C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

We are the publishing revolution

03/06/2013 • 1:52 PM 3

I screwed up. I’m going to need a bigger boat.

I screwed up

I had a publishing schedule and a plan. I committed to ship books on time. As Seth Godin says, “Artists ship.” This is business, so make a good plan and stick to it. But what if the plan sucks?

Time to adapt

Adaptation is what a small company can do that a big company often can’t. Big companies have committees and hierarchies and approval processes. I’ve got me and a couple of freelancers and an ad hoc committee of friends and allies I bounce ideas back and forth with. All the decisions, blame and reward go to me. It’s time to take blame and make new plans.

The Excuses Not to Ship

I had stalled out on writing fiction for a couple of weeks because of time management issues and sickness: My daughter got sick; I started a new podcast; I wrote a book about Vine. All those things were necessary to deal with and I have no regrets. I’m rather fond of the sick kid, so there’s that. I’m excited about adding another podcast (the Cool People Podcast!) to my tiny empire. Six Seconds, The Unauthorized Guide to How to Build Your Business with the Vine App, was a fun exercise that could actually help people get more attention to their brands with a new social media tool. Diversifying helped my other books’ sales, too. As diversions go from the main war plan, these are pretty good ones. However…

The Reasons to Adapt

My production plan was off target because I need to launch a new series to get more attention to my other books. I try not to think too much about all that I have planned for this year. If I try to grok it all at once, my cerebellum pounds my brain pan until I lie down clutching an Advil bottle.

The core issue is the crime fiction I write is hardboiled, but funny. That’s a tough nut to crack. Many would call sardonic neo-noir a forgotten niche. The reviews of the Hit Man Series (Bigger Than Jesus, Higher Than Jesus) are great, but I realized I had to diversify to get the whole line of books more attention.

Self-help for Stoners, for instance, sells the best consistently, but it’s also been around longest and by some people’s lights, it’s experimental fiction, too (or at least weird and maybe challenging). The Hit Man Series would be considered experimental by some. I don’t agree. In fact, I think that’s a bit silly, but who cares what I think when I have numbers to evaluate? I have to diversify to get the tide to raise all the boats.

The Original Plan

I was going to write the third book in the Hit Man Series, Hollywood Jesus, next. I’m already more than halfway through it and I love that character and his story. The book after Hollywood Jesus will be a real twist, too. I’m going to revisit characters from the original book. My pitiable assassin, Jesus Diaz, will share the book with…ahem…no spoilers yet…but the twist will make that series achieve lift off in a huge way, I’m sure. I can hardly wait. However, in publishing Six Seconds, I’ve seen how one book can help other books in surprising ways. By giving new readers a surprising book that delivers in a more conventional way in a comfortable genre, I’ll open them up to trying my other brands of inspired lunacy.

The New Plan

I have a post-apocalyptic, coming-of-age plague thriller that’s already written. It took me a year to write. I’m revising it now. It’s 125,000 words and ripe for serialization. This book has some strange elements to it since much of the action is seen through the eyes of a boy with Aspergers. I’m going to publish the Aspergers/plague book next, instead of Hollywood Jesus. Though the subject matter can be strange and wonderful and scary and terrible, it’s an adventure story told in third person, limited omniscient. In other words, it won’t scare anyone off because it feels “experimental”. Strange at times, sure, but it’s ultimately about a family and family relationships strained by a crisis. In the Hit Man Series, there’s a lot created to make you laugh. In this series, you’ll take me seriously.

I will deliver the plague thriller in two months. Anybody who wrote me off as too weird for them just because I write stuff that challenges preconceptions of how stories should be told? Buckle up. I’m coming for you and I won’t even have to shanghai and coerce you up the plank to my party cruise. You’re going to want to be a passenger on my pleasure boat. I’m making it bigger, just for you.

“You will laugh your ass off!” ~ Author of Cybrgrrl, Maxwell Cynn

Game on.

~ Chazz’s author site is AllThatChazz.com where you can find out more about his books or check out his rants and author readings on the All That Chazz Podcast. His new website is CoolPeoplePodcast.com. The first episode features horror author Armand Rosamilia in conversation about zombies, The Walking Dead and writing more books, faster (among other things.) Check it out.

Writers: Shorter is better (chazzwrites.com)
Writing the novel: Overcoming plot problems & cranking up the pace (allthatchazz.com)
Micro-publishing is publishing: Tools, tech and committing to change (chazzwrites.com)
Writing and Production Schedules: What it looks like (chazzwrites.com)
The Unknown Man Edition (allthatchazz.com)
New podcast release at AllThatChazz.com (chazzwrites.com)
The Mean Streets Edition (allthatchazz.com)

Filed under: book marketing, Books, ebooks, podcasts, Publicity & Promotion, publishing, What about Chazz?, All That Chazz, Armand Rosamilia, Bigger than Jesus, book, books, Cool People Podcast, crime fiction, critics, difficulty with genre, ebooks, Genre fiction, genres, higher than jesus, Hit Man Series, hollywood jesus, Jesus Diaz, Marketing, neo noir, production schedules, publishing, Six Seconds, Time management, Walking Dead

02/19/2013 • 12:29 AM 2

Writing and Production Schedules: What it looks like

This week…

1. I’m writing a non-fiction, instant ebook. It won’t be more than 10,000 words. I had 5,500 the first day and I’m finalizing it now. The turnaround time in total will be one week. Why? Because I found a topic I’m excited about. People will benefit from knowing more about the subject and use it to expand their businesses. One more day of research and writing and another bit of interviewing should do it. More on this soon. It’s also fun, and how rare is that?

2. I still have two books of fiction in production. One is the next Hit Man novel and the other is a massive post-apocalyptic tome. Two to three thousand words a day on these has to happen to make my plans move forward according to schedule.

3. With the help of my friend, Dave Jackson from the School of Podcasting, a new website for a new podcast is born. Details to follow once the website is prettier and filled out and curvy in the right places. This is just the beginning, though I think we’ll have a few podcasts up soon.

This will be an interview show, unedited and bouncy. I’ll talk to cool people for about half an hour about their businesses, their books and their lives. Think of the coolest person you know. Email me their contact information at expartepress@gmail.com. They could be a future guest.

4. Coordinate with my graphic designer, Kit Foster of KitFosterDesign.com for podcast and cover art. Don’t have to budget much time for this. Kit knows what he’s doing without me sticking my big nose in.

5. I’ll also have to get a new blog theme going and generate content for the new website. I’ve explored different options for a recorder for Skype interviews. Fortunately, Dave saved me some money by suggesting Call Recorder for that job. I recommend Hover for your website registration needs. They’re easy to deal with and there is no hard up sell of services you don’t need.

6. Record the original podcast, All That Chazz in a few days. Yes, All That Chazz will continue. These next nine months in particular are going to be a little more furious than usual. We’ll see what’s born at the end of that gestation period, literature-wise.

This week it’s another reading from Higher Than Jesus and I really don’t know what else yet. When I put my mind to it, something will come. Something always does come along. I hope it’s funny in the right spots for the right reasons when it arrives.

7. I’m going to resist an exhaustive listing of the rest of my to-do list because it’s mostly the mundane stuff everybody has to do. Sometimes I do actually write “floss” (so I will floss) and “brush teeth” because it feels great to cross an item of that damned list so easily.

When I get tired, I dip into Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and remember what really great writing feels like. It spurs me forward.

I’ll get it all done. C’mon. Write your way to happiness with me.

#Podcast: Night & the City Edition (allthatchazz.com)
The Ticking Clock Edition (allthatchazz.com)
Podcast Hosts Told to ‘Cut Out the 4th Grade Fluff and be Professional’ (prweb.com)
Listen and Learn: A Guide for Creating Energized Podcasts (contentmarketinginstitute.com)
Seven tips about book marketing very few will heed (chazzwrites.com)
Podcast: Furious! (allthatchazz.com)
Author Platform: Problems, Solutions & Stuffed Speedos (chazzwrites.com)
What will you make of 2013? Help is on the way. (chazzwrites.com)
TOP TEN: Reach more readers with these blog tweaks (chazzwrites.com)
Podcasting 101 for Content Marketers: An Interview with The Podcast Guy, Dave Thackeray (contentmarketinginstitute.com)

Filed under: author platform, blogs & blogging, getting it done, All That Chazz, books, call recorder, Kit Foster, kitfosterdesign.com, Literature, new podcasts, new websites, Podcast, Time management, writer, writer's schedule, writing

05/24/2012 • 9:34 PM 4

Elvis has left Linked In

English: Graph of social media activities (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thought I was a social media gadfly with unlimited capacity and patience. I was wrong. I thought more was always better. Usually more is better unless we’re talking gunshot wounds. However, as the reminders and posts from Linked In piled up, I found Linked In had the least to offer me of the social media options I’ve explored. Linking with friends or old acquaintances was fun. Finding out what horrible job afflicted an old enemy filled me with inappropriate glee. However, the rewards were brief. Most friends, readers and dreamers are on Facebook or Twitter anyway, so Linked In quickly became redundant. After the bottom dropped out of Facebook’s IPO this week, some pundits are saying the big FB has past its peak and will tank to become the next MySpace. Facebook still looks plenty active to me.

The primary reason for my ennui has nothing to do with Linked In: I’m not looking for a job. Publishing keeps me very busy. If I were looking for a job, I might feel differently.

However, I had thought the groups related to my interests could be useful. Theoretically, they could have been, but that’s where the corpse floated up. I’m not going to name any names, but I can tell you that far too many posts seemed to fall into one of two camps:

1. I know nothing about X and could someone explain all the basics to me so I won’t have to do a pesky Google search or look at Wikipedia or read a blog or a book on the subject?

or, far worse,

2. Everybody sucks but me and I know everything and I’ve been in this business for 40 years and you all know that because I start every snarky post with, “After 40 years in this business…”

Ugh. No, thanks. I’ve had quite enough of that attitude, thank you. I really have to protect my time, especially from big green meanies. I hadn’t encountered that much rudeness in one place in other branches of social media and my policy is I give rude people no time.

If you were trying to connect with me, there are still plenty of fun and friendly ways to do so (Twitter, Facebook, email, puppetry and interpretive dance or possibly even G+.) I don’t think Linked In is a great communications opportunity for indie authors or at least it isn’t for me. Joining was an experiment. Staying with it too long was my mistake. Leaving means one less thing to track.

(Hm? Pinterest? What’s that? Never mind what it is! Quick! Sign me up!)

Filed under: publishing, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pinterest, snark, social media, Time management, Twitter, Wikipedia

08/08/2011 • 11:31 AM 0

Improving ourselves: Bruce Lee, Reading self-help, writing horror

I’ve been trying to improve myself to make me worthy of your love. I’m not eating sugar so I’ll lose more weight (after gaining some back.) I’ll get to the gym. I’ll keep slogging on making my ebooks. I’ve been reading a time management book by the Bruce Lee of Time Management.

I’d tell you more about the book, but it turns out the author and Bruce Lee have something in common:

good at what they do, sure, but jerks.

Bruce Lee was a kung fu legend who made some interesting movies for 14-year-old boys and those with chronically arrested development. (Yes, I was so afflicted until quite recently.) But Bruce Lee also picked a lot of fights just so he could beat up his physical lessors . (You didn’t see that much in the biopic Dragon, but getting into too much trouble and buying too deeply into his macho bullshit was one of the reasons he had to flee Hong Kong for the United States.) Bruce Lee was also (struggling for a kind euphemism here) an intense individual. He had a thing about staring into people’s eyes as he spoke, even when he was driving. He got into several fender benders because of that macho man/genius policy. Bruce was an amazing innovator and there is much about him that is enviable. He’s inspired people far beyond the bailiwick of kung fu. The legend obscures the flawed person who stands behind the fiction.

Then there’s the time management guru: He started off with some good points, though his unexpected obsession with making more time for sex hit kind of a weird note. I’m sex positive, so I didn’t write him off quickly. Making more time for sex is a good thing rarely spoken, so good on him for speaking it. Then, for some reason (no editor or an editor who got overruled) he veered off into a narrative ditch. People in China die without healthcare because they don’t have money, he said, and that’s the way it should be. If you want to be able to afford healthcare and not die horribly, get off your lazy ass. Surgery is for closers!

Whoa.

His vision of getting the best out of life seems to be scheduling your time properly in an Ayn Rand hellscape where only the strong survive as you drive your enemies before you, crush them and hear the lamentation of their women. Okay, I’m paraphrasing Conan the Barbarian there, but seriously, the author crammed some pretty ugly beyond-far-right politics into his time management book and derailed his book.

I’ll learn to manage my time from someone else. I admit it, I’m not reading the whole thing. This isn’t a book review. It’s a warning to keep your inner disregard for fellow humans tucked away when you write a self-help book. Unless you’re a horror writer. I don’t want to read more and share a mind meld with someone whose concept of compassion for the sick is to cackle while he watches the poor die, drinking from a gold goblet while scheduling a spa treatment on his oh-so-organized Blackberry.

Hey, come to think of it…I am writing a book that has “self-help” in the title and there is a lot of horror in it.

Hm. I’m complex. And I’m trying to do better.

In my horror stories, I hint at a high regard for the worth of humanity.

There’s no horror at the loss of a life if you’re just losing another nosey neighbour you never liked anyway.

Filed under: book reviews, Books, writing tips, horror, self-help, Time management, writing tip

06/12/2011 • 2:48 PM 0

Writers: Defend your writing time

Defend your writing time. Make children understand you have needs.

Filed under: What about Chazz?, writing tips, defend your writing time, finding time to write, Time management

02/09/2011 • 5:00 AM 4

Writers: Action Items and Mega-links!

Image by ifindkarma via Flickr

Most to-do lists are torture devices that never stop. You make your list too long. You never get to the end of the list and, to assuage your guilt, you start adding things to said list that you were going to do anyway — and possibly couldn’t even have avoided—just so you can cross it off. ~~Put on hat. Took off hat. Sit down. Cogitate~~. ~~Sit on toilet~~. ~~Cogitate more.~~

But, after my recent Writer’s Union of Canada symposium on the state of publishing (the movie poster tag line would read: Brace Yourselves! It’s the End of the Beginning!) it’s time to commit to a plan.

Out of the blue, I have been approached by an agent. Agents are useful for lots of things (more on that in another post) but since that’s all theoretical so far and may come to naught or be complementary…

I’m going ahead with these action items:

1. ~~Switch my browser to Opera.~~ (Already had Chrome and that’s recommended, too. Migrate away from Internet Explorer. IE is inferior. I also like the way Opera remembers my tabs for quicker zipping around.

2. ~~Get Dropbox.~~ Dropbox is a free tool that keeps your data safe across multiple servers (AKA The Cloud.) It uses the same security tech your bank and the military use and the system’s more stable than say, one server in California. I’m replacing my fee-for-service backup software with Dropbox and I’ll be able to access my files across multiple computers. I don’t plan to use it for file sharing with others, though that may prove useful in the future.

3. Learn more about HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, a formatting language.) Boo, scary.

4. Find a web developer capable of putting up an interactive, standards compliant website for me that looks good, works and can sell stuff. Also get said website hosted through one of these top three services: Rackspace, Dreamhost or Slicehost.

5. Most important: finish the polish on my WIP. By April 15th goddammit. I’ve been dawdling through perfectionistic tendencies. I have other books already written and more ideas for more books. As writers, we have all sorts of ideas but time is trouble. This is a time management, make short-term money working on other people’s long-term plans. I’m grateful for the work, but Ive got to find the balance and get it all done!

6. On completion of #5, simultaneously get new work (short stories, fiction, non-fiction) on website to sell using Smashwords. (I’ve heard one bad review of Smashwords and several good ones. Guest blogger, the fab Rebecca Senese, will be telling us about her Smashwords experience soon.)

7. Research blogging a book, using Create Space and podcasting a book. Blogging a book through a service like Blurb is a cool idea. I’ve heard about it but haven’t explored in detail. Basically, it’s a cheap and fast way to make a book out of the blog content you already have. I joined the Create Space community to hang out and see how it’s working for them. I will do the same with ~~Kindle’s Writer’s Cafe~~ (a good tip I picked up from Mike Plested’s podcast over at Irreverent Muse. Plus, Mike has asked me to join him on a podcast. Can’t wait to do that after I get the majority of this list done.) For podcasting — radio across the Internet for those of you who aren’t on board yet — I have a book and people I can consult about that.

8. Start using Posterous for blog posting. It’s described to me by writer and self-publishing guru Ross Laird as a “pre-built content management application” that posts everywhere you want in a single, elegant click.

9. Explore alternatives to word processors (like VIM). I posted about this a few days ago. What? You missed the bit about dumping your word processor?! (Don’t get annoyed. The link is just below this post.)

10. Live free and love hard, keep rockin’ the mic and the black fedora, keep connected and reach out to give to get, fight The Man, love what’s to love and transcend what’s to hate, make fun of the hopelessly powerful, pity the stupid as long as they aren’t in power, do: do not wish, bring comfort to the afflicted, chocolate every day (non-negotiable), help the poor by not being one of them, embrace the human zoo experience and ~~stop to smell the coffee!~~

Well, I’ve got most of it covered…

And, yes, I have fancy plans and pants to match—

nod to Mr. James James, the man so nice they named him twice.

And if you get that reference, I love you, you big freaky nerd you!

Ahem. This is a good start.

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