Your First Published Novel: Part 2

My friend W Dan Willis has the theory that any given road to publication works once, because they plug up the hole after you get through. It’s certainly true that most writer’s I know have some unique aspect to their story. I, for instance, have never been rejected by a publishing house, only by Agents and Magazines. That isn’t to say that I haven’t submitted to a house. It also doesn’t mean I have a half dozen novels out. It means that historically, if I submit I’m either accepted or they never reply at all. Everyone has a twist to their story.
Mine came shortly after I gave up on Death by Cliché. A member of my writer’s group, Carolyn Nicita, decided that she wanted to build herself a portfolio of audio work. So she offered to record and edit for free if I read. Traditionally, I haven’t been big on self publishing. Even when I have gone the self publishing route, it involved starting my own game company and soliciting licenses from at least one company where I already had a fan base. I would not normally even consider this, but in the end I decided why not Death by Cliché. People seemed to enjoy it and it was unsaleable. If anything it gets funnier when read aloud. If there was ever a book for the experiment, this was it.

So late in 2008, we began recording Death by Cliché. I believe that was the same year that I moved, but I seemed to recall all the recording sessions happening in the old house, to we must have done all the sessions relatively closely together in a big push. Just about the time I actually moved, we were pushing out the first episode.

Howard Tayler has a panel he does called it “Charisma is Not a Dump Stat.” One point of the panel is to make sure writers know that while writing is a solitary task, marketing is not. I’ve always believed this myself. In fact, when I go to conventions, I only attend panels when I’m flying the colors for some topic or another. I do the panels where I’m speaking, and otherwise I spend my time in the green room, networking. I have been accused of holding court, but I like to believe that has more to do with the fact that my back injury makes getting up and sitting down fairly painful, so I spend a great deal of time ensconced in a chair. The more throne-like the better.

At any rate, I didn’t know Howard before I started conventions. I didn’t know any of my writing friends before that. Brandon Sanderson once told me that the first year we met, before he’d published, he hung out with Dan Willis and I in the halls because we were the “real writers.” In retrospect, that’s pretty funny.

At this point I’d been doing the local convention circuit pretty heavily since LTUE made me a guest of honor through a wacky set of hijinks and misunderstanding. I’ve been told that the way I handled that convention has a lot to do with my popularity with the LTUE staff. For instance, at the banquet after I was sitting at the table with the con committee when I won a child’s toy tiara in a giveaway. I don’t know what kind of guests they had in the past, but they were all terrified that giving me a little girl’s toy would insult me, and I was still Guest of Honor for about another two hours. I claimed the prize, put it on my head, and in my deepest and most manly voice declared, “I’m a pretty pretty princess.”

The point is, a great deal of my success can be attributed to the fact that I take great pains to make certain that people WANT to be around me.

So it isn’t terribly surprising that when we released the first episode, Howard Tayler wanted to talk about it on his blog. I believe at the time he had about 50k unique hits a day. The first episode saw a large amount of downloads. The next week, for the second episode, he asked his crowd, “Let’s break Bob’s server.”

And break it they did.