25 Years of Publishing - Jaguar Thoughts
There are a lot of things on my mind lately, and this year particularly because this month I hit a milestone birthday (what I call the decade birthdays!), and it’s been 25 years since my first professional fiction sale. To date, in that 25-year-span, I’ve published 71 books for adults, 3 for children, and 7 coloring books. I feel like this is a great start to a career, particularly given that some people don’t start publishing their first books until they’re closer to my current age!
So I’m satisfied that I’ve created a significant body of work. I’ve got the Peltedverse arc to wrap up, and some other projects I’d like to get back to, but I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished and there are enough finished series in that I don’t feel like I’m sitting on a giant mass of unfinished projects.
Which brings me to my birthday and my reflection on the industry and social trends. Every year since the indie revolution hit has brought some version of doom about discovery and organic reach and advertising and ‘finding your tribe’ and ‘nicheing down’ (which sounds awful, but I didn’t make the term up), etc. All of it boils down to ‘how do you make money in an oversaturated market?’ if you’re of an entrepreneurial mindset, or ‘how do you get noticed when you’re competing with millions of other artists for mindshare’ if you’re of an artistic one. The overwhelming consensus on how to do this has always been, ‘Figure out something no one else is doing and do that!’
You can imagine my amused face here.
AI has only accelerated the problems we were already facing. I don’t think of AI as a unique threat in this regard: it’s just adding more Stuff People Can Waste Time Browsing to the already enormous amounts of Stuff People Were Wasting Time Browsing. And because I’ve never created to market, my niche is less vulnerable to AI anyway. If your books are formulaic enough to fit into a genre category easily, you’re in more trouble than people like me, who write books that cause people to complain ‘wait, you ended what I thought was the plot in the middle but it’s still going so maybe that wasn’t the plot I should have been focusing on?’ (Correct.)
Anyway, we have always been at the point where if you depend on your work for income (like some of us), you need to be searching for your ‘thing that no one else is doing’ that might make you more interesting/uncategorizable/hard to replace.'
That’s where I am. I’ve reached what I hope is only the midpoint of my artistic career and I’m sitting on a pile of fantastic stories, what Marketer would gleefully categorize as IP ready for repackaging. Those stories aren’t working as hard for me as novels as I could wish; partly because fewer people are reading, and partly because I’m one of those hard to categorize types. And honestly, I’m feeling stale: like I’m not learning, or risking much. I told myself this year I’d try things, which… honestly is uncomfortable. If you like groceries, turning away from the endeavor you know will earn some money so you can learn things that might give you new income streams (or might be a total waste of time!) takes a stiff spine. But I don’t want to stay stale, and I don’t want to be whining, ten years from now, about the royalty checks I remember receiving back when people read books more often. I want to bring my stories to life in new ways and see what happens!
My first endeavor in that regard is the gallery project I’ve mentioned before, which I’ve put on hold for various reasons (foremost being I need to figure out some things with my scanning setup). While I’ve been waiting on that, then, I’ve turned to something I’ve wanted to do forever: I’m making a game based on my books. In particular, I’m making a resource-management/breeding/dress-up/light RPG set in the Jokka universe.
Good things: I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m making tons of mistakes and running into a lot of walls. I’m having to go backwards and redo things I thought was working. I’ve discovered stuff that sounded easy to do is actually really really complicated on the backend. I’ve done a lot of drawing… discovered that drawing is a different skill from creating image assets… and done a lot of image editing.
I’m serious, those are good things. I can feel the neurons in my brain struggling to make new connections!
Not so good things: I don’t know if this is going to work or how to monetize this thing because I’ve never finished a game and I’ve never monetized a game, and as I will tell any new author who asks for advice, you can only learn these things by doing them… and until you do them, some part of you will doubt you can.
But back to the good things: I’m having fun. I’m excited to work! I can’t remember the last time I’ve wanted to sit at a computer for longer than I needed, absolutely, to do the bare minimum of anything! And here I am, waking up at 2 am because I just thought of an addition to a feature that I absolutely need to write down right now!
A few people have warned me that creating a game based on a very strange IP that almost no one’s heard of is not a recipe for success. But I’m not interested in recipes. My (modest) goal is to make something that a handful of people play; to get it to generate a little coffee money; and to introduce strangers to the books/art/merch. An immersive game world based on five books’ worth of material with really strange lore and conceits might fail completely; or it might succeed wildly. Or it might, most likely, entertain a small number of people who pay me enough to make me glad I did the thing. And I’ll have learned new skills in the meantime. If this works out and I keep enjoying myself, I’ll move on to some new game… or I might decide to try something completely different. But at very least I’ll be reinventing myself instead of stagnating… and I can’t help but think that shaking up my brain this way will make my future novels better.
I've added some screenshots of the work in progress! If you’re curious about the game, ping me about the discord. Most of the development talk and playtesting is coordinated there.
Fine, fine, you say. But what about the WRITING?
I hear you. XD My goal for the rest of this year is to finish Red Honey, complete the serialization, and publish it. And start on one more project. That will either be Kherishdar 5 or Surela 3, and I’ll keep you updated. Reviews and social media mentions make me more excited to work on things, by the way, so if you want to inspire me the tools are at least partially in your hands!
So that’s it for this update! Tomorrow we’ll get Back in Time Tuesday art as usual, and the serial on Friday. Tell me your thoughts! Ask your questions! Make your suggestions! I’m always listening.
