Happy Birthday: the Do-over Year

If how a birthday goes is any indication of how the year will go, I am really looking forward to this next year. I got to spend time with my favorite people, got some work done, had a lot of fun, and escaped it all without bodily injury or an arrest record. If that’s how I have to characterize next year, I’m good with it.

The reason it’s a Do-over year is that I was talking with my folks on my walk to Starbucks at 5 AM. My father asked how old I was. I said, “54.” My mother corrected me, tossing in a minor math lesson. (If authors did math well, we’d not be authors, we’d be bean counters at the publishers.) I spent all last year thinking I was a year older than I was. So, I’ve done year 53 before. The Do-over will be a cinch—prime number years always go well.

The sheer number of folks wishing me a Happy Birthday via Twitter and Facebook last Saturday overwhelmed me. While one could look at the gross number of friends and followers and suggest that, given the law of averages, of course I’d get that many greetings; that misses the point. Writing tends to be a fairly solitary profession. It is, however, one where people trust me enough to let me come be their personal storyteller. In times when they’re bored, they turn to me. When something bad is going on and they need to escape, they trust me. When they want to discover something new, when they want to be shocked, or want to smile, they give me access to their minds. They let me in further than most folks they know—as I do with other authors; as we all do with our favorite authors.

The trick is that writers seldom get to see that. Sure, at conventions we have folks asking us to sign books. They might tell us that they enjoyed the story, but there’s little chance for a conversation where they share their reaction to tales. And in terms of numbers, sure, twice a year we get an accounting sheet that tells us how many copies of the book have sold. But as Stalin suggested, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” It’s very difficult to look at a royalty sheet and translate 75,000 units into individual people.

That is changing, and this is one of the most exciting aspects of the Internet and the Do-over year. The other day a friend made a cryptic remark about my use of the word scintillate in At The Queen’s Command. I knew exactly where she was in the book, and I knew exactly why she made the remark she did. And I smiled. Because of Facebook, where she posted her remark, I got to share part of her experience of the book, almost in real time. That’s the sort of feedback that writers seldom get. (The closest I’ve had before that was when a death-row inmate was reading a novel and jotting down reactions as he went. He then copied them over and sent them to me.)

I also get to see this because of digital sales. When someone comes and buys In Hero Years… I’m Dead from my store, I actually get to see who it is. That book already has world-wide distribution. A lot of Australians are buying it, and I’ve had sales on every continent except Antarctica. (I think people have bought it down there, but I suspect it’s through a satellite sales structure set up by Dr. Sinisterion through his secret base down there.) Digital sales also becomes a venue through which I can see word-of-mouth selling going on. A couple people buy in a particular area, then a cluster of orders comes in.

And by “area” I mean web-community. When some kind folks in the mobile reading community put up information about the Talion: Revenant challenge, lots of folks came in and purchased. The power of the internet to alert folks to things that interest them can’t be understated (though traditional publishers are gladly underestimating it). I can’t tell you how much that support means to me, both financially and providing positive feedback about books.

So, maybe this isn’t exactly a Do-over year for me; but a Do-better year. I do need to write more, and shall. I also need to exercise more; and shall. (I’m just trying to figure out what kind of program I want to use.) And I need to learn to do better marketing and promotional stuff. The way digital publishing is taking off, this next year could actually be the year in which I leave dependence on advances beyond. I’ll no longer be mortgaging the future to pay for today, which means I can write what I want to write—and write what you want to read.

Thank you all for birthday well wishes, and for all your help and support over the last year.