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A New Interview – Shameless Self Promotion

This is an interview I didn for Bill Hillman’s ERBZINE – the largest Edgar Rice Burroughs fansite in the world, covering Tarzan, Mars, Venus, the Inner Earth, the Land that Time Forgot and many more.  Bill, as it turns out is practically a neighbor, living only a couple of hundred miles away.

I grew up with the pulps, reading Tarzan, John Carter, Conan, but also Lovecraft, Asimov, Clark, Heinlein and many more, and I found different things to love about each of them.  This interview talked about my growing experiences with Burroughs and his exotic worlds, particularly Barsoom, the strange turns I took as a writer and explores my career from that perspective.  Anyway, check it out.

PART ONE

ERBzine 7856: Valdron Interview

PART TWO

ERBzine 7857: 2 Valdron Interview Part II

PART THREE

ERBzine 7858: 3 Valdron Interview Part III

ERBZINE ARTICLES

ERBzine 1402: The Fantasy Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Den Valdron

TORAKOR OF MARS

ERBzine 1580: Torakar of Mars Intro & Contents by Den Valdron

Thoughts on this Writing Business

Recently, I came across a year end wrap up by Ron Vital, a writer. Basically, he’s been working at this writing thing pretty hard core. And he’s been doing annual wrap ups, providing detailed breakdowns in terms of his expenses, his sales, his sales breakdowns and his marketing and promotional efforts going back six or seven years.

In some ways, we’re pretty similar. We’ve both been self publishing for about the same length of time. We’ve both kind of had this lead time of the first few years not making very much. We’ve both moved up dramatically in sales in the last few years. We both write and publish a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. We both have a lot of books.

Where Ron differs from me is that he’s much more meticulous about keeping track of what he’s spending and how, what he’s trying, where the money is going, and whether it produces a return. He’s also deliberately investing more and heavily into selling his books.

Now for me, I pretty much do no marketing at all. No bookbub, no book funnel, no amazon ads, facebook ads, no newsletter, etc. etc Certainly not in the methodical and meticulous way that he does it.

So here are the awkwards. He is heavy duty working at marketing, to the point where for most years he went heavily into the red. His last two years, he netted a profit of about $25 and then $500 (mostly by reducing expenses).

But we made about the same amount of money in terms of gross sales and revenue. Actually, I think I’ve consistently done better. Not necessarily by huge gigantic increments. But in terms of grosses, I think I’m about $500 to $1000 ahead.

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SUNDAY BOOK LAUNCH – THE TOLTEC CONQUESTS

Sunday, November 19, 2023, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm

4th Floor, Artspace Building, 100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg

BOOK LAUNCH – THE TOLTEC CONQUESTS by RJ Hore

TOLTEC DAWN, TOLTEC KHAN and TOLTEC NOON

Sponsored by Fossil Cove Publishing and the Manitoba Writers Guild

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A Pirate’s History of Doctor Who

July, 2022.  Oh man, do I just suck at marketing and self promotion?  Apparently yes.  Here’s a book that is so absolutely brilliant, so amazing, so revelatory and groundbreaking that it turned into a trilogy all by itself.

So what do we have in the first volume, the early years?

  • Well, now that Jody Whittaker is out of the way, we can give proper credit to Barbara Benedetti, the first woman to play the Doctor, through a series of four, unlicensed half hour adventures in the 80s.  Back when Doctor Who was at its lowest point, with the trial of a time lord, the attempted cancellation, the disastrous first McCoy season, there was Barbara, effortlessly hitting it out of the park.  Go ahead, compare Mindwarp and Time of the Rani to the Wrath of Eukor and Visions of Utomu. I dare ya.
  • The early Super8 film years of fandom and fan films, including a bunch of lost gems, and featuring the Image Makers, Ocean in the Sky and Mission of Doom
  • The early video wave, including the gothic Troughton/Davison crossover Spectre from the Past;
  • The recreation of Tom Baker’s Sontaran Experiment… with Cybermen

* The Reign of Turner and the odyssey of the Federation

  • Vaulkherd, Rutan and The Alliance, the stories of Sharon Horton, the second woman to play the Doctor

*

The Reign of Timebase and the Rupert Booth Doctor, the true Doctor of the 90s, with 12 episodes comprising five stories, plus three shorts

Review – Regenesis

Review – Phase Four

Review – Paradise in Chains

Review – Long Shadows

Review – The Hidden Face

 

Finally, reviews of great overlooked films Resurrenction of Evil,  The Chronotron Effect,  Dealers of Death and Time and Again

Another Pirate’s History of Doctor Who

August, 2022 – Here’s me forgetting to do self promotion.  But featuring….

  • The Complete History of Doctor Who stage plays, including
    • Curse of the Daleks
    • Seven Keys to Doomsday
    • The Ultimate Adventure starring Colin Baker AND Jon Pertwee
    • The Karnak Trilogy
    • Empress of Otherwhen
    • The Bedlam plays – from Planet of Fire to the Dalek Masterplan
    • The Three Trials of Davros
  • The Power of the Daleks, Reimagined
  • Millennium Trap
  • Recreating Masters of Luxor
  • The thirty year Odyssey of Devious
  • The Reconstruction of Marco Polo
  • The Strange Tangle of Copyright Confusion
    • Explaining the lost episodes
    • LEGAL fan films
    • Colin Baker’s The Stranger Series
    • Sylvester McCoy in Do You Have a License to Save this Planet
    • The Brigadier and Sarah Jane facing off the Great Intelligence and the Yeti in Downtime
    • Sontarans and Rutans confronting familiar faces in Shakedown
    • The Auton Trilogy, Zygon, Sil and the Devil Seeds

Holy cow! There’s amazingly good stuff in here. I mean, for a Doctor Who fan, this is all flat out terrific.  I can’t believe I’m the one who wrote it.

Okay, so now I have PRINT books!

“Why don’t you have print books?” Fran Bitney, a friend of mine, asked me.

I like Fran, she’s one of the local Keycon people. Very nice, very sweet person. Her mother is a poet. We’re on speaking terms, we have friends in common, no animosity, friendly enough. So when I say friend, that’s basically the category of people who don’t throw rocks and sticks at me when they’re sure I’m out of range.

Look, I take what I can get.

Anyway, Fran asked the question.

I’ve been doing eBooks. Been really fine doing eBooks. Been happy doing eBooks.

I have avoided doing print books.

Theoretically you can. There’s presses like Friesen that do small print runs. If you want to pay for a hundred or a couple of hundred and try and sell them, go ahead.

There’s Print On Demand (POD), and that’s getting better and better. There’s companies that do POD – Ingram Spark, Lulu.com, Amazon, Draft2Digital, probably others. There’s even POD machines in bookstores, McNally Robinson, the local independent bookseller had one.

I haven’t really been interested. The possibility is there, but so what?

Basically, if you’re self publishing 98% of your sales will be eBooks. That’s just how it is. You don’t get to be in bookstores, where print books are sold. You don’t get to have the commercial infrastructure of major or medium presses and publishers with their infrastructure to push print books. Print books are expensive, that’s asking people to take a big chance.

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What’s Up With This Self Publishing Crap?

Den, what’s up with all this self publishing crap you’re doing?  A question that absolutely no one has asked me, and no one cares about. But I’m going to explain myself anyway.

So here’s the deal.  It was 2017, my father had just died, my first novel ‘The Mermaid’s Tale.’ had been released by Five Rivers Publishing, they were going to do an audiobook, and I had a contract to do a second novel, ‘The Luck.’ My pseudo-career as a writer was finally taking off.

Yay me.

I’ve been trying to be a writer since my grandfather died, over twenty years ago. Hell, I’ve been trying to be a writer since I was a teenager, since before I was a teenager, but it was after grandfather died that I decided to get serious about it.

I started writing and sending out lots of short stories. I joined a writers group and worked alongside some people who went on to be pretty big names. Slowly, I was selling stories here and there, even getting reviews in an age when those were almost impossible to come by, getting honourable mentions in Years Best anthologies, doing chapbooks, studying marketing and just focussing on getting my stuff out there – I subscribed to Locus, Science Fiction Chronicle, Scavenger’s Newsletter, Rising Star, the zine markets you name it. I wrote a novel, started looking for an agent, wrote another novel, sent it out, went to conventions, won a writing grant, even got tagged for a nonfiction book.

I gave it a pretty good shot, and it looked like I was getting somewhere, might even break through. Or that’s what I heard, later on.

But you know how things go; life comes around and kicks you in the nuts. Boss went crazy, relocation, burnout, flirting with bankruptcy, shit happens. There was a lot of shit, it’s tedious and not worth getting into. To make it as a writer, it’s a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are luck and connections, either of those will guarantee you. Below that is talent and hard work. Beneath that, you need a certain income and stability. Anyway, the bottom of my period was wobbly, so I kind of fell out of the game.

But I never stopped writing. Not necessarily novels or commercial work, but writing nevertheless, for me, for others, for Bill Hillman or Chris Nigro, on alt history, for web sites, for anywhere, or just random stuff. For me, writing is somewhere between a pathology and a therapy.

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Keycon Post-Mortem

Well, admittedly this is late. Be nice, I’m finally catching up after the beating Covid handed me in May and June.

Yeah, June. Did I post on June 2, 2022, saying I was finally recovered? I wish. It’s insidious, you think you’re fine, until you actually try and do something, then everything takes twice as long and is twice as hard. There was steady improvement. But I think it took me the middle of June to shake the damned thing completely. I got my fourth shot as soon as possible. Had a bunch of health issues to deal with, still dealing with them, and a lot of catching up to do.

So Keycon?

Normally, if I’m there and doing things, I’d be announcing on the blog in advance, to make sure people had extra time to skip readings and avoid my stuff. Also, it’s kind of handy to have the note so I can update my artists resume.

Honestly, I was barely functioning this Keycon. I was clear of the virus by the time it rolled around, and definitely not infectious. But I was still depleted. I was good for a few hours, then it was time to go home, or find a soft spot on the floor for a nap.

This Keycon was a bit interesting for a few reasons. It was physically back for one, which was nice for the people attending. Keycon is the huge social event for the Winnipeg fan community, and while I’m not really part of that community, or any community, I respect that importance. And let’s face it, that social event is the primary function, no one really cares about writers or panels or programming. It works on other levels, and that’s a good thing. The point is it works.

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Farewell to LEXX

As of June/July, 2022, literally twenty years after the show went off the air, long after almost anyone else cared, my long, long relationship with LEXX comes to an end, with the release of trade paperbacks of each of the four volume LEXX Unauthorized series, and the release of an audio-book version of volume one.

This feels significant, if only to me. But here I am, I’ve got a blog, so I’ve got a forum to talk about it.

To begin with: What is LEXX?

It’s a television series that ran four seasons from 1997 to 2002, about an organic spaceship, a ten mile long dragonfly designed to blow up planets. The ship was stolen by a wayward crew of misfits – Stanley Tweedle, a former security guard fourth class; Zev or Xev Bellringer, a rebellious wife and escaped love slave; Kai, an undead former assassin, and 790 a love-struck robot head.

Over the course of four seasons, they fought an evil empire, destroyed a planet sized bug, presided over the destruction of an entire universe, went to heaven and hell, and ended up on Earth, where things didn’t go well.

It was also a marvellously surreal and subversive show, owing as much to Barbarella and film makers like Bunuel and Jodorowsky as it did Star Trek and Star Wars. It frequently indulged surrealist and absurdist sensibilities, introducing stunning images and ideas. It was, quite simply unique.

And it was a thoroughly Canadian product, even a regional product, conceived, produced and populated by Atlantic Canadians, from Salter Street Films in Halifax. The background story of its creation and production was almost as unconventional, bizarre and entertaining as anything on camera.

I loved it.

I loved it enough to write books about it.

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