I had the pleasure of meeting Alexandra Sokoloff at one
of her week-long classes and found she’s as delightful a person as she is a
writer and teacher. I’m happy to welcome her as our guest for today’s blog. She will share
her progression as an author—as she reinvests herself and her career in the rapidly evolving world of publishing.
Alex is the Thriller Award-winning author of the crime and
supernatural thrillers THE HARROWING, THE PRICE, THE UNSEEN, BOOK OF SHADOWS,
THE SPACE BETWEEN and the brand new crime thriller HUNTRESS MOON, and a
co-author of the paranormal KEEPERS series, with Heather Graham and Harley Jane
Kozak. She is a Bram Stoker and Anthony Award nominee. The New York Times Book
Review called her a "daughter of Mary Shelley," and describe her
novels as "some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the
genre."
As a screenwriter, Alex has sold original scripts and
adapted novels for numerous Hollywood studios. In non-fiction, she is the
author of SCREENWRITING TRICKS FOR AUTHORS (AND SCREENWRITERS!), and WRITING
LOVE, workbooks based on her internationally acclaimed blog and workshops.
Reinvention
By Alexandra Sokoloff
Last night I was on my way home from a “Noir at the Bar”
reading here in L.A., and my favorite radio station was playing alive recording
of a Sting concert I’d actually been in the audience for, years ago. I always
love that multidimensional feeling; it was like being in a time machine taking
me back to a night I remember very well, because I’d just sold my first
screenplay that month, a huge kick-start to what turned into an eleven-year
screenwriting career. Now, when you’re outside the film business, a break like
that feels like shattering some enormous, impenetrable glass dome atop the
mythical business they call “the movies” that you’ve been circling for years,
trying to figure out the entry point. A
feeling I’m fairly confident you debut authors are experiencing yourselves,
lately!
And it was a great synchronicity, being transported back to
that time and that feeling... because I’ve just now broken into e publishing
with the launch of my new direct-to-e thriller Huntress Moon and am feeling the
same kind of exhilaration of shattering a barrier to a whole new and exciting
level of my career. It reminded me how
life is a spiral like that. You come back to the exact same points of life, but
hopefully you’re constantly moving UP the spiral, taking all your knowledge of
that pivotal threshold with you and ascending to a both a higher and a deeper
level.
It also reminded me that as writers, we are constantly
reinventing ourselves. I would say “having to reinvent ourselves” but that sounds
scary and ominous. Oh well, okay, let’s be real. We are constantly HAVING to
reinvent ourselves.
I started out as a theater person, from the time I was a
kid, really, but after college I quickly switched my ambitions and focus to
screenwriting, because I was aware of the practical need to, you know, eat. Knowing nothing about the film business, I
moved to L.A. just figuring I would figure it out. And the fact is, I did
pretty much just that – I got the classic entry level job into movies, a script
reader for various production companies, learned the business and the craft of
film writing by reading and reporting on hundreds of scripts in a very short
amount of time, wrote my own script with a writing partner, got an agent by
using what I’d learned as a script reader, and sold the script to Fox in a
bidding war.
Now, the trouble with being a screenwriter, and with
Hollywood in general, is that you get caught up in the fact that you’ve MADE IT
in a profession that all the naysayers (you know the ones I mean) always told
you you would never MAKE IT in, and you’re making great money for doing what
you love and the people you’re working with are wildly talented and
interesting, and it’s all so exciting and non-stop that it becomes very hard to
see when things are not quite working out the way you envisioned. Screenwriters have very little power over
their work; the potential movies you work on are very very seldom made, and
most of them don’t look like any movie you would want your name on anyway once
the script has been through the process very aptly named “development hell.”
Cut to ten years later and I had become so creatively
miserable, without really knowing it, that it was affecting every other area of
my life. And when a movie I’d written that I was truly passionate about fell
through when we lost our director to another movie, I snapped. I just wasn’t
going to go through that whole thing again.
And that’s how I wrote my first novel, THE HARROWING. And all the naysayers started up again, a lot
of them inside my own head. “You’ll never make a living in publishing. At least
in screenwriting you’re writing AND getting paid...” (insert any profession, you know the
drill....) But I knew I had to do something else, so I did, and the book got
written, and it got sold, and suddenly a whole other glass dome had been
shattered and I was on the rollercoaster of a whole new career, to mix a couple
of metaphors. And I was lucky to make the shift when I did, because changes in
the film industry have made a screenwriting career exponentially more difficult
and creatively frustrating than it was when I started in the business.
But now I had to learn a whole different business and figure
out a whole different way of making a living at writing.(NOT making a living
was not an option – I’ve been writing professionally for so long I have no
other marketable job skills). And publishing is a different way of making a
living.
When you start out as an author – well, when I started out
as an author, in 2006, people advised that we put our entire first book advance
back into promotion. Because that’s how important the lift-off factor is in
traditional publishing. I was a total newbie, and got completely obsessed with
trying everything there was to try in marketing, all the things I imagine you
all have been doing or preparing to do with varying degrees of terror: website,
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, blog, grog, blog tours, book tours – oh
right, and writing that second book. (If you want a bloodcurdling glimpse into
how it was, I’ve blogged about it here:
Marketing =Madness).
Well, I made a good launch with THE HARROWING- nominations
for Stoker and Anthony Awards, significant recognition as a new and interesting
female horror writer... but nothing like the brass ring, bestseller status. But
I wrote more good books and got more recognition and also figured out how to
create multiple income streams in my writing life –like teaching my very
popular "Screenwriting Tricks for Authors" workshop, that I started on my blog
and developed into an e workbook
Screenwriting Tricks (doing the workshops
for free at conferences until I was in demand, and then starting to pick and
choose my venues and going only where people would pay me, which also turned
into self-perpetuating and well-paying promotion, as well as a personally
rewarding avocation).
I’m a big believer in diversifying your writing career in
the same way that you diversify a financial portfolio; the money is erratic in
a writing career, often cyclical, and it’s a huge mistake to think you’ll earn
the same income every year – I’ve seen way too many talented screenwriters and
authors crash and burn by making that assumption. Invest wisely when you have
the money and always keep a cushion for the lean years, because believe me,
there are going to be lean years.
But still, I wasn’t published for long before I started
getting that uncomfortable feeling again.
This time it didn’t take as long for me to figure out that I had to try
something different – again. (Watching the publishing industry starting to
crumble before my eyes with the rise of e readers and self-publishing was a
pretty good clue...)
I truly believe we are in the midst of the biggest
revolution since the invention of the printing press. E books, ereaders – it is
ALL good news for us as writers, because we have so many more choices now.
Look, I know it’s hard enough to just get through the day doing the writing you
have to do and the promotion you have to do on top of that. You may be just
learning the ropes of traditional publishing and here I am suggesting that you
add learning the ropes of e publishing, to boot. Don’t panic! Do what you need
to do on this wonderful cusp of your brand new career. But if do you find
you’re not making enough of a living with your traditionally published book(s),
or are getting a nagging feeling that your publisher is not getting enough of
your books out there to be bought and read in the first place, or Barnes &
Noble goes bankrupt or something, there is a whole other miraculous option for
you now.
In a time of diminishing publisher advances and massive
bookstore closures, I and many of my traditionally published author friends who
started out in publishing at the same time as I did have recently had the
surreal experience of making more money in the first few weeks of an e publishing
book launch as we ever got for a traditional advance. We can put a book out as
soon as we finish it, rather than waiting a year and a half to two years for
the publishing process to grind through its cycle. Given the choice between a traditional publishing
deal for HUNTRESS MOON and the tens of thousands of new readers that I was able
to reach in just three days of a free Amazon promotion, plus having the full
force of the Amazon marketing machine behind the book (which is now an Amazon
bestseller that is outselling a staggering number of high-profile traditionally
published books that have a Big Six publisher behind them)...
Well, it’s a no-brainer to me.
I guess what I’m trying to say to you is: Be aware. Be aware
if a small voice in your head or your gut or wherever those small voices come
from tells you that you need to do something different. Be aware of the
incredible sea changes taking place in publishing because of the e publishing
revolution, and the incredible opportunities that are there for you. Be aware that you can always, always reinvent
yourself.
We’re writers. We make things up.
Including ourselves.
I wish everyone the absolute best of luck and am very happy
to answer any and all questions!
- Alex
Twitter @alexsokoloff
From Thriller Award-winning author Alexandra Sokoloff - Book
1 in the riveting new Huntress FBI series about a driven FBI agent on the hunt
for that most rare of all killers: a female serial.
FBI Special Agent Matthew Roarke is closing in on a bust of
a major criminal organization in San Francisco when he witnesses an undercover
member of his team killed right in front of him on a busy street, an accident
Roarke can’t believe is coincidental. His suspicions put him on the trail of a
mysterious young woman who appears to have been present at each scene of a
years-long string of “accidents” and murders, and who may well be that most
rare of killers: a female serial.
Roarke’s hunt for her takes him across three states...while
in a small coastal town, a young father and his five-year old son, both wounded
from a recent divorce, encounter a lost and compelling young woman on the beach
and strike up an unlikely friendship without realizing how deadly she may be.
As Roarke uncovers the shocking
truth of her background, he realizes she is on a mission of her own, and must
race to capture her before more blood is shed.
. I will say that it’s been a long road for me (as it is for most authors). FINAL CROSSING was my fifth novel but the first to sell. This made the experience at Thrillerfest this year all the more sweet for me—the hard work had finally paid off (at least in terms of satisfaction if not gobs of cash). This year at Thrillerfest, I met two dozen other debuts like me, and was able to compare and contrast experiences. Most importantly, I now had people to drink with.
