Celebrating A Diversity of Worldviews

By Maggie Faire

I am an author who writes across several genres because I love looking at the world and its problems and resolutions through different perspectives.  As Maggie Faire I write Young Adult Urban Fantasy. My current series, The Forest People, is about a young woman who is a human chameleon. She has grown up with “normal” parents and because of her condition has been sheltered from the world. It first manifested at birth, but then becomes uncontrollable during puberty. Isn’t that when everything is uncontrollable? J  An important part of her journey is to discover why she has this curse (her view of it) and how she can learn to live with it or use it to her advantage.

Thank you, Judith Ashley, for asking these questions to make my discussion easier!

Why YA? I know you write for adults so why add YA?

The simple answer would be that I’m crazy. Most people don’t think a grandmother should be writing YA and of course I love to disprove whatever “most people” think.J  A better answer is that YA, unlike most adult genres, reader expectations are not as prescriptive in the genre rules. This allows authors much more freedom in incorporating a wider range of topics, protagonist experiences, and cross-genre stories within any one book.  I think that is also why so many people, both teens and adults, love reading YA novels. Did you know that 50% of YA readers are between the ages of 35 and 50?

Also, YA is primarily about the coming-of-age story—that time in life where a young person becomes an adult and has to figure out who they are separate from their parents, their peers, and form a real sense of “self.”  I personally believe that we all go through this who-am-I-really stage at several times in her our lives. Certainly, the move from child to adult is the expected one. However, I think anytime something changes (marriage, death, divorce, finding or losing a job, retirement) we go through some type of re-evaluation of who we are, what we want, and what we are contributing to the world.

The other thing I love about YA books is the emotion. When I remember back to being between the ages of 12 and 19, I remember that every decision seemed life-changing and potentially the end of the world as I knew it. By putting my YA books in a fantasy world, I can truly make the real end of the world a possibility that is all on this young adult’s shoulders. It heightens the emotion and allows me to exploit themes in a different, more exciting way than I can in some of my adult books.

What, if any, message are you sharing with your readers in your stories?

I think the hardest thing to learn in life is that there is both good and evil in the world and, whether we admit it or not, we are all capable of both. It is not so easy to identify what constitutes evil and what that means to how we live our life. Is evil a supernatural entity like the devil? Is it a conglomeration of all the bad we do that somehow becomes something more than the sum of its parts? Is it something that we can define by specific ways we treat people or animals or the things in our life? There is a lot of grey between the two polls of good and evil; and I think it is pretty easy to slip toward evil little by little. And that slippery slope becomes more dangerous when things aren’t going our way, when expectations for our daily life aren’t being met.

In my series, evil is a somewhat ambiguous concept that becomes manifest in an entity called the Abaddon. This name is taken from the Hebrew translation for “place of utter ruin, desolation, or destruction” and is personified as the angel of the abyss. In the series, the Abaddon also creates some real environmental consequences for the Forest People who live in the land of what we might call Faerie or Myth; and when it seeps into the human world it is manifested through behaviors of greed and power. Teens are very interested in the good and evil tug-of-war and I wanted to delve into that in both an existential and practical way in these books.

What are the easiest and most difficult aspects of writing for this age range?

I don’t find the age range more difficult than writing adult books. I simply find it different because the protagonists are younger and, therefore, bring a different level of experience and expectation to solving problems. Writing YA protagonists requires me to revisit that time in my life, or my children’s lives, and recall the emotions and feelings of that age. Fortunately, by casting my protagonist as an outsider, both in the human and fantasy world, I am not tied to knowing the latest jargon, language, or pop culture references that teens experience today or may experience in the future.

The most difficult part of this series is the world-building genre. I’m building a complex world with different races, religions, cultural practices and rules that are unlike the ones we know—yet have some characteristics familiar to us so readers aren’t completely lost. Memory is no longer a strength I have, so I have lots of notecards and what I call a “world-building bible” that is my reference for my character and creature descriptions, rules, practices, religions, relationships to each other and to the human world, etc. Believe me, I have to refer back to that reference almost daily because it is so huge.

Fortunately, I have 3-5 wonderful beta readers for this series. They are between the ages of 14 and 18 and they love a variety of YA books and particularly paranormal or fantasy fiction. These teens are unrelated to me, so they have no problem telling me where I’ve gone wrong or right, and whether they think things are believable or not—interesting or not. This is critical for me. When I release a book, I feel confident that it will work for a good portion of teens in this age group who read fantasy or urban fantasy.

Thanks for letting me share the space here on Romancing the Genres. Tell me, what do you look for when reading a fantasy or urban fantasy novel? If you write in the genre, I’d love to hear your answer to the question of WHY.

About the Author:

Maggie is the author of 18 published books, as well as more than 30 short stories and numerous non-fiction articles. She is also the founder of Windtree Press, an independent publishing cooperative. Her adult fiction spans romance, suspense, and SF titles under the name Maggie Jaimeson. She writes YA Fantasy under the name Maggie Faire.  Her non-fiction titles are found under Maggie McVay Lynch.

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Changes in Publishing - Part Two

By Maggie Lynch

***If you missed Part One, click on this link Changes in Publishing, Part One

What does all this mean to the individual author?

It means you have to think in terms of the long game. You don’t write a book (or even a short story) for next week’s or next month’s sales spike; and there’s no way to even see a trend before it’s gone. 

One could read all of the above and simply throw in the towel and say “I’m not writing anymore. I can’t make any money.”  However, I would suggest the author’s response to this should be NOT to play the short-game. 

Don’t count on book launches, short-term velocity, or deciding the value of your book on the first month’s or quarters, or maybe even year’s, earnings. 

Stop practicing or seeing answers to the short game. Instead focus on the long game. What is that title worth in two years? Ten years? How can it be re-used, re-purposed, re-made into new products? Duets, short stories, boxed sets, series. 

These are all thinking about long-game products and thinking about each product being more than a stand alone.

On the marketing and discoverability side, the long game approach is also very different. For example, there is no point in jeopardizing your long-term business over something that isn’t going to last. Too often authors check their sales every day and then react by trying some new latest fad to give it a boost: a Facebook or Twitter ad, a Pinterest post, a Tumblr blog, a … you name the latest new multimedia. Some subscribe to a tweet buzzer, or blast their fans with “buy, buy, buy, ” or frantically search for the secret “make millions now” scheme.

These are all temporary boosts with diminishing returns. Yes, the first time you try it you might see a few more sales, but the next time is less, and the next time may be nothing. While chasing those spikes, you’ve failed to write the next book or take into account the long-term sales results for that title.

Joanna Penn has coined a popular term for the type of author who can learn to thrive in this new publishing environment. It is: “author-entrepreneur.” I like this term because it joins both the creative and business sides that successful authors must embrace today.  Let me quote Joanna’s thinking on building an online presence.

“The author-entrepreneur” takes the long-term view, plans accordingly, and thinks ahead. For example, this is why I think relationships with other authors are so important. Some people consider social media a waste of time, but if you have a long-term perspective, you know it’s not about this one tweet, or a single blog post, or this one podcast interview. It’s about building social karma over time, about generosity that comes back to you in unexpected ways, about making friends and supporting each other on the journey. None of that is possible with short-term thinking.”

Embrace Change
Finally, I think the biggest change in publishing is the fact that it IS changing constantly. 

We are nowhere near stability or even heading toward equilibrium in the publishing game. 

We will continue to see changes in both traditional and indie options. 

We will continue to see a plethora of software solutions to speed the production cycle. 

We will continue to see power shifts among companies, countries, genres and formats. 

Authors who can find a way to continue to write great stories while being buffeted by change will be the ones to succeed, long term. 

Authors who don’t become obsessed with the latest gadget, marketing campaign, or promises of riches, will be the ones more likely to succeed in the long term. 

Authors who are willing to take chances, to experiment a little but always verify results, are the ones who will learn to be on the leading edge of change instead of hanging onto the tiger’s tail and bouncing between the earth and the sky.


Like most things in life, authors who can find some semblance of balance of creativity, business acumen, and a match with their core will now be more successful. Learn how to exercise control where you have some power and to let go of control where you do not.

And remember what brought you to writing in the first place. It probably wasn’t riches or fame. Get back to that person—that person who wrote because she had a story that wouldn’t leave her alone, or wanted her voice to be heard in a medium that has long-term staying power, or simply loved the shape of words and sentences and paragraphs. Don’t lose the core and all that flows from that will help you adapt as matches your need.

MAGGIE LYNCH

Maggie Lynch is the author of 15 published books, as well as more than 35 short stories and numerous non-fiction articles. She is also the founder of Windtree Press, an independent publishing cooperative.

Visit her online at http://maggielynch.com
Maggie's love of lifelong-learning has garnered degrees in psychology, counseling, computer science, and education;  and led to opportunities to consult in Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. Since 2013, Maggie has enjoyed the luxury of writing full-time. Her adult fiction spans romance, suspense, and speculative fiction titles under the name Maggie Jaimeson. She writes young adult fiction under the name Maggie Faire.  Her non-fiction titles are found under Maggie McVay Lynch. 

Changes in Publishing - Part 1

By Maggie Lynch

Whenever writing about changes in publishing, the question one needs to first address is how many years of history to include? For the purpose of this article, I will only address the last fifteen years: 2000-2014. 

I choose that period because it is the beginning of massive change. Before 2000, traditional publishing had run the same way for the past 100 years. In fact, I can remember publishing a textbook about online learning in 1998 and a second one in 2000 and asking the publisher to create a website with digital links in it.

The publisher (a worldwide textbook publisher based in London and New York) balked at that suggesting that no one would want to go online to get information from a link in a paper book. It wasn’t until a book in 2004 that I finally got a website. My how five years makes a huge difference!

Traditional Publishing Changes

BOOKS, TOYS, CLOTHES
AND MORE

Five years ago, traditional publishing was the only game in town for an author wishing to reach an audience that extended beyond their personal family and friends. But getting a traditional contract had grown progressively more difficult since the 1980’s.

At the end of the 1980’s and into the 1990’s publishing morphed to become large media conglomerates. The Big 5 publishers of today are content publishers. They do that through books, radio, television, movies, and games.  When you have nothing else to do look up Bertelsmann, the parent company of PenguinRandom House and other media corporations. You will see that publishing books is not it’s only, nor it’s biggest, money maker.

 A “content publisher” is different from a book publisher. A content publisher needs larger and larger numbers of consumers to buy the content in order to pay the high prices of developing it. 

BOOKS, MOVIES
AND MORE

By the mid-1990’s traditional publishing changed from a model of buying books they liked and investing in that author for the future, with a plan to “break them out” around book five or eight if sales were decent, to a model focused on acquiring bestsellers that could also be made into movies and games and plays. Authors were easily abandoned by the second book or third if sales weren’t always on an upward trajectory.

The book distribution model five years ago was based on large booksellers (B&N, Borders, Walden, Crown) and big box stores (Walmart, Target). Small indie bookshops were ignored, and ebooks were relegated to small online publishers that received authors who couldn’t publish anywhere else or published in genres the big guys weren’t interested in (like erotica before 50 Shades of Gray). What a difference only five years make.

Indie Bookstores and Ebook Distribution Models

As of last May, the number of indie bookshops in the U.S. was 1,664—actually an 11% increase over the past five years. The only big bookseller left among the ones named above is B&N and they have announced they are closing about 220 stores over the next decade.

On the ebook side, in 2010 there was one big ebook retailer. Amazon had 22% of the market. Now there are many big ebook retailers that are online only (Kobo, Nook, Apple, Rakuten, and others). Though Amazon has ~50% of the U.S. market, they have significantly less outside the U.S. In many countries Apple and/or Kobo are the only big ebook retailers, and Amazon has no market. Simultaneously thinking locally and globally is critical to authors today.

The next hurdle for bookstores is how to get a bigger slice of the ebook pie if they are to compete successfully in the long term.

http://www.indiebound.org/spread-word

Consumer Buying Changes

In addition to the significant changes in print and brick and mortar stores are the changes in consumers' buying habits and choices. Now books compete with audiobooks, enhanced books, series books, even twitter books. In addition, a multitude of “free” books, heavily discounted books (a boxed set of nine novels for 99 cents), and a variety of membership clubs online (Kindle Unlimited, oyster, scribD) have put downward pressure on pricing and built consumer expectations of what a book is worth. This is just in the book marketing space. In addition, there is the usual competition of music, movies, games, and other entertainment-related sales and the book tie-in to all those options.

On the consumer side, the ugly industry realities that impact traditionally published and self-published authors alike are: consumer impulse buying with free or heavily discounted books that have led to purchased books never being read and therefore never reviewed or recommended. This means that in addition to lower and lower pricing, there is less and less word of mouth sales. All of that leads to discoverability challenges for everyone—including Amazon.

What does all this mean to the individual author? 

This article, therefore the answer to that question, continues next Saturday, December 13, 2014.

MAGGIE LYNCH

Maggie Lynch is the author of 15 published books, as well as more than 35 short stories and numerous non-fiction articles. She is also the founder of Windtree Press, an independent publishing cooperative.

Visit her online at http://maggielynch.com
Maggie's love of lifelong-learning has garnered degrees in psychology, counseling, computer science, and education;  and led to opportunities to consult in Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. Since 2013, Maggie has enjoyed the luxury of writing full-time. Her adult fiction spans romance, suspense, and speculative fiction titles under the name Maggie Jaimeson. She writes young adult fiction under the name Maggie Faire.  Her non-fiction titles are found under Maggie McVay Lynch.