Recent entries

hachkc

[Uncrowned's Ending] definitely felt abrupt but WW likes to keep books a certain length. WW has stated why he feels he needs to keep books a certain length; a business decision. I guess the good news is he's working on it now and should in theory be out by EOY. Given his self imposed constraints, it was either a shorter tournament or more books.

That said, It didn't sour my opinion of the overall series though. Just gave me an excuse to go read his other books. I started with Cradle, moved to EE and I'm just starting TG so I can keep my fix sated for a bit. Should he turn into a GRR Martin type author and related release schedule, you'll get a different answer. I don't need instant gratification but going more than year between books is a chore.

Will Wight

You’re not wrong, but I feel like I have to clarify: this is about NOT becoming an author who releases only one book every two years.

I like telling stories. I don’t particularly like sitting on one story until it’s perfect, and my favorite thing is coming up with new stories.

So the more books I write, the more stories I get to tell.

Also, readers tend to prefer series that come out regularly and authors that release regularly.

Because of that, rapid releases sell more books, which keeps Amazon’s wheels a-turnin’ and sells even more books.

The sweet spot for release schedule in terms of keeping them regular and not working myself to a sweaty death is about two books per year at roughly 100k words. So that’s what I aim for.

Two books at 100k words = happier me, happier readers, more money to save so that I can write books forever.

It would take more time to write longer books, which would mean fewer stories, fewer readers, and fewer total sales. Not just slower sales; a lower total number of sales.

...I need a shorter way of saying all this, but the bottom line is that my general word count limit is for keeping my release rate up.

If I could write 2-3 200k books a year, I’d love to do that, but if I did that now they wouldn’t be up to my usual standard.

Mystical98

Is there gonna be a little romance scenes

Will Wight

Absolutely.

Skeletickles

This makes me so happy. I'm a filthy shipper, so I've been wanting to see some romance for a long time.

Will Wight

Well, this book is already heavier on it than any of the others.

It’s still not the primary focus, of course, but it’s definitely a thing.

extreme-jannie

I just started writing my first book, please let me know which one works.

Will Wight

If you’re writing your first book, then your ONLY goal is to get to the end of the first draft. “Finish the draft” is your new tattoo.

It doesn’t matter how bad you think it is, don’t stop or start over. Finish the draft.

The strategy that works for you is the one that gets you to finish the draft.

First make a book, THEN make a good book.

I’m working to improve my process because I’m on book 17. This would have been a bad thing for me to try on my first book.

Godspeed, soldier! Keep punching those keys!

kenwolfe11

I want a 500 page cradle book. I don’t even care if it’s bloated.

Will Wight

This brings up another great point!

Because I believe you, and I know that a lot of my readers would love me to death if I crammed each book full of content, even if half the scenes are just Lindon and Yerin doing laundry or trying to prevent Little Blue from accidentally falling out a window.

BUT I’m terrified to change the formula now.

I’ve kept the pacing really tight thus far, and even though many fans want be to loosen the belt and let the series breathe, how many readers will feel betrayed if I do that?

I’ve kept the pedal to the metal so far, and if I start letting up, will that ruin what made Cradle work in the first place? Or will we find out that I’ve been speeding way too fast this whole time, and only by slowing down can the story reach its full potential?

Idk, but I’m nervous.

Sohtro

Honestly, I don't know how can you keep this "sharp" the story in every book. It's really exciting, but I'm a little afraid that you will crash like an airplane, which flies vertically up, and then loses momentum and falls back down. Not because it runs out of fuel, but because the air simply gets too thin. Although it sounds good, a whole book can't be one big climax, in my opinion.

I'm halfway through with my 6th reread, and I really miss those small brush strokes, depicting small moments in the life of the characters.

Will Wight

I miss those things too, and I think there’s some leeway where I can include some of those scenes without slowing down too much.

I THINK that.

But am I right? I don’t know. They could be mutually exclusive

FourFreyPies

The characters seem to be the strongest part of the books, and I expect most would agree with me. Now you have a great advantage where scenes that would have been "bloat" for new characters or at the start of the series are the kind of scenes fans would love to read. I don't think you can go wrong at this stage no matter what option you choose

Will Wight

That brings up something else I didn’t mention: it could be that I can afford to slow down at this point because I’m on Book 8. Nobody gets eight books deep into a series unless they’re invested in the characters.

So it could be that any readers I would lose because of “too many character scenes” are already gone.

Will Wight

I’ll explain this tweet a little bit:

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

—Mark Twain

I hate slow stories. I have zero patience with fiction. If nothing happens in a scene, I want it gone.

I can’t stand musicals because, in most musicals, the second a song begins the story comes to a DEAD STOP. You could go to the bathroom and miss nothing but the sick beats.

So in my own writing, I am ruthless about culling anything that I would consider wasted time.

Some might say TOO ruthless.

My normal process is to make a plan, then dive in and start writing it, and whenever I hit a scene where I feel like the pacing is starting to drag, I change the plan.

I either combine scenes so that I’m only writing one where the plan called for three, or I cut scenes from the plan, or I’m halfway through writing a scene and I stop and go back and summarize what would have happened in 2-3 lines instead of a whole scene.

Usually the first scenes to go are the scenes that exist primarily for world- or character-building, or scenes that I thought would just be cool.

For instance, I had a bunch of scenes planned in Skysworn just with the Skysworn going around doing missions.

I had this whole idea in Blackflame for Lindon to interact with Lezaar, the Arelius family refiner, and demonstrate how refining works. And also a sub-plot with Yerin where she found out that a Truegold was going around claiming to be the Sword Sage.

There were Soulsmithing scenes planned in virtually every book, which I either skipped or cut.

Anyway, the point is that this process—constantly planning and re-planning and cutting and skipping and figuring out how to combine scenes—takes a long time.

It usually takes me 4-6 months to produce a Cradle book, and I often have 50k words of waste. On paper it should take me less time and there should be less waste.

So, this time, I’ve written my outline the same way I always do, but I’m hammering out the draft quickly without giving myself time to alter the plan as I go.

The THEORY is that the changes I’ve made haven’t really been improvements, they’ve just been lateral moves that have cost me time.

So now, we think we’ll see one of two results:

1.) A more fleshed-out Cradle book with more words that actually took less time to write.

2.) A bloated, boring mess that loses the snappy pacing I love so much and is in dire need of a critical edit.

I’m really hoping for #1, but even if we end up with #2, we’ll have learned that the “constantly fiddle and re-plan” phase is necessary to my process.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I didn’t have enough time to write a short post.

DisWastingMyTime

Should we expect [Wintersteel is] the same range of word count of the previous books?

Will Wight

Similar, yes. This isn’t going to be an 800 page monstrosity.

But I can’t imagine this being shorter than Underlord. There’s a real chance this ends up being the longest entry in the series so far.

Not sure until I finish, though!

Questioner

Wow, Will must be joking when he updates his progress bar! (Paraphrased)

I am not.

EDIT: At other points of the process, it’s hard to put a percentage on my progress.

What percent am I through editing, for instance? I never know, it depends on how much we end up changing in total. We could be almost done or we might need an entirely new round of edits.

But for the first draft, I can accurately measure my percentage by comparing my current word count to my total expected word count. So I ended yesterday about 30% done.

Adamhayce

Will refers to his Traveler's Gate series as halfway between a Japanese light novel and a traditional Western fantasy novel. I can see the western fantasy novel elements in the medieval setting, how the clothing and swords on the covers look and are described. I can't however, tell what he means by it being half lightnovel. Because the books are short maybe?

Will Wight

It’s a stylistic thing.

Light novels are typically fast-paced and visual, with an emphasis on action and a focus on one clear protagonist. They are also written quickly and released frequently, in short volumes.

Traditional fantasy novels are typically denser, slower, longer, with more characters and several sub-plots. They tend to have more complex plots as well as more page space devoted to character- and world-building.

But these are just generalized terms I was leaning on to communicate a point quickly. There are, of course, dense light novels and light traditional fantasy novels.

TheDazeOfOurLives

According to another famous narrative, God once ordered to collect dust from earth from which Adam is supposed to be created from. Only Azrael (Angel of Death) succeeded, whereupon he was destined to become the angel concerning life and death of humanity.

I thought this was humorous as Ozriel is the Monarch of the Arelius family and they are so focused on cleaning things and finding dust.

fudgemetal

Sweet catch my dude, wonder if WW is aware

Will Wight

I am absolutely aware.

Bradley

Lindon's trip into the Archlord Treasure vault should have had an entire chapter full of amazing weapons and trinkets for Lindon and the readers to get dragon fever over. 

Will Wight

That treasure vault scene, I absolutely did feel like it was missing.The treasure vault is mentioned in Underlord, then twice more in Uncrowned. When the scene skips to Lindon's fight with Naian, the transition is written competently, so it wasn't jarring, but it definitely felt like something was missing.Also, it would have been a perfect place to explain WHY Lindon chose the weapons he did for the individual matches, which would have smoothed out another rough spot.So yeah, while I'm too deep in Book 8 to be able to objectively rank Book 7, I do agree that the vault scene should have been there.

tlor180

The character to character interactions in Elder Empire are leagues ahead of his other books,(although tbf cradle has a very different focus). I hope the relative obscureness compared to cradle doesn't dissaude will from writing more character focused stories.

Will Wight

Not to bring down the mood, but it kind of has dissuaded me.

IMHO, Elder Empire has two strengths:

1.) The world feels cohesive. It has history and culture and a postal system, different characters have different opinions on people and events that everyone is aware of, there’s shared mythology, etc.

2.) The major characters are a lot more fleshed out.

I believe I can bring some of that over to Cradle, especially having refreshed myself on it by skipping over to OKAK, but back when I started writing EE I thought this was the direction I was going to take my writing.

If you’ll pardon the comparison, let’s say Traveler’s Gate was halfway between a Japanese light novel and a traditional Western fantasy novel. Then Elder Empire would be a step more towards traditional novels and Cradle is a step towards light novels.

Well, one of those did 10-20x better than the other.

So I’m a lot more inclined to keep leaning toward the light novel side, which means not diving deeper into world and character development.

Having said all that, there’s still room to improve my character writing even without changing the formula of Cradle at all, it just comes down to skill. I’m working on it!

acog

It's a tough question to answer since you're trying to guess why someone didn't buy it, and people don't leave feedback for books they decided to skip. Still, I think I'm not alone. I had a small company for years and one lesson I learned in sales was that "analysis paralysis" is real. If the customer is the least bit confused, the easiest thing to do is not make the sale. Look at how many posts there are in this subreddit asking about the proper reading order for the trilogies. Might be a sign.

Will Wight

I actually completely agree with what you’re saying.

My experience is that readers need to think they know what they’re getting from a story in order to pick it up.

Then you have to give them what they came for, as well as a little something extra they didn’t expect.

So, given all that about the structure, here’s the situation I’m actually in: I’m going to start a new series, for which I’m DEFINITELY not doing a crazy new experimental format, and I have to decide whether to make it more like a traditional fantasy story or more like a light novel. (So to speak.)

And I have three data points. The hybrid version (TGT) did very well, the traditional series did relatively poorly, and the one that was most like a light novel performed by far the best.

Now, I too believe that it was mostly because of the structure that people didn’t try EE.

But is it worth the risk to gamble with a traditional fantasy series?

I feel like I’m at a crossroads where one road is covered in fog and vultures while the other is well-paved and raining gold.

acog

Why didn't the Akura equip Lindon better in the Uncrowned tournament? 

Will Wight

I would have had to look up the answer to this except that I listened to Uncrowned just yesterday.

Round one, the competitors can’t bring anything.

Round two, they can all bring only what they can fit in their soulspace, and Lindon chooses to bring a bunch of utility constructs instead of a weapon.

In the individual fights, Lindon CHOOSES to make himself a shield to the specifications he wants. He doesn’t cobble one together because he has to; in fact, he uses their foundry and materials to make it.

Are they willing to give him all the materials of a shield but not a shield? Of course not.

It’s also mentioned a couple of times in the book that there are restrictions across the whole tournament as to the kinds of equipment you can bring in (no armor + another reference to there being full rules for equipment), and they can’t bring void keys, so those rules together mean he can’t use the tactic he used against Kiro or Jai Long of just packing himself to the gills with weapons and then unloading.

cusecuse315

Why isn't Cradle traditionally published?

Will Wight

From our best estimates, I earn many times more than I would be paid by a traditional publisher.

COULD they offer me a million dollars (or some lesser but still ridiculous sum) per book? Theoretically yes, but they would have to be confident they could sell enough copies to make that worth it.

In practice, they can’t be confident that they’ll sell significantly more than I’m selling now, so I won’t get that kind of an offer.

Will Wight

I like controlling my schedule and that no sane traditional publisher is going to be confident that they can sell 5x what I’m selling now.

In theory they could, of course, but that would require giving me the All-Star promotional treatment, and 99% of authors don’t get that.

Will Wight

I’m right there with you! [Not wanting to work for a boss]. There are so many reasons, and this is a big one.

For one thing, it would most likely be a pay cut to sign with a publisher. Probably a huge pay cut.

But even more than that, I don’t WANT to work for somebody else when I don’t have to. I’d take a pay cut from what I’m making now if that’s what it took to keep my rights.

So why would I accept less money for less control over my work?

Will Wight

There are a LOT of answers to this question.

The two easiest answers are that 1.) I make more now than any traditional publisher would offer me, and 2.) I like having control over my work.

I’ve gone into detail about both of those answers in other comments on this thread, but there’s another, related answer.

Here’s the thing: I have no reason to expect that a traditional publisher would grant me MORE freedom and MORE time to work on my books. Only less.

The freedom traditional publishing grants is the financial freedom to spend time working on a book instead of having to work another job. This comes in the form of an advance.

Well, I already write full time and we save most of the money that the books generate, and we’ve been doing that for seven years now. So I don’t need an advance to keep writing.

As for keeping up momentum in self-publishing, that’s very true and very real, but traditional publishing only makes that harder. Not easier.

The rule of thumb for editorial turnaround is usually about six months, meaning the fastest a traditionally published book will be released is six months from completion.

(If your name is Stephen King you might be able to break these rules, but it’s a good generality.)

So the ABSOLUTE FASTEST you could POSSIBLY release books is twice a year, which is my current rate.

And given that I would have to run it by a network of people, it’s likely to be slower.

But that doesn’t matter because I don’t need the momentum anymore, right? The publisher will take on the burden of marketing so Amazon doesn’t have to.

Well yes, but actually no.

Publishers only put their big promotional guns behind the titles they know are going to be worth it...so basically just their top earners.

Since my last name isn’t Grisham and my first name isn’t “New York Times best-selling author,” I have no reason to expect that treatment.

So what’s likely to happen is slower releases with less attention that sell fewer copies and I make a smaller amount per copy, leading to a slow death spiral that ends in obscurity.

I don’t see a world in which I can happily take more time per book. And that doesn’t even take into account the Golden Reason above all others: most readers don’t want me to spend more time per book.

So I just can’t think of a single benefit to being traditionally published.

...having said all that, I could be persuaded otherwise.

If a publisher is willing to sink a lot of money into a project, that means they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is, and I have every reason to expect good treatment of the property.

But Cradle is no Minecraft. I have no reason to expect Bruce Wayne to shower me in blank checks, and therefore no reason to think I’ll be traditionally published.

Questioner

First, just want to say your books are amazing. I started with House of Blades, another favorite of mine. I wanted to ask; if you had to give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be based on your experience as a professional writer?

Will Wight

Finish the book. Here’s some advice I gave someone on Reddit not long ago when they said that the advice to “keep writing” wasn’t working for them: That is very common, and I think most of us have been there. I think I’ve identified the cause, though: “just write” isn’t a strategy, it’s a mantra. “I realized it was bad and stopped writing,” wrong, keep writing. “I had no idea where to go next,” then you’re going to be very surprised at what comes out of your fingers when you keep writing. “You don’t understand; I sat down to just write and the result was an exact clone of Harry Potter as crapped out by Satan. I’m going to get both sued for copyright and exorcised by the Pope.” There is no good writing, only good rewriting.

April

All your characters know you are responsible for everything that has happened to them. You hear a knock at the door. Who is it and how much trouble are you in?

Will Wight

It’s Eithan. He knew all along. He invites me into my own home for a cup of tea.

Questioner

What is the magic system of Traveler's Gate like in its native state, if the Way wasn't so thin and there were no fragmented Iterations attached to it? Would it serve no function?

Will Wight

I have some notes to this effect, but I’m afraid to lock myself into something by answering this question. Suffice it to say that I would like to explore this in the future.

Questioner

Do you plan any new series in the near future?

Will Wight

I would like to write something new! But certainly not before the next two books of Cradle.

Questioner

Any plans to release more short stories set in the Travelers Gate universe?

Will Wight

Plans, yes! But I always end up delaying those plans for another book...

Questioner

How many books planned for cradle? Any sequels intentions?

Will Wight

12 books planned, though that number isn’t set in stone. As for sequels, it very much depends on where the story is at the end! And how much interest there is in a sequel.

Questioner

Hey Will ! I am a big fan of your works (i probably already said this through my other user accounts but hey). I have a few questions if you don't mind entertaining.   Did Valin somehow have access to the Way when he created Valinhall ? Or the creation of Valinhall is kinda a Travelers Gate magic and nothing to do with the Way?   Did Eithan expect Yerin to eventually learn using the sword icon through his training ? Or that was just a pleasant surprise/coincidence that he did not know would bear fruit from his training?   Thanks for bringing Cradle/TG to life ! It has been a pleasure.

Will Wight

1.) It DOES have something to do with the Way, in fact. 2.) Who can know the mind of Eithan? (In all seriousness, #2 is a Read And Find Out.)