Years That Were
It’s funny looking back over the years of my coming to play at RTG.
My very first post here, December 8, 2012, sounds very positive (https://romancingthegenres.blogspot.com/2012/12/agile-thinking.html, OMG those early covers were awful…and the next ones were worse!).
I’m not quite sure how I did that because it was one of those depths-of-despair times that occur in any long writing career. My publishing career was taking off, very slowly. I’d just received my first royalty notice from my trad publisher. They’d bought eight books (four were already written and in the pipeline), but the first one had only just released.
Imagine, as my wife unfolded that royalty statement while I washed the dinner dishes, how excited we were. I’d been laid off in August [thank you, Mr. Unscrupulous Boss] and we were dead broke [thank you, recession]. Then she read out the amount the represented our great hope for the future. What we’d earned was below the publisher’s minimum threshold for cutting a check ($2.34 against a limit of $10). We lost it! I mean both lying on kitchen floor holding our sides against the laughter that lay dangerously close to hysteria.
Less than six weeks later, I’d given up the corporate job hunt (after a 30-year career), dumped the city apartment for a place half the price out on the Oregon Coast, sold the house we’d built to retire in (but had to rent out) for half its real value (again, thank you, recession), and gambled on my writing career actually taking off.
You see, it was the year after the Kindle Christmas. I’d written a little Christmas book set in the same world as my traditional books, but I was selling it indie. Curiously, The Night Is Mine and Daniel’s Christmas would continue to be my bestselling books until I launched my Miranda Chase thrillers in 2019.
The Night Stalkers #1 and The Night Stalkers Holidays #1
Years That Are
Did I make breakout success due to indie? Well, yes and no.
I didn’t get any boost by being one of the very first to publish indie back in 2009 when the wisdom was: Publish anything indie and you’ll make a fortune. The $0.99 revolution didn’t touch me. My Amazon and Facebook ads rarely even paid for themselves (even when I got professional help). The Bookbub storm blew in some other sea than mine…
I did it by writing the best stories that I could as fast as I could. The learning curve was horrendous, challenging, fascinating, and (did I mention?) horrendous. The production rate is something I’ve never achieved since—the power of desperation to grab onto that brass ring of being a full-time writer was immense. I’d been dreaming about that ring since I first started writing in 1993 and had my first book published in 1997.
Curious side note: though I’ve only managed to write one more book in that series, I can’t wait to get back to it. I already have two more already started…now I just need to find time to finish them.
So, a mere 6 weeks after that first RTG post, I’d made the jump. I was now a hybrid author struggling to complete the leap of faith my wife had agreed to take with me.
Curiously, and rather unexpectedly, one of the most important changes to happen that year was announced very quietly in an RTG post. In 2012, while my known world was collapsing around me, an editor forced me (almost literally) to write a short story for a Christmas Ghosts anthology. The fact that I didn’t write short stories, holidays, or ghosts carried no weight with her. So, in 2013, my first short story launched—to rave reviews.
Over the next decade, I’ve written over 200 short stories and they make up a full third of my income. Ghost of Willows Past still sells nicely every Christmas season.
Always remaining flexible is one of the great keys to success in this industry. After seven years, forty-two novels, and seventy short stories in the military romantic suspense of my Emily Beale Universe (https://EmilyBeale.com), I began to worry about keeping myself challenged as a writer. That’s an essential, to always learn and grow. Otherwise creative stagnation becomes closely followed by career stagnation.
Besides, I had discovered a character who I couldn’t wait to hear from. It took me two years to develop and understand Miranda Chase enough to write her. Two years of wondering if my military romance audience would follow me into thrillers. Of wondering if fans of the ultra-competent icon of Major Emily Beale would embrace an autistic air-crash investigator unsure of everything about her.
Fifteen books later? The answer was absolutely!
But it was only by facing my fears and following my character into story that it happened. Had I failed to embrace Miranda, I expect my career would be having a much smaller arc, rather than still supporting my family as a full-time writer thirteen years after corporate America spit me out.
Years That Will Be
In the dozen years since that first post, the publishing world has changed in new ways at a new pace. No, I’m not ignoring the history when Dickens, Twain, and others were self-published. Nor the rise of the big publishers, the catastrophic fall of the pulp magazines in 1959 and 1960, or the nearly overnight collapse of the local distributors in the 1990s. Publishing has long since proven that it is far from done with evolving.
However, between indie, the rise of direct sales (https://shop.mlbuchman.com), and now AI, the speed of that change is mind-boggling.
They’re not the only thing that is changing in my world either. I’ve been mostly writing Miranda Chase for the last 5 years. But a funny thing happened on Wedgetail, Miranda Chase #15. My first readers asked, “So, what’s your new series?”
“My new one? I’m still writing Miranda.”
They shook their head sadly at my writerly naiveté.
My Emily Beale Universe, being in the romance world, had a new hero and heroine in each book. Yes, Emily was a power figure throughout the multiple series that universe became, but it wasn’t all her story.
Miranda Chase led all fifteen titles in her thriller series personally, growing and evolving with each one. And, in Wedgetail, I’d brought all of her emotional curves to closure without realizing it. Well, almost. She has at least one more book coming, probably this fall.
So, while I have many books that have been on hold while I’ve written Miranda, will any of them become such a major, career-altering force as Emily or Miranda? How will direct sales, AI, and whatever comes after that affect my career? How will it affect yours?
We have a few key phrases on our refrigerator to remind us of how to approach the future. And thirteen years coming to play at Romancing the Genres (thank you so much for the support and congratulations on achieving something so wonderful for so long), I think these make the best advice I can offer to myself and to you:
Semper Gumby – If you’re too young to remember the Gumby character, look it up. This fixture of my childhood is the ultimate reminder to be flexible.
That was so three days ago. – Don’t stay rooted in the past simply because that’s what has worked before.
Violet is Level Six. Start where you stand. – This is a different version of the previous one, coming from a misquote of my second book (thankfully long since out of print). Translates as The past is meaningless. Look ahead. At every disaster along the road (and there will be plenty of those), we remind ourselves to look ahead, not back.
Have fun! – Seriously. This is the biggest tool I’ve got. If you aren’t having fun, a) your audience can tell, and b) why bother? Life is too short to be wasting your time.
USA Today and Amazon No. 1 bestseller M. L. “Matt” Buchman is the author of 75+ action-adventure thriller and military romance novels, 200 short stories, and lots of read-by-author audiobooks.
PW says: “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more.” Booklist declared his romances were: “3x Top 10 of the Year.” A project manager with a geophysics degree, he’s designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, solo-sailed a 50-foot sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and he quilts.
Come visit: https://mlbuchman.com.
