by Gene Turnbow | Aug 5, 2025 | Business, Writing
I am not, and have not been, in my thirties for a very long time. That said, I probably don’t have the time to wait around to pummel hundreds of agents with my manuscript until I am “discovered” by one of them. I have therefore decided to take matters into my own hands.
Helium Beach is an imprint I have been operating through Krypton Media Group for about five years now, as of this writing, and I was using Patreon money to buy short stories for publication. Needless to say, this sucks as a business model, so after a couple of years I stopped buying articles. Now, though, Helium Beach comes back into play. I am releasing my first novel, Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere, through this imprint, and I have established it with various publishing agencies and companies. The eBook and the paperback release on September 8, 2025.
And now I am swimming through the sudden realization that what I know about social media you could drown in a teacup. The learning curve has been soul shredding, terrifying. Yet, failure is absolutely not an option here, so despite the emotional trauma at having to get my feet back under me at 68 and start a whole new career, here we f**king go.
I’ve learned how to do internal design, cover design, how to work with an editor, the importance of using one, doing endless rewrites, doing my own cover design, and everything else while I keep my radio station running—the radio station, by the way, without which I would have had zero shot at any of this and would have been truly starting from scratch. The station, SCIFI.radio, has a social media reach of about 140,000 pairs of eyeballs due to its presence on five or six social media, and without that springboard I honestly have no idea how well I would be doing as an author. Probably not well.
It’s been exhausting, having to learn all this on top of having to write the book in the first place. I can see why a lot of indie authors never sell more than a dozen copies of their book. I think this just might be the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, not because the work is that hard, but because it’s so alien to how I think. I was raised to believe that if I did good work, people would notice, and I would rise. And that’s not actually how things work at all.
Quantity over Quality
You might find it appalling, but success has more to do with how you twiddle the knobs than the quality of your work. I mean, sure, the quality has to be there at the end, or your sales success will be singular and short-lived, but to begin with, before anybody’s seen your actual work, you can get quite a long way before you actually have to deliver the product.
TikTok and Instagram, for example, are currently considered the platforms for marketing and selling books. Nothing else really moves the needle. Facebook, which I had been relying upon for years, absolutely doesn’t. Yet, both platforms favor videos of a length between seven and fifteen seconds. You’re not doing much selling in seven seconds. You have to fall back on repetition, posting a couple times a day, sometimes for months, before you start to see a benefit. I can tell you, it’s exhausting.
I was just reading about one young lady (whom I will not name, in case she wants to try again and do better next time) who had somehow managed to get 4,900 pre-orders on her book, and then the book released, and all the people who bought it felt cheated because little attention had been paid to preparing the book for publication. It was poorly written, poorly edited (which could have fixed the “poorly written” part,) and contained numerous spelling errors. She got probably a $30,000 payday out of it as a first time author, and yet somehow had managed to run the prerelease guantlet without getting a proper editor in the mix; the point being that it is possible to learn the intracacies of the sales engine without having an actual salesworthy product.
The Actual Path
By this time you can figure out for yourself why indie writers usually fail. It’s not enough to write a great novel. If you’re an indie author, you have to not only write your book, but you’re responsible for all the things your agent would normally do for you, and all the things your publisher would normally do for you. You have no idea what you’re facing until you do it for the first time, nor do you have a clear idea of just how deep this rabbithole goes. The successful self-published author has mastered every single one of these tasks.
And here’s the kicker to all of it. The decision to self-publish might have been the right answer, even if I want to be traditionally published later. An astonishing number of agents now only accept authors with proven sales records and established social media spheres, because they can’t risk gambling on somebody who doesn’t have either one. The publishers are getting this way too. It used to be that the proving ground for new writers was selling short stories to the trade magazines, but they’re all gone now, and that hasn’t been true for probably half a century now. Writing shorts is still a way to polish up your writing skills, but if I’m honest here, writing short stories and writing novels are two completely separate skill sets. Success in one does not require or suggest success in the other.
Anyway, long story short, if you’re an indie author trying to climb to the top, don’t give up. You’re doing it right. There is no slush pile anymore. Indie publishing is the slush pile. Persistence will win the day.
by Gene Turnbow | May 15, 2025 | Uncategorized
I’ve started querying agents. This might take a while.
I keep reading about how long it takes to get an agent, and that much of the time “no” doesn’t mean your book is bad, it just means it doesn’t fit the flow of what they’re doing this year.
And, I have to assume that most people who query don’t even know what a query is supposed to look like but submit anyway, i.e., most people who think they’re writers don’t actually have any idea how the game works (and it is a game). That’s got to be skewing the numbers big time.
When I wanted to get into the FX industry, I just went ahead and did it and ignored the people who said how hard it was or that I would never pull it off. The same thing happened when I went into the game industry, and when I wanted to get into UCLA Film School, and when I wanted to work in feature animation. I did all of them. The lesson I learned is that all the horrible statistics take into account the most wildly stupid and self-destructive applicants in each pursuit who never get past the front door.
Screening applicants for positions at the feature animation studio taught me that for each successful hire, there would be 300-400 applicants, out of which perhaps a dozen might have the basic requirements for the job, and only two or three might actually have everything we were looking for.
That’s only about 3% that make the “I’m not an idiot” cut. And less than one in three of those got hired. Which is FASCINATING, because that’s the same ratio of would-be authors who start a book that go on to see their work published. It doesn’t prove correlation, but it suggests it really f-ing hard.
It also suggests that I’m probably a lot closer to getting published than I think I am. We’ll see.
by Gene Turnbow | May 14, 2025 | Books, Business, Writing
I’ve finished the third draft, and still frankly doing little tweaks here and there. I’ve learned that most agents, if not all of them, request the first three chapters of the book to read when you submit a query, so I’ve been polishing. A word here, a phrase there, suddenly it all seems to have outsized importance. And then, of course, it makes me want to go through the entire book and do that to every chapter.
When I’m alone with my thoughts, when I’m writing the story, that’s the sweetest, most engaging part of the entire process, but now I’m faced with having to do the one thing I’ve never ever been good at, the one thing that terrifies me more than anything else I’ve ever done in my entire life that didn’t involve doing something like playing electric guitar and singing on stage, solo, in front of an auditorium filled with my high school peers and their parents (this was when I was 17), encountering a band of thieves in my own home, led by someone I thought was my best friend (this happened when I was nineteen), or diving in the driver’s side window of my mother’s borrowed car to grab the emergency brake as it was about to dive off a cliff off the end of a pier into the Pacific Ocean (this happened when I was twenty), or having to pull over to blow out an engine fire on my way to work and then get back in the car and drive the rest of the way to work (this happened when I was 40).
I have to sell an agent on the idea of representing my book to a publisher.
I’m terrible at salesmanship. Throughout my life, any time I’ve been confronted with having to do it, it’s always been a horrible experience and I’ve failed at it miserably. But this time I can’t afford to fail, because the rest of my career as a writer depends on my being able to pull just one more miracle out of that dark secret place in the back of my trousers where flying monkeys come from.
I’m doing all the things I think I’m supposed to. I’ve gotten myself an annual membership on QueryTracker, which is a web site meant to help you find agents and keep track of whom you’ve submitted to and what they said, or didn’t say, afterwards. I’m considering entering BookPipeline’s unpublished author’s contest. To be honest, though, I have no idea if that’s a good idea, or if it would help me in the slightest. They don’t even start judging until September, and that seems a very long time from now, and I’m impatient to get started pitching agents.
I’m told that I need to start working on my next book while I work on selling this one, because the publishing industry runs at the speed of books, which is to say, not very speedy at all. Even if I get an agent right away, which isn’t terribly likely, I might see my seventieth birthday before the book is published, assuming it ever gets there. This prospect does not fill me with confidence. I’m sixty-eight now. I don’t want my life to go by while I wait to see if I get to be a real writer. Frankly, the odds aren’t good.
I will tell you something, though. The reason most people fail at getting an agent is that their work isn’t finished before they submit their queries, or they query the wrong agents because they haven’t done any research, or they can’t follow simple instructions given them by the agents. Frequently they just have no idea how writing a novel works, and have written something unreadable, and their books are nowhere near where they need to be to submit. Your book doesn’t have to be in its final, polished, perfect form, but it needs to be as good as you can make it, and it should have been through the hands of a professional editor before you submit (mine now has). The odds of my getting an agent are probably far, far better than I believe they are, because most of the field is just self-disqualifiying.
Now that my manuscript is finished, the real adventure begins.
Wish me luck.
by Gene Turnbow | Apr 26, 2025 | Books, Writing
Now that I’ve gone through the whole book, replaced a chapter I shouldn’t have yanked, and found a bit over 1600 instances of filler phrases and useless sentences to either edit or remove entirely, now the manuscript is in the hands of my editor Lori Alden Holuta.
And I am starting to be faced with the questions of how do I pitch this thing, to whom to I pitch it, and how does the publishing industry work from this point forward. One important web site turns out to be QueryTracker, which is the natural evolution of an industry that is so swamped with people who dearly wish to be writers but don’t quite reach top tier who are looking for agents that there needs to be a service to help agents coordinate it all.
Gone are the days when you could go to a publisher’s office and throw the manuscript into the office over the transom and expect that it might get read someday. The publishing industry is now far far busier than that, and even just the fantasy genre by itself has grown over 40% in the past three years. It’s not just a river of submissions now. It’s a tsunami, made all the worse for people thinking that A.I. can write their books for them. I know publishers who have had to close their submission pipeline entirely while they wade through the sudden oceans of crap that weren’t in the pipeline just three years ago. It’s disheartening.
At the same time, it’s uplifting. Because while it’s harder to stand out than it was, when somebody does actually stumble across my manuscript, it will shine all the brighter. I might actually have a shot at getting agented, and if that happens, I could be published by TOR, or Baen, or DAW, or Dell.
I’m impatient. If this isn’t going to work, I want to know sooner rather than later. That isn’t how the publishing industry works, though. It might take two or three years to learn the fate of my first book, and that means that if I want a career as a published author, I have to start writing the next one whether or not I know that the first one will ever sell. That’s going to be a leap of absolute faith, or hubris, I’m not sure which.
But I’m not giving up, or stopping, or even slowing down, because the only option is to Keep Moving Forward. It might be a long shot, but it’s still my best possible future, and my best possible bet.
I’m taking it.
— Gene
by Gene Turnbow | Apr 10, 2025 | Books
It’s easy to say, “I’m writing a book.” Lots of people say that at parties. It’s hard to actually sit down and write one. This is why people treat the news that you’re working on a book with as much enthusiasm as they do a fart in an airlock, because the world is full of pretenders. And I mean full of them. A great many people want to be a writer, but don’t want to actually write.
And then when you say, “My first draft is finished,” now it’s a matter of both pride and fear. So many people never get that far. I’ve heard estimates that as few as 3% of people who start a book actually finish a first draft.
So, as you might have guessed, I have now finished my first draft, and it’s in the hands of the beta readers. And all I can do now is wait for their feedback, and I hate waiting, of course. And then too, some of the advice I’ll get back will be useful, or even vital, and some of it won’t be. And after I’ve gone through and polished the manuscript based on their recommendations and some of my own revelations, it will be time to either look for an agent, or prep it for publishing via a smaller publishing company that wouldn’t necessarily require me to use one, or self publish.
There are parts of the book, by the way, that ended up being cut because they don’t fit the story, but that will make wonderful short stories or novelettes. They might get included when the book publishes, and they might appear here first as a thank you for your continued support.
Running the radio station while I do this has been an experience as well, and I want to thank you for staying with me while I do all of this, and being with my team as we keep all the little wheels and gears from falling off. The station means a lot to a lot of people, and I don’t know if you’ve checked lately, but we are now the only science fiction themed radio station in the world, and have been for a while. You have earned the right to polish that particular apple, because it’s you and your contributions that make it all possible.
Second draft, here we come.
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