Bloggasm

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean born writer and a 2002 John W. Campbell Award Nominee. He was also a 1999 Writers of the Future 1st prize winner and a graduate of Clarion ‘99. His first novel, Crystal Rain comes out in February from Tor Books, and he’s working on a second.

He’s been blogging about his path to becoming a writer from various locations since 1998, and blogging from his own URL of TobiasBuckell.com since 2002.

Simon Owens: A few months ago, you posted a widely read survey about novel advances for genre writers. Do you find the results to be disappointing?

Tobias Buckell: The genre advance survey found that median advance for a first novel was $5,000. Just over 100 writers gave me info to come up with that result, as well as the graphs I posted. The median book advance for a writer after several books and a few years in the industry was $12,500.

Are they disappointing? I don’t know. They are what they are. If you write a book that publishers think will sell well they’ll give you more money. If your book sells well you’ll make more than the advance with royalties. If you do well they might pay you more for the next book. A significant cluster of writers in this survey saw $10,000 and $25,000 advances for a first novel.

What this survey does not do is track what these writers made in foreign sales very well, or any other subsidiary rights. Many writers double their US advance with foreign rights sales. Many writers get speakers fees. Teaching fees. The genre advance survey was a very limited snapshot into how working writers work, but it will tell you what you could expect to get as an advance for your first novel. And the survey only touched on whether these writers’ books earned out and how much more they made off royalties.

Almost half the writers who answered had a significant portion of their yearly income come from writing and/or a combination of the other income streams I mentioned above. The other half still stayed with their dayjobs.

SO: As someone who has had success in both short fiction and novels, which do you prefer? Do you find yourself wishing you could spend more time on short fiction?

TB: I really love novels. As a reader they were great, because when I got a novel I liked I could lose myself in for the better part of a day or two (I’m a quick reader), and I became so much more immersed in that world than I was when I read a short story. I do love short stories, don’t get me wrong, but novels have a special sort of magic for me.

To answer your second question, as a writer, I love the short form because it gives me a quicker sense of accomplishment. In a week or two I can create a whole finished product and be done with it. I can experiment with a style, character, or setting, then be done. Over the last year and a half I’ve only written a handful of short stories, whereas in the five years previous to that I wrote some 100 short stories, so I do miss them. A lot.

But working on novels primarily right now letting me create the form I feel most comfortable with, and enjoy as a reader the most. In an ideal world I’d have time to work on both novels and short stories, right?

SO: How have you used your blog to promote your work, and how much do you think internet promotion has on book sales?

TB: I didn’t set out using the blog to promote my work. It was more of an attempt to keep myself working hard by having some eyes on me, but as time went by I just kept adding links and commentary about stuff that interested me that wasn’t necessarily about writing. The main thing I do to promote my work is just post about anything I’d like people in general to know about. If I sell something I blog a post about it, then get back to blogging about other things. If a story of mine is out in an anthology, or got a good review, or got a bad review, I post to the blog.

I think the value of the blog isn’t so much the hard sell where I have those posts letting people know where my stuff is. I think the value is in keeping readers who find me after reading something by me that they liked and who hunt down my name via google or who read my bio and a note about my website. If the blog is interesting to them and they keep reading, then they tend to know where my next piece of fiction is coming out. I imagine this ’stickiness’ will be useful as I get into writing novels, as there is a year between each novel at least, and so I’m giving readers another way to access me between the novels.

Does internet promotion help sell books? Promotion is always this frustrating thing where we know only 20% of it helps, but we don’t know which 20%. My gut sense is that blogging helps, as every time I go to a convention and give a reading there are people there who found out about me through my blog. Wherever I go there are always people that seem to already have made this friendship with me that I’m only meeting for the first time. It’s really cool, and I can’t imagine it hurts. But you have to be willing to be authentic and engaged on the blog, not just using it as a way to hard sell people who are looking for something interesting to read while plonking away online.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

TB: Only five? I have 300 in my RSS feedreader. But okay, here some favorites are:

boingboing which is run by Cory Doctorow and others

www.scalzi.com/whatever which is John Scalzi’s ‘The Whatever,’

electrolite which contains Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blogs

futurismic is another blog I blog occasionaly at about space news, but it features items about technology and the future, and also posts science fiction short stories.

‘The Mumpsimus,’ a blog by Matt Cheney that I also keep a close eye on and enjoy.