Accountability & writing in public

Gotta have a plan

Couple of bits in the newsletter today. An update on sales figures for No Adults Allowed (spoiler: don’t get excited), a preview of my first attempt at a comic, and thoughts on accountability and announcing your creative intentions in public.

When I switched to serial publishing back in 2015, I didn’t expect it to transform my productivity as much as it did. What started as a fun experiment in a quirky publishing technique turned out to be a highly effective mental trick which has kept me coming back to the keyboard every single week ever since. I went from a sporadic writer that never completed anything to having three novels under my belt and a fourth in-progress.

Serial storytelling builds in all sorts of useful accountability processes. For someone like me who is always at risk of being distracted by the next shiny idea, writing serials keeps me engaged and focused:

• There’s a natural cadence. A new chapter every week. That built-in deadline makes it very clear what needs to be done day-to-day.

• The targets are small. I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but it’s much easier to write a chapter than it is to write a novel. A chapter is doable, fun, rewarding. It’s not intimidating. Do enough of them and you’ll create a novel almost by accident.

• It encourages an agile, just-in-time attitude. I have to keep moving forward as a writer, because a the story needs to keep moving as well. I don’t have time to spend ages agonising over plot points, and need to make decisions quickly.

• I have readers from the very beginning of a project. That builds in accountability: I’ve declared that I’m writing this thing, readers are already reading it, and I can’t just abandon it.

• It’s a public declaration that I’m working on something. This is the same reason Nanowrimo works well for lots of people. It’s why raising sponsorship ahead of running a marathon helps. It’s a promise that you’re going to do the thing - a promise to other people, but more so to yourself.

There’s inherent risk, of course. Writing in public like this means that any mistakes are also very public. I always do prep work before I start publishing to make sure I actually enjoy the idea. Getting ten weeks into a serialised story and realising that you’re not liking your own creation would be bad time.

It’s all very different to when I used to write in private. I’d have half-finished projects all over my hard drive, always abandoned, and nobody would know. Nobody knew I wanted to be a writer, and nobody ever knew when I wasn’t writing. The projects and their failure was my shameful little secret. Going public with my process fundamentally shifted my relationship to the words.

All of that is a slightly rambling segue into declaring what I want to achieve this year. I figured putting this out in a post would help me stay on target, much like writing my fiction as a serial. It’s unlikely that I will actually achieve all of this in 2023, given that it’s a deliberately ambitious list, but if I hit even half of it I’ll be very pleased.

So, this is my creative 2023:

1. Continue writing Tales from the Triverse and this newsletter, obviously.

2. Revise and expand my Writing Serialised Fiction guide (which you can find here), and publish it as a paperback and ebook. This is going to be under the working title of How to Stop Procrastinating and Write that Book and is going to focus more on productivity, rather than explicitly serialisation.

3. Learn how to use Affinity Publisher, so that I can produce higher quality paperbacks without relying on online tools.

4. Start publishing my first comic strip! Very excited about this. A sketch is below.

5. Create a fancier onboarding version of the first part of Triverse to serve as a free ebook intro for new readers, and for using in BookFunnel promos. I already have a version of this, but it’s old and a bit basic.

6. Work on an ebook and paperback collected volume of Triverse. I’m thinking of the model that comics use whereby individual issues are brought together in trade paperbacks every 10-or-so issues. The Triverse word count is already up to 100k, so would make quite a satisfyingly chunky first volume.

7. I’m determined to at least make progress editing both A Day of Faces and The Mechanical Crown. They’re currently under contract elsewhere, but that expires in the summer. At that point I want to make them available in various forms - ebook and paperback, and I will probably re-serialise them here as well.

8. Orbiting around all of that is a determination to finally get the hang of actually promoting my work. Let’s get into that below…

If you want to declare your own 2023 ambitions, by all means leave a comment below.

No Adults Allowed sales update

Talking of doing things in public. I published No Adults Allowed on Amazon at the end of November 2022 as ebook and paperback.

Here’s how it’s gone:

• 8 paperback sales

• 11 Kindle ebook sales

• Geographically:

  • 10 UK

  • 8 US

  • 1 Canada

• Pages read via KENP:

  • 1,343 (I like this stat: knowing that people have actually read the book, rather than merely bought it, is meaningful)

• I’ve made £32 from the combined sales. I’m not buying that tropical island just yet.

You can see here that there was a burst of activity around launch, and then a trickle since:

I’ve poked tentatively at some promotion. On Facebook I ran a very small scale ad from 14-21 December, which seemed to convert. I’ve run Amazon ads as well, which haven’t had any traction whatsoever. I’ve also tried running a countdown deal on Amazon over the last week, which seems to have had more of a reaction.

It’s all a bit inconclusive in terms of promotion and sales.

I’d love to hear from anyone with more experience promoting books about what works and doesn’t work (though I suspect it’s quite book-specific).

If you’d like to check out the book and help boost up those stats, you can get a copy from Amazon here. :)

A comic

I’ve always wanted to make a comic. My illustration skills have never been up to the task, but I’ve been working away at my drawing for the last year. Part of the problem has been that I’ve always wanted to be able to draw realistic, proportional humans and tell realistic stories - I wish I was Jamie McKelvie or Jen Bartel, basically.

More recently I’ve tried something different and more stylised, and I’ve been quite pleased. As such I’m developing a series of short 3-4 panel sketches featuring:

The mini-story will be following her as she tries to figure out who she is and who she wants to be. The plan is to incorporate a range of art styles, but it’ll be primarily hand-drawn and non-digital.

Should be fun.

Thanks for reading. Good luck with your 2023 projects!