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.

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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!

 

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Projects Take On Weight When You Have The Connections To Get Them Published

I remember when I was in my 20s that I could keep three dozen project ideas spinning in my head at any given time. From horror stories, to roleplaying games, to modern fantasy novels, they came out of my brain like cotton candy, and all I had to do to keep them in the air was lightly tap them every now and again to make sure they didn't fall out of place. It wasn't that they didn't have substance, or that it's somehow easier to create when you're young, either. Real talk, it was so easy to keep all those ideas in the air because there wasn't any immediacy to them. I'd work on them as I had time, polish them up, put them in a bottle, and toss it out into the world. They were a gamble that might pay off, but it was equally possible I'd just get another rejection letter to add to my growing pile.

Now that I have a publishing history, industry contacts, and the ability to skip the queue in a lot of circumstances, it's another story entirely. It's not that I don't generate fresh ideas with nearly every breath I take (it's a stress response, and 2020 has been nothing if not stressful). Rather, it's that those ideas are no longer maybe-one-day potentials; they are real seeds I have to make a decision on right now. Because now I can send a few emails, make a pitch, and get these things out of my head and into the hands of an editor as fast as I can commit them to a word document... and that immediately raises the stakes.

Brain to inbox is now a pipeline.

On the one hand, that is an amazingly freeing, powerful feeling. On the other hand it means all those ideas that were just so much fluff in the wind are now lead balls... and I have to throw them extra hard to keep them in the air.

Also, before I forget, make sure you sign up for my weekly newsletter if you want to stay on top of all the fresh nonsense that comes off my work desk!

When It's Time To Put Up, Or Shut Up

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of writing, as a profession, is playing around in the imagination sandbox. It's freeing to make worlds, create characters, map story arcs, and just do whatever strikes your fancy. And when getting those ideas published is still theoretical instead of practical, there isn't really any weight to them. Because the supply chain from your mind to the hands of your readers hasn't been created, so there's no real pressure on your follow-through just yet.

When it does exist, though, suddenly those ideas aren't just whimsical musings; they're raw gemstones. And you have the responsibility of figuring out which ones are good quality before you cut, polish, and put them out for people to ooh and ah over as fast as you can get the tumbler to tumble.

Space opera with a wild West twist? Sure, people seem to like that. When can I have it?

To be clear, I'm not asking for sympathy here. I'm also not trying to pull the whole, "Woe unto the creative genius, for he has universes within his mind, but can only reveal them one galaxy at a time," nonsense. This is more of a tradesman's warning for folks out there who haven't experienced this shift in thinking/fortunes yet.

Because when you're just starting out, you're free to make basically whatever you want, as you want. And when you're wildly successful you can do basically the same thing, except now there's probably a big, fat check attached to it. It's when you're established enough that you can get your projects reliably green lit, but you don't yet have the audience, clout, or sheer volume of past work to coast on, that you find yourself deciding which seeds to plant now rather than later in order to get your garden growing.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

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!

The Pros and Cons of Using Tabletop RPGs as a Writing Tool

Tabletop roleplaying games have been around for decades now, and at this particular moment they're undergoing something of a resurgence in popularity. Between shows like Stranger Things, which heavily feature Dungeons and Dragons, and the popularity of online live play shows like Critical Role, it seems that more people than ever before are getting into this particular hobby.

Believe me, we are happy to have every one of you!

If you're a fan of genre fiction, though, you've likely noticed the impact tabletop RPGs have had for some time. Writers like R.A. Salvatore, Ed Greenwood, as well as Chris A. Jackson, are known for their novels that explore the settings these games take place in, for example. Additionally, many of these games will adopt popular fictional settings, from Tolkien's Middle Earth to the Known World of A Song of Ice and Fire, and give players the chance to forge their own tales in realms they've only read about before.

A lot of folks use these games as ways to test out story ideas, character concepts, and to help them build worlds. However, there are good sides and bad sides to using RPGs when it comes to your writing.

The Pros

Just take a drink... what can it hurt?

Before we get started, I'd like to establish some bona fides. First, I've been playing RPGs on the regular for about fifteen years or so. I'm also a content creator for these games, with modules like The Curse of Sapphire Lake for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, and supplements like 100 NPCs You Might Meet at The Tavern on the market right now. Lastly, I've used several games to explore characters and ideas for stories, such as in "Jungle Moon" and "Dead Man's Bluff," both found in my latest release The Rejects. I also run the gaming blog Improved Initiative.

This is a topic I know a little something about, is what I'm trying to say.

So, from the pro side of things there are a lot of benefits for writers who take up tabletop roleplaying games. First and foremost is that these games exercise your creativity (often in ways you don't expect). They let you experiment with personalities, archetypes, character arcs, and histories, getting all the reps you need to pump up your imagination. These games also give you a sandbox to play around in, testing out different ideas and structures to see what most appeals to you. Perhaps most importantly, though, these games are group affairs, so you can play off all the other folks involved, get feedback from them, and build off of the collective activity.

And that's just what you get from being a player.

If you take the extra step to become the dungeon master (the person who runs the bad guys, voices all the other characters, and generally breathes life into the setting) you can learn a whole new set of skills. Everything from constructing narratives, to filling plot holes, to making the world feel real and lived-in are things you learn how to do when you sit behind the screen. And while the extra character creation and world building are good practice, you also learn how to cover all the details when it comes to the world. Because when your players ask you what the history of a particular symbol is, or what kind of sewer system the city of Karoka has, you learn there's always more going on in the world than what you think to put on the page.

The Cons

Oh god... not again!

Before you get too enthused at the idea that a DND boot camp will turn you into a brilliant novelist, I'd like to let a little air out of your balloons. Not all of it, of course, but there are some genuine traps I've seen a lot of writers fall into you need to be aware of, and that you need to watch for in your own work if you use tabletop games as your training ground for writing.

Keep all of these things in mind, because they'll save you a lot of time, trouble, and frustration along the way.

First and foremost, you need to know where the lines are in a game so that you don't end up using someone else's intellectual property. I've talked with dozens of different RPG players who were going to write novels about their favorite characters or adventures who didn't realize until someone pointed it out that everything from the names on the map to the gods of the realm are the intellectual property of the company who created the game. So unless you're writing the book for that publisher (great work, if you can get it), you're going to have to go through and scrub everything in order to make sure nothing you can be sued over makes its way into the final product. And depending on how intimately your story is connected to this specific setting, that might torpedo your whole project.

Another problem I see a lot of writers deal with is that when they base their books off of RPGs they often end up with a distinct RPG feel to them, which can introduce a flavor to their stories they may not even realize is there at first. For example, roleplaying games generally have tiered threats and achievements, with the player characters growing in power over the course of the story. So they start off protecting towns from goblin raids, and end the story fighting god-like wizards for the fate of the world. Now, there's nothing wrong with that kind of escalation, but if your story has definite periods where the party "levels up" in threats and powers, just happening to discover new abilities when they most need them, that can impose a structure you weren't intending on your narrative.

Where the hell did all this come from?

Speaking of unintentional structure, another issue folks who try to write stories and novels based off their gaming experiences run into is adopting the framework of the game for how things work in their books. As an example, in fantasy RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder your spellcasters have a certain number of spell slots per day they can use for their magic. This is meant to keep things fair in the context of a game's challenge, but it isn't necessarily something a story will benefit from. If your protagonist is a wizard, though, and that limitation has been part of their character since their inception, you might simply adopt this Vancian magic system out of reflex. The same is true with iconic magic items, the special abilities of the monk, or the rage of the barbarian; if you get too steeped in how things work in the game, you often end up copying and pasting those elements into your story without asking whether they're helping or hurting.

To be clear, that's not inherently a bad thing. There is, after all, an entire genre of Lit RPG books which are supposed to feel like you're reading an RPG campaign. But if you aren't doing it on purpose, it likely won't make your book better.

Lastly, something I would recommend to those looking to use RPGs to enhance their writing is to test out concepts and ideas, rather than simply recording the events of a campaign and then writing them in a more engaging prose format. Part of the reason for this is because (with very few exceptions) you are not the only one at the table, and the other players may not take kindly to having their characters wind up in your work. This goes double if you're the dungeon master, because then it feels like you ran the game so your friends could write your book for you. Learn how to test specific elements and ideas, and to take those things out of the game, polish them, refine them, and spin a book about them.

You get a lot more mileage out of this approach.

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 sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my short story collection The Rejects!

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!

Writing a Bestseller is Like Winning The Lottery (How Facing Facts Can Help You Beat The Odds)

Have you ever stopped to consider what the odds of writing a New York Times bestseller actually are? Well, in case you haven't looked it up yourself, both Forbes and Free Money Finance say that your odds are about 1 in 200. On the one hand, those odds are significantly better than winning the Powerball (about 1 in 238,000,000 in case you're thinking about buying a ticket), but those odds still aren't great. Especially if you've got to put in sweat, blood, creative juices, and years of hellish effort just to get that one ticket ready.

Come on, baby, papa needs a new laptop!

It's pretty easy to find that discouraging. However, if you can face the facts, and accept that you probably won't beat the odds, you'll actually find the game is a lot easier to play.

Ancient Greece, Acceptance, and Spinning The Wheel

In case you're not an etymology geek, the word happen comes from the Greek hap, which referred to chance and fortune. While today we think of happiness as something we have, as a commodity generated from inside ourselves, in the ancient Western world happiness was something that literally happened to you. It came and it went much like luck, ebbing and flowing with fate and favor. And while people still had bad times, the philosophy of the language was basically that you accepted what the gods and chance gave you, because there was nothing you could do about it one way or the other.

And you would be amazed at how freeing that can be in a professional sense.

Let me give you an example.

As a quick for instance, not long after I released my pulp fantasy novel Crier's Knife, I held an ebook giveaway for it. As promotional devices go, these giveaways are a smart bet. People like free stuff, it increases the traffic to your page, and you see a lot more action than you otherwise might. I moved 700 copies over a weekend, which at the level I work at was a pretty decent success. My previous giveaway, which was for my steampunk noir collection New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam barely hit 500 copies, so I was making clear progress.

Was I involved in that process? Absolutely. I was the one who decided when to host the giveaway, I was the one who made the social media posts, and I was the one who made sure the book was ready for prime time, so to speak. I kept the comments going on the forums, and I was the one who drew as much attention to it as I possibly could. At the end of the day, though, the downloads were only partially determined by my efforts; mostly, they were determined by raw chance.

Every part of this process was affected by so many factors that were outside of my control. Facebook and Reddit's group algorithms decided who saw my posts, and more importantly who didn't see them. I also had no control over the reaction people had to my post. If they were in a good mood, or a bad one. If they decided to download my book since they liked free stuff, or if they down-voted my post because they didn't like something about my description. I had no control over who shared the link with other people, who actually read the book once they downloaded it, and of the people that did read it who left a review.

I was tossing a message in a bottle out into the ocean, and hoping against hope that a YouTube influencer with millions of fans found it, then told all their followers to go buy a copy. That didn't happen, but at the same time there was no guarantee that it would. No magic assurance that my book would become a success if I just tweaked these words in the description, or posted it on this platform as opposed to another one. There is no magic formula to bring a stampede of people with their dollars held out for more of your story.

And the sooner you accept that, the easier it will be to keep trying to make that very thing happen.

You've Got Enough of The Burden as It Is

Don't misunderstand me, here; this is your job, and you are a big part of what goes into it. You're the one who writes the book, helps with the promotion, and who is the face of your brand. You're the one turning up at shows, making your pitch, and getting people interesting. You are, in other words, the one who is buying the ticket.

You simply have no guarantee that the ticket you buy is going to be a winner.

You can, however, stack the odds in your favor.

I said this back in If You Write One Story It May Be Bad. Write A Hundred, And The Odds Are In Your Favor, but it bears repeating. The more you create, the more your put out, and the louder your signal gets, the better the odds you have of people actually discovering you. Much like how buying one ticket might only have a small chance of winning big, but if you buy a few hundred, or a few thousand, well, the odds are looking better all the time.

Because if you put out one book, one article, one YouTube video, etc., your odds of going viral overnight are pretty slim unless you already have a massive fan base of people interested in your work, or you have a gigantic budget to pay for the advertising machine it would take to acquire all those eyes. However, little successes add up over time, and every person you win over as a fan is one more snowflake to stack on your mountain. You pile them up slowly, and eventually there are enough of them to cause an honest-to-goodness avalanche.

Sure, there are some people who buy one lottery ticket as a goof, and win millions of dollars by sheer happenstance. Just like there are people whose books just happened to be in the right genre, or who told just the right story at the right time to get everyone's attention. There's no rhyme or reason to it, because it happens to good books and bad, to books that are heavily promoted, and indie darlings no one has ever heard of.

But don't you worry about that. Because whether the odds are with you, or against you, doesn't matter. Because sometimes your luck will be good, and sometimes it will be bad. But if you focus on telling good stories, on spreading the word, and on cultivating your little crop of readers, you'll get there eventually. Even better, you'll get there without "what-iffing" yourself inside out, wondering why other books got more attention, sold more copies, or got more likes than yours did.

Are there factors you can quantify? Sure there are. But they're only a tiny slice of the pie, and the sooner you learn to accept that luck is a huge part of whether you succeed or fail, the sooner you can get back to work without that huge weight of worry on your shoulders. Do your best, and let the rest take care of itself, because you cannot force fortune to turn your way.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife!

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!