All posts by Joshua Smith

Editing: When, How, Where – Part 1

In short, it’s constant. In long, it’s constantly irritating.

Editing.

It’s the bane of most authors’ existence(s). It’s that squiggly little red line, or that query to Google, or that double-check with another writer. Or it’s that moment when you realize you missed a line (or forgot you wrote one) that changed a plot point forever. Or it’s just that you thought of a better way to phrase something. It’s developmental, it’s line, it’s copy, it’s a lot of headaches.

So when do you do it? How do you do it?

This answer is going to depend on a few key things, and you’re going to have to be the one to answer them for yourself.

This blog is going to be split into two parts, with part two coming later the week of 9/29-10/6. Part one addresses concepts and some soul-searching, and part two identifies the way I go about it.

Key Note: This is for Novels, Novellas, and Shorts.

All the love for FB posts and blogs, but this is a bit more involved than that type of content.

  1. Your own personality.
    I’m not going to lie to you; this is going to be a major deciding factor. Are you someone that has to make everything perfect the first time? Are you someone that has to ensure that whatever you type is exact the moment you write it? Or are you okay with going by the seat of your pants and just getting something down?

    In fact, I’m going to push that last part. A major unwritten rule of writing is, “You can’t edit a blank page.” I’ve heard this from so many successful writers, but the actual quote seems to be from Jodi Picoult. In short, if you don’t have something on the paper, you can’t fix it. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you have to have it written first.

  2. What your final goal is.
    Are you writing for yourself? Are you writing to have other people read it? Are you writing for publication? Are you writing for your career?

    Depending on your goal, you may not need to do everything. You may just need to give it a good solid proofin’ and drop it onto the free hosting site of your choice. Or you may want to invest money into it… and expect to make a living from the net result of your work.

  3. What kind of budget do you have?
    Money is an issue. There’s an old joke that says the quickest way to have an author earn one million dollars is to give him ten. It hurts, but for a lot of us, it’s true.

    When you’re low on cash, you may consider doing the bare minimum. I’m going to tell you up-front that if you’re writing for publication, if you’re publishing your own work, if you expect to earn money from it, then don’t do that. Don’t skimp; don’t screw around. Invest. You got someone to buy one book. Don’t you want them to buy the next book?

    I’m going to be upfront on this one:
    My first six titles (Snowflakes in Summer, Dead Men in Winter, Slag Harbor, Favorite Things, Blindsided, and Fearmonger) were self-edited. Not just once, but several times over the last few years. The net result? Some readers communicated with me that they had a bad experience. The ones that stuck around really enjoyed the full Battles of Coldstone’s Summit, but they were disappointed in the quality of production.

    I lost potential fans. I lost sales. I didn’t find the success that I was after.

    It still hurts to this day.

    This isn’t the route you want to take. So maybe… don’t. If you’re completely broke, writing a book for sale is likely not the way to fame and fortune that you may think it is. You do have a lot of costs that are involved and if you are trying to build a career, this may not be your best option.

    BUT DO NOT LET THAT SWAY YOU.

    I’m broke as hell. I continually try to find the money to make ends meet and to push one book out after another. Why? Because it’s what I want to do with my life. If you want something bad enough, you will find a way to make it happen.

    I only want to caution you against going full-bore. If it takes longer than expected, it takes longer than expected. That’s just life sometimes.

    And – who knows? There are scores of authors that have made mega-bank on their first book. These are the authors that we aspire to be. The ones that get a movie deal and a show on HBO. You might just be one!

    Sometimes, you just have to say ‘Never tell me the odds!’ and punch it into hyperdrive!

  4. Time.
    How much time are you willing to invest? This is THE question. What type of schedule are you on? Do you have one? Do you have an editor lined up? Do you know how long they’re going to take? Do you have a plan?

    It takes me, on average, two months to run a completed novel from point A to point B in my editing process. It takes up to one to two months for my developmental editor and my proofreading editor to work on their parts of the process. So, generally (a word used liberally and loaded with salty tears), a 270-380pg book takes up to four-five months(!) of alternate development time for the methods I use.

    You can cut this down significantly if you make certain choices. You can pay more to have your editor work faster (or pay less and hire a cheap one). You can skip developmental editing if you don’t think it needs it (and I’d at least run it through a beta reader first). You may not sit down and do two different full read-throughs with a red pen.

  5. Publishers… do you have one?
    One of my best friends in the indie-author industry recently took a contract with a local publisher in the WV area (Henlo Press; they’re good people, though I don’t use them myself) who handles things like cover design and editing in-house. Amanda doesn’t have to do any of it; she submits a manuscript and goes off to the next one.

    I’m jealous. Not gonna lie.

    There comes a point where you have to decide: what method is right for me? Where is my time best spent? How much control do I want over the final product?

    If you’re like me… you want all of it. All the control.

    And it comes with all the headaches.

My way is not the end-all-be-all of ways.

While you think on these (and I work on getting my ads ready for Necromancer’s Bullet to be released on October 1st), remember:

I’m one guy.

I have been doing this for ten years.

I have not been measurably successful with a positive ROI for a variety of factors.

What I have found works for me may not work for you. What I’ve found that works for me may lead you down a path of despair. What I’ve found that works for me may waste your time. Your time may be better used by spending your money on intensive editing solutions that hand the work to other people.

Or you may read my next post (later this week) and incorporate these methods into your own work.

For now, I hope I’ve given you something to think on.

See you soon!

~Joshua E. B. Smith, Author
sagadmw@gmail.com

Like this post? Want to do me a solid? Share away!
The bigger the reach, the better.
Yeah yeah, it’s a marketing thing. At least I’m honest about it~
But seriously – I do write these articles to share my experiences in the hope that it’ll help other authors out!

Necromancer’s Bullet: Meet the Crew

Anthony Pierson: ex-Army, ex-husband, ex-hausted.

He’s not perfect, but he’s honest about it.

42, Captain, US Army. Retired, with an other-than-honorable flag.

Anthony is a tough nut to crack. America’s war against the New Persian Caliphate cost him his arm, a decent chunk of his moral compass, and the women he used to deal with his PTSD cost him his wife. Discharged back to civilian life at the age of 38 – with roughly fifteen years in the service – he’s shacked up in the projects of Los Santuario with limited hopes for… or interest in… the future.

“Can’t a guy just go through some sh*t?”

To make mends (and alimony) meet, Anthony has taken to working on the back-end of things. His time working for Army Intelligence (aka INSCOM) taught him a thing or two about operational security, intelligence gathering, and situational overview. It’s not a bad skillset in 2057 America, especially when you consider that Los San is the largest, grittiest corporate-meg in the country (and one of the biggest in the world). Dip your toes into the shadows and a guy like him can find all kinds of work.

Some of it is even legitimate.

Still, his preference is to live life as a man without a country. Pledging allegiance to one of the city’s corporate overlords comes with significant risks; the wrong boss can put you on the wrong side of a coffin in a hurry. While he’s not a stranger to taking a job or two from one of the local street gangs, a decade in the desert has made him a little skittish about jumping right into the middle of another gunfight if he doesn’t have to.

For him, black-ops has always meant black-magic.

Army Intel loves necromancers. They love them so much they have an entire division for them – and Anthony had the privilege of being embedded with a counter-insurgent platoon for nearly half his time in the service. When you can rip the secrets from a dead man’s mind and spread those tales far and wide through the halls of the Pentagon or Hoover Central, you get special considerations from the feds… even after you’ve been discharged.

As a federally licensed necromancer, Mr. Pierson has a few tricks up his sleeve – other than his cybernetic arm. Li-Necs are permitted to have a familiar, and they’re under a mandatory contract with law enforcement agencies anywhere in the states. It also comes with risks: if a Li-Nec is made aware of a Magical Anomalous Event, they are mandated to deal with it in whatever way seems reasonable at the time.

With a possessed shotgun on his hip, wit that’s only dulled by whiskey, and an arm that’s made of the cheapest poly-steel-and-chrome on the market, “whatever way seems reasonable” is frequently decided by a Necromancer’s Bullet.

Coming October 1st, 2024.

Get the first chapter and prologue here:
https://www.sagadmw.com/email

Or find out more about the book here:
https://www.sagadmw.com/the-series-necrotek

Or pre-order on Amazon at:
https://bit.ly/4diVF3D

Writing a book – it’s more than just a few good Words!

Dead Man Bloggin’ – Sept 22nd, 2024

When I first started writing, I thought I knew it all. I had an idea. I had a story. I had Wordpad. That was enough, right?

Right?

Me of a decade ago (and 8 novels) was not bright.
Me now isn’t much of an improvement, but I’m trying.

With Necromancer’s Bullet coming out in a little more than a week ( #panic ), I thought I’d talk about all the things that went into getting the sausage made. For writers… you probably know this (or you’re about to be in for a shock). For readers, you probably had no idea.

With luck, you’ll learn a thing or two.

First, two notes about me in brief:
1. I am an independently published author. That means everything from my cover design to my website design flows through and ends with exactly one person: me. I make the decisions and I call the shots. As a result, I take the credit… and the blame.

2. I am an affiliate for one of the software items below – Publisher Rocket. With that said, I haven’t written my full review for it yet. I just wanted to be clear with that fact.

The Software Packages & Websites

This list isn’t inclusive, and I’m sure I’ve left something or other off. But, if you’re thinking about writing a book and doing it all on your own, here’s some of the skills I’ve had to learn over the last few years… and the sites that help put them together.

  • LibreOffice Writer
    Okay, so let’s jump into the brass tacks on this one. Libre is a free-to-download word processor and office suite. It is one of several that you can find online that all do roughly the same thing; it works as a word processor.

    I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love that it’s free; I love that I’ve used it since I was in college two decades ago. I don’t love that sometimes it can be incredibly buggy, or that it doesn’t always recognize “American” English.

    That said, there’s been a large push over the years for people to migrate over to Google Docs. I personally don’t like web-based solutions, but I may switch into it for my next title.

  • Grammarly
    Recently, Grammarly has made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Depending on your stance on AI and AI content generation, you may want to skip using the service. I do use it, knowing that they parse my documents for their AI models. On the other hand, God help any AI that gets it’s digital fingerprints on my first draft.

    But why do I use it?

    Let me be perfectly clear: I don’t generate content with it. Period.

    I do use it to check for basic typos, misspellings, or grammar breaks. It isn’t perfect and we don’t see eye-to-eye. It is NOT a replacement for an editor. It does, however, cut down on the work that either my editor or myself have to do for the next revision. Anything that makes my life easier is for the better.

    Not perfect, but useful. That said, neither is their stance on AI.

  • LibreOffice Calc
    A little less important than writer, but I use the spreadsheet functions to keep track of my yearly sales, advertising keywords, advertising links, ad copy, and basically anything that can be spread-sheetable.

  • Affinity Photo 1
    I can only speak for the first version of Affinity, and they have released an updated version since. That said, it is a one-time purchase with no subscription required. Why do I use it though?

    When you advertise online, the vast majority of posts you’ll see have an image in them that utilizes their book cover along with a background image and other features. Affinity is a graphics software package that rivals Photoshop, and as a one-and-done purchase, it’s my preference.

  • Covers by Christian
    But there are some things I can’t do – and detailed graphic art is one of them. For that, I outsource to the immensely talented Christian Benultan of CoversByChristian.com. Is he cheap? No. Is he worth every penny? Absolutely.

    Christian has done the covers for the vast majority of my work – everything from Snowflakes to Requiem and Bullet. I can’t recommend him enough, and in fact, I’ll recommend him so much that I already have two more covers ordered from him!

  • Google Forms
    While I’m not a fan of G-Docs, Google Forms is an incredibly useful tool for pre-sales. With the way that I have my business structured, I use a free Google Form to accept paperback pre-orders for people that want a signed, dedicated copy sent direct from me on book launch. Truthfully, it took about fifteen minutes to put together and it notifies me whenever someone orders in.

  • Google Drive
    I am a fan of off-site storage. I want to know that my documents are going to be salvageable in case the worst-case scenario happens. Drive helps me accomplish that. As a perk, I can get into them wherever I am – at the mall, on my phone, in traffic, whatever. I seriously can’t recommend off-site storage enough; if you’re a content creator, use it!

  • Social Media Platforms
    Listen, I know that you didn’t land here by chance. Odds are very good that you came to this blog by way of my YouTube channel, my Facebook page, or a post on X. I use all of them, plus Threads, LinkedIn, and Goodreads.

    Who do I advertise on, though? For my paid advertising, I keep it simple: Amazon Ads and Facebook Ads, both rarely (at the time of this blog) but with intent. I post semi-regularly on TikTok, X, and I am working on building up my engagement on the ‘tube and Threads.

  • Atticus.io
    With previous ebooks, I used the Calibre software package. Typically speaking, it would take me up to a week to format a title, eliminate the bugs, check the table of contents, organize the metadata, and test it.

    With Bullet I used Atticus, an online formatting/semi-wordprocessor.

    The cons? It hated the print edition and nearly doubled the size of the book. That’s my number one beef. The other? It’s designed to be user-intuitive, but since it’s web/browser based, I kept making the mistake of going “back” when I just needed to close an overlapping window.

    That said? A task that normally would take a week and a slew of old HTML/CSS knowledge took an afternoon.

    No joke. And I was able to add some extra bells and whistles I’ve never used before. Seriously – no joke. I’m delighted with it and how the end product came out.

  • Publisher Rocket & Kindleprenure.com
    Okay, full stop – I am registered as an affiliate marketer for PR. I am not linking to it in this blog, because I want to dedicate an entire post to it later.

    With that said, the reason I registered as an affiliate is because PR has vastly improved over the years. A semi-recent update has made it incredibly easy to find *valid, relevant keywords* for advertising, Amazon-specific ad targeting, and general marketing. I cannot stress how important this is.

    I also can’t stress at how fast it makes your research, from a marketing standpoint. A task that two years ago took me 3-4 days of reviewing and then a month+ of testing took a whopping HOUR to get my keywords and categories set for Necromancer’s Bullet. It is the #1 reason I am going to try to run Amazon Ads again at book launch.

    Anything that makes advertising less of a headache is entirely worth it to me.

  • WordPress.org
    Welcome to my website. I’m not going to lie; WP gives me a headache on most days. On the other hand, there’s a reason why it’s one of the most popular web development platforms in the world. It’s more than just blogging; it’s e-commerce. It’s design. It’s development. It’s plugins. SO MANY PLUGINS.

    A lot of authors think that having a social media page is enough. It isn’t. When you have a website, you have your own part of the internet that you can do almost anything, say almost anything, and host almost anything on. You have more control over it than you do your FB page, and that’s important.

    Your website serves as a one-stop shop. Look at everything on mine; it’s a portal to all of my other platforms. It hosts first chapters of all of my books. It links to my vlogging platforms. It supports my charity work. It hosts my newsletter signup page.

    It’s also not at the whim of a random social media bot deciding I’ve violated “a policy” that will get my account suspended. If I lost my FB account tomorrow, it would be freaking terrible; but I’d still have my website. I’d still have a line of communication. I’d still be able to sell direct, even if I’ve been ‘zucked.

    It’s worth the investment, even if you don’t see a positive ROI (yet).

  • Bowker
    Do I like that I have to use Bowker? No. Do I have to use Bowker? Technically, no. Do I use Bowker? Yes. Why?

    In the US, ISBNs aren’t handed out freely by our government – unlike in some countries. Bowker is the agency that handles registration fees and ISBN assignments for any form of media you create. Can you get a ‘free’ ISBN from a publishing company? Yessss… kinda. Except you don’t own it; you’re effectively freely leasing it (and that’s a story for another blog).

    For me? I bite the bullet and pay for them. It’s better to own your own, so for all of my print books, I do.

  • Ingram Spark
    IS is a Print on Demand (PoD) distribution agency – you give them your work, you upload your files, and you grant them the right to fill orders. I’m not going to lie to you: their prices have increased repeatedly over the years, and I am not a fan of it. However, most non-Amazon bookstores won’t stock books if Amazon does the PoD service…

    …so if you want to see your books carried in smaller/alternative retailers, Spark may be the service you want.

  • Amazon KDP
    For me, this is the core of the self-publishing world. Without Amazon, I wouldn’t/likely couldn’t do what I do. There are plenty of places to self-publish, but Amazon is the biggest. While it’s not always fun to play by their rules, it is their sandbox – and everyone is welcome.

    With that said, be wary! There’s a few services out there that promise they will publish your book on Amazon, but you don’t need them; Amazon KDP is Amazon. Period. Here’s a direct link so you don’t get ripped off:

    https://kdp.amazon.com

    Start there for your publishing journey!

But at the end of the day…


…at the end of the day, these are just tools, services, and service providers. What world you make is up to you; what stories you tell. It STARTS with you, it ENDS with you.

Sure, you need a bit of mental elbow-grease to put it all together. Sure, you need time, effort, and tech to polish it. However, all the tech in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t put pen to paper, or cursor to screen.

Just remember:
You’re not just creating content, you’re creating a product. Writing for fun is writing for fun, but writing to publish is a business – and you’re the de-facto CEO.

Good luck, and I hope this list helps you out in the future!

~Joshua E. B. Smith
Grimdark Fantasy Horror & Cyberpunk Novelist
josh@sagadmw.com

And now for a taste of what’s to come: NecroTek!

Dead Man Bloggin’, Sept 11, 2024

Hey everyone!

On October 1st, the culmination of more than two years of incredibly hard work will be released on Amazon (and wide-release across global booksellers on the 2nd): NecroTek 1.0: Necromancer’s Bullet!

Bullet is a major, major shift for me as an author and at the same time, feels incredibly familiar. I’ll do another post in the coming days about the book, the characters, the plot – but for now, let’s talk the genres!

I grew up reading and playing Shadowrun, the tabletop RPG and novel series set in a futuristic earth where magic and technology combined in a mix of cybernetics and otherworldly influences across a backdrop of a world gone corporate. There are few things I’ve ever read that have managed to take that idea and mix not only the brutality of street life with the fantastical concepts of elven, dwarven, orc, vampires and then throw in advanced tech with it. The Netflix movie Bright is the only thing that really compares, at least to me.

In fact, there’s been so little that I’ve seen that has ever compared that I decided it was time to write the kind of book that I want to read.

Enter Anthony Pierson – a former intelligence officer in the US Army. He’s enjoying his other-than-honorable medical discharge while living in a sh*tty apartment in a sh*tty slum in the largest mega-corp-stylized city in 2057 USA. In Anthony’s world, magic has been a part of human society forever, even if it only was given “official recognition” in 1970.

The Gates of Hell opening up sorta forced the point.

With Anthony, black-magic also means black-ops. In his role as an intelligence officer, he was trained as a necromancer; so I have a character that is capable of using cybernetic technology embedded in his body to compliment the ability to get into a dead guy’s head and learn what he or she knows.

Building a world around this concept was incredibly fun. What happens when Daemon Lords leave Hell but decide that Earth really is a better place to live? What happens when torture chambers are replaced with boardooms and status reports? How does humanity cope with halfbreed demon/human people who just want to live in modern society?

How does society change when everything is an advertisement, when if you can pay your way for it you can turn your body into anything you want, and how do you find a way to make a living if you don’t want to just be some corporate drone?

On a personal note, this is something I’ve had boiling for literally years. It’s gone through two extensive rewrites, and one was so heavy that I effectively cut an actual third of the book and rewrote it over a four month period. It is the very definition of ‘labor of love,’ even when the content of it is anything but.

With Necromancer’s Bullet, I’m shoving you into a brand new American dystopian cityscape in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s an urban fantasy/cyberpunk thrill ride with a bit of horror, a lot of violence, over three-hundred utterances of “f*ck,” a six-decade dead former Texan Marshal that goes by the name Marshal Marshall Blackburn, and a forty-year-old asshole that just wanted his d*ck sucked before everything in his life went straight to Hell.

If he’s lucky, it’ll be Hell and back.

But he may not be that lucky.

Enter Anthony’s world on October 1st, 2024!

Necromancer’s Bullet by Joshua E. B. Smith
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGRVBG