Helena Puumala's romantic short story "Love at the Lake" , now on Amazon

Helena Puumala's romantic short story "Love at the Lake" just went live on Amazon. It's about 6000 words, with an awesome cover and available for Kindle/iPad/iPhone/smartphone for the princely price of 99 cents.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IPSZKLS

A Conversation with Helena Puumala, author of the Kati of Terra Series - What is success for a writer, Part 2

February 26, 2014 Plato’s Pizza, Edmonton Alberta

What is Success for a Writer Part 2?

Question:  Here’s a quick review of our topic.  Last week, I received this work-spam email from the Educational Policy Institute, that included a list of Richard St. John’s Eight Secrets of Success.  Though they do have the flavour of standard business school fluff, the general topic is of “success’ is of widespread interest and this list provides a framework around which to discuss the concept.  So, we thought it might be interesting to discuss them at some length, particularly from the perspective of a writer.  Obviously,  though, any of these thoughts could probably apply to the rest of the creative arts, whether that be writing, drama, painting, music, what have you.  And naturally they apply to other career or life goals, in general.

In Part 1 of our blog (on this site), we discussed the first four general items: Passion, Work Hard, Be Good at what You Do, and Focus.   In this blog we will review the last four major items, indicated below.

Answer: Ok, let’s have a go the remaining items.

Push Yourself

Question:  The first major item is called “Push Yourself” and the first sub-theme is “physically and mentally push yourself to your limits.”  What do you think?  Is this good advice for a writer?

By the way, just as context for blog readers, I know for a fact that you have written over half a million words in the past two years (Kati of Terra 2, published May 2013 and Kati of Terra 3 soon to be published).  If we go back a bit further, you are closing in on a million words written in the past five years (Kati of Terra 1 published May 2012, Witches’ Stones 1 published July 2012 and a collection of short stories, Northern Gothic Stories, published December 2012).  So you are no slacker, and are quite well qualified to comment on this issue.

Answer: Thanks for the literary synopsis.  To be fair, a few of those were based on drafts that I had done when I was younger, as well.  That does sound like a lot, but it’s not so hard if you enjoy what you are doing.

 Anyway, as for pushing yourself to the limits, it’s probably good advice as long as it is interpreted reasonably.  There’s no point in pushing yourself until you have a breakdown.  And with writing, it is more of a mental thing than a physical thing.

Question:  Do you say that because writers just “sit in a chair” while they work, which physically isn’t too difficult.  Because that can be tough on the body too, as a lot of people can attest to.

Answer: I suppose that’s true.  It’s helpful in novel writing, that you can get up and move around at will, which is not generally true of most office jobs.  But I was thinking more about the danger of burning the midnight oil to the point where you just exhaust yourself entirely.  That’s probably counterproductive.  You have to pace yourself, even as you push yourself.

Question:  What about the mental aspect?

Answer: You do have to push yourself mentally, because that’s the way you expand your mind, and you need to expand your mind so that it can hold the contents of your book.  You want to be able to hold a lot of the contents in memory but it’s more than that - you want to be able to mentally inhabit your created world, really immerse in it.  That makes writing easier.

Question:  It sounds a bit like how the best actors try to “live their character” while filming or during the course of the play’s run.

Answer: That’s probably not a bad analogy.

 Question:  You have mentioned previously that you felt that your mind really was expanding, as a result of writing long-form novels.  What’s that feel like to you?

Answer: I can hold more of the book in my head now.  I don’t have to consult notes as much as I did at the beginning.  It just feels like there is more room in my head than there was before I got serious about my writing again.

Question:  That reminds me a bit of studying advanced calculus in my undergraduate days.  When things went well, it felt like your mind could hold things that seemed impossible before.  It could almost feel effortless sometimes.  You were surprised at yourself.  Unfortunately it didn’t always go that well J.

Answer: I agree.  The feeling of your mind expanding can come as a shock at the beginning.  But it is a nice surprise.

Question:  Ok, here’s the next sub-item: “push through shyness and self-doubt.

Answer: I am not sure that shyness applies for most of the writing process.  After all, it’s pretty solitary.

Question:  Oh, I don’t know about that.  What could be more truly the essence of “pushing through shyness” than having the audacity to write a novel or short story, then actually pushing the publish button.  Same thing for “pushing through self-doubt”.

Answer: I guess that’s true in a way.  You are not speaking in front of a big crowd, so the shyness concept doesn’t apply in that way.  But you are expressing yourself and trying to entertain and/or educate.  So, you can’t be shy in a certain sense, to do that.  You can’t be self-effacing.  You have to have an ego and confidence in your right to make your statement. 

Serve

Question:  The next general category is called “Serve”.  The first sub-theme is “make it a privilege to serve people.”

Answer: In writing, you are trying to entertain and perhaps educate, so in that sense you are serving people.  But the way it is phrased has a sort of elitist connotation, like a bit of noblesse oblige.  Plus it can be an ego trip - “I serve”.  So I have some issues with the terminology.  The word serve is a loaded one.

Question:  It can come off as a little bit “business school goody two-shoes”, though there is something there.  The next sub-item is “serve other people something they will find of value”.

 Answer: As a writer, you want to offer for peoples' consumption, the products of your imagination.  Naturally you hope they find it of value.  But it should be a transaction among equals, so again “serve” seems like the wrong word for that.

Question:  The third sub-item is “think more about the needs of your stakeholders than your own needs”.   It sounds like Spock's famous line from The Wrath of Khan -“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”.

Answer:  Well, then I will counter with Kirk's quote in the next movie, The Search for Spock.  In writing, “the needs of the one must outweigh the needs of the many”.   Your production comes from your own innermost intuitive self, so you have to give that first priority.  If you are going to cater to anyone, it has to be to your own muse.  You have to assume (or at least hope) that your audience will follow you to the places where your imagination leads them.

Question:  So, don’t try to slavishly write to some intended audience, because it will just get in the way of your creativity.

Answer:  Well you do want to keep your market in mind, but you can’t really know for sure what they want, so you should offer what comes from within you.   That way it’s sincere and genuine.

Have Ideas

Question:  The next major category is called “Have Ideas”.  The first sub-theme is “you must find the time to think.”

Answer:  Well, that’s self-evidently true for writing.  Even bad writing requires some thought.

Question:  That brings up the question of how much time you should devote to thinking versus how much time you should devote to writing versus how much time you should devote to editing.  There is a school of thought current now, that says writers must push out a lot of product in order to have a reasonable chance of commercial success.  Conversely, in the old days, there was perhaps too much emphasis on re-writing, re-editing and re-polishing.  Obviously there is a trade-off inherent in the quantity versus quality argument.  Where do you stand on that?

 Answer:  I can’t speak for others, but I have never tried to measure the amount of time I spend on one versus the other.  But a good book does require a lot of thought and creativity, in my opinion. And that does take time.  Writers shouldn’t stint on that for the sake of publishing some set amount of product per year.  You can’t get too rule-bound about productivity - that can interfere with the natural rhythm of creativity.

Question:  The next sub-item is “seek inspiration from whatever and whomever you can: books, TED, mentors, gurus”.  This is another one that seems self-evidently true for writers.  You have to beg, borrow and steal from everyone you can.

Answer:  That’s true, but footnote and cite and say thanks.  And try to respect copyright, unless you have a lawyer in the family.  But seriously, you want your ideas to be respected, so you have to respect the ideas of others.  And always remember, the depths of your creative self are the best source of material that you can come across.  Try it, it’s really amazing.

 Question: Obviously in all endeavours, we borrow from the past and lend to the future - that’s Newton’s “standing on the shoulders of giants”.   The last sub-theme of this category is “listen, observe, be curious, ask questions, problem solve, make connections”.

Answer: I would just add: If you are a writer, create, create, create. 

Persist

Question:  The final major category, and perhaps the one most salient for the arts or indeed many careers is “Persist”.  The first sub-item is “persist through failure”.

Answer:  As a writer, you will get the chance to practice that a great deal J.

Question:  Of course, leaving aside money as a scorekeeper, you never really know when you are succeeding or failing.

Answer:  And you have to accept that.  If you throw in the towel, you might do so just before the book or short story that breaks through for you.  It may be the tenth or twentieth book that makes you an overnight success.

Question:  The final sub-item is “persist through CRAP: Criticism, Rejection, Assholes, Pressure”.  That sounds like submitting query letters to agents.

Answer:  Doesn’t it though.  That’s assuming you could find one that was even willing to give you the courtesy of paying attention to you long enough to reject you.  Yes, that’s the beauty of self-publishing, at least at the moment.  Nobody can stop you from expressing yourself.

Question:  But there is still criticism, rejection, assholes and pressure out there.

Answer: True, but that is all easier to ignore now.  I LOVE self-publishing.

 

Richard St. John’s Eight Secrets of Success

1. Passion
1. do it for love not for money.
2. if you do it for love the money will follow.
3. passions are the first thing you thing of in the morning and the last thing you think of at night.
2. Work hard
1. the harder you work the more you will achieve
2. success rarely comes without hard work; lucky winners are few and far between.
3. Be good at what you do
1. work long and hard to be good at something
2. practice; practice; practice
3. when it comes down to it if you aren’t good at what you do you can’t be a success and sustain it
4. Focus
1. concentrate all your efforts into one or two goals.
2. without focus your resources will be too thinly stretched to achieve real success.
5. Push yourself
1. physically and mentally push yourself to your limits
2. push through shyness and self-doubt
6. Serve
1. make it a privilege to serve people
2. serve other people something they will find of value
3. think more about the needs of your stakeholders than of your own needs
7. Have ideas
1. you must find the time to think
2. seek inspiration from whatever and whomsoever you can: books; TED; mentors; gurus
3. listen; observe; be curious; ask questions; problem solve; make connections.
8. Persist
1. persist through failure
2. persist through CRAP: Criticism; Rejection; Assholes; Pressure

 

A Conversation with Helena Puumala, author of the Kati of Terra Series - What is Success for a Writer?

February 13, 2014 Plato’s Pizza, Edmonton Alberta

Part Thirteen – What is Success for a Writer? (Part 1)

Question:  Ok this is kind of hokey, but here is the setup.  I received this work-spam email from something called the Educational Policy Institute the other day, that included something called Richard St. John’s Eight Secrets of Success.  Though they do have the flavour of standard business school fluff, a certain sincerity did come through.  So, I thought it might be interesting to discuss them, particularly from the point of view of a writer, though it could probably apply to anyone involved in the creative arts, whether that be writing, drama, painting, music, what have you.

Answer: Ok, let’s have a look.  Yeah, it’s a hokey list, but not entirely useless - sometimes this sort of stuff does have a ring of truth.  Still, you can’t take these advice lists too literally.  You have to do your own picking and choosing.

Passion

Question:  Right.  So here we go.  The first general category is “Passion”.  The statement is “Do it for love, not money”.

Answer: But of course.   Especially true of any activity in the arts.  You probably won’t be able to tap the true wellsprings of creativity if you are primarily focussed on money.

Question:  And it’s true in other activities, such as data analysis, which is my day job.  That’s really all about telling a story too, the truest story that the numbers lead you towards.  But the reality is that for many people money trumps passion, because they need to eat.  Those of us who have choices in that regard are really lucky people.

Answer: I think society needs to work hard at making that choice a possibility for everyone and I make that clear in my fiction.

Question:  The next statement under the general category of passion is “If you do it for love, the money will follow.”

Answer: It might or might not.  It can take a long time in the arts.  We all hope it’s true, though.

Question:  In my professional career it happened, at least to a limited extent, though I am mindful that I might just be lucky.  The next statement is “Passions are the first things you think of in the morning and the last things you think of at night.”

Answer: Well, that’s silly if taken literally.  That would be called obsession.  I don’t mean to deny or diminish the notion of passion, but life’s a lot more complicated than that.

Question:  Of course, you can’t be too literal with this kind of fluff.  But don’t you find that sometimes your book is the first thing you think of in the morning and the last thing you think of at night?

Answer: I suppose it can and does happen for a while, but you’d be a basket case to live that way.  You have to make room for the rest of life.

Work Hard

Question:  The next general category is “Work Hard”.  The statement is “The harder you work, the more you will achieve”.

Answer: There’s no doubt that achievement requires effort, but effort doesn’t guarantee achievement .  It might better be stated “the harder you work, the greater your possibility of achievement.”

Question:  Yes, effort is (generally) necessary, but not sufficient.  The next statement is “Success rarely comes without hard work; lucky winners are few and far between”.

Answer: And those lucky winners are called lottery winners, whether it’s a formal lottery or not.  There’s also the lottery of genetics or the lottery of birth.  But even with hard work, luck (or the intercession of the fairies) often plays a role.  Things are easier if you catch a few breaks.

Question:  Luck’s usually nice, but it can drag you down too.  A lot of compulsive gamblers started with an early lucky streak that they continued to try to relive, almost always unsuccessfully, for the rest of their lives.  That’s what the research says, and those have been my personal observations.  Some day I will have to blog about my efforts to beat the horses with multivariate statistics.  I saw a lot in that time.

Answer: You should enlighten us about that some day.

Be Good at What you Do

Question:  The next general category is “Be Good at What you Do”.  The statement is “Work long and hard to be good at something”.

Answer:  Well of course.  If the activity in question is truly your passion, that’s precisely what you do.  You almost can’t avoid it.

Question:  I would naturally agree, conditioned once more on the person’s actually opportunities to work long and hard at their passion.  It’s easy to be stuck working long and hard at something you hate.   The next statement is “Practice, practice, practice.”

Answer:  Talent and practice aren’t exclusive.  They go together.  Very few people can ride on talent alone, though to be really good at something it helps to be gifted with a higher than average innate skill at the activity.  In writing, perhaps practice, practice, practice can lead to a certain level of commercial success, when coupled with a decent dollop of luck.  But to go much beyond that, seems to take that indefinable thing we call talent.  It’s hard to describe it, but we feel like we know it when we see it.

Question:  Perhaps you are influenced by the fact that we saw a Shakespeare play earlier this afternoon.  (By the way Love’s Labour Lost is a great Valentine’s Day play).

Answer:  Well, Shakespeare could hit emotional peaks that catch you up and surprise you, transport you.  It seems so effortless when you watch it.  I suppose that’s an example of how talent shows itself above and beyond practice, practice, practice.

Question: The next statement is “When it comes down to it, if you aren’t good at what you do you can’t be a success and sustain it.”

Answer: That seems self-evident in most cases, though history seems replete with counter-examples.  Maybe you can succeed in terms of money, but in terms of your inner self, you probably won’t really be satisfied.

Focus
Question:  The next general category is “Focus”.  The statement is “Concentrate all your efforts into one or two goals”.

Answer:  Again, this is conditional on the meaning of the words.  Life is so much more complex than just knocking off a couple of goals.

Question:  Yet there is a kernel of truth there.  You do have to concentrate your energies, and by that I mean your energies that are surplus to physical and social survival. 

Answer:  And life is long and it has stages.  So, the things that you concentrate on are an ongoing evolution throughout the life cycle.  Sometimes one thing takes priority, and later other things do.   For example, I am letting my heroine Kati of Terra off the hook for a while from adventuring, so that she can do those family things that are important too.  And as with Kati, so with us all.

Question:  Yes (smiling), Kati can teach us so much.  The next statement is “Without focus your resources will be too thinly stretched to achieve real success.”

Answer:  You compromise and you make choices, that’s the essence of life.  You can talk all you want about focus, but you can’t avoid the fact that life is complex and that there are competing demands.

Question:  Yes, it’s another statement that seems like an obvious truth, until you unpack its full meaning and its consequences.  I mean, if you focus so hard that you sacrifice your family on the alter of success, then what have you really gained?

Anyway, that’s as much as one pizza and bottle of wine will get us through for now.  Luckily, there are four more of Richard St. John’s secrets of success, each with multiple sub-items, that we can discuss later.

Answer: Oh joy.

 

 

Richard St. John’s Eight Secrets of Success

1. Passion
1. do it for love not for money.
2. if you do it for love the money will follow.
3. passions are the first thing you thing of in the morning and the last thing you think of at night.
2. Work hard
1. the harder you work the more you will achieve
2. success rarely comes without hard work; lucky winners are few and far between.
3. Be good at what you do
1. work long and hard to be good at something
2. practice; practice; practice
3. when it comes down to it if you aren’t good at what you do you can’t be a success and sustain it
4. Focus
1. concentrate all your efforts into one or two goals.
2. without focus your resources will be too thinly stretched to achieve real success.
5. Push yourself
1. physically and mentally push yourself to your limits
2. push through shyness and self-doubt
6. Serve
1. make it a privilege to serve people
2. serve other people something they will find of value
3. think more about the needs of your stakeholders than of your own needs
7. Have ideas
1. you must find the time to think
2. seek inspiration from whatever and whomsoever you can: books; TED; mentors; gurus
3. listen; observe; be curious; ask questions; problem solve; make connections.
8. Persist
1. persist through failure
2. persist through CRAP: Criticism; Rejection; Assholes; Pressure

 

Amazon Top 100 Kindle Books - Indies versus Trads Sales Revisited, and Comparing with Hugh Howie’s 2014 Data

Recently, noted SF writer Hugh Howie released data developed by himself and a data analyst partner, utilizing Amazon data via a web “spider”, which can data mine publicly available internet data extremely quickly and efficiently.  While I haven’t had a chance to delve very deeply into their data (which I will do later, as they provided the base data to the public), I did do a quick check against some of my early Amazon Top 100 results (collected laboriously by hand, I might add J).  Those blogs of mine can be found under the general tiles “Amazon Top 100 Kindle Books”.  Hugh Howie’s can be found in the website “Author Earnings”.

Here’s my result for number of Indie vs Trad books in the Top 100, along with the new results reported by Hugh Howie.

Amazon Top 100, 2013	Total
Traditional	76
Indie	24
Grand Total	100

 Here are the numbers after removing the books that weren’t in the Mystery/Thriller, SFF, and Romance categories, to make them comparable to Hugh’s numbers (these are restated as percentages, rather than raw numbers).

Amazon Top 100, 2013	Total
Traditional	74
Indie	26
Grand Total	100

 Here’s Hugh Howie’s numbers, form a much larger sample (about 7000 Amazon genre books).

Hugh Howie’s Amazon snapshot, early 2014	Total
Traditional	65
Indie	35
Grand Total	100

 These are Hugh’s numbers restated, with a category called “Single-Author Publishers” grouped with Indies.

Hugh Howie’s Amazon snapshot, early 2014	Total
Traditional	53
Indie	47
Grand Total	100

 So, the Hugh Howie numbers are even more favorable to Indies than mine were, especially in the second case, where the single-author publishers are assumed to be Indies.   As I recall, a certain CEO of a major U.S. publisher was alarmed and disbelieving of the results that I blogged (on a Passive Voice discussion) – he must be apoplectic at Hugh’s results.

Anyway, why are the results different?

The first possibility is that a lot changed between the times that the two samples represent.  My Amazon Top 100 analysis was based on Amazon’s list of their top 100 books of 2013.  In a sense then, it could be thought of as representing the mid-point of the 2013 data, since it is an accumulation of data collected throughout the year.  Hugh’s analysis was from a snapshot in February 2014, if I recall correctly.  So, about 8 months passed between the mid-point of one sample and the time of the second.  In the current publishing world, a lot can change in 8 months, as we know.

The second possibility is that the traditionally published books in the top 100 were more consistently present in that list over a longer time period, whereas any particular Indie book spends less time in the top 100, to be replaced by a new Indie book.   Think of a baseball team that came in third place for 5 straight years, while the other teams cycled in and out of the pennant race.  In that case the consistent third place team might place higher than the rest in a theoretical five year season, though it never wins a pennant.

That hypothesis would imply that there is more “churn” in the Indie books than the Trads.  That could simply be because the Trad authors have had longer careers and therefore have a ready-made fan base that allows them to stick on the top of the list for a longer time.   Indies have a more experimental audience, so any particular book doesn’t stay at the top as long, though as a group they are very successful .  If that’s the case, the passage of time will tend to make the most popular Trad and Indie writers converge,  in this regard.  Hugh’s data collection might also make that a fairly easy hypothesis to test, via some longer term tracking.  That’s the nice thing about a reliable and robust dataset – you can test hypotheses against the evidence.

Hugh’s large sample analysis also noted some things that my small sample had noted.  Briefly:

·         Indies have higher reader review ratings/rankings, on average, than Trads.

·         The vast majority of top-selling books, Trad or Indie, are in the general categories of Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Science Fiction/Fantasy, and Romance.

·         Indies are at lower price points than Trads.

·         Assuming the usual royalty structures for Indies vs Trads, Indies can more than make up the difference in price, yielding equal or greater earnings for the writer.

I might say more later, but now I’m off to have pizza and wine with my favorite writer J.