There are a few good reasons to ally with craft. Writing is hard work, and revision thankless. Yet, plenty of non-writers just imagine writers “being creative” and generating stories. Then the money flows on in. Writing skills can be learned, though mostly just by reading widely, and so it has a lot in common with other crafts. Practice makes…improvement. (Not perfect.) Then there’s the publishing aspect. Writers take assignments, write to certain themes or lengths, and many pride themselves on their ability to write anything.

However, writers often protest too much. I used to collect the sillier comments, but it got boring after the first few thousand. Here are a few of my favorites:

Writing in Starbucks is not writing. It is “trying to hook up with attractive members of the opposite (or same) sex by appearing to be a sensitive, tortured Artist.”

Oh, yes, I can hear the snickering from the fellows in the back row dressed in black turtlenecks, obscured by their haze of cigarette smoke, and trading witty barbs that are just regurgitations of something Nietzsche said much better.

The garret is a myth. Ignore it.

“Craft” today is not a counter to the Romantic vision of an artistic elite chosen by the Divine, it is a quasi-proletarian flinch often designed to protect one’s work from being compared to art, thus protecting it (and one’s ego) from its near-inevitable failure to stack up to the idea of art as a superlative. The craft metaphor also serves the production-driven processes of conglomerate publishing: books are published to fill slots and develop and extend categories on a mass scale, which militates against the individual nature of a piece of art. And yet, writers, as small businesspeople, also hope to avoid complete proletarianization (even when they write work-for-hire material to specifics as stringent as anything one might find in a fast food joint) and thus don’t dare embrace the industrial metaphor their masters long ago did. So they declare themselves to be craftspeople, a head higher than the cloth hats that used to read their stuff before everyone got television sets.

Writing is a balance between art and craft, but there is enough suspicion of art—it suggests snobbery, laziness, and even homosexuality in some of the more idiotically conservative quarters—that the stick must be bent in the other direction. Craft is a matter of artisanship, and artisanship is a matter of mastering a relatively small tool kit in order to solve a number of practical problems. These practical problems also allow for aesthetic flourishes to be added. You can thus have a basket with an interesting weave, for example, but you can’t have the weave by itself, without the basket.

Writing, by way of contrast, is a matter of deploying a relatively small number of tools from a toolkit of infinite size in order to solve problems that don’t exist until they are solved through the use of the tool. That’s art. This is what people are trying to say when they trot out that all canard about learning all the rules, and then forgetting them. They mean, “Some tools are far more commonly used than others. It’s generally helpful to start using some set of tools first, then you can search The Infinite Toolbox for others, once you’ve figured out what a handle is and what part of a widget to plug into the wookedtyclicket.”

There are an infinite number of potential sentences (and paragraphs, and chapters) and thus a toolbox of infinite size. Even very simple communicative tasks can be accomplished in an infinite number of ways. When I visited London in 2000, I came across a broken escalator somewhere, and it was cordoned off. On the cordon there was a sign that read something like “Please Do Not Attempt To Use This Escalator Whilst Repairs Are Underway.” When I got home to Jersey City, one of the escalators eading up out of the Journal Square PATH station was also broken, and also had a sign. This one read something like “ELIVATOR NOT ORDER NO!!” (sic) Yes, the escalator was labeled an “elivator.”

Both communications—both tools—worked just fine. At least I didn’t see any wayward legs twisted into the teeth of the receding steps in either country. Both were pretty memorable too. As matters of art, they both have a lot to say about their creators as well.

Why think of writing as an art? For better or for worse, there is a connotation of seriousness about “art” that “craft” doesn’t have. Indeed, that’s why many writers claim to be craftspeople rather than artists—it’s a punt and a dodge. Writing is like any other result of practice; the more seriously you take it, the better you’ll be at it. The deeper you consider its structures and possibilities, the better you’ll be at it. Sticking with the common tools of “the craft” and viewing art with suspicion is self-limiting. Patricia Highsmith had a wonderful bit of advice for writers: “Suspense writers, present and future: Remember you are in good company. Dostoyevsky, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe…there are hacks in every kind of literary field…Aim at being a genius.”

Perhaps the term “genius” is even more fraught than “art”, so I’ll stick with the latter. Fight against the tyranny of craft. Aim to be an artist. Take each blank page as a formal challenge, not just a narrative or commercial challenge. Will many writers fail at being artists? Yes, most people fail at most things on most attempts. But a failed artist can end up being a fairly competent craftsperson, just from the attempt, and and the extended conceptions of the work. If one aims to be a craftsperson and fails at that, as most people do, then what sort of writer does one turn out to be?

Dear Reader:

It’s now been a year since my writing strategy book Booklife came out, and it’s received lots of praise, leading to an interview on National NPR, among other opportunities like speaking at MIT and the Library of Congress. I’ve even had artists and musicians tell me they picked it up and found that the advice in it worked for them as well.

I know there are more of you out there, so if you’ve enjoyed Booklife and/or reading new content on this website, it would be wonderful if you’d be willing to blog about it this week, recommending the book as a holiday gift. (Or tweet or facebook if that’s more your style. Or even re-post something you wrote when the book came out.) Monies from sales will be directly reflected in my next couple of royalty statements and help off-set the cost of a couple of important projects my wife Ann and I are taking on gratis.

If you do decide to blog, here are a few possible links to include:

Booklife at Amazon

Booklife Kindle edition

Booklife at Indiebound

Booklife at Indiebound (ebook)

Booklife at Powells

Direct from the publisher, Tachyon

As importantly, I’m interested to know how Booklife was of use to you (or, even, where you wished it would’ve been of more help), and will write a follow-up post here and on Booklifenow that links your post. If you tweet or facebook post, consider echoing into the comments thread here.

Finally, thanks for considering Booklife as a holiday gift for the creatives in your life!

The editor behind those guidelines is generally much more complex and nuanced, and, while maintaining a main focus for their publication or book project, may also be inclined to mix in some more esoteric material, or material that doesn’t hit the center of their brief. Further, it makes sense from a proactive point of view to send in even stories that you think for some reason may not appeal to an editor from a political or social point of view. You might be surprised, you might realize that you’ve pegged an editor incorrectly based on a very small sample of interviews or back issues. Editors’ tastes also change over time, and they react to new directions in whatever general area of fiction they’re involved with.

So, as long as your story doesn’t violate a prime commandment of the guidelines, it’s generally not a good idea to otherwise presume to guess an editor’s tastes—or to try to parse subtext out of the way guidelines are written. Even back issues of a magazine may not fully illuminate for a writer the editor’s tastes because the editor may not have received a good example of a particular type of story and therefore hasn’t yet published that type or that particular approach.

Editors, like all human beings, are complex organisms and should be treated as such.

Today, a great guest post by author David J. Williams , whose futuristic military thrillers I quite enjoy–tightly written, intelligent, and exciting. This is being posted on Tuesday rather than the regular Wednesday due to a WordPress issue. – JeffV

er, hey, is this thing live? Well, first of all, thanks a ton to Jeff for inviting me to say a word or two about how I’ve been marketing my Autumn Rain trilogy (consisting of the books THE MIRRORED HEAVENS, THE BURNING SKIES, and the forthcoming THE MACHINERY OF LIGHT). I’ll also say a bit about Lessons Learnt and all that…

First, let me reveal the Actual Strategy, and then I’ll break it down a little from there. “Viral marketing” has more definitions than you can shake a stick at; it seems to me that the essence of the best campaigns is that they’re not transparently related to the author, but instead help to generate a buzz by virtue of their being a little mysterious.

The core of my campaign was the following site:

http://www.greateramericanews.com/breakingnews

“TERRORIST STRIKE DESTROYS SPACE ELEVATOR”

“AUTUMN RAIN CLAIMS RESPONSIBILITY”

That dastardly terrorist group Autumn Rain! Who the #$# are they? I.e., we’re dropped straight into the world, with a faux news site with CNN-like look-and-feel, reporting on the aftermath of the catastrophic event that opens the first book. There’s plenty of “apparent” content and even (if you click on the graphic at the top) an actual video, in which a doomed reporter broadcasts his final hapless transmission. Of course, if you try clicking on the other links, you rapidly realize that there’s really not much to this website: it’s just a shell, intended to convey the emotional impact of Something Really Huge Going On, creating the illusion of verisimilitude…an illusion that’s carried still further by the page that virtually every link takes one to:

http://www.greateramericanews.com/restricted.html

The world of 2110 is one where the government has the Internet in “lock-down”, so it ties in thematically…but the point is that this website is like a cat that arches its back and makes all its hair stand on end to appear larger than it actually is. (I apologize for that somewhat-forced analogy, but as I write this, my feline friend Captain Zoom is sitting on my lap and intruding upon my cognitive processes, in addition to making it that much harder to type).

Now, in addition to that first website, I created three more:

http://www.presidentandrewharrison.com

http://www.spacecommandcenter.com

http://www.spaceelevatorclimb.com

….which all point to back to

http://www.greateramericanews.com/breakingnews

I won’t discuss these “feeder” sites in great detail, except to make the following points:

—Each one relates to some aspect of the world of Autumn Rain/the early 22nd century.

—Each one is even more of a shell than the core site, with far less detail.

—Each site has a “breaking news” update that appears over it, giving us the impression that the site has been around for a while, and holy crap, something’s just happened that’s overriding business as usual.

You may be wondering why the core site URL is http://www.greateramericanews.com/breakingnews instead of just http://www.greateramericanews.com. Well, if you go to the latter URL, you’ll find out why: that’s an entirely different web page …

EUROPA PLATFORM UNDER ATTACK

…promoting the second book, in which the O’Neill cylinders of the Euro Magnates get attacked by Autumn Rain, who’re trying to bag the U.S. president during a secret summit conference. (If you’re sensing a theme here as to the content of those books, you’re probably on the right track.). Originally, I built the first four sites to promote the mass-market release of MIRRORED HEAVENS (book one), and then when it came time to promote BURNING SKIES (book two), I made the “main” site the one that related to the sequel, since that was the priority. Then I linked that new site back to “breaking news” since it occurs subsequently.

So what we’ve got is a fully-functioning web ecosystem of viral sites, linked to one another, with multiple entry-points that draw the viewer further into the mystery. At no point is there a link to the actual book, and that gets to the central tension that I take to be at the heart of this kind of viral marketing, to wit:

How do you get exposure without being exposed?

The risk of not putting in links/mentioning the books is that the casual viewer stumbles upon the site (more later on how they get there in the first place), says, hmm, interesting, wonder what that is, no idea, let’s go find out what Megan Fox is up to these days, and then just keeps on surfing. But what I was betting on is that the viewer who DID get intrigued would then go to additional effort to find out what’s going on, and would then be that much more likely to TELL OTHER PEOPLE. It’s clear that the sites can’t possibly be real, but what are they promoting? A quick google search of Phoenix Elevator/Europa Platform/Autumn Rain will rapidly reveal my website and books, which would then trigger this kind of discussion:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×5237545

…i.e., an exchange on a bulletin board as to what’s going on and what the books are and who I am.

Note the balance I was trying to strike here, which is while it’s not blindingly obvious as to who’s behind the sites, it’s also not *too* hard to figure out what’s up. This is in sharp contrast to the gold standard of viral marketing, which are campaigns that function as full-on activities in themselves (and have the budgets to match). For example, consider the oft-cited www.ilovebees.com , a gateway to an immense alternative-reality labyrinth/full-fledged ARG intended to promote the Halo franchise. But the problem for authors like me is that this is one of those Bell the Cat issues, i.e., it’s a great way to solve a problem that is already largely solved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_the_cat

…because if I had a million eyeballs watching my every move, I wouldn’t need to take steps to try to get a million eyeballs watching my every move (Halo promoted Ilovebees.com via trailers relating to the game itself). Since Halo’s architects were confident of driving huge numbers of people to ilovebees.com, they could rest assured that SOME of those people would get to the end of the mystery, no matter how involved it was. I had no such assurance, which meant I couldn’t make the mystery too complex.

Which brings us back to the fundamental challenge with this kind of campaign—and the core issue with gaining exposure without being (immediately) exposed: how do you drive people to the sites in the first place? I can’t claim to have totally solved this, but part of the answer is that these campaigns take time. They can’t be launched overnight, and that’s why for the first several months of this year I ran a batch of google ads that pointed back to the site, resulting in this kind of thing:

http://thedanward.blogspot.com/2009/01/space-command-mystery-jobs.html

Note that this blogger raises the question why the heck I didn’t link to the books themselves. I’ve given my reasoning above, but he may very well be right—the rulebook on all this has yet to be written. Which is part of what makes it so much fun…

I’ll conclude with a thought or two on the economics. First, although this might *look* like it cost a lot, it didn’t, because—like I’ve already said—there really isn’t *that* much content here. These aren’t so much web-sites as stand-alone web pages/shells. Web design was done through these guys , and I obviously also spent some $ on Google ads. The videos came from my friend Paul Ruskay, of Studio X Labs in Vancouver. The major investment was simply writing everything out, which I delegated to Captain Zoom and his friend Ajax in return for some salmon. But that’s another story.

So did I get my money’s worth? Like so much of PR, that’s hard to say. I clearly reached a lot of folks I wouldn’t have, and had the chance to build out further aspects of the world I created. I even received a really cool note from graphics artist legend Steve Lieber, who stumbled upon the site through a gmail ad, and wrote to tell me that how much he liked the content, and that he’d bought the books as a result. That kind of buzz can go a long way. And ultimately, buzz is what this is all about.

Interview with Jeff VanderMeer About Booklife

Eric Rosenfield | MySpace Music Videos

(1) Acknowledge the limits of your skill set.

The skills that led you to write a book or story or article are not the same skills required to leverage it in the public world. That is a separate skill. Not everyone has it, and only some people have it in genius-level quantities. This can work for you in areas where an element of inspired amateurism—the Do-It-Yourself impulse—is appreciated, even expected. However, even in areas previously the domain of amateurs, like YouTube book trailers or podcasts, more and more sophisticated, professional efforts have started to become the standard.

Therefore, to avoid stress and be more successful: Recognize your own limitations and find others with the required skills and experience. You may need a budget to hire someone, but you may also be able to barter for services. The barter system has become more and more common as creative individuals collaborate across the Internet. The best way to find the right people to work for you is to find existing examples of what you want to do, and approach whoever created them—whether it’s a banner ad or a website or a short film. In all things remember that a combination of mimicry and your unique vision provides the best chance for success.

Luckily, too, online platforms like blogs come with ready-made templates, and a blog platform like WordPress allows you to turn a blog into something very much like a website. Make sure to let standardization and templates do the work for you where appropriate. If you cannot find someone to do something you know is not your strength, you may need to decide whether it’s worth the effort. An ugly or clunky website or book trailer can be worse support for your efforts at leverage than no website or book trailer at all.

(2) Define the limits of your effort.

There are only so many hours in a day, and you have only so much stamina, across a day, a week, or a longer period. Before entering into a campaign for your creative project, decide how much time and energy you can afford to spend on it. Ask yourself these questions:

—How much time will I be spending on this effort and over how many days, weeks, or months? (For example, are you going to devote forty hours over three weeks, or sixty hours over three months?)

—Will I be traveling as part of this effort, or staying at home? (Time spent traveling may not be time spent promoting your work, but it’s still time lost.)

—Will I be spending money or only using opportunities provided by the publisher as well as free tools and platforms? (If you’re spending money, what’s your budget, and are you buying services, access, or hardware?)

—What form of follow-up is required for this project? (Whether it’s nudging gatekeepers, conducting interviews, or finding ways for people to view your book trailer, every creative project requires some type of followup. Follow-up, even if it’s just emailing people, takes time and must be accounted for in your efforts. Sometimes this is the most important part of what you will do for your project.)

—How much additional follow-up am I willing to do? (The “X” factor in all PR campaigns is the exponential way success feeds on itself. If you’re successful in your initial efforts, there will almost certainly be additional investments of effort to leverage that success.)

These questions and their answers exist in the context of a wider space: your creative life. Some writers can easily promote their work and continue to create by separating “creative” and “career” efforts into separate daily blocks of time. Others require the immersion of total concentration on the act of creation and must acknowledge (without guilt) that focusing on their careers will require not working on creative projects during that time. Whatever your personality and approach, make sure you know the personal consequences of your decisions in this area.

This week on my book tour, I’m lecturing in Seattle, heading over to Los Angeles for readings at Cal-State San Bernardino and BookSoup, and winding up in San Francisco for a workshop, reading, and discussion.

Here, he shares some tips for writers in their dealings with booksellers. – Jeff

(James Crossley)

(1) If you’re reading at a bookstore or participating in any other similar event, remember to be gracious. Audiences are forgiving of many faults, but they don’t usually enjoy arrogance. One writer’s opening appearance in front of a substantial, welcoming crowd consisted solely of staring at the lectern and saying, “I’ll read for about fifteen minutes, and then I guess we’re supposed to move on to a Q&A session, but hopefully we can dispense with that, because I don’t really see the point.” Now, these kinds of appearances can become tiresome and repetitive, but there’s certainly a better way to express discomfort with the process than by announcing, in essence, that you don’t want people to buy your book.

(2) Your graciousness should extend particularly to the store staff. Ideally, a reading will result in some immediate sales, but for a writer without an established reputation, the more significant impact will come later on as booksellers spread the word to their customers. If your book is of interest to the staff, it will be one that’s remembered and recommended, and making a good personal impression can only help in this regard. I worked with a woman who was a big fan of a journalist who’d co-authored a couple of edgy and informative books about marginalized industries including punk music and adult films, and she heavily promoted his work whenever she had the chance. She was delighted to help arrange an event for him, but in person he proved bizarrely hostile and demeaning, and by the end of the evening she’d been reduced to tears. Thereafter, his sales fell off more than slightly, not surprisingly.

(3) When trying to convince a retailer to carry your book, similar rules apply. Before you pitch whatever it is you’d like to sell, check the store out in person if you can and be honest with yourself about whether you can imagine a place for your book on its shelves. A shop that emphasizes business titles and vacation thrillers may not be suitable for your young adult novel. Try to engage with the staff about the place and what they like to read and sell, not in an artificial way, but to size up how well your book fits in. If you find someone who seems amenable to what you have to offer, expect to give away a copy to sway the decision maker. A bookseller will pay far more attention to an actual book than she will to a postcard or flyer. If you can’t make an actual visit, at least research online as best you can to better target your approach.

(4) When you’re communicating with a retailer, be conscious of how he’ll sell your book even if he hasn’t read it. What’s its intended audience? Don’t say everybody, provide a specific hook. “It’s great for fans of smart, action-oriented historical fiction, like Patrick O’Brian’s books,” or “It has a very contemporary setting, but the characters are discreet and the story unfolds gently, so it has more appeal to the Jane Austen crowd than it does to Sex & the City viewers” or “It’s for literary readers who find Pynchon too simplistic.” If there’s a local connection, highlight it. You may feel as if you’re reducing your work to a caricature, but once you’ve shown that your book can sell to somebody, you’ve established a beachhead of sorts and word of mouth will begin to push it in other directions.

(5) If at all possible [if you don’t have the support of a traditional publisher], make sure your book is available through the major distributors such as Ingram and Baker & Taylor. The terms won’t be quite as favorable to you as they would be if you supplied copies yourself, but easier availability makes it much more likely that your book will be stocked. Many independent stores will work directly with you, however, especially if you’re willing to consign your book. Self-publishing no longer carries the stigma it used to, but customers are still concerned with aesthetics, so pay attention to the design of your book if only to make sure it doesn’t stand out in a negative way. This is an area where an expert can really be of service.

As you can see by visiting the events page, I’m embarking on 28-event 35-day Endurance Tour in support of Booklife and my new novel. I’ll be hitting a variety of venues on the West Coast and East Coast, and I hope to see Booklifenow readers at many of these events. The tour also includes guest blogging, interviews in local media, engaging with local writer groups, and much more.

Booklife covers book tours, including how to conduct a virtual book tour through guest blogging and the like. But as my friend Matt Staggs and I put together my Endurance Tour, I think we both realized that the modern book tour is a complex, organic entity, the dimensions of which are even more dynamic and three-dimensional than depicted in Booklife (I can already see I’ll need to revise that section for the second edition).

Here are some thoughts just from planning the Endurance Tour. When I get back in mid-December I’ll report on how much of this I still believe in and what new ideas were sparked by the experience.

(1) Real-world events are still important because a real-world event still triggers certain responses from local media and from the blogosphere, which is especially useful for events in large cities, where local coverage can translate into national attention. (Besides, doing a reading or other gig contributes to the cultural literacy of your country.)

(2) A book tour should be balanced between real-world and virtual events, in part because doing so engages different audiences and different gatekeepers and influencers. You can also be your own best advocate out in the world by Twittering and blogging from the road–people love hearing about writer tour experiences.

(3) Good intel from readers “on the ground” as to which indies and individual chain bookstores are best at promoting events will save you from booking an event at a venue that winds up just going through the motions.

(4) Adding variety to the real-world part of your book tour means turning to universities, venues that host workshops, and unconventional locations like bars. For example, one of my gigs is a lecture at MIT in Boston and another is at Manuel’s bar in Atlanta. Given local resources and the timing of each event, each venue is the best possible for the area. (The MIT lecture will be podcast to a wider audience, and there are no indie bookstores in Atlanta with enough pull to make an in-store event a success.)

(5) Adding variety also means being able to bring diversity of material into play. Just doing a reading and signing will not allow you to take advantage of all the opportunities out there. I have prepared a number of different talks, lectures, discussion topics, workshops, and anecdotes to take advantage of many different situations.

(6) The actual physical event is important, but only half the battle. Getting pre-event publicity to encourage attendance is also important, but as important is sparking reactions after the event, from bloggers and others. Having a chance to meet bookstore managers is also key, as they are, of course, among the strongest advocates for the written word.

(7) In creating a book tour, you should think about how the events dovetail with your career as a whole. Which is to say, while you want to sell books and generate interest in your current book, you should also analyze how certain events fit in with your long-term goals. Since I want to do more workshops and lectures about certain subjects, some of the events I’ll be doing for the tour should be gifts that keep giving: they will lead to other opportunities.

(8) If your tour is unique enough to write about the experience, you can create another context for getting publicity for it. I would be writing about my five weeks on the road regardless, but as it turns out I’ll be blogging about it for Amazon and for other venues, in addition to a longer piece at the end of the tour for a print media venue. What makes my tour unique? The variety of venues and the length mean that I’ll be getting a nice cross-section of American book culture, and that’s worth writing about.

(9) Teaming up with other writers is often a good idea. It’s not just that there’s safety in numbers, but that variety can create additional interest. In addition, if you’re teaming up with writers you find really interesting, you benefit because you get a chance to hang out with them and talk before or after the event. (In general, the talking to interesting people aspect of a book tour gets lost in all of the more “practical” reasons for doing one.)

(10) If you can multi-task so a tour supports your career and creativity goals, all the better. I’m working on a definitive book about steampunk called The Steampunk Bible. This book tour will allow me to meet and interview some of the main creators in this subculture.

Also, the physical part of a book tour in our new media age helps balance all the hours spent at a computer, and that travel, for me at least, always sparks a thousand new story ideas. I also feel less fragmented on the road, because it’s almost impossible to be online 24-7. No matter what the irritations of travel and the stress of planning the gigs and prepping material, that all tends to make up for it.

But, as ever, your results may vary. A physical book tour isn’t strictly necessary in this day and age. Even a virtual book tour may not be necessary, if you get the right reviews and the right word-of mouth. The most important thing is to be happy and creative. Me, I like to push myself sometimes. This is me, pushing myself. Endurance Tour. If I survive, I’ll tell you all about it.

>>>Share your experience: Tell me the funniest or strange event you’ve ever done in support of your Booklife?