A Message For Writers

First, an observation, then an epiphany...

Everyone knows that literary one-hit wonders exist (writers who write one book and find attention and success). But one-hit wonders are quite rare. If you go back through history, you'll find that most of the one-hit wonders are soon forgotten. Yet would-be writers still think about writing a single book. You could write the next To Kill A Mockingbird or Gone With The Wind. But your odds of success would be vanishingly small.

In the past, I've said that writers shouldn't think about writing one book. They should think about writing a shelf full of books. If you want success, the need for this approach is increasing. And that is the point of this post. I'm beginning to think that the number of books you have, and the frequency with which you publish them, makes more difference to your success than most anything else. (Yes, the books still need to be good. Yes, you have to have professional covers. And yes, your books probably shouldn't be 140-page novellas masquerading as novels, as the bad reviews reveal that readers are unhappy with what one reviewer called "pretend novels.")

It takes very little research (poking around on Amazon will do it) to see that nearly all successful writers have a dozen or more books. The most successful writers have far more. In my experience, every successful writer I know has at least a dozen books. (Look at your own favorite writers!)

Today, writing a shelf full of books is almost a requirement to find success in the book business.

Here's where my epiphany comes in:

Writing a lot of books generates success. Every writer I know who's written a dozen or more books has found success!

In other words, if you do write many books, you will find success. Put in the work, you will succeed. That can't be said about all fields of complex work. Writing novels is a complex undertaking. But with sufficient practice, it can be learned. In fact, it has to be learned. People aren't born with writing talent. In the same way a coordinated person cannot simply strap on a snowboard and then do a triple twisting, double back flip off the half-pipe, a writer has to learn the skill. Yet writing can be learned. And with enough work, it will be learned.

The idea that every writer should stop thinking about a single book and instead think of many books may be the single most important aspect of finding writing success.

I should probably put in a qualifier and say that it would be best if those dozen books are in a single genre, comprise some kind of series or two, and need to have been written in a relatively short time frame, like a book or two a year or faster. A dozen books strung out over 40 years won't cut it.

It's possible that there are people who've written a dozen books and haven't found success, but I haven't met or even heard of one, at least not one in the self-publishing era. 

Why is this, that simply writing a dozen books will bring you success? I don't know. But it's probably that a dozen books will give you a mixture of substantial writing skills, teach you how the book business works, and, most important, you will spend thousands of hours thinking about what works for readers and then trying to craft your prose to fit what you've learned.

Should you start trying to publish before you've written a bunch of books? I think not. Readers are looking for multi-book authors. They don't pay attention to single-book authors. Why? Probably because there are too many of them. Write one book, you have millions and millions of competing authors. Write a dozen books, you have relatively little competition.

I recently read that fantasy superstar Brandon Sanderson wrote 12 novels before he showed any of them to an editor. Hugh Howey wrote 20 novels before he ventured away from his desk. 

By comparison, I only wrote six, the last two of which became the first two in my series. But that was in another era. If I were starting out these days, I would write a dozen. 

Yet another perspective is to realize that, if you're going to be a success, you will end up writing many, many novels. So why bang your head against the publication wall with just one book? Assume you'll be successful, which means you will write a bunch of books. So write a dozen of them first, and then venture forth into the book world. You will be amazed at the difference as you proceed with a substantial body of work, while you watch others struggle trying to find traction with a single book.

Is writing a dozen books hard? Yes, of course. So is studying to become a neurosurgeon or a lawyer or a competetive snowboarder or opera singer or a Shakespearean actor. All worthwhile skills take enormous amounts of time and effort to acquire. But most serious skills produce great reward, whether financial, emotional, or other.

Writing is one of those skills. If you investigate careers that successful writers have abandoned, you find all manner of occupations. It's worth noting that writers don't quit to become doctors or professors or attorneys. But if doctors, professors, and attorneys find success writing, they often quit their former careers. What does that say about the rewards of writing? It says this: Writing is a very attractive job. So get going on those first dozen books!

Birds Are Amazing

We all know that birds can astound. I just read a book that explains some of the why and how and where.

A World On The Wing by Scott Weidensaul is an intriguing book.

The stories you'll end up talking about at the dinner table are numerous. The bird's migrations are nearly unbelievable.

Because birding scientists now have minitature tracking devices they can attach to birds, they've learned that their previous ideas about how far birds migrate are very much understated. There are birds that fly 50,000 miles a year. There are birds that take to the air and don't land for months. There are birds that live in one small area during our spring and summer (breeding season) and then fly halfway around the world each year to another small area in our fall and winter. (And some of them have a second breeding season for the Southern Hemisphere's spring and summer. The precision of their travels is astounding.

Take California's Swainson's Hawk, a big population of which, during our spring and summer, live in a small valley north of Mount Shasta. Come fall and winter, they fly 9,000 miles one way to a small valley in Argentina. As spring returns to the north, the birds fly back. Each year, they repeat. The round trip is 18,000 miles.

There are too many such stories to recount. I'll let you dive into the book and enjoy what you learn.

I highly recommend A World On The Wing. I was amazed. I think you will be too. 

Just How Old Is My Computer?

 My wife and I have lots of computers. Ten, at last count. Several are old desktops. Some are laptops. Some are old, some new. (You can't beat an old computer for its software, and you can't beat a new little Chromebook for traveling.) 

We keep the old computers because they've got valuable software we still use. (We hate the planned obsolescence of the tech companies, when they quit supporting older software and force people to throw old computers into the landfill! Not only is it a crime against the Earth, it is terribly inconvenient for those of us who don't want fancy tools and just want to use the tools that work! For example, give me back my old email. I don't want fifteen thousand bells and whistles that take forever to load, are filled with bugs and glitches, and often crash. Yes, here's looking at you, Microsoft, and you, GoDaddy for forcing us to use the new Microsoft 365. I just want basic email. But of course, young software engineers seem to universally fall for the concept of putting every possible feature into every possible program.)

We also have an old MacBook for its old Photoshop software. We also have two old Windows 7 laptops we use for general office work. 

But our favorite computer is an old, huge Dell with Windows XP. We bought it in the early 2000s and got a large Epson scanner to accommodate my wife's smaller paintings. 

When we bought the Dell, we'd already heard stories about viruses, so we made the decision to never to put that computer online. Guess what? It's still running. No online access means no viruses and no problems. I had to replace the internal clock battery a couple of years ago, but otherwise the computer's been perfect, 20 years later.

Of course, it's irreplaceable. You can't use the old Epson scanner with a new computer. And, Adobe, in their infinite stupidity, made it so their new Indesign software can't read the old Indesign files. Can you imagine how idiotic that is? So even if I wanted to get the new software, it would do me no good with my old book files. I'd love to have a word with Larry Ellison over that decision. It would be like buying a new car that won't drive on older roads. 

There is one amusing aspect to it. Among other things I do with that old computer is spell check my manuscripts before I convert them into PDF files. The software is good and thorough, and its architecture, though confusing, still works. In the process, I do some "time travel." Old Indesign software doesn't know what a landline is. It doesn't know what a selfie is. It doesn't know what an influencer is. It doesn't know binge-watch or a hundred new terms. The list is long and a bit like a digital archeology dig. But the computer works!

I'm very much hoping our Windows XP computer lasts another 20 years!

Drought? Going...Going... Not Gone Yet

 If you check out the national drought monitor map, you'll see that California has gone from "We're drying up and blowing away" (dark brown on the map) to "We've got a bunch of snow and water, but please don't stop the storms just yet." Nevada, Utah, and the prairie states 1000 miles to the east are much worse off.

The U.S. Drought Monitor is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Map courtesy of NDMC.

The Drought Monitor doesn't just look at how much snow or rain has fallen (the snow at our house is up to the second floor) but also looks at the reservoirs and other aspects of drought. According to a reservoir tracking website: https://engaging-data.com/ca-reservoir-dashboard/ our current reservoir storage in California reservoirs is at 94% of historical average. Which means we're still not up to the normal storage for this time of year. But we're getting closer! Stay tuned...