S. Andrew Swann's Blog

This past week saw my 59th birthday, and as a present my wife got me The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn, all five hardback volumes.

Many of you might be saying “who?’ right now. I don’t blame you. Even back in the 1970s and 1980s when there was a bit of a renaissance in interest about the pulp writers of the first half of the 20th century, Quinn was a bit of a punching bag for those writing forwards to reprints of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Even though he was a Weird Tales contemporary of all of them, people tended to look down their nose at him. He was popular, he was prolific, and he was pulpy, so he wasn’t worthy of consideration.

It’s a shame, because in his stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, he is anticipating much of what we would come to think of as urban fantasy. He investigates monsters, sprits, devil worshippers and serial killers in a milieu that would be familiar to most fans of the genre. Where more modern occult detectives draw from noir detectives like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlow, de Grandin draws more from Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. It’s a fun combination and it’s easy to see why he was the most popular writer in Weird Tales.

He saw one set of paperback reprints of his stuff back in the 1970s, which is how I came to be familiar with his work. It’s nice now to see that Night Shade books saw fit to reprint the entirety of de Grandin’s tales.

Last month I posted a small tirade about a spammy book marketer who tried to engage me by first sending me a vague email about Marked, positioning it as a fan mail. In retrospect the schmuck emailing me had never actually read my book. He waited for me to answer a question about other books, then hit me with a sales pitch. Needless to say, that pissed me off.

So that’s the wrong way to cold call an author with your services.

However, I got a recent e-mail that illustrated the right way to go about marketing yourself to a author without coming across as spam or infuriating them.

First, let’s look at the subject line:

Expanding the reach of Wolfbreed , where history, faith, and the supernatural collide

First of all, the subject line is being honest. It’s not pretending to be something it’s not. It’s obviously a marketing email targeted at Wolfbreed. But it also includes details that shows the person sending me this is actually familiar with the book.

Now I want to show you the first couple of paragraphs:

Hi Andrew,

Wolfbreed isn’t just a werewolf story, it’s a reinvention of the genre. By weaving medieval history, spiritual conflict, and haunting romance, you’ve created a book that doesn’t just entertain, it lingers with readers long after the final page. Lilly’s flight from the Teutonic Order, her struggle with humanity, and Uldolf’s fractured innocence make this a tale as much about the soul as it is about the supernatural.

Right now, Wolfbreed already has the bones of a classic, rich reviews, a devoted niche audience, and a premise that hooks fantasy and paranormal readers alike. But in a crowded genre, visibility is the difference between being a hidden gem and becoming a must-read recommendation. That’s where I step in.

This is the right way to make a pitch sound like a fan mail. The subject told me it was a pitch, but they’re actively showing that they’re familiar with the book, its genre, and its target audience. It leaves me much more kindly disposed to the person who sent it.

The rest of the email is just a description of the services this person is offering, which I was much more disposed to read. I’m not going to retain their services, not due to anything in the e-mail, but because Wolfbreed was traditionally published over fifteen years ago and I don’t know if a marketing push now would do much. But I might consider them once I get my new books up and running.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

When I’ve commented on bookish controversies on this blog before, it usually is in regards to “authors behaving badly” be they plagiarizing or trying to game the NY Times bestseller list. But this time I don’t think the author in question had any ill intent at all. I think that makes her missteps all the more tragic.

Audra Winter is the debut self-published author of a novel called The Age of Scorpius. What distinguished over any other twenty-something debut novelist was her gift for marketing. She engineered Scorpius into a viral sensation on TikTok before it was ever published. She seemed to have a genius for getting potential readers’ interest and hooking people with her worldbuilding. She also showed a gift for producing an excellently and professionally packaged book. She managed to get thousands of pre-orders for her book. Everyone was eagerly anticipating its release.

Then it was released.

Even if you haven’t heard this story before, you can probably tell where it is going. Especially when I tell you Audra is just 22 years old, and had been working on this book since she was 12.

The reading public panned her work. It sits at 1.88 on GoodReads right now, 62% of the reviews 1-star. Worse for Audra, the people who had been fans of her marketing were now angry and venting on social media, accusing her of scamming her readers. I don’t think that’s quite fair. I don’t think you can bootstrap this kind of marketing success for a project you don’t sincerely believe in. Audra clearly believed in her world, and wanted to share it with others. The problem was she was too close to the work (after living with it for a decade) for her to read it as other people would read it. She needed other eyes, editors, beta readers, to give her some objectivity and the chance to work on the book so the words on the page were closer to what she saw in her head.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

Artists are human beings. As such, a certain percentage of them will be reprehensible, or at the very least hold opinions that are reprehensible. Humans are imperfect beings, and some of them fall short of the mark. I’ve thought about this a lot in relation to two works of art that have had an influence on me despite the problematic nature of the artists behind them.

The first is the film Chinatown. It is one of my favorite movies, despite the fact that Roman Polanski is a certified creep. Also it’s arguable in this case that you cannot separate the creep factor from the movie, as Polanski’s particular creepiness actually informed its central themes. I think it can be argued that Chinatown couldn’t be what it was if Polanski wasn’t who he was.

The second is the whole oeuvre of  H.P.Lovecraft, who’s the go to guy when it comes to problematic fantasy authors. He was a largely unrepentant racist, to a degree that was even a little off-putting for the time. And, like Polanski and Chinatown, his particular creepiness can not be divorced from the themes of his work. Pick one and you’ll find fear of the other, fear of degeneracy, and a fear of the unknown that undoubtedly were informed by his opinions on particular groups of humans. Yet it’s unarguable that he was as influential in his sphere as Tolkien was in his. The whole genre of Cosmic Horror can’t be separated from him, to the point that his name has become an adjective.

This is an uncomfortable fact for many people. You can see it play out over people’s reactions to the fact that Harry Potter is still, and probably will remain, an undeniable foundation of YA  fantasy cannon, despite what unpleasant opinions J.K.Rowling might hold.

Some people try to posit the “death of the author” to ease some of the discomfort. If the art and the artist are completely separate entities, I can enjoy my fiction in peace.

I don’t ascribe to that view. As the examples of Chinatown and Lovecraft show. The artist is deeply connected to the work. What I do think is that while art may not be divorced from the artist, art does have a separate existence from the artist. One can view a work of art, and one’s opinions of the art do not automatically reflect one’s opinions of the artist. And while we can judge art in relation to its flawed creator, we can also make the judgement if the art is indulging in the creator’s issues, or is reflecting something more universal.

I’d argue in the case of my two examples, the art transcended the artist.

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Just a short post to remind my fellow creatives to hoard your ideas. Jot down those flashes of inspiration, save those false starts. You never know when they’ll turn useful. In my own case I started writing again after a long hiatus by working on a trio of short stories, all resurrecting ideas that in some cases were over a decade old.

The seed for Marked originated in some ideas I had in high school.

My current WIP started with an idea for a main character and a plot I’d been knocking around for ten years in one form or another, including three abandoned novel attempts, before I finally zeroed in on Jack in his current form.

You’ll never know when or how a stray idea might resolve into a full-fledged story.

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I’ve just written a scene I’ve been avoiding for a while. I wasn’t consciously avoiding it, but after falling out of writing for a few years, it gave me some perspective on my current work in progress and I realized that the outline was missing a key scene— without it there would be a massive hole in the narrative. Not that you’d consciously notice it on a casual read-through, but you’d sense it. Something missing. And the fact was, I had consciously not included it in the first draft of my outline.

To understand what the scene was, and why I was avoiding it, I need to give you some backstory of my WIP. My protagonist is Jack Paris, psychic PI, Iraq war veteran, and most important to this scene, has family roots in Louisiana Voodoo. In book one we deal with John Dee and western esoterism, so it didn’t come up much except to establish his place as an outsider.

Book two, which I’m working on now, I have Vodou as a major plot element with both good guys and bad guys practicing. I’ve done a lot of work to treat the tradition respectfully as a religion. (As I’ve said before, I do like writing about religion) The bad guy isn’t bad for using Vodou, he’s bad for corrupting it for personal ends. Jack is non-practicing and a bit of a novice, so he needs to go to a mambo for assistance.

What I was avoiding was a full blown Vodou ritual. Given the subject matter, there needs to be one for a number of reasons. One’s thematic, showing Jack deepening his roots as the story progresses. There’s a plot reason, as the mambo is trying to ritually protect Jack from an evil bokor’s workings. But the biggest reason is that Vodou is part of the book and dealing with it respectfully means I need to include a ceremony. (Can you think of the Exorcist without any Catholic rituals?)

I think I was avoiding it because I was worried about doing it justice without being exploitative. The whole purpose of the Jack Paris stories is to show these different belief systems in a grounded realistic fashion, and I didn’t want to fall into Hollywood territory.

But I finally did the work, did the research, and wrote the scene. The story is stronger for it. If people give me grief for it, at least I know I did a respectful portrayal, and worked through my own fears.

Image by chris, Public Domain, Wikimedia.

I think every author has their go-to archetypes, and mine happens to be the outsider.

Most of my characters are misfits, oddballs, or just displaced from the rest of society for one reason or another. That’s true of my most recently published book, Marked, which has Dana, who’s socially isolated because of the mark on her body that she’s kept hidden from childhood. It’s also true for my first book, Forests of the Night, which has Nohar navigating between human and non-human worlds.

Then there’s Jack Paris, my protagonist in my current WIP. He’s a bi-racial Louisiana native who was transplanted to Cleveland as a teenager. That marks him as an outsider even before you take into account his psychic ability and his family roots in Louisiana Voodoo.

I like outsider characters, in part, because I identify with them. I’ve been weird and socially awkward my entire life, and I tend to feel like an outsider even in groups I’m a part of. So I deeply empathize with these characters inability to fit in. The other nice thing about an outsider, is it gives an outside perspective to whatever’s going on in a story. It allows you to explore interactions that would be invisible or unconscious to somebody who’s fully embedded in a social group. It also gives a reason to explain things to a protagonist who’s outside the group/society/civilization that we’re exploring.

But, in the end, it seems to be the POV I’m most comfortable writing from.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

I started out as a science fiction author back with my first six novels. However, for a while now, my output has been fantasy, be it dark, humorous, or urban. It’s been over ten years since I produced my last SF with the Apotheosis Trilogy.

Why?

The fact is, it’s becoming too hard for me to posit a realistic future. It takes long enough to write a novel, that it’s become more than likely that technology or events will overtake it while I’m writing the damn thing. I’m worried about that with just the contemporary urban fantasy I’m writing now. But, at least with that, I can explicitly set it in 2025 and avoid any anachronisms. (A solution I did with the re-issue of TeeK. Rather than update all the dated references, I just added an explicit date back in the nineties when it was written.) Trying to write in the future, that won’t work.

The pace of change, technologically, politically, culturally, has outstripped my ability to anticipate it. I can’t come up with worlds that feel plausible to me, as I feel that what I’d write would be dated almost as soon as I put words on the page. I find contemporary, fantasy, and historical settings much more comfortable for me now.

Fortunately, I can still read SF without this problem. (Loved the Martian or the Bobiverse for instance.) But, as an example, I look at the current state of AI compared to where it was a year ago, and I find I can’t write an imagined future that overcomes my own personal suspension of disbelief.

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

One of the most important things you can have as a writer is a measure of humility about your craft. No matter how many years you’ve been doing this, there’s always some area to improve, something to learn. This is not to say you shouldn’t be confident about what you write, but you should always be open about feedback and advice. One thing experience should give you is the ability to analyze that feedback and advice to recognize something that could improve your work.

Recently I heard a comment, and it changed both the book I’ve written and the one I’m working on. I was talking about the first book of the Jack Paris series (the occult detective series that’s my current WIP) with my wife. Now she’s a fan of witchy paranormal cozy mysteries, so not quite what I’m writing. And she was concerned that I wasn’t mentioning a love interest for the main character. At the time there really wasn’t one. There was a high school friend that I’m sure future fans of my work will ship with my protagonist, but no active romantic interest.

So, is that really a flaw? I’m not writing in the same UF subgenre that she reads, so what’s the problem? Well, she said something that raised alarm-bells for me. “Most people are in a relationship.”

In fact, if you include those that are between relationships or are looking for a relationship, you got most of humanity covered. I realized that not including some sort of relationship, past, current, or future, was implicitly saying things about my protagonist that I wasn’t intending to say. Not to say I couldn’t write that protagonist— there’s nothing wrong with ace protagonists— but there are problems doing so unintentionally. Your protagonist, especially in a noir setting, will probably be describing characters in a dissonant way at the very least. And there’s be even more dissonance if, in a future book, I ever decide to bring Jack and his high school friend together.

So, at the very least, I needed to address Jack’s relationship status.

So, by inserting a girlfriend into the book I addressed this problem and a few others. One, I think it helped the pacing. It gave me something substantive to do with Jack’s downtime. By making it a new relationship, it gave me opportunity to naturally reveal some of Jack’s character and backstory. It gave me a minor subplot. Overall, I think it improved the book, even though I am not writing paranormal romance.

Now that I have this new character, I’m weaving her into what I’ve written of book two. And I think it’s a major boost to the pacing. It’s breaking up the drumbeat of investigation, A to B to C to D, giving the reader spots to breathe.

Lesson, always consider feedback that might improve what you’re doing.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Something happened today that really pissed me off, and I thought it might be an object lesson in how to make potential customers/readers/friends very angry.

First off I should say, I get a lot of spam, especially stuff that is publishing and SEO related. None of it has a particular effect on me one way or another. It’s just there, I delete it from my inbox and go on with my day. So a spammer needs to make an effort to engage me in a particularly negative way. One guy in particular managed to do so.

How so?

I got the following email:

Hi S Andrew Swann’, I came across your book ‘Marked’. The cover caught my eyes, and the concept sounds interesting! Is this your first release, or you have published other titles too?

Best regards,

Jess.

Cool, a fan mail, right? Nothing odd about it… Except on second reading, I notice a few things. One, note how it omits any specifics about the cover or the content of Marked? I didn’t notice that at the time and just emailed back thanking Jess for the e-mail and directing them to the books page on my website.

It was Jess’ response that pissed me off:

Hey Andrew Swann,

It’s an absolute pleasure reconnecting with someone who’s been telling stories since 1993—that’s a legacy worth celebrating. You’ve laid the groundwork with years of writing, and I believe now is the perfect time to breathe new life into your books and introduce them to an even broader audience.

I’d love to introduce you to a few impactful services we offer that are helping authors like yourself boost visibility and generate sales:

What. The. Fuck.

You come at an author like a legitimate fan of their work, then once they are nice enough to respond, you hit them with a sales pitch? Jess is damn lucky he forgot to actually name the company he’s shilling for, because I’d go out of my way to tell every author I know about this sleazeball and his tactics.

It reminds me of some fellow authors who go on other author’s pages and pretend to be a fan, just so they can pimp their book. Though this seems a bit more… personal. Most important, it tells me what kind of company you’d be promoting my work. Even if this didn’t piss me off so viscerally, why would you think I’d want my name tied up with a company that uses tactics this sleazy?

Thanks for reading. I just had to vent.

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