Imagination Unbound

Fast-forward a year (I think?), to when I was bored with all my stories and my creativity was dried up, and I decided I needed to write something just for fun, just for me, without any set intention of having it published or even having anyone else read it, just something to refresh my spirit. It was June in coastal Maine, and I began a story, hand-written in a notebook with a fountain pen, about a young woman who is feeling lost in life, arriving at a coastal cottage in Maine because she had a letter from her lawyer telling her she'd inherited it from her great-aunt, only to discover after her arrival that her great-aunt was a sorceress and not only did she inherit the cottage, she inherited the role.

That story became my "PICTA" (project-I-can't-talk-about), and remained that way right up until I finished the handwritten draft and had decided this was worth pursuing further and started typing it out. Then I started casually mentioning to one or two people that I was working on a "Maine cozy fantasy," but I still wasn't talking about it. The working title at that point was Trillium Cottage, only changed late in the typed draft to The Sorceress by the Sea as fitting the genre vibe better. (But the house is still named Trillium Cottage in the story!)

I typed "The End" today. It's turned out not so much cozy fantasy as it is magical realism + healing fiction + DE Stevenson with magic if she were American and living now - any sort of romance. I don't have a clue what genre it best fits into or how to market it to agents and publishers, or even if that's the right path for this story. All I know is, I kind of love it. And I have a companion story in mind that hit me last summer while we were camping, so we'll see what happens there.

Anyway. Many, many thanks to @fictionadventurer for her dream that kicked this whole thing off, and to @rockinlibrarian who nudged me along the path toward writing it (come to think of it, From the Shadows being a novel instead of a novella is your fault, too, you writing enabler, you!).

Fast-forward a year (I think?), to when I was bored with all my stories and my creativity was dried up, and I decided I needed to write something just for fun, just for me, without any set intention of having it published or even having anyone else read it, just something to refresh my spirit. It was June in coastal Maine, and I began a story, hand-written in a notebook with a fountain pen, about a young woman who is feeling lost in life, arriving at a coastal cottage in Maine because she had a letter from her lawyer telling her she'd inherited it from her great-aunt, only to discover after her arrival that her great-aunt was a sorceress and not only did she inherit the cottage, she inherited the role.

That story became my "PICTA" (project-I-can't-talk-about), and remained that way right up until I finished the handwritten draft and had decided this was worth pursuing further and started typing it out. Then I started casually mentioning to one or two people that I was working on a "Maine cozy fantasy," but I still wasn't talking about it. The working title at that point was Trillium Cottage, only changed late in the typed draft to The Sorceress by the Sea as fitting the genre vibe better. (But the house is still named Trillium Cottage in the story!)

I typed "The End" today. It's turned out not so much cozy fantasy as it is magical realism + healing fiction + DE Stevenson with magic if she were American and living now - any sort of romance. I don't have a clue what genre it best fits into or how to market it to agents and publishers, or even if that's the right path for this story. All I know is, I kind of love it. And I have a companion story in mind that hit me last summer while we were camping, so we'll see what happens there.

Anyway. Many, many thanks to @fictionadventurer for her dream that kicked this whole thing off, and to @rockinlibrarian who nudged me along the path toward writing it (come to think of it, From the Shadows being a novel instead of a novella is your fault, too, you writing enabler, you!).

there is no right answer! there is a wrong answer.

Trina Schart Hyman (1990)

Point Fantasy (1992)

Peter de Seve (2002)

Kindle Editions (2015)

bonus omnibus

I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house. 

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well. 

It is only about two statements that I saw go by: 

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing. 

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously. 

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers. 

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half. 

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing. 

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy. 

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought. 

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out. 

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

I often hear the argument that having major characters die is more realistic than having them always come through unscathed. Of course it is. But I personally don’t want my fiction to necessarily be “realistic” – I want my fiction to be entertaining. For me, that means watching engaging characters I care about get into and out of dangerous predicaments, working and thinking together in order to defeat the bad guys. While some authors (and readers) like the tension of wondering who will live and who will die, I prefer the tension of seeing how the heroes are going to think or work their ways out of each difficult or impossible situation they find themselves in. If I want realism and the deaths of people I care about, I can turn on the news.

I got breakfast cookies made for the girls to get them through the rest of this week (and probably into next week)

I got some stuff done that I've been intending to for a while, and while they didn't need to be done specifically for the weekend it's good to have that burden off my mind

Remembered that it's not up to me alone to get the whole dang house cleaned and so had Grace dust and reminded Joy she needs to wash dishes tonight

Looked at the list of food for Joy's graduation party, eliminated some of it, and decided to outsource some of the others to the friends who told me SEVERAL times to let them know what they could do to help

Did not dissolve into guilt and shame over having to take several breaks due to my energy being really low right now

With that off my shoulders, I managed to dip 60 strawberries in chocolate, make two batches of lemon bars, and a double batch of brownies (from a mix!), AND still take time for lunch and making a quick run to the grocery store with Joy (we could have made Carl do it, but I wanted the chance to check in with her).