introduce yourself

[Mark Neumayer]

Mark Neumayer has been soaking up books on mythology almost as long as he has been reading. And that's despite the best efforts of the elementary school librarian to get him to read Dr. Seuss "with the other kids." He reads: omnivorously, near-incessantly, and concurrently - thinking nothing of jumping back and forth between three different books at a time.

Mark wrote prolifically back in high school and even edited the school paper. Afterwards, however, he drifted into the world of TV graphics. He still wrote the occasional commercial, but he concentrated on the graphic side of things, working as an Art Director for two different TV stations and picking up a regional Emmy Award along the way. He's also worked for a textbook publisher, an environmental activist group and run his own freelance design business.

Now he is writing again and quite happy about that. Mark has lived in New York, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Ohio. He currently lives with his wife Theresa and his son Taliesin in North Carolina, where he is working on the next book in the Valda series.

[davidgaughran]

Do we have to do this in the third person? I already feel strange enough writing all that cover copy, and I'm worried I'm going to start lapsing in public ("David Gaughran would like the pecan pie").

I've been an omnivorous reader and occasional scribbler my whole life. I've lived all over the world, and worked nearly every kind of job going: construction, paralegal, door-to-door salesman, bartending, waiting tables, copywriter, law clerk, cashier, landscaping, customer service, busboy, data entry, handyman, doorman, advertising, technical support, legal secretary, shop assistant, helpdesk, and English teacher in a shanty town in Peru.

I've worked in digital advertising for a multinational tech company and saw first-hand the ability of the internet to revolutionize and disintermediate any business it comes into contact with. Even so, I was slow on the uptake with e-books. I was projecting my preferences onto the rest of the world. I do that sometimes.

I have changed my mind on self-publishing a few times in the last year or so. I used to think self-publishing was a mug's game. Then I watched with interest as a handful of people like Joe Konrath started posting decent numbers, and I thought it was an option worth exploring if you had an audience in print and a reverted backlist.

I started to take self-publishing seriously when previously unknown writers like Hocking and Locke started making crazy money. But I only started considering it for myself when I discovered the large group of writers on the next "tier" down who were making decent money (David Dalglish, Michael Sullivan, Michael Wallace, HP Mallory, J Carson Black, Victorine Lieske etc etc).

I remember being sick in bed with an awful flu at the end of March, at a crossroads in my writing career. I had a modicum of success with short stories, but I couldn’t get an agent for my novel after 18 months of trying (and several near-misses). Barry Eisler had just walked away from a trade deal and Amanda Hocking had just been snapped up. I was going back-and-forth about whether to self-publish when a solution came to me: test the water with some shorts.

That way, I could see if I enjoyed the process, whether it was a viable option for me, and learn a little about digital publishing without risking my most valuable work. I started a blog to document the process of an unknown writer self-publishing for the first time, and within a couple of weeks I was getting over 100 views a day. I self-published my first e-book four weeks after making my decision – a two-story collection – and the next three weeks after that. Sales were more than expected, and the blog just took off. I’m now getting 2000 views a week and it’s still growing – it’s crazy. The next logical step was a book based on the blog, and that will be out towards the end of the month.

I was having so much fun that a couple of weeks ago I decided to pull my novel from the four agents that were still considering it and publish it myself. Self-publishing is hard work, but it’s extremely motivating, and my productivity – despite all the extra stuff I have to do – has shot up.

My TV time has fallen by the wayside. But you can’t win ‘em all...

[lvcabbie]

I've been around forums for some time but just found this one the other day. lvcabbie is a screen name I've used just for obvious reasons - if you read my bio.
But, the truth is, I'm a retired US Army Master Sergeant who had to give up "real" work for medical reasons. That allowed me to do full-time what I've wanted to do all my life - write.



So far, I've self-published a number of works but am waiting to hear from several publishers about two novels and three sequels. I think that's the hardest part of going the "traditional" way of becoming published.

Anyhow, I hope you all will drop into my blog - and comments are ALWAYS welcome! My bloglvcabbie.blogspot.com

[goldhawk]

Hi,

I've been following Dean's column for a while, and since he mentioned this forum, I decided to drop by and see what it is about.

[Carradee]

Jun 12, 2011 20:27:11 GMT -5 goldhawk said:

Hi,

I've been following Dean's column for a while, and since he mentioned this forum, I decided to drop by and see what it is about.

Yeah, Dean Wesley Smith's comment is what brought me here, too.

I've always loved to play in fantasy land, and folks always told me to write my stories down. After practicing that for a few years, I started working as a freelance writer and editor; now that's my only my day job. I currently self-publish two young adult fantasy series: one traditional, one urban. As a hobby, I knit and crochet small toys, baby clothes, and jewelry.

[gerald]

Jun 12, 2011 20:27:11 GMT -5 goldhawk said:

Hi,

I've been following Dean's column for a while, and since he mentioned this forum, I decided to drop by and see what it is about.

Yep. Me too.

I'm from the UK, and have written heaps of short stories & flash fiction over the years. I also have about six novella / novel-length works, none of which I think is good enough to complete / publish.

I have self-published two collections of my short writing, which have been reasonable successful (over 100 purchases), but I recognise that more people buy novels that shorts.

I write in crime, horror and thriller genres, sometimes all three.

Oh, I have a blog: geraldhornsby.wordpress.com/

[maryfrikkenpoppins]

Hi,

I just got back into writing a year ago and I have a lot to learn about the business and the craft. I have a long way to go still but it's been fun learning along the way.

I haven't published zip.

I self-pubbed a short story for free just to learn the process and discovered how fun that could be. But for me to actually try and sell something at this point would be mistake.

Being an avid reader of DWS blog is what led me here, too. I may not have much to add to the conversation at this point, but I will be reading them with interest.

[R. L. Royall, Jr.]

I'm a bit of hobby writer; I've always been good with vocabulary and language, and my mom considered me her own personal dictionary when she wrote letters to the family (I was 6 at the time). I've read young adult sci-fi and fantasy practically since I started reading (McCaffrey's Pern and Asimov's robot short stories feature prominently in my early memories). As a result I've had a fairly active imagination.

As I progressed through school I ended up getting high marks in English, regardless of whether I actually bothered to study or not. Reading so much as a kid taught me more about the English language than any class did, and since I was bored most of the time I decided to jot down little story lines. It didn't help that my friends and I liked to play a lot of D&D and Battletech during lunch break. In some ways I think of RPGs (tabletop and video games) as the closest thing to an interactive novel as you can get.

Since graduating high school I've had four or five independent worlds, encompassing about 20 storylines, bumping around in the back of my head. Considering the fact that I graduated high school about 15 years ago, that's a lot of time to flesh out my characters and their lives. But I've always loved programming (which my language skills help me a lot with), and I've never really had a lot of time or determination to actually get things down on paper.

A lot of my job as a programmer is describing what I do with documentation, so for the past few years I've been something of a part time technical writer as well. Obviously technical writing and prose don't share a lot of common ground, but I've learned from my writing time to be critical and examine writing styles and idioms (which is especially useful when you're trying to decipher just why the heck some other guy decided to code his module in a manner that makes no sense at all). That's given me a leg up in studying a lot of the books I enjoy and sussing out exactly what they do (in terms of plot, character development, setting, etc.) and why I like it. I hope I don't make too much of a mess of it in my own work.

To make a long story short, after following Joe Konrath and Dean Wesley Smith for several months, I finally decided to go all in and try to get some of the stories that have been gestating in my brain into a format where I can share them with someone. I never thought I was good enough for a real agent and publisher to market my work, but with self-publishing being as easy and accessible as it is now, I think that even if I work on my writing part time, I can hopefully bring someone the same enjoyment that I felt reading those first genre books so many years ago.

PS. Since a couple people seem to be shilling their blog I may as well join in the fun: www.rlroyalljr.com. I was somewhat inspired by Konrath doing a tell-all about his self-publishing odyssey and I thought that it might be fun to talk about how I write, the process of publishing and marketing, what I'm working on, or anything else I find interesting and like to share.

[jcandrijeski]

Jun 12, 2011 20:27:11 GMT -5 goldhawk said:

Hi,

I've been following Dean's column for a while, and since he mentioned this forum, I decided to drop by and see what it is about.

Yep, I'm another person who read's Dean's blog and headed this way to check it out.

I started experimenting with the indie/self-publishing thing (also through learning from Dean, Kris, Scott and others) about half a year ago, starting with a few shorts and then gradually working my way up to novels. I now have the first three books in an urban fantasy romance / alternate history series up, and am working on the fourth, which I also plan to self-publish. In the future I will probably be sending more stuff to NYC, but given the current environment, I'm kind of preferring doing my own thing, learning the process, and getting to write whatever the heck I like, and as fast as I like. But I'm open to whatever...I'd just prefer to have more leverage than, well, none, before I enter those shark-infested waters as a nobody.

In terms of me, I'm another jack of all trades, moved around a lot type, like a lot of people on this list it seems...odder jobs were mucking out stables and building crypts in a meditation school, but I've also been a high level consultant making over 6 figures, worked as a journalist and for the government in IT/Finance, for universities as a teacher and researcher, in bars, waited tables, did sound editing, disease management work...and so on. Currently living in India but I'm from the SF Bay Area originally, and have lived in NYC, London, Sydney, DeLand Florida, LA, Eureka California, Seattle, Albuquerque, Prague and most recently Portland, OR. As of last month, I'm now in McLeod Ganj India, which is in the Himalayas and gives me a lot of time to write, when I'm not out wandering or eating or butchering Hindi with the locals.

I love the idea of this forum, so looking forward to hearing everyone's learnings and experiences - great idea to pool knowledge and info like this, so thanks!

[Dean Wesley Smith]

Wow, this is a pretty cool place. Thanks for doing this. I'll make it a point to come by, but if some discussion is going on you want me to see, someone please point it out to me in my comments.

Cheers
Dean

[mfstrnad]

I meant to do this post a few days ago, but it's summer vacation and I have four kids. Every time I thought I'd have a minute to post, I was needed elsewhere.

I've wanted to write since I was in high school, fifteen years ago. After a stint in the military and several years on roleplaying forums I'm back to writing. Still, I may not have done anything with it if I hadn't read a great blog by Dean Wesley Smith. (Then devoured all of his myth series along with Kristine Kathryn Rusch's freelancer series.)

I joined the same day DWS blogged about this forum. (I've been told over and over again that I need to network.) So here I am. I've getting ready to self-publish my 50odd-K novel on the 19th and have a self-imposed deadline for a short story due in two weeks. I'm not so great with marketing or self-promotion and I'm trying to work through the book as event myth. (I did start a blog and have a fb author's page, so I'm not a complete loss.)

I look forward to many great discussions and have to add a huge thank you to Mark Neumayer for starting this forum.

[mewalston]

Hey everybody. I surfed in here from Dean's blog, as well.

[djmills]

Hi All. I got here from Dean's blog also. I have been following his sensible advise for a few years, and hope to learn more epub advice on this site. Thanks for making it happen.

My name is Diane J Mills and my pen name is Diane J Cornwell. I have 4 novels and a short story up on Smashwords, and hopefully, growing in experience and quality every book. Oh, I live in Australia, so my spelling will be different to your spelling in a lot of words.

[Django Mathijsen]

Hi everyone.

Django Mathijsen from the Netherlands here.

Yep, Dean Wesley Smith's influence reaches the Dutch shores ;D. I've been following his blog for well over a year.

I'm a Dutchman, an engineer, jazz organist, composer and writer. In business as a science journalist for over fifteen years, I started writing science fiction as a hobby back in 1999. A few years ago I decided to start switching from non-fiction to fiction professionally. I've since won a lot of awards for my short stories. My first novel (a science fiction technothriller) was published last year; that’s all in the Dutch language.

In the meantime I’m plodding away at my English fiction. So far I've managed to win four Honorable Mentions at Writers of the Future and I recently made my first short story sale in English.

My girlfriend Anaïd Haen is also an award winning Dutch author. We edit each other’s work and last year we wrote a thriller novel together about WikiLeaks. Inspired by Dean Wesley Smith’s blog, we’re venturing into indie publishing, trying to learn as much as we can in order to make a living at writing fiction. Anaïd has a knack for making covers and turning stories into nice looking pdf's. Of course she wonders how good her covers really are, so I intend to put some of them up on the forum.

As for me: I love the podcasts the English magazines are doing. No Dutch magazine is doing anything like it yet. So I’ve started producing short story podcasts in Dutch (I have my own little recording studio). As far as I know, Anaïd and I are the first doing this in the Dutch language. Are there any selfpubbers interested in traveling the podcast/audiobook road? I don’t see a section for it on this forum yet. Turning a short story into a good quality podcast isn’t too difficult with today’s technology.

We currently have five of Anaïd’s stories (which have all appeared in print first) up on her website as pdf and mp3 (all in Dutch I’m afraid). Soon we’ll start putting them up on Smashwords. I’m looking forward to sharing experiences.

[johnnylemuria]

Hi. I'm John Robinson, long time reader, first time writer. I got here via Dean's blog. Very inspired by indie publishing phenomenon. Currently working on my first science fiction story, "Burn Sky".