Category Archives: Writing

What novel is worth writing, really?

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I am writing a beautiful tale about corpses. Very seasonable weather for it.

–Evelyn Waugh

Here’s the problem with self-publishing: no one cares about your book. That’s it in a nutshell. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe. Many of those – perhaps as many as half or even more – are self-published. On average, they sell less than 250 copies each. Your book won’t stand out. Hilary Clinton’s will. Yours won’t.

–Nick Morgan, Thinking of Self-Publishing Your Book in 2013? Here’s What You Need to Know, Forbes, 2013

If you’ve ever written, or have tried to write, or hope to write a novel, I suppose you sometimes think thoughts like the ones I’m thinking today.

Why am I doing this?

What am I trying to do, exactly?

I know I left that novel idea around here, somewhere. And yes, I'm a loon.

I know I left that novel idea around here, somewhere. And yes, I’m a loon.

I’m a decent writer. Above average, perhaps. But in this sea of writers — this sea of millions and millions of books — all that being “above average” means is that my head bobs up above the surface once in a while.

Just long enough for me to suck in a quick gasp of air before I disappear again.

I am also, arguably, a confused writer.

I’m envious of writers who live and breathe genre, because if you’re a passionate fan of genre, and then you decide to write genre, a big chunk of the “why” question is automatically answered. You’re writing to contribute to the genre. Genre readers are always looking for more genre to read. What you’re doing is participatory — reciprocal.

I like genre. I’ve read a fair share of genre. But I have never honestly felt completely at home in any genre community.

And look. Here’s what someone posted in a new review on my novel, Can Job:

Really 3.5 stars because it’s solid, but it never makes up its mind about what genre it wants to be.

You get a sense that this is going to be a romantic chick-lit romp from the cover and some of the scenes, but the majority of it reads like an attempt at big business satire.

Is it "art" if you look like you don't know what you're doing?

Is it “art” if you look like you don’t know what you’re doing?

A totally fair critique, I’m sure. From someone who obviously reads a lot and who doesn’t know me, and so isn’t even subconsciously inclined to just “go along with it” when I color, awkwardly, outside the lines.

And the thing is, it’s intentional. I’m doing this to myself, on purpose.

Sigh.

So I’m working on another novel, one of 3 or 4 WIPs in various stages of done-ness. And wrestling with the same kinds of questions.

What kind of book is this?

What am I trying to say?

I mean: what am I really really trying to say?

Let’s go back again to Faust.

Start in the 1500s with Historia & Tale of Doctor Johannes Faustus.

Faust is the arrogant guy who renounces Christianity and trades his soul in exchange for, basically, magical powers.

Peel that back and the story asks the questions: what is good? what is evil? what is truly most important and why are some people foolish enough to trade the most important away?

The answers are based on the assumed 16th century virtues of obedience and faith. Faust, like Lucifer in the Historia’s tale-within-a-tale of that angel’s fall, “rose up in insolence and vanity.” He thought he was too (good? smart? something) to heed the guidance of the Church.

Goethe’s Faust, written some 300 years later, asks the same questions but frames them completely differently.

Romanticism, suddenly aware of dynamic (even irrational) principles underlying both man and nature, took striving–tentative progression and development, and pure endeavor–and made it the defining quality of mankind.

From “Masterpieces of Romanticism,” edited by Howard E. Hugo, in The Continental Edition of World Masterpieces.

A being of searchings and questionings, living a life of constant aspiration towards goals but dimly seen–this, as described by God, is the being He has created in His own image.

And of the devil’s pact with Goethe’s Faust:

Here is no simple temptation to be naughty …

If Mephistopholes can destroy Faust’s sense of aspiration, if Faust can say of any single moment in time that this is complete fulfillment of desire–then the devil wins, and God and man are defeated.

I.e. “evil” is the cessation of striving toward something.

That something is still God. But it’s not obedience to God in the narrow sense articulated by the first Faust chapbooks. To Goethe, to be “good” is to be an active participant in God’s plan–to actively fulfill your part in God’s plan for humanity.

Obviously we see, here, the ideas of Progressivism in its modern/political sense, stirring in the minds of 19th Century Romantics. Or anyway, in a 1956 essay on Romanticism by an English professor at Berkeley ;)

So two final things and then I hit “publish.”

First, here I am in 2018 pondering two versions of Faust, one of which was published 450 years ago, and the other 200-ish.

And the ideas communicated by these two works are effing immense. You almost can’t get your head around them, they’re so big. Poke at them and they start to rattle you.

And part of me wonders, what is the point of writing a novel that is any less than this — that is any smaller?

Second: what kind of mind could possibly wrap itself around these same questions today?

Set aside that I wouldn’t dare to suggest I am personally capable of such a feat. I’m not that smart, and my world–including my intellectual world–is far too parochial. Pains me to know this, but I know this.

The fact is, it’s quite possible nobody could pull off a new Faust today. We’re drowning in noise–and we’re so fractured by social technology that no one mind can hope to bridge us.

And yet, I keep writing, and I keep thinking there’s no other novel that’s really worth writing, except a novel that tries …

Looking back: the first 6 weeks of The French Emerald serialized novel

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The French Emerald, Serial Novel by Kirsten Mortensen

Serial novel. Sweet, funny, fast-paced — perfect to read with a cup of coffee (or glass of wine!)

Six weeks.

Hard to believe!

But that’s how long it’s been since the release of Chapter 1 of my new serial novel, The French Emerald.

It’s been an interesting experiment. I’ve been pushing notifications of new chapters out to my email list and on the Tuesday Serial Linky aggregator here. The book is also running in some regional newspapers (please say “hi” in the comments if you found me that way!)

If you haven’t seen any of the story yet and would like to take a peek, you can start on chapter 1 here.

The most unexpected aspect of doing all this? How complicated it is to set up all the files.

Mind you, I completed the entire novel before I published the first chapter. There are 43 chapters in all — and each chapter has a reminder of last week’s chapter and a teaser for the next week. So even before I put the first one out, I was dealing privately with questions about managing 43 files in a way that would let me tee them up for week-by-week release–not to mention help me keep them all straight =0

That, it turns out, was the easy part. Year 2018 and it’s still a PIA, if I may be blunt! to transfer formatted text across apps. I wrote the book in Word, and it’s impossible to paste it into WordPress without having to re-do the formatting. (Maybe if you use localized formatting it would work, but I use Styles, because in theory that will make it easier later to import the book into InDesign for print. So my Word files come over to WP with zero formatting.) For my email version (using Mailchimp for that) I have to copy/paste and reformat again.

Then there’s the links, since all the chapters in every version have to be cross linked so people can move from one chapter to the next. I just now realized some of the links in the first few chapters of the website version were broken. Sorry if you ran into that — fixed now :/

And then there’s the scheduling! It’s a lot easier to write a post, like this one, and hit “publish.” With the serial novel, I’m prepping chapters in batches and scheduling their release. So I live in terror* of accidentally releasing chapters out of order, or tweeting a chapter link before it’s officially published.

All the same, I’m enjoying it.

And I believe the serialized novel is poised for a resurgence. Microfiction, baby. Let’s do this thing.

*Well, okay, maybe not terror, exactly. More a state of being resigned to constant low-level anxiety. hahahahahaha

Countdown to Launch: The French Emerald

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The French Emerald, by Kirsten Mortensen

It’s a mystery! It’s a romance! It’s a … serial novel? =O

I have written a serial novel.

I have written a serial novel. I’ll be publishing on my site, one chapter per week.

The first chapter debuts March 4.

I’ll post more about the how’s and why’s at some point.

But for now, please click here for the teaser copy and how you can play along :)

UPDATE: All 43 chapters are now online and free to read! Click here to start with Week 1.

Fresh Face for Can Job :)

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A New Year, and a new look for one of my favorite novels :)

(Like I can really choose a favorite! Hah.)

The goal: see if a different look can help me position the novel more effectively. So much of Can Job’s plot hangs on what it’s like to work in corporate marketing, and yes, the novel pokes gentle fun at my fictional, fumbling Diptych Corporation. But the book is also a romance, and I don’t feel that the last cover, much as I liked it, conveyed “romcom.”

So here’s to a new experiment….

In which I confess: I’ve been completely rethinking my latest draft novel

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Yeah, I’ve been busy doing other things as well. Work stuff.

But I haven’t stopped working on current novel. It’s just that the work has been going on “underground.”

Here’s the quick version.

As a writer, I operate on a kind of cusp. I aspire to writing novels that are well-plotted, because to me action is what entertains. But the questions that most interest me personally — and that (naturally) I want to explore with my books — operate at a non-surface level.

Let’s make this concrete. Suppose you have a heroine being chased by a monster. The action is all about her attempts to elude, outsmart, or fight her pursuer. And you need all that ducking and weaving and swordplay and making-of-alliances. It’s what pulls us into stories.

But no monster worth the name is “just” a physical threat. What makes monsters truly scary is that they evoke an existential threat. A monster that is “just” a monster is a cartoon. What really frightens us are things like suffering and death — things the monster represents.

Pick up that thread and follow it a bit and we find even more interesting fears. For me, for example, the fear of death is paired closely with the fear of “as if I never was.” All these memories, these experiences, the people who love me and think about me! Will that really all be wiped out one day, lost forever? Horrible!

Another closely related fear is the fear of losing control. This comes into play when people start thinking of “how” they would prefer to die. Compare “peacefully, in bed, surrounded by loved ones” with having your life snatched away from you unexpectedly. No chance to say good-byes, wrap up loose ends, settle back and take some part in the process (“more morphine please, nurse.”)

What’s scarier?

In The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll writes that “art-horror” works by imbuing monsters with qualities that invoke dread, disgust, and “the idea that unavowed, unknown and perhaps concealed and inexplicable forces rule the universe.”

Scary!

And that’s just one dimension of our heroine + monster scenario. A novel has so many layers, subplots, relationships. Ultimately they must all work together, and on that same under-the-surface level.

The novels that I truly love –that I find transporting — operate almost as if the novel itself is a psyche. I’m thinking of novels like The Book of Ebenezer LePage (GB Edwards). Everything about a novel like that seems to be part of a single psychic entity.

It’s not something you’re naturally conscious of (although people who write about GB Edwards’ book are likely to observe that the island shapes the characters, somehow. “You couldn’t write the same book if you set it on the mainland” etc.) But on an unconscious level, there’s a wholeness that transcends the categories we normally think of: character, setting, plot, conflict.

Okay, I said this post would be “the quick version” of what’s going on with my current novel.

So let me wrap it up by saying that I’ve re-titled it. It’s not Third, any more. The title is now Parthenon.Which I adore.

And it went from being basically “done” to being a WIP.

And it’s given me a constant headache as I have wrestled with how to show you, my presumed reader, something that I *know* in my bones about this place I’m writing about, which is fictional and yet not. I want to take you to this place, and show it to you, so that when you return to “the real world” you understand something you didn’t before.

That’s a tall order. I probably can’t pull it off. But I’m going to try :)

Learning from failure (indie book marketing)

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There's a pattern in there, somewhere. If only we could see it ...

There’s a pattern in there, somewhere. If only we could see it …

In my last couple of posts about indie author marketing, (one here and one here) I’ve referenced the need for data.

You need data to market. You need data to even plan how to market.

That probably sounds almost too reasonable to challenge, right?

But it also brings us to a couple more questions:

1. What data do we need, and

2. How do we make sense of it?

It’s All About the Data

The answer to the first question also sounds almost too easy, doesn’t it?

What data do we need? Why, data on how indie authors are successfully marketing their books, of course!

But is that really the best answer?

Maybe not.

The BBC published a fascinating article last week about surviving disasters. It cites the work a guy named John Leach, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth who studies how people respond when their ferry starts to take on water, or their plane crashes, or a terrorist bomb goes off in their office building.

But surprisingly, he’s not interested so much in the people who survive. He’s interested in the people who don’t.

Stories about survival often focus on the 15%, and what is so special about them that helps them stay alive. But Leach thinks this is the wrong question. Instead, we should be asking, why do so many people die when they need not, when they have the physical means to save themselves?

Huh?

This goes against everything we’re “taught” about learning, doesn’t it?

We’re taught to study success. We’re taught to seek out winners and copy them, find mentors and ask them to guide us.

And there’s a place for that.

But we also need to look at losers. We need to look at failure. We need to look at what doesn’t work.

And so often, we indie authors ignore the failures. We focus on the success stories.

Focusing exclusively on success creates problems, guys …

It creates a couple of serious problems.

First, it introduces cognitive bias — specifically, a subset of confirmation bias that’s called survivorship bias.

Author Tobias Buckell wrote a great piece on this in 2013.

It ought to be required reading for every indie author.

“The problem, right now, in eBook direct sales,” Buckell writes, “is that everyone is paying and listening to people” who have broken out. Writers who have achieved bestsellerdom.

“They’re listening to everything they say, and sifting everything they say as if it’s a formula for success.”

That ignores the vast — the overwhelming — number of indie authors who never sell more than a handful of books.

And what can we learn from them?

What have they tried that does not work?

How many times have failed authors applied the same “proven formulas” as successful authors?

We don’t know.

We. Don’t. Know.

And because we don’t know, we don’t really understand what variables are at play.

Focus on that for a moment.

Variables. Those tricky little gremlins that sneak in and try to skew every experiment ever conducted.

You have to control them if you want to understand the experiment.

But you can’t control them if you don’t know what they are.

I’ll write more about cognitive bias in a future post (or posts). But today I want to focus on the psychological consequences of falling under the sway of survivorship bias.

Don’t be hypnotized by dangerous illusions

Buckell touches on one of those consequences in his post:

Like in most cultish behavior, if you follow the rules and don’t get the results, you’re either ostracized, ignored, or it’s pretended you don’t exist. Many who don’t get the same results just shut up and go away.

When you apply some “winning formula” and it doesn’t work, you often find yourself marginalized.

And that hurts.

Now we’re all big boys and girls. And you know this as well as I do: we must grow thick skins if we’re going to survive as indie authors.

So I’m not bringing this up to whine. I’m not bringing it up so that I can decry how horribly unfair it all is.

I’m bringing it up because you and I and every other indie author out there on the long tail needs to be aware of what’s going on. We need to wake up. We need to know what we’re up against.

Which leads to the second psychological consequence of survivorship bias:

Discouragement.

You look out there and it seems like everyone else is succeeding.

And that’s a dangerous illusion.

You are a writer.

Write.

Don’t become transfixed with an illusion.

Don’t start comparing yourself to Internet spirits who seem to have achieved something that you also want.

Write.

Write.

Write.

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Speaking of misinformation

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Quote of the day:

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a business where there’s so much poor advice or lousy, limiting thinking than the writing business, nor so much misinformation.

—Russell Blake, novelist.

He’s writing about the myth that only “hacks” write novels quickly, but that observation could be applied to a looooot of other things as well.

(For context, see my posts on indie author marketing, e.g. here and here.)

Why Marketing Indie Books is SO Hard (Part 1)

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Getting to the Truth about Indie Author Marketing, by Kirsten Mortensen

Getting to the Truth About Indie Author Marketing: A clear-eyed guide to promoting your self-pubbed book

As a fellow writer, I’m sure you share my fascination with the trickiness of the human mind.

It is, after all, one of the primary sources for conflict in fiction. Pick up any decent book or article on the craft of fiction, and you’ll soon find yourself reading about character motivation: what your characters want or desire.

“Desire drives the action,” notes novelist Carol Edgarian. “It is what makes characters real.”

But characters’ desire is only half the equation. Their desires must also be thwarted.

And very often, the thwarting comes not from external factors but from internal ones. Characters’ desires are thwarted because of their internal flaws and mistakes. Characters become their own worst enemies.

We writers are also, often, our own worst enemies

One of the most fascinating internal character flaws, in my opinion, is what author mentor K.M. Weiland calls “The Lie Your Character Believes.”

A character realizes he has a problem in his life. What he doesn’t realize, subconsciously or otherwise, is the true solution to his problem.

He thinks that if he can just have what he wants, all will be well.

In the the great English novel Middlemarch George Eliot follows a number of characters who are their own worst enemies, because they’re unable to see past the fantasies they’ve erected in their thinking. Their fantasies obscure reality.

Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

900 pages later, and she finally realizes it was Rhett all along.

Dorothea, for example, believes that marrying Edward Casaubon will fulfill her deepest desire. It will allow her to align herself with a cause that is larger than herself, that will make a mark on the world. Throughout the courtship period of the relationship, she builds a fantasy in which Casaubon is a man of extraordinary gifts, destined to publish a great scholarly work, The Key to All Mythologies.

Marrying Casaubon is what Dorothea thinks she wants.

But within a few weeks of being married to the man, she begins to realize she’s completely mistaken about her husband’s greatness and destiny. Much of the novel explores the sorrowful consequences of that mistake.

There are a zillion other examples in both literary and genre fiction. Think Scarlett O’Hara’s fantasy about Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, for example. She’s so committed to that fantasy that she fails to understand her true love is right there under her nose. A tragedy for the ages!

But here’s the thing: it’s not just our characters who struggle with this.

All humans do.

Including writers.

We think we know what is “real,” but we don’t.

In Getting to the Truth About Indie Author Marketing, one of the topics I explore is how difficult it is for we writers to really know what author marketing tactics work.

This is hugely important, because if you don’t really know what works, and what doesn’t work, you’re guessing.

You’re gambling.

And if you’re gambling with your money, chances are you’re going to get burned.

One problem is lack of data.

Professional marketers don’t make uninformed bets.

They make bets that are based on years’ of experience — and on DATA.

We indie authors don’t have data.

But we fool ourselves into thinking we do.

We think that by reading what other authors have done, we’re getting a true picture of how to market our titles.

Okay.

I’m going to be completely blunt here.

That’s a fantasy.

No matter how much time you — as an individual — invest in gathering information about how to market your indie book, you can’t begin to grasp the entire industry. You can’t begin to see the “big picture” information about what authors are doing that works, and what authors are doing that doesn’t work.

Think about it. There are some 300,000 indie titles published every year. In some cases, authors are publishing multiple titles, but even if we account for that, there are hundreds of thousands of indie authors out there.

You could read ten or 20 or 50 or 100 case studies about those authors, and what they’ve done to market their books.

You still wouldn’t have a representative sample of the industry from which you could draw any meaningful conclusions.

There’s a second factor as well: the information you do gather is almost certainly dated.

This industry moves at lightning speed. Factors that influence the effectiveness of specific marketing tactics change overnight. (Just look at the way Amazon’s introduction of Kindle Unlimited roiled the status quo for many authors.)

Third factor: there are so many indie authors out there trying to market their books, that if anyone gets a clever new idea that proves successful, within a matter of weeks thousands of other authors are doing the exact same thing. By the time you tumble to the idea, the novelty has worn off. Readers have tuned it out.

(Blog tours probably fall into this category; I’ll be including a chapter on blog tours in my book, and will write more about my research on blog tours in a future post.)

Last but not least, there’s the issue of cognitive bias. I’ll be exploring that in more depth in a future post, so be sure to come back, but in a nutshell: the human mind is wired in a way that makes it hard to make sense of data, even when we do have access to it.

So Is There Any Hope?

Actually, yes, there is.

However, making money at indie publishing is FAR from “a sure thing,” and if you think it is, odds are you’re going to be disappointed.

What we writers need to do is to approach marketing our books the way experienced, professional marketers approach their consumer products challenges.

We need to use data. We need to cultivate expertise in the principles of marketing so that we don’t so easily jump to erroneous conclusions. And we need to be honest with ourselves.

We need to be clear-eyed about what bets make sense, and what bets are just a waste of money.

More Coming!

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Have You Had an Experience with Author Marketing That You’d Like to Share?

I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to either leave a comment or click here to contact me using the form on my About page. Anyone who’s contribution is used in the book will receive a free e-copy on publication. (And yes, you can remain anonymous if you like.)

writers, writers, an ungovernable bunch …

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Megan McArdle has a column up about the meltdown at The New Republic.

It’s an interesting read in general for anyone in the writing or publishing business.

But in particular, I chuckled to myself when she began describing some of the reasons running media companies presents special challenges. “You’re not running a normal type of organization,” she writes. “You’re running a professional group.”

And so you encounter a number of problems:

… the difficulty of getting creative types to produce great stuff on demand; the astonishing amount of autonomy that journalists need, because it’s impossible to write hard guidelines, and too expensive to supervise long hours of reporting and typing; the fact that great writers are frequently terrible managers and editors, which screws up the normal management pyramid; the simultaneous need for speed and accuracy; the fact that media employment selects for a cluster of personality traits that resists closer management; the professional ethic that will stymie you when you decide to make a different set of trade-offs between competing priorities such as speed, accuracy, and the need to monetize your content; the fact that writers, especially in the digital age, frequently take their audience with them if they leave, making it even harder to impose discipline …

As someone who has earned a living as a professional writer for many, many years: yep. That pretty much sums us up :)

Dark Chemistry spotlight in Rochester D&C

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The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle featured my romantic suspense novel Dark Chemistry in its author spotlight.

Brighton resident Kirsten Mortensen has published a romantic suspense novel about a twentysomething California woman who must move back to upstate New York and run the chemical* manufacturing company that her recently deceased father founded if she wants to inherit his fortune. What she doesn’t know about is a sinister force within the company who is up to no good, and she finds herself fighting for her identity and her life.

Here’s the article.

Thank you, D&C!

*Pheromones!