Jason Pettus's Blog

Today, a few thoughts on the modern online PESO system of marketing, and how each of the four quadrants might actually be good for the lone self-publisher or small indie press as well

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter on February 2, 2024, and republished here at this website on the same day.

I haven't been shy about sharing in the past that one of the main reasons my own former small press failed was because of poor marketing and promotion, and especially understanding how much money I would need to spend in order to make the kind of money I wanted each book to generate. So it's in this spirit that I make the subject such a focus here at my newsletter, since I'm in this rare position to be privy to various different successful promotional plans by self-publishing authors around the world, and thus get to see exactly what's working for a lot of people and what isn't. If a self-publisher has their stuff together enough to be able to bring me on for the sometimes several thousand dollars it costs for me to do both a full developmental edit and a full copy edit of a rather hefty novel, then they typically have their stuff together enough to make a serious go at breaking even or ideally turning a profit, and I love that my newsletter can be partly devoted each issue to how various authors both near and far are making a successful go of it themselves.

In this spirit of continual research, I recently came across something called the PESO system of marketing, and have been thinking more and more about how this recent new model that's especially caught on online might be applied to the subject of self-publishing. Originally taking hold in large corporations, it's a way of combining PR and marketing with the creatives within a company to promote the brand in a way that none of them could on their own; it turns out to also be good for small startups and online-only organizations as well. It consists of four distinct types of marketing efforts, making up the acronym of its name:

Paid: When you exchange money for distribution, such as an advertisement.

Earned: When you create content for someone or a place with a bigger audience than you.

Shared: When you amplify your content through your existing audience.

Owned: When you make content that gets your audience to seek you out, like a blog.

Of course, there are both free ways and paid ways to do all four of these; and as I've talked about in a previous issue, I do now believe (based on witnessing a lot of case studies) that you simply must combine a certain amount of spending with any free labor you do to promote and market a book, if you expect that book to be able to sell at least a couple thousand copies and generate a small profit. So I've gotten to thinking lately about how you might do both a free and a paid version of each of these PESO elements when it comes specifically to being a self-publisher? Specifically, what if we think about it in terms of spending $2,000 and 100 man-hours of volunteer labor per each quadrant? The collective $8,000 and 400 hours of labor for the entire book is a bit above what I suggested the last time we were discussing this subject at the newsletter (at which point I advocated $6,000 and 300 hours of labor), so perhaps we can expect a bit more sales as well than the 1,000 copies of last time, so that we're not just breaking even anymore but generating a pretty decent little profit. 

To start with, it'd be easy to spend $2,000 on paid media; it's right in its name, after all. That'd get you a bit of advertising at Amazon, pay for a book giveaway at Goodreads, or fund a lot of keyword advertisements at Google. And as far as a hundred hours of labor, you could keep very busy with those keyword advertisements, constantly trying out new phrases and combinations to see what works best for you under what circumstances; or with hand-addressing and mailing several hundred copies of your book.

Earned media, on the other hand, is almost the opposite, when you work for your benefit instead of spending money. This might consist of you writing guest articles for other blogs or in magazines on self-publishing topics, or participating in interviews and podcasts; or it might consist of convincing your readers to write good reviews online of your book, or convincing a book club to take on your book one month. But of course, you need to spend the money to have the opportunities for the earned media in the first place; you'll want a website, multiple social-media presences, a professional newsletter-delivery service, and perhaps a college student being paid minimum wage and class credit to manage it all.

This leads naturally into shared media, because much of that takes place through the various online social webs we maintain—Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Discord, Reddit, Goodreads, TikTok, the list just goes on and on and on and on these days. But of course, this can also consist of a webinar you host on self-publishing, or even an entire online convention for the subject, easier and easier to do online these days. The possibilities for spending money and time within shared media these days are endless.

And then finally there's owned media, where a writer truly shines. Owned media includes this very newsletter where you're seeing this exclusive article; or if later in time, the blog maintained online of this newsletter's archives, done deliberately that way so that the material will get indexed better at Google. It's any YouTube channel you might maintain, or short videos you make for TikTok and Instagram. It's any podcast you might produce on self-publishing or the subject of your book. And best of all, the material just keeps building up and up, becoming more and more valuable as a collection the longer it's online. But again, you'll need a website for people to find this stuff, all the way up to maybe an entire team to produce professional-quality videos on a weekly basis, if you want to start talking about ways of spiking up to $2,000 as quickly as possible.

So, some food for thought. Can you organize a united yet complex plan for marketing and promoting a book this way over the course of a year or so, putting in 400 hours of labor and about $8,000? What things am I missing or not thinking about? As always, this newsletter is a community where we're all learning together, so I look forward to your insights at ilikejason@gmail.com if you ever feel like sharing them.

I LUV U!!! 50% Off All Editing For Romance Writers in February!!!

Holey moley! Love is in the air, I'm telling ya! For the entire month of February, romance authors get an entire 50% off my services, meaning 0.5 cents per word for either copy editing or developmental editing, or a low, low 0.75 cents per word for both in one book. Am I doing this in honor of Valentine's Day? Oh, mayhaps! Or because I've picked up the habit again of downloading a bunch of free romance novels through these promotional websites and then reviewing them all at Goodreads? Oh, perchance! Or is it because I'm still giddy from the recent birth of my standalone freelancing website, over at Pettus.rocks? Versooth, I say unto thee!

Tell your friends! Spread the news at the RWA! HEAs for all!!!!!!!!1!!!! I have girlfriend hairwashing in the bathtub on my mind these days, so come one, come all. And of course, don't forget, no matter what kind of writer you are, if you remind me you're a newsletter subscriber when booking a job through the website, you'll receive a 25 percent discount no matter what—all clients, all jobs. Talk with you again next week!

Today, a talk with my client Steve Waddell, reality-TV pitch-show veteran and author of the soon-to-be business bestseller "Valuepreneurs"

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter on January 26, 2024, and republished here at this website on the same day.

Why do I call Steve's book a "soon-to-be bestseller?" Because he's already had so many amazing things happen with it before it's even come out—testimonials from a Forbes columnist, an offer to turn it into a textbook for high-school classes, and more. Of course, none of this is surprising for the already accomplished Waddell; a graduate of the Newport News Shipbuilding Apprentice School who spent the beginning of his career creating risk-management processes for nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, later in life he got the idea to invent a new type of bathroom sink with a water-fountain spigot on its top, named the Nasoni after the Italian public fountains that work the same way but without the spigot, and ended up on several of these reality-TV pitch shows that were on the air in the 2010s, including both Shark Tank and Funderdome.

The gamble paid off, and the product can now be happily purchased from retailers nationwide, as well as being a finalist in Fast Company's 2020 World Changing Ideas prize, and an NIH grant-winning hit among the disabled and those with Parkinson's disease. So what to do next? Why, write a book about how you can do it yourself, of course! His Valuepreneurs is the real deal, a densely factual book chock-full of actionable, practical advice, and not the usual 300 pages of fluff surrounding a single listicle of good ideas that make up so many of these "YOU CAN BE ON SHARK TANK TOO" titles littering the back alleys of Kindle Unlimited. And I can state that for a fact, because I was the one who edited this book, so I held Steve's feet to the fire and made sure it was devoid of fluff! (And as always, for the sake of my professional ethics, let me remind you that every book featured in this newsletter is one I got paid to edit.) 

After a long pre-publishing process so to gather up a lot of early feedback and reviews, the book finally just came out to the public two days ago, so I'm excited to have Steve join us and do what I think will actually be the first-ever public talk about the book, right here after release. Fellow business writers (and there's a lot of you in my client list) will find all this especially interesting, so please keep scrolling for the entire thing.

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So before we get to the book itself, let's talk about these reality-TV pitch shows you were on in the 2010s, which partly inspired you to write Valuepreneurs. What was the process like to apply and get on the first one? Did that then make it any easier to get on the others? What do you think was the greatest benefit you got out of those experiences? If someone's interested in doing this themselves, what's a good piece of advice you learned only by going through it?

The reality-TV pitch shows—they were quite a journey and definitely a spark for writing Valuepreneurs. The process to get on the first one was both exhilarating and nerve-wracking. It involved a detailed application, pitching the idea, and showcasing not just the product but also the story behind it. The key was to be clear, concise, and compelling—to really grab the producers' attention.

Once I got onto the first show, it did open doors for the others. It's like having a stamp of credibility; you've been on one, so the others take notice. But each show had its unique application process and vibe, so it wasn't a free pass, more like a foot in the door.

The greatest benefits from these experiences were twofold. Firstly, the funding. It was crucial in helping to grow the idea, especially in the early stages. And secondly, the validation. Having industry experts and seasoned entrepreneurs believe in your idea? That's priceless. It's a massive confidence boost and a signal to the market that you're onto something good.

For anyone looking to dive into this world, my biggest piece of advice is: learn to embrace the pause. This might sound simple, but it's powerful. I learned this in Toastmasters. When you're speaking, it's so easy to fill every silence with "um" and "uh." But in these high-pressure pitch situations, those fillers can be distracting. Toastmasters taught me the power of a well-placed pause—it can add emphasis, give you a moment to think, and keeps your speech clear and effective. So, when you're pitching, remember, it's okay to pause. It shows confidence and control. And that can make all the difference in how your message is received.

Let me do a mea culpa here, and admit that when you first decided halfway through our editing to change the focus and name of your book, I thought it was a big mistake and I urged you not to do it; yet your intuition turned out to be correct, and the book's now much stronger and tightly focused than it'd been before. How do you decide where the line lies between following the advice of people you've hired to give you advice, and sticking to your guns about something you feel is really important? I think this is an especially interesting question for self-publishers like yourself, who have an entire team of experts they're getting opinions from daily—multiple editors, multiple designers, a marketing squad and more. How do you stay true to yourself in the middle of that chaos while still doing the things that are ultimately best for your book?

As for balancing jumping on these opportunities versus doing the research, it really feels like a dance between intuition and due diligence. Sometimes, you just get that gut feeling that screams it's the right move. It's like an internal nudge saying, "Do it, or you'll regret it!" So, you kind of just bite the bullet and go for it. There's a unique energy, a certain buzz that comes when an idea feels just right. But, of course, it's also crucial to temper that gut-driven enthusiasm with a slice of practicality. You want to quickly dive into the research, check out the feasibility, potential profit margins, and really get a grip on the market's needs.

Like a lot of how-to business guides, yours is filled with illustrations, and something I found interesting about yours is that you taught yourself the basics of illustration software, so that you could do "wireframes" of what you had in your head first before sending it along to your paid designer. What have been the advantages of this compared to the time cost of learning that software? Do you recommend that other self-publishing authors do this? 

The journey with the illustrations in my book was quite an eye-opener! I didn't dive deep into learning illustration software, but I am pretty good at creating concepts in PowerPoint. These initial concepts were simple, and I would send them to a cost-effective illustrator on Fiverr based in Pakistan. The work was good, but initially, there wasn't a consistent "brand feel."

Then, everything changed when I created a flyer and worked with a lady from India. Her work was fantastic, and the colors she chose were just spot-on. It was a lightbulb moment for me—those colors became the brand colors for Valuepreneurs. I decided to have her redo all my previous graphics to achieve a consistent look and feel throughout the book. The transformation was incredible! Everything in the book now resonated with the same visual language, making a massive impact overall. As a visual learner myself, I understand the power of good graphics.

In terms of the advantages versus the time cost, I think the biggest benefit was being able to visually communicate my ideas effectively to the designer. It saved a lot of back-and-forth and ensured that the final graphics were aligned with my vision. Plus, being involved in the initial design process gave me a better understanding of what works visually and what doesn’t.

Would I recommend this to other self-publishing authors? Absolutely, especially if they have a clear visual idea of what they want. It doesn’t require in-depth software skills—even basic tools like PowerPoint can help you convey your ideas to a designer. It streamlines the process and can significantly enhance the final product. However, it’s also important to balance the time invested in learning and creating these wireframes against the other demands of writing and publishing a book. But if you’re visually inclined and enjoy this part of the process, it can be both rewarding and effective.

Your book covers a lot of ground, basically showing someone how to go from just an idea they have in their head for a new product to eventually holding one in their hands in the aisles of Target. Out of all these steps, which do you think is the absolutely most crucial one or two for someone who's never run a company before and is basically starting from scratch? What about those who HAVE run a small business, but have never dealt with bigger issues like international supply chains or asking for millions from venture capitalists?

Absolutely, when it comes to transforming an idea into a tangible product, the most crucial aspect, hands down, is getting in front of your actual customer. This is critical not just to ensure that your product aligns with what they want, but also to confirm that you can deliver it at a price point they're willing to pay. This is true whether you're a first-time entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner stepping into new territories like international supply chains or venture capital.

For those starting from scratch, understanding your customer is key. You've got to step out of your comfort zone and interact with potential customers—and I'm talking about strangers, not just friends and family. Friends and family might fall into the trap of "confirmation bias," telling you what you want to hear because they like you. Strangers will give you the honest feedback you need. They'll tell you if your idea has merit, if there's a real need for your product, and if your proposed price is acceptable. I go into this in the book.

If someone really wants to learn more about this from one of the foremost experts in the country, they will want to hear John Nottingham, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Nottigham Spirk. John will be speaking on Day 1 of the Idea to Product Summit I’m hosting in late February. John’s company has more than 1,450 patents and have been involved in bringing revolutionary products to market like the Spinbrush toothbrush, the Dutchboy Twist and Pour paint can, the rotating lollipop (which turned into a $1.2b product!) the Navage nasal irrigation system and so much more. 

One of the most interesting things about your post-publishing marketing plan is how you just accidentally stumbled across the fact that early readers were responding very passionately to the idea of your book doubling as a school textbook, which prompted you to put out a less expensive "student edition" that can be bought in bulk for things like high school entrepreneurialism clubs and the Future Business Leaders of America. How often have these kinds of "happy accidents" happened over the course of your varied career?

The world of happy accidents in a career can be quite the adventure, can't it? It's funny how often these serendipitous moments pop up, especially when you're deeply immersed in your work as a new author and simultaneously managing a grant from the NIH. In my experience, they tend to happen more frequently than you'd think. It's like once you're in the flow of your career, these little surprises and opportunities start revealing themselves in the most unexpected ways. Like with the cheaper edition of the book. I always wanted my business books in color, and the hardcover is going to be that way. And I was planning on having a cheaper paperback version in color as well, UNTIL I decided to print a proof copy just to see how it turned out. And with only 2 minor tweaks to graphics, it turned out better than expected so I went with it. That brought my author copy price down to under $6, which is great because at that price I can actually hand copies of it to key individuals whenever I need to and it won’t be that hard on the wallet.

Where do you think the balance should lie with jumping on these sudden opportunities while the iron is hot, versus doing some research into how feasible it is and how much a person might or might not profit? 

I'd say, definitely strike while the iron is hot, but with one eye always on the bigger picture. You don't want to leap without at least peeking first. It's about striking that perfect harmony where your instinct meets insight. You know, the best ventures often start as a spontaneous spark but take shape and flourish thanks to thoughtful planning and execution.

Easily the most intimidating part of your book to me is when you discuss ramping up to a million units of your product using overseas factories in countries such as China. I know you've actually gone through this process yourself with Nasoni (in fact, I've seen the fascinating photos of you actually over there at the factory with your manufacturing team), so maybe you could share a little about what that process was like to go through for the first time yourself? Let me again ask about something important you maybe learned actually going through that process that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.

Oh, visiting China for the first time for Nasoni was an experience I'll never forget! It was absolutely fascinating, a real adventure. You know, you hear so much about a country on the news, but being there is a whole different story. The warmth and kindness of the people really struck me. I remember just after landing, I had this limo from the hotel waiting for me at the airport. I asked the driver how long of a ride it was and he indicated he didn't speak English. So, out comes my iPhone, and I use Google Translate to ask him. The moment I played the translated question out loud, he looked at me through the rearview mirror, grinned, and got his phone out to reply. It was like something out of a Star Trek episode—using these 'communicators' to break the language barrier!

Culturally, it was so different, but what an amazing experience. I made so many new friends and was so grateful for the trip. It's etched in my memory, and I'd jump at the chance to do it again. One thing that really stood out was the drive to the airport. They had these big interstate signs with vertical arrows for the highway and curved ones for exits, just like back home. But here’s the catch—they were color-coded! Red, yellow, or green, indicating the traffic conditions. It was a moment of, "Why aren’t we doing this in America??"

Now, about ramping up to thousands of units in overseas factories like in China. Let me tell you, it's an intimidating yet exhilarating process. Going through it for the first time with Nasoni was a steep learning curve. Being there, on the ground, at the factory, you get this hands-on experience you just can’t replicate. You learn the importance of building a relationship with your manufacturing team, understanding their work culture, and the nuances of their production processes. It’s one thing to discuss things over emails and calls, but being there in person, seeing the operation, and interacting with the team—it changes your perspective. You learn to appreciate the intricacies of manufacturing on such a large scale. It's not just about numbers and contracts; it’s about people, communication, and understanding different ways of working. That first-hand experience is invaluable—it teaches you patience, flexibility, and the importance of mutual respect and understanding in business.

The pre-publication blurbs you've put together are far and away the most impressive lineup I've seen from any client in my entire career—a Forbes columnist, a co-founder of MapQuest, multiple CEOs, and a lot more. Are these all people you knew before the book, or did you literally send cold copies of the PDF to any strangers and say, "If you like it, maybe you'll say something nice?" How does a person even go about meeting people in their profession like this anyway?

You know, gathering those pre-publication blurbs was quite the journey in itself! A mix of familiar faces and reaching out into the unknown. Some of these amazing people were part of my network, thanks to my experiences and connections made over the years. But others? Well, it was about having the courage to just reach out and ask. Sure, I got turned down a couple of times, but that's all part of the process.

Take Chris Heivly, for example, the co-founder of MapQuest. That was purely about seizing the opportunity. He was speaking at a local 1 Million Cups event, and he mentioned that people could book a call with him through his website. So, I thought, why not? I signed up, we had this fantastic call, and he agreed to write the foreword for my book. It's amazing how things turn out when you're just willing to put yourself out there.

As for meeting such influential people in one's profession, it's a blend of networking, being proactive, and sometimes, just good timing. Attending industry events, keeping an eye on opportunities like guest speakers or webinars, and not being afraid to introduce yourself can open so many doors. It's about building relationships, not just contacts. And of course, always being genuine in your interactions—people can sense when you're truly passionate about what you do. So, it's a combination of nurturing the connections you already have and daring to step out of your comfort zone to make new ones. It's all about taking that chance.

One of the things I love about the press you set up to publish this is that part of its profits are being donated to German Shepherd rescue organizations, a cause that's a big part of your personal life. Could you tell us a little about that? Do you consider this a benefit of self-publishing, that you were able to take some of the money that would've gone to a publisher under a traditional system and instead spend it this way? Or would you have figured out a way to get that money into the hands of the rescue places no matter what?

The story behind RosenThor Publishing is something quite close to my heart. It's all thanks to our rescue German Shepherds, Rose and Thor. My wife created this name for an online login, and when I saw it, it just clicked—“Voila! That's it!” It was the perfect name for our self-publishing venture on Amazon.

We've always been passionate about German Shepherd rescue organizations, and we regularly make donations to them. So, when it came to publishing the book, it felt natural to continue supporting this cause. With no traditional publisher involved, it became an easy decision to divert a portion of the profits to these organizations.

Self-publishing really opened up this avenue for us. In a traditional setup, a significant chunk of the proceeds goes to the publisher. But with self-publishing, we had more control over where the money went. And yes, while we support the cause regardless, self-publishing made it much more straightforward. It’s one of those unexpected benefits of going the self-publishing route—having the freedom to align your business practices with your personal values and passions. For us, it’s about giving back to a cause that's given us so much joy and love through Rose and Thor. It's incredibly fulfilling to know that with every book sold, we're helping support German Shepherd rescue organizations.

And finally, let me end today with the same two questions I'm asking everyone in the newsletter this year, so that I can compile all the answers in December and we can all see how they compare to each other. First, can you tell us about something you spent money on that it turned out you shouldn't have or you regret doing, either in making the book or marketing it afterwards? And second, what's something unexpected that's turned out to be a positive or make a big difference?

You know, navigating the digital aspect of being an author can be quite a ride! Take my website, for instance. I initially set up https://valuepreneurs.com, investing time and money into it. But then I found myself wrestling with the limitations of WordPress and its myriad of plugins. So, I shifted gears and built another platform that integrates everything—CRM, email, hosting, you name it, all in one place. It seemed like the perfect solution to streamline everything. But here's the catch—I haven't fully transitioned yet because of how busy I am, especially with the upcoming summit. So now, I'm juggling both platforms, which means double the expense. I'm planning to consolidate everything post-summit, but for now, it's a bit of a balancing act.

Speaking of making an impact, let me share something about raising book awareness. The traditional advice was to get on 100 podcasts, but honestly, the thought of pitching to podcasters was daunting. So, I took a different route—I decided to host a virtual summit. And it's been an amazing journey! The summit is scheduled for Feb 21-23, it's free to attend, and I've got some incredible CEOs and industry leaders lined up. What's great is that all the sessions are pre-recorded, ensuring no last-minute hiccups. Plus, this gives speakers the chance to engage live during their sessions. Hosting this event has not only allowed me to build stronger connections but also positioned me as an authority in the entrepreneurial space. Post-summit, I anticipate this will open doors to podcast appearances without the need to "beg" for a spot. Check out the summit here, I hope you’ll register and share it with anyone you know who may benefit: https://2024.ideatoproductsummit.com   

Regarding spending regrets and positive surprises: well, I guess my dual website situation fits the bill for a regret. In hindsight, I should have researched more thoroughly to find an all-in-one solution from the get-go, rather than spending on two separate platforms. As for the unexpected positive? Definitely, the virtual summit. It's turning out to be a game-changer in terms of networking, boosting my authority, and promoting my book—all without the traditional podcast tour hustle. It’s a testament to thinking outside the box and leveraging digital platforms creatively.

My thanks again to Steve for this really eye-opening and inspiring talk. Like I said, Valuepreneurs finally came out for public sale just a couple of days ago, so I hope you'll have a chance to go by and pick up a copy, and then afterwards join me at Goodreads and leave a review of it. I'll be at Steve's coming summit; will you? And don't forget that my new freelancing website at Pettus.rocks is now open for business! You can check out my guide to the self-publishing process, read hundreds of testimonials (and see a lot of cool book covers to boot), and learn more about me and my now 30 years as a paid professional in the arts. (Note: In my twenties, "20 bucks and a ride to the venue" sometimes counted as "paid professional.") Remember, if you book an editing job with me through it, and remind me that you're a newsletter subscriber, you'll receive 25 percent off your final bill—all jobs, all bills. I have lots more talks with recently published clients lined up for you here soon (and don't forget to drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com if you've got a new book you'd like to talk about here), so I'll see you again next Friday!

Today, an interview with my client Kyle Wolfson, author of the surprisingly funny and unsurprisingly harrowing post-apocalyptic political thriller "DERT"

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter on January 20, 2024, and republished here at this website on the same day.

Happy 2024! As mentioned in the last issue, I'm changing the format of this newsletter a bit this year, making them smaller in length but published more often (hopefully every Friday this year...and I mean it this time, I swear to Bob), and mostly concentrating now on interviews with my clients whose books have recently come out. Today that's with Kyle K. Wolfson, a Georgian who isn't new to publishing (he's already self-published the 2018 literary experiment The Haunting of Abraham Lincoln) but who has really hit a big new high point in his career with the recent release of his political thriller, DERT.

Set in a day-after-tomorrow future in which climate change has gotten even worse than it currently is, it's the story of a political radical who manages to get elected President based on mass fear from the population, then once in office creates a cult of personality that leads to an authoritarian dictatorship, using the legitimate instruments of power to create quasi-illegal new organizations in which to do their bidding, such as the new Cabinet-level Department of Environmental Reclamation and Trust (the "DERT" of the book's title), giving their almost religious political organization unprecedented powers that feel like they should be illegal, if they hadn't manipulated the system to make them perfectly legit in the eyes of the law. The clever twist? Instead of this being a male far-right conservative who veers into fascism, the person at the center is a female far-left liberal who veers into Stalinism; and instead of a Department of Homeland Security engaging in torture at Guantanamo Bay like in real life, the members of DERT (the “Gaia” political party) set up re-education camps across the Midwest in the style of Mao's Cultural Revolution, where brainwashing and brutal beatings are used to turn a nation of middle-class suburban capitalists into "Gaia true believers."

It's freaking amazing, and I'm not just saying that because I got paid to edit it (although, as always, for the sake of my professional ethics, let me remind you that I did get paid to edit all the books I feature here at this newsletter). In fact, I can honestly say that this is a manuscript I would've signed to my own small press back in the day, if it had come in as a submission back then; and I can only say that once or twice a year as a freelancer, so it's pretty much the highest compliment I can pay a book. After a long production process that lasted almost a year, the book is now finally out, and I'm so excited to kick things off here in 2024 with this extended talk I recently had with Kyle about it. I hope you find this both interesting and informative for your own publishing journey.

So first, let's talk about the fact that you already self-published a book before this one, a historical novel called The Haunting of Abraham Lincoln that cleverly takes a look at the dreams of him, John Wilkes Booth and others to tell the story of the last days of Lincoln's life. What kind of experience did you have with that, in terms of bringing in outside help versus how much you did yourself, and how did that influence the way you went into DERT when it finally came time to ramp that manuscript up to publication?

I really enjoyed writing that novel. It was the first book I ever wrote, and I think it was a great first project, being historical in nature, a large amount of the story already existed. Since the history books provide the framework of events, it made it a lot easier to build a story around it. I don’t know if I could have managed to write a novel from scratch on the first try.

However, the self-publishing aspect of it was a complete failure. Once I finished writing the manuscript, I had a friend who was an author do the editing, for $300 she edited my entire book. I queried a bunch of agents to no success and then decided to self-publish on Amazon. That resulted in an embarrassingly formatted paperback book with a blurry self-made cover. It obviously resulted in zero sales, even though I believed I really had a bestseller on my hands.

I enjoyed writing and crafting stories in my free time, but I didn’t really have any interest in doing the legwork necessary to sell copies. My feeling was that I had a good book, and people would recognize that on their own and bring fame and riches to me out of the goodness of their heart.

A few years later, the woman who had edited my book contacted me about re-publishing the story with a new title, cover and a full development/copy edit with her newly started publishing company. I agreed and finally saw what a real edit of a book looks like. However, yet again it registered hardly any sales before sinking to the bottom of the Amazon wastelands. In my mind, the publisher should handle all of the extra work and I just write new stories. That strategy didn’t pan out either.

That brings us to the beginning of 2022. In addition to the already published Lincoln novel, I had three other manuscripts that I wanted to move forward with. I had enough experience to realize the very first thing I needed was a high-quality editor and that led me to you.

I think the biggest thing with my self-publishing experience this time around is a commitment to doing all the work.

I’m not a social media person, but I must do it.

I don’t want to have a newsletter, but I must do it.

And that goes with every aspect of getting a book to market, there are endless amounts of grunt work to be done and if you want to sell books, you have to do it. I think so many authors starting out have the same view I did when I started, “I wrote a book, isn’t that enough?”

Easily what I think is the most interesting thing about DERT is how you subvert expectations for a post-apocalyptic novel -- the President who ends up becoming sort of an authoritarian dictator is actually a radical liberal, who uses climate change to bend the laws in the same way the Bush administration used terrorism to pass the Patriot Act, create the Department of Homeland Security, etc. Meanwhile, our heroes are a middle-class suburban couple who in a previous age might be described as moderate Republicans. Yet you write about these subjects in a complex, nuanced way, so that they're still very interesting and thought-provoking without being polemic. What made you decide to come at the story from this angle, versus the very well-known trope of the right-wing fascist authoritarian who creates a new Nazi state, and the plucky activists who rage against the system?

This is probably the hardest question for me to answer, because I feel like I could go on for hours discussing the nuances between different dictatorships, the political dynamics at work and how I feel about them.

But the reasonably short answer is that this book was written with the Chinese Communist party and Chairman Mao as its inspiration for the villains.

I think the Nazis are a great template for writing villains, but there are plenty of other monsters out there as well. My issue with how Nazism would play in this context has to do a lot with my understanding of history.

The Nazis generally were exporters of terror. Their biggest crimes were committed outside of Germany’s borders and against foreign populations. DERT is about what is happening inside the USA.

The Nazis were not overly concerned with converting people to their ideology. It’s hard to convince people who aren’t Aryan to support Aryan supremacy. In general, if people submitted to the Nazis' control, the Nazis wouldn’t worry about their private thoughts. DERT is about an ideology that demands to be embraced, tolerating it isn’t good enough.

So, the ideology explored in DERT is based on my readings of the re-education camps and thought reform that was administered on the Chinese population after the Communists seized control of the country. It also stems from my beliefs when it comes to fascism. To me, at its core, the principle of fascism is control. Nationalism, racism, right-wing, etc. are just symptoms of the disease, the desire to control people is the driving force.

That is what we deal with in DERT, is the desire of the Gaia party to control the population and the easiest way to do that is to rely on the tactics of the Communists. In a country the size of the US, it’s hard to control the population with authoritarian tactics from the get-go, you are going to get a lot of pushback.

But by wielding non-lethal tools (public humiliation, self-criticism, societal pressure, stripping status and assets and a bit of FOMO of being on the wrong side), The Gaia Party gains the levers over power peaceably, and then has free reign to rely more heavily on violence to cement their control.

Studying the Chinese Communist methods is a little hard, because there isn’t a lot written about them. But if you do get a chance to read about what was done during and after the revolution, it is astounding. The term “Brainwashing” was invented to describe the methods of control that Mao’s acolytes force on the people. That is something I tried to explore in DERT. When our main characters are in the camps, everything would be easier if they just gave in and accepted the teachings, instead of clinging to what they believe to be true.

As for the main characters, they are obviously based on my wife and I, the desire to raise them up as champions of the little people, to give them heroic storylines where they topple to the evil government and repay all the injustices against them is very strong. But I decided that wasn’t the type of book I wanted to write. This isn’t about being heroes, it’s about surviving. So they are presented as two regular people who possess a normal level of skill. The goal is to write a realistic story, not a self-aggrandizing story about how if given the chance all I would need is a knife and a faithful dog and I could solve the nation’s problems.

Speaking of that, one of the most clever things I think you do in this book is have our perpetually fleeing heroes end up in three different settlement camps of sorts, with one of them being run by far-right conservatives and the other by far-left liberals, and showing how both of them were equal nightmares to our protagonists, just in different ways. [For newsletter people who are curious, the third settlement is a harshly pastoral Luddite matriarchal community out in deep Illinois farmland.] How do you find a good way to talk about politics without making the book itself political?

I think I stuck with the general writing advice of writing about big things in a small manner. DERT isn’t about solving the eternal question on what government is best, it’s about how these characters fit in a changing world.

As I got deeper into the book, it became clearer to me that this was not about politics at all, but about human nature. Our characters are not driven to their respective sides because they feel a certain way about a certain issue, they choose sides because of how they want to be viewed, how they view themselves or what they value. Environmentalism is the core issue in the book, but I think it’s hard to find a character that truly cares about the environment in a real way, instead it’s a tool to make them feel the way they want to feel, to be perceived as they want to be perceived.

Dystopian books are a dime a dozen that rely on the clear-cut tropes of heroic white men who fend off the atheistic hordes with his assault rifle and Bible. But I tried hard to not commit my book to one side or the other, I hope that people of all political persuasion can find something interesting in DERT and how it approaches these topics. It tries to be less manifesto and more discussion.

One of my favorite comedians is Mike Birbiglia, he does these one man shows where he really digs into an important topic (marriage, parenthood, death) and talks about the lessons he has learned. I think what makes his shows connect so well with me is that he doesn’t present the lessons as a lecture about how you should behave, but instead a story of how he learned something. It’s a much more effective tool to share your experience with the audience instead of preaching at them.

You had an unusually long manuscript when you came to me, and in fact one of the things we initially discussed was tightening up the word count. Where did you get your initial numbers for what constitutes a "too long" novel? Did you just feel it yourself, or did early readers tell you? Now that your book is published and has been out a bit, what has the reality been versus what you heard about this subject beforehand? Are you happy with the smaller version, or do you pine for the "Wolfson Cut?"

My goal with a novel when I start is 100K words. If I get over that number, I feel like I’m overachieving, if I fall short it feels like I skimped somewhere.

My personal preference is to shy away from overly descriptive segments. I don’t enjoy reading books that rely heavily on that writing style, I want to get to the point. However, I always worry that it negatively impacts my own writing. I cut things too short, skim over details and end up with chapters that are abrupt and books that don’t feel complete. That’s an ongoing battle that I don’t think I will ever win.

It's really hard when you are writing to look at your work with an honest eye, in my writer’s mind if I wrote it, it must be important. So, I think every story I bring to you as the editor will be a battle of “Is this really necessary?” and “Is that all you wanted to say here?”

I think DERT benefited tremendously from being cut down, especially in the political elements that we just talked about. If it takes half a page to get my point across, then I’m not really getting my point across. So, cutting it down, getting to the point faster and clearer made for a much better read and much clearer statement.

I don’t think there is any benefit to the “Wolfson Cut” of DERT, it’s longer, less concise, and more indulgent. 

One of the things I find extremely interesting about your post-publication marketing campaign is that you tried out these recommendations that usually are only done by self-publishers cranking out fast and cheap genre thrillers exclusively for Kindle Unlimited, where the whole point is to poop out a book every month and then SEO and keyword the hell out of it; yet you wrote much more of what would be called a literary-fiction thriller, something very smart and dense and in the category of books that get discussed on NPR, which is simply never going to happen with Knocked Up by the Billionaire Mobster, as much as I love my romance clients who write those kinds of books. So what happened?! Have you been able to sell a thick, meaty literary thriller using the techniques of the monthly genre quickies? Would you recommend this for other literary writers?

My marketing campaign is guided mostly by trial and error.

When I embarked on my current self-publishing endeavor, I tried to commit myself to being clearsighted about my novel. It’s not a masterpiece, I am not a literary genius and fabulous success is not going to just show up at my doorstep because I got 100K words into a single document. The only way it’s going to have any success is hard work and commitment.

Of course, this desire to be honest leads to a different form of self-delusion. I tried applying genre fiction tactics to my own novel, that doesn’t really fit into that genre. My book is a dystopian tale but doesn’t look anything like the best-selling Kindle books in that category. My desire to be humble told me that if it was working for them, then I needed to follow the trail blazed by the category leaders.

So, it took a while and some guidance from you to accept that my book is different, it fits in the literary fiction category more than it does the relevant Kindle categories.

Of course, the path forward for literary fiction is far murkier than genre fiction, so I’m working on trying to find what can be incorporated into my plan and what I can abandon.

Part of the issue is that when you search out self-publishing help online, it skews heavily to genre fiction tactics, but without the disclaimer of saying that it only applies to certain type of books.

Still, I think trying everything and then figuring out what works is a better strategy than trying to pick and choose to start with. If I had been pickier, I probably wouldn’t have tried anything at all other than some FB post and given up in frustration again. So, I may have wasted a fair amount of time collecting emails of people that will never read my book, but I gain experience and commitment to figuring it out.

What’s worked best is collecting ARC readers via Instagram, I got good reviews for my book and a building block of people interested in reviewing my next novel. For advertising, most of my sales have come from Facebook Ads.

And speaking of this, you've decided to write a sequel! What has that process been like so far, and how much are you worrying in it about catching people up who didn't read the first book? You never give a definitive answer at the end of the first novel as to the ultimate fate of this post-breakup apocalyptic America, where the federal government right now is only really keeping full control over the area of New England immediately surrounding Washington, so there's always an opportunity for an entire "Wolfsonverse" if you wanted. Is that something you've ever thought of doing? Or perhaps porting the concept out into other media like a roleplaying game? How much do you like the idea of adhering to a genre series, and how much of you just wants to move on to an entirely different kind of book?

DERT was a story about marriage and my wife. We were newly engaged when I started writing the story and it was a bit of a love story by the end of it. I conceived the story for the sequel to DERT just before the arrival of my first child. I was working on an edit of DERT and thought about how I would react in a civil war type of situation now that I have a wife and child that depend on me. I love my country and have a strong desire to fight for my values and beliefs, but there is a counter feeling that my first duty is to my family. No matter what faction gains control of the country, my wife and daughter will have a better life if I am alive. How should a man answer that question?

I imagine it as a trilogy, the first book is about the father, second about the mother and third is about the child growing up in this dystopian world. I have the first draft of the first book done. Hoping to have it ready for you soon. It is not a direct sequel; it predates the original DERT in the timeline by a few months.

I do hope to build a bit of a “DERTverse.” So far, I have only told very narrow stories focused on individuals, but I think there is room to expand the direction of the story to include the outcome of the war and the fate of the country.

This book is really the first book I’ve written that is in the same genre as a previous book. I hope to keep writing the stories that inspire me instead of just picking a formula and sticking to it.

And to end things along those same lines, I don't think it hurts to admit that we're currently editing your newest novel as we speak. I'll leave it up to you to decide how much you'll want to talk about it in public while we're still working on it, but I think it's safe to state that it's not connected to the DERT universe at all, and is in fact an entirely different kind of story in a brand-new genre altogether. How does it feel to be actively working on that at the same time you're still marketing and promoting DERT?

My current promotion of DERT is mostly driven by Ads on FB and Amazon, which don’t require much attention. However, I am currently working on writing two new books, I have two other manuscripts that are just waiting around for when I have time to address them and we are editing The Vegas Flop to get it ready for release in May, plus all the work I am trying to do on getting the pieces lined up for a successful release, so my biggest complaint is not enough time.

I really believe that writing also comes first, it’s the easy thing to let slide to another day, but it’s the most important. So, I try to focus on my writing first each day and get done whatever other tasks I have time for, which with two kids isn’t much. I keep hoping I will find a sweet spot of time when I can get ahead on all of my to-do items, but I haven’t gotten there yet.

And then finally, I think I'm going to try an experiment this year and ask all the self-publishing authors I talk with on this newsletter the same two questions, so I can compile the answers at the end of the year and we can compare what everyone had to say. First, could you tell us about something you spent money on that it turned out you shouldn't have or you regret doing, either in making the book or marketing it afterwards? And second, what's something unexpected that's turned out to be a positive or make a big difference?

I spent money and time writing and promoting a sample chapter for DERT. I don’t feel like it made any difference in the overall sales, but I don’t know if it qualifies as a regret because I do think I learned from the experience.

For the unexpected it’s probably the cold call messages I sent out on Instagram looking for ARC reviews. It’s a very small percentage of people that respond and a smaller number that follow through on the reading. But it’s the beginning of my “street team” that are engaged and excited with my work.

My thanks again to Kyle, for taking the time to really show us how the sausage got made with his book. DERT is available this moment at Amazon, and then afterwards you should join me over at Goodreads and post a review. Are you an author who published a book recently? Want to come on the newsletter and talk about it? Drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know!

And as long as I'm here, let me welcome you to the brand-new freelancing website, over at Pettus.rocks! (Yeah I do!) Remember, if you book a job with me through that and remind me you're a newsletter subscriber, you get 25% off your final bill -- all jobs, all bills. This is one of those things I've been saying for an entire year that I'll "one day get around to doing," so let me profusely thank Letitia Henville and the entire staff over at the really admirable "ethical marketing" freelancing consultancy Antihustle.ca, who in the week between Christmas and New Year's invited all their personal friends to an eight-hour, one-day workshop, in which we basically checked in with each other over Zoom once every two hours, but otherwise spent the entire day getting one more big project checked off our lists before the year ended. That's when I built the entire freelancing website, over the course of just one big eight-hour stretch, so I'm grateful to Antihustle for sponsoring this workshop and getting me off my butt. I've got lots of great interviews with fascinating, talented writer clients of mine coming up, so please stop by pettus.rocks/newsletter and sign up for the new version of this newsletter if you still haven't. Talk with you again next Friday! I MEAN IT THIS TIME!!!!!!1!!

More and more horrendous behavior by the company has finally chased me off for good. Today, where and how to sign up for my new newsletter, now controlled directly by me.

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on December 30, 2023, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.

Did you hear? The CEO of Substack recently participated in a particularly horrific public interview, where he proudly admitted that the company profits by taking a share of ad revenue from the newsletters of white supremacists and other violent fascists, calling it a “free speech” issue. I’ve been growing more and more tired of Substack over the last year anyway, as the catastrophe at the Social Network Formerly Known As Twitter has made Substack decide to go chasing after all those angry ex-Twitterers by introducing a bunch of Twitter-like social media elements.

That goes directly against the original message Substack sold when they first convinced “content creators” like me to join; that they were entirely unlike social media, and that this mattered, that the long-form pieces delivered directly to intimate destinations like phones is what leads to thoughtful reading and true engaging in a way little short blasts of dopamine simply can’t. To see the company immediately abandon this concept just the exact first moment they realize they can have a “footprint” in the “social media realm” themselves has been disappointing; but what’s made it intolerable is the executive staff proudly defending the monetization of their company partly through hate speech and calls for systemic violence, which is why I’ve decided it’s time for me to leave.

Thankfully, I just so happen to have recently finished an alternative way to subscribe to my newsletter! That’s because I finally, finally finished my first-ever professional freelancing editor website, located at the hopefully easy to remember Pettus.rocks, where on top of the newsletter you can also find all the details about hiring me, a guide to the self-publishing process for those completely new to it, more about the small press I ran for a decade in the ‘00s and ‘10s, a complete list of all of my services and their prices in advance, and more.

This newsletter you’ve been reading at Substack for the last two years will be moving to that website for good in another four issues, and you can subscribe to the new one anytime by visiting Pettus.rocks/newsletter. (Please note that international law prohibits me from automatically adding your name there myself; you will need to manually add your own name, then afterwards respond to an email and verify that you really do want to join.) After literally decades of letting third-party services host my various mailing lists, going all the way back to Mailchimp at the turn of the millennium, I’m finally taking the advice of an acquaintance of mine, Ernie Smith of journalism newsletter Tedium.co, and taking complete ownership of my mailing list myself, using various outside tech options for verifying addresses, making sure I don’t get marked as spam, and actually composing and sending the individual emails, but otherwise keeping the master list of my subscribers just directly on my own home hard drive.

I’m done handing all this stuff off to faceless corporations who get rich off my efforts, and who can decide to do any ol’ silly stupid fascist Libertarian Tech-Bro thing they want to whenever they want. That’s why I quit all my older “Web 2.0” social networks a year ago too, and have been exclusively on the decentralized open-source Mastodon ever since (warning: my Mastodon account is much dirtier and more smartass than my newsletter). I’m currently hosting my freelancing website at Squarespace, and they maintain the engine that also sends out the emails of my newsletter; but the content of the site, and the master list of recipients, are kept on my hard drive at home, its backup, and the backup’s backup, not at the cloud database of the latest convert to the “Let’s Build One-Percenter Drivable Islands To Get Away From The Poors” club. If Squarespace’s executives ever turn out to be those latest converts, then I can easily walk away from them too, and we’ll just start all over again somewhere else, but now with my master list of recipients and all my newsletter archives with me.

So for now, please stop by Pettus.rocks to join the newsletter before this one shuts down in another four issues, and of course to actually hire me for a job if you feel like it. I’ve spent an entire year saying, “Yeah, one day I should get around to building out my freelancer website,” so I’m grateful to my friends at Antihustle.ca, who recently threw a free eight-hour one-day workshop for their friends in which we all agreed to get one more big thing off our list before the year was through. The newsletter itself will be going through a change in 2024 as well; instead of hugely long issues that I put off for sometimes months at a time, it’ll be just one short item per issue (most of them interviews with recently published clients of mine — drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com if you’ve had a book come out in the last year and would like to talk about it for a future issue), done consistently every Friday afternoon. I look forward to re-engaging with everyone in the new year again, and getting off to a big new foot at a big new online location, with a whole new infrastructure and hopefully some fascinating new developments at that new location still to come (hint — maybe the ability soon to accept credit cards, maybe the ability soon to create Ethereum “smart contracts” …or maybe not!).

Today, my first-ever free gift at my newsletter, a simple yet information-packed guide to writing a winning romance novel proposal

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on June 13, 2023, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.

Oh my goodness, hello to all, and I'm so sorry I haven't updated this newsletter in so long! This is the problem with something like a newsletter that you're not directly making money from, but is just a fun hobby meant to help market and promote your main day job as a book editor; once things with the editing get busy, like they've been this spring, all of that must take priority, sometimes leaving little time for anything else. But oh, I have so many new projects by clients to share with all of you by now, and so many email chats to do with them about what has worked and not worked for them in their own publishing adventures, and I'm dying to have the time to sit down and complete that work and start getting regular issues out to all of you again about my various adventures in the self-publishing world.

For now, though, I'm happy to say that I have my first-ever "free gift" to offer through the newsletter, which I'll also now be sending out in the welcome letter anytime someone new now subscribes. My hope, in fact, is not just to offer one of these free downloads at any given time, but to basically have a whole series of downloads that will build up over time, so that someone subscribing a year from now might get six different free publications the moment they come onboard. In this case, it's something very practical and geared very specifically to people in the romance genre, which as regular subscribers know is something I've found the opportunity to talk about a lot in the last year of my life, ever since getting hired more and more by self-publishing Kindle Unlimited romance authors and thus learning more and more about this fascinating semi-hidden part of the literary industry.

Thanks for reading Jason Pettus, Editor! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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One thing I've discovered in my work so far with publishers is that incoming proposals for new books display wildly different formats, word counts, and prose quality levels, and that there's a need for the serious publisher to be able to provide some guidelines and rules for those who wish to pitch book ideas to them. I've assembled the information I've now learned from rating and assessing close to a hundred of these kinds of romance proposals at this point, to arrive at a combination of information that gets across everything a publisher needs to know, while requiring as little work on the author's part as can be helped. If you're a romance publisher, I encourage you to adopt this format to your own submission process if you want; and if you're a romance writer who's thinking of submitting things to publishers, you give yourself a huge leg up by submitting your proposal in this kind of form, because you won't believe the kind of rambling, unreadable nonsense I sometimes see get pitched to my clients, and you automatically jump up above all these people simply from having a proposal that's tight and makes sense.

You can download the Word file from my Google Drive account by using this link (I think; let me know at ilikejason@gmail.com if you have problems), but I thought I'd go through its small amount of parts here today in this newsletter issue as well, which will also give me the chance to make additional comments about each section. We start with some simple information gathering:

Characters List of every character in the book with a name, what their age is, and briefly how they relate to the other characters. Tropes Romance tropes you plan on using in this book. Please include no more than three.

One of the biggest mistakes I see both romance authors and publishers make is trying to cram in ten different tropes from the genre all into one overly stuffed 50,000-word manuscript. And I know why they do it too, because many guides to self-publishing romance overly emphasize using Big Data! to target Breaking Trends! so they can Search Engine Optimize! it and make sure to show up high in Amazon KU searches on specific kinds of romance novels. That's fine and good, but cramming too many of them together makes it nearly impossible to create a coherent storyline that both follows them all and makes any bit of sense. Don't forget, tropes are the big broad brushstrokes of the genre to begin with, so too many of them become way too much at once; once you have a mafia melodrama with young lovers who were forcibly separated then reunite when older, you don't then also need to add that the male lead character is an improbably young don, and that at a certain point they get locked in a small space together, and oh, did I mention the MLC is a billionaire as well? Oh yeah, and I forgot, the FLC is pregnant, did I not mention that? 

Whew! A little of this stuff goes a long way, so just choose and pick well, and build your story around perhaps two major tropes and maybe a third weird one for comic or erotic effect. Hitting high in Amazon searches is important, but not at the expense of making the story incomprehensible.

Next:

Summary Around 500 words, exact word count not important. Give enough background details for us to understand what the story is about (including genre and setting), then briefly mention every major story beat. This is a different thing than an Amazon description, so feel free to “reveal spoilers” and divulge other important information.

This is the time for the author to very plainly lay out what "happens" in this book. Whoever this is getting pitched to should be able to have a full understanding of the entire book's contents by the end of this, and for it to take no more than 500 words. You are not enticing the person into buying the book here in the same way you're doing so to customers at Amazon, so the summary should not actually sound like an Amazon book synopsis (which old-schoolers also call the "dust jacket copy"). This should instead be a straightforward, spoiler-heavy look at the page-by-page details of the book from start to finish. Don't forget to mention what genre your book is set in, and where and in what time period!

Outline Around 1,000 words, exact word count not important. The same story beats as the summary, but now with more detail, showing us chapter by chapter what events will take place and when exactly they’ll happen. It’s important that the things happening in this outline are the same exact things happening in the summary, so please double-check before submitting a proposal.

Here's the other huge mistake I see in a lot of romance novel proposals, that the events that occur in their proposal's outline don't match the events that occur in the summary. It's the same story, people! The outline is simply the same thing as the summary but now twice as long, which means the author has the time to really detail the chapter-by-chapter rundown of how the entire book will play out, now not just covering story beats but showing us where exactly in what chapter the beat will occur, and how it will actually be described or explained. But the things that happen in the outline should be the same things that happen in the summary, so do yourself a favor and always double-check this before you send a proposal in to a publisher.

First Scene of the Book Around 500 words, exact word count not important. The actual fully written-out final version of the book’s first scene.

Where we see if the proof is in the pudding. 500 actual words from what your final manuscript will look like, which means they better look good.

That's all I personally need as an assessor of romance novel proposals, other than knowing the word count; I don't think any of the other things that many other romance publishers ask for, or that freelance writers voluntarily send in their proposals, are really that necessary. I don't need to know what actors you had in mind when creating this; I don't need to see embedded images of the visual look you have in mind for each of these characters; I don't need a big special separate breakdown of setting and timeframe, as long as you briefly but adequately include it in the summary. That makes these proposals faster to write, faster to read, and faster to judge, which is good for everyone involved all around, and leads more quickly to great writers and great publishers working together for decent pay to produce a solid romance novel its readers will love. Get the wheat separated from the chaff quickly, I say, then spend the majority of your time working with your final choice for writer to produce the best book you possibly can.

Anyway, here again is the download link for the Word version of what you just saw me describe, although do please let me know at ilikejason@gmail.com if you have any problems with that link, since I'm basically just hosting this file at my Google Drive and using the "share" parameters they're claiming there I should use. This link will now also be sent in the welcome email every time someone new subscribes to the newsletter; so if a friend wants a copy for themselves, feel free to recommend they subscribe!

Book Reviews: Busy Spring Edition

Ooh, at least lots of book reviews to share with you since the last update, including:

Amy Schneider's Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction, which I found to be a good basic guide for someone who might not know the first thing about the subject, but not all that useful to someone like me already doing it 40 hours a week;

Ben Riggs' Slaying the Dragon, which wow, was just one of the more entertaining nonfiction reads I've had this year, detailing the endless trainwreck that happened at TSR (former owners of Dungeons & Dragons) in the ten years between forcing out Gary Gygax and a near-bankrupt company getting bought out by their rival, Wizards of the Coast;

J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, part of my completist look at this weirdo sci-fi/horror/erotic author who had such a huge influence over Postmodernism;

Alvin Toffler's 1970 Future Shock, in which I revisit this famous "futurist" fortune-telling book and see if his predictions about the coming "new world order" came true here in the 2020s, half a century later;

Bridget Collins' The Binding, an earlier and simpler novel by the author of the beguiling slipstream story The Betrayals I read and loved a year ago;

Jack Donovan's popular and widely shared alt-right masculinity guide The Way of Men, extra-interesting to look at now that Donovan has largely distanced himself from the alt-right movement;

M. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, considered a classic but that I found disappointing, a novel supposedly about the young disaffected people of the 1920s Jazz Age, but written in the 1940s by someone who was already an old man even back when the '20s happened;

Lee Child's Jack Reacher story Running Blind, the opening salvo of this year's "Long Summer" reading challenge, in which I try to finish 52 books in 26 weeks and concentrate on "easy reads" like beach and airport novels;

Jim Thompson's 1963 ultra-black noir classic The Grifters, part of not only my summer reading challenge but my larger Great Completist Challenge;

This year's co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Hernan Diaz's Trust, which I had high hopes for but just turned out to be another RPB novel (that is, "Rich People Bad!!!!!!!1!!");

And Gregory Mcdonald's classic Fletch's Fortune, the third book in the long-running series about the wiseass investigative reporter who solves crimes, after being reminded of these novels by watching the great new Hollywood adaptation of the second book starring a pitch-perfect Jon Hamm.

I have only a couple of Reddit ESL questions to share with you at this point, so I think I'll just save them and include them in the next issue. That means I'm pretty much done with the updates this issue, except just to remind you as always that my shingle is open and I'm ready to be hired for your next project, if the details can be worked out. Remember, if you hire me directly through email (as opposed to a third-party service like Upwork) and remind me that you're subscribed to the newsletter, you automatically get 25 percent taken off your final bill -- any job, any bill. I'm also very happy to be hired through Upwork, so if you prefer that means of setting up our contract, by all means feel free to contact me over there!

In the next issue, the long-delayed talk with my client Jeff Rosen about his remarkable new '70s heavy-metal coming-of-age novel The Nothing Brothers, remarkable precisely because he wrote the first draft as an actual young man going through the events in the 1970s, then stuck it in a drawer and only got out again recently, almost fifty years later, to polish up and finally publish. It has the kind of crisp, startling verisimilitude that only comes from being written by someone who was a first-hand witness to the events, and it's turned out to be one of the most enjoyable books I've ever worked on as a freelancer. Please keep an eye out for that in another two weeks (fingers crossed), and of course let me know of your own upcoming project (or anything else you want to talk about) by dropping me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com. Hope your month is going better than the five-week case of the summer flu I recently caught here in Chicago! What a bummer way to celebrate the tiny little slice of the year here when we get perfect weather!

Plus: The latest book reviews at Goodreads, and a look ahead to the interesting titles I'll be reviewing soon

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on February 3, 2023, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.

Over the holidays I dropped a line to most of my past freelance clients, getting caught up with how they were doing and seeing if they might want to have their project featured here in the newsletter in 2023. (Are you an author as well, with a new project you'd like to talk about? Drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know!) I heard back from about eight or ten people, and I'm happy today to be doing the first such feature, of romance/erotica author Kay Freeman. Kay was the first romance author I had a chance to start working regularly with, about six months or so ago at this point, after having lots of one-off experiences in the years prior with romance authors here and there. She specializes in BDSM stories, regarding topics having to do with domination and submission, bondage and ritualized sex play, but with tales ultimately about relationships and that thus classifies her books under the traditional label of “romance.” (There's a lot of bleeding between story types within the world of romance novels, I've discovered; there are Western romances, sci-fi romances, graphically pornographic romances, clean Christian romances, and on and on.) 

After signing her first trilogy to the traditional publisher The Wild Rose Press (the first book in that finally comes out this spring), Kay's been focusing a lot more with her latest books on putting them out herself, so that she has a fine-tuned control over their details and especially the kinds of promotional campaigns and other marketing efforts she participates in. I've found it fascinating as her editor to watch and observe all the various tools and mechanisms now available in this heavily saturated, highly mature genre of publishing, and I'm really glad to see her first potential breakout book finally coming out in another couple of weeks (but more on this later), now curious to see whether all the work she's done at promotional websites like BookFunnel are going to pay off. Kay and I recently gabbed about all kinds of subjects over email, the transcript of which I'm including below. My many thanks to her for putting aside the time to chat!

Kay, I think you'd agree with me that you haven't yet achieved "literary superstar" status, but you HAVE published what's now close to half a dozen books without going broke, and have amassed your first awards, your first high scores at Amazon, and your first passionate fans in a relatively short amount of time. Assuming that many of this newsletter's readers are fellow publishing professionals who already understand the basics, what's one of the more important advanced lessons you've learned about the publishing process only by actually publishing multiple books now?

I just now have three books on preorder so I can’t comment on reviews, but my book Hitman’s Honey is getting high marks and is downloaded more than many other free books and people are clamoring for a second so I must have done something right. I just sent some ARC outs and signed up with Booksprout to get book reviews. I think the best advice I can give is to make the first book your best book, whether you give it away or sell it, make it as strong as you can. Even if you have to wait longer to get it out, don’t feel rushed. I think there’s lot of pressure when seeing all these authors turning out books in four months but what you don’t understand is that some of them have been writing for ten years and/or it's a fifth book in a series, based on a trope, and it's a 30,000 word book. They can afford to have a dud because they have followers who read their books. You don’t. The competition for someone just starting out now is intense. Every day thousands of books get released. Can your book compete with all these other books? The answer needs to be yes.

I love that you're an active participant in the Romance Writers of America. What benefits does a group like that (or the events they sponsor) provide, and what's the nonsense you'd rather do without? Is it really like that " Fake Death in Romancelandia " article in the New York Times that's become so notorious in the literary world this month? 

RWA is an essential group to join. They offer the RAMP program which matches would-be romance authors with professionally published ones who help you with your manuscript, and also the Pen to Paper program. They also have a conference every year with valuable workshops. They also have all kinds of online workshops. I also belong to two other online organizations that I enjoy, Contemporary Romance Writers and Passionate Ink.

You've published traditionally now with a small press, and you've self-published as well. Which is more satisfying? Do the extra responsibilities and duties of self-publishing equal the extra rewards? 

I think when you’re first starting out, you are a bit overwhelmed and the marketing in particular is something I did not want to take on by myself. Unfortunately, most small presses do not have the employees to do much for you either. Most likely you will have to do most of the marketing for yourself, whether you go with a small press or self-publish, but a small press will educate you and show you the ropes. As you begin to learn more you begin to want more control over your covers and other things and want to spread your wings. This is where self-publishing comes into play. If you do go with a small press, make sure you know the cost of books and who holds the rights to translation, movies and audio. I would say in the future I anticipate a hybrid approach.

One thing that's really struck me about the BDSM erotica romance novels you publish is how densely they get into the mental issues surrounding domination and submission, when so many other erotic novels in Kindle Unlimited are simply about the activities. I also really admire how much you examine the negative mental things that might come with a BDSM lifestyle, like how some subs might develop an unhealthy obsession on constantly needing someone around to fix all their problems, maybe even manifested sometimes in OCD behavior like the protagonist of your newest book. How deliberate is it of you to want these kinds of elements in your novels? What do you think is the right balance between mind games and graphic descriptions when it comes to literary erotica?

All good characters are flawed in some way and believe it or not, some people are drawn to that BDSM lifestyle to heal, they find it cathartic. A Dom once told me that a sub is actually the one in control, because at any point they are the ones who can bring the whole thing to a halt. They are the person who decides whether to submit or not. My next book does not have a strong BDSM element; although it's mentioned, that is not the power dynamic between the couple. I believe The Devil You Know has the strongest “mind games” element of any of the books I’ve written, because it has a male who at one time had been a slave himself.

Tell us briefly about what marketing efforts you're putting towards your books right now. I know, for example, that you've had some pretty good successes at BookFunnel.com , and that you seem to be happy with a service called Draft2Digital . Are you running any traditional ads at the Kindle Store? Related, I know you've been to some live events at this point as well. What are these like, and how important do you find them to your career, compared to the things you can do exclusively online?

BookFunnel has been a godsend for me and has helped get the ball rolling,and for those getting started and don’t have much of a mailing list, it’s a good way to start. I put my Hitman’s Honey book on and offered it for free. I’ve run three promos and my mailing list is up to 370 names. I started with 42. I plan to also use BookFunnel to sell some of my other books because they also sell books on BookFunnel. Draft2Digital is good for turning your book into an epub so you can put it on BookFunnel and then if you want to publish it to an ebook they can distribute to Kobe, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, etc. Although they can also distribute it to Amazon, you would be better off doing this yourself. Draft2Digital also does audio. I am not doing Kindle Select, I am publishing wide and I am not doing any advertising on Amazon. I’ve heard of many authors going broke on there. I am exploring my options now, but most likely I will advertise on Google, where I have my books, Pinterest and Facebook.

I'm pretty sure you're offering your books through the Kindle Unlimited program, but are you also selling them as standalone books in the Kindle Store? You've also so far eschewed all paperback opportunities; is that a permanent policy, or are you waiting until you have a manuscript at a more substantial word count? (Kindle-exclusive genre novels tend to clock in around the 50,000-word mark, which would make for an extremely small paperback.) How are most of the copies of your books getting into your readers' hands? 

No, I’m not doing Kindle Unlimited. I’m very frightened of Amazon’s power and ability of taking a book and deciding a book is “erotica” and if they decide it is this, it basically disappears. Why should I give them total control over a book I’ve put sweat and tears into? No way. They are the gorilla in the room, but there are other smaller gorillas I’m willing to play with. By involving myself with Draft2Digital to distribute to most of the others, it takes much of the work off of me, leaving me Amazon and Google Books. When I do the second of each series of a book, I’ll do a printed version. I plan to do audio too, and explore translations at this point. My publisher is doing the digital and printed version, and I’m doing an audio version.

What's a lesson about self-publishing you had to waste a lot of time or a lot of money on learning? 

Don’t buy every course that comes down the pike that says that they have the answer to how to write a bestseller. If they did, they’d be writing a bestseller.

My thanks again to Kay for these really revealing and informative statistics about her work as a self-publisher, which I hope will help provide some good advice to all you fellow self-publishers out there. Her third novel, the particularly intensely psychological BDSM tale The Devil You Know, comes out this February 15th, deliberately the day after Valentine's Day. Take my recommendation for what it's worth (don't forget that I got paid to work on this), but I think it's fantastic, a really probing look at so many of the mental issues that come along with attempting to live a BDSM lifestyle, couched within an exciting urban thriller set here in Chicago where I actually live (and including nice insider details such as the main BDSM house being located in a Gothic-looking old mansion in the Hawthorne Place one-block historic district along an obscure street on the city's northside). The best way to learn about its release details is by joining her newsletter, which you can do over at her personal website at kaylaafreeman.com. She also has a more "making the sausage" type newsletter about writing erotica, similar to mine, here at Substack, or of course you can visit her Amazon author page for the latest as well. If you have a book that's recently come out or is about to, and you'd be interested in discussing the highs and lows of putting it out yourself (or what it was like to send it to off to a press), drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know!

The Latest Reviews: It’s All The Gold Standard’s Fault Edition

I’ve been talking a lot here at my newsletter recently about my romance freelance clients, but not all my clients are romance authors! For example, I’m working with the author of a dystopian day-after-tomorrow thriller right now too, and he mentioned during a recent chat how one of the inspirations for his was a similar book by Lionel Shriver (of We Need to Talk About Kevin fame) entitled The Mandibles; so I ended up checking that out of the library and reading that in the last couple of weeks, which I of course loved in a chilling, terrifying way. Spoiler alert: The world destroys itself ultimately because of going off the gold standard in the 1970s! Yeah, it’s one of those kinds of books!

That was it as far as book reviews in the last two weeks, in what was otherwise a really busy period of too much work and some traveling to do in the middle of it too; but now that things are settling down finally, I really hope to throw myself heavily into reading and reviewing for the remainder of this winter, where I have such tantalizing titles coming up as…

George Saunders’ lessons about literature as seen through 1800s Russian novels, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain;

My first-ever read of Margaret Mitchell’s perennially controversial Gone With the Wind;

A re-read of John Jay Osborn’s The Paper Chase and The Associates on the occasion of his recent death;

A “What Did He Get Right?” examination of Alvin Toffler’s infamous 1970 technology prediction book Future Shock;

An entire re-read of CS Lewis’ seven-book “Chronicles of Narnia;”

The book version of the New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning re-examination of American history through the lens of slavery, The 1619 Project;

Some really high-level science-fiction such as Mark Geston’s Lords of the Starship and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (with thanks as always to Tor.com’s blog for the recommendations);

My official addition of Agatha Christie to my Great Completist Challenge with 1920’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles;

The infamously “reverse-published” biography of Philip Roth written by Blake Bailey;

The latest by Lauren Groff, Jonathan Franzen and Colson Whitehead;

And of course a ton of romance novels in between them all.

I hope you’re looking as forward to that as I am! So until my next issue in another two weeks, let me finish today by humbly reminding you that my shingle is officially hung out as a freelance book editor right now, and that I’m currently accepting assignments for any new manuscripts you might have on your hands. As always, don’t forget that if you’re subscribing to the newsletter at the moment you book a job with me (don’t forget to remind me when you contact me), you get 25% off your total bill, no matter what the job. No complicated web form you have to go through to get ahold of me; simply drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com if you’d like to book a job directly with me, or stop by Upwork or Gatekeeper Press if you’d prefer to book me through a third-party service like theirs. I’ll talk with you again in another couple of weeks!

Plus, 10 pieces of practical advice I've now learned about writing romance novels; and links to all the romance reviews I've recently been writing

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on January 20, 2023, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.

Hello and happy new year! A whole lot of new people have signed up for this newsletter since its last issue way back in October, so let me take a moment and reintroduce myself. I'm Jason Pettus, a freelance book editor and former small-press owner based out of Chicago, and this newsletter is my way of gathering a literary community around me and my editing work, despite the fact that I don't work for a traditional press anymore and can't build a community around me in that more traditional way. I mostly use it to highlight my clients and other newsletter subscribers who are authors or publishers, bringing some attention to a new project worth your time while also getting their opinions on what worked for them from a marketing and business standpoint and what didn't. 

On weeks I don't have a profile like that, I then share a long essay I've written about some sort of literary issue or another, whether that's writing advice, advice about the business of publishing, or tips on how to become a paid freelance book editor yourself. I also share links to all my latest book reviews at Goodreads, because I write a lot of them; and then I also share the most interesting questions I've come across since the last newsletter among English as a Second Language students over at Reddit, within subreddits full of clever questions such as r/WhatsTheWord. I'm shooting for a new issue once every other Friday in 2023, but I've already missed one deadline and we haven't even finished January yet, so that lets you know what that number will probably be like by the time we reach the end of this year.

I've had a really interesting development in my professional life since the last issue, which is that I'm starting to pick up a large number of new clients who are specifically romance novelists, and who specifically try to write a quick 50,000-word story once a month for sale exclusively at Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program. As we've discussed in previous issues, this is where you pay 10 bucks a month and then have unlimited access to several million titles in the Kindle Store, encouraged to get through as many of them as you possibly can in those 30 days, and then Amazon takes all those 10-dollar subscriptions, adds together the collective royalties, then disperses them through algorithmic-derived percentages based on how many pages of your book got read that month by Kindle Unlimited's several million members. 

KU struggled when it first opened, because what rapidly became clear is that the program doesn't actually contain any mainstream books whatsoever, which means you won't get anything off your actual reading list through KU, or find any popular titles at all; indie lit in particular does horrible in the KU program, and when I tried it as a small press owner back in the mid-2010s, I was only making cents per book each month, in the style of an unknown singer with a non-existent audience uploading their songs at Spotify. But what I've learned from a growing amount of my genre clients here in the 2020s is that they're actually making so much from those percentage-based payouts from the entire KU subscriber base, it's essentially the same kind of money as if they were selling them in a traditional way, one copy at a time to one reader at a time. Apparently a lot of other people discovered that at the same time, and now a little more mature KU program has finally found its stride, now promoting itself as a home for genres whose fans are particularly known for reading an entire book per day because their fandom is so passionate (in other words, genres like crime, young adult, science-fiction, fantasy, romance and women's erotica, among others), and creating an entire cottage industry now of part-time genre authors who are cranking out Kindle-exclusive titles for almost no money at all (by making smart business decisions like buying premade covers for cheap, having their fans proofread and beta-read the final version, etc.), which means that the profit margin on this digital intellectual property is almost 100%, the only "cost" being the brain-hours of sitting down and writing the 50,000-word story that month in the first place.

I gotta say, it's a fascinating world, and I find myself falling more and more into this rabbit hole of publishing that so few industry professionals understand or even maybe know exist. So that's had me reading a bunch of romance novels myself (11 in the last 20 days, in fact), all of which I've written reviews for, which I'll link to at the end of today's issue, because I'm trying to study up on the genre as much as I can so that I can be of the most help possible as a "storytelling expert" to my existing and coming romance clients. That's had me thinking about the "rules" and "tropes" and "traditions" of this genre as well, and I've come up with for now (and probably more in the future) ten very specific pieces of advice for all romance novelists that will hopefully improve their books, no matter which specific subgenre within romance they write in (but more on this in a moment). 

I also have a chat with one of these clients, the BDSM and "outlaw biker romance" specialist Kay Freeman, coming in the next issue, as well as a whole bunch of other great talks in the coming weeks with clients with recently completed projects (I heard from something like seven or eight of them over the holidays expressing an interest, after I sent out a feeler to everyone around Thanksgiving; to let me know of your own interest in having your project featured here in this industry-heavy newsletter, especially your willingness to talk about what worked for you and what didn't from a financial, business and marketing standpoint, drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com). For now, though, let me leave you with...

How to Write a Great Romance Novel Without Needing to Stick to a Script10 pieces of practical advice that transcend specific subgenres

1. The cardinal, most important rule in romance writing, one that must be present in every book that exists no matter what its subtype, is that there must be longing, in whatever way this manifests. The frisson that always makes romance interesting (in fiction and in real life) is the uncomfortableness of wanting something badly and not getting it, and so it's this sensation that provides the fuel that makes the engine of a romance story's three-act structure run efficiently. So in a Regency romance, for example, perhaps this longing is a chaste kind, smoky glances across the ballroom while the Mozart minuet politely plays in the background. Or in an erotic story, perhaps it's more literally that the main character really wants it badly (you know, it), but hasn't yet gotten it (you know, it!). Or perhaps it's a contemporary human interest dramedy, and the object of our protagonist's desire is married or lives halfway across the world, or maybe is known only through social media, or maybe is the owner of a rival business who the protagonist is actually in a fight with, etc. etc. No matter how it's manifesting, it's this yearning for the thing they don't have that sets the heart on fire of any romance fan, and it's for this reason that they're ultimately reading, no matter which subtype of romance they like the most.

2. The cardinal, most important rule in any writing, no matter what the genre, is that the story must be fueled by conflict, as much as possible and as often as possible. Conflict drives storytelling, pure and simple, and anytime you've ever come across a story that seems to drag in the middle, that's always because there aren't enough problems going on or enough trouble happening. That's what makes the best romance books so gripping, because longing and conflict are closely related concepts, so combining them in the perfect way produces a story as tempting as crack, and gets you lots of happy "addicts" who will gladly come back month after month for more.

3. Your romance story can really benefit by making the first half a "will they won't they" (WTWT) tale of flirtation, whether that's clever and funny in nature or serious and intense. Although your readers will already know that the chances are most likely the couple will end the story "happily ever after" (HEA), they'll still enjoy pretending at the start that this isn't a foregone conclusion, if you write these early scenes with the strong combined sense of longing and conflict mentioned above. This also gels with a common storytelling rule that at least I believe in, and I suspect many other people believe in as well; that in a typical three-act novel, the halfway point is where it's revealed what the story is really about. In romance, this is primarily about a couple trying to get together and make a relationship work, hopefully living happily ever after—so the 50% point would be where it's officially revealed that the two people are going to try to make it as a couple, whether that's just a mental promise at that point or the couple has actually gotten together by then, whether they've declared it to each other or only in their own heads so far. The second half of the story, then, is about all the conflicts that might keep their relationship from working out, leading to the climax, the resolution, and the HEA. 

4. If your erotic dialogue sounds like it could be convincingly said by a frat bro, leave it out of a romance novel. There's nothing wrong with aggressive sexual language, but there's a way to do it that's not inherently insulting, abusive and dimwitted. If you can picture two young straight white males high-fiving each other after saying it, then rewrite it.

5. Unless you're specifically writing something like a "Kindle Single" that everyone knows in advance is just a short story being sold as a standalone ebook, make sure your romance story has a full three-act structure and interesting plot. Googly-eyes and long sighs do not an effective novel make on their own; no matter what the storyline, it still has to be an interesting one for the book to be an interesting read. Romance is like crime fiction in this regard, in that either can be set within a large selection of broader genres, like Westerns, sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction, and a lot more.

6.  Romance books are deliberately supposed to be outrageous and over the top. There, I said it. That doesn't mean you can't write realistic character dramas set in contemporary times within the genre, but just that any tropes featured in that subtype should be cranked up to eleven, even if that's only the intensity of the emotions. But of course, much more common in romance is the outrageous types of details that are truly outrageous, whether those are mafia stories or outlaw biker ones (specialties of two actual clients of mine), ones set in fantasy worlds or sometimes science-fiction ones, or perhaps Gor-type "Conan the Barbarian"-esque environments that cleverly combine the two. Don't be afraid to turn everything up to eleven in your own romance stories or women's erotica; that's exactly where you should be with it.

7. Embrace the details of whatever milieu you've chosen to set your story in, to the extent of perhaps hiring someone just to do fact-checking of your stories and a listen to whether dialogue sounds period-specific. A romance set in a specific time and place needs to primarily be a story about that time and place, with the romantic elements added as a bonus on top; but no amount of heaving bosoms in the world will save a Western or Regency story that contains modern slang or inaccurate descriptions of clothing. 

8. The men in romance novels are a perfect combination of everything a woman ever wants a man to be, traits displayed only one at a time at the exact best moments for the woman to witness them—forceful and sexually aggressive one moment, reticent and intimate the next, a slave to traditional gender norms who nonetheless has a progressive view of women's rights, and who inherently understands regarding any particular issue in a woman's life which side he should come down on and which exact right moment in her life he should do so, almost as if having the magical ability to read her mind 24 hours a day. (Jesus, no wonder dating in your twenties is so difficult.) Is that fair to the hundreds of millions of actual men who actually live in the real world, who mostly try to do what's right but could never in reality be the everyman for every occasion at the exact right moment like a mind-reader? No, of course not, which is why 95% of the audience for romantic fiction is women. Great romance authors get this, and take pains to make their male romantic heroes not this type of guy or that type, but rather every guy for every occasion who can slip in and out of roles at the exact right moment for our female romantic hero to most be impressed, attracted or aroused by, depending on the occasion.

9. Stop thinking that your free introductory book, the one you give out in return for people joining your newsletter (known in marketing-speak as an author's "lead magnet"), should be your worst or your smallest book of your whole oeuvre. If this is to be the very first thing a new reader of yours reads, and will be the sole determinant of whether they stick around for more and eventually become a fan, you should be offering the best book of your career, not your worst or slimmest. 

10. If all else fails, have the MLC (male lead character) wash the hair of the FLC (female lead character) in the bathtub. Ladies love it when their boyfriend washes their hair—it's so far shown up literally in 100% of the books I've now read, 11 out of 11, no matter which subgenre it fit in, whether the tamest clean Christian romance or the darkest "reverse harem" graphic pornography. Ladies love it when their boyfriend washes their hair. Yeah, guys, I don't get it either.

This Week's Reviews: Romance (The Genre) Is In The Air Edition

I wasn't kidding about all the romance novel reviews! Here's them all! I'm trying to add at least one piece of practical advice about writing romance fiction inside each review, because I've been thinking about releasing a whole book of them at a certain point and selling it specifically as an advice book to romance novelists. I'll break them down by type for you below, because that's a crucial part of understanding this genre, is understanding that the tropes are both so standard and so unique by now that often books just lead with this information before ever even mentioning the title or synopsis, and so it's been broken down into an infinite amount of pithy terms and abbreviations. I'm going to list these according to my scores, high to low...

Cecelia Mecca's The Blacksmith is historical fiction, set in the Robin Hood "Evil King John" period of 1200s England. It's great, because first and foremost it's a great Game Of Thrones-like tale, and only a great romance afterwards. It's also known as an "instalove" book, in that when the FLC first meets the MLC, their hearts both instantly go aflutter and they find themselves instantly falling in love with each other.

Drusilla Swan's Sold to the Master Vampire is one of two erotica tales I've now read that got 5 stars purely from how filthy and prurient the sex scenes are. People, there's a lot of darkness going on in the world of women's erotica that you know nothing about. A Joss Whedon-worthy universe and mythos, married to X-rated sex scenes often involving terrified former mousy secretaries now being kept against their will in cold, dark vampire sex prisons. Yeah, she went there!

Lexi Lovejoy's Knocked Up By the Dom is the first of my romance freelance clients to get a book actually published and out (or at least the first who has explicitly given me permission to mention her publicly; never forget, a good 70% of the books I edit each year are done under a confidentiality clause, meaning I'm not allowed to mention the author or title by name in public), so, professional disclosure, of course I'm going to think highly of it. But seriously, it's great! Deliberately outrageous "mafia fairytale" that all of you who are into romance for its over-the-top elements will love, love, love.

Lizzy Bequin's Their Human Vessel is the other title getting 5 stars merely from the quality of the sex scenes, in this case an ultra-prurient genre I wouldn't have even thought existed in woman-focused books, basically a way to safely engage in dark fantasies about aggressive group sex by imagining the male leads as paranormal creatures who are "driven" to "breed" with whatever "mate" happens to be closest, but is also a nice and caring guy and so will without a doubt wash her hair in the bathtub after the aggressive group sex is over (known alternatively in RomanceLand as "reverse harem" stories, "fated mates," "why choose," "compelled to breed," "imprinting," "knotting," "dubious consent," "the omegaverse," and even more, depending on which aspect is being emphasized, how intense the sex is, if there is or isn’t hunky eight-foot-tall blue-skinned aliens involved, etc.). Unfortunately, her follow-up, Wounded Omega, wasn't nearly as fun, basically a scaled-back, tamer and less logical version of the previous title.

Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty is pretty good, but in hindsight I can see is also not outrageous enough for its outre concept: A model and Hollywood wannabe agrees to be Harvey Weinstein's sex slave during a week-long yacht cruise, but a shipwreck flings her together with a hulking, barely literate worker on the ship, who blackmails her into having rough, humiliating sex in return for his protection against both wild nature and the fellow castaway Weinstein creeps down at the beach.

Jane O'Roarke's unwieldy Eve Of The Fae: The Beginning: Thea is frustrating, because what's there is actually a quite well-done genre thriller, doing a lot of world- and mythos-building to present us an interesting and complex small town full of secrets; but since O'Roarke meant it as a lead magnet title, she actually writes it as a giant book-length first act to the coming trilogy, meaning no actual plot development here and not even the introduction yet of the MLC. 

Ginger Busch's Dirty Americano, Ellis O. Day's The Voyeur, and Victoria Lewis's Wild Nights all suffer from a similar problem: all of them designed to be lead magnets themselves, the problem here is that they're simply too small, presenting just one erotic scene and with a little bit of exposition slapped onto the front of it, basically like taking a Penthouse letter and publishing it as a 99-cent Kindle ebook. That's fine if that's what you're looking for (and makes especially strong financial sense for a subscription service like Kindle Unlimited), but is just not my cup of tea, especially since most of these ultra-quick, ultra-cheap titles are only written in a mediocre way to begin with.

And finally, Pearl Tate's Mate Exposed is a lot like Bequin's Their Human Vessel in terms of subject matter, but handles the setting worse, doesn't go far enough with her aggressive blue-skinned aliens, and provides way too complicated a backstory to explain the frenetic amount of things going on.

And of course, let's not forget the questions I'm always answering from ESL students over at Reddit! This is a particularly great place to answer questions about English usage, because they're...you know, Redditors, clever and funny teenagers from around the world who ask clever and funny questions about the English language, and how native speakers might put things in that language. Here are the most thought-provoking discussions I've participated in since the last issue:

Can you think of another kinda old-fashiony term like "lousy with money" only without using the word "lousy?"

Why would someone use the term "coloring inside the lines" to describe a person's personality?

What's the difference between "respectively" and "respectfully?"

Do Americans really say "but I digress" in casual conversations?

Is the exclamation "What a time to be alive!" meant to be sincere or sarcastic?

How do you express that someone has quickly stopped by a house but without going in?

What's the difference between "title case" and "title style?"

Isn't there some famous American idiom for when something good comes from a bad thing?

What's a way to describe someone who cares too much about something that doesn't really matter?

If melancholy means sadness without any real reason, what's the word for happiness of the same kind?

What's it called when you binge-watch emotional or tearjerking videos in order to induce a crying session?

What's the word you use to describe the whipping of a blanket so hard that it makes a cracking sound?

That's it for this week, except of course as always to remind you that I'm accepting jobs as a freelancer right now, so please feel free to reach out if you're currently finishing up a manuscript and would like me to help you target and fix all its problems before self-publishing or sending to agents. I charge 1 cent per word for developmental editing, another 1 cent per word for copy editing (2 cents per word if you need both), for most situations with self-publishing authors. Don't forget, if you remind me that you're a newsletter subscriber when you book a job directly with me (as opposed to a third-party service like Upwork or Gatekeeper Press, which you can book me through too if you want, I don't mind), you automatically get 25% off your final bill, all subscribers and all jobs. It's my way of providing a substantial thank-you to people who continue subscribing and reading each issue, instead of just one free thing when you sign up and then nothing again. Booking a job with me is as simple as just sending me an email, no big online form-based complicated procedure required. No matter what the subject, I look forward to speaking with you over at ilikejason@gmail.com.

Plus: A look at the surprising 150-year history of the idiom "ain't no such thing as a free lunch;" and the usual reviews and questions from ESL Redditors

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on October 7, 2022, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.

Leland Cheuk of 7.13 Books on Indie Lit, Query Submitting and More

I guess I don’t technically have to ethically disclose that I was actually the first publisher of Leland Cheuk’s debut novel, the uproariously hilarious dark comedy The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, which I put out through the now shuttered Chicago Center for Literature and Photography; but I actually love disclosing that fact anyway, because I was very proud to have Leland’s book in my catalog, a clever and unexpected tale about The Most Dysfunctional Asian American Family In Human History. It brings a welcome sense of absurdity and outrageousness to this often overly earnest community in a way that wouldn’t be seen again until the recent Everything Everywhere All At Once, and it’s no wonder that it picked up a strong cult following that has led in subsequent years to Leland’s first mainstream national successes in places like VICE and NPR.

Leland was also one of the most socially active authors in the CCLaP catalog, perhaps only beaten by The Hardest Working Man In Show Business, Mister Ben Tanzer (but hopefully we’ll be talking with him more about this in another issue soon); so it’s also no wonder that when my press closed and my authors were required to find new fates for their books, Leland would decide to just start his own indie press called 7.13 Books in the style of mine and others, where the main focus is not on easily marketable titles but on finding truly great books, ones that don’t pander to the usual totebag crowd but offer legitimately challenging, legitimately thought-provoking stories and ideas. Now that it’s been up and running for a bit, I thought it’d be a great time to check in with Leland and see how things are going, and also have him share with all us some of the lessons he’s now learned about the business side of putting out books, as well as what it’s like to now be reading query letters instead of sending them. Our email conversation is below, so let me thank Leland very much for taking the time to participate.

You famously started an indie press after first writing and publishing a novel yourself. I imagine many of my subscribers have thought about doing this too. What's the most unexpected thing you've learned, now that you've been up and going for several years now?

I don’t know about “famously,” but I’ll take it. As strange as it is to say, I think the most unexpecting thing I’ve learned is that a lot of people care about writing and love literature, a word that means different things to different people. You’d think that, with how much we’re all on our screens with streaming services, more folks would be dying to write screenplays, but it seems that if someone wants to be creative and tell a story with words, people still want to write a book.  

You have a pretty incredible list of media mentions already—NPR, the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Buzzfeed, Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and even more. How did an indie press like yours pull this off? More specifically, are there any basic lessons that anyone could learn and repeat for similar success?

It’s also been a surprise to see the trade reviewers review our books. You hear that they won’t review small, print-on-demand presses, but we haven’t had an issue with that. I just follow the same submission guidelines as the large presses. We get galleys ready 4-6 months ahead of the publication date and put it in the mail. I think if the book looks good and has a solid blurb or two on it and a professional looking press sheet, it has a shot.

As for the national outlets, I really rely on my authors to get there. I send them a simple 2-page book marketing guide on how to get reviews, interviews, and bookstore events. Usually, it starts with making a list of writers the author knows who can help, not just writers who can blurb the book, but freelancers who might be willing to pitch a review somewhere. I’m a book reviewer for these outlets so I know how the sausage gets made. For every full-time-employed critic like Ron Charles at the Washington Post, there are hundreds of freelancers like me.

A big thing we often talk about at the newsletter is the realistic amount of money an indie-lit person needs to pull off a commercial success, and how long you can go before you absolutely need that money back. Without needing to go into specific numbers if you don't want to, what's been your general experience with this subject at 7.13? How much does your marketing rely on traditional ads at Amazon and Audible, for example? Do you participate in the Kindle Unlimited program? Do sales to public libraries account for a significant amount of your revenue?

Publishing at the scale of 7.13 Books, where we’re doing 2-5 books a year, is at best a breakeven business—you know this well, Jason, from your experience with CCLaP. I make my money back on about a quarter of my books. I don’t pay for advertising or Kindle Unlimited, and I don’t pay myself or anyone associated with the press. We seem to sell some to libraries but not much. Without a national distributor like the Ingram-owned companies, it’s tough to get into bookstores and libraries at any sort of scale no matter what trade reviews you get. And because we do so few books a year, it’s tough to get a national distributor interested in putting a sales rep behind you. A lot of small presses that are with national distributors complain about being in debt.

My experience with a distributor for a year was a money-losing one. We sold twice as many books, but once all the fees came in and you factored in the shipping costs of doing a print-run, we were spending three times as much, so we actually lost more money than ever by selling more books than ever. [JP: This was the biggest factor behind my own press going out of business too, my experiences with the traditional system of physical distributors and brick-and-mortar bookstores, run so wonkily that it leaves you owing money even after you’ve sold thousands of books. This will be the standalone subject of another newsletter soon!]

You yourself are a popular, widely read author, published in such hipster places as VICE, The Millions, The Rumpus, Salon, etc. You're also young(ish), very social, tech-savvy, and part of an already strong community based on race (in your case, Asian American). How much are these things absolutely needed for 7.13's success, do you think, and how much of it is just fun byproducts of being heavily involved in the literary community? 

First of all, thanks for calling me young(ish) and popular because I don’t feel either. I think starting a press is about building your own little literary community, and as that grows, you get to know more creative people. My writing life is mostly separate from my publishing life. Where they intersect is that everyone in the literary community loves a publisher. Being a publisher is like being automatically elevated to literary sainthood. It’s not just because writers want to get published. It’s because I think we all know how frail and generally unprofitable this art form can be. And yet there’s this huge community that cares deeply about books. Literature resists the logic of capitalism.

What's something you never, ever want to see in a query letter or sample submission ever, ever again?

God, there are so many. I never want to see a book described as “completed.” It’d better be done before you submit it. The main issue I see with queries is that they’re generally about twice as long as they should be. Two-hundred-and-fifty to 350 words, tops—just the facts. I don’t need to know what inspired the book or how your agent ghosted you or how you’ve sent 10,000 queries prior.

Has being both an author and a publisher been worth it enough that you would recommend it to other ambitious authors? What are some of the biggest pitfalls to avoid, especially ones you didn't see coming?

I think more big-house authors should do it, particularly midlist ones who have some critical acclaim. The vast majority of them aren’t making a living off their advances. They’re probably teaching or doing some other day job. Publishing is one of the only endeavors where you can make someone’s lifelong dream come true by spending a few thousand bucks. That’s about as meaningful as it gets.

As for pitfalls, I’d say that distributor trap is a big one. If you’re lucky enough to have a distributor interested in your press, make sure it makes economic sense. Another pitfall is—and you probably know this as well, Jason—authors can be high-maintenance, particularly if it’s their first book and they haven’t thought about the way the publishing ecosystem works and how everything from publicity to distribution is tilted toward the big houses. [JP: I plead the Fifth.] Being a publisher requires high emotional intelligence: you’re setting expectations with authors, disappointing them almost daily, and finally, building them up when you can.

My thanks again to Leland for these insightful thoughts. 7.13’s newest book, Tessa Yang’s The Runaway Restaurant , comes out this Tuesday. Do you own a small press? Would you like to tell us how things have been going recently? I’d love to feature you in the next issue, so just drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com .

Idiom Corner: No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

One of the truly surprising things I’ve learned by regularly answering questions for English as a Second Language (ESL) students at Reddit is just how rare it is for a language to rely as much on idioms for daily communication as English does, and specifically American English. “Idiom” is not a term many Americans know, but it’s a concept all of them inherently understand and intuitively use at least a dozen times every day; it’s when you create a witty or clever phrase that symbolically stands for a bigger or deeper action or subject (“I gave him the cold shoulder;” “He sent me on a wild goose chase”), but the words in that phrase have to be the exact same words every time, or else the meaning is instantly lost. So in other words, if I slangily say in a conversation, “Straighten up and get your act together, pal,” it cannot be directly substituted with the phrase, “Vertically align yourself and ensure that your theatrical performance is complete, comrade.” (Although now that I’ve written that down and looked at it, I do believe I’m going to try to work that second version into the next dinner party I attend.) We take them for granted here in the US, but I’m learning from ESL students around the globe that these kinds of universally known symbolic phrases in a culture (seemingly learned by osmosis—we never remember specifically learning them, but feel like they’ve just been with us our whole lives) are rare to non-existent in many other languages, and because of this can be one of the most difficult things for an ESL student to learn, grasp and really understand.

Not too long ago, we were discussing a fascinating one from American history over at Reddit, which is “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” This is a great example of how, since these kinds of phrases tend to be passed casually from one generation to the next via conversations with grandparents and old pieces of pop culture, they’re often some of the few cultural references we have left and still use from 50, 75, 100 years ago or more. This is of course yet another thing that makes them so difficult for ESL students to understand, because they’re often referencing a long-ago event from history or using now outdated language. Today’s phrase, for example, originates way back in the mid-1800s, when it was common practice for urban blue-collar saloons to offer a free lunch for day laborers who would come in for a beer; remember, these were the days before restaurants, certainly the days before diners or fast food, so it was kind of a win-win situation for everyone, keeping the city’s workforce fed and the bar owners making a tidy profit to boot. The fact that most such 1800s bar food was extra-salty (cheese, ham, crackers, peanuts), thus inspiring more drink orders, was merely a capitalist bonus. (For what it’s worth, free lunches in bars are not really a thing in America anymore [the elimination of daytime drinking, and the rise of fast food, put a permanent stop to it], although a very closely related ritual that happens at the end of the work day is still hugely popular to this day, called a “happy hour” when not only are drinks discounted but free food often served by the bar, often quite sophisticated.)

It's not until we get to the Great Depression of the 1930s, though, that this phenomenon from the American urban working world gains a new meaning and becomes a well-known phrase for the first time. For of course this tradition of free lunches at blue-collar bars was still in operation in many places across the country even 75 years after it had started, but in the Depression the nature of them often changed—either the drinks suddenly started costing a lot more, or you were required to buy more of them, or they were sponsored by a group and suddenly you were getting the hard sell from them, whether that was the communists, the fascists, the unions, the mafia or the Catholics. In fact, that’s a hallmark of any depression, how many groups try to manipulate the down and out during economically fraught times by promising big rewards for little to no work (something we would know nothing about in our current times at all); so no wonder it started being said more and more during the ‘30s that there “ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” by which such people were metaphorically expressing their frustration with the entire infiltration of these kinds of groups into society, not just bars. But no wonder such people expressed this frustration through this dwindling but still existing Victorian Age tradition of urban blue-collar bars offering lunches; because everyone understood what this was, and understood the actually quite sophisticated moral lesson that was being taught by evoking that image.

This phrase starts getting used over and over by people in conversation in the 1930s; it begins showing up in pop culture items like song names and movie titles; an entire generation later, ‘60s Libertarians like sci-fi author Robert Heinlein coopt it to further their agenda of radical self-empowerment; and that’s how something becomes an idiom, to the point where a huge majority of Americans will know this phrase and understand exactly what you’re trying to say by using it, even as none of them know when or where they exactly learned of the phrase for the very first time. And that’s why if someone shook their finger at you and admonished, “A meal without payment is not a truth that exists!” you would squint and frown and respond, “…What the hell you talking about, pal?”

We use these idioms all the time in American English to express complex thoughts quickly in fast, casual conversations; and it’s a subject we’re often talking about over at ESL Reddit, because this is just so difficult for someone new to our culture to learn in any kind of traditional or rational way. The idioms under question often turn out to have fascinating histories; so I thought maybe I’d start regularly sharing some of their stories here at the newsletter, in between the industry news, grammar features, indie marketing discussions, and advice to prospective book editors. If you have one in particular you’d like me to examine here in a future issue, please drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know!

The Latest Reviews: Alphabet Challenge Edition

It’s the end of summer and the start of fall, so time to pack away all my beach and airport reads from Elin Hilderbrand and Lee Child and Jim Butcher, and get out the weighty tomes that will each take a month apiece to read (currently Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; then my second read of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem; then Mary Shelley’s forgotten 18th-century post-apocalyptic novel, The Last Man; then at long last my first-ever read of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind; and finally around the holidays, a reread of Don DeLillo’s White Noise in preparation for the coming Noah Baumbach adaptation on Netflix at Christmas).

That’s going to keep the book reviews few and far between this autumn; but that gives me time to delve more into my new Alphabet Challenge over at my movie review account at Letterboxd! Namely, I’m sick to death of paying all this money to all these streaming services and then never getting around to actually watching anything (or worse, just binging the same ol’ episodes of Seinfeld every night); so as often as I can pull it off, I’m going through the alphabet and every week watching five movies that start with that week’s letter, respectively each night at Netflix, HBOmax, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and free service Tubi.

The A and B weeks are far off in the past now, but the C week just recently got posted, so here’s some writeups to keep you occupied for the moment, with another letter or two I’ll have ready to share with each new issue (hopefully):

First was 1978’s Coma, written and directed by technothriller pioneer Michael Crichton, one of the first movies I have a conscious memory of because the commercials featuring naked people hanging from wires freaked me out. It was quite good!

Then David Cronenberg’s latest, this year’s Crimes of the Future, marketed as his grand return to disgusting technofreak body horror. That’s true, and the results aren’t bad!

Next, the recent Concrete Cowboy, starring Idris Elba in a tale so surreal it has to be true; namely, it’s a fictional tale but set within the real world of Philadelphia urban-class Black “urban cowboys” who have been stabling and riding horses within the city all the way back since the 1800s and horse-drawn wagons, now a dying breed whose unsafe stable shacks are being demolished by the city and bringing an end to a centuries-long way of urban life. As most of you know, earnest afterschool specials aren’t really my thing, but this one is thoughtful, tough, and uses its bizarre true origins for all it’s worth.

After that was Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 The Conversation, one of those post-Kennedy moody conspiracy thrillers I love so much, quickly forgotten because it came out the same exact year as his Godfather Part II, which won all the awards and pushed this one out of contention. It’s for sure worth your time to track down and watch on streaming.

And finally, 1984’s low-budget cult horror “classic” C.H.U.D., inspiration for a movie review website that became more famous than the film itself. Every bad thing you’ve heard about it is true, which of course is what makes it so delightful to watch.

And of course, let’s not forget about those questions I’m always answering for English as a Second Language (ESL) students at Reddit! Here’s some of the more fascinating ones since the last issue:

What’s the name of those little stick figures on bathroom signs?

If “racism” is someone being discriminated against for their race, what’s it called when someone is discriminated against for their language skills?

Is there a special name for that sudden feeling around 25 that you’re more adult than you were even a year or two ago?

What’s it called when you ask someone for driving directions somewhere and, instead of answering, they respond, “You shouldn’t own a car”?

Is there a term for when a singer leaves a band and they’re replaced with someone specifically because they sound exactly like the first singer?

If someone jumps rope in the past, is it that they “jumped rope” or “jump-roped?”

Why is it considered good if something is “humming like a machine?”

Why do Americans say “more perfect,” when “perfect” already means “as good as it possibly gets?”

What’s the difference between “finishing” a plan and “fulfilling” a plan?

Is there a difference between “nearest” and “closest?”

Is there a literary term for when an author adds a hint at the beginning of a book about something that will happen at the end of the book?

Got a book or movie you want me to review? How about a question concerning the English language? Or are you maybe ready to start editing your own book, and want to see if I’m available? Drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know about it! Remember, if you’re subscribed to the newsletter when booking a job directly with me, you get 25 percent off your bill—all jobs, all bills—so don’t forget to make a mention of it when you write.

Plus: The One Self-Publishing Marketing Plan to Rule Them All; and reviews of "Three Thousand Years of Longing," Horatio Hornblower and more

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on September 23, 2022, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.

I recently heard from an old friend of mine, Chicago author Kyle Beachy, who I originally got to know through my old small press’s podcast when I interviewed him about his debut novel, 2009’s The Slide which was published by The Dial Press, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. This by definition means that Kyle secured the services of a literary agent early in his publishing process, in that editors at mainstream presses like The Dial don’t accept submissions at all unless they specifically come from an agent, thinking (pretty rightly) that since the agent doesn’t get paid unless the book is sold, they’re not going to waste their time representing bad or unpublishable manuscripts. This has worked out well for Kyle, for he published not only this but most recently a nonfiction collection of themed creative essays on skateboarding called The Most Fun Thing, put out through Grand Central Publishing, the company that was created when Warner Communications acquired the famous Paperback Library.

This is quite unusual when it comes to the typical reader of this newsletter—most of the authors I work with either self-publish or sell their manuscript directly to a small press, in that case needing no agent at all—so I thought this would be a particularly great thing to have Kyle talk about in a little more detail here in this issue. I kept it short, since I didn’t want to waste his time or yours, but I hope you’ll agree with me that his thoughts here are illuminating and worth the time for any unpublished author to think about. My big thanks to him for taking a few minutes to talk about this subject, and don’t forget to check out both of his books whenever you have a chance.

You've gone the old-fashioned route in your literary career, which is to sign with a literary agent and get your first novel signed with a major press. I'm sure many of my subscribers already know the steps to getting an agent, but could you tell us the most surprising thing you learned through the process, as well as the most useful thing?

I'm always surprised how long the steps take, once the exchange with agents gets moving. Often they'll respond quickly to a query because you happen to have caught them at a good time. Sometimes, even, the initial pass over your sample will move along at pace. But then, giving them the entire manuscript means strapping into this seemingly endless waiting game. So, the most useful thing is patience. You've got no choice but to be patient, and there is nothing that will serve you during this process but patience. 

Do you feel an agent has helped you with your overall career? How do they affect things like you publishing short pieces in literary journals?

I've had two agents and they've both sold my manuscripts, so it would be real strange to argue that they haven't helped my career. They've also helped, at times, with counsel—my current agent is someone who's super effective at talking me through frustrations either with myself or my publisher. Neither, though, has helped publish short pieces in journals. As I've experienced two rounds of publishing cycles, it's the publicists who are more interested in getting my work into magazines and journals. 

Your newest nonfiction book was put out by Grand Central Publishing. Is there a marked difference when you work for one major press versus another? Did you ever feel like a cog in the machine at either of these places?

Well that's hard for me to say, because the more relevant detail is that twelve or so years passed between my first book and my second. Publishing changed a lot during that time. My first novel was coming out right as the big chain markets crashed. So, one day I've got someone at Barnes and Noble telling my publishers what my cover should look like if we want it to be featured on the front tables, and the next day, never mind, B&N is slashing all their orders across the board, we can go with our original cover. Is it depressing that a retail chain was able to dictate the book's cover? Was this, maybe, kind of an extortionary practice? I'd say so. But was it better than what we have today? This round I got a modest advance, a pretty large first print run, but no budget to promote the book or even help cover plane travel or hotels for readings I arranged. Now I learn they won't do a paperback because they didn't sell enough of the hardback and, well, they probably printed too many of them. So, in short, it's not rad to be a non-major author at a company that relies on a handful of major sales for their bottom lines. Probably this answers your cog question. 

The One Self-Publishing Marketing Plan to Rule Them All

In the last issue of my newsletter, I examined in detail the ongoing raging debate within the world of indie and genre literature—to self-publish or to go with a small press. Whatever the case, though, I had mentioned, it’s now largely up to the authors themselves to fund and run their own marketing and promotional campaign for their book once it’s out; and now that I’m working as a freelancer with a wide variety of writers around the world who are in all kinds of different situations, I’m getting to see what’s working in all of these settings and create a sort of aggregated “best practices” list that can hopefully start being replicated by any author in their situation for basic success (“basic” here meaning “selling a thousand copies and breaking even within a year of the book coming out”). In today’s issue I thought I’d lay out what I’ve learned so far about what I think such a repeatable blueprint might look like; I word it that way because I expect to be continuously tinkering and changing this as I learn more and more, and as the industry changes more and more. If you’re coming across this in the future through a web search, you should always check out the newsletter issues closer to your current date, because I’ll have more nuanced things to say about the subject by then.

I laid out the very basics last time, so let me quickly repeat it here: I currently recommend putting together USD “$12,000” to “spend” in the first 365 days after your book coming out, with the goal being to sell a thousand copies of the book in that first year, which is generally around the break-even point whether a self-publisher or trying to make up your advance as a traditionally published author. That’s deliberately in quotation marks because that only comprises $6,000 in actual money; the other $6,000 is volunteer labor, also called “sweat equity” in that you are literally building value into your book through your sweat and effort. You can get an entry-level job at Whole Foods or Starbucks here in Chicago for $15 an hour, so if you want to be a little more enticing and offer $20 an hour to do the tedious duties that come with marketing your book—then if you pretended to hire yourself and pay yourself this $20/hr wage—you would need to put in 300 hours of labor in that first year of the book’s existence to reach your $6,000 budget.

How does this break down? Roughly—as just a general guide, mind you, with your numbers maybe varying greatly—you could realistically look at it this way. Examining the money first:

$2,000 for traditional ads at Amazon and its sister sites Kindle Unlimited and Audible. I didn’t create this situation, I’m just reporting it—Amazon now almost completely dominates the entire publishing industry. I didn’t create this situation, I’m just reporting it! One of the things I’ve discovered from watching my clients’ successes and failures is that a certain amount of traditional advertising must be done if you want to sell a thousand or more copies of your book, and so it simply makes sense to spend that at the place where 80 percent of your audience is getting their paperbacks, 90 percent their ebooks, 95 percent their audiobooks. There it is. Sorry, folks.

$2,000 for a book giveaway promotion at Goodreads. Also owned by Amazon! But in this case, Goodreads is a vast and popular social network, like Facebook just for book nerds; and so instead of traditional ads, you pay them for the right to give away a certain amount of copies of your book to readers through the website, in return for the recipients promising to post a public review, and have the whole giveaway promoted at the special page online Goodreads maintains just for these book promotions (which, to be clear, are insanely popular, and get thousands of requests for every title offered). The initial cost over there looks deceptively cheap, but don’t forget that you also must pay for the printing and shipping of all those individual copies out to every giveaway recipient, which adds up fast.

$2,000 to attend literary conventions. Every genre has its own special get-together every year. Some are huge, like science-fiction’s Worldcon, horror’s Stokercon, or crime’s Bouchercon. Some are regional and therefore cheaper to attend, or smaller and therefore easier to stand out. General literary writers outside of a specific genre can always attend the American Writers and Publishers (AWP) convention, the largest literary gathering in the United States. Actually pressing the flesh at these events is a must for the “complementary marketing plan” we’ll be looking at later, so you should put aside the money to attend one large one or several small ones each year.

And then looking at the 300 hours of labor you put in, it would break down into the following major categories:

Soliciting reviews, interviews, features and guest posts. Ready for a hot take? Never pay a publicity company to seek reviews of your book on your behalf. I’m not saying it’s a scam, but I am saying that these publicists get blocked quickly among the people on their distribution lists—I know, because as a published reviewer back in the day through my small press’s website, I was constantly getting added to these distribution lists against my wishes for many years. Their emails concerning your book are going straight into a lot of these people’s spam or trash folders, even though they’re continuing to boast to you about how they have “1,500 reviewers” they solicit each time, because technically they are soliciting 1,500 reviewers each time. You get a much better reception rate by sending these out yourself as the author, handwriting each one, and including a detail in each cover letter that lets them know that you’ve been by the reviewer’s publication to check it out. It’s tedious, but just chalk it up to your 300 hours and start sending them out. It's this or Starbucks, buddy!

Attending virtual and physical bookclubs. This is one of the most powerful ways an author can not only sell books but also create a profound bond with their readers, turning them into free walking advertisements for their book. It’s easy to research these groups at social media, and especially Goodreads, which has an entire section of their website for them; the general idea is that you offer a private bookclub a discount on their group order of your book (often 20 to 25 percent off), and then after they’ve read it you come and join them for their discussion afterwards, either physically or through something like a Zoom call. How I wish I could’ve gotten Bret Easton Ellis to stop by my student union with my reading group when I was a freshman in 1986! That’s what makes this a powerful marketing tool, precisely that one-on-one connection. Before the pandemic, a crime-writing friend of mine told me about when he would sometimes be sent by his day job to a place like, say, Cincinnati for a week, and he would contact all the bookclubs in the surrounding suburbs about driving out on weekday evenings to hang out at someone’s house and discuss the book with their club over tea and snacks, and have these amazing experiences all week while having his day job pick up the actual travel bill. Here’s hoping we one day soon get to a “post-pandemic” time when authors will be able to do this again.

Attending the literary conventions you put aside the money for. As we’ll examine in the “complementary marketing plan” below, these conventions are not just for you to have fun and wander around like a common fan; you’re a published author now, and this is one of the few times a year where you work your ass off every waking moment of the day. You should rest up, make a plan, and be ready to devote 16 hours a day at a convention (a full 48 hours of your year’s 300 volunteer hours over that convention weekend) towards deep marketing work for you and your career, no matter what your level of success—signing books, attending parties, having deep discussions with fans and other writers, supporting old friends, making new ones, and in a lot of cases actually being granted 15-minute exclusive intimate interviews with big movers and shakers in the publishing industry, for talks about possibly making a move upward in your career, that you earned by having your self-published book out and available for sale and showing off at the con.

And that finally gets us to the “complementary marketing plan,” which is basic and easy to remember; every time you spend a little burst of money, you should surround it by a much larger and more encompassing set of volunteer labor that directly ties to and amplifies the money being spent. That way you get the biggest bang for your buck, both when it comes to what effect you get from your money, and how efficient your sweat equity is. A great obvious example are the conventions, how you spend a big chunk of money at once on airfare, hotel and a ticket, but you put in 48 hours of labor and make every dollar you spent count. To amplify it even further, for example, you could go to one of those cheap business card printing services online and get a thousand promotional cards for your book printed off, each containing a special code that lets the recipient download a free copy at Amazon, but that is only good until midnight that Sunday night. That means that people at the convention have to download it to their Kindle that very night back in their hotel room, which means you get a big head-start on the 500 other authors at the con who are also giving away free copies of their book at the Kindle Store, but are letting people do it well after they get back home.

I’ve very sadly watched a lot of authors throw away a lot of good money over the years, tricked by marketing companies into spending lots on things that didn’t matter; so that’s the entire goal of this plan, to acknowledge that some money has to be spent, but that it should be done as wisely as possible, and backed by a much larger amount of volunteer labor that will amplify the money’s effect and have a much bigger impact than just the money alone. I have to admit, this is one of the big places where my own small press failed back in the 2010s, that I come from an indie/punk background and thought an endless amount of volunteer labor could make up for a lack of traditional advertising. It can’t, it turns out, as I’ve learned from both my own failure as a publisher and the successes of my most thriving clients as a freelancer; but it can certainly be done more smartly than a lot of people do it, so that $6,000 of money gets you $20,000 of results (1,000 books sold at $19.99 apiece), or however you want to measure it.

That said, don’t forget, another big lesson concerning all this is that you generally can only make a certain percentage more in revenue than how much you spent on marketing and promoting your book, and that a lot of “surprise runaway success stories” you hear about Kindle books actually had very quiet, expensive and effective marketing plans behind the scenes to achieve its “miraculous” sales. Like I said before, for example, these numbers we’ve been talking about here is just for the goal of selling 1,000 copies of your book in the first year, which is the amount a self-publisher generally needs to sell to break even, and the amount a traditionally published author generally needs to sell to make up their advance and start actively generating money from their sales again. But what if you want to sell 10,000 copies over maybe two years? You might, for example, really ramp the advertisements up; plan on being on the road a lot more often; rent out your own booth at a convention, and bring along enough people to have it manned the entire weekend; or add an entirely new expense by trying to get your book nominated for an industry award, like an Edgar or Hugo or Lambda or Independent Publisher Book Award.

It happens that books occasionally come out of nowhere with no money spent or no effort made that suddenly through a random miracle sell a million copies; but it’s much more common to look at success in the commercial arts as a ratio of how much money was spent promoting it versus how much money was made from it. If you want a big huge success, be prepared to spend a huge amount of money and do a huge amount of labor. Or, plan on doing a book series, but instead of spending any of the revenue, keep plowing 100% of it back into the plans for the next book; and be ready to put in a part-time job’s amount of work, because this now legitimately is a part-time job. But if you’re looking to simply publish a book and make your money back while still in that one-year window of the book being considered “fresh,” I’m starting to believe based on my various clients’ successes that the above outline can more or less work in more or less this form for more or less a profit on any book self-published or put out through a small press. I look forward to further tweaking in the months ahead; needless to say, if you have information you think I’m overlooking, numbers you think are off, or complications you think I’m not considering, please drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know, and I’ll factor it into future updates!

The Latest Reviews: National Cinema Day Edition

Just one new book review to report since the last issue, but it’s a good one, my first-ever read of a C.S. Forester “Horatio Hornblower” novel (specifically the first one, 1937’s Beat to Quarters), set among the British Navy of the Napoleonic Era. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and it also gave me an excuse to talk at length about the “grandpa-lit” genre that at 53 I find myself just now starting to grow into (including not only authors like Forester but Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, James A. Michener, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, among others).

Ah, but I recently started up my movie reviews at Letterboxd as well, prompted by the recent “National Cinema Day” over Labor Day weekend, in which all movies in American theatres nationwide were only $3. I saw Three Thousand Years of Longing, in which Idris Elba plays a sexy genie, and Tilda Swinton uses one of her wishes to have sex with him, because duuuuh. I absolutely loved it, just like I knew I would love a charming romantic fairytale from the creator of the “Mad Max” franchise.

And I’ve also begun a new viewing project this autumn, after learning that a total of 27 Woody Allen films are currently available to watch at the six streaming services I belong to (Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Hoopla and Tubi). I’ve so far done a write-up for 1971’s Bananas, and a double-review for 1972’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask and 1975’s Love and Death.

Have a book you’d like me to review? How about some news from your own publishing project to share? Have you tried a particular marketing idea and had it surprisingly succeed or fail? How about a publishing professional you’ve had a recent good experience with and would like to recommend? The content of this newsletter is largely shaped by your ideas, so don’t hesitate to drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com about anything on your mind. Remember, if you’re subscribed to this newsletter while booking a job with me, I’ll automatically knock 25 percent off your bill—any job, any bill—so don’t forget to mention it when soliciting me for editing work. For now, I’ll leave you below with a little example from earlier this week of the ever-glamorous world around here of #FreelancingLife. Bye!

Plus: The Great Indie Debate—Small Press vs. Self-Publishing; and the latest book reviews and Reddit ESL questions

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on September 9, 2022, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.

Big news! I’ve just joined my first-ever trade organization on the subject of editing! Specifically, I’ve joined the American Copy Editors Society (or ACES), which first came together in the 1990s after a series of discussions among members of the American Society of News Editors. As a result, it’s still mostly headed by full-time newspaper editors, and the group is dedicated to more traditional and academically rigorous copy editing, the kinds of perfect jobs that need to be done for things like doctoral theses or the few print magazines that are left in the world.

I thought this would be a good one for me in particular to join, since I’m almost entirely self-taught as an editor, and in many ways I edit intuitively and only afterwards learn of the rules that govern those actions. That’s been working fine so far, three years now into my attempts to freelance full-time as a career, and I’m at a point where I charge 1 cent per word to self-publishing authors for things like genre novels and am making pretty good money. If I want to jump up to a higher pay rate, though, sometimes even up to 4 or 5 cents per word, I have to learn all the rules and learn them inside out, because it’s only places like magazines and universities where you find that amount of money available to spend on this, but the editing in those environments have to be scientifically exacting.

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That’s one of the things I like about ACES, is that they co-sponsor a training program and eventual certification in both basic and advanced editing in these issues, jointly run with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida, which is priced half-off if you become an ACES member; plus, as a member you have access to a plethora of other educational material as well, not just online but through the chance to attend their yearly national convention (in Columbus, Ohio in 2023). They also have a members-only online space where you can list your CV and learn of interesting new job opportunities in the field; and they offer discounts for the AP, APA and CMOS stylebooks, as well as software like PerfectIt and WordRake.

This gives me the chance to list these certifications at places like my Upwork profile, to prove that I’ve gotten an expert’s level of training on these subjects; and that way I can not only continue to offer my fiction-editing services to self-publishing authors, but more and more pick up jobs for much higher pay rates with academics, journalists, NGOs and corporations. This is combined with other things I’m doing this year to kick my career into a new level; for example, I’m finally getting a standalone website open for my freelancing services, where you’ll be able to book me directly in an online calendar instead of having to go through third-party services. You’ll also be able to use an Ethereum cryptocurrency “smart contract” to hold the payment in safe escrow, much like how a place like Upwork currently does it manually in exchange for a big fee.

That’s all coming up in the future, so I’ll keep you apprised of the latest. For now, if you’re an author and are ready to get started on a round of editing, simply drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com so we can begin discussing rates and schedules. Don’t forget that if you subscribe to this newsletter when booking the job, you get 25 percent cut from the total bill—all jobs, all bills—so do make sure to mention that when you initially reach out.

Small Press vs. Self-Publishing: The Great Indie Debate

80 to 90 percent of the authors I work with as a freelancer have one of two fates awaiting their manuscript: either they've decided to pitch it to editors at small presses (or perhaps already have a deal with one), or they've decided to self-publish it. (The remaining 10 to 20 percent plan on pitching their manuscript to literary agents, in the hopes of getting it published somewhere big like Random House and the like, but we'll talk about that whole subject in detail in another issue.) Therefore it's a common question I'm asked as a freelance editor, and a subject I think about a lot, the relative merits versus demerits of either option.

I thought this would be a good subject to explore here at the newsletter, but with a bunch of caveats attached: that my numbers here are only approximate, and that you can find both smaller and bigger exceptions out in the real world; that some people disagree with just these steps in the first place, both the total number and their definitions; and that I'm undoubtedly getting a few of the details wrong, so you shouldn't take this as gospel or a blueprint but just general advice. I also wanted to give a summary of what this lengthy section says, which I'm starting with below.

TLDR: If you can afford to loan yourself $5,000 to $10,000 of your own money slowly over the course of two years and not need it back until year 3, and are enthusiastic about not only all the steps of publishing but all the steps of marketing and promoting, you're better off self-publishing. If you don't have this money to spend, or if you don't want to be involved in every step of the publishing process, you're better off signing a contract with a small press.

I always advise authors I work with that the following are the basic minimum steps that come with publishing a good book, one that has a realistic chance of garnering positive reviews and turning a profit:

Developmental edit. Done after your final private draft, and often the first time someone outside your family sees the manuscript. A developmental editor gives you big-picture advice on things like characters, plot, length, pace, style, etc. This often involves large changes (such as moving entire chapters or combining two characters into one), so most often this step is done to completion before beginning the next.

Copy edit. Done with either your developmental editor or with a brand-new editor. This time they are looking only for technical issues with what the editing community calls GUPS (grammar, usage, punctuation and spelling). This editor has assumed you've been through a developmental edit and have made all your final decisions over big-picture issues, so will only bring them up in an emergency if they see something glaringly wrong. This step is your very last chance to make changes to the manuscript, at which point it is "locked off."

Interior design (ebook and/or paper book). The final layout of your manuscript into the book itself, for all elements except the cover. 

Cover design. The final layout of the cover and nothing else. This is often done by a different designer than the one doing the interior, which is why book covers so often have different design schemes and typefaces than their insides.

Post-Production Proofread. One more look through the entire book by a trained editor, but this time searching only for legitimate and unambiguous last problems (typos, missing punctuation, etc.) and nothing else. This editor also proofreads all the formatting, to make sure the page numbers are in the right order, that there are no typos in the headers, etc.

Book Set-Up Online. The uploading of all these pieces once they're complete to Amazon Direct Publishing (for ebooks and paperbacks in the mail) and Ingram Spark (for paper books only, in brick-and-mortar bookstores only). This is also where you complete the book's "metadata," such as its synopsis (known in a previous life as its "dust jacket copy"), ISBN and ASIN codes, BISAC categories, and Amazon "keyword" phrases.

Marketing and Promoting. Everything that happens after the book's publication date in order to convince as many people as possible to read it. 

To get down to brass tacks very quickly, the main difference between a small press and self-publishing is that a press provides all of these steps themselves, in return for keeping a bigger percentage of each sale. When you self-publish, you keep much more of each sale, but you're in sole charge of making sure all of these steps get done (and they do all have to get done in one way or another, although there are cheap and smart ways to do each of them, as we'll see). So let's say we're self-publishing, like is my own background before I started publishing other people back in the early 2000s. Based on the numbers I see from my clients on what they're spending, here are some very general numbers we can expect to see these days (autumn 2022)...

Developmental edit: 0.5 cents per word up to 5 cents per word or even more. I myself charge 1 cent per word; the upper rates are for specialty edits, like of academic papers or traditional journalism. Assuming in our hypothetical case that our book is 100,000 words, the size of a good airport thriller or hefty YA novel, that would make this $1,000.

Copy edit: Same rates, so another $1,000.

Interior design: $500 to $1,500. If someone's offering less, they're probably trying to hide that they're a beginner and perhaps not that good.

Cover design: $200 to $2,000. This one is all over the board, since it's only a single image that needs to be delivered. You can spend on the high side to get the same exact cover artist who also freelances for the mainstream presses; or you might luck out and find a friend's kid who's a college student and studying this subject, willing to do it for a few hundred dollars and class credit.

Post-Production Proofread: Typically half of what you paid for the copy edit. Here, $500.

Book Set-Up: Free if you do it yourself; there are a plethora of simple online guides that can teach you. Or maybe 20 bucks an hour to hire someone to set it up for you, for perhaps $100 total.

Marketing and Promoting: I currently recommend that clients set aside "$12,000" for this step, that number deliberately in quotes because it only constitutes $6,000 of actual money. The other $6,000 is volunteer labor you put in, also known as “sweat equity;” if you "pay yourself" $20 an hour for this effort, that's 300 hours of labor spread across 365 days, the first year of the book’s existence. This is also a big enough subject that we'll tackle it on its own in a future issue, but that basically breaks down to $2,000 in targeted ads at Amazon and Audible, $2,000 for a book giveaway promotional campaign at Goodreads, and $2,000 to attend literary conventions; then the 300 hours of labor mostly breaks down into pitching your book to reviewers, sitting in with physical and virtual book clubs to discuss your book they just read, and attending the literary conventions you put aside money to afford. 

So all in all, roughly $4,000 to publish the book and another $6,000 to properly promote it thoroughly enough to break even, but with a chance for this to be as low as $2,000 to publish it if you luck out a bit, do a lot of homework, and are smart with your decisions, and $3,000 in marketing if you only care about breaking even and having fun. But you probably won't get to enough sales for break-even until a full year into the book actually existing and being promoted, which already followed a year of editing, revising, designing, uploading and printing, which is why I say that you need to be sure you don't need that money again until year 3 of this process. 

Let's say that you averaged somewhere around $8 net profit of each retail sale once all forms of sales—print, ebook, Audible, Kindle Unlimited, public libraries, etc.—were added together (again, a complicated enough subject to warrant its own future issue); that means you would need as a self-publisher to sell somewhere around 600 to 1,200 copies to recoup your losses, and then for every thousand copies you sell after that, you make a quite great $8,000, adding up fast if you have a breakout hit that sells in the tens of thousands or more. Of course, selling less than 600 to 1,200 copies would result in a loss, and that's a gamble you take when you self-publish; but the basic marketing plan outlined above is so foolproof that it's almost guaranteed to sell a thousand copies in the first year if you follow it closely.

On the other hand, if you sign to a small press, they provide all of these steps for you,* then simply pay you a percentage of whatever profit is left over. This is typically expressed as a percentage of each retail sale, known as a "royalty." As a new author, you would typically receive a royalty of around 10 percent, but then with the press paying you a certain amount of those royalties in advance, before the book is even out. This, surprisingly enough, is known as an "advance," and for a small press might realistically be somewhere between $500 and $2,500. If your royalty worked out to, say, $2 per book, that means the publisher is paying you in advance for the first 250 to 1,250 sales, whether or not you actually sell that many. So if you don't, you still keep that money no matter what, which is another big difference between traditional publishing and self-publishing. After those sales, though, you're only making $2,000 of take-home pay for every additional thousand copies sold, which is why I say that if you're energetic and a natural project manager, likely to sell in the 5,000-10,000 range of your book, you're much better off going the self-publishing route, especially if you're a genre author doing a series and building up a bigger and bigger following with each new title (exactly why so many self-publishers are genre authors).

*That said, don't expect a marketing budget of $6,000 from a small press; most of this money will simply have to come from you, like $5,000 of it or more. On the other hand, presses may have "publicity machinery" in place that you can't access as a lone operator, such as opportunities to get interviewed or reviewed at certain publications, or maybe a free pass to a genre convention so that you don't have to buy one yourself, maybe even a slot during the day to sign books at the publisher's table while you're there, and an invite to an exclusive insider-only party that night.

Of course, another aspect of a small press providing all these steps for you is that they provide their own people for them as well, and you typically have little to no say over who these people are and what kind of alterations they do to your manuscript. I was reminded of all this, unfortunately, through a recent chat with a client over frustrations they're having with a press they signed with not long ago; and so this is also a perfectly legitimate reason why people sometimes self-publish, so that they're in total and complete control over every step of the publishing process, from the final edit to the final cover, the synopsis, the author photo and everything else. Plus, of course, if you want to publish with a small press, you have to actually convince a small press to publish you; so that's another difference as well, that anyone on the planet with the right minimum resources can self-publish, no outside permission needed from anyone at all.

Coming from a self-publishing background as I do, it's not exactly a spoiler alert to divulge that I often swing to that side of the debate, and am always delighted to see the authors I work with who have decided to take on that responsibility in exchange for the big rewards that come with something they strongly believe in. But I also know that not everyone has this opportunity, nor this energy level or bank account amount, so it's perfectly valid to go the traditional publishing route as well, and exchange some of your rights and money in return for a smoother, cheaper and easier process. 

That said, as I've hopefully made clear, in the 21st century the marketing and promoting of a book largely now falls on the author, whether self-publishing or going the traditional route, and that's what we'll talk about in detail in the next issue. One of the big pluses that's come with freelancing is getting to peek in on the marketing plans of authors all over the world, so that I can gather a lot of real-time data over what's working and what isn't. By synthesizing all these stories I've been hearing, I'm coming up with more and more of a basic plan everyone can use no matter what their situation, so we'll examine the detailed steps of that next time.

P.S. What's the upper limit of self-publishing? Well, check out this recent profile in the New York Times of fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, who broke Kickstarter's all-time record and raised $15.4 million in a single 24 hours ($41 million altogether) for a self-published book; and all this before the book actually goes on sale to the general public, at which point it will make millions more. But note, as it says in the article, what he has in place that he's paying for out of his own pocket to make these numbers a reality: 100 days every single year on the road, an entire company with 30 employees, an entire physical warehouse in Utah (where he lives) for his various products. That's why I always advise that rule #1 in devising a marketing plan is to immediately start thinking in terms of percentages: "If I want to make X amount of money, can I do it spending Y amount of money beforehand? What if I want to make Z amount of money instead?" But again, we'll talk about this in a lot more detail in the next issue.

The latest reviews: Sexy Vampire Edition

As always, more new book reviews over at Goodreads to report…and this time most of them are urban fantasy!

We start with Jim Butcher’s 2001 “Dresden Files” story Fool Moon, whose underwhelming nature reminded me that I actually created a 50-title “Urban Fantasy Canon Reading Challenge” list several years ago, and that it’s probably finally time to start it.

Then we move to the random first title of the challenge, Benedict Jacka’s 2012 “Alex Verus” story Fated, which unfortunately instead of expanding the genre in new directions gave me a virtual copycat of the Dresden mythos and prose quality.

And then we move on to the random second title, Kim Harrison’s 2004 “Rachel Morgan” story Dead Witch Walking, which itself was also a virtual copycat of both the Dresden story and the Verus story. A troubling trend or merely a strange coincidence?

Oh yes, and I finally finished up my Summer of Moshfegh, by reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s fourth and newest book, the recently released black-as-Hades horror tale Lapvona. It was right up my dark, twisted little alley.

And of course let’s not forget those fascinating questions I’m always answering from English as a Second Language (ESL) students around the world at Reddit, especially at subreddits like r/WhatsTheWord and r/EnglishLearning. Some of the most thought-provoking ones recently include:

What’s a common term for someone who flips between two extremes of a spectrum?

Is there a special name in English for those all-encompassing, ambiguous terms like “reasonable” in law, or “respectful” in a Terms Of Service?

Is there a name for the kind of crazy killer who just smoothly confesses to his crimes like he doesn’t care at all?

Is there a narrower term besides just “media” for media specifically that tells a three-act story?

Is there a special name for that particular sadness of knowing you’re about to come to the end of a really great book? If not, would you care to make up some long German or Japanese word for it?

Is there a particular name for the horror trope in which people try to escape from somewhere, just to realize with growing dismay that they’ve only been going around in circles?

What’s it called when someone has a mild interest in something, but the unwillingness to fully immerse themselves into it like a true fan or semi-pro does?

Is there a single short word for squeezing something so tightly, you might break it, but you don’t necessarily do?

Don’t I remember a famous term about wanting to learn as much about the universe as you possibly can, and you get so overwhelmed you can’t even decide where to start?

Want me to review a book? Have a strange question about English or grammar to pose? Send them to me at ilikejason@gmail.com, and I’ll try my hardest to answer them!

This is not my city you’re seeing above. It’s simply an example of how cool and detailed you can build within Cities: Skylines.

Oh yes, and I’ve also started my latest strange online avant-garde storytelling project

Oh yes, and did I mention that I have a new literary project to announce? Behold: “Tales from Winnemac,” an attempt to build out complex and highly detailed metropolitan environments in the video game Cities: Skylines (CS), then write stories and shoot narrative videos that are all set in these complex fictional environments. The big conceit here, however, is that they’re all located in the same fictional US Midwestern state that revered author Sinclair Lewis invented in the 1920s to set many of his most famous novels, including Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth and more.

I’ve actually been doing experimental storytelling projects online way back since the mid-1990s and the birth of the World Wide Web; called “hyperfiction” back in those heady cyberpunk times, they were essentially clunky “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories done through webpages and hyperlinks, which with a lot of work and finessing you could get to run interactively on pioneering mobile devices like Palm Pilots by the late ‘90s. The intriguing thing about CS, though, is that it’s an actual simulator of a city, a sophisticated one where you just tell it what kind of neighborhood you want to build and it will start implanting zone-specific homes and offices, factories and police stations, schools and hospitals. In effect you’re doing joint storytelling with a “partially intelligent” AI bot, where you’re filling in some of the details, the bot is filling in other details, and you in the end write stories based on what the two of you came up with.

It's essentially like the old ‘80s game SimCity, but with all the sophistication you get from modern thousand-dollar gaming computers; but unfortunately that means you have to own a thousand-dollar gaming computer to run it, which is why it took two years of YouTube obsession with the game before I could finally afford to own a copy. I’m just starting my first project now, but in the meanwhile I’ve written an overview of what will be coming, what I hope to accomplish by this, and what inspired it all, over at my personal journal at the indie hosting service Write.as (write.as/jasonpettus, get it?). Consider this an official invitation to all you writers to pen stories within these fictional spaces once they’re up and running; I’m going to be releasing the entire thing under a Creative Commons license, after all, so it’ll be perfectly legal for you to do so. The game files will also be available for fellow CS players to shoot their own animatic videos, so in all cases please just write to me at ilikejason@gmail.com to let me know of your interest.

Have a project you’ve just released? Let me know about that as well, and I’ll share the news in a future issue! Until then, goodbye for now!