SFFMP 126: Breaking Out, Five Figure Months, and Writing in Someone Else’s World
Fantasy author Justin Sloan joins us this week to talk about why the traditional “just write the next book” advice may not always be the right tactic for every author in every stage of his career. He also discusses how he broke out and went from small successes to big ones when he started reaching out to other authors for collaborations. He ended up working with Michael Anderle and co-writing a series with him in his popular Kurtherian Gambit world. Since then, he’s started selling a lot more books, and he just quit his day job to write full time.
Here are a few more details of what we covered:
- Why Justin thinks some of his series have done significantly better than others.
- The challenges of writing series in lots of different subgenres of fantasy instead of sticking with one.
- How he reached out to other authors and was very proactive in finding people to collaborate with.
- How he got into co-writing a series with Michael Anderle in Michael’s world, and what it’s meant for his career.
- Whether face-to-face or phone meetings are necessary for co-writing or it can all be done through email and Google Docs or some such.
- Managing the finances and accounting when writing with several different authors on different projects.
- Why Facebook can be such a powerful marketing tool and what to post on your page.
- Posting snippets of up-coming books to get readers excited before the release.
Please visit Justin’s website to learn more about his work and grab some free books, or like his author page on Facebook to see what he’s doing there.
Justin is also the co-author of the Creative Writing Career Podcast. Check it out if you’re looking for another show to listen to.
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Would love to hear more discussion about how people manage the accounting for collaborative projects. It’s a tricky problem, and if anyone has figured out a good solution where one person isn’t stuck playing accountant for the rest of their lives, I’d love to hear it.