Under a Black Rainbow

Kansas City Library, Downtown KCMO I've been having an interesting summer. Really, the last few years have been a long bit of a hard education in terms of how I approach my writing, how I *should* approach certain aspects of the writer's life, and learning the ins and outs of publishing in general. Getting Individual Stories Published My grad school program was great at offering up two end-of-semester talks about "Life after the MFA." Many of these were about finding an agent and how you find gainful employment with a writing degree, other kinds of work out there for writers, etc. All good things to know and many of the writers on the panel gave great information. I don't recall, however, a panel that ever discussed the nature of publishing stories. I may have missed that discussion or it never happened during my tenure. Regardless, I have an incredibly arduous process for this now that's taken me a couple years to perfect and implement. It work...

Author Adam "Bucho" Rodenberger will read excerpts and play special audio bits from his latest short story collection, "The Machinery of the Heart: Love Stories."  There will be time throughout the reading for questions and commentary.  Copies of both his current book and his previous book, "Scaring the Stars into Submission" will be available for sale through the fine folks at Subterranean Books.  The event is free and will be from 7pm-8pm.  To RSVP for the event, follow the invite link on Facebook HERE .  Subterranean Books is located at; 6275 Delmar Blvd.  St. Louis, MO. 63130 314-862-6100 (194)

I just released my second collection of stories and I've been trying to approach the marketing of it in a more nuanced and specific way. When I put out my first book, I think I was just happy to have it out and didn't bother trying to create ads for it until months later when sales started to falter. Had I been smarter, I would've started those earlier AND put the book up on several Amazon and Goodreads giveaway platforms to get the book in the hands of other readers who are currently outside my advertising reach (i.e., we are not Facebook friends and they probably don't read my blogs or know who the hell I am). With this second book, I was more on top of things, having several giveaways planned for both platforms, ads bought on Facebook and Amazon, and a general advertising campaign blast through my regular posts on FB and Instagram. To be clear: advertising on Facebook and Instagram is garbage. When I did both last time, I got some 50,000+ people engaging with t...

There's this interesting thing that happens when people who are not writers talk to people who are. I imagine this doesn't differ too much in other endeavors where those of us (who are uneducated in what someone does) ask some pretty dumb questions or say some pretty dumb things. I have no doubt that I have been on the giving end of this to several people at several points in my life. If you're one of those people and you're reading this, then please accept my apologies for I did not know what I was doing.  Part of this is pure and innocent ignorance of what it is that we actually do, and that's both understandable and totally fine. Other phrases, as you'll see below, come from the kind of people that just expect you to do something for them without pay or because it's "what you do." These people are garbage and probably rarely ever pay an artist what they're worth. In all things, avoid them like the plague.  Understand that this ...

I have this personal philosophy that I tend to stick to pretty rigidly: your first idea is usually a bad one, so choose another...but maybe skip the second, third, and fourth ideas too.  This philosophy can be utilized to great effect in every creative field. But since I'm a writer, I'll only focus on how it helps my writing. The reasoning behind this is because sometimes a concept is so widely known that it becomes the first thing people think of when they hear a word or phrase. My next book is titled "Under a Black Rainbow," and it feels a little too on the nose (and just wrong, contextually) to do a cover with a rainbow that's colored in all the shades of black and white and everything gray between. What Rob and I have come up with, conceptually, for the next cover is infinitely more interesting and engaging and will definitely make people stop to really pore over the design before they even crack the book open. Think of your immediate first idea a...

Here's what I know. In the last 6 years, I've had 36 stories picked up for publication in various art and literary magazines/journals. That's six stories published a year. That's one every two months for 72 months. Many of them have been included in my first two short story collections. Others are going into the upcoming collection to be released a long, long, long time from now. But this productivity, this level of personal success, is not something I expected. If you'd asked me ten years ago where I'd be at this point, "writing short stories" would not have been my answer by any stretch of the imagination. I was working on full-length books; novels. And so I'm crazy thankful to have this kind of progress to look back on. I get to see the trail of completed and published stories in the wake I leave behind, and it's pretty awesome. But I have a very small inkling of how many of them have been read. I doubt I'm at the top of...