If You Need More Writing Advice, Then Check Out "Alice The Author" And "Tabletop Mercenary"

I've been running this blog for well over a decade now, and I like to think that I've given folks a lot of good advice. Whether you're a writer looking to improve your craft, or an author with questions about how words on the page turn into money in your pocket, my goal has been to help people get to where they want to be, and to avoid as many pitfalls as possible on their own paths.

Things are pretty damn hectic on my side of the screen, though. So I wanted to take a moment to direct my readers to some other useful resources, while also explaining how checking them out can help me keep doing what I'm doing from week-to-week.

Help us keep helping you!

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

First Off, Tabletop Mercenary!

For folks who don't know, in addition to being a blogger, a novelist, a former journalist, and more, I'm also a tabletop RPG designer. And to help catalog that journey in particular, and to blaze a trail for folks who are thinking about giving it a go themselves, I put together the series Tabletop Mercenary over on the Azukail Games YouTube channel.

 

This series currently has 42 episodes, and you can listen to the whole playlist here. With everything getting tougher and tougher these days, keeping the numbers up for the channel is one way my publisher can continue to make money, which allows them to keep paying me and other creators to get our games on the market. So if you're interested in hearing more about my experiences in this little sliver of the publishing world, please check out the show... and if you want to help a little more, subscribe to the channel and check out all the other videos I've got on there as well!

There's something for everyone, so take a stroll through the archive if you're of a mind.

Up Next, Alice The Author

Alice Liddell, my partner and co-creator of The A.L.I.C.E. Files, has been writing even longer than I have. She's published dozens of books, she's survived the fashion industry, and she isn't shy about telling fellow authors (both the experienced and the hopeful) what's what about writing and selling books.

Now, I've mentioned Alice and her YouTube channel Alice The Author several times on this blog, but I wanted to bring her up again because we're currently dealing with a somewhat dire situation. She has to relocate in the very near future, and we're trying to open up as many income streams as we possibly can to help make that happen. Despite the sheer amount of great information on her channel for writing, publishing, marketing, and even which conventions to go to, Alice is still short a lot of subscribers, and about a thousand or so watch hours to get YouTube to allow her to monetize anything she makes... so she's just been doing all of this for the love of the game up until now.

Please go check out her channel today, and subscribe if you want to do your part to keep it going. And if you want to do more to help her cover her moving expenses (and just generally survive in this terrible world we live in), please review the blog entry Author and RPG Designer Alice Liddell Is Moving, And Really Needs Our Help To Make It Happen! It contains all the way folks can help her land on her feet, and help the both of us keep making things.

My Thanks In Advance For All Your Help!

With everything getting more expensive these days, it's harder and harder for creators to actually pay our bills. But every time we get new subscribers, and every time you watch our videos (with ad blocker and VPN turned off, if you can, as YT doesn't count those views) it helps us keep making stuff. We depend on all of you to help us spread the word, and find fresh readers and writers to join our community.

So thank you for reading, for subscribing, and for watching. Don't forget to upvote stuff you like, and to leave a comment or two if you're so inclined!

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (an audio drama channel I launched with Alice Liddell)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.

Most Authors Aren't Making Money Writing... But Some Make It Gatekeeping Marketing Knowledge

I've said it before on this blog, and I'm probably going to say it again; most authors do not make a living writing books. While there are a handful of Big Names who cash fat royalty checks, and a few Smaller Names who cobble together enough for a decent living, most of us who do this are rolling the dice and hoping for the best. However, there is a... let's call it a strategy among a lot of authors for making those ends meet.

In short, they're selling courses teaching others how to succeed as an author. And while I'm all for structured education and paying people what they're worth, a lot of the time these things feel like they aren't worth the cost... especially when there are ways you can get the information free-of-charge from authors who don't want to put a paywall on what you want to know.

Just push... the door is open.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

Too Many Authors Are Aping Capitalism's Playbook

All right, at the risk of the Soviet national anthem playing while I write this, the strategy used by capitalists and corporations (there's barely a functional difference, but I list them both for completion's sake) to make money is RARELY to invent new things, improve new services, or to actually be competitive. Instead, these monied interests find something that is either a public necessity (water, land, healthcare, food, housing, etc.) and they take control of it. They then force you to pay for access to it, while keeping control and ownership of it so they can make you pay them as much money as possible until you die.

If you've been on the Internet for any length of time, then you watched this happen with paywalls. Once upon a time you could just read the news, play games, and consume content all across the Internet... but then more and more sites started putting up paywalls so that only people who forked over a membership fee could actually access the services, or information. Hell, it's also happening with "free" websites like YouTube, and several social media sites where you can pay a fee for a kind of VIP package.

So what does this have to do with writers? Well, it seems that a LOT of us aren't actually trying to make a living selling copies of our books... instead, we're trying to make a living selling people who aren't writers the tools to publish and market their own books. And we're doing it in the form of online courses that can run for hundreds of dollars.

And holy crap is this becoming an issue.

Now, the idea of this is fairly simple. An author will put together a series of videos that act as a kind of digital lecture, which will be hosted somewhere that the prospective students can then pay money to access. The idea is that you are getting the inside scoop on publishing and writing from people who have been in the trenches, and who can tell you how you can become a writer just like they did. While this isn't new (there are countless books that claim to be able to make you a bestseller, a business tycoon, etc.), it has become something of an issue for a few reasons.

I'd argue that the first reason is because this information is often (though not always) presented as some kind of secret knowledge that will put one on the fast track to becoming a successful author. That it's marketing using the glitz of a get-rich-quick scheme, which is something that has become all too pervasive in the writing world. What makes you successful is rarely the knowledge, but a network of connections and a proven track record; and those aren't what you're paying for.

Secondly, though, is that the information being paywalled isn't secret. It is all over the Internet, and there are authors out there who are literally giving away the techniques to get published, find an agent, market your book, and even down to the nitty gritty where they'll walk you through building an Amazon ad campaign that will actually get noticed (something that's pretty damn valuable). Hell, I make a show that does this on the Azukail Games YouTube channel titled Tabletop Mercenary, and author Alice Liddell has an entire YouTube channel stuffed with topics titled Alice The Author. If you go watch our videos, you'll save yourself a cool C-note... and you can leave questions in the comments if we don't answer everything you need to know!

This whole trend first came to my attention over a year ago when I was talking with PatZi, the host of the YouTube channel (and former radio show) Joy On Paper (which you should go follow if you haven't yet). At the time I figured that every author with any kind of name recognition putting together a course for prospective writers was just another part of the cycle... but it hasn't gone away.

Now, I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum. If you feel that this is a fair deal, and that you want to hear what a particular writer has to say, that's your decision to make. However, I've been doing this for a pretty long time now, and I've met a lot of folks doing it longer than I have. The information being paywalled is absolutely out there for free, and you could probably find it in less than 20 minutes of searching. I am of the opinion that people who want to write better books, or who want to learn how to actually sell their books once they've released them, will be far better served by using the resources they already have at their fingertips. Also, join communities of writers. Social media platforms are jammed with them, and we are all more than happy to share our experienced and tips with folks.

Most of us actually want to sell copies of our books. Information, though, that we generally give out free of charge because we understand that creating community means you help others out where you can.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.

Getting It All On The Page (It's Harder Than You Think)

Writing a book seems simple. "You just sit down at a typewriter and bleed," as the old gem goes. However, sometimes we end up losing things in the translation from the slurry of brain sauce, to the electrical impulses in our fingers, and things that we know about our story just end up omitted by accident. Sometimes this can be funny, like when you forget an adjective and end up with a line like, "She had skin. That was certainly a plus." Other times, though, you end up leaving critical character development, plot points, or connections you want your reader to make on the cutting room floor.

Now, ideally, you're going to catch these things during editing... but are you going to trust your brain? The soggy organ that screwed up the translation in the first place?

Because sometimes you really can't trust yourself

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

How To Double Check Your Map

Now, first and foremost, you need to edit your manuscript. It's the part of the job that all writers hate (except for that weirdo Geoff... we don't talk about him), but we have to do it. Once you've finished your draft, and left it in a drawer to percolate for a bit, you take it out and read it over, fixing as many obvious gaps as possible. Then you read it over and do the same a second time. Generally I stop self-editing after the third pass... but even I'm aware that I don't catch all my errors in just three little sweeps.

Shoutout to Alice The Author, who inspired this week's topic. Got check out her YouTube channel, and subscribe if you haven't yet!

And speaking of Alice (who self-identifies with this week's issue), she recommends two major strategies for catching as many missing bits of omitted story as possible after you've gone through and filled in all the holes you could catch on your own. First, hand your manuscript off to someone else (these people are typically referred to as beta readers). Make sure this person will give you honest feedback, and that you make sure they know you want to hear where any problems are, or where things don't make sense, or feel underdeveloped. They don't necessarily have to have any specific skill set or life experience, but people who are familiar with stories and their construction are always a plus. This is how you get feedback like, "This character seems like he's being a jerk for no reason... and this insult that he threw out made very little sense." Feedback which reveals you forgot to put in the background to explain a character's difficult home life and uncertain financial situation, along with personal insecurities that would put those story beats into perspective.

The second method is actually a lot harder for most people, because it can make you feel kind of silly. However, reading your manuscript out-loud makes it way more obvious when you've got a problem. I can personally attest to this, as there are some errors I didn't catch in my vignettes until I went to record them for the audio drama. For instance, in Paying Your Dues, which opens the supplement 100 Body Mods and Augmentations For A Sci Fi Game, I used two different names for the head of the newly-formed dockers' union. I fixed that in the audio, but it took me until that point to catch it!

Now, if you're somebody who feels a bit silly, I recommend using the Rubber Ducky Method. I wrote about this in another post, but the short version is that you put a small plushie, or a rubber duck, down on your desk and read to them as if you're explaining the story to someone else. This gives you a ritual and a purpose, and you can't just stop, because the point of the exercise is that you're trying to present your story to an outside perspective.

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Every writer is different, and we're all going to find things that work for us, or don't work for us. As such, it's best to use a layered strategy when it comes to your editing, giving yourself maximum potential coverage from mistakes getting through. Because some errors might get through your first two rounds of self-editing. Some more of them might get caught by your beta readers, with each one bringing a different perspective. Still more of them will get caught by a read-aloud session. Hopefully the few that remain will get caught by your actual editor, and then your manuscript will be clean and perfect by the time it gets into your readers' hands.

It probably won't be... but at the very least you'll probably have all the context, transitions, and lore you want to be there if you're diligent in making sure no one lets you leave anything out.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Creators Need Your Help (Even When It Looks Like They Don't)

I want to take a moment to talk about the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios. This channel, by all measures, is a pretty big success on the platform. It's been around for a decade and a half, most of its videos have view counts in the hundreds of thousands, it has half a million subscribers, and a relatively robust Patreon and Ko-Fi audience. It's also the channel where the very popular series of video essays titled The Alt-Right Playbook is posted, and it broke down a lot of rhetorical devices and arguments used by those on the right side of the political spectrum.

To all appearances, the channel and its host should be doing well. However, as a recent video he put up states in the title, Being A YouTuber Bankrupted Me.

And this is something I wanted to talk about today. Not just to try and push a little support toward a creator and video essayist whose work I enjoy and admire (though seriously, help out if you can even if that's just subscribing to his channel and watching some videos in his archive), but to try to drive home something to everyone out there.

None of us are doing well. Even if it looks like we are, we are literally 1-2 months away from everything crashing down without meaningful support from people like you.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

We Can Never Have Too Much Support

There is a common misconception among the general public that creators are either wealthy, or we're making ends meet without too much difficulty. And part of this is likely because when you think of the richest people out there, chances are artists of one stripe or another come to mind first. Whether it's YouTube creators like Mr. Beast, authors like Stephen King, movie stars, pop sensations, and so on, the assumption is that if a few of us are rich beyond an average person's wildest dreams, then surely the rest of us are doing all right? In addition to that there are fictional portrayals of creators such as on the TV show Castle where the successful novelist has a level of wealth that can solve an episode's entire plot, or even on shows like Two and a Half Men where a washed up songwriter wrote a single jingle years ago whose royalties can pay for an obscenely indulgent lifestyle.

However, I've met a lot of authors in my life. I've also met my share of podcasters, YouTubers, RPG designers, as well as a handful of marginally well-known singers and musicians... and do you know what all of them had in common? No matter how much money you thought they were making, I could guarantee that you weren't even remotely in the ballpark. Nearly all of us are broke. Period.

Seriously... it's depressing how broke we are.

And why are we so broke? Well, there's the fact that a lot of our rates for stories haven't actually gone up since the early 1900s for a lot of publications. There's the fact that platform decay across social media has made it nearly impossible for us to reach an audience like we could even a decade or so ago. There's the fact that if someone buys a $15 book that only $1-$3 of that makes it into our pockets, so we have to move tens of thousands of books a year just to keep our heads above water. There's the fact that Covid killed a lot of conventions (and seriously harmed those that survived), where a lot of us could make sales in-person. There's the fact that creators are given bare crumbs by platforms like YouTube, Spotify, etc., so that we need to rack up literal millions of views/listens in order to get even a $100 check at the end of the month...

But that's mostly the modern problems we're dealing with as creators. The truth is that being a professional creative has basically never paid well except for a handful of us that get plucked up by the zeitgeist, who make smart business decisions, or who are supremely lucky.

I cannot count the number of times I've met someone who I consider a more successful author, game creator, etc., and they always ask me the question, "So what do you do?" not because they're being dismissive of my work, but because it never occurs to them that this is my full-time job... because even at their level, their creative work isn't enough to cover their needs. Most other creators I know, even the really successful ones, typically have a retirement (quite common among the hard sci-fi crowd who had a military career before they started writing), they have a well-paying day job (I can think of one union welder and one regional sales manager I've shared con space with over the years), their spouse is actually the house breadwinner (which you wouldn't think was the case for someone who designed one of the major games in the World of Darkness, and who has a bestselling fantasy series under his belt), or in some cases they have an inheritance or trust fund that just lets them write without worrying about keeping the bills paid.

If you remove all of those folks from the general pool of creators out there, and only count those of us who are doing this full-time to support ourselves, there aren't a lot of us out there. And a majority of us (myself included) live in poverty, dependent on the whims and support of our readers to help us keep the lights on and the words coming.

And I don't mean that as hyperbole. I mean real-life, qualifies for Medicaid, uses food pantries, barely-makes-enough-to-pay-taxes poverty.

To Be Clear, "Support" Comes in Many Forms

When most people hear the word support they immediately close themselves off because it's become synonymous with money. However, while beoming a Patreon patron or throwing a tip into my digital jar (via my Patreon page or my Ko-Fi respectively) is always nice, I completely get that's not something a lot of folks can do. However, as I've pointed out several times in this blog, as well as in other places, support comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. In addition to giving creators money directly, or buying our books and other merch, support also looks like:

- Following our social media pages (bigger subscriber counts makes the algorithm friendly)

- Interacting with our posts (comments, upvotes, shares, etc. all make a difference)

- Consuming our content (watching videos, reading articles, etc., as that can get us paid)

- Sharing things we make to reach a wider audience (we literally can't do this on our own)

Even if you cannot personally pay a creator's bills by handing us money, you can do your part to boost our signal, and get our view counts up... the hard part is that we need a lot of people all working toward the same goal. And like I said a while back in episode 16 of Tabletop Mercenary, Audience Support is a Reverse Iceberg, we're lucky if 10% of our audience actually participates at all. And of that 10%, less than 10% of that number actively supports us by upvoting posts, sharing on social media, watching/reading any time something new comes out, talking us up to their friends, etc.

I want to end this off on a note of real talk for anyone who got this far. This isn't just unique to me, as a creator. This is a situation all of us are facing. We aren't just out here shaking a tip jar because we want a little extra money from you... we are literally funded by what you choose to do or not do as members of our audience.

So if there are creators out there that you like (whether it's me, or someone else), please, actively support them in any way you can. If you have money, support their crowdfunding endeavors, or buy some of their merch to show there are people out there who want more of it (hell, a single tee shirt gives them more revenue than an entire month of streaming a podcast on your mobile device). Leave ratings and reviews to help them get noticed more, follow their socials, tell your friends and family... and if you really want to make a creator's day, leave them some nice comments.

Seriously, we get so much hate on a daily basis. Sometimes it really helps us stop the candle from going out for someone to just tell us they really liked a story we wrote, and they can't wait for the next installment.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.