Scott William Carter

Winter Update: New Myron Vale book coming soon

February 6, 2015February 6, 2015Scott William Carter

Just a quick winter update on multiple fronts. That picture at the top is from a little weekend getaway that Heidi and I took to the Nye Beach area of Newport, Oregon. We stayed in the fantastic Slyvia Beach Hotel, where every room is themed after a different author. I took the picture on the beach below the Yaquina Lighthouse. It’s actually my camera sticking together a couple of shots, but I still thought it came out well. It’s pretty small on the blog, but you can click the image for a larger version. Bonus points for spotting the seagull.

Health in the Carter household has been up and down, as is often the case in the winter with all the viruses lurking about, but we soldier on. Most of our Saturdays lately have been taken up by the kids’ basketball games. I just finished The Ghost Who Said Goodbye, the second of the Myron Vale series. It’s scheduled to go to my intrepid copy editor in a few weeks, with an expected publication date of late March or early April. As things firm up, I’ll post more info — a cover, a book description, etc. And, of course, I encourage my readers to sign up for my mailing list. I always let my most dedicated fans know first when my books are available for purchase, and I seldom email otherwise.

And yes, I’ve already started the next Garrison Gage book. It’s early goings, but I’m feeling really good about it — always fun to return to Gage’s world. He’s practically like family now. I took a bit of time to build a “Gage Bible” for myself, an encyclopedia about the characters, Barnacle Bluffs, and other info I can now use as a reference. I’d been using scattered notes until now, but since I’m working on the fourth book, with plans for many more, I figured it was worth a little extra effort to put together a resource I can turn to a little more easily.

Speaking of Gage, I also took the time to hire another copy editor to go over The Gray and Guilty Sea one more time, and I’ve implemented those changes in both the ebook and print editions. There weren’t a lot of errors, but a few people still complained, so it was worth it to me to make one more pass — especially, as I said, because the series continues to do very well. I appreciate all of your wonderful emails! Thank you! Making the The Gray and Guilty Sea free as an ebook was one of the smartest things I did. It’s gone so well, in fact, that I decided to leave it free for at least a few more months.

Oh, and for you folks who live within driving distance of Western Oregon University (the day job part of my life) I’m teaching a course on writing and publishing this coming spring. I’ll have more about that in a week or two, so I’m just leaving this as a bit of a tease, but I plan to teach the kind of course I desperately wished I had as an undergraduate — full of all the practical, nuts and bolts things you need to know to write for a commercial audience today, including all kinds of stuff about the business side of being a writer. More on that soon.

I’ll leave this post with a shot from a recent hike I took with fellow writer Mike Totten on the Little North Santiam River Trail. We never get the kind of snow hitting the East coast right now, but it’s still been unseasonably warm winter — rainy, yes, very rainy, but not all that cold.

The Lovely Wicked Rain Audiobook Available

December 10, 2014December 10, 2014Scott William Carter

Been a bit buried with a few things lately, but I wanted to slip in a quick bit of news. For those of you who prefer your words in the spoken form, the third Garrison Gage book, The Lovely Wicked Rain, is now available for download at Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes. It also happens to be narrated by the fantastic Steven Roy Grimsley, who narrated the first two Gage books. If your weather is anything like the weather we’re getting here in Oregon —cold, gray, and rainy— this book might be a fitting read.

Available Here:
Audible | iTunes | Amazon

Book Recommendation: Blockbusters by Anita Elberse

November 23, 2014November 24, 2014Scott William Carter

If you want to make money as an artist, or at least understand what’s happening to writers, musicians, and other entertainers in the age of Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix, you really need to read Anita Elberse’s book, Blockbusters. A professor at Harvard, her conclusions are grounded in plenty of evidence and ten years of research. I can’t stress enough how much this book has changed how I look at the publishing industry. At the very least, you should watch her twenty-minute interview with Charlie Rose, where she hits most of the high points of her book.

I had originally planned to write a much longer post about what I learned, particularly the middle chapters about the digital disruption, but it’s not much different than what I wrote a year ago with a few exceptions. You should read this book if . . .

You want to know why Chris Anderson was wrong about “the long tail,” and that there is even more concentration toward bestsellers than the pre-Internet days (and increasingly so)
In most digital marketplaces 85% of the income is made by 1% of the products, 95% by 5% of the products, and that the bottom 75% make virtually nothing
That publishers, studios, and music companies are absolutely correct to bet big on blockbusters
And why simply putting out a lot of products, at least by itself, is not a winning strategy for any artist

She does not lay out that strategy. That’s not her target audience. If you’re a writer, musician, filmmaker, or any kind of artist working in the digital age, that’s up for you to decide. I’ll just say this: It’s not getting any easier. If you want to make more than pizza money, you need to take the long view, constantly striving to get better at both the craft and the business, and do what you can to give your work maximum visibility.

I’ve recommended this book to a number of writers already, and when I told them about some of the conclusions, they’ve all said it sounded pretty depressing. I don’t think it has to be. Yes, the bad news is that it’s probably just as hard, if not harder, to make money as an artist as it was before there were so many ways to go direct to an audience. The good news is that the playing field is more open to newcomers than ever before. There are no gatekeepers except the fans themselves, and they will give you their attention — the most precious commodity in the modern entertainment era — if you earn it.

Postcards from the Garage: Cape Blanco and More

September 24, 2014September 24, 2014Scott William Carter

I made a quick jaunt down to Crescent City, California for the North Coast Redwoods Writer’s Conference over this past weekend, staying an extra day so I could hike for a day in the Humboldt Redwoods State Park area. I was one of the guest speakers, and I spoke a little about craft and quite a bit about the changes in the business. I met some great folks. On the drive there and back, I mostly stuck to the California and Oregon coasts, which took longer but of course makes the trip much more fun. Here are a few pictures from my trip.

The Redwoods are always hard to photograph and do them justice, but here’s one shot from my 10 mile hike of the Bull Creek Loop south of Eureka, California. I often walked for an hour without seeing a single person.

Here’s one more:

On the way home, I stopped for coffee. The place was a bit drafty, but the view wasn’t bad:

That’s a shot from Cape Blanco. There was hardly anyone there anyway, but I still hiked out a bit on the bluff to have a bit more of an isolated feel. Gotta love my little hiking chair, which collapses into a bag and weighs under two pounds.

On the way down, I stopped at the Umpqua Lighthouse and took the tour, which allowed me to poke my head up into the lens itself and take this shot:

Here’s a close-up of the lighthouse itself:

And one last one, of a lonely sailboat out on one of the many lakes around the Florence, Oregon area. It was a quiet spot to stretch my legs and have a snack.