Episode 014 - Collaborating on “Taking the Short Tack” with Mark Leslie Lefebvre
January 30, 2020
Mark Leslie Lefebvre and I discuss the learnings we share in our co-authored book,Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction. We also discuss the collaboration processes and tools we used to create the book.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre (as Mark Leslie) has authored numerous horror short stories and edited horror anthologies. He writes, speaks, consults, and podcasts on topics related to writing, publishing, and bookselling. He was the founder of Kobo Writing Life and is the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital.
Mark: Hello, this is Mark Leslie Lefebvre from the Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing podcast.
Matty: Hi, and this is Matty Dalrymple from The Indy Author podcast.
Mark: We're going to share right now our background in terms of how we both got into writing.
Matty: I am the author of the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels The Sense of Death and The Sense of Reckoning and the Lizzy Ballard thrillers Rock Paper Scissors, Snakes and Ladders, and The Iron Ring, and perhaps even more applicable for the topic of this podcast, I am also the author at the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts. In addition to that, I have a nonfiction platform called The Indy Author, and I speak, consult, and podcast on topics related to writing and publishing.
Mark: Excellent. And when did you first get into writing?
Matty: I published my first book in 2013. That took me two-and-a-half years, which was somewhat inefficient, and I've got a little more efficient every year since then.
Last year, I actually finally left my corporate job, so I'm able to focus on my true loves, which are fiction writing and delving into the world of publishing full time now.
Mark: Excellent.
Matty: Habout your background, Mark?
Mark: My very first short story was published in 1992, which was the same year that I first became a bookseller.
I first got into the bookselling industry because I realized that with a degree in English language and literature, there wasn't much else I could do other than getting a part-time job as a bookseller. And I got bit by the book bug. And selling short stories is where I actually got started, back in the day.
The going advice was to sell some stories, build a name for yourself, and then maybe once you've sold enough stories and you have a track record, maybe an agent or an editor will be interested in your book. I ended up self-publishing my first book in 2004, which was a collection of short stories, which had mostly previously been published in small press magazines. So my entry into self-publishing happened that early, but it's fascinating—my very first self-published book was short fiction and just last week I published another collection of short fiction, and you and I have connected via this short fiction, which is a really exciting project.
Are we ready to reveal what this project is, or are we going to still tease people?
Matty: Well, maybe we can share the story of how it came to be, and then the punchline will be what the culmination of all that communication was.
Mark: I love that. And since I'm old and can't remember things, Matty, how did this come to be?
Matty: Well, I had the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, which are a series of suspense short stories based on the characters from my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels. I had published those as standalone eBooks, and I was really looking for what else I could do with those, what opportunities they afforded to me.
In one of your episodes of the Stark Reflections podcast, you had mentioned something about short fiction, and as a patron of the podcast, I sent you a note and I said, “I have all these questions about my short fiction, what I can do with it. Would you be willing to devote an episode to it?” And you kindly did.
Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing EP 097 - 10 Tips for Marketing and Making Money Off Your Short Fiction
That episode was so chockfull of great information that I then sent you a follow-up note and asked if you would be interested in co-authoring a book that expands on that topic.
And I will let you give the punchline of what that ended in.
Mark: No, I want to tease it out a little bit more. So the question I want to ask is: I have collaborated on books before and I'm wondering, have you ever collaborated on a book before?
Matty: I have not, and I never thought I would. At the time I was thinking mainly of fiction, and I would hear stories from people who were collaborating on fictional work—more power to them, but I just don't think I could do it. I chose the indy route because control is very important to me, and I still can't imagine giving that up for fictional work. But I was also very interested in expanding my presence in the nonfiction world—writing and speaking on independent publishing—and recognizing that you had this fantastic background and fantastic contacts and that you were so amenable to the idea of co-authoring, I rethought it on the nonfiction side. I just have to say it's been a fantastic experience.
Mark: So we have revealed that it's nonfiction that we're writing—or that we have written, I should say, because the book is actually up for preorder as we record this. We're recording this on Monday, January 20th, and the book's been up for preorder, I think we snuck it in a week ago.
Matty: Yes, just about a week ago.
Mark: Are we ready to reveal the name of the book and when the release date is, or do we want to keep teasing it out? Cause I just love doing that.
Matty: I think we've teased enough—let’s not torment them too much longer.
Mark: Okay. So the book is coauthored by Matty Dalrymple and Mark Leslie Lefebvre, the book's release date is February 4th of 2020. It's up for preorder on all the platforms, pretty much every retailer out there that you can get an ebook on, and it's already starting to appear in some of the library systems, so you can request it at your favorite library. Support your local library, and support us by getting our book or requesting it at the.
So the book is called …
Matty: … the book is called Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction.
Mark: Awesome. And the publishing imprint that is being used for this book is called …
Matty: It's William Kingsfield Publishers, which is my imprint. William Kingsfield was the pen name that my father used. My father was a short story writer and he got some stories published back in the 50s, in magazines like Colliers and Cosmopolitan, and then turned his attention to novels. And that turned out that he was much more of a short story guy than a novel guy, but he wrote under the name William Kingsfield, and William Kingsfield Publishers is my homage to my father for inspiring me to be a writer.
Mark: That is phenomenal. I love that. And I don't even think we've spoken about that before, or it might've been briefly mentioned, but I love the fact that you're using the imprint as an homage to somebody whose passion was short fiction. That's wonderful. There's this wonderful sub-text that most people are never going to know about the imprint, but that's really, really cool. I love that. Thank you.
So you reached out to me and initially you sent me the note and said “would you do the podcast episode?” I thought, okay, that's cool. But I am leery about episodes where it’s just me rambling on and on and on. I love when I'm in a conversation with someone cause I just feel like there's enough of me, let's get some other voices in here.
But I wanted to be able to put something together that I thought might be beneficial, like looking at the different options: traditional publishing, self-publishing. What are the choices? When I first started, there wasn't a choice. I mean, I could have mimeographed short fiction, staple that together, and sold it for 5 cents, taking my little wagon down the street and tried to sell it to all the neighbors.
Matty: And you didn't do that? That sounds exactly like the kind of thing a little Mark would have done.
Mark: Oh, little Mark did do that. I actually have to go back and explain that I was very much a DIY guy, so we actually did have foolscap mimeographs—long sheets of paper for the high school newspaper. This was the 80s, so a long, long time ago, and it would be a quarterly, so it only come out four times a year. I joined the newspaper in grade nine because I was so excited cause I wanted to send in my jokes and my articles and my cartoon sketches.
It wasn't really a “newspaper” because it was quarterly. I guess it was more like a magazine when you think about it, because news is like, “Oh, yeah, the basketball team lost last week,” and two months later it's published. So, not the Twitter news cycle that we have now.
I think it was in grade 12 I ran to become the editor and somebody else got voted in as editor, but she didn't do anything. And the newspaper club is waiting for direction from our new esteemed team leader and a good buddy of mine who is a computer nerd—so you've got to remember this is like on a Commodore 64, I think the Amiga computer might've been out by then—we were using PET computers in the schools, with the big green screen, giant box thingies, and he had the software that looked like a newspaper layout. You couldn't upload images, you would just upload graphics.
So there was an article that I had called Marky's Corner and it was just an opinion piece—me being funny and riffing on something or quoting Rush lyrics and doing whatever I wanted to do. It even had a computer generated graphic of me. Now I had a beard when I was in high school, so I had the beard and I had big, giant hair, and glasses—caricature is pretty easy when you're bald and have a certain facial features.
So Greg and I changed it from a mimeographed newspaper that had to be supported by the student council cause it didn't fund itself cause the cost to produce it was higher than the money when you bought it for 5 cents each or 10 cents each or whatever. So I went to the student council, I said, “I'm starting a new newspaper, the other newspaper hasn't happened like that. You normally pay them X amount per quarter, so just give me 100 bucks. That's all I need to start up.”
And when we got the money, we did the computer as there were no photocopiers in the town we lived in. No photocopiers at all. So you had to go into Sudbury, which is a 45 minute drive. Greg and I produced a test sample. We posted it all over the school saying, “first issue coming end of September.” The English teacher, Mr. Ferman, went into the equivalent of a Kinko's back then and did the photocopies and we had just enough money to produce all the issues.
Obviously nobody got paid for the newspaper, it was all volunteer stuff. And we released that issue and I increased the cost to 25 cents and then the money we made back funded the next issue. And we did it monthly. So I've very much always been DIY—“You're not gonna run the newspaper? I'm starting my own.”
That's what I admired when I heard from you is you want to learn this stuff so you asked for it. And if you don't ask, sometimes you don't get right because people don't know that you want it.
And then you came back and said, “Hey, I have this really cool idea. Let's do this.” And initially, especially in a DIY environment, you say “who am I to do this?” Well, I already did an episode on it and I've lived this, and you've also done it too. So why not?
Matty: The other thing that turned out to be really beneficial that I didn't appreciate as much when we started but really appreciated as we were working through it is that we brought two pretty different perspectives to how to get our short fiction out there. You had this great background in more of the traditional market approaches to getting to the publications that were looking for short fiction tips, and about how networking can help do that. And I had come from the completely indy publishing background of having published all my short stories as a standalone eBook on the retail platforms. I think it will be a big benefit for the readers of the book to be able to get both those perspectives.
Mark: I think it's balanced in that way. The other thing that I'm always curious about because I've collaborated numerous different ways is the way we collaborated and how we communicated. Some of the tools we used were Google docs, like a shared drive, Dropbox. Dropbox was beneficial because you could open the document in Word and edit it and it was saved to that folder. So if you went and saw it five minutes later and I just made the change, you can see it. We did email stuff back and forth as well, but that way we always had a place to go.
Matty: Yep. I think having the shared sources was key because it did avoid that version control nightmare of trying to maintain things by emailing it back and forth. Dropbox ended up working pretty well because in most cases, each of us was the primary editor of each document. So I was editing the action items list and I think it was convenient that you had access to that to read. And then there were documents that you were editing that I had access to read.
It was a little awkward when we would both start going into documents and trying to edit them, and then conflicts would occur. So in that case, Google docs had its benefits in that way, but it was more awkward because at least I couldn't figure out how to use some of the standard Microsoft Office-type functionality, like track changes and things like that. So it took a little bit of experimentation to find the best way to go about that.
Mark: The other thing that I thought was very valuable and useful for me, was that it was an eye-opening exercise to see how somebody who's actually organized and does project management stuff actually completes a project. As a pantser in terms of my fiction writing, I'm a discovery writer and I just figure things out as I write the scene. Of course things come up and you make notes and you know what's going to happe, but how am I going to get there? What's going to happen? How are those characters going to make these decisions and are they going to change my mind? That for me is the thrill and joy of writing.
So even when I'm doing a nonfiction book, I do usually high level: here are going to be the chapters, here are the points I need to cover. And then sometimes the chapters take a mind of their own. Two of the books I've written in my Stark Publishing Solution series were supposed to be chapters in another book that has kind of got out of hand. “It's already got 20,000 words, I guess it's more than just a chapter.”
But you brought this discipline and organization to my world of writing that even in my former collaborations, it was never that organized. When I've done previous collaborations that have been nonfiction books on ghost stories, we've used Google docs and other spreadsheets to say, “Here are the stories we think we're going to want to tell. Here are the locations.” And then we just decide you're going to do this, I'm going to do this, you're going to do this, I'm going to do this.
And then sometimes we flip them. Maybe Shana, my last co-author, thought she was going to do this because she was going to go on the ghost walk and then she goes, “No, that's more your cup of tea. I think you would like it more,” or whatever. And so that's how those collaborations work. Or sometimes we thought we would write a chapter about this haunted house but we couldn't find enough background.
So that was the extent of my use of spreadsheets: What are you doing? What am I doing? Is this done? What's the estimated word count? What did it end up being? Has the other person proofread it before we compile it to send to the editor?
And I always did all the compiling. I always took all the stories and did all the formatting and then sent it off. In this particular case, it was my first time stepping back and saying, “Okay, Matty’s controlling all of this and she's putting everything in order and I'm assisting in that.”
Your outline was so detailed and so comprehensive. It almost scares me to be that organized. How do you know this early on that's what it’s going to be?
So I'm curious, did you find it a challenge to work with some scatterbrain like me for this project?
Matty: No. I think again it worked out really well because we're bringing very different perspectives and approaches. I came at this after having had several decades of experience as a project manager, and so my first tendency in all circumstances is to make a spreadsheet. I'm seeing we could have like a collaborative article about collaboration out of this conversation.
Mark: Oh yeah, for sure. I think we do need to write one on collaborating with the yin and yang of collaboration.
Matty: Absolutely. We had the action items spreadsheet with all the things that had to be done and assigned names and dates, and we had the promotions spreadsheet that listed all the places where we wanted to promote Taking the Short Tack. And we had various versions of the actual manuscript. That's just how I process things—get it all down on electronic paper.
The other thing that I think was very interesting and would merit more a deep dive is that when I went into this, I didn't know what approach was going to be most successful. I had never done a collaboration of this nature before, and when we first started out, I thought, well, I'll write what I know and then I'll interview Mark and write what I find out from him, and then I would send it to you for basically for a review.
What we evolved to, and I thought worked out very well for me, and I hope worked out very well for you, is that I would draft a section and send it to you and then you would actually do a lot of the writing. So, it wasn't like I was having to extract the information and put it together. You would send me half of the chapter, a quarter of the chapter, three-quarters of the chapter, whatever it might be, in some cases, entire chapters because you are writing about topics that I myself didn't have experience in. And then my work became more taking what I had put together and making it sound consistent from a stylistic point of view so you didn't get any kind of awkward jumping back and forth about: Oh, Person, A. must have written this, Person B must have written that.
I was using Scrivener for the initial draft until we got to the point where we needed to format it for the different platforms. So I was really just slotting in whenever there was a topic: we want one on anthologies, we want one on serials, we want one on reader funnels, we want one on reader magnets. And then I could move them around.
In fact, when we started out, I didn't even have a clear sense that the two themes were going to be creating income and connecting with readers, but it evolved quickly over time that those were the two big chunks of information. In Scrivener I could easily create a section for creating income, create a section for connecting with readers and move the chapters into the appropriate sections.
And this all happened pretty quickly because the Stark Reflections podcast was at the end of September (2019), and we agreed on the approach for doing the co-authored book in October.
At the time, I had speculated that I wanted to try to get this out by the end of first quarter of 2020, and we’ve beat that by almost two months, so I think it worked really well. And I think that if we ever want to do a future collaboration, it would be even more smooth because we've gotten past learning each other's styles. And I also want to say as a pantser, I appreciate that you are so amenable to my spreadsheets and the approach we were using. So that made it very easy for me.
Mark: I don't have that natural inclination to do the steps and document it and timeline and Gantt charts. But when I've been in charge, I've always made sure that there is a project manager type person to keep that because I can't. So recognizing that was valuable to me, but also I know I would never do that. And so I loved the fact that you are always on top of things.
You were always highlighting the things that hadn't been answered, keeping track of the estimated deadlines and stuff. And I honestly think that if it weren't for that, we probably wouldn't have gotten as far as we got so quickly. The other thing that was going on is I wrote, edited and published two books in the time we were working on this. One other nonfiction book that was based on podcast episodes as well.
But because I didn't have a coauthor, I didn't have to be as organized. I didn't have to communicate anything to anyone except my editor. So that was beneficial. And I did the cover design myself. Whereas with this particular project, you commissioned a cover designer for that.
How was that process and how did that work? How far were we with the book before the cover was designed?
Matty: We were pretty far in before we came up with a name. Maybe when we get into more of the meat of the book rather than the collaboration we can talk about where “the short tack” came from, but the short version is that in my writing about independent publishing and writing, I love the nautical analogy. There's just no aspect of writing or publishing that I've not found a great analogy for in the nautical world too. So I wanted a title that would reflect that for our book, and we can talk a little bit later about what “taking the short tack” means, but it's a sailing term.
My book cover designer, Lance Buckley, had done some work for me earlier on large print covers for the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels and the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers. I had gone through Unsplash, which is my favorite resource for free images, and I had found a picture of a sailboat taken from inside the sailboat and looking forward. What I liked about it was that it didn't hit you in the face with sailboat. It was very sort of elemental, you could see a couple of the lines and you could see part of the sail. And I sent that to Lance and I mocked up a cover and I said, I'm not suggesting that you reproduce this because I recognize this is very amateurish-looking. But what I like about this is that it’s referencing sailing without hitting you in the face with it, without making it look like it's going to be sailing book. It was subtle.
And so Lance worked on that and he sent me back a version that was actually based, I think, on a stylized version of that photograph. I love the overall design. My only concern was that the topic being short fiction wasn't immediately clear from the cover, so we went through a few more iterations and very quickly came up with the cover. That was a really fun experience to be working with a professional on that.
Mark: That's a good segue into the nautical elements. I was reminded of the phrase “a rising tide floats all boats,” is a nautical saying.
And that's why authors help each other. And that's why they collaborate and that's where they share. And that's why they're so giving of their time. Because if I help other people be successful, it's not taking anything away from me.
Matty: That's a phrase I use a lot when I'm talking with audiences about writing or publishing, that are are really too mindsets in the author community. There's the zero-sum game mindset, which is that, if that reader buys that person's book, it means they're not buying my book. And there's the rising tide lifts all boats mindset, and I'm very much a proponent of the second one.
My favorite story about that is, a year or so ago, I was at a book event at a bookstore, and there were three of us sharing a table, all of whom wrote suspense, crime, mystery kind of books, and we were having a nice time chatting with each other and we realized that one of our books was truly a very traditional mystery with a humorous twist, mine was not really a mystery but more suspense with a paranormal twist, and then the third person's was more of a family dynamic story with a mystery underpinning. And so what we started doing is when a reader would come over to the table, we would say, “What kind of book do you like?” And they would say, “Oh, I like this kind of book.” And we as a group would say, “Oh, then you want Jane's book or you want Kelly's book you want Matty’s book.”
It was such a nice experience that I think we all sold more books than we would have if we had each been trying to grab on to each reader that came and sell, sell, sell our book.
And we not only think benefited in that sense, but also benefited in the sense of all the goodwill we built up among the three of us, that we were all willing to sell each other's work.
Mark: I think what's critical about that is you were focused on the person who approached you and what was the best book for them. So they left with the best possible book. You probably sold more because you focused on the reader first. And I'm going to go back to David Gaughran, about the reader journey and being focused on the reader first to you are all more satisfied. You weren't competing with one another, and the reader who walked away most likely became a fan and probably bought more books of yours.
So you weren't just selling a book. You were building relationships with each other, and then you made relationships with your ideal reader rather than the wrong reader, which is probably a really good long term. So you weren't just sailing for one day, you were sailing off into the sunset magically. I'm trying to stick to the motif.
Matty: Absolutely. That's a great image.
Mark: So a “short tack” then—we've teased that out. What does that mean? How does that apply to this wonderful book that we've written?
Matty: I was pinging all my friends who are boaters about terms that would include the word “short,” and one of them eventually came up with “short tack,” and so I started doing internet searches on “short tack.” I actually pulled up a couple of quotes here because I liked the explanation.
In the Wikipedia definition of short tack, it says “to tack several times in rapid succession when sailing upwind in a narrow waterway.” And in the book, we talk about how the rapid release of short fiction can help an author make the most of the opportunities that are posed by the ever-changing winds of the marketplace.
Another quote that I liked was from a sailing instructor. He said, “From a racing perspective, it is generally faster to make several short tacks over a distance of a race course. And here's why. While moving up the race course, a sailor has the opportunity to read and react to shifts. There were always wind shifts, no matter how small.” If you replaced “wind” with “market” in that sentence, then you get a sense of how authors can test the waters of new opportunities using several short tacks rather than one larger work.
Mark: “Test the waters of new opportunities.” Beautiful.
Matty: I'm going to share one more. This was from sailing world. It says, “If your engine dies one day, and you can bet it will, the ability to short tack could be vital to know.” And one of the other things we talk about is how authors can use short fiction to get unstuck and a longer work. So the more I read about what short tack meant, the more I saw that it was really perfect for the message we wanted to get out there.
Mark: Which is fantastic. So in terms of the content of the book, because it's so well organized, we approach it from multiple perspectives, right? Traditional publishing and self-publishing. But it's not just about making money off short fiction. It's about using short fiction in multiple strategies and multiple ways for different outcomes, like connecting with readers, kick-starting your muse.
How is it best for somebody to approach this book? What are the expectations? Is it for people who are already writing short fiction?
Matty: It's for definitely for people who are already writing short fiction and wondering what they can do with it, but it's also for people who have only written longer fiction and want to explore what the opportunities are that short fiction provides.
As we mentioned, we have the section about creating income. We have the section about connecting with your readers. And then there's a section called best practices, which is the lessons we have learned as independent publishers about how to go about this. We organize those in a separate section because they're really applicable across so many of the other ideas.
Things like how to go about editing and proofreading for a short work. You don't necessarily want to sink the same money into a short story that you might for a novel-length work. And so what are some options for achieving a professional-level result without bankrupting yourself? How to go about a cover design? Similarly, links and QR codes, which is something that I learned from you.
But we start out with probably the most traditional way of getting your short work out there, which was the traditional publishing market. And that's really where I had to totally rely on you for advice, because that was just something I had not experienced at all.
So do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Mark: That's how I got my start and I still do some traditional selling of my fiction, but, but I've changed my gambit. When I started in the early days, it was payment in copy—you
get a copy of the magazine. Then you'd start to make a little bit of money. I think my first actual pay was $5 for a story. And then there was the Science Fiction Writers of America have the pro rates, which is five or six cents a word, which is now eight cents US per word. I remember getting to a certain point in my writing career where I refused to go with semi-pro or anything less than pro rates.
I thought, okay I'm a big enough name now, I'm a good enough writer, I don't need to sell for payment and copy or $25. I want prorates.
But I've changed my tack in that in the last several years. We talked about editing, for example, when you sell your work to a market. When you're working with a good editor, they edit the work before it gets published. And that was one of the reasons why I felt confident enough to self-publish my book in 2004 because all the stories had been edited, they already were vetted and approved.
So let's say I don't get eight cents per word, let's say get three cents per word, but I get it edited by somebody. So I'm getting a bit of money, I'm getting another credit, I'm getting the magazine or anthology that I'm in, and I'm getting it professionally edited. There are a lot of anthologies I've been involved in lately that are charity anthologies where the money goes to a good cause, but it's being edited. I've been in two anthologies in the last six months that were charity anthologies. One was a reprint, one was original story. For the reprint, it's probably the best edit it’s ever had. This new editor took the story that's been reprinted several times and she helped me make it even better. She drew stuff out of it and I was like, “Oh my God, this is awesome. This is the best version of this story ever.”
And the other one was a completely new story. And again, the editor helped make it better. And so, after six months, nine months, whatever the terms are, I've got this edited story that I did not have to pay out of pocket for and even if I didn’t get money for it, I got something personal out of it knowing that it's for a good cause.
In other cases, maybe I got some cash, but then I didn't have to lay out a lot of cash for the editor. So I get the best of both worlds. So that was something that I don't even think I mentioned in my podcast, I think as we were exploring it in the book, that's one of the things we talked about.
Matty: There are a couple of messages that are very consistent through the book. One is more explicit and one is more implicit. The implicit one is the one you just discussed, which is with a single story and placing it in a single market or using it in a single way, you're gaining these benefits, like you just mentioned with the editing.
The other message that we're very explicit about is that one piece of fiction can keep earning you income or reader goodwill over and over and over again if you play your contractual cards right, and at the end we found the ultimate example of that with one of your stories where you went through every way you had used that story from promotion to moneymaking.
So you don't have to go to the book and pick one of the ideas that we've described. If you're careful about maintaining the rights to do so, you can pick many of the ideas that we laid out for a single piece of work.
Mark: Yeah. Or even better, you see this idea and that idea and you come up with your own hybrid merger of those two ideas.
I've found often when I've done talks, I've had people come back to me a year or two later and say, “Oh, you said that thing, and then I did this and that.” And they said thank you for the idea. And I'm like, “I didn't give you the idea, you came up with an all on your own.”
Like you heard something I said, and it made you think about something. So when you added your chocolates to my peanut butter, you made something pretty awesome. I love when a reader could pick up a book like ours and say, “Okay, Matty and Mark were throwing around peanut butter and chocolate, but we're going to mix it in different ways, in different variances. So I'm going to use dark chocolate in mine, and I'm going to use this organic peanut butter, or I'm going to use crunchy.” I should've made that a nautical thing, but I haven't had breakfast, so peanut butter and chocolate are probably pretty appealing to me right now. But I think that's a value too, is when you take a resource like that and say, “Oh, cool, great ideas—I’m going to take it even further with my own choices in my own paths and things that are important to me as a writer.”
Matty: Yeah. I think that in a in a year or so, we'll be able to publish the second edition of this with ideas that I hope the readers will send us with exactly those kinds of new ideas.
Mark: Yeah. “Here's what I did. Here's what I took.”
So one other thing I wanted to talk about, because to me this is exciting, I've always said that the future of publishing is going to be more collaborative than ever before. And I'm excited that we got to do this collaboration. I mean, think about how we connected. I don't believe we have ever hung out in person yet.
Matty: We have not, we've only hung out over Zoom.
Mark: Yeah. But we connected through common interests and common goals and common aspirations as writers as indy publishing people. And then we did this project.
But then the challenge we had was, I didn't want to publish the book and then have to get the money and then pay it to you or you don't want to publish the book and get the money in, have to pay it to me. The tax issues and all that stuff–it’s complicated. So the way that we collaborated and the way that we've published it, I think is unique and it's part of a beta program right now, but it allows us to do this without having to go back and forth on it. Talk a little bit about that.
Matty: One thing that we did that I think is vital is that we had a contract. It was just a couple of pages that we emailed back and forth: What do you think about this? What do you think about that? Fortunately I don't think we disagreed about any of it. So it was quite easy, but it was nice to have that in place.
And there are certain things that we assumed when we went into it, like how we were going to split royalties or how the book was going to be branded. That turned out to change over time. And we both looked at the contract and said, “Well, this isn't what we originally thought, but we both agree it's going to be different.”
Then on the side, I had this little one pager that says what things we changed in the process of doing the book so that in a couple of years when I look back and I say, “How come we didn't do that?” I'll have a record of it.
But that was very important. I think that just to set the expectation not only from the legal point of view but for what is going to come out of it.
And then as you said, the payment side, the royalty side was key. And maybe we can talk a little bit about that side.
Mark: I want to go back to the contract and just talk about its importance. We get along, we agree on this, and you want to create a contract when you're both getting along and you're both onboard because there may come a time where we disagree.
Or something that might happen. Let's say movie rights come up and we both disagree on whether to sign the contract. There could be a disagreement, so that, even if we’re not on friendly terms anymore, there's a contract that binds us to particular behavior expectations.
And it wasn't complicated—it was like a one pager. And because it was collaborative, when we made addendums and changes, we both agreed on them and just tack it on as an appendix.
The other thing, because this is critical, and I've talked to Matt Buckman about this as well, is that this is your business and this is my business. And somebody else comes along and has to clean up the mess. If my plane goes down or I get hit by a bus or I drown—I fall off the boat and I, and I get eaten by sharks, and the sharks are those really bad people in publishing—”
Matty: That's a whole other podcast.
Mark: I think that's important because somebody else comes along—you know, my wife for your husband—and has to figure out how to work with this other person, there's an outline that says, this is the agreement. Mark's the coauthor, the money's coming from Draft2Digital, and that's how it's being published.
Therefore, If I have any questions about the money and stuff like that, it's a technical thing with D2D. You have any questions about the ownership and the other agreements, stuff that were mutually agreed upon, then I reach out to Mark. That really helps clarify things for us, but it also could clarify it for our heirs.
Matty: And there were times, even during the production of the book, where I would have question and I couldn't remember, and I would go back to the contract and say, “Oh yeah, we had talked about this, and that's fine. We talked about this, but that seems weird now. Let me check in with Mark and see if we want to keep doing that.”
Mark: Yeah. And I thought that was cool. In terms of Draft2Digital, I have ties to D2D as the Director of Business Development there. And D2D Universes is a program that was created as a way to allow authors who were using Kindle Worlds to write in each other's universes and both make money off of it.
It's been in a beta release and there are authors that have been using it very beneficially. But knowing that Universe has required that collaboration aspect with payments splitting, we reached out to Tara, the Director of Operations there, and asked, is there a way to leverage this?
That is something that D2D has on the development roadmap and with me being an insider, being able to communicate directly, I can say, “Here's what's working. Here's what's not working. Here's how we wanted it to work. Here's how we had to adapt it.” We experiment. Someone went into the back-end and created a relationship between us so that when one of us publishes the book, the other one can see that it's a collaboration effort. So we saw the ways that that could work, but we also saw the ways that we had to MacGyver it into a way that not necessarily the way we imagined it when we talked about it, but I think it was a learning experience as an author. I think it's a good learning experience for D2D because at the end of the day, we're going to have a tool that is satisfactory to meet the needs of what we need to do as writers, feeling confident that neither one of us has to worry about cross border tax issues, for example. I fill out a tax form as a Canadian with D2D so I don't have to get the 30% withholding. If you were paying me, would you have to fill out a tax form so that you wouldn't have to withhold 30%? So these are the weird issues we don't have to worry about because someone else has already taken care of them.
Matty: Yeah. In almost every case, I will trade a little bit of money or a little bit of something in order to be relieved of those kinds of administrative headaches and even legal headaches.
Mark: We make 10% less than publishing direct all the platforms. But we have a single source of truth, a single source of reports. And if there's a problem or we're doing price promos, we don’t have to look into 16 places.
Matty: Normally I am not a bleeding edge person. I'm a big believer in letting somebody else experience the pain. And so another huge benefit I got from collaborating with you not only is your great reputation and your reach in the publishing world, but also your contacts at Draft2Digital. For example when I went to set up the book, I finally said, “Mark, can you get on a screen share with mebecause I want to make sure I'm filling it all in right.”
And there were a couple of places where I would have put the wrong thing and you said, “Oh yeah, that is confusing.” And you can get that word back to the people who might be able to impact that and help navigate those things that happen when something's being used in a somewhat experimental manner.
Mark: Yeah. That's a benefit too. We're MacGyvering this process so we could do something, but this is something that I believe is valuable for writers and is going to be more valuable as more writers are able to collaborate better. What are the tools they need? How should it work for them? I think by doing this experiment, we're mutually benefiting, but I think D2D is also helping with how is this going to help other writers? And there are other writers who are using it in beta and are providing feedback as just yet another point of reference.
Because I'm internal, they can reach out to me and say, “Okay, go do this now.” They have easier access to me. I can be sitting in the office one day when I'm visiting the office and actually show them my perspective as a writer, and I do that all the time. I do videos of how I've done something to share with customer service, to say, “Here's how I as an author use this tool.”
Matty: Absolutely.
Mark: So the book is available for preorder. It's coming out February 4th, 2020. The ebook is up. The print book is still in process–we’re still testing it to make sure it looks good.
What are some final words that we want to say about this project, about this collaboration, apart from teasing people that there may be future collaborations coming?
Matty: Yeah. once the recording stops, I can pitch you my idea.
Mark: Then we'll have to drag it on a little bit longer for people.
Matty: In terms of Taking the Short Tack, I'll just reiterate the idea that it was a great learning experience for me in order for me to understand what I could do with my short fiction. It really runs the gamut, from more traditional approaches to really pretty cutting edge approaches such as the location based apps. I think something you've talked about earlier on your podcast was how you can use a short story and then bake it into a walking tour with a virtual guide, which is pretty neat. And I think that even more of those kind of ideas that seem very futuristic now in the next year or two are going to be very much within grasp.
But one thing that really benefited me is that when we were working on all these ideas, my goal was to try as many of them as I could myself. And so I actually wrote a short story specifically so I could submit it into the traditional publishing market, to platforms that didn't accept reprints. I had submitted a reprint—I still don't know what happened to that—and then I had this new story and I was following the advice you had mentioned earlier about, you might as well start at the top. You might as well start with the platforms that are paying pro rates. Why not? All they can say is say no.
So I went to the publication’s website, filled out all the metadata, hit submit—and this is a big name magazine—and got an error, so I tried again. Got another error. I sent a note to a friend of mine who I know had submitted there. He said, “Oh yeah, they're pretty buggy. Try this other, equivalent platform.”
It was the same form. I filled it all out, got exactly the same thing, no responses from customer service, and at that point, my indy author-ness dicked in and I said, “This is crazy. I'm not going to wait anymore for somebody to fix their stupid website so I can submit my story.” And I ended up publishing it as a standalone ebook.
But it was cool to have gone through the process that I needed to in order to prepare it for submission so that even though I didn't delve into the traditional publishing market, except for that one story that's still out there with a magazine as a reprint, I gave it the old college try.
But there's a ton of learning. There are a ton of ideas you can use, and you can pick and choose. You can find one that really works for you. There's a lot there for any person who's interested in fiction writing to benefit from.
Mark: That's cool. What I love about that is that in the book we talk about how you can use a short story to kickstart a longer project or to get you back into something if you're blocked or whatever. You used our book to kickstart a short story.
Matty: Exactly. Favorable winds all around. You know, you really can't go wrong. You're never going to not benefit from exploring an idea. You're going to benefit in one way or the other.
Mark: Yeah, and I have to thank you because one of the many benefits I got from this project, apart from a new collaboration, is the fact that you prompted me for the information for the podcast, and then we worked on this book together. And I imagine that the book listed on Amazon probably has a bigger reach than my podcast, so the content that exists in audio for certain people who prefer to get it an audio content is there for the podcast. It's free. You helped me take that idea and expand it into something so much bigger and also in a different context where people could read it. And yes, there will be an audio version of it out eventually as we get that together. So there will be an audio version that people can buy, but you helped expand this idea and now there's the possibility that more writers will have the benefit or the opportunity to learn in the way they prefer—to read it in print, to read it in the book, to listen to the audio book rather than the podcasts. So I love the fact that suddenly there's intellectual property, this idea, this concept that is now available in even more formats for people to enjoy in multiple ways.
Matty: Yeah. I'm a podcast person. I enjoy listening to podcasts, but then I like having a book so that if I say to myself, “What did he say about the idea of location based apps?” I can just flip to it in the book and remind myself about that. So I use different formats for different needs.
Mark: Well, Matty, thanks for collaborating with me on the book, and thanks for collaborating with me on this episode.
Matty: Yes. Thank you for having me as a guest and for being a guest on this episode.
Matty: Hi, and this is Matty Dalrymple from The Indy Author podcast.
Mark: We're going to share right now our background in terms of how we both got into writing.
Matty: I am the author of the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels The Sense of Death and The Sense of Reckoning and the Lizzy Ballard thrillers Rock Paper Scissors, Snakes and Ladders, and The Iron Ring, and perhaps even more applicable for the topic of this podcast, I am also the author at the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts. In addition to that, I have a nonfiction platform called The Indy Author, and I speak, consult, and podcast on topics related to writing and publishing.
Mark: Excellent. And when did you first get into writing?
Matty: I published my first book in 2013. That took me two-and-a-half years, which was somewhat inefficient, and I've got a little more efficient every year since then.
Last year, I actually finally left my corporate job, so I'm able to focus on my true loves, which are fiction writing and delving into the world of publishing full time now.
Mark: Excellent.
Matty: Habout your background, Mark?
Mark: My very first short story was published in 1992, which was the same year that I first became a bookseller.
I first got into the bookselling industry because I realized that with a degree in English language and literature, there wasn't much else I could do other than getting a part-time job as a bookseller. And I got bit by the book bug. And selling short stories is where I actually got started, back in the day.
The going advice was to sell some stories, build a name for yourself, and then maybe once you've sold enough stories and you have a track record, maybe an agent or an editor will be interested in your book. I ended up self-publishing my first book in 2004, which was a collection of short stories, which had mostly previously been published in small press magazines. So my entry into self-publishing happened that early, but it's fascinating—my very first self-published book was short fiction and just last week I published another collection of short fiction, and you and I have connected via this short fiction, which is a really exciting project.
Are we ready to reveal what this project is, or are we going to still tease people?
Matty: Well, maybe we can share the story of how it came to be, and then the punchline will be what the culmination of all that communication was.
Mark: I love that. And since I'm old and can't remember things, Matty, how did this come to be?
Matty: Well, I had the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, which are a series of suspense short stories based on the characters from my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels. I had published those as standalone eBooks, and I was really looking for what else I could do with those, what opportunities they afforded to me.
In one of your episodes of the Stark Reflections podcast, you had mentioned something about short fiction, and as a patron of the podcast, I sent you a note and I said, “I have all these questions about my short fiction, what I can do with it. Would you be willing to devote an episode to it?” And you kindly did.
Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing EP 097 - 10 Tips for Marketing and Making Money Off Your Short Fiction
That episode was so chockfull of great information that I then sent you a follow-up note and asked if you would be interested in co-authoring a book that expands on that topic.
And I will let you give the punchline of what that ended in.
Mark: No, I want to tease it out a little bit more. So the question I want to ask is: I have collaborated on books before and I'm wondering, have you ever collaborated on a book before?
Matty: I have not, and I never thought I would. At the time I was thinking mainly of fiction, and I would hear stories from people who were collaborating on fictional work—more power to them, but I just don't think I could do it. I chose the indy route because control is very important to me, and I still can't imagine giving that up for fictional work. But I was also very interested in expanding my presence in the nonfiction world—writing and speaking on independent publishing—and recognizing that you had this fantastic background and fantastic contacts and that you were so amenable to the idea of co-authoring, I rethought it on the nonfiction side. I just have to say it's been a fantastic experience.
Mark: So we have revealed that it's nonfiction that we're writing—or that we have written, I should say, because the book is actually up for preorder as we record this. We're recording this on Monday, January 20th, and the book's been up for preorder, I think we snuck it in a week ago.
Matty: Yes, just about a week ago.
Mark: Are we ready to reveal the name of the book and when the release date is, or do we want to keep teasing it out? Cause I just love doing that.
Matty: I think we've teased enough—let’s not torment them too much longer.
Mark: Okay. So the book is coauthored by Matty Dalrymple and Mark Leslie Lefebvre, the book's release date is February 4th of 2020. It's up for preorder on all the platforms, pretty much every retailer out there that you can get an ebook on, and it's already starting to appear in some of the library systems, so you can request it at your favorite library. Support your local library, and support us by getting our book or requesting it at the.
So the book is called …
Matty: … the book is called Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction.
Mark: Awesome. And the publishing imprint that is being used for this book is called …
Matty: It's William Kingsfield Publishers, which is my imprint. William Kingsfield was the pen name that my father used. My father was a short story writer and he got some stories published back in the 50s, in magazines like Colliers and Cosmopolitan, and then turned his attention to novels. And that turned out that he was much more of a short story guy than a novel guy, but he wrote under the name William Kingsfield, and William Kingsfield Publishers is my homage to my father for inspiring me to be a writer.
Mark: That is phenomenal. I love that. And I don't even think we've spoken about that before, or it might've been briefly mentioned, but I love the fact that you're using the imprint as an homage to somebody whose passion was short fiction. That's wonderful. There's this wonderful sub-text that most people are never going to know about the imprint, but that's really, really cool. I love that. Thank you.
So you reached out to me and initially you sent me the note and said “would you do the podcast episode?” I thought, okay, that's cool. But I am leery about episodes where it’s just me rambling on and on and on. I love when I'm in a conversation with someone cause I just feel like there's enough of me, let's get some other voices in here.
But I wanted to be able to put something together that I thought might be beneficial, like looking at the different options: traditional publishing, self-publishing. What are the choices? When I first started, there wasn't a choice. I mean, I could have mimeographed short fiction, staple that together, and sold it for 5 cents, taking my little wagon down the street and tried to sell it to all the neighbors.
Matty: And you didn't do that? That sounds exactly like the kind of thing a little Mark would have done.
Mark: Oh, little Mark did do that. I actually have to go back and explain that I was very much a DIY guy, so we actually did have foolscap mimeographs—long sheets of paper for the high school newspaper. This was the 80s, so a long, long time ago, and it would be a quarterly, so it only come out four times a year. I joined the newspaper in grade nine because I was so excited cause I wanted to send in my jokes and my articles and my cartoon sketches.
It wasn't really a “newspaper” because it was quarterly. I guess it was more like a magazine when you think about it, because news is like, “Oh, yeah, the basketball team lost last week,” and two months later it's published. So, not the Twitter news cycle that we have now.
I think it was in grade 12 I ran to become the editor and somebody else got voted in as editor, but she didn't do anything. And the newspaper club is waiting for direction from our new esteemed team leader and a good buddy of mine who is a computer nerd—so you've got to remember this is like on a Commodore 64, I think the Amiga computer might've been out by then—we were using PET computers in the schools, with the big green screen, giant box thingies, and he had the software that looked like a newspaper layout. You couldn't upload images, you would just upload graphics.
So there was an article that I had called Marky's Corner and it was just an opinion piece—me being funny and riffing on something or quoting Rush lyrics and doing whatever I wanted to do. It even had a computer generated graphic of me. Now I had a beard when I was in high school, so I had the beard and I had big, giant hair, and glasses—caricature is pretty easy when you're bald and have a certain facial features.
So Greg and I changed it from a mimeographed newspaper that had to be supported by the student council cause it didn't fund itself cause the cost to produce it was higher than the money when you bought it for 5 cents each or 10 cents each or whatever. So I went to the student council, I said, “I'm starting a new newspaper, the other newspaper hasn't happened like that. You normally pay them X amount per quarter, so just give me 100 bucks. That's all I need to start up.”
And when we got the money, we did the computer as there were no photocopiers in the town we lived in. No photocopiers at all. So you had to go into Sudbury, which is a 45 minute drive. Greg and I produced a test sample. We posted it all over the school saying, “first issue coming end of September.” The English teacher, Mr. Ferman, went into the equivalent of a Kinko's back then and did the photocopies and we had just enough money to produce all the issues.
Obviously nobody got paid for the newspaper, it was all volunteer stuff. And we released that issue and I increased the cost to 25 cents and then the money we made back funded the next issue. And we did it monthly. So I've very much always been DIY—“You're not gonna run the newspaper? I'm starting my own.”
That's what I admired when I heard from you is you want to learn this stuff so you asked for it. And if you don't ask, sometimes you don't get right because people don't know that you want it.
And then you came back and said, “Hey, I have this really cool idea. Let's do this.” And initially, especially in a DIY environment, you say “who am I to do this?” Well, I already did an episode on it and I've lived this, and you've also done it too. So why not?
Matty: The other thing that turned out to be really beneficial that I didn't appreciate as much when we started but really appreciated as we were working through it is that we brought two pretty different perspectives to how to get our short fiction out there. You had this great background in more of the traditional market approaches to getting to the publications that were looking for short fiction tips, and about how networking can help do that. And I had come from the completely indy publishing background of having published all my short stories as a standalone eBook on the retail platforms. I think it will be a big benefit for the readers of the book to be able to get both those perspectives.
Mark: I think it's balanced in that way. The other thing that I'm always curious about because I've collaborated numerous different ways is the way we collaborated and how we communicated. Some of the tools we used were Google docs, like a shared drive, Dropbox. Dropbox was beneficial because you could open the document in Word and edit it and it was saved to that folder. So if you went and saw it five minutes later and I just made the change, you can see it. We did email stuff back and forth as well, but that way we always had a place to go.
Matty: Yep. I think having the shared sources was key because it did avoid that version control nightmare of trying to maintain things by emailing it back and forth. Dropbox ended up working pretty well because in most cases, each of us was the primary editor of each document. So I was editing the action items list and I think it was convenient that you had access to that to read. And then there were documents that you were editing that I had access to read.
It was a little awkward when we would both start going into documents and trying to edit them, and then conflicts would occur. So in that case, Google docs had its benefits in that way, but it was more awkward because at least I couldn't figure out how to use some of the standard Microsoft Office-type functionality, like track changes and things like that. So it took a little bit of experimentation to find the best way to go about that.
Mark: The other thing that I thought was very valuable and useful for me, was that it was an eye-opening exercise to see how somebody who's actually organized and does project management stuff actually completes a project. As a pantser in terms of my fiction writing, I'm a discovery writer and I just figure things out as I write the scene. Of course things come up and you make notes and you know what's going to happe, but how am I going to get there? What's going to happen? How are those characters going to make these decisions and are they going to change my mind? That for me is the thrill and joy of writing.
So even when I'm doing a nonfiction book, I do usually high level: here are going to be the chapters, here are the points I need to cover. And then sometimes the chapters take a mind of their own. Two of the books I've written in my Stark Publishing Solution series were supposed to be chapters in another book that has kind of got out of hand. “It's already got 20,000 words, I guess it's more than just a chapter.”
But you brought this discipline and organization to my world of writing that even in my former collaborations, it was never that organized. When I've done previous collaborations that have been nonfiction books on ghost stories, we've used Google docs and other spreadsheets to say, “Here are the stories we think we're going to want to tell. Here are the locations.” And then we just decide you're going to do this, I'm going to do this, you're going to do this, I'm going to do this.
And then sometimes we flip them. Maybe Shana, my last co-author, thought she was going to do this because she was going to go on the ghost walk and then she goes, “No, that's more your cup of tea. I think you would like it more,” or whatever. And so that's how those collaborations work. Or sometimes we thought we would write a chapter about this haunted house but we couldn't find enough background.
So that was the extent of my use of spreadsheets: What are you doing? What am I doing? Is this done? What's the estimated word count? What did it end up being? Has the other person proofread it before we compile it to send to the editor?
And I always did all the compiling. I always took all the stories and did all the formatting and then sent it off. In this particular case, it was my first time stepping back and saying, “Okay, Matty’s controlling all of this and she's putting everything in order and I'm assisting in that.”
Your outline was so detailed and so comprehensive. It almost scares me to be that organized. How do you know this early on that's what it’s going to be?
So I'm curious, did you find it a challenge to work with some scatterbrain like me for this project?
Matty: No. I think again it worked out really well because we're bringing very different perspectives and approaches. I came at this after having had several decades of experience as a project manager, and so my first tendency in all circumstances is to make a spreadsheet. I'm seeing we could have like a collaborative article about collaboration out of this conversation.
Mark: Oh yeah, for sure. I think we do need to write one on collaborating with the yin and yang of collaboration.
Matty: Absolutely. We had the action items spreadsheet with all the things that had to be done and assigned names and dates, and we had the promotions spreadsheet that listed all the places where we wanted to promote Taking the Short Tack. And we had various versions of the actual manuscript. That's just how I process things—get it all down on electronic paper.
The other thing that I think was very interesting and would merit more a deep dive is that when I went into this, I didn't know what approach was going to be most successful. I had never done a collaboration of this nature before, and when we first started out, I thought, well, I'll write what I know and then I'll interview Mark and write what I find out from him, and then I would send it to you for basically for a review.
What we evolved to, and I thought worked out very well for me, and I hope worked out very well for you, is that I would draft a section and send it to you and then you would actually do a lot of the writing. So, it wasn't like I was having to extract the information and put it together. You would send me half of the chapter, a quarter of the chapter, three-quarters of the chapter, whatever it might be, in some cases, entire chapters because you are writing about topics that I myself didn't have experience in. And then my work became more taking what I had put together and making it sound consistent from a stylistic point of view so you didn't get any kind of awkward jumping back and forth about: Oh, Person, A. must have written this, Person B must have written that.
I was using Scrivener for the initial draft until we got to the point where we needed to format it for the different platforms. So I was really just slotting in whenever there was a topic: we want one on anthologies, we want one on serials, we want one on reader funnels, we want one on reader magnets. And then I could move them around.
In fact, when we started out, I didn't even have a clear sense that the two themes were going to be creating income and connecting with readers, but it evolved quickly over time that those were the two big chunks of information. In Scrivener I could easily create a section for creating income, create a section for connecting with readers and move the chapters into the appropriate sections.
And this all happened pretty quickly because the Stark Reflections podcast was at the end of September (2019), and we agreed on the approach for doing the co-authored book in October.
At the time, I had speculated that I wanted to try to get this out by the end of first quarter of 2020, and we’ve beat that by almost two months, so I think it worked really well. And I think that if we ever want to do a future collaboration, it would be even more smooth because we've gotten past learning each other's styles. And I also want to say as a pantser, I appreciate that you are so amenable to my spreadsheets and the approach we were using. So that made it very easy for me.
Mark: I don't have that natural inclination to do the steps and document it and timeline and Gantt charts. But when I've been in charge, I've always made sure that there is a project manager type person to keep that because I can't. So recognizing that was valuable to me, but also I know I would never do that. And so I loved the fact that you are always on top of things.
You were always highlighting the things that hadn't been answered, keeping track of the estimated deadlines and stuff. And I honestly think that if it weren't for that, we probably wouldn't have gotten as far as we got so quickly. The other thing that was going on is I wrote, edited and published two books in the time we were working on this. One other nonfiction book that was based on podcast episodes as well.
But because I didn't have a coauthor, I didn't have to be as organized. I didn't have to communicate anything to anyone except my editor. So that was beneficial. And I did the cover design myself. Whereas with this particular project, you commissioned a cover designer for that.
How was that process and how did that work? How far were we with the book before the cover was designed?
Matty: We were pretty far in before we came up with a name. Maybe when we get into more of the meat of the book rather than the collaboration we can talk about where “the short tack” came from, but the short version is that in my writing about independent publishing and writing, I love the nautical analogy. There's just no aspect of writing or publishing that I've not found a great analogy for in the nautical world too. So I wanted a title that would reflect that for our book, and we can talk a little bit later about what “taking the short tack” means, but it's a sailing term.
My book cover designer, Lance Buckley, had done some work for me earlier on large print covers for the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels and the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers. I had gone through Unsplash, which is my favorite resource for free images, and I had found a picture of a sailboat taken from inside the sailboat and looking forward. What I liked about it was that it didn't hit you in the face with sailboat. It was very sort of elemental, you could see a couple of the lines and you could see part of the sail. And I sent that to Lance and I mocked up a cover and I said, I'm not suggesting that you reproduce this because I recognize this is very amateurish-looking. But what I like about this is that it’s referencing sailing without hitting you in the face with it, without making it look like it's going to be sailing book. It was subtle.
And so Lance worked on that and he sent me back a version that was actually based, I think, on a stylized version of that photograph. I love the overall design. My only concern was that the topic being short fiction wasn't immediately clear from the cover, so we went through a few more iterations and very quickly came up with the cover. That was a really fun experience to be working with a professional on that.
Mark: That's a good segue into the nautical elements. I was reminded of the phrase “a rising tide floats all boats,” is a nautical saying.
And that's why authors help each other. And that's why they collaborate and that's where they share. And that's why they're so giving of their time. Because if I help other people be successful, it's not taking anything away from me.
Matty: That's a phrase I use a lot when I'm talking with audiences about writing or publishing, that are are really too mindsets in the author community. There's the zero-sum game mindset, which is that, if that reader buys that person's book, it means they're not buying my book. And there's the rising tide lifts all boats mindset, and I'm very much a proponent of the second one.
My favorite story about that is, a year or so ago, I was at a book event at a bookstore, and there were three of us sharing a table, all of whom wrote suspense, crime, mystery kind of books, and we were having a nice time chatting with each other and we realized that one of our books was truly a very traditional mystery with a humorous twist, mine was not really a mystery but more suspense with a paranormal twist, and then the third person's was more of a family dynamic story with a mystery underpinning. And so what we started doing is when a reader would come over to the table, we would say, “What kind of book do you like?” And they would say, “Oh, I like this kind of book.” And we as a group would say, “Oh, then you want Jane's book or you want Kelly's book you want Matty’s book.”
It was such a nice experience that I think we all sold more books than we would have if we had each been trying to grab on to each reader that came and sell, sell, sell our book.
And we not only think benefited in that sense, but also benefited in the sense of all the goodwill we built up among the three of us, that we were all willing to sell each other's work.
Mark: I think what's critical about that is you were focused on the person who approached you and what was the best book for them. So they left with the best possible book. You probably sold more because you focused on the reader first. And I'm going to go back to David Gaughran, about the reader journey and being focused on the reader first to you are all more satisfied. You weren't competing with one another, and the reader who walked away most likely became a fan and probably bought more books of yours.
So you weren't just selling a book. You were building relationships with each other, and then you made relationships with your ideal reader rather than the wrong reader, which is probably a really good long term. So you weren't just sailing for one day, you were sailing off into the sunset magically. I'm trying to stick to the motif.
Matty: Absolutely. That's a great image.
Mark: So a “short tack” then—we've teased that out. What does that mean? How does that apply to this wonderful book that we've written?
Matty: I was pinging all my friends who are boaters about terms that would include the word “short,” and one of them eventually came up with “short tack,” and so I started doing internet searches on “short tack.” I actually pulled up a couple of quotes here because I liked the explanation.
In the Wikipedia definition of short tack, it says “to tack several times in rapid succession when sailing upwind in a narrow waterway.” And in the book, we talk about how the rapid release of short fiction can help an author make the most of the opportunities that are posed by the ever-changing winds of the marketplace.
Another quote that I liked was from a sailing instructor. He said, “From a racing perspective, it is generally faster to make several short tacks over a distance of a race course. And here's why. While moving up the race course, a sailor has the opportunity to read and react to shifts. There were always wind shifts, no matter how small.” If you replaced “wind” with “market” in that sentence, then you get a sense of how authors can test the waters of new opportunities using several short tacks rather than one larger work.
Mark: “Test the waters of new opportunities.” Beautiful.
Matty: I'm going to share one more. This was from sailing world. It says, “If your engine dies one day, and you can bet it will, the ability to short tack could be vital to know.” And one of the other things we talk about is how authors can use short fiction to get unstuck and a longer work. So the more I read about what short tack meant, the more I saw that it was really perfect for the message we wanted to get out there.
Mark: Which is fantastic. So in terms of the content of the book, because it's so well organized, we approach it from multiple perspectives, right? Traditional publishing and self-publishing. But it's not just about making money off short fiction. It's about using short fiction in multiple strategies and multiple ways for different outcomes, like connecting with readers, kick-starting your muse.
How is it best for somebody to approach this book? What are the expectations? Is it for people who are already writing short fiction?
Matty: It's for definitely for people who are already writing short fiction and wondering what they can do with it, but it's also for people who have only written longer fiction and want to explore what the opportunities are that short fiction provides.
As we mentioned, we have the section about creating income. We have the section about connecting with your readers. And then there's a section called best practices, which is the lessons we have learned as independent publishers about how to go about this. We organize those in a separate section because they're really applicable across so many of the other ideas.
Things like how to go about editing and proofreading for a short work. You don't necessarily want to sink the same money into a short story that you might for a novel-length work. And so what are some options for achieving a professional-level result without bankrupting yourself? How to go about a cover design? Similarly, links and QR codes, which is something that I learned from you.
But we start out with probably the most traditional way of getting your short work out there, which was the traditional publishing market. And that's really where I had to totally rely on you for advice, because that was just something I had not experienced at all.
So do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Mark: That's how I got my start and I still do some traditional selling of my fiction, but, but I've changed my gambit. When I started in the early days, it was payment in copy—you
get a copy of the magazine. Then you'd start to make a little bit of money. I think my first actual pay was $5 for a story. And then there was the Science Fiction Writers of America have the pro rates, which is five or six cents a word, which is now eight cents US per word. I remember getting to a certain point in my writing career where I refused to go with semi-pro or anything less than pro rates.
I thought, okay I'm a big enough name now, I'm a good enough writer, I don't need to sell for payment and copy or $25. I want prorates.
But I've changed my tack in that in the last several years. We talked about editing, for example, when you sell your work to a market. When you're working with a good editor, they edit the work before it gets published. And that was one of the reasons why I felt confident enough to self-publish my book in 2004 because all the stories had been edited, they already were vetted and approved.
So let's say I don't get eight cents per word, let's say get three cents per word, but I get it edited by somebody. So I'm getting a bit of money, I'm getting another credit, I'm getting the magazine or anthology that I'm in, and I'm getting it professionally edited. There are a lot of anthologies I've been involved in lately that are charity anthologies where the money goes to a good cause, but it's being edited. I've been in two anthologies in the last six months that were charity anthologies. One was a reprint, one was original story. For the reprint, it's probably the best edit it’s ever had. This new editor took the story that's been reprinted several times and she helped me make it even better. She drew stuff out of it and I was like, “Oh my God, this is awesome. This is the best version of this story ever.”
And the other one was a completely new story. And again, the editor helped make it better. And so, after six months, nine months, whatever the terms are, I've got this edited story that I did not have to pay out of pocket for and even if I didn’t get money for it, I got something personal out of it knowing that it's for a good cause.
In other cases, maybe I got some cash, but then I didn't have to lay out a lot of cash for the editor. So I get the best of both worlds. So that was something that I don't even think I mentioned in my podcast, I think as we were exploring it in the book, that's one of the things we talked about.
Matty: There are a couple of messages that are very consistent through the book. One is more explicit and one is more implicit. The implicit one is the one you just discussed, which is with a single story and placing it in a single market or using it in a single way, you're gaining these benefits, like you just mentioned with the editing.
The other message that we're very explicit about is that one piece of fiction can keep earning you income or reader goodwill over and over and over again if you play your contractual cards right, and at the end we found the ultimate example of that with one of your stories where you went through every way you had used that story from promotion to moneymaking.
So you don't have to go to the book and pick one of the ideas that we've described. If you're careful about maintaining the rights to do so, you can pick many of the ideas that we laid out for a single piece of work.
Mark: Yeah. Or even better, you see this idea and that idea and you come up with your own hybrid merger of those two ideas.
I've found often when I've done talks, I've had people come back to me a year or two later and say, “Oh, you said that thing, and then I did this and that.” And they said thank you for the idea. And I'm like, “I didn't give you the idea, you came up with an all on your own.”
Like you heard something I said, and it made you think about something. So when you added your chocolates to my peanut butter, you made something pretty awesome. I love when a reader could pick up a book like ours and say, “Okay, Matty and Mark were throwing around peanut butter and chocolate, but we're going to mix it in different ways, in different variances. So I'm going to use dark chocolate in mine, and I'm going to use this organic peanut butter, or I'm going to use crunchy.” I should've made that a nautical thing, but I haven't had breakfast, so peanut butter and chocolate are probably pretty appealing to me right now. But I think that's a value too, is when you take a resource like that and say, “Oh, cool, great ideas—I’m going to take it even further with my own choices in my own paths and things that are important to me as a writer.”
Matty: Yeah. I think that in a in a year or so, we'll be able to publish the second edition of this with ideas that I hope the readers will send us with exactly those kinds of new ideas.
Mark: Yeah. “Here's what I did. Here's what I took.”
So one other thing I wanted to talk about, because to me this is exciting, I've always said that the future of publishing is going to be more collaborative than ever before. And I'm excited that we got to do this collaboration. I mean, think about how we connected. I don't believe we have ever hung out in person yet.
Matty: We have not, we've only hung out over Zoom.
Mark: Yeah. But we connected through common interests and common goals and common aspirations as writers as indy publishing people. And then we did this project.
But then the challenge we had was, I didn't want to publish the book and then have to get the money and then pay it to you or you don't want to publish the book and get the money in, have to pay it to me. The tax issues and all that stuff–it’s complicated. So the way that we collaborated and the way that we've published it, I think is unique and it's part of a beta program right now, but it allows us to do this without having to go back and forth on it. Talk a little bit about that.
Matty: One thing that we did that I think is vital is that we had a contract. It was just a couple of pages that we emailed back and forth: What do you think about this? What do you think about that? Fortunately I don't think we disagreed about any of it. So it was quite easy, but it was nice to have that in place.
And there are certain things that we assumed when we went into it, like how we were going to split royalties or how the book was going to be branded. That turned out to change over time. And we both looked at the contract and said, “Well, this isn't what we originally thought, but we both agree it's going to be different.”
Then on the side, I had this little one pager that says what things we changed in the process of doing the book so that in a couple of years when I look back and I say, “How come we didn't do that?” I'll have a record of it.
But that was very important. I think that just to set the expectation not only from the legal point of view but for what is going to come out of it.
And then as you said, the payment side, the royalty side was key. And maybe we can talk a little bit about that side.
Mark: I want to go back to the contract and just talk about its importance. We get along, we agree on this, and you want to create a contract when you're both getting along and you're both onboard because there may come a time where we disagree.
Or something that might happen. Let's say movie rights come up and we both disagree on whether to sign the contract. There could be a disagreement, so that, even if we’re not on friendly terms anymore, there's a contract that binds us to particular behavior expectations.
And it wasn't complicated—it was like a one pager. And because it was collaborative, when we made addendums and changes, we both agreed on them and just tack it on as an appendix.
The other thing, because this is critical, and I've talked to Matt Buckman about this as well, is that this is your business and this is my business. And somebody else comes along and has to clean up the mess. If my plane goes down or I get hit by a bus or I drown—I fall off the boat and I, and I get eaten by sharks, and the sharks are those really bad people in publishing—”
Matty: That's a whole other podcast.
Mark: I think that's important because somebody else comes along—you know, my wife for your husband—and has to figure out how to work with this other person, there's an outline that says, this is the agreement. Mark's the coauthor, the money's coming from Draft2Digital, and that's how it's being published.
Therefore, If I have any questions about the money and stuff like that, it's a technical thing with D2D. You have any questions about the ownership and the other agreements, stuff that were mutually agreed upon, then I reach out to Mark. That really helps clarify things for us, but it also could clarify it for our heirs.
Matty: And there were times, even during the production of the book, where I would have question and I couldn't remember, and I would go back to the contract and say, “Oh yeah, we had talked about this, and that's fine. We talked about this, but that seems weird now. Let me check in with Mark and see if we want to keep doing that.”
Mark: Yeah. And I thought that was cool. In terms of Draft2Digital, I have ties to D2D as the Director of Business Development there. And D2D Universes is a program that was created as a way to allow authors who were using Kindle Worlds to write in each other's universes and both make money off of it.
It's been in a beta release and there are authors that have been using it very beneficially. But knowing that Universe has required that collaboration aspect with payments splitting, we reached out to Tara, the Director of Operations there, and asked, is there a way to leverage this?
That is something that D2D has on the development roadmap and with me being an insider, being able to communicate directly, I can say, “Here's what's working. Here's what's not working. Here's how we wanted it to work. Here's how we had to adapt it.” We experiment. Someone went into the back-end and created a relationship between us so that when one of us publishes the book, the other one can see that it's a collaboration effort. So we saw the ways that that could work, but we also saw the ways that we had to MacGyver it into a way that not necessarily the way we imagined it when we talked about it, but I think it was a learning experience as an author. I think it's a good learning experience for D2D because at the end of the day, we're going to have a tool that is satisfactory to meet the needs of what we need to do as writers, feeling confident that neither one of us has to worry about cross border tax issues, for example. I fill out a tax form as a Canadian with D2D so I don't have to get the 30% withholding. If you were paying me, would you have to fill out a tax form so that you wouldn't have to withhold 30%? So these are the weird issues we don't have to worry about because someone else has already taken care of them.
Matty: Yeah. In almost every case, I will trade a little bit of money or a little bit of something in order to be relieved of those kinds of administrative headaches and even legal headaches.
Mark: We make 10% less than publishing direct all the platforms. But we have a single source of truth, a single source of reports. And if there's a problem or we're doing price promos, we don’t have to look into 16 places.
Matty: Normally I am not a bleeding edge person. I'm a big believer in letting somebody else experience the pain. And so another huge benefit I got from collaborating with you not only is your great reputation and your reach in the publishing world, but also your contacts at Draft2Digital. For example when I went to set up the book, I finally said, “Mark, can you get on a screen share with mebecause I want to make sure I'm filling it all in right.”
And there were a couple of places where I would have put the wrong thing and you said, “Oh yeah, that is confusing.” And you can get that word back to the people who might be able to impact that and help navigate those things that happen when something's being used in a somewhat experimental manner.
Mark: Yeah. That's a benefit too. We're MacGyvering this process so we could do something, but this is something that I believe is valuable for writers and is going to be more valuable as more writers are able to collaborate better. What are the tools they need? How should it work for them? I think by doing this experiment, we're mutually benefiting, but I think D2D is also helping with how is this going to help other writers? And there are other writers who are using it in beta and are providing feedback as just yet another point of reference.
Because I'm internal, they can reach out to me and say, “Okay, go do this now.” They have easier access to me. I can be sitting in the office one day when I'm visiting the office and actually show them my perspective as a writer, and I do that all the time. I do videos of how I've done something to share with customer service, to say, “Here's how I as an author use this tool.”
Matty: Absolutely.
Mark: So the book is available for preorder. It's coming out February 4th, 2020. The ebook is up. The print book is still in process–we’re still testing it to make sure it looks good.
What are some final words that we want to say about this project, about this collaboration, apart from teasing people that there may be future collaborations coming?
Matty: Yeah. once the recording stops, I can pitch you my idea.
Mark: Then we'll have to drag it on a little bit longer for people.
Matty: In terms of Taking the Short Tack, I'll just reiterate the idea that it was a great learning experience for me in order for me to understand what I could do with my short fiction. It really runs the gamut, from more traditional approaches to really pretty cutting edge approaches such as the location based apps. I think something you've talked about earlier on your podcast was how you can use a short story and then bake it into a walking tour with a virtual guide, which is pretty neat. And I think that even more of those kind of ideas that seem very futuristic now in the next year or two are going to be very much within grasp.
But one thing that really benefited me is that when we were working on all these ideas, my goal was to try as many of them as I could myself. And so I actually wrote a short story specifically so I could submit it into the traditional publishing market, to platforms that didn't accept reprints. I had submitted a reprint—I still don't know what happened to that—and then I had this new story and I was following the advice you had mentioned earlier about, you might as well start at the top. You might as well start with the platforms that are paying pro rates. Why not? All they can say is say no.
So I went to the publication’s website, filled out all the metadata, hit submit—and this is a big name magazine—and got an error, so I tried again. Got another error. I sent a note to a friend of mine who I know had submitted there. He said, “Oh yeah, they're pretty buggy. Try this other, equivalent platform.”
It was the same form. I filled it all out, got exactly the same thing, no responses from customer service, and at that point, my indy author-ness dicked in and I said, “This is crazy. I'm not going to wait anymore for somebody to fix their stupid website so I can submit my story.” And I ended up publishing it as a standalone ebook.
But it was cool to have gone through the process that I needed to in order to prepare it for submission so that even though I didn't delve into the traditional publishing market, except for that one story that's still out there with a magazine as a reprint, I gave it the old college try.
But there's a ton of learning. There are a ton of ideas you can use, and you can pick and choose. You can find one that really works for you. There's a lot there for any person who's interested in fiction writing to benefit from.
Mark: That's cool. What I love about that is that in the book we talk about how you can use a short story to kickstart a longer project or to get you back into something if you're blocked or whatever. You used our book to kickstart a short story.
Matty: Exactly. Favorable winds all around. You know, you really can't go wrong. You're never going to not benefit from exploring an idea. You're going to benefit in one way or the other.
Mark: Yeah, and I have to thank you because one of the many benefits I got from this project, apart from a new collaboration, is the fact that you prompted me for the information for the podcast, and then we worked on this book together. And I imagine that the book listed on Amazon probably has a bigger reach than my podcast, so the content that exists in audio for certain people who prefer to get it an audio content is there for the podcast. It's free. You helped me take that idea and expand it into something so much bigger and also in a different context where people could read it. And yes, there will be an audio version of it out eventually as we get that together. So there will be an audio version that people can buy, but you helped expand this idea and now there's the possibility that more writers will have the benefit or the opportunity to learn in the way they prefer—to read it in print, to read it in the book, to listen to the audio book rather than the podcasts. So I love the fact that suddenly there's intellectual property, this idea, this concept that is now available in even more formats for people to enjoy in multiple ways.
Matty: Yeah. I'm a podcast person. I enjoy listening to podcasts, but then I like having a book so that if I say to myself, “What did he say about the idea of location based apps?” I can just flip to it in the book and remind myself about that. So I use different formats for different needs.
Mark: Well, Matty, thanks for collaborating with me on the book, and thanks for collaborating with me on this episode.
Matty: Yes. Thank you for having me as a guest and for being a guest on this episode.
