your project depend on a miracle, a bolt of lightning, on being chosen by some arbiter of who will succeed? I think your work is too important for you to depend on a lottery ticket. In some ways, this is the work of the Resistance, an insurance policy that gives you deniability if the project doesn’t succeed. “Oh, it didn’t work because we didn’t get featured on that blog, didn’t get distribution in the right store, didn’t get the right endorsement…”

Dean and Kris have been telling us the same thing for years.  Be it on rewriting through workshops, or giving up because of rejections, or sending directly to editors.  Being a writer the way they explain it is the same way Seth describes Tribes.  It takes hard work and patience.  You can’t eat an elephant all in one bite and becoming a writer is one mighty big elephant.

Those frequent failures are going to be painful.  When you sell to a big traditional publisher, you can always blame it on them because of bad marketing or a bad cover.  When your book goes out on the e-publishing market and it doesn’t sell as well as you’d like, then it’s all on you.  But that’s okay.  Getting it out there is the hard part and you’ll do better next time.

Matt Mullenweg recently wrote about Apple and their willingness to fail in his post 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number.  If Steve Jobs, the turtlenecked guru, can stomach not having copy+paste on his first iPhone, then I can give it my best and be happy with the result.

In Dean’s New World of Publishing and Kris’s Business Rusch , they explain how to navigate this new world of publishing.   One of the most important points they make to new writers is that the new model is going to be slow.   But that’s okay, Seth already warmed me up to the idea that building a tribe takes time.

Plus, meeting people along the way, one-at-a-time, is a lot more fun than plugging into a massive corporate box any day.

Failure can often be a predictor of future success.  It’s known that a bank is more willing to give a loan to a business person that has previously failed with another business than one right out of the gate (assuming similarly chanced business plans.)  Thomas Edison was said to have failed at the light bulb around one-thousand times before getting it right.  Even then, it was only a version good enough to sell for the time.

Writers typically have a harder time with failure.  Getting those first few rejection slips from a magazine or publishing house will often doom a new writer to hanging up the keyboard.

In any business we must accept that we have much to learn.  Failure is the only real way to understand how something works.  In the inverse, early  success can often be a worse result, because it may have had more to do with luck and give a person the wrong impression on what it takes to succeed.  Just ask any former high school quarterback.

So by failing we can gauge the boundaries of our abilities and find new ways to stretch.  For writing, there are a few common benchmarks that writers use to tell how they are progressing.

The first is word count.  It was said by John D. MacDonald that you had to write a million words before you were capable of putting out good stories.  Depending on if I count the non-fiction articles, blog posts and other writing I did when I was younger I could either be approaching one million or well past into the 1.5 million count.  Either way, I’m not stopping or slowing down.  My goal for the year was 200,000 words and I’m well past.  Next year I’ll easily hit the 250,000 word in one year mark.

The next commonly discussed marker is the Race Score which was coined by Dean Wesley Smith.  Basically, you get one point for every short story being considered at a magazine, three points for novel proposals and eight points for a full novel.  Typically professional writers operate above the fifty point area and some long term ones are well above one-hundred.  This may sound like a huge number but when you consider how long submission process might take (one sub of mine has been at a particular publisher for ten months, a normal turn around time for that particular one) it’s not so bad.

Currently I have eleven shorts and three novels out making the rounds.  This gives me a race score of thirty-five.  I’m very proud of that score as I was only a four or five just a year ago.  It helped that I had an earlier novel that I didn’t know how to sell ready to go.  Once I understood the mechanics of the submission process I was able to get it in shape to send out.  The rest has happened from straight nose-to-the-grindstone work.  Sometime next year I’m planning on passing the fifty point number, assuming I don’t sell something, which would be a find reason not to meet that goal.

The last is the rejection count.  Long term professional writers like to make a point of pride about how many rejections they’ve received over the years.  The early number to shoot for is one hundred rejections.  Professionals like Dean Wesley Smith have gotten over one hundred rejections from a single magazine, let alone the whole industry.  Right now I’m around eighty rejections for both novels and shorts and expect to pass one hundred early next year and once again, I’d be happy with a sale to screw up my math.

There may be other benchmarks to go by.  My writer friend Annie Bellet has argued for counting the number of ePub products we have on the market.  As the marketplace is changing rapidly, this may end up being a good way to judge future success.  Though in all of this, quality of work must always be there no matter now how many words or rejections we have.  I can write the word “apple” one million times and that won’t make me a good writer.

So the writer’s benchmark breaks down into 1,000,000 / 100 / 50.  Mind you, this is just the general requirements for breaking into the industry.  Staying in is another level up that I’ll have to learn as I go and I don’t suspect it gets any easier, but I’m willing to study and work hard and keep at it.  Success is where preparation meets opportunity and I’m trying to be prepared as possible.

I finished reading the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell today.  One theme from the book was the idea that 10,000 hours of meaningful work within a skill set will make you an expert.  A brief example from the book is a comparison of three groups of violinists at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music.  The first group are judged as having world-class potential as a violinist.  The second group was judged as merely “good.” While the third group aspired to be high school music teachers. 

The difference in their ability was correlated to the amount of time they practiced.  All of them started around the age of five, but the world-class players practiced for long hours and had achieved the magical 10,000 hours by the time they reached the academy.  The second group had totaled eight-thousand hours and the last group only four-thousand. 

This should come as no surprise to anyone that hard work pays off.  The book goes on to give examples of how people like Mozart, Bill Gates and the Beatles all benefited from their 10,000 hours. 

The surprise to me was that, well, I was surprised.  This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this axiom.  Growing up I played soccer and attended Pat McBride’s soccer camp in St. Louis.  Pat played for the Olympic team and is in the National Soccer Hall of Fame.  He’s a legend around these parts.  One of the things he said was that to be a great soccer player, you must touch the ball a million times. 

While I never aspired to be a professional soccer player, I always took that lesson to heart for soccer.  It’s not until I’ve become a bit older and wiser (and having read Malcolm’s book) that I realize that is true for any skill. 

Thinking back to two of my favorite writers, Steven King and George R.R. Martin, I realize that both of them recounted the many rejections they received at a young age in their books on writing.  They were working on their 10,000 hours at ages long before I’d even thought about putting pen to paper on a regular basis.

This also holds true to Heinlein’s Rules, which is a guidepost for new writers (and old ones still trying to learn the craft.)

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

And if you need another example, then read these posts from Dean Wesley Smith about Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing.  Read not only the posts, but the comments.  Reading all of them has been like jacking into the Matrix and downloading thirty-years of experience in a few hours. 

While I haven’t yet reached the mythical 10,000 hours, I’m working diligently on that task.  This year my goal is 200,000 words (not including my blog posts for here and Games Alfresco.)  That seems like a lot, but I hit 140,000 words last year (one novel, 4 short stories.) and made around 220 blog posts.  Professional full-time writers probably put in about 500,000 words a year. 

In the end, I’ll only get better if I have the courage to keep writing, sending out stories and novels, and waving at the rejections as signposts on my way to success.