Questioner
Why aren't your books available for pre order?
Will Wight
With Kindle Direct Publishing, I could put the book up for pre-order anytime up to three days prior to the release date (which was yesterday). Had I done that, which all the publishers do, not only would you have been able to pre-order, but the book would come out at exactly midnight in every region that allows this system.
I don’t do it that way for two reasons. First, in the past, pre-orders have killed the Day 1 ratings spike I need to generate interest in the book. When I tried this before, I lost money by having pre-orders.
Now, Amazon may have changed how this works by now. They’re tweaking stuff all the time. But that’s why I only tried pre-orders once and haven’t since.
Second, I make changes to the book all the way up until the moment I release it. I rewrote a scene two hours ago and made some formatting changes just now. I’ll be tweaking that up until the release.
Instead of stopping that process two weeks ago and having the book uploaded, ready to release at exactly midnight on June 1st, I chose to keep working on it and upload it the night of May 31st.
Does that mean that the exact release time depends on how long Amazon takes to build a landing page for the book? Yes. But last time it took them about 45 minutes after upload for Amazon.com, so it’s not likely to be too bad.
The main “risk” here is in other domains, like Amazon.co.uk, where the landing page takes longer to create.
Kidpen
Who do you ship?
Will Wight
Ichigo and MC from Darling in the FranXX. I don't care about MC, Ichigo just deserved to be happy.
Lil' Blue
Will how long did you stay after I left???
Lil' Blue
An hour and a half or two, not too long
Lil' Blue
Have you read all 80 threads about when the book is coming out?
Will Wight
I think so. I try to read everything, except for Discord channels other than this one.
Secret Agent Book Theif
Terry Goodkind says that reading other people's books is bad because it influences your writing. Would you say you have been negatively influenced by the writings of your students while you were teaching intro to creative writing? Or any other work for that matter?
Will Wight
I would...strongly disagree.
I would strongly disagree with many of the other things Terry Goodkind has said as well.
Your Benevolent Dictator
Do our constant questions annoy you?
Will Wight
Not these, no. But I get some questions multiple times a day for which I've already provided an answer, and those irritate me. Like all the people who ask if there will be another book in the Cradle series or if I'm done writing them.
TransEmo
Given the choice of drinking a hot Gatorade on a hot day, or a chilled Gatorade on a freezing day, what is the air speed velocity of a unladen swallow?
Will Wight
African or European?
Lil' Blue
If you don't like coffee, what's your favorite warm drink? Boiled Gatorade?
Will Wight
It is the state drink of Florida.
Hjorth
Do you like coffee?
Will Wight
I do not like coffee. I don't like the taste, so I have never drunk coffee.
Secret Agent Book Theif
Will, how do you feel about this?
Will Wight
It makes me wonder if their algorithm accounts for an author having fans
Tievel
Hi Will. I wasn't able to comment on your blogpost, but tell all those folks at Hidden Gnome that they're my heroes
Will Wight
Will do, Tievel! Thanks!
They're the ones who flog me into productivity.
Tievel
That's what makes them my heroes. And apparently it helps your productivity to boot, so even better
Polycore
And guys really, a blog post on the 1st of April? Will's posts are already insanity on a regular basis, imagine the kind of shit he would have to pull off on the 1st of April
Will Wight
I have done April Fools Day posts in the past, and I enjoy them, but I don't do them every year. Doing it well takes some thought and time, plus someone always takes it seriously. I did an April Fools short story called "House of Cool Swords" that was a parody of House of Blades, and some people still emailed me breaking down why they didn't like my new style.
Aru
Will from now on will you invest all of your income into garlicoin?
Will Wight
What do you mean from now on? That implies I was once paid in other, inferior currency.
Your Benevolent Dictator
What is your favorite book you've written
Will Wight
Of Dawn and Darkness
Your Benevolent Dictator
Why?
Will Wight
Because I tried a lot of difficult things behind the scenes and they paid off. As opposed to something like Blackflame, which came together well, but was relatively easier so I'm less proud of it.
Lil' Blue
Ugh but Calder
tries to throttle him
Will Wight
Yeah, part of what I did in that series was give the MCs more obvious character flaws. To contrast them with Simon and Lindon, who are fairly straightforward people and more normal protagonists.
But as a result, one or the other usually makes people violently hate them.
I was aware of that risk.
Aru
For real though, one of my favorite activities is logging into Reddit writing prompts or one of my online stories that still has a following and writing "There will be an update soon." And then never releasing an update. It keeps them all in suspense.
Will Wight
That's my release date policy.
...
Aru
You can tell that I wrote it because I also used the name "Aru" on that site. Gotta warn you though at this point I was still embracing the "Show, don't tell" to an extreme extent, so the first 50k words takes place over two-ish days.
Will Wight
That happens all the time. "Show, don't tell" has become one of my least-favorite pieces of advice; now my left eye twitches whenever I hear someone say it. First of all, most people don't understand it. What it should mean is "In a story, don't simply tell me something is true when you can show me that it is true." For instance, don't tell me a character is brilliant when you could instead show them doing something brilliant. You want to get the reader to think "Wow, this character is brilliant" without you having told them so. People generally use it to mean "Show us when something happens, don't tell us." This is dangerous because it's both good advice and bad advice. It's a double-edged sword. When something is important or integral to the story, you always want to show it happening in a scene, rather than telling us that it happened in narrative. "Lindon fought a dragon and won" isn't nearly as interesting as a fight scene between Lindon and a dragon. But there are always scenes that you should be telling instead of showing. "Winter passed without incident" is a much better way of summarizing a boring winter rather than ten pages of summarizing boring training and nothing happening, even though the first one is telling you that nothing happened and the second one is showing you that nothing happened. TL;DR - "Show, don't tell" is both so broadly applicable and so frequently misused that it's almost useless except in certain specific circumstances. So even though it's good advice, IMO it confuses new writers more than it teaches them.
Aru
Got 384 pages into it too before I ended up stopping. Part of that was because I improved so much while writing it that the beginning just felt like a hunk of junk. And also because my sense of pacing was waaay off.
Will Wight
Always true. Part of finishing a book is just getting to the end so you can go back and fix the beginning. You usually don't know what your story is about until you finish the first draft. Which is what makes writing serial stories one chapter at a time hard
Aru
Part of the reason I gave it up was because I realized that the first 70 thousand words should have been the first 10 thousand words.
I'm open to criticism though if you, Will, or anybody else wants to skim through a few chapters.
Will Wight
One of the most common problems new writers have is starting way too early. That happens all the time.
Anu
That is, as long as I don't accidentally scrap it and start over again. Sigh. Stories get harder as they reach the actual length you expect them to be.
Will Wight
That's the truth
Anu
Will: Is there a limit to how bad a story you are willing to read? How low are you willing to go?
AKA, now long do I need to spend editing my story before you are willing to read it?
Will Wight
That is one of my favorite questions I've ever gotten. I laughed out loud.
I used to teach Intro to Creative Writing, so there is no rock bottom.
It's an endless freefall.
