Is horror dead?

I have been here before. The eerie feeling of deja-vu is all encompassing.

I rode the horror bandwagon during the 1980s mass-market boom. Although I also crafted mysteries and westerns and contemporary romances and erotica and science fiction, I became known as a horror writer because my stories appeared in The Horror Show, The Arkham Sampler, Deathrealm, Masques III, and many other horror-themed anthologies and magazines. I also helped found the Horror Writers of America, now known as Horror Writers Association (HWA), which branded me as a horror writer.

I didn’t switch to horror, as some writers did, because it was the “in” thing. I wrote psychological horror and suspense because that was the kind of story I loved to read. Obviously, enough other readers loved horror to support an entire industry devoted to horror fiction. I suspect Stephen King’s success had a lot to do with horror’s popularity. Horror’s popularity began to wane when America launched Operation Desert Storm and real-life horrors were televised 24/7 by CNN and Fox.

When I returned to fiction writing in 2012, horror was undergoing a renaissance. New publishers had sprung up to take advantage of on-demand publishing and e-books. When I attended the 2014 World Horror Convention in Portland, I was introduced to Don D’Auria and Samhain Publishing. I pitched Don and he liked my story ideas (so did other editors who snatched up my novels first). When Don asked me to whittle my manuscripts down from 140,000 words to under 90,000 words, I knew Samhain wasn’t right for me. Don and I met again and talked at the Atlanta WHC in 2015. I was devastated to learn Don lost his job as editor of Samhain’s horror line near the end of 2015. Don, like David G. Hartwell, was one of the good-guys who knew and loved the genre as much as I did.

I am additionally devastated to learn today that Samhain plans to give up the ghost entirely. Samhain announced they will cease publication later this year due to declining sales.

Two of the other horror publishers who had licensed my novels in 2014 also went out of business recently. Eldritch Press published Abandoned in trade paper and e-book last March, and Eldritch shut down at the end of 2015 after publishing multiple Stoker Award nominees. Damnation Books, which contracted for Deviants in 2014, sold out to someone else who promised to publish my title but who has not remained in contact. Their new website is currently “under construction”. I suspect they won’t publish the novel before the contract expires.

Something similar happened to me in the 1990s when I sold several novels and dozens of short stories that never saw publication. Horror publishers bit the dust faster than Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers at the OK Corral, and it’s happening again.

Why is it happening now? I blame Donald Trump.

If you look at social media, you’ll notice how Trump dominates the posts, including posts by horror authors and readers. Trump has become a real-life horror that holds the attention of horror writers and readers the way the First Gulf War did, the same way Joseph McCarthy did in the 1950s and WWII did in the 1940s, when horror fiction also died from neglect.

Fear activates the fight or flight response in human beings just as it does in all animals. The human mind can only handle so much fear at a time before it seeks to escape from all fears real or imagined.

Not only has the fiction field been saturated by too much horror, so has real life.

What readers need and want now is a hero who will fight our fears for us. Like Generals Norman Swartzkopf and Colin Powell during the First Gulf War or Patton during WWII or Eisenhower and Edward R. Murrow during the McCarthy era. Mark my words, such a hero will emerge.

This is a recurring cycle, folks. It’s happened before, and it will happen again.

Horror never dies. It goes away for a while, and then it comes back.

Fortunately, I don’t depend on horror alone for my livelihood. I also write suspense thrillers with supernatural heroes and crime-suspense novels with detective heroes. I’m perfectly positioned for the superhero boom.

Writers who follow marketplace trends often find themselves a day late and a dollar short. The secret to surviving in this business is to write from the heart. Write what you want when you want, and to hell with current markets.

And, remember. Horror can never die. It returns from the grave with a vengeance.

Why I write and go to conventions

I write novels because writing novels makes me happy. When I’m not writing or reading, I’m not happy. Anything that takes me away from reading and writing for more than an hour or two throws me into a blue funk.

Marketing my writing takes away from what precious little writing time I have each day. I try to do marketing tasks while taking a break from writing or revising, and I usually break for an hour or two in the afternoon and then again between nine and eleven PM to read e-mails, return phone calls, and attend to social media.  During this afternoon’s break, I put my current novel aside and ventured to the local Barnes and Noble store in the mall to see if they had displayed copies of Abandoned (my new novel released by Eldritch Press on March 1^st) in the front of the store or on the shelves. The local B&N did have copies on order, but no copies prominently displayed as one might expect them to do for a local author. They assured me they would have plenty of copies available for the autographing I have scheduled in their B&N store on April 18^th.  I want to believe them.

With multiple new novels appearing this year, I’ve already committed to appearing on panels or do autographings at Odyssey Con, World Horror Convention, Wisccon, Nebula Awards, Sasquon, World Fantasy Con, Windycon, and Bouchercon. I’ve had to turn down other invitations to be on panels or to autograph books. I must be getting older and much more curmudgeonly because I used to enjoy going to sf, fantasy, horror, and mystery conventions more than anything. I still love to talk with friends and fans at cons and bookstores, and I love talking shop with other authors and agents and editors and publishers. What taxes me to no end (beside the IRS and the State of Illinois Department of Revenue) is the hassle of traveling these days. It often takes ten times longer to get checked in at airports than the flight itself takes, and it seems I usually get booked on flights that leave from the gates most distant from the main terminal. Several of my recent flights have been cancelled or delayed because of severe weather or mechanical problems. By the time I get to a convention and settled into a hotel room which always seems to be the room at the end of the hall most distant from an elevator, I feel too exhausted to enjoy the con. The arthritis in my knees becomes painful from all that walking and standing. And I suffer from nicotine withdrawal because not only can one not smoke on airplanes anymore, one cannot smoke in hotel rooms or bars either. No big deal. I don’t need to smoke, but I do like to smoke because I enjoy it. That’s probably a lie. But now, when I want a smoke at a convention, I do have to trudge all the way outdoors and away from the doorways themselves to stand in the cold and rain or snow. That takes extra time and effort I no longer have.

I used to write at least one new short story at each con, and I still squeeze in some writing time whenever I can. But novels require concentration to achieve continuity, and I can’t concentrate on my writing at conventions. Maybe other writers can, but I can’t. Besides, it seems silly to spend a small fortune to travel half-way across country to attend a convention and then spend most of the time inside my room writing. When I’m at a con, I want to meet people. I want to talk and listen and catch up on what’s happening in other people’s lives and careers. And I am constantly torn between my need to write and my need to communicate face to face.

You can sense my conflict in these paragraphs. I want to meet people and talk about writing. But I also want to write. Are they mutually exclusive endeavors?

I have known so many people who spend more time talking about writing than actually writing. I have done that myself from time to time, and my writing suffers for it. It’s better to let the writing speak for itself. Whenever someone asks me what my latest novel is about, I really want to reply, “Read the book and see for yourself.” Instead, I have memorized short elevator speeches to describe each of my novels. I can usually tell by the look in a person’s eyes if I’ve hooked them. It’s like watching readers browse in libraries and bookstores. People read the blurbs on the back cover and end-papers first. Then they open the book and read the first and sometimes last pages. They may even flip through the pages to scan some of the dialogue. Then they either put the book back on the shelf or add it to the pile they intend to check out or buy. You know when you see the eager glint in their eyes that they’ll buy the book because your words hooked them. That’s what I’m still learning to do with my elevator speeches. I need to give readers enough information to keep them interested, but not so much that they don’t need to read the novel to get the whole story. I want them to have that same wonderful look in their eyes after they’ve finished reading the entire novel and they simply can’t wait to rush out to find other books with my by-line.

Book marketing is as much an art as book writing. Finding the right words at the right time takes skill and practice. I’m still learning, and I learn best by doing. I know I need to get out there and talk to people about my books. Each time I go to a convention or attend an autographing, I learn more. Now I need to find the right balance between talking away my stories and writing what people want to read.

I’d rather be writing. Writing makes me happy.

But there’s something magical that happens when I witness that gleam in a reader’s eye, and seeing that gleam—that hunger for more—in a reader’s eye makes me ecstatically happy, too. It doesn’t matter if that gleam appeared because of something I’ve written or something another author has written. I love to share in the reader’s joy. Joy is contagious.

That’s why I write. And that’s why I go to conventions and do signings. I just wish there were more time to do both.

 

Remember Barbie?

“I’m taking my childhood back,” says  P.  J., the kill-crazy antagonist of Wyborn Senna’s Bury Me With Barbie. “I get to redo it my way, and nobody can stop me.”

            I spent a fortune reacquiring the EC horror comics of my youth that my parents made me burn when I became a teenager because they thought I was too old to still read comic books, so I can easily identify with the doll collectors depicted in this fact-filled novel about all things Barbie. My girlfriend is also an avid doll collector, and I see the same madness in her eyes when she finds a new American Girl or Kids ’n’ Katz for sale as the compulsive madness in the eyes of many of the characters in Bury Me With Barbie. I imagine I get the same kind of madness in my own eyes when I find a novel by a favorite author that I haven’t yet read, or a new book on the history of comics.

            I bought Bury Me With Barbie because I am a completist. I try to acquire every book published in my favorite genres, just as I have reacquired every issue of the original EC horror titles. I bought Senna’s new novel because it was about a demented serial killer with compulsions, the kind of tale I sometimes write myself. I didn’t expect I’d actually enjoy reading the story.

            Bury Me With Barbie isn’t great literature. Many of the characters are the same kind of stereotypical two-dimensional caricatures found in contemporary romances or 1930s pulp fiction. But B. J. is nasty enough and Caresse is nice enough to make readers care what happens to them, and the plot moves along from murder to murder like clockwork. Wyborn Senna ties up loose ends nicely, and dialogue is natural-sounding. I couldn’t stop reading because I wanted to know what would happen next. That’s my definition of a good read.

            The bonus is an abundance of factual Barbie history (everything you ever wanted to know about Barbie but never bothered to ask), plus valid cautions about the dangers of putting so much personal information online or in the media that you become easy prey for predators. P. J. selects victims from members of the Best Barbie Bulletin Board or collectors interviewed for the monthly Barbie International magazine. B. J. is actually the publisher of Barbie International, and Caresse is the freelancer who interviews collectors and photographs collections for B. J.’s magazine. The ending came a little too abruptly and left enough questions in my mind to expect a sequel. What about Darby, P. J.’s half-brother? What will happen to P. J.? And will Caresse ever find her true love? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

 

Those who know me well, know I’m a shy guy. I don’t like talking about myself because I’m a private person. I am a good listener, however. And I’d much rather hear about other people’s lives than my own.

            I’m the lurker in the shadows, the one who reads all of my friends’ posts on blogs and Facebook and who so seldom comments. I was the wallflower at the school dances, the reporter who covered the four-alarm fires and drive-bys, the one who preferred to take photographs to appearing in them. I would rather observe than participate. Perhaps that’s why I love reading so much. I get to observe other people living their lives while forgetting about my own.

            I was the sideline guy on the varsity teams in high school and college. I was good enough to make the teams and earn varsity letters, but I was never motivated to be a star player. I was satisfied just being a team player, although I didn’t get to play in every game. That has been true of my writing, too. I have been happy to be a mid-list author, qualifying for membership in SFWA, HWA, MWA, and ITW. But I never wanted to win an award, and I always downplayed the quality of my work. I hid behind pseudonyms like a shy child hiding behind his mother’s skirts.

            When I wrote about myself, it was usually in the third person. I much prefer reading books written in the third person, and most of my novels and short stories are third-person narratives. It’s difficult for me to write these first-person pieces under my own by-line, but the discipline is good for me, too. I’m out of my comfort zone, and I realize feeling uncomfortable may be necessary if I want to continue to grow both as a person and as a writer. One of the reasons I write horror is because it makes people uncomfortable and helps them grow spiritually as they confront their worst fears.

            Part of my growth as a writer occurred when I emerged from the sidelines to play the game in earnest. I now put my whole name on manuscripts and reviews, and I appear on panels at conventions and sign at bookstores using my own name. I have recently begun to give interviews where I will talk about myself and my craft.

            There is a familiar voice inside of me—my father’s voice—screaming loudly that I’ll make myself a target. Being out in the open makes me vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. My father, also a shy man, warned me often of the dangers of being a public person. Do only enough to survive, he cautioned. When you go public, you will create enemies. It is better to remain invisible, to be an average person, to get lost in a crowd.

            My father, whose name was Paul Anders Anderson, settled for half-measures all of his life. He died at the age of sixty-four when I was twenty-four. He was an average middle-class man. He left behind a son, a granddaughter, a house, and not much more. Few people alive today still remember him.

            I have spent my entire life making mistakes and learning from them. One of the mistakes I made was listening to my father.

            My father also told me it was okay to write, but one couldn’t expect to earn a living from writing. One should have a career that paid the bills and provided for a family. That was my father’s dream, and he realized his dream.

            My dream has always been to write stories that revealed a small kernel of truth buried beneath a top-layer of fertile soil. Truth—the real nature of things—is, by its very nature, occult. Truth, like God, must be hidden from man’s conscious mind if it is to continue to exist. It can only be revealed, a little at a time, when the subconscious recognizes the secret meaning of universal archetypal symbols. Otherwise, truth would surely be devoured by animals hungry for truth before it had even a chance to grow into a tall tree like the proverbial mustard seed.

            My father wanted me to be an engineer or an architect, someone who built things. Or to serve as a soldier, something he was unable to do because he was too young to enlist in World War I and too old to enlist in WWII. My mother wanted me to be a teacher or a minister. I was able to do all of those things, serving in the military from 1966 until 1987, part of which was with the Army Corps of Engineers. I studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, switching my major from EE to physics and eventually to journalism. I studied philosophy at Rockford College. I earned my BA from Loyola University with a major in English and a minor in journalism. I continued my education by earning a masters in Educational Psychology and most of a doctorate from Northern Illinois University.  I also earned an MA in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin. I taught creative writing at the University of Illinois and for Writers Digest Schools. I was a certified instructor for the National Guild of Hypnotists, and I taught hypnosis at the enTrance Center and at Rock Valley College.

            I have been an ordained minister, and I have married people and buried people.

             I have been, like Yeats’ slate-colored thing, many things in this life. Being many things, I think, is fitting for a writer.

            Now, at last, I am ready to write. I am ready to emerge from obscurity and make my name known. Too few people read my books unless they know my name.

            Name recognition appears to be the number one reason for book buying.  When I was an editor (yes, I was an editor, too, and have the mastheads to prove it), I know I paid more attention to big-name writers and often bought their works mainly to add prestige to the publication. I know agents also pay attention to established names. And I know from my own book-buying experience that I buy books from names I recognize rather than take a chance on an unknown author. I am also willing to pay more to read a name I know than a work from an unknown, despite the fact that the greatest joy a reader, agent, or editor can have is to discover a hitherto unknown masterpiece from someone new.

            Masterpieces are few and far between. Stephen King’s The Stand is a masterpiece. Gone With the Wind is a masterpiece. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is a masterpiece. I like to think my own novel, Abandoned, is a masterpiece. I want people to read it. You don’t have to buy it. Just go to your library and check it out. Or find Abandoned at your local bookstore and read a chapter at a time while sipping coffee in the store’s coffee shop, if they have one.

            Of course, I have been disappointed with some of the works of big name authors. Writers are notoriously inconsistent, and good writers write a variety of stories as part of their growth process. Some stories appeal to me more than others. At least, with a name author, I can expect to read a competent story even if it isn’t my cup of tea.

            I hate giving interviews. I am a private person who only exposes himself through his writing, and I abhor talking about myself or my work. If I had the money and knew of a good publicist, I would pay to have someone else write news releases and give interviews for me. My publishers do a small amount of publicity, but they expect me to do the actual leg work of appearing in public. So, once again, I must leave my comfort zone and venture out into the cold cruel world and answer questions to make my name and face known. I would so much rather remain at home where it’s warm, comfortable, and I can write all day.

            Abandoned will be published on March 1^st, and Eldritch Press is already taking pre-pub orders (at a 20% discount, I might add). The Devil Made Me Do It and Daddy’s Home are already available from Crossroad Press as e-books. A revised Claw Hammer will be next, followed by Pick Axe and Ice Pick. If I want these titles to sell well and lots of people to read them, I need to let people know what the books are about and where to get them. Interviews, especially magazine and newspaper interviews, reach a lot of potential readers. TV and radio interviews do sell books, but those books are seldom read all the way through. Regardless, I need to do all of those interviews in hopes of finding the one reader whose life will be changed forever by my words.

            You may have already guessed I wrote this to psych myself up to do interviews. I’ve done lots of interviews before, both print and media, and I want to be prepared with answers to as many questions as possible. When an interviewer asks me, “What is Abandoned about?” I’ll reply, “Redemption.” That’s it, really. My entire elevator speech. The book is about redemption.

            It’s about making mistakes and learning from our mistakes. It’s about ordinary people who have extraordinary abilities. It’s about good and evil warring on multiple levels. It’s about life and love and greed and salvation. It’s about belief and endurance, hope and despair. It’s about karma and reincarnation. It’s about forgiveness for not knowing and it’s about doing better the next time around.

 

           

 

           

 

Two of the Nice Things about Social Media, Especially Blogs

 

I’ve quoted Shakespeare often before, and I’ll quote the Bard now again. In the first scene of the fifth act of The Tempest, Miranda exclaims, “O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in it!” Prospero replies: “Tis new to thee.”

Social media is relatively new to me. I began writing in the late 1940s, pounding out stories on an old Remington upright. I migrated to a manual Royal in the early 1950s, acquired an electric Smith-Corona in the 1960s, and got my first dedicated word processor in the 1970s. By the 1980s, I was writing on computers: Commodore 64 (with a voice tape recorder to save files), Apple IIe (with dual 5.1 inch floppy disk drives), Mac SE with a 120K hard drive. I paid $7,000 for a Macintosh portable in 1990. It had one megabite of RAM and a small hard drive and used 3.5 inch floppy disks to store stories. But—miracle of miracles--I could connect it to a modem, connect the modem to a telephone line, and access Genie. SFWA had an online discussion board on Genie where I could post messages and read messages from other writers. HWA followed SFWA onto Genie not long after, and my novel and short story writing suffered as I learned the new technologies and spent way too much time online. I followed SFWA onto Compuserv and then AOL and, finally, to the worldwide web. I was a lurker as much as a contributor, and I felt a part of the writing community even if I were no longer writing fiction.

When Gretta developed heart problems and I was diagnosed with cancer, I stopped writing fiction entirely and became a researcher. I used hypnosis and visualization to shrink my tumors until they disappeared, and Gretta used hypnosis to generate new arteries in her heart. Gretta lost her battle with heart disease and diabetes in 2012, and I returned to fiction writing shortly thereafter.

I discovered modern social media while earning a masters in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin and working on my doctorate in Educational Psychology. So computers, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, e-books, and website creation weren’t exactly new to me by the time I returned to full-time fiction writing. But I still have Miranda’s sense of wonder at how many goodly creatures there are here online.

I now keep in touch daily with hundreds of friends on Facebook and thousands of readers through Blogger, Twitter, Tumblr, and Google +. I can download e-books instantly from Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com. And I can literally see the faces and workspaces of other writers and read about their daily struggles to commit words to memory.

That seems like a godsend to me. I am no longer alone at my keyboard facing a blank screen.

Writers are lonely people who want desperately to connect their minds with other minds. They attempt to do that with words and images while wishing direct mind-to-mind communication were possible. Sometimes, when a writer recognizes her own thoughts in the writings of others, mind-to-mind communication does indeed seem possible.

I maintain blogs on Blogger, Tumblr, and Wordpress, and so do many other writers. Some writers post about their daily struggles, and some talk openly about the process they follow to create works of fiction. I used to think it was a waste of time and creative energy to devote hours and thousands of words daily to blogs, but I was wrong.

Blog postings, like short stories, can be collected into books. I can go back to blogs I have written, extract the most salient points, and edit them into a book on the process I follow to create fiction. Such a book can be valuable not only to me but to other writers, especially new writers just learning the craft.

Just as important, however, is the name exposure. When people go into a bookstore—either a brick-and-mortar bookstore or an online emporium—they might recognize my name and take a look inside a book with my name on it. I do that, and I suspect others do that, too. I don’t buy a book simply because of author name recognition, but I do take a look inside every book by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Patricia Cornwell, Joe R Lansdale, Billie Sue Mosiman, Mark Rainey, Lee Child, David Morrell, Brian Garfield, and everyone I befriend on Facebook. If their stories or styles interest me, I buy their books. I would hope people do that with my books.

One of the nice things about blogs is seeing a writer’s style before buying his or her books. It costs nothing but a few moments of time to scan a blog. I have bought books recently solely because I liked what I read on the author’s blog.

 

Coming Next: Author Interviews and Elevator Pitches

A digression

A lot of writers have been commenting lately that they don’t use outlines when they write. Joe R. Lansdale mentioned that today on his Facebook page, and Stephen King admitted the same in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. They also said they know how to use outlines and can write to outline if they absolutely have to. I think it’s great they no longer have to.

                In the bad old days when three-book contracts were negotiated based solely on synopsis and outline, I felt obligated to stick close to the original inception. But my writing has become so much better now that I’m writing the story first and then doing the synopsis only after the entire tale has been told from beginning to end. I love the surprises that my subconscious supplies as the characters develop on their own and the plot unfolds naturally. I want to learn what happens as much as readers will. I love experiencing the unexpected twists and turns and all those dangerous and exiting rapid-fire ups and downs that shove your stomach up into your raw-from-screaming throat as the roller coaster picks up speed near the end of a wild ride. I’m completely breathless when the car abruptly slows, stops, and I have to get off. I want to buy another ticket and ride again. And I always do.

                I’m a thrill-seeker as much as the next guy.

                Three rides is usually enough. By then, I know what’s coming next before it happens. After the third ride, I’m ready to find another roller coaster, one with even more surprises.

                Lately, I’ve been writing three slasher novels in a row, then switching to supernatural thrillers for a three-book run, then a stand-alone police-procedural or military/spy/action-adventure novel. Those are the kinds of books I love to read. Those are the kinds of books I write.

                I’m prolific, but not fast. I used to be fast, but my fiction suffered for it. Now I write at varying speeds as the action demands.

                But once I begin a story, I get caught up in it and pursue the story to the very end. I write six to ten hours a day, every day. Some days I write all in one sitting with time outs only for bathroom breaks and coffee refills. Most days, I write in the morning, do e-mails, social media, marketing, interviews, and write non-fiction in the afternoons, then return to fiction-writing before bed. There are days when I edit as I go along, polishing each paragraph until the words shine like diamonds. I have days when I do no editing at all. I just write. Those are the glory days when I’m living the story. When I finally do take off my writer’s hat and don my editor’s hat, I cut and polish my many-faceted diamonds in the rough.

                Bedtime is for reading. That’s when I discover how my colleagues think and write. I prefer hardbounds and paperbacks to read in bed. I read books on my Kindle and computer during the afternoons and early evening when I find time. I usually read a dozen books at the same time. Plus, I have a dozen more waiting to be read. Life is good.

                Sometimes family and social obligations require a change to my normal schedule, but I still find time to write six-to-ten hours a day. What suffers most often is my reading, and I absolutely refuse to edit my own work when I’m preoccupied with other things. I can switch realities and re-enter my fictional worlds anytime. What I cannot do is concentrate on editing when I’m in the middle of a family crisis or attending a con. Maybe other writers can. I can’t.

                These days I shortchange my family and friends in order to write. Not all of my family or friends want to accept that, but I can only say to them what Martin Luther said to his Bishop when he resigned as a Catholic priest: Ich kann nicht ander. Please understand, this is something I must do. I can do nothing else.

                True family and friends unconditionally accept the writer as he or she is.

                I have been fortunate to have the support of most of my family and friends. Not everyone appreciates that I prefer to write horror, and that’s okay. If I had to depend on my family and friends to buy my books, I would already have starved to death.

To be continued….

 

 

Myths of Book Marketing Part I

Myths of book marketing Part I

Social media marketing is a great way to get the message out about your upcoming book releases, but it can be time-consuming. In the old days book marketing was done by publishers, and authors only had to show up when they were scheduled to do signings. Market research was done by agents or publishers, and authors could devote most of their time to writing.

                Successful authors have always done lots of marketing on their own. We went to select conventions (World Science Fiction Convention, World Fantasy Convention, World Horror Convention, Bouchercon, Thrillerfest, Horrorfest, and monthly regional cons) as much to get our names in program books as to have a good time and meet old friends. In this business, like most businesses, you’re nobody without name recognition. There are so many other authors out there that it’s easy to write a good book and never sell enough copies to impress publishers. Writers have always had an obligation to get out the word about their books.

                Today we sit at our keyboards and post to Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Blogger and Wordpress and Tumblr or send off e-mails or Constant Contact newsletters to subscribers to our mailing lists. We have no need to shower and shave and dress up in costume and hop planes to far-off places. We can stay at home and switch hats from writer to marketer as easily as switching from our writer’s hats to our editor’s hats. ‘Tis indeed a brave new world that hath such wondrous and goodly tools in it.

                But, like talking out your story instead of writing it, it’s much too easy to fall into the social media trap. Authors are, of necessity, solitary creatures chained to keyboards. We relish positive feedback. We know we are often too close to our own work to see the forest for the trees. And we love to see our by-lined names in print even if it’s only on blogs.

                I’ve noticed my creative output (novels and short stories) declined significantly as I increased my on-line presence. Something similar happened to me back in the early nineties when SFWA and HWA went on Genie and Compuserv (precursor to AOL). Not only did I have to overcome the learning-curve for new technology, I spent far too much time reading and posting to forums instead of writing novels and short stories.

                Now I’m doing the same thing again. I recognize the need to find a balance between writing, marketing, and social presence. Some of my writer friends have publically commented on the decrease in their creative output in direct proportion to the increase in their social media presence. I guess it happens to most writers.

                My present solution is to set specific times for each task. I write in the mornings, and I refuse to talk to anyone in person, on the telephone, or online during my best writing time. I edit in the afternoons. And I do marketing, Facebook, and reply to communications in the evenings. I limit my convention appearances to four per year, and I do signings and public readings only rarely. That seems to work well for me.

                With the release of six new novels during the next two years, I’m preparing to do interviews and even a book tour overseas. I’m looking forward to getting copies of my books into the hands of readers. But I’m also dreading the toll this may take on my creative output. What happens if I have written no new novels next year or the year after that? Will I fade from memory as I did after 1997?

                I know marketing is important. Without readers, my writing means nothing. Writing only for oneself is like verbal masturbation. It’s satisfying, but it’s fruitless.

                (To be continued)