Of Starships and Intergalactic Wars

Probably ten years ago, when the Internet was a younger space and podcasting and the concepts of web fiction and indie e-publishing were young, I ended up guesting on a podcast dedicated to web fiction, talking about Awakenings initially. The conversation with the host eventually drifted to my recently released book, Broken Stars, about which the host was duly enthused.

The universe of Broken Stars is in some ways more optimistic than the world of Awakenings—sure, the human race still has problems but the actual apocalypse hasn’t happened and hey, we’re in space. Sure, Earth is held by a galactic state that stands in opposition to our heroes in Broken Stars and there’s definitely a simmering conflict there, but we’ve managed to survive two wars of annihilation and enslavement by an alien race to get there.

More on that in a second.

The question—in the midst of this long-ago interview—that came up from the host, something that is probably the only thing that I remember from the whole interview, was the question whether or not Broken Stars would ever be released as web fiction, if anything in that universe would be released online as web fiction. I remember laughing and saying that I wasn’t sure it quite felt right to do it that way, that the format might not be right.

Fast forward to a pandemic, to another bachelor’s degree, to a much different point in my life than where I was in the days of that interview.

There has been an idea rolling around in my head for a little while now, suggesting that in addition to getting back to both Awakenings and at least the world of the Legacies of Lost Earth, perhaps there was hope for a web-facing taste of the Epsilon universe—of which Broken Stars is a major part.

The Preytax Wars are a historical event that takes place in the Epsilon universe, an event that planted the seeds for the status quo that exists in Broken Stars. Taking place in the 22nd century, several decades after humanity has made its way deeper and deeper into the stars (thanks to a bit of help from a few friendly alien races that made first contact in the later 21st century), the Preytax Wars represent humanity’s first encounter with a hostile alien race and two major conflicts with that race—both of which are generally characterized as life or death for humanity and human society on the whole.

Humanity won, but not without cost and not necessarily as decisively as anyone characterizing it as an existential conflict might have hoped—but no one actually thinks they’ll come back, right?

More on that to come in the future.

I have never been sure if I would actually write a full-blown book in the era of the Preytax Wars—I would have to write several, in fact, due to knowing who some of the important macro and micro stories live with. Something that I have been playing with is putting together a site that gathers fictional news reports, journal entries, sequences, etc. that would tell at least part of the story of the Preytax Wars. It’s been an idea that’s simmered for a little while now.

I suppose we’ll see what happens next.

Doc’s Writercraft: What I know about writing webfiction

While attending the 2013 Desert Nights, Rising Stars writer’s conference at Arizona State the last weekend in February, I was shocked by how many questions I got asked about writing webfiction.  The inevitable question at any break point in the conference was “Are you published?” and when I said I was the self-published, indie-published type and listed what I was working on, people would get increasingly curious when I mentioned the serials I write.

This, of course, led to more questions.

At the end of the day, everything I have learned about both publishing in general and writing webfiction, I have learned by researching these particular topics on the internet.  There is a wealth of information available if you know where to look.  I didn’t know where to look when I started, but I knew how to start looking.

Introduction

I’ve written before about why webfiction was attractive to me (Doc’s Writercraft: Why Webfiction?), but I haven’t gone into much depth about what you need to write it.  By the time you’re done reading this post, hopefully you’ll have a rough idea of the following:

  1. Essential ingredients for good webfiction
  2. What skills and tools you need to write webfiction
  3. Additional resources to help you along the way

I will not be talking very much about monetization of webfiction because I really don’t have very good experience with it.  Other webfiction writers, such as MCA Hogarth, have had extremely good luck with it, however, and I would highly suggest checking out the links listed under the resources section to do more research on that particular subject.

Remember, webfiction is a challenging marathon.  You don’t have the luxury of going back and changing the rules in mid-stream like you would if you were drafting a novel.  Now, some webfiction writers use their serials to live-draft novels.  That’s fantastic and can be really, really fun.  Keep in mind, however, that in live-drafting your novel for an audience online, you’ll lose some of the flexibility you might otherwise enjoy in the plotting and writing of your first draft.

It is, however, a fantastic way to make sure you write consistently and stay on-schedule.

What you need to get started

The most important thing that you will need to write successful webfiction is a good story that you are interested in telling.  Webfiction is in part episodic by nature and ongoing.  You will be writing the same story over the course of an extended period of time.  You’ll need all the trappings of a good book and more.

What makes a good story?  For me, it’s the following (in order of importance for me as a reader and in part for me as a writer):

  • Good characters (characters I give a damn about and want to know more about)
  • Good pacing
  • Understandable/comprehensible/believable problems (and solutions)
  • Good setting

Why are good characters listed as the most important thing?  Readers are willing to forgive a multitude of sins in most forms of entertainment–books, webfiction, comic, television, films–but if you have crappy characters, most readers are not going to put up with it.  You write good characters in your webfiction and people will keep coming back just to find out what happens to them day after day and week after week.  A good cast gives  you a little bit of leeway when you otherwise wouldn’t have any, especially when it comes to the next item on the list, pacing.

Pacing is very important in webfiction.  Unlike in your standard novella or full-length novel, which has rising and falling moments of tension, webfiction has to keep a reader coming back day after day and week after week to see what the new “episode” holds.  This means that while you don’t always have to keep ratcheting up the tension, you will need to be careful to make sure that you don’t have very many long, expository stretches in the story where not much happens.  People will get bored and abandon you in this scenario.  They may wander back later, but you can’t bank on that.

This brings us to problems–these are the challenges that the characters face, the obstacles in their paths toward their ultimate goals.  Depending upon the type of story you’re writing, they may be fantastical, beyond the scope of normal life–and that’s fine.  But they must be comprehensible to your readers.  While the problems may be impossible in our world, the audience must understand and believe that yes, the characters are facing this problem and you, the writer, must keep your reader believing from the moment the characters realize they’ve got a problem to solve until the moment the characters solve it.  If you break your reader’s suspension of disbelief, you lose the reader.  For a writer of webfiction, this is especially important because the minute you lose that reader, they’re gone–probably never to return.  If you’re a webfiction author trying to parlay your webfiction into donations or as promotional material for your traditionally or self-published works, odds are that you’re not going to get anything out of that reader, monetary or otherwise, and if they bother to talk about your serial at all, it probably won’t be in a good way.

Last but not least, setting.  In a lot of ways, settings are almost like characters unto themselves, especially in science fiction, post apocalyptic, paranormal, and fantasy webfiction series.  These need to be as believable as both your characters and your problems and almost more importantly, your setting must be internally consistent.  What do I mean by this?  It means that your setting has to have rules, laws–just like Earth has gravity and this force of nature behaves in predictable ways, so too must your setting.  In a fantasy setting, for example, your magic should work in internally consistent ways.  If your wizard needs to be able to use his hands to cast a spell and his hands are bound, then the spell can’t be cast.  If your hungry vampire needs blood to fuel his powers and he’s running on empty, he’s just going to be like every other average Joe on the street until he gets a snack.  If you can only make a hyperspace jump at certain points in the system and your heroes are cut off from a jump point, they’ve got to find a way to get there before they can escape to hyperspace.  Consistency is key.  If you’re constantly breaking your own rules, then you’ll lose readers–unless you’ve got a damned good way to explain the rule-breaking that doesn’t break your story at the same time.

Skills and tools

So you’ve got a great idea, awesome characters, all kinds of neat problems, a fantastic setting, and you’re ready to start writing webfiction now, right?

Wrong.

There are a few more things you’ll need before you can get started.  In no particular order, here they are:

  • A website (or other platform)
  • A backlog to work from
  • A way to get the word out about what you’re doing
  • The ability to write consistently on demand (so you don’t miss an update)
  • A rough idea of how long each update should be
  • What you want your posting schedule to look like

Most webfiction writers blog their webfiction through platforms such as Livejournal, WordPress, Drupal, and BlogSpot.  I cannot think of any that I am aware of that do it through a static website.  Other webfiction writers use communities such as Figment and Wattpad.  I have tried both and have found it very difficult to build audiences there, but I’m sure a great many writers (especially those who have come from fan fiction backgrounds) have had success with them.  For my own webfiction, I use self-hosted WordPress installations because I find the back-end interface easy to use and the front-end easy to manipulate with downloadable and editable themes.  For those who aren’t as code-savvy, WordPress.com hosted blogs or BlogSpot blogs are a good choice.  Livejournal is a little less robust and fading from popularity, but it’s still a valid choice.  Drupal is a good choice for those who are very code-savvy who prefer something other than WordPress as their blogging platform of choice.

Backlogs for webfiction writers, especially when you’re initially starting out, are incredibly important.  You want to have a story started and to know at least initially where it’s going for a few chapters before you start posting anything.  This is a failsafe against writer’s block or getting busy.  Believe me, writing to a deadline every day of the week can get very difficult, very quickly, especially early on in a project.  In addition, by the time you have a few chapters under your belt, you typically have an idea of where the story is going (if it’s a viable story, in fact), who your characters are, and what your setting is like.  This guards against early failure and gives you a chance to concentrate early on in your webfiction career at building an initial following–and keeping the words flowing.

Your initial following, if you’re lucky, will eventually leverage itself into a wider audience later, especially if your story is consistently interesting and good.  But how do you get that initial audience?  Many writers will have different answers to that question, and quite a few will tell you to leverage your friends and family into your audience.  That’s fine, but I assume that you want to reach more than your cousin Jamie and your best friends Susie and Jack.  Social media, like Facebook and Twitter, can be helpful in building your audience as well, but only if you’re not obnoxious about it.  I don’t know about you, but the fastest way to get dropped off of my Twitter feed is to only hock something you’re trying to sell (or draw attention to, etc).  For me, the bigger step in developing my audience was twofold: I got my fiction listed on some of the larger webfiction databases (The Webfiction Guide, Muse Success, and Epiguide) and did some advertising on Project Wonderful.  These days, I don’t always run advertising campaigns through Project Wonderful, but when I do, I definitely notice a bump in my site traffic.  Not all of these hits will be readers to stay, but if I get one devoted reader out of every ten or twenty hits, I’ll count that as worth my investment.  For those of you who don’t have the cash to shell out, getting listed on the databases and being active in the communities there will go fairly far toward getting your work noticed if you practice proper internet/forum etiquette.

If you ever run through your backlog of work to post–and this eventually happens to everyone and usually at the worst possible time–you have to be prepared to produce a volume of words at a consistent level of quality in a very, very short amount of time.  In essence, you have to write to a deadline.  Why not just skip an update or three?  Because that will cost you readers and fast.  Any time you put your fiction on hiatus, planned or otherwise, you run the risk of someone walking away from your work and never finding it again.  After all the hard work you’ve done, this isn’t something you want, is it?  So you need to prepare yourself for the eventuality that you may be writing 500-2500 words a day to a deadline for your webfiction, depending on the average length of your posts.

The average length of your post should be generally consistent with some room for outliers.  Most webfiction writers tend to hit somewhere between 1000-1500 words per update, but some run shorter or longer depending on their posting schedule.  Senna Black, who writes The Frequent Traveller’s Guide to Jovan, posts weekly (or did until recently–she’s up to twice a week now most weeks) and her posts are typically longer than those in my Awakenings series, which posts three times a week.  You want to be internally consistent so your readers know about how much fiction they can expect a day or a week–and how much time it’ll typically take to read your updates on the days you post them.

You should also have a consistent schedule for posting so readers will know when to hit your site for an update.  Decide this from the outset and stick to it.  Keep in mind that it is very, very easy to increase the number of posts you write a week but more difficult to decrease it.  Start smaller and get bigger is a good rule of thumb.  I initially started Awakenings updating two times a week and later increased it to three.  Jim Zoetewey did something similar with Legion of Nothing (though he, if I recall correctly, is one of the few webfiction writers who has increased production and then successfully decreased the number of updates a week without a discernible drop in popularity or readership).  Other writers, like Senna Black, post one update a week (and with a recent upgrade to two in the last few months).  Some writers have had good experience offering faster updates if they reach a certain cash donation goal, but this works well when you’ve established a large audience that can support this kind of structure.  At the end of the day, the trick is to have a schedule–decide what it will be and then stick to it.

Resources

The best resources I’ve found for learning about writing webfiction are ones that I found just by Googling the terminology.  Here are the most useful sites I tripped over when I was doing my initial research into the world of webfiction.

Additional links:

That about sums it up for this round.  I welcome questions and will answer them to the best of my ability.  I hope that this helps anyone who’s thinking about diving into webfiction writing head-first (or even just dipping your toes into the pool).

 


 

Erin M. Klitzke writes the webfiction serials Awakenings and Legacies of the Lost Earth.  You can follow her on Twitter at @EMBKDoc and find her writing wherever ebooks are sold.

First print release! – What Angels Fear

I’d intended to post about this last week and failed.  As of 17 March 2012, my first print book (novella), What Angels Fear went live on Createspace and Amazon.com.

It was actually not all that hard to put together, but I chose to publish this smaller piece first so I could get used to the formatting demands and the processes of Createspace as a POD service.  My overall experience with Createspace was actually really good and the finished product is very, very nice.  The cover (which is built on one of their stock templates) turned out awesome and the interior looks great in my opinion.

I’m very pleased with the result, which is available for $4.95 (plus shipping) via the links above.  It’s 122 pages and includes a raw preview of my next print release.

The next book I plan to release in print is Awakenings book one, which comprises the first year of postings on the project.  It’s twelve chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue; since I’m going to print the “deluxe” edition rather than the “basic” edition, there will be extra features such as a FAQ and an essay about working on the project.  These are coming together as I edit the raw text of the web serial into (what I hope is) a very readable book format.  As it stands, the trade paperback will be around 370 pages, though that number will shrink and grow as I edit and format the book to my liking.

The cover of Awakenings will be my first fully designed print cover, which I dearly hope will look awesome, and will be my first title distributed beyond Createspace and Amazon.

Kind of scary and exciting, huh?

Doc’s Writercraft: Why webfiction?

Webfiction (noun): combination of “Fiction” and “web.”

Fiction (noun): (1) the class of literature comprising works of imaginative narration, esp. in prose form. (2) works of this class, as novels or short stories (ie, “detective fiction”)

Web (noun): synonymous with or referring to “Internet.”


Webfiction isn’t exactly a new phenomena, though it seems to be on the rise and on the wane all at once in this rapidly changing, tech-savvy writing world.  For some writers and readers alike, webfiction bears the same stigma as “fan fiction,” which is loosely defined as fiction set in worlds not of the writer’s creation.  Webfiction, however, is markedly different in that it is original fiction published first on the internet, often for free consumption.(1)  For some authors, it’s a method of alpha/beta testing their work before editing and releasing it in self-published formats.  For others, it is the end-all, be-all of their work, simply another medium they work in.

So why do it at all?

For me, it’s a way of getting my work out there and vetting it before a live audience.  A lot of people write in a vacuum and often their work never sees the light of day–it’s the same for many artists, some of whom turn to writing and drawing webcomics to force themselves to hone and share their craft with others.  For some writers of webfiction, the reason they turn to the internet as a medium for their work is twofold:

  1. To force themselves to write to a deadline every day (every week, every month, etc. depending upon update schedules).
  2. To expose their work to the world in the most easily accessible way.

A corollary to this last point deals with self-publishing.  Up until very recently, self-publishing books (prose, comic, or otherwise) was incredibly cost-prohibitive.  While the ebook revolution has caused a paradigm shift in the self-publishing universe(2), webfiction remains one medium that is entirely in the hands of an author.  Anyone can set up a blog through Blogger or WordPress and get to writing–and quickly.  That means your work is out there for anyone to find.(3)

The internet is an almost inherently social medium.  It is this social aspect of the web that is attractive to many authors of webfiction.  It enables writers to glean insights and get opinions from readers–on a work that’s still in progress.  Here’s an example from my own webfiction serial, Awakenings.

I had a reader make the following observations in a comment on Chapter 9, entry 7:

As for Thom’s broken ribs, they’re gonna take at least six weeks to heal. Don’t ask me how I know this, OK? Coughing is a challenge and despite the five plus years since I broke a couple of my ribs, I still wince at the memory of sneezing.  Agony hardly begins to describe it.

I’m a gun owner, BTW, and if you need any technical advice about pistols and/or rifles, feel free to email me. I’m also into flint- and caplock rifles, i.e., muzzleloaders, and making black powder and flintlock rifles are well within the means of someone with access to hand tools and abandoned train rails.

This was incredibly helpful advice (and I’m still indebted to the reader who shared it).  It’s this kind of thing that makes readers for webfiction invaluable, especially if you wouldn’t be able to get test readers for an independant project with that kind of knowledge (I know that odds are for me, I wouldn’t have been able to). Through tapping into the social aspect of the web, I got some really interesting information that will help me not only with Awakenings, but with other projects down the road.

Another useful aspect of putting work out on the internet–if you’re planning to either just leave it online or self-publish, that is–is that you’re able to have folks catch little tics in your work that you wouldn’t ordinary catch (Chris George, who writes the webfiction serial Shadow has been good about this for me).  Readers aren’t always shy.  They’ll tell you what they like, what they don’t like, and they’ll tell you all of this before it ends up in a book review.  In essence, it’s crowdsourcing part of your editorial process (in many cases, the developmental stage of your editing process, though occassionally it’ll be the proofreading segement, too).

Of course, there’s a caveat to all of this: if you’re planning on traditionally publishing your  work at some point, you should be leary of putting any piece you’re planning on shopping to agents or publishers on the web.  Heck, based on this post shared on The Passive Voice blog, you’ll need to be careful about putting anything out there.

So why write webfiction?  For me, it was about getting work out there, writing to a deadline, and getting some feedback on a piece that was in a very difficult to define genre.


You can find Erin on GoodReads these days @ http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5211226.Erin_Klitzke
And on Smashwords @ http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/EMBKlitzke

 


1. Some webfiction authors (such as MCA Hogarth) have experimented with paid models, but I don’t have data to show whether or not the model works well or not.
2. For more information on the self-pub revolution, see J.A. Konrath, Dean Wesley Smith, and Michael A. Stackpole, as well as the ebook Be The Monkey by Barry Eisler and J.A. Konrath.
3.  Of course, this assumes you know some basic SEO or aren’t afraid to market yourself a little bit.  I’ve had pretty good luck with advertising through Project Wonderful for Awakenings.

September slumps (and updates)

So Septembers come in two varieties for me: incredibly productive, or incredibly unproductive.  This September, thus far, has been strangely both.

The first week or so was insanely productive, especially when it comes to Awakenings, and I have to admit that this past week wasn’t so bad, either.  Epsilon: Broken Stars still requires quite a bit of attention before it’s ready for e-publication, so it may not see digital shelves until October, since the magnitude of the additions I decided to make (and the breadth of some of the rewrites I decided to do) were greater than anticipated–we’re talking the addition of several chapters here and a couple of unexpected subplots, which up the complexity level of the story quite a bit.  My schedule at the store last week basically meant I had to decide between sleeping and writing, and I wisely chose sleep when and where I could (I help a lot with the visual merchandising where I work, and my store manager was out of the business for a week–when we were supposed to be totally rearranging the store–so guess who got to do most of the rearranging by herself.  That’s right.).  Schedules are becoming lighter in that regard…just in time for me to prep for the 16th Annual Grand Valley Renaissance Festival in Allendale, MI, which I’ll be attending with Jude’s Chest again this year.  Something’s different about it this year, though, and that’s me bringing someone who’s never been (and therefore, since I’m there with the booth, will be requiring garb for the trip).

There goes more time.

The upshot is that as a result of the sewing break, that helped kicked some writer’s block in the sorry arse.  I’ve managed to finish Chapter 10 of Awakenings much sooner than I anticipated (I wasn’t expecting to be done with that until next week) and I’ll be able to launch into working on Chapter 11 as early as tonight.  I’ve also been getting some words down on a page for an Awakenings side story, one involving some characters that won’t debut in person in the narrative proper for some time.  The story will either serve as a filler after Awakenings: Book One is completed or will be released as an extra with the ebook version of Awakenings: Book One.

Of course, if I’ve got the cover designed, that means it should be coming soon, right?  Well, sometimes yes and sometimes no.  This is the third or fourth version of the cover that I’ve played with, but it’s the one I’m the happiest with.  However, in this case, I can fairly safely say that Awakenings: Book One should be complete on the website within another few chapters–probably by Chapter 12 or Chapter 13, but we’ll see where the story takes me.  Following that, there’ll be a time-skip forward probably a couple months, then a resumption of the (mis)adventures of our hapless heroes.  I have plans, after all.

Those plans, of course, change as I write onward, but that’s what keeps webfiction fun and interesting, isn’t it?

Speaking of…I was a guest on a podcast that’s available streaming here or as a download from iTunes.  It was a lot of fun, and I love the Webfiction World folks.  They put on a good show (even when they’re put on the spot–hell, especially when they’re put on the spot!).  Keeping my fingers and toes crossed that they do a show based on Jim‘s superhero webfiction idea.

A new webfiction podcast goes live!

So right now I’m listening to the first episode of the Webfiction podcast put out by the folks at Webcast Beacon, who’re the same people that brought us the Webcomic Beacon podcast.  I’ve read some stuff by one of the hosts, A.M. Harte (specifically, I’ve read her serial DarkSight and I’m awaiting the next installment), but not anything by MCM, who’s the other host.

I’m listening to it right now as I’m writing this post, and it’s pretty good.  I don’t listen to many podcasts (this, Made of Fail, and a couple on medieval and British history) but I think this one is addressing something in publishing that’s kind of important to address.  They make a very good point of stressing the fact that just because the entry level for webfiction is pretty low, that doesn’t mean the quality of work is low.  There’s some very good fiction out there–one of my current favorites is A Traveller’s Guide to Jovan by Ellipsis (it’s the one that I currently load up every weekend, eagerly awaiting the next entry into the story–I think it’s also the only story I’ve given five stars on the Webfiction guide, and I think I gave it a 9 or a 10 on Muse-Success).  Part of what’s neat about web fiction is that people are able to take risks.  There’s a lot of stuff out there that traditional publishing houses might not take a chance on, but is no less good than any book I’ve read from Tor or Orbit (and better than some that I’ve read from the even bigger houses, like DelRey, Random House, St. Martin’s, et cetera).

Some of what’s coming up in the webfiction circles I’m exploring actually dovetails a bit with what I’ve been reading at Stormwolf.com, which is Michael Stackpole’s website.  He’s been advocating electronic publishing, electronic self-publishing at that, for a while now.  The industry is clearly changing, and much faster than a lot of outlets seem to be able to keep up with.

It’s a glimmer of hope, though.  I no longer have to stress out about an agent wanting to buy my work or that my work fits into traditional niches.  The world of publishing is a lot different now, and it’s kind of interesting.

On this note, the trilogy that begins with The Last Colony may be released in ebook format when I get finished with the first book and get deeper into Ashes to Ashes, which is the second book of the series.  That’s still a little ways off, though.  Stay tuned for updates!

Work on Awakenings is going in fits and starts, better now than it was a few days ago.  Chapters will be getting longer from here on out.  As always, the link for the Awakenings site is http://awakenings.embklitzke.com.

Happy reading (and listening)!