There Are Fewer Soap Boxes Than Ever For Authors

About a year ago I wrote a post titled If A Tree Falls In A Forest (The Reason Authors Are Always Promoting Their Books) which was all about how authors' attempts at promotion can slip through the cracks, and about how so many folks will talk out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to authors trying to expand our audiences. And while all of that absolutely still stands, I wanted to talk about the fact that the changing landscape is making it more and more impossible for creators to reach an audience on our own.

There just aren't any soap boxes to stand on anymore.

Okay, so this was for AGGRESSIVE soap. My point still stands.

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!

Nothing Works Anymore

I've been a professional author for something like 15 years now. If there's been a marketing gimmick that didn't require a huge budget, I've tried it. I've been on almost every social media platform, I've made half a dozen different kinds of content, and I've used all of the "smart" solutions to getting your work seen. And all of those things would have worked fine about 12 years ago. However, in the age of the Internet we find ourselves in, everything is broken, and nothing fucking works.

The short answer is because corporations broke everything. The longer answer is a little more complicated, but not by much.

Because most of this was deliberate.

The first major issue that we're dealing with is platform decay, which I talked about in my post The Reason Social Media Sucks For Everyone These Days (Not Just Creators). The short version is that social media sites used to offer good functionality, and there was a lot of cross-discovery. Your friends would see what you post on FB, and if you made a popular post on Twitter it could generate millions of views with tens of thousands of fresh audience members. These days the websites have been deliberately hamstrung so that there's no discoverability, and so that people rarely see anything on their feeds at all. And if you try to share a link to something that goes off that platform? That's a good way to have your signal buried, because the sites want to keep people on them as long as possible, and they want to hide any off-ramps someone might come across. You won't even show up to your friends and followers, and they have to go looking for you.

For some of my own numbers, in the past I'd share to FB and on a slow day I'd still get 400-500 views on something, with 1,000 or more on a busy/popular posting day. Now I share to more groups, and I have more followers, but I'm lucky if I get 20 views total. That's not an organic failure; that's a hand choking off air. And those numbers are the same with most other smaller creators I know not just on FB, but on all social media platforms they use.

The second major issue is the spread of websites these days. Think of it like streaming services. Once upon a time you had Netflix, and that was it, so you paid a little money and you got to stream whatever you wanted. Then Hulu wanted a piece. Then Disney. And with every company that yanked their copyrights and put them behind a separate paywall, you ended up with more services that were more scattered, diluting the audience and effect. The same thing happened with social media. Because it used to be you had Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, and maybe Reddit. Now you add in Blue Sky, Instagram, Threads, and apps like TikTok, and you have more platforms, but it's harder to be heard by a sizable audience on any one of them... especially if you work primarily in text.

And that's before we talk about the tsunami of AI slop, and how it's shut down websites like Digg because they refused to amplify that signal, but couldn't find a way to stop it from spreading. So that's even more legitimate options taken off the table.

All of that is bad enough... but on top of all those things, you also have so many platforms that are segregating advertisements and promotional posts. To be clear, not banning them. Segregating them.

Yeah, make your posts here. Folks will absolutely see them!

For added clarity, I am all about deciding in your group's rules that promotional posts are not allowed. Whether you're on Discord, Facebook, Reddit, or any other platform, if you don't want promotion happening in your group, that's your decision. But having a weekly thread where everyone links their promotional posts? Or having a subgroup where all the promotion happens away from the actual main page where people interact with stuff? Come on. We all know that no one is looking into those areas, or reviewing what came out that week. It's not happening. It's the equivalent of giving your younger sibling an unplugged controller while you're trying to play a video game so they feel like they're participating... and this has generally become the norm across most of the remaining social media landscape these days.

So if you post on social media it's very likely that your signal will be throttled if you share a link that leads off-site. If you try to get clever and share it in the comments, you'll have folks screaming at you for promoting in their groups. If you try to run a newsletter you'll have literally 1% of the people who subscribed to it click anything you shared (saw that when recently reviewing numbers). Convention numbers are down, and even the people who do attend aren't actually buying anything, or paying attention to authors and creators they don't already know.

What the fuck are we supposed to do? Well, the same thing I've been saying this whole time, because there is only one thing that seems to work anymore, and it's the one thing we, as creators, have zero control over.

Word Of Mouth Is All We Have

I've said it before, but I feel that I need to keep saying it because people don't seem to grasp how truly dire the situation is for creators. Because we literally cannot do anything to make the broken machinery all around us work. There is no magical keyword we can use to hoodwink the algorithm to make sure we get more views. There is no organic interaction we can perform that will magically cause our posts to be seen. There is no other social media site out there that's just waiting to give us views, reads, listens, and sales. Our hands have literally been tied, and unless we have hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to budget for ads on platforms, we can't really do much with the systems as they exist.

All we have is you. Our audience. People who want us to actually be seen, be heard, and to keep making more stuff. Because without your shoulders pushing the wheel right alongside us, we aren't going anywhere.

You are the wellspring from which we flow.

If there's a creator you care about, whether its me or someone else, make sure you do the following for them:

- Follow/Subscribe to Their Socials - Algorithms give preference to those with the most bodies behind them.

- Interact With Their Posts - Whether it's sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook, upvoting on Reddit, or liking and commenting on YouTube, that interaction pushes creator's content up in the algorithm rankings

- Leave Ratings and Reviews - Positive reviews on books, on podcasts, etc. add up, and help creators get seen more

- Tell Your Friends and Family - We can talk until we're blue in the face, but no one is going to care. If you have friends or family you think would like what we make, tell them because we can't.

And after you've done all that, it helps to buy books, leave tips, become a Patreon patron, and all that... but even if you just lend your voice to helping make that wheel turn, that's still doing something that authors are unable to do for themselves these days. So until we figure out some other solution, I hate to say it, but you all really are our only hope!

As A Final Call To Action

In order to help focus the energy of your readers, you're supposed to give a call to action by giving them something specific to do. Well, if you've read this far, and you really want to help me get the word out about something, then head over to the YouTube channel The A.L.I.C.E. Files, subscribe, and give our episodes a watch! It's a sci fi reimagining of Alice in Wonderland with a couple of odd little twists and turns that I think most people who enjoy my stories will get a kick out of!

Most importantly, we need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watched hours before YouTube lets us actually keep ad revenue... so please, help us get there!

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 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.

Don't Lock Into A Story Point That No Longer Serves Your Plot

Too often authors think of themselves as slaves to their stories. They claim they aren't responsible for the actions of their characters, for the holes in their plots, or for the walls they're running into. And if you find yourself trapped in a situation where you feel like your plot is slithering away from you, or you can't figure out a way to get from where your characters are to where you want them to be... take a moment, and remember that you are in charge of things, and you can change them as needed.

It's a heavy responsibility, but you're the captain of this ship... whether you like it or not!

It really is all up to you.

But before I get into the meat of today's post, remember, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.

Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!

It's Your Story, And You Can Change Anything About It

Let's say you're writing an epic fantasy story. You've assembled a party of skilled and daring adventurers, and part of the plot for your story is that you want the former thief to betray their companions. But as the story goes on, and you get a better sense of that character, that face-heel turn just feels less and less authentic. However, you need the party to fall into the clutches of the enemy so they can be dragged in chains to the dark fortress where they meet a wizard that's been locked up in the dungeon. No matter how you turn things, though, it just feels like a sour note in the narrative.

So change it.

Gun to your head, you can do anything.

For example, do the characters get captured by a bounty hunter that you introduce as a new antagonist, and he hands them over to the villains? Do the characters find out where the wizard is and get themselves captured to enact a jailbreak? Or does the wizard manipulate things with minor magics to bring the characters to their side, allowing the plot to get back on track?

All of these are acceptable changes and shifts. Or you could do something even bigger if you want to! It's your book, and no one can stop you.

If there's a character you were going to kill off who'd be more useful alive, you can just have them not die. If there's a motivation that doesn't make sense, or which has been rendered moot by a direction the story has gone in, you can come up with a different one. If there is a character who feels too much like an exposition dump, you can remove them entirely and find a different way to get the information to your reader.

I've said it before, but think of your book like it's a road trip. You know where you're starting, and you know where you're going. Your outline is your preplanned route. And some of us can just follow that route, get where we're going, and that's a wrap! Sometimes, though, you find there's construction and you have to take a minor detour. Other times a bridge will be out, and you've got to take the scenic route. Sometimes there's a natural disaster like a flood or an earthquake, and you have to completely reimagine your route.

You are in control of where you go. And if a road you were planning on taking is no longer serving you or your story, take a different route. If the book hasn't been published yet, then nothing is set in stone, and you can do whatever the hell you want!

More importantly, no one is going to know if you don't tell them. So keep your initial drafts and outlines so you can share tales of what might-have-been on podcasts or during YouTube interviews, but remember that these are just ideas and plans... if you get to chapter 17 and the bridge you were going to drive over is out, you don't turn around and go home. You bust out your map, look for a detour, and ask what other way could you get to your final destination?

Because sometimes the road is rocky... but you'll get there in the end.

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 (a channel full of short stories, many of which are mine)

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!

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!

What Stories Would You Like To See On "The A.L.I.C.E. Files"?

As regular readers know, I recently launched a new audio drama YouTube channel in partnership with Alice Liddell called The A.L.I.C.E. Files! While the overarching story of this channel is about the mysterious Carroll Institute and the new "Alice" that's been hired as a witness cataloger, that overarching narrative is punctuated by the stories she finds in the files themselves. These stories come from my and Alice's previously published works, and we're also drawing on public domain books and collections, as well as writing a few fresh stories to add to the collection.

My question for you all this week is a simple one. What stories would you like to see turn up on Alice's desk in Workstation 17?

We have a lot of things to draw on, after all...

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're Taking Requests Now (Because They Take Time To Make)

When we sat down to start this channel, I had a handful of dramatized story videos already in the bag. I've been updating them with fresh intros and outros so they add to the channel's overarching story, but these were the seeds of the project that we've been steadily planting over the past month and change.

It started with my story Dead Man's Bluff, which came out of my short story collection The Rejects:

And then we moved on to an audio rendition of my 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, which was one of the most popular fiction posts in my Vocal.media archive:

And there are a handful of future episodes that we're recording fresh intros for. These include:

- 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, Cthulhu Mythos Edition

- 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, SCP Edition

- 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, Warhammer 40K Edition

- Suffer The Children (also from my collection The Rejects)

- An untitled story from the Exalted tabletop RPG

- A dramatization of my short story Devil's Night, from the Pathfinder adventure path Hell's Rebels

However, once we've finished with those episodes, we'll have a wide open field regarding what shows up on Alice's desk next. And that's why I wanted to take a moment to ask my readers what stories you'd like to see us tackle!

And I'm asking now because we still have some lead time. Because full audio dramas that last between 20 and 30 minutes aren't something we can just make in a single week. We have to check the scripts, corral the voice actors, edit, create the soundscape, create the video... it's a whole process! So we need to start slotting in our new audio dramas now to be sure they're ready in a month or two!

With that said, some of the options available include:

- More published short stories taken from books like The Rejects, or possibly from SNAFU: A Collection of Military Horror, and other anthologies Alice and myself have appeared in over the years.

- Samples of full books, like my novels Old Soldiers or Marked Territory, or some of Alice's books like the period vampire novel Succumb to Darkness or her mermaid fantasy novel Love of The Sea.

- Stories taken from public domain works, such as The King in Yellow, or the works of writers like Lovecraft, Poe, and other classic authors.

- Creepy pastas, such as the stairs in the woods, ritual games, and other instances that might come to the Institute's attention.

- Fresh stories that have never appeared anywhere else before, written just for the channel!

Whatever your vote is, please go to The A.L.I.C.E. Files Trailer, and in the comments leave your vote for the kinds of stories you'd like to see going forward! Please mention that this is in response to the Literary Mercenary post, so that we can keep track of how many folks are actually voting.

Also, if you want to help ensure that we have the momentum to make the episodes you're requesting, please subscribe to The A.L.I.C.E. Files, watch the episodes that are already up (it's only about an hour and a half of stories so far, so it's easy to binge), leave comments, and tell your friends about us! We're still growing, and doing our best to get this thing monetized so we can keep the wheels turning, and telling stories for all of you to listen to!

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 (where many dramatized versions of my stories can be heard for free)

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 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.

Undercutting Death Can Undercut Your Story

When I was very young I loved comic books. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy a good comic these days, but as a child they were my go-to thing I asked for from the store. I read so many of them that concerned adults would whisper to my mother that I should read real books. Fortunately she ignored them, which allowed me to grow up with the heroes (and antiheroes) of the grim and gritty 1990s.

However, there was something that I learned reading comics that I felt was a unique lesson more writers should take to heart. Generally speaking, death is the end. If you are planning on circumventing death (and especially if you're installing a revolving door in the afterlife) then you have to do a lot of work to keep your readers invested, as you just drastically altered the stakes of your conflicts in a manner that can make life-and-death struggles seem pretty trivial when all is said and done.

Welcome to hell... oh... getting resurrected? Nevermind, I guess.

But before I get into the meat of today's post, remember, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.

Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!

It's All About Cost and Consequences

If you've ever played the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons (or any of the other games that pattern themselves after it), then you're likely familiar with the concept of resurrection spells. The general idea is that, once you reach a certain level of power in the game, you should be able to bring back a fallen comrade to continue the quest. The cost for such an action tends to be quite high (thousands of gold pieces in diamond dust, and either being or finding a spellcaster powerful enough to invoke the rite), but there will come a point where it's almost a joke to the players because their characters die and come back so often. Some players might even start a session with, "What happened last game? I was dead at the time."

This is one end of the Resurrection Scale, where death has been rendered relatively trivial (at least by a certain point in the story), and it's the opposite of the other end where death is permanent and irrevocable. And while stories and properties might move back and forth on this scale, it's important for you to ask why resurrection is happening in your storyline. It's also important for you to ask what the cost for such a resurrection is, because the cost (and the difficulty that comes with it) is what is going to maintain the threat and challenge in your story going forward.

Rise my son... today is not the day you die!

For example, let's say a character dies in your story. Tragic. You want to resurrect them, but you don't want it to feel cheap, or to undermine that emotional resonance you built with that death scene. The key here is to think about both how difficult resurrection is, how rare it is, and what it actually costs one to perform... or what it might cost to have it done to you.

Let's return to the fantasy gaming example. Making it essentially a financial and time cost makes reversing death functional as a game mechanic, but it can be pretty underwhelming as a story element. So how do you move the scale a little closer to the less trivial side of things? Well, perhaps a person can only be resurrected once, and if death comes again there is nothing that can bring them back. Alternatively, someone might have to make a deal with an outsider, giving up a part of their body, or a piece of their soul, to return (and if one does this often enough they might end up with the monstrous trope Came Back Wrong). It might even require performing some dire rite, and sacrificing something (or someone) in order to pay the cost; death for death, and life for life.

It's important to remember that cheating death (or just flat-out reversing it) should be its own element of drama and danger. And sometimes the reversing of death can be even more interesting than the death itself.

As a different example, consider The Widowmaker; a heinously corrupt six gun found in my recently-published supplement The Blade Itself for the game Hunter: The Vigil. A cursed weapon, the Widowmaker seeks to wipe the corrupt and the wicked from the face of the earth. However, it tends to be wielded by the desperate, and the mad. Why? Because if the one bound to the gun dies they spend 1 day in hell before being resurrected in the burned out ghost town where the gun was given to its first bearer. However, in exchange for this dark resurrection, the gun takes the life of someone close to the wielder; a mother, a brother, a lover, a friend... and only when they have lost everyone and everything can they truly die.

This is an example of a dear resurrection price... and it still has the stakes of death; it's just the death of others, rather than the character.

This Applies To Villains As Well

It's important to look at the other side of the coin, because resurrection for villains is extremely common as a tactic. Maybe it's that they made a deal with the devil to get out of hell, they were blessed by a dark god with a terrible form of immortality, or they have vat-grown clones of themselves that are updated to make sure they have all the memories and abilities of the last version of themselves that died a horrible death.

Villains get some latitude here, because their ability to cheat death increases the stakes when that is not a power that the protagonists have. However, your villains also have to have some kind of scale and cost for this power in order for it to not become eye-rolling and predictable.

In other words, make sure Palpatine doesn't just return for no reason.

Through the Mirror of Death Sight, all things are possible!

If your antagonists are resurrected there should either be a great cost to them (Darth Vader's cybernetic existence of pain and rage is a good example), or if it's treated as a power then that power needs to come with some kind of weakness (they must maintain the favor of a malevolent force, it requires a costly technology, etc.). Being able to endlessly respawn can lead to some short-term scares if you know that a foe cannot be permanently killed, but if that's the case then it needs to become part of their mythos.

Put another way, killing Jason Voorhees permanently may not be possible, but it's tense as hell as we wait to see whether the kids on the campground manage to get him under the waters of Crystal Lake. But when they take him into space, and that containment is no longer an option, things get ridiculous in a big, big hurry.

Final Thoughts: Match The Scale To Your Tone

The important thing to remember is that resurrection (or the lack thereof) is a mechanic in a story, and you can use it however you want. However, it's important to ask what it means for challenge, for the stakes, and for how interested your readers are going to be.

In a story like The Crow, where a character comes back from the dead as a nearly-unkillable revenant, the very invulnerability of their resurrection is a power fantasy that makes them akin to a slasher. In a story where people can die and resurrect over and over again, death may have become meaningless... but what takes its place if that's the case? And if someone knows they can die and return, but not how often they can do that, it leaves us wondering if this is going to be the death that really matters.

Your setup means a lot here... don't just bring characters back because you didn't want them to be dead for too long.

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 (a channel full of short stories, many of which are mine)

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!

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!