THE LONG VERSION:

Here’s the clause:

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:

(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

And then the next paragraph is bold-faced, just so you don’t miss it:

Apple will not be responsible for any costs, expenses, damages, losses (including
without limitation lost business opportunities or lost profits) or other liabilities you may incur as a result of your use of this Apple Software, including without limitation the fact that your Work may not be selected for distribution by Apple.

Here’s the guy who found, dissected, and posted about it, along with his dissection, and it will save us a BUNCH of time if you read his article.

So what’s the problem? You’re not going to use the damn software anyway!

Nope. I’m not. But I had ten books up on the iBookstore, which I put there using iTunes Producer, which is software. I do my epub versions of most of my books in iWorks Pages, which is software. And I work on Apple computers, an iPad, and an iPhone, all of which use Apple software. OS X and iOS 5 at the moment.

And the rule of software is this: Software does not get to dictate the use of output. Period. Software does not get to tell you WHERE you can sell what you’ve created, only that you have the right to sell it (in the cases where software requires a commercial license if you are producing for profit).

Software does not get to tell you, “If you create this work on our software and we don’t want to distribute it, we own the rights to the version our software created, and if you want another version, you will have to disassemble this one, and rebuild it from scratch on other software.”

The purpose of purchasing and/or using software is to make your work easier.

It is not to have the software claim ownership of any part of what you have created with it.

There is no difference—except in number of people affected—between a company claiming ownership of the rights to something you created with its ebook publisher, and something you created with its OS.

The principle is identical.

(Apple is not claiming to own rights to your work if you work on OS X. My removal of my own work from their site is on principle, not because my own work is affected.)

And there is no number of people affected that is insignificant. The smallest minority is the individual, and minority rights protect the rights of the individual because those are the only rights there are.

So THAT is why I pulled all my books from distribution on the iBookstore, why none of my further books or any of my writing courses will be going to the iBookstore, and why I can no longer recommend the iBookstore to my students.

And this in spite of the fact that Apple makes my favorite products in the world, and I hate like hell having to do this.

And if they remove their damn clause and respect the purpose of creative software and the rights of the individual, I’ll go back.

COMMENTS have now been closed on this post.  Please read the follow-up post, and if you choose, comment there.

I will support my position, and if you disagree with me you are invited to debate, but to debate, you MUST follow the blog rules.

First, let me define terms.

individual: A human being. All human beings are individuals.

individual rights: Every individual on this planet is born with the following inherent rights (and only these rights), which exist independent of any grant or external source, by virtue of the fact that the individual is alive:

• The right to life—that is, the right to sustain his or her own existence.
• The right to liberty—that is, the right to choose to take such actions as permit the individual to sustain his or her own existence, so long as these actions do not infringe on the rights of other individuals.
• The right to the pursuit of happiness—that is, the right to pursue any work or activity that the individual finds rewarding or pleasurable, so long as his rights do not infringe on the rights of other individuals.
• The right to self-defense—that is, the right of the individual to respond with force to preserve his own existence when faced with the threat of force used against him or her. No individual has the right to initiate force against another.

No matter where you live, no matter what sort of government you live under, these are your rights as a human being, by virtue of your existence as a human being, and these rights may not be taken away from you ethically or legitimately for any other cause than that you have initiated force against another human being (Example: You attack someone to steal his money.), or have caused such force to be initiated. (Example: You hire a hit man to kill someone, so you bear equal guilt for murder with the person who physically killed him.)

ethical human being: An ethical human being acknowledges individual human rights as the origin and underpinning of all rights, deals only voluntarily and consensually with all other human beings, and uses force against another individual only in self defense. No human being who deals with individuals in any other way is an ethical human being. Ethical human beings are rare, and have to work hard to remain ethical, but do exist.

ethical government: Any government that exists under constitution as the servant of the individual, with its laws created to protect individual rights and with individual rights reserved equally for all individuals, and that exists only to protect the individual from the use of force against him, either within or without, and which is paid voluntarily by the individual to provide the services free human beings require:

• A military force to protect individuals and their rights from force originating outside the nation’s borders,
• A police force to protect the individual and his rights from force originating within the nation’s borders.
• An impartial judicial system held to the same standard of law it enforces, charged with ensuring that laws protect the rights of the individual, which will enforce contracts and decide objectively and without bias in support of individual rights when disputes exist, and which is held accountable for every decision made by the individuals who serve within it.
• A representative executive system made up of individuals chosen by the vote of all those individuals represented, where the representatives must live under the laws they create, and who are charged with and entrusted with the making of laws to preserve the rights of the individual—and NO other sort—and who are held accountable for and will be judged for the laws they create.

An ethical government is the only entity which has the right to initiate force, and may initiate force against individuals or nations who have used force against its citizens or who intend to. Because it is the only entity that may legitimately initiate the use of force, ethical government must be closely controlled by ethical human beings: those who hold the preservation and protection of individual rights as their sole standard, and who do not seek to turn human beings into slaves. At present, I am unaware of the existence of any ethical governments in the world.

slavery: 1) Outright ownership of one human being by another human being or by a government, OR 2) outright ownership of the products of the labor of one human being by another human being or by a government, OR 3) the involuntary removal of the products of labor of one human being by force for the enrichment of another human being or a government.

Involuntary and by force in the definition above are actually redundant because they mean exactly the same thing, but because most people accept one of the two above as acceptable, but not the other, I’ve included both.

There is no such thing as the right to enslave.

Now I’ll give examples, by sections of my definition of slavery.

Form 1—Outright ownership: If you walk down to the corner slave market and buy Bob so that you claim a right to force Bob do whatever you tell him to do, you are a slave owner and Bob is your slave. Same thing if you stick a gun to his head and take him into captivity so you can claim the right to force him to do what you tell him to do.  If you hire an agent of the government to capture Bob and give or sell him to you so that you may force him to work for you, you are a slaveholder, and Bob is your slave. If your local, state, or federal government sends an agent into Bob’s house to claim ownership of him so that it may force him to work, the government is a slave owner, and Bob is its slave—BUT if you are the beneficiary of the spoils of Bob’s forced labor, YOU are also a slaveholder, and Bob is YOUR slave as well as the government’s.

Form 2—Serfdom: If you don’t actually own Bob, but claim the right to force Bob to give you everything he makes (either in terms of money or physical goods), you are a slave-owner and Bob is your slave. If you hire an agent of the government to take everything Bob works for to give to you (either in terms of money or physical goods), you are a slave owner and Bob is your slave. Likewise, if your government lays claim to the products of Bob’s work, even if it does not claim to own him, the government is a slaveholder, and Bob is its slave. AGAIN, however, if you receive any of the spoils of Bob’s stolen labor, YOU are a slaveholder along with your government, and Bob is YOUR slave as well as the government’s.

The euphemistic term for a human being who is not owned by an individual or government, but who does not own what he produces, is serf, but in truth, serfs are slaves.

Form 3—Enslavement by degree: If you don’t own Bob, and don’t lay claim to 100% of his production, but do claim the right to stick a gun to Bob’s head to force Bob to give you some percentage of his production for as long as he produces, (whether in terms of money or physical goods), then you are a slave-owner and Bob is your slave to the degree of the percentage of his production that goes to you. If you hire an agent of the government to force Bob to give you a regular percentage of the results of his productive efforts for as long as he works, you are a slave owner, and Bob is your slave by degree.  If the government claims the right to force from Bob a percentage of his productive effort for as long as he produces, then Bob is a slave of the government to the degree that what he has created is taken from him—AND if you receive any portion of the products of his forced labor, you are a slave owner by degree, and Bob is your slave by that same degree.

You as an individual are free to the degree and percent that your individual rights are protected and observed by your government and other individuals, and that the products of your effort to sustain your own existence belong to you.

Some of you are looking at instance #3, and thinking, “Wait a minute, that’s, um… familiar. She doesn’t really mean that.“

Yes, it is familiar, and yes, I do mean that.

Enslavement by degree is the version of slavery most people actively and enthusiastically support for exactly as long as they can pretend that it’s not really slavery.

I had my one brush with attempting to be a slave-owner back in the early nineties, when I applied for a grant from a government-funded arts council. I was writing a book outside my normal genre, and doing it on spec, and I thought it would be nice to have a little extra money to live on while I took the chance on a book I couldn’t be sure would sell. I hoped it would sell, of course, but I couldn’t be sure, and we were hurting financially.  (I think the book I tried to get the grant for was a very early version of what became MIDNIGHT RAIN.)

I applied for the grant, waited a long time, and eventually heard back from the council. My grant application was turned down…but the reason it was turned down was both fascinating, and—when you take the time to actually think about it—horrifying.

My work did not receive a grant because it was deemed to be commercial fiction.

Okay.  What is commercial fiction?

Commercial fiction is any fiction that one human being voluntarily purchases from another human being.

The act of volition, of having one person say, “I think this is good enough that someone will be willing to pay me for it,” and of having another human being say “I like that enough that I’m willing to pay for it,” makes a work commercial.

If just one person is willing to pay you voluntarily for your work (not donate to you: pay you—in that you set the price, and your reader purchases the right to read your work), then you are a writer of commercial fiction. If you cannot make a living from one reader, you are STILL a commercial fiction writer. The right to the pursuit of happiness does not guarantee that you will be able to make a living wage from whatever you love and pursue. It simply grants you the right to pursue it, and if you don’t make a living wage at it and you wish to be an ethical human being, you’ll have to support yourself with a second job, the way all ethical writers start out, and the way many ethical writers continue for as long as they create.

HOWEVER, I was, back then, still screwed up enough that I was willing to look at money without questioning too hard where it came from. Before that rejection, I would have happily taken the grant, and I would not have looked at the price other people paid for it to exist.

That incident—and trying to figure out the standards by which the individual handing out the grants was using to select work—forced me to look at where the money DID come from, and by what standards it was being handed out. If commercial work—work people would happily pay for—was not considered appropriate for government-funded grants, then what work was considered appropriate?

And the answer was: Only work that the individual handing out the grants decided no one would pay for voluntarily, and that individuals should be forced to pay for, whether they liked the work or not.

Take a moment and think about that, and think about the horror that underlies it. Government money is being taken at the point of a gun (and if you would debate this point, first try not paying your income taxes, then call me from prison to let me know how that’s working out for you), and it is being taken to give to people who have not earned it.

In the case of government-funded writing grants, the money taken at the point of a gun from individuals who work to support their own existences is being given to those who are creating works some individual has decided no one would pay for voluntarily. Because that’s what non-commercial work is.

Non-commercial work is work people are not willing to pay for voluntarily, and government grants are the means by which governments force people who would not willingly buy a work to pay for it anyway.

I’ve rephrased that same statement three times, and I apologize for the repetition, but this matters.

So what sort of ethical government grants exist?  None.

If you are a writer and you accept a grant funded by government taxation, you become a slave owner. You are a person who has willingly participated in the forcible removal of the products of another individual’s production, which should by right belong solely to him to support his own existence. And, because you used an agent of the government to apply force against another human being for your benefit, you have walked away from being an ethical human being.

Any human being can regain his ethics. To do so, you agree that never again will you be party to the use of force against any other human for your benefit, that you will only deal with other human beings voluntarily and by mutual consent, theirs and yours. And that you will resist in any legal manner you have available to you the use of such force against yourself.

Remember, the right to enslave does not exist.  Not for anyone, not for any reason.

My office workboard, now with what is probably going to be a two-year checklist in place.

If you’ve taken any of my courses (or read some of my more detail-oriented posts, you’ll recognize me as big on goal-setting, getting a plan in place, and making sure it’s where you can see it.

So the day before yesterday, I erased all the short-term stuff off my office workboard, and put up my BIG goal, which is to retire from teaching inside of two years so I can write JUST my fiction again.

And I put up the steps on how I’ll accomplish this, in order, and with checkboxes.

I love checkboxes.

They’re physical proof of progress. Sitting there blank, they’re a reminder of a step to be taken. Checked, they’re a square on the game board you’ve now covered.

I don’t know how you organize goals, but on the MACRO level, this is how I do mine. On the micro level, I have a notebook I carry with me all the time, in which I keep lists of the small steps that help me accomplish the big steps. I’m pretty close to finishing the first of the four Self-Pub lessons. I’ll check that off on the little list, then make a check on the board when all four are finished.

How do you get from where you are to where YOU want to be?

Oh. By the way, CD II and CD III on the right are shorthand for Cadence Drake 2: Warpaint, and Cadence Drake 3: The List of Three (working title). So my list does include the completion of two novels along with all the rest of the work on the board.

Yes, you CAN beat the odds. You already did.

They’re high. Not quite win-the-lottery odds, but high. You think you’re lucky enough to beat them? I do.

Consider this.

You are the product of 100% survivors. Since the dawn of time, every single one of your ancestors survived droughts, plagues, fires, earthquakes, meteors, Ice Ages, floods, wars, genocide, homicide, witch-burnings, Inquisitions, jihads, and in the last thirty years, Roe v. Wade, to bring forth at least one offspring that was fit to reproduce.

100%.

100% of your ancestors were winners playing at a brutal global table with odds considerably higher than it takes to win the lottery jackpot, just to be breathing in the first place.

And they had you. The two cells that got together to make you are full of winning genes. Spectacular, luckier-than-shit, magnificent genes that came together at odds of anywhere between 40,000,000 and 100,000,000 to one (any of those other sperm would not have resulted in you, nor any of those other eggs). The baby that resulted from that conception then survived a risky nine months (or thereabouts) just to be born, and however many years following that moment. To arrive here. Now.

The odds of your being YOU, and being alive to read these words at this moment are so astronomical you might as well be counting atoms in the planet to figure them.

And yet here you are. You beat all the odds to get here. You want to write, you want to sell what you write, and you’re getting a certain amount of crap from people telling you that you can’t do it, that the odds are too high, that it’s too hard.

Gimme a break. You’re HERE, dammit. Breathing, kicking, with a dream and a vision and a hunger, having passed through millennia of dangers and suffering and struggle just to get here. If you want to beat puny publishing odds: You. Will. Find. A. Way.

Believe.

And then ACT.

(Wrote this in 2005. Needed to bring it to the front, because I keep hearing despair, and this is a time for challenge, and endeavor, and effort, and triumph.)

"Dooooomed! We're all DOOMED, I tell you!"

He makes the following assumptions:

• That 100% of people, given a choice between stealing something and paying for it, will steal it.
• That the shitbags who steal from torrent sites would have actually paid for the books had the torrents not been available.
• That quality has no virtue, and that no writer will be good enough to warrant the support of readers enthusiastic enough about their work to PAY them, rather than stealing from them.
• That publishers somehow PROTECT writers, and that left in the wild, no writers will be able to survive.

This article is generating some worried discussion on the How To Think Sideways Renegade Marketing board. (Members only, so no link).

Now read my counterargument.

Our objective HERE is to make sure good writers without publishers don’t get lost.

To do that, you:

• Write a story worth reading
• Price it at a price people with integrity will willingly pay
• Recommend other writers whose work is like yours.
• Get to know them, exchange site links, and promote each other’s work as well as your own.
• Interact personally with your readers.
• Thank them when they recommend you to other readers.
• Let them know they matter to you.
• Listen to what the people who LOVE your work have to say about it. (To hell with the ones who hate it—they’re not your market and you’ll kill your writing trying to satisfy them.)

Look. It’s always “the best of times, the worst of times.” If you figure out what really matters to you in life, decide on a plan of action to make it happen, and then act, for you it will be the best of times.

If you sit on your hands and bemoan the horrible state of publishing, you’ll live in the worst of times, and never get out.

Figure out who you want to be.

Figure out how you want to live.

Figure out what you want to write.

And then make it so with your effort, your determination, and your intelligence.

I could have let my career die any number of times when things were bad. Every series I ever wrote got cancelled prematurely. Having that happen ONCE has killed a lot of careers.

I found ways to remake myself, remake my writing, change genres, change from fiction to non-fiction. I have ALWAYS gotten paid. I have ALWAYS paid the bills (though sometimes it’s been scary).

And there’s always some dick-head saying from now one, no one will pay for whatever it is you do.

You know what?

There’s all sorts of free information on writing on the internet. Why are you paying to be here? (ED.: In my writing class.)

Because the information you pay for from recommended sources is better than the stuff that’s free.

Same with fiction. People will pay to read something good. The folks who just want “free” are willing to put up with a lot of crap. Let ’em have it.

The folks who steal wouldn’t have bought your work anyway.  They’re thieves.  They’re scum.  They LIKE what they are. Screw ‘em.

Be good enough to get paid, and the people worth dealing with will pay you.  

And with that, you come full circle. This is why you’re here. To learn THAT.

And how do you know when you’re good enough to get paid?

When you put your work out there, and the first person pays you, then recommends you to one other reader.

This is not the end of publishing. This is the beginning of publishing the way it should be.

And some additional info.  Most people have abandoned newspapers.  But there are individuals making tens of thousands of dollars a month independently publishing single-topic newsletters.

Long-tail publishing will probably destroy the multi-million copy bestseller.  But word of mouth works, folks, and if people like your work, they’ll tell friends.  You can make a living by writing for your readers, LISTENING to them, and creating things that matter to both them and you.

Corporations that rely on manufacturing (like print book publishers) are going to have a hell of a time surviving.

In the wake of their passing, agile individuals have the opportunity to step up and make their own places.  I’ve been doing this since 2006 now.

You can’t be lazy and succeed.

But you can succeed.

Your creativity CREATES new money

People struggle with the realization that creating fiction creates jobs. Always.

In this miserable economy, I think we as readers and writers need to take a look at the powerful economic force one person with an idea and the guts to get it out there can be.

So I’ve written the article Money From Nothing: The Economic Value of Writing Original Fiction to discuss the power of the individual writer at every level to create economic good—including the value of writing unpublished fiction, as well as the good done by the writer who publishes either commercially OR via self-publishing.

Read the article there: Talk HERE about how you’re a force for good in the world.

"I Quit!"

After years of publishing my publishing my fiction through big commercial publishers, with thirty-two novels sold to the big New York houses as well as to international publishers around the planet, and more than a million books in print, I have decided to move to self-publishing my fiction.

Why am I going to start publishing myself?

First, because books don’t stay in print anymore with major publishing houses, and my 32-novel backlist has just about vanished.

Second, because I know self-publishing works, and doing this will allow me to write the books I want to write the way I want to write them, and present my stories to my readers without an intermediary.

Read the rest, then follow the link there to come back here…

I imagine it seems a little crazy to walk away from twenty years of publishing with the major New York publishers to go into indie publishing and do all the work myself.

The thing is, as fun as it is to walk into a bookstore and see your novels on the shelf, the rest of the experience gets old fast. Prior to reading Locke’s book on self-publishing, I was going round and round with myself about giving up on fiction altogether.

I was already publishing non-fiction (my writing courses), and the experience was FUN.  And all the frustration, headaches, and fury associated with my fiction career stood in stark contrast to me being able to talk live to my students in a forum, get immediate feedback on work, and, frankly, get paid regularly.

But I LOVE writing fiction.  I didn’t want to quit—I simply didn’t see a way to make it fun again.  To make it as immediate and joyful for me to create as my nonfiction.

When I read Locke’s book, I saw myself.  Someone who does not care about the numbers, who is not interested in constantly pushing for more readers, who wants only to write stories people love and to get them to the people who will love them.

Being a “team player” has never been my strong suit.  Not school, not in nursing, not in writing.  I’m not writing for everybody, and I’m not interested in pretending I am.  I want to write for the folks who already love what I’m doing, not to have someone constantly push me to make my work blander, safer, and more commercial so it will appeal to people who don’t like what I’m doing.

I was BORN to be indie.  And now I can.

I hope you’ll join this adventure with me.

Site set-up, lesson template setup, student set-up.

Today I did workflow setup. Because I’m doing two projects at once, and because one is nonfiction and one is fiction, and because they are inextricably locked together like Siamese twins—and because both are MASSIVE projects, either of which could sink me if I don’t plan well—I built something different.

I made organizer wallpaper for my desktop. I then set up my desktop with all my templates and files and folders either to the side, or right on the spot where I’ll need to use them. Workflow is top to bottom, and left to right.

And Saturday is my day off, dammit. Except for today.

A bit of organizational coolness against the coming storm. I’ll let you know how it works.

Maybe you’ve handed over your power over your own life to randomness and chaos, to someone else’s direction, to someone else’s philosophy or religion.

If you have, realize you’ve done this voluntarily, and you can regain control of your own existence simply by reclaiming it. You cannot choose what happens to you—but you can choose what you do, how you react, why you pursue your goals, what goals you hold sacred.

I realized this during my (still-ongoing) vacation—each of us has the choice to make our life about something, to choose the theme of our own existence.

(I tripped over this realization when I went through my goals for last year and discovered that, even though I had about half a year of being nearly out of commission, I still accomplished a surprising number of them. I stayed on track because of my theme—because when I could work, I was always working toward the same large goal, even if the small goals varied.)

If we don’t choose a theme for our lives—if we hand over control to someone or something else, we wander from desire to random desire, from thought to flitting thought, from action to disconnected action with no coherent plan, no direction, no discernible plot.

We become bad books.

For most of my life, I’ve had a theme, though I got pretty badly lost in the 80s. I came back, though. Because I had, and have, a theme.

My life’s theme is “You can overcome life’s worst assaults and rise triumphant from the ashes to joyful, love-filled existence if you pursue a life of learning with direction and creation with positive purpose.”

My life goals are:

1. To love the people I love well.
2. To write stories that matter.
3. To teach what I’ve learned to people who want to learn and value learning.
4. To live each day with purpose and joy.

 

So I thought this year instead of discussing New Year’s resolutions with you, I’d ask you to think about your life’s theme. Or, if you don’t have one, I’d ask you to consider creating one.

• What is your life right now?
• What do you want your life to be?
• And how can you summarize the life you want to live in one sentence of thirty words or less? Write your theme into something you can memorize, something you can hang onto when things get bad, when your path gets dark, when you wonder about the meaning of your own existence.

 

When you have a theme, you know the meaning of your existence.

If you’d like, you can post your theme and life goals here. I’d love to read what you have to say.

And Happy New Year.

He called me up after spending a few hours on the site, and the first words out of his mouth were “I just read your blog, and I didn’t think there was anyplace on the internet like that.”

I asked him what he meant.

“Everyone on your site is intelligent. Everyone writes in whole sentences and uses punctuation correctly and knows how to spell. They all talk about the subject you’re talking about, and add interesting, relevant points — they’re good at discussion.

“Even the people who disagree with you don’t flame. They bring up good points and they do their best to support them, and they’re polite. It’s amazing. I didn’t think there there was anyplace like this on the internet.

“Where did you FIND these people?”

Well, first I grinned, because he’d spotted something I’ve been working hard at for years—getting the people I want to talk to on my site, and keeping the ones I don’t want to talk to away.

Then I told him I set up my site to attract only people I want to reach.

If you’ve enjoyed my novels, the conversations on the writing diary, the articles I’ve written on the website, the various writing courses I’ve created, my writing tips newsletter, or any of the other things on my site, the odds are high that you’re exactly the person I want on my site…and you fall pretty closely in line with one of these two descriptions.

IF YOU’RE A READER

You read regularly, and a lot. You recommend books you like to friends. You read reviews that enthusiastically recommend new work and select new authors based on such reviews, and you tend to ignore and discount reviews by people who are clearly out to trash authors, and who pride themselves on being negative, or “hard reviewers.”

When you read a review, in other words, you’re not interested in seeing someone torn apart — you’re looking for a way to find more books you’ll like reading.

Most or all of the fiction you enjoy falls into the designation Romantic Fiction — stories that show the world and the characters who inhabit it not as they are, but as they could be, and should be, and emphasize individualism and the ability of the individual to right wrongs, to change outcomes, and to triumph over adversity.

You prefer fiction that contains plot, story, and pacing; in which the stakes are high and the price of failure will be high; that holds meaning beyond the pages of the book. You want something you can take with you when you’ve read the last page—something that offers you a way to understand your own life and the world around you.

You do not enjoy helpless main characters who are destroyed by fate, you don’t care for work in which nothing happens, and you don’t like writing in which the point of the work is to destroy coherence (deconstruction) or to declare fiction pointless (metafiction). You understand that language exists only to communicate, and that writing that does not communicate clearly is not “deep.” It’s garbage.

You may not fit all of these criteria, but the longer you stay on my site, and the more often you return, the better the odds that you fit most of them.

IF YOU’RE A WRITER

You love to put words on the page. You do it pretty regularly — or you want to. Your objective is to create stories people will like to read, and you work hard learning how to do that.

You’re not interested in telling people you don’t know that you’re a writer, you have never gone to a party and introduced yourself as a writer to non-writers and then talked about your writer’s block and how you’re suffering for your art.

You don’t think you’ll find inspiration for your fiction in the bottom of a bottle or at the tip of a syringe, you don’t think killing yourself at forty is the perfect punctuation mark to a perfect career.

You don’t own an entire wardrobe of black turtlenecks, and you don’t own either a smoking jacket or a corduroy jacket with elbow patches (or if you do, this isn’t because you want to “look like a writer”).

You know that writing — and writing well — is hard work, and you’re okay with that. You like to write, and you like to work.

You don’t publicly and elaborately trash individual writers or their works, dissecting them and what they’ve written for the sheer joy of making them bleed. You do not own, nor do you frequent, online sites that do. You don’t take pleasure watching the destruction of others any more than you would enjoy watching yourself being destroyed.

You acknowledge that not everything written is to your taste, but that writing is a helluva lot of hard work, and you respect the effort other writers have put into their books, even if you don’t like what they’ve done. While you are clear about the kinds of writing you respect and don’t respect, you leave individuals and individual works out of your line of fire.

If you must dissect a work you don’t like, you do it privately to teach yourself or others why it doesn’t work.

You read heavily in fiction and nonfiction, and across genres and fields. You take well-earned pride in your ability to communicate clearly, your ability to use your language well, and in your ability to discuss issues from a researched, knowledgeable perspective. You bring the same care to your personal communications that you do to writing fiction.

You have and cultivate other skills besides writing, and you use these in your work to lend it verisimilitude.

You are, in other words, someone who wants to write and write well, not someone who wants to have written, or to pretend to have written. You’re not interested in scamming readers, in writing work you don’t respect for people you don’t like, or in writing work you know is crap and trying to pass it off as clever or cutting-edge or ‘too deep for ordinary people to understand.’ You know perfectly well that the definition of good writing is that it communicates clearly.

You may not fit all of these characteristics, but the longer you stay on this site, and the more times you return, the more likely you are to fit most of them.

These are the descriptions of the people for whom I created my site, and for whom I write my novels and my courses. These are the description of people I enjoy spending time with, whom I seek out, whom I appreciate.

SO HOW DID I FIND YOU?

And how can you use my techniques to bring the people you want to talk to and get to know to your website, and to keep them there?

You focus on your people, not on your site.

If you don’t understand clearly who you want coming to your site and why you want them to come, don’t waste your time creating a site. Sites exist to serve people, not the other way around. NO ONE is going seek out your website so you can promote yourself. Unknown writers who create a website that’s a vanity page for the books they’ve written are wasting their time and their money. No one CARES.

My Instructions: How To Promote Yourself Online

If you want people you can enjoy and like — people worth the time and effort it takes to create and maintain a site — to find you, follow the instructions below.

Be what you value.

In every word you write on every page you create, be exactly the sort of person you want to meet.

If you want to create a hangout for sharks, build a site where you rip apart other people and their work, gossip about people who are in trouble, either by their own doing or through no fault of their own. Write lots of negative reviews. Seek out articles on the web that you disagree with them, link to them, and then attack the writer as well as the article. Feel free to misinterpret what was said, feel free to change meaning to suit your purpose, feel free to take quotes out of context. Declare that you’re doing all of this as a public service.

Then sit back and wait while the site fills up with people who are exactly like you as you’ve presented yourself. And good luck with that. When there’s blood in the water, sharks will eat their own.

If, on the other hand, you value light and laughter and creation, intelligence and competence, people who do and create rather than people who resent those who do and create, avoid everything listed above.

Do things. Create things. Don’t be afraid to be funny, don’t think the people who actually matter to you will dismiss you as a lightweight if you aren’t weighed down by your own importance.

Be honest about who you are. Show your mistakes as well as your successes.

Offer people what you value. Give them good conversation, interesting debates, help in creating the sorts of materials that matter to both of you.

Understand that not everyone is in a position to buy things from you right now, and that you’ll still like the people who find you, even if they don’t add to your bottom line. Create for those who are flat broke as well as those who are comfortably well off.

Ask for input.

Ask people how they found you, what they like, what they need.

If you’re adding articles, ask folks who read your newsletter to tell you what they need to know more about. Read your email and look for article ideas. (How I came up with this post, actually — recently I’ve had a rash of e-mails requesting information on self-promotion. This is the response to those e-mails.)

If you’re creating products, give your readers questionnaires that let them tell you exactly the problems they’re having so you can show them how to fix them.

If you’re writing novels, this is tougher. You must write what you love, and the people who find you through your work will come in loving what you write.

You don’t EVER build your fiction around the sort of reader input that would dictate your stories, your content, your characters, or your meaning. Fiction is best when it is the vision of one individual, not when it is some sort of weird collective design-by-committee atrocity.

You can, however ask your readers which characters they loved most, which worlds they’d like to read more about, which story was their favorite, and you can create the stories that matter to you in the worlds that matter to them.

Either way, when you create what your site visitors have asked for, either contact them personally or via newsletter or social media to let them know you’ve answered their request

Don’t think you have to answer every question, or create content for every need. Answer only the needs that are in line with your own philosophy. If you have a lot of people requesting a “Flames” board in your community or asking you to add a Don’t Read segment to your book review column along with your Books I Recommend, and you don’t want this sort of content on your site, feel free to ignore the requests. If necessary, remove the requesters.

Create auto-segmenting content

That’s a technical term for ‘find ways to offend people you know you won’t like or don’t want to help in order to get them off your site’ — what it means is that you want to include on your site articles, posts, and other content that will encourage the people you want to stay and keep coming back, and that will encourage the people you don’t want to go away.

If this seems cruel or unkind to you, consider that people who are working counter to everything you value require more of your time than those who share your values. They will clutter your site with flames and hostility, spam you with endless e-mails telling you why you’re wrong and why they’re right, mistreat the people on your site that you like, and in all other ways make your life miserable and make you wish they were gone.

So get rid of as many of them as you can BEFORE you have to deal with them.

Do this simply by being honest and by being yourself — by creating content not just about what you love, but about what you find despicable and why you find it that way.

Do I have articles like this on my site? You bet.

How To Write Suckitudinous Fiction is a good example, though there are a lot of others. This article is designed to do two things — to show serious writers how to write good fiction (while being funny about it), and to mock writers and readers who value garbage fiction.

It includes (in the inverse) a detailed brief on the most important steps you must take if you want to write fiction worth reading. But it is designed in the inverse — that is, as an article ostensibly on how to do something for which I have NO respect — because when I wrote it, I wanted to piss off exactly the sort of writers I don’t like and don’t want to deal with. That article tells them who I am, what I value, and that whatever they came to the site looking for, they aren’t going to find it here.

It is an article as much about two philosophies of writing as it is about the technical details of writing, and most people who hate my philosophy read it and go away. The rest write me nasty, argumentative e-mails, which I delete.

I feel no obligation whatsoever to help people who hate what I do. Neither should you.

Test your content and gauge your results

There was a little quiz on the bottom of my front page for a long time.

It asked: Are you more likely to read a story where the hero is the most compelling character, or where the villain is?

I was interested in the results, not because I have any intention of changing the way I create heroes and villains, but because I wanted to know what percentage of people who found my site were the people I wanted to find it.

Here’s how to read the results as I read them:

I want both the hero and the villain to be amazing and I want to read about a strong hero are my solid YES responses. These are folks who have found a site where they’ll find something they’ll like. That’s 83.4%. I’m very happy with that.

I want to read about a strong villain is a bit more ambiguous. This response includes folks who want to have the bejeezus scared out of them, but still want the good guys to win… but it also includes those who revel in the destruction villains create and want to see the villains triumph. So 10.8% of this particular quiz came back inconclusive.

I only read stories that are morally ambiguous is my dead canary down the mineshaft. These are the folks I DON’T want sticking around my site. They’re the ones who prefer fiction than stands for everything I hate, who require that fiction make no moral judgement on the actions of its characters because they’re looking for fiction that excuses the worst in themselves, and they don’t want to be judged.

People who read fiction that makes strong distinctions between what is good and what is evil are NOT looking for ways to excuse their own behavior, and they’re not reading fiction to see depraved characters wallow in their corruption and have the fiction declare these crapbags ordinary folks. They have no need to look at something disgusting and say “everybody does it.” They know everybody doesn’t, because they don’t.

People who read moral fiction (again, fiction that clearly distinguishes between good and evil, not preachy fiction) are people willing to be held accountable for their own actions, people who are not afraid to see a reflection of themselves in the fiction they read and come off badly in the comparison.

These are the people I want to work with. Not people looking to see just how much they can get away with, or trying to convince themselves that everyone does evil things, so they can do them too, and they’ll still be just a good as anyone.

5.7% of the folks who responded to that particular quiz are folks who don’t belong here. Considering the vast numbers of folks out there who actually DO prefer morally ambiguous fiction (the sort I decry in How To Write Suckitudinous Fiction), I’d say my auto-segmenting is working pretty well.

So now you may be wondering — are all my quizzes attempts to figure out the philosophies of the folks reading my site?

No.

The one up currently, What part of writing dialogue causes you the most trouble?, is me trying to figure out a fine point on a course I want to offer.

Most of the time, I’m looking for input on some new cool thing to make, because making cool things is what I enjoy most. Sometimes, though, I want to make sure I’m making them for folks who will appreciate them and get some good out of them.

So those are the steps. If you follow them, you’ll discover that the people who find your site and stay are people who love what you love, folks you’ll be happy to meet and talk to.

But where’s the part about self-promotion?

That’s it. This IS self-promotion. Using social media, twittering, pitching your novels, flogging your newsletter — all of that is just means to the following simple end:

You invite the people who matter to you to your site by creating things they’ll value, and you take necessary steps to keep out the riff-raff so folks you value will enjoy spending time on your site.

Finally, I’ve worked hard to find you out of all the people on the internet, and I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for coming to talk to me.