fbpx

10x Thinking: Applying startup methodology to indie publishing

This is a reprint of a post I made over on Kboards, but it was suggested I include it as a blog post as well. I don’t do a lot of posts aimed at indie publishers, but why the heck not?

I live in the land of Uber and Fitbit, where Apple is king and Google Glass is normal. Where Elon Musk holds court and billionaires seek the next Youtube. San Francisco is a fascinating culture with different rules, and a wholly different religion. It’s called 10x Thinking, the art of Dreaming Big. Those who embrace it risk everything playing the great game of business. They invite criticism, and they listen attentively when it is given. They make bold choices, and study failures closely.

This religion is not for everyone. For every successful startup there are dozens of flameouts. It is high risk, high reward. If you have a day job you hate, or need immediate income then you should give very serious consideration to the publish often methodology many successful authors espouse here.

Publishing often will help hone your craft, and give you invaluable experience. It can show you what works and doesn’t, because you are iterating very quickly. My religion refers to this as prototyping. Without it you are simply too slow. Too ungainly. We recognize the value in rapid releases, but not at the expense of quality.

Thou Shalt Be Agile

The startup world adheres to the Agile methodology. We have scrum masters and sprints, software suites and epic debates. All surrounding one simple principle. What was true yesterday may not be true today. It will definitely not be true tomorrow. We embrace Wayne Gretzky’s philosophy that good players go where the puck is. Great players go where the puck will be.

This often means a sharp pivot, a dramatic change to your business. For writers that can be identifying a potential hot new genre, or experimenting with shorter (or longer) works. You must be able to react quickly, which is the essence of any successful business.

This is why you hear the drum beat of publish quickly, but as you’ll see below this must be done very carefully.

Thou Shalt Breakout

There are hundreds of billions of dollars in funding available in San Francisco. CellScope (my company) has already raised 5.6 million dollars. We’re a tiny fish in a very large pond.

Every investor is looking for the same thing. They want to back The Next Big Thing. They don’t care if you can make a profit quickly. They care whether you can create or fundamentally redefine a market.

Nothing else matters. I understand the advocates of publishing quickly, because as some authors have pointed out that gives you more swings at the ball. More chances for a home run. But it risks sacrificing brand to do it. Mediocrity is dangerous, and excessive speed risks falling into that trap.

Thou Shalt Brand

Brand is everything. Your audience must not only know you exist, but eagerly await every product. They must become devotees of your religion, advocates in the quest for more converts.

Achieving this is the holy grail, the reason Apple succeeded and Blackberry face planted. It requires polish, consistency and patience. Your brand is like a garden, requiring constant care and attention if you want it to bloom.

You must not just create good products, but great ones. In our world that means amazing covers. Incredible blurbs. Stellar reviews, awarded to stellar products. Fail in any of these areas and readers will lose faith.

There can’t be any weak spots in your brand, any chinks in your armor. This is why investors give startups millions of dollars over several years before they expect them to show their work to anyone.

I’m guessing almost everyone here was an avid reader growing up. I devoured a fantasy novel every single day for years. I couldn’t tell you the names of the vast majority of books I read. I have no idea who the authors are.

But I remember Tad Williams. I remember Robert Jordan. I remember Michael Crichton. There was something different about their books, something that set them apart. My religion is all about identifying that something, then harnessing it.

If you want to break out you must master your craft, creating incredible stories readers absolutely love. The kind of books they will wait years for, just like they do for George R.R. Martin. Otherwise you are forgettable, and there is no worse fate.

Thou Shalt Beta Test

We all know how bad our first drafts are compared to a releasable product. Software works exactly the same way. You make a minimum viable product, then you show it to a handful of people.

You listen closely to their feedback and add or remove features accordingly. You show it to a larger group of people and see how they react, then iterate again. This process is repeated many times before you end up with a product worthy of The Almighty Brand.

Advocates of quick publishing iterate many times, often with disposable brand names. This allows them to learn while insulating them from the consequences of mistakes. I nearly took this approach for that very reason, but my time in software has taught me the value of user experience testing.

Releasing a product means immediate profit. It means seeing what things people will buy, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you why they bought it. To understand that you need to ask the right questions, and measure the trends in a limited subgroup of customers.

In our case that means finding your potential audience and having them beta read your book. Not just one or two people, but twenty or thirty. It means asking meaningful questions about what worked for them and what didn’t, then refining your product accordingly.

I re-wrote the first forty thousand words of No Such Thing As Werewolves almost from scratch after my first round of beta reading. My characters gained more definition, plot holes closed and my pace tightened.

Then I showed it to my writing coach, who tore apart my prose and pointed out the remaining flaws in the plot. I integrated her feedback, then showed the book to another crop of beta readers. They had a few last minute suggestions, but in general they loved it.

This process made me an immeasurably better writer, which made the first draft of the second book much stronger. I’m following the same process for that book now, and by the time I release it will be closer to mastery of my craft.

Thou Shalt Ship

There is a point of diminishing returns, and many writers never release a product because they are forever tinkering in a vain quest for perfection. I don’t think you should pump out unpolished products every month, but you DO need to put out products.

No Such Thing As Werewolves wasn’t perfect when I released it. There were over 20 typos, and several inaccuracies about the military hardware (*cringes*). But that didn’t matter. What did was reader reception.

Almost every beta reader and reviewer responded with one of two statements. Where is the next book, or I can’t wait to see the movie. This is gold in the 10x World. It means you have a chance to breakout.

Thou Shalt Iterate

I aimed for a small initial test market. 10s of copies a day, not hundreds or thousands. I listened to what my audience is saying, and am making changes based on that feedback.

I hired a proofreader to give the manuscript another pass. I tightened my blurb. Very soon I’ll be redoing my covers to be more uniform. The initial 2,000-3,000 people who bought my book will see a beta version of it.

The rest will see a polished uniformly branded product.

My Plan for 2015

In April when book 2 launches I will aim for my first Bookbub. I will market anywhere and everywhere to drive readers into my sales funnel, knowing that the product they are about to consume is the best one I could have produced.

I plan to stay agile, to adjust my strategy as often as necessary to make better products and to continue honing my craft until I am the type of writer that inspires fandom.

This means consistently releasing products. A novel every six months, something readers can depend on. If they like my novellas (The First Ark is doing well so far, but its too early to tell) then I will release one three months after every novel so something comes out every quarter.

Will that be enough to keep readers interested? If my stories are good enough, yes. If my user testing was accurate the books will spread, hopefully like wildfire.

I will help that along of course. As I’ve said elsewhere marketing is key. I need to get my books in front of people who will love them. That will be the topic of its own post, but many of the tools for doing this are things we’re already familiar with. Boxed sets is a great example.

With every book I’ll become a better writer and I will learn more about what my audience craves. In doing so I plan to redefine a currently underserved market.

Vampires have been huge for years. So have zombies. But there is a dearth of good werewolf books, and those that do exist take a completely different approach than I do. So I’m re-defining werewolves. Watch carefully what happens next Halloween. If I do my job right werewolves will be The Next Big Thing.

Am I both arrogant and ignorant for not releasing a short novella every month? Maybe. I’m gambling that my path leads to mastery of my craft and the existence of a strong brand marketed to a user tested audience.

It will be interesting looking back at this post in 6 or 12 months to see if I face plant like Blackberry or soar like Apple. In the mean time I’d love to answer questions and to hear about flaws in my plan.

No Mere Zombie is coming

I have good news for those who finished the first book and are cursing me for dropping that horrendous cliffhanger.

I’m in the middle of the last heavy content edit and should be done the first week of January. After that No Mere Zombie is off to beta readers. The goal is an April release, and I believe I can make that happen.

If you haven’t read No Such Thing As Werewolves I’d stop here, because spoilers lie ahead. 

The ending was messed up, right? Of all the things that could have happened to Trevor. Jesus. So what happens to the poor guy? I’ve decided to give you a sneak peak at his fate. He plays a large role in Werewolves Versus Zombies. In fact, he’ll be on the cover.

Below you’ll find his first PoV chapter. Completely unedited. I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 2- Nameless

The shambling corpse had lost his name. It hovered just out of reach, as distant as the stars. It bothered him, this lack of a name. Bothered him a great deal. Almost as much as his imprisonment, an unwilling passenger in a body that had its own agenda. His body shambled forward, weaving through the deserted street. He passed unfamiliar houses, odd structures set atop two-foot stilts. They were different than the houses the nameless corpse knew, with thinner walls and thatched roofs. It would have been interesting to inspect them more closely, but his body shambled forward with no regard for his wishes.

He staggered, tripping over a shape in the darkness. His body looked down at the obstruction. A corpse, or what remained of one. The flesh had been meticulously stripped clean. The bones cracked, already drained of marrow. The tide of hunger rose, threatening to overwhelm him as it had so many times over the last week. It never abated unless he was feeding, resuming the very instant he stopped chewing.

His body turned its gaze back to the town, studying the line of houses. The flickering light of a candle came from a window four houses down on the left. The darkness obscured any differences, making the house identical to its neighbors. His body shambled towards it, slow and awkward. That frustrated him too, though he didn’t know any other way of walking. It felt…wrong.

His leg shook violently as he raised a foot, but he avoided toppling as his body set it on the first step. It creaked loudly under his weight, but it held. He attempted the second. Then the third. A fourth step carried him to the door, faintly illuminated by the glow in the living room window. A gasp came from inside. The light winked out.

He listened. Breathing came from behind the door. There were heartbeats. Two of them. Both rapid. Should he be able to hear heartbeats? No, he was positive that was wrong. Different. New.

He raised a trembling hand to the door handle, wrapping a weak grip around it. It turned with a click, the door creaking open with a little urging. Shouldn’t they have locked the door? Or at least blocked it with a dresser or bed? Clearly these people had never seen a zombie movie.

His body staggered inside, gaze sweeping the room. It was gathered in darkness, except for the patch of bamboo planks in the pool of moonlight. The heartbeats were more frantic now, thundering from the corner of the room. He could just barely make out a pair of shapes huddled against the wall. One taller, sheltering the smaller one. A woman and child. Horror bloomed, giving way to panic. Every fiber of his being yearned to warn them, to scream that they should run. All that emerged was a low wail, the first time he’d been able to force his body to do anything.

It shambled across the room, moving towards the doomed family. Why didn’t they run? They could probably make it past him. He was slow, ungainly. Yet they cowered there, praying he wouldn’t notice them. His body crossed the gap in three awkward steps, then lunged at the larger figure. She flinched, but made no attempt to run. Instead she shoved the smaller figure forward. “Antonio, ejecuta!”

The little boy shot to his feet, bolting across the bamboo floor like a deer as he burst from the room into the night. His head turned to watch the boy’s flight, then turned back to his prey. He seized the woman’s arm, biting savagely into her shoulder. His weight bore her to the wooden floor with a hollow thump as he began to feed. At first she screamed and thrashed, but that grew weaker as he tore loose mouthful after mouthful. The hunger faded for the first time in days. In its place came clarity. He remembered.

There had been a pyramid, surrounded by bright lights. Men with guns. Werewolves. That couldn’t be right, could it? There was no such thing as werewolves.

Adventures in Audiobooks

I went through a reading dry spell for several years where I’m not sure I picked up more than two books. That’s horrifying considering back in high school I used to devour a book a day. All that changed when I discovered Audible.com.

Suddenly I could download a book wherever I happened to be and listen to it while driving. Or hiking. Or working out. Or walking. Or grocery shopping. Just like that I was back into reading in a BIG way. I started listening to at least one book a week. It reminded me how much I loved reading, and for the last several years my audio library has swelled.

Now I finally get to add to that library. No Such Thing As Werewolves is now an audiobook, and has just made it through QC. It will be live in just a few days!

Creating the audiobook was far simpler than I ever would have expected. Amazon has a company called ACX (Amazon Creative Exchange) that pairs up authors and narrators. All I had to do was post a chapter and the auditions came rolling in by the truck load.

I settled on Ryan Burke, who did an amazing job bringing the characters to life. He uses a full range of emotion and gives each character their own distinct accent and cadence. It took him about three weeks to record the entire thing, and another week for me to listen to it and tag corrections. Ryan fixed the few errors, and just like we were done.

The finished product is absolutely amazing, and I am beyond thrilled that I get to listen to my own novel. It’s too early to really predict anything, but I firmly believe people will love it. I’ve attached a sample. What do you think?

The First Ark is nearly here!

FirstArkFront_v2The manuscript has been completed and is just awaiting one final edit before being ready! The preorder will be up on Amazon this weekend, and the most important part? The beautiful new cover! I’d like to offer a big thank you to Nikolai for the amazing rendition of The Mother, and to Stu for his stellar typography.

For those curious the novella explains what happens when the Mother entered the First Ark, a scene that raised a lot of questions in the first novel. For those who haven’t read book one you can still enjoy The First Ark, though you’re likely to end up with some very interesting questions about what happens next.

Anyway, just wanted to share the progress! I’ll be emailing the mailing list for the first time this weekend to offer a free copy of the eBook. If you haven’t signed up yet now is a great time!

Dungeons & Dragons: The Rise of the Indie Author

I discovered D&D when I was six. Several older kids were hunched around books and dice at a corner table in the library. I was fascinated and asked to join, but they told me I was too young. It was one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.

See, I don’t deal well with being told I can’t do something. It brings out that competitive streak, and I’ll move heaven and earth to prove someone wrong. In this case it took me four more years. I saved up my allowance, then got a paper route without asking my parents. They were furious when they found out, but allowed me to keep it.

basic13thEvery dime went to one of two places. Fantasy novels, or D&D books. I started with the red basic set and cajoled three of my friends into playing. We were instantly hooked. Years passed and faces changed, but the games remained the same.

We’d gather every afternoon in my backyard to play D&D, Shadowrun, Rifts, or the World of Darkness games. These games allowed the unconstrained use of our imaginations in a way video games and even novels couldn’t match. We could do anything, be anyone.

I’ve seen similar stories repeated all over the internet. Hundreds of thousands of gamers spanning four decades, all loving and exploring our own unique worlds. Unsurprisingly nearly every game master also wanted to be a writer.

We spent hundreds of hours fleshing out worlds, characters, histories and stories for our players to enjoy. In short, we became storytellers and most of us didn’t just love it. It became part of us. Something we needed to express.

Fast forward to today. Those gamers all grew up. We went on to be IT guys and programmers, but part of us never forgot our roots. The urge to create and share amazing stories was still there. This has led to a curious phenomenon.

2010 saw the first explosion of eBooks. Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble and now Kobo allow anyone to publish a book. All of a sudden tens of thousands of authors could bring their fantasy worlds to market.

Many are terrible. Some are amazing. There is now an entire generation of authors who got their start in the same fantasy worlds. You’ve probably heard of at least a few. Patrick Rothfuss and Jim Butcher still play D&D.

For some reason this makes me unbelievably happy. The hobby I most loved when growing up has given rise to a sea of wonderful worlds I get to enjoy. I love knowing that many of us are living our dreams, and I smile when I think of all the GMs cum authors who will soon be joining our ranks.

Searching For My Tribe

Once I was part of a vast tribe. An endless nation of geeks and nerds, each armed with their fandom. Star Wars,  Harry Potter or Rifts. We’d gather every weekend to play the latest RPG, or draft the newest box of Magic the Gathering. Every few months we’d congregate at Dundracon or ComicCon.

It was part of my identity and it represented everything I had grown up to appreciate. Yet as the years passed, as careers changed and bills accumulated it somehow slipped away. I woke up one day and my tribe was gone.

I searched everywhere for them. Except where they were. Where they’d always been. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t my tribe that had disappeared. I’d just gotten lost. Separated from the herd.

I’d somehow wandered into the mainstream, hiking Half Dome and learning to write. I started missing the opening days of tribal movies like The Avengers. I shed fandoms, winnowing it down to the greats. Then the unthinkable happened. I stopped gaming. My last pen and paper RPG was over three years ago. Jesus that hurts to say.

My excuses were excellent. The iPad had come out and I spent every waking minute learning to code. Then I took up a career doing exactly that, working six to seven days a week at aggressive startups.

I moved forty miles closer to San Francisco, putting the few tribal members I was in contact with juuust out of reach. Sure, I always meant to make it back to Santa Rosa but I’d blink and six more months had blown by.

My tribe’s absence was difficult. I coped by writing. I wrote every day, turning out hundreds of thousands of words. I wrote about things my tribe would love. About things any Werewolf the Apocalypse fan would resonate with, that people who loved Buffy the Vampire slayer would get into.

One day I looked up and realized I’d written a decent book. My girlfriend liked it. So did all the beta readers. So I took the plunge and published it. Much to my continued surprised the book has started to sell, which is great.

But after publishing and selling my first couple hundred copies I didn’t feel much like celebrating. It took a few weeks of chewing on the problem to finally figure out why. I didn’t want to celebrate, because celebrating was all about sharing what I’d created with my tribe. I couldn’t do that, not beyond immediate friends and family.

I wanted to geek out with people on forums, just like I had about WoW or Anime. I knew some of them would love it, and just like any good geek it was my responsibility to share the fandom. Not to  stand on a marketing rooftop alongside every other new artist yelling, read my book, it’s awesome. To share it like a fan. Tell them why they’d enjoy my take on werewolves in the same way I nagged my best friend to check out Dragon Age: Origins (He loves it- you will too. Go check it out).

Fortunately we live in the age of the internet. My tribe isn’t just easy to find, they’re everywhere. A vocal pageant of proud geeks who love lightsabers and wish a blue police box would appear in their backyard. Who talk about H.P. Lovecraft and love BSG.

I just need to sit down at their campfire and introduce myself. It’s time to rejoin my tribe.

Writing: One Hour a Day

Most of my friends and family know I’m a writer, but whenever I’d say ‘I’m going to publish a novel‘ they’d look at me the same way you look at the fat guy who says he’s going to lose weight (I know, because at one point I was the fat guy). They give polite smiles and enthusiastic nods, but no one really expects too much.

Who can blame them? Anyone can call themselves a writer and very few ever finish anything. I fell into that category for a lot of years.

After the book came out the biggest question I received was where do I find the time? Don’t I have a day job? I do as a matter of fact. I write software for the best startup in the world, which is by far the most demanding career I’ve ever had (and I’ve had several).

I work ten to twelve hours on weekdays and an hour or two on Saturday and Sundays. Last year at crunch time I worked on Christmas and had a three month block where I worked at least eight hours every single day. It was a brutal marathon, and it was absolutely worth it the first time I saw someone using the app I’d written.

During this same stretch I wrote the bulk of the sequel to No Such Thing As Werewolves. I cranked out 90,000 words in that three months. People gawk at me when they hear that. How did I work as hard as I did on software and still find time to write?

The answer isn’t sexy, but it is something anyone can do. I get up at the ass crack of dawn every day. From 5am to 6am I work out and while doing so I think about what I’m going to write. Then I go home and write it.

I belt out two thousand words of fiction, which typically takes about forty-five minutes. The last fifteen minutes is spent marketing, or writing blog posts like this one. That’s it. There’s my secret.

It doesn’t sound like much, but that’s 700,000 words a year and I’m done writing it each day right around the time most people are waking up. There is a cost of course. I don’t go out to parties, because I’m in bed by 10pm every night. 9:30 on a lot of nights.

This paradigm has worked for many novelists and it will work for you too. The trick is to create a habit, a sacred space where you do nothing but write. By setting it early you can do it before the husband or kids get up. You can do it before you have to start thinking about email, or errands.

Grant yourself that hour every day. Do it diligently. In a year you’ll be looking back at your first novel.

No Zero Days

I launched my blog just over a month ago and during that time I’ve struggled to decide which direction to take it in. Conventional wisdom says I should include posts about things my readers might like in an attempt to corral the type of traffic that will net book sales.

So I wracked my brain. What kind of post would do that? Movie or book reviews? Post about other authors? Then, just the other day, it occurred to me. I don’t care. This is my blog and I should write about whatever I feel like writing about without worrying about building a brand.

I decided the first post would be about a program I’ve followed for the last five years, one that took me from working in a dead end collections job to a successful app developer and now a published novelist. The program is called No Zero Days.

The idea is simple. Every day do something to achieve your primary goal. It can be anything, no matter how small, but it must move you towards the completion of that goal. Want to write a novel? Bust out a hundred words. Trying to lose weight? Skip that 2nd piece of pizza, or do 10 pushups.

This process sounds deceptively simple. How much can a paragraph a day add up to? A lot. More than you’d ever expect. You see the most important thing in achieving any goal is discipline. It’s forcing yourself to do something until it becomes automatic, until not doing it never even crosses your mind.

This discipline leads to two very important things. First, you’ll get momentum. If you go to the gym every morning for ten minutes you’ll quickly find that becoming twenty, and before you know it you’ll be at an hour. You’ll start seeing gains and when you do you’ll be spurred on to work harder.

Second, discipline tends to spill over into other areas of your life. Start getting in shape and the next thing you know you’re looking at a career change. Or finding a significant other who really excites you. Or writing a great novel.

Five years ago I weighed 300 lbs. My day went something like this. Wake up and slink into work without making eye contact. Keep my head down and make my daily quota of phone calls. Slink home at night to the disgusting apartment I shared with several roomates, then spend the evening getting high and playing video games.

Before I knew it I’d spent four years doing this. I was horrified. How had that much time passed? That’s when the lightbulb came on. Success or failure are not build overnight. They are the cumulative result of tiny decisions you make every single day.

So I resolved to have no more zero days. I picked a goal and went for it. The first one was becoming a more outgoing person, so I joined Toastmasters and went every single week. Within a few months I was a competent speaker, and within a year I was winning almost every speech contest.

Next I wanted to clean up my career, so I picked up a book and started teaching myself how to develop apps for the iPhone. This goal was a lot more difficult, but by never allowing a zero day I moved steadily closer. After eighteen months I left my collections job and started as an engineer, despite not having a degree. Three years later my app was on the Colbert Report.

This discipline has rippled through every area of my life, including my writing. Every day I do something to achieve each of the important goals in my life, and the results are incredible.

I highly encourage you to try this process for yourself. Pick a goal, something you want to transform. It can be your career, your body, your relationship…that’s up to you. Whatever it is resolve to make it better. Decide today.

No more zero days.