First Cup of Coffee - January 9, 2020

A commute podcast today with thoughts on finishing THE FATE OF THE TALA and what's up next. Also a bit on knowing - and not knowing - how well a book is selling.

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Transcript

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Today is Thursday, January 9th. And I am doing a commute podcast today. I am on my way home from Ryder Coffee. So actually I'm not coffee in hand, but three lattes down internally. So I figure that counts. Feeling good about the fate of the Tala. It is well, I've been saying this for weeks now, but nearly done. Actually, it's really, actually, almost done. I have I'm on the last chapter and the epilogue. The last chapter is almost completely written. I've got a little bit more on it. And then I'd started writing the epilogue the other day because I was kind of wearing thin on that final climactic battle scene. And I thought, well, the the epilogue, I knew what it was going to be, and I could start writing something that would be like a little, what, you know, happier. Sorry about that. I was thinking about the traffic here. They've got construction here and moving everyone over to a single lane, and I was realizing I needed to get over to this lane, and then someone was zooming up behind me, wanting to turn left, and being very uh upset that I was paused in the lane because I was trying to just get over and not like zoom ahead of everybody to get to my place in line. Sorry drivers are impatient drivers. I mean, you guys might think that I am impatient by the way I yell at other drivers, but I am actually the soul of patience and calmness compared to some of the people here. It's a bizarre thing. I know I mentioned it before, but it's uh I don't quite get it. There's no reason for all the road rage that there is here. It's a small city. So I'm although this is a very long backup of this light. We are sitting here for a really long time because of this construction. Okay, folks, let's go, let's go, let's go. Alright. We'll see if I actually make it through the screen. Cross your fingers for me. Well, it's all in retrospect for you, but no, I'm not going to. No, no. Alright, let's see how long this takes. It's probably going to be several minutes. Alright, so um, oh yeah, so I just started to write the epilogue, and uh that was a that was a good break. So really all I have to do is finish this uh climactic chapter and finish off the epilogue. Um which has all stuff that I like to write in it. So I think I will be able to finish those things today, and then tomorrow I will go back over them and uh do some layering. Layering some stuff and see how it goes, and then off it will go to the line and copy editor. So Hallelujah, huh? Um you know the RWA situation is of course ongoing. And you know, it's just been um, I think, you know, really wearing everybody down. It's been really a difficult situation for everyone involved. But okay, so this wasn't terrible. That was a full minute. I got the green now. So I guess I shouldn't complain so so bitterly. My mom has uh one light that she has to sit through sometimes that she said she timed once and it was like a full five minutes, which in Tucson, I believe, some of those lights are really super long. So let's see. Um yeah, I don't want to so tired of talking about RWA. Um, and some of you all have, you know, if you're really interested, you could sort of follow online. More board members resigned yesterday. Um people are pulling their workshops. We don't believe that the convention's going to happen this year, with there not being the Rita Awards, which is kind of the linchpin of the conference, and so many people having lost faith with the conference or with the organization as a whole. This is going to be, if we're gonna save RWA, it's going to be a rebuild year, and um that's going, I think it's gonna be a scrape and rebuild. So 2020 is going to be like the the year that nothing happened. I think that's how it's going to work out, but I still believe we can rebuild. I am, however, an idealist, so we don't know that that will be the case. I seem to be wrong on these things. I was sure that Hillary Clinton would be elected, not Trump. Um, although she did get the majority of the popular vote, so I wasn't wrong. Uh, so it goes. Uh, had Goodwriter coffee today. Um, everybody was there. Jim Sorensen, Emily Ma, Trent Zelazny had a really good conversation. We did talk about RWA, they asked me for all the inside gossip. So that's the great advantage of in-person meetings. There's a lot of things that uh you can say in person that you will not say in any other medium because you do not want to have it written down or reproducible. Uh there is no replacement for that in-person conversation. Rebecca Ronhorst was there also, but she did not sit with us. She was off at her own table with her laptop and her headphones because she is under a very tight deadline, which so say we all, right? Um it's different when you're self-publishing, right? Because you're beholden mostly to your readers. And yes, I I do feel bad that I have repeatedly missed my deadlines with all of you readers. Uh, I keep getting various messages and comments in different places. People asking me, when will Fate of Natala be out? And so official word is um it'll probably be out the week of January 27th, which is not far off of January 15th, which is of course my adjusted, adjusted, adjusted release date. I don't remember how many times removed, adjusted, but um, you know, it has just honestly it's taken a long time. I I don't know if I could even even at this point explain why this book has taken so long to write, except that it is sort of the eighth book in the full arc, and it took me a long time to layer in everything. I had to keep going back and remembering to touch on characters. And even so, there are a few characters that I have not been able to bring into it, and when you all read it, there will be one major, not major, one how could you say that? You know, like if I had five main plot points to resolve, and one of those I am going to have to resolve in a novella, which I will almost certainly write next and get that done. Um it would have made the ending way too clunky for the overall structure to include this particular. It's I I don't want to call it a side quest. I don't know what we call, you know, because it's multi-pronged. I mean, it's like the you know, the the Hydra, you know, where you're chopping off heads. To chop off this particular head um was going to take a whole nother chunk of story. So it would have delayed this book, and also it would have made the structure completely unwieldy. Um, you know, I use that eight-act eight-seam three-act structure, and the way that the book is shaped up now, it's pretty much spot on. If I had had, if I added this on, it would have been very, I guess, bottom heavy, right? Because you consider the beginning the top, top heavy. If it was the beginning was too slow, we would say it was top heavy. Um, this would have made it very bottom heavy and in a weird way. And besides which I decided that because we all know it's no longer a sacred, the fate of the Tala is um Andy Andromeda's point of view. And this final Hydra head is best chopped off by somebody else, and so I really want to do it in uh their point of view. There, I successfully did not betray who it would be. So I'm pretty excited about that. I think I I am going to write that story next. We'll see. I'm I'm gonna take a little bit of a break. I need to I need to deal with business. Um, I need to take down the Christmas decorations, and I need to set up my new computer, right? This guy in front of me is going very slowly. He's going ostentatiously slowly. Like five miles below the speed limit slowly. Um it's a good thing I am so calm and patient. I'm on the little two-lane old Las Vegas highway here. So, um, yeah, I need to set up the new computer that I got for Christmas. You know, you know what a pain in the ass that is. Uh you know, getting all the passwords in there and everything, and I just didn't want to do that while I was still finishing this book because I did um I did turn it on and do the initial setup just to make sure it was running right because we had until like January 6th to return it just in case it wasn't working properly. So I do know that works right, and I do have my initial settings, but now I have to um now I have to get everything tweaked to my specifications, and um I know it's a fresh start, but and I'm looking forward to having a computer that works really well because mine does not mine hangs every once in a while. It's old enough that each update kind of makes it freak out. So it'll be good. I just need to spend time doing that. I need to catch up a few other things. I'm um working on a secret project for Sarah, and that will be um a little bit of a genre diversion. So I'm looking forward to working on that. Oh, now somebody's coming up behind me and they're wondering why we're going so damn slow. It's not my fault. He might pass. I hadn't bothered to pass. It always feels a little bit rude on this road to pass. There's only certain points where you can, and it's like, ugh, is it really worth it? It's a pretty road anyway. That's when we first moved here. Well, every time we drove down it, we'd be like, uh, beautiful, gorgeous, wish you were here. So it'll be good to have this book done. I'm sure you all will be relieved. You've been hearing me talk about it for so long. So I'm gonna work on those next few things, little interim projects, maybe that uh novella. And then I'll be working on book three of Forgotten Empires sequel to Fiery Crown. Fiery Crown, of course, comes out May 26th. So that'll be exciting. My mom was asking me about being emotional about withdrawing books from the Rito Awards and wanting to know um why that had been such an emotional impact for me. And I think that's a good question. And and I had posed a question to on Facebook, um, partly to my friend Grace Draven, where I had said, you know, well, what do you think about awards? And there is a thing that it's not always easy to tell how your book is doing. Um, you know, people will ask, how is it selling? And you know, how is it doing well? And that sort of thing is not very transparent to the writer, especially if you are trad publishing. And there's multiple reasons for this. Um, one is that there's a huge long delay before you get a royalty report for a book. So, for example, Orchid Throne came out in September. Um St. Martin's will probably send me my first royalty statement. I don't know when they do it. Um, you know, like Kensington does it in like um November and April or May. I think that's right. It'll be twice a year. So I will probably get my first statement from St. Martin's in April or May. And until then, you could say, yeah, I can look at rankings and so forth, and my agent could look at book scan. And a lot of the agencies and publishing houses use book scan. And the thing about book scan is that you know, and people don't believe me when I tell them this, but it's true. Book scan only looks at print, it only tracks print sales, it does not track digital sales, and my digital sales are always far, far better than my print sales. Uh, I don't know, that was true for Kensington, and those were trade paperbacks, and trade paperbacks are expensive. So that might not be true with the mass market paperback that is Orchidhrone. But you know, it's it's hard to say. So I've not asked for my book scan numbers. I don't look at um my Amazon ranking so much because you know, even that is black magic, especially if it's a book from another publisher. Because recall that Amazon is a publisher in their own right, and they have their own imprints, and they they bunky with how books appear on Amazon's, excuse me, you know, in the ranking system, how the algorithm interprets it. So, you know, none of these things are hard and fast. My um self-publishing numbers on Amazon are probably far more accurate because Amazon has a more invested interest and more vested interest in showing those accurately to me because they get a cut. Um they're always like screwing with the traditional publishers because they consider them to be the competitors, even though they're selling on Amazon. So that's the thing is that an award, finaling for an award or winning an award, is a more or less concrete demonstration for whether or not you've hit the sweet spot with the book. And of course, it's subjective, and of course, it's a gamble, and it depends on which judge you get. But there are people who've argued on that thread saying that reader feedback and whether or not read, you know, is because we can't always tell when readers buy a book is if it's trend, but that reviews and reader feedback um is the real measure. But even then, you know, it's it's all subjective. You know, what one person loves, another person doesn't, and so I don't know, I suppose we're just always looking for milestones and markers of how things are doing. And but it's true that in the end, it does not matter whether or not um I get to have Orca Throne or Warrior of the World in the Rita Awards. And it was just an emotional decision for me. I think that's basically what it comes down to. But life goes on, and we find other ways of you know making this business a one that that feeds us, right? Uh both literally and uh physically and spiritually and emotionally. So I'm home now. I'll remind you that first cup of coffee is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. And you can find more podcasts that you will love at frolic.media slash podcasts. And I will talk to you all tomorrow. Take care. Bye bye.