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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Welcome everyone.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Welcome back to Science Fiction writers Week. If you can see and hear me drop your location in the chat so we can see where in the world you're joining us from.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: and I'm sure we'll see many repeat names.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: but if you can see and hear me drop your location. So I know that everything is working well.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Yes, I already see, repeats Arthur in the Netherlands. Hello! Welcome back.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Chris in Indianapolis, Carla in Boston. Welcome everyone.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: It looks like everything is working on your end.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: So we will jump right in. Welcome to our last regular day of crime. Sorry science fiction writers week it has flown by. I can't believe it's already Thursday, but we're so glad that you are still here with us.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have a great session for you 1st of all to access your replays.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: As usual, you will go to the Hub. All of today's replays will be up within a couple of hours of the sessions ending. You just have to give a little bit of time for processing between Zoom and Youtube, but they should be up soon, and then these replays will also be posted to our community page next week in the event recording section where you can also see past

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: event replays. So there's a lot of content there for you.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Tomorrow is premium day. So Monday, through Thursday we're free for everyone to attend. Tomorrow is limited to our premium and premium pro users. Those users will get an email tomorrow morning with instructions to access those workshops, and if you would like to upgrade to a premium or premium pro account you can, and to get access to premium day, you can do so until tomorrow morning.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have a special offer for you, which is 15% off your 1st year of premium or premium pro. And this offer ends on September 27th there is a link on the hub that will automatically add the code that you need for checkout, so you can head to the hub. There, I'm going to drop links in the chat for you

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: now, and I will drop them intermittently throughout the session as well. If you would like to keep talking about Science Fiction, we would love to have you in our private online writers. Community, it is free to join you. Just log in with your prowriting aid account information. It lets you write in. And then, if you want to come to the live event chat area. You can see the conversations currently taking place. And then, as I said, the event Recordings Section has a ton of video content there for you

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: reminders for this session. Please use the Q&A. Box if you have any questions for Dave, so that we don't miss them. If you would like to use the chat to talk with other attendees, please feel free to do so. Just know that whenever you send a message. You will want to change the dropdown menu to everyone. If you would like everyone to be able to see your message, otherwise by default, they just come to us.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: And I did drop another link in the chat, and that is, we do have a survey. It's very short type form survey. Just to get your feedback on Science Fiction writers. Week. What did you like? What did you not like? What do you suggestions do you have for us for future events. If you could take a couple of minutes to fill that out, it would be greatly appreciated. It's very helpful for us to have your feedback whenever we're planning future events.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: So without further ado, I will introduce you to our speaker.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have here with us Dave Dobson, a native of Ames, Iowa. Dave loves writing, reading, board games, computer games, improv comedy, pizza, barbarian movies, and the cheaper end of the Taco Bell Menu, also his wife and kids.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Dave has written 9 novels, including fantasy, Sci-fi mysteries and thrillers. In addition to his books, Dave is the author of Snood, Snodoku, Snood Towers, and other computer games. Dave 1st published Snood in 1,996, and it became one of the most popular shareware games of the early Internet.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: His most recent project other than writing is Dr. Esker's notebook, a series of puzzle card games and the spirit of escape Rooms. Dave taught geology, environmental studies, and computer programming at Guilford College for 24 years, and he does improv comedy every week at the Idiot box in Greensboro, North Carolina. He's also played the world's largest tuba in concert. Not that that is relevant, but it's still kind of cool welcome, Dave, we're so happy to have you here.

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Dave Dobson: Hey? Thank you so much.

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Dave Dobson: Really happy to be here.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: I will go ahead and hand the reins over to you, and we'll see you at the end, for QA.

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Dave Dobson: Alright great

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Dave Dobson: it is. Yeah. The tuba thing was fun

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Dave Dobson: I played a sleep in the deep in in concert near my college graduation ceremony. So that was great.

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Dave Dobson: alright. So today, I'm gonna go and share my screen. I've got some slides and stuff that'll have information. And then

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Dave Dobson: extras from when I'm speaking here.

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Dave Dobson: I'd like to thank pro writing aid for hosting this. I think this is really neat to see so many people out here.

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Dave Dobson: getting excited about sci-fi and and and writing I'm gonna talk a little bit today about what I've done, which is change. Careers sort of midlife around age 50 to doing, writing full time. And as we'll see, I'm still in the process of figuring out how to make that work and to make it into a a sustaining kind of activity. But I'm on the on the road to that, and I've learned a bunch of stuff.

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Dave Dobson: mostly through mistakes

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Dave Dobson: that I'll try to share with you. And also talk about my writing process and all of that kind of thing as we go.

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Dave Dobson: You just got the intro but I grew up in Iowa. I'm actually here now. This is my dad's office. Helping them out with the

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Dave Dobson: A hip replacement. So I'm I'm here, back in my hometown. I am trained as a geologist, a marine geologist. And that's what I taught for many years. And so that's that actually makes it into some of my books. There's a whole bunch of my geology. 1, 22 field trip in the locations that get visited in one book. And then

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Dave Dobson: people are always talking about tectonics and things, even if they shouldn't know that stuff in my other books.

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Dave Dobson: And then I have done a couple of game design kind of projects, including snood, which was

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Dave Dobson: a big deal, and which has actually helped me.

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Dave Dobson: Be confident that I have the resources to try this India author thing for a while.

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Dave Dobson: Alright. So I've done all of these things at various phases in my life. The indie author thing really got started in 2,019, although I do have a traditionally published book from 1,996. That's a nonfiction. Children's book, and I actually started writing my 1st book in 2,005, and it took me 14 years to finish. So we'll talk a little bit about

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Dave Dobson: how stupid decision that was.

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Dave Dobson: Oh, but anyway, in terms of what I have done here. As I said, I have this children's book. My wife's

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Dave Dobson: family runs a publishing company, Charles Bridge, and they were looking for somebody to write a sequel to a successful book they had. The original author didn't want to do the sequel. So that's how I got started kind of in the traditional world, and that was really

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Dave Dobson: cool experience. Then I was finishing my Phd. Starting, teaching, having kids and didn't get back to doing

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Dave Dobson: much writing, although I had little projects that I worked on until 2,005. And that's when I started flames over Frost Town, which is a fantasy detective book, and became the 1st in the series of those that I've written. It's a second world fantasy. So it's a medieval ish city.

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Dave Dobson: but in a different on a different world. And the books focus other mysteries that focus on a detective agency. That's part of the government of this Frost Helm City. And so they read a lot like mysteries. They're all standalone mysteries with different main characters, that kind of thing.

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Dave Dobson: And so that's that's what got me sort of launched into the speculative fiction world. After spending 14 years on that 1st book.

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Dave Dobson: I actually moved on and wrote a a couple of others more quickly. The outcast crown is a sequel. I'd actually started that. So I didn't have to finish the whole thing in that next year, and then traders unseen is a novella length, one that I've been using as a as a giveaway sort of reader magnet thing.

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Dave Dobson: Then I switched over to Sci-fi. I did daros, which is a a space opera sci-fi book. That's set in a far future where earth is expanded to the stars. And then a a

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Dave Dobson: a massive conflict has wiped out the inner original planet's Earth and the others. And so there's a small

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Dave Dobson: of worlds at the edge of old human space that is still

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Dave Dobson: trying to rebuild and set up a new human society. So that's the the sci-fi environment that I would imagine for that.

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Dave Dobson: I continued writing. Kenai is another world set in that universe, but a totally different story with different characters

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Dave Dobson: that's come out last year. Got trouble is my 1st attempt to write one in the real world. It's got some sci-fi elements.

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Dave Dobson: But it's really basically a thriller. The sci-fi stuff is no more than you'd see in an episode of twilight zone, and probably

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Dave Dobson: less than an X files or something like that, but it does have a little bit of sci-fi.

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Dave Dobson: And then this year I've put out another mystery

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Dave Dobson: set in North Carolina, this one with no sci-fi at all, and then a comedic

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Dave Dobson: fantasy book not related to the Inquisitors guild. That's about this female knight and her hapless squire, who tries to keep her from

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Dave Dobson: killing people in the name of of justice, so that one's I. I had a lot of fun writing that one that one's just come out this year.

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Dave Dobson: So yeah, you can see I've I've picked up the pace that I'm also going to show some of the really good advice that I have received over the years that I have totally ignored. The 1st one is right only in one genre. A lot of people say you should do that. Because it helps you build a fan base in one area.

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Dave Dobson: and readers can find you and and

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Dave Dobson: and enjoy your books that way. It's also an argument people make in terms of algorithmically on Amazon or Barnes and noble other places like that. If your books are being recommended to readers in a in a different genre than what they are then. That's supposed to be harmful for you, although that's probably great advice. I figured I couldn't. I didn't want to deal with the complexity of pseudonyms, so

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Dave Dobson: but just to know that that what I'm doing here is probably stupid.

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Dave Dobson: The journey to that 1st book, like I said, took 14 years. And that's because I was working my regular main job. And I had young kids, and I didn't sort of sit down and try to finish it.

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Dave Dobson: But it was a fun thing that I kind of picked up every so often, and it got me into this idea of writing a book and and understanding it. I actually finished it in about 7 years. The 1st draft

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Dave Dobson: after a big push that 7th year, and then I tried to attract agents to do a traditional publishing route for the book.

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Dave Dobson: That didn't work very well, I hired a developmental editor and started revising

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Dave Dobson: and then I got sucked up into Administration at the college where I worked for a long time, and didn't have much time to devote to it.

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Dave Dobson: And then I got an offer from Charles Bridge, the company that had published my children's book that if I were just to convert it

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Dave Dobson: to a Ya. Book which would have been a pretty major revision, it's not super grim, dark, or violent, or anything, but I would have had to kind of recast the whole thing

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Dave Dobson: for a ya audience to fit their market.

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Dave Dobson: And so I didn't do that, and I ended up

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Dave Dobson: publishing it myself through Amazon and and some other places. But just to show you how long that took. There's my kids before and after. So that was a a really long time

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Dave Dobson: to get that book out there. And since then I've developed a lot better habits. I've put more time and energy into it, and I'm doing it pretty much full time now.

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Dave Dobson: along with the the card game design. So

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Dave Dobson: so that's a major shift towards making this a real effort. That's taking up more of my time.

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Dave Dobson: So that's another piece of advice I ignored. This quote has been ascribed to Isaac Asimov. But I don't think it's really from him.

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Dave Dobson: but it's it's true. Nonetheless, success equals asset and share. In order to actually succeed.

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Dave Dobson: You really need to put the time in and and finish projects as opposed to just starting them. And I have hard drives littered with half baked.

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Dave Dobson: half done projects going back, you know, 30 years.

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Dave Dobson: So that's 1 thing at least, that I've learned and fixed

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Dave Dobson: as I've moved on with this

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Dave Dobson: in terms of how I write. I don't know exactly how other people do, although I've certainly been involved in a bunch of online author communities and and learned more about people's processes for me. I can't do more than about an hour at a time, and what happens with me is that I I run out of ideas, and then I need to think of what will happen next. Because I write without an outline. I'm coming up with the story as I go.

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Dave Dobson: and I will write all that I have thought of, and then I actually will. I'm not sitting at the keyboard, but for the rest of the day.

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Dave Dobson: I'll be kind of thinking about. Okay, in this situation. What would my characters do? What would they want to know? Where would they go to find that out. And then, by the time I come back I've got that buffer of you know what's gonna happen full again, and I can write another scene occasionally. I've been able to pull off, you know, 3 h, 5 h at a time, but that's that's more rare.

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Dave Dobson: One thing I have learned about me

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Dave Dobson: is that focusing on writing every day

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Dave Dobson: keeps that cycle really working because I don't forget what I have already written. I keep the voice of the characters in my head, and they stay consistent, and I have a really good, consistent train of

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Dave Dobson: of sort of where's the plot going? How is it working? Who are these people, and what do they care about?

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Dave Dobson: If I interrupt that, there's a whole bunch of time I have to spend rereading what I've done, finding the characters, voices again and and learning how to

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Dave Dobson: to write that book again. And sometimes time off has helped me sort of rethink the big issues, but for the most part it actually

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Dave Dobson: just stops any progress and provides a barrier to restarting. So so now, when I write, I try to do at least a 1st draft

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Dave Dobson: as much of it as I can at once. Obviously life intrudes, and sometimes you run out of

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Dave Dobson: ideas, or you get to a place where you can't quite figure out how to end it, or what to do next.

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Dave Dobson: But but that change has really helped me. One way I do. That is through Nanowrimo, the national novel writing month. I've done that for the last 5 years.

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Dave Dobson: And as you can see.

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Dave Dobson: much of many of my books have actually been written in Novembers. And so that's where I figured out that that kind of pattern really works for me

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Dave Dobson: outcast crown I had about. I don't know 1520,000 words of it written, and then one November I got another 60.

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Dave Dobson: got trouble. It was my fastest. I actually wrote the entire 1st draft in a November focusing hard. It's it's really weird that it starts to feel a little bit like an athletic event. Because there, if you're writing, you know.

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Dave Dobson: 2 h and a half sessions a day that, and then thinking for all the rest of the time, even as you're sitting there trying to go to sleep, go to sleep. It can be really taxing.

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Dave Dobson: And that sounds overwrought and email. But but it it by the end of November I'm usually pretty blasted and ready to to dial back a little bit, but that's how I have become more productive is writing consistently, and sometimes I'll do it other months, other times, if I am just on a different calendar schedule for it.

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Dave Dobson: Obviously this is all 1st drafting, and then the revising and editing, and all that takes longer, and is a very different kind of feel.

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Dave Dobson: in terms of how I write. I think I've sort of hinted that I am what they call a Pantsr. I write seat of the pants. Primarily, there are other people on the other side of that spectrum who go into a book before they write the 1st word. They have, you know, pages and pages of background about how the world works and what the different political factions are, and who the characters are, and you know what they grew up doing. And all of that kind of thing.

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Dave Dobson: And I think both of these ways of writing can be

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Dave Dobson: absolutely successful. And when you're writing you'll need to figure out which way works for you. But for me starting a chapter without knowing how it's gonna end is is exactly the way I love to do it. Part of that, I think, is my background in improv comedy and also in tabletop role playing games. D and d that kind of thing.

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Dave Dobson: where, when you're figuring out what to say, it depends entirely on what the situation is.

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Dave Dobson: who your character is, and how they're responding to that situation

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Dave Dobson: in improv comedy. You're making that up on the spot on stage

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Dave Dobson: and the challenge is to make it a realistic and in a voice that's consistent, and, you know, moving the scene forward. But for me, that's also how I write my characters, and I think it. I think it helps me make the dialogue more natural.

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Dave Dobson: If I knew that, you know 5 things had to happen before the end of the chapter, then I would probably try bending the dialogue towards those things that are happening in the future. And that's not necessarily how

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Dave Dobson: people talk. They react to what's happened in the past. They don't necessarily know what their destiny is. And so for me, that sort of approach really helps

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Dave Dobson: there's a limit to how much you can do riding by the seat of your pants, because, one of the joys of it is, you'll be riding along.

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Dave Dobson: and then, you know, somebody will show up in a you know, dark cloak with a glowing dagger, or something like that, and you'll be like, oh, that's cool. I'll write that in there, and you have no idea who that person is, or what they want, or you know why their dagger is glowing.

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Dave Dobson: And so that becomes a kind of promise you make to explain that later and improb. We call that justification

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Dave Dobson: and and so doing. That is really fun. But every one of those, if you can imagine it like you were a juggler. Every one of those things you add is like a ball you've thrown into the air, and before the book ends. You have to catch all of those balls and sometimes I don't. Sometimes they land on the floor, and I have to take out whatever they were on editing. Sometimes I bring it up in a way that's not consistent with the plot, or I have a better idea for how these people should work or something like that. So that's that's the editing process.

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Dave Dobson: But about 60 or 70% of the way through the book, I really have to stop and just throwing whatever I want in, and trying to bend the thing towards satisfying resolution.

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Dave Dobson: And then, with the editing process, really throw it all together.

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Dave Dobson: So that's the challenge for me, at least with with the approach I do, which I love, but and which I think mostly works. But making sure you've got a story that people are going to care about is the challenge for me with the

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Dave Dobson: passing approach.

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Dave Dobson: With sci-fi and fantasy. Now that I've written some in the real world and some in speculative worlds, I've realized how different those processes are. When you're writing in the real world.

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Dave Dobson: There's a lot that's much easier, because, you know, you don't have to explain to your readers how a grocery store works or how the Internet works, or you know where you can drive to or what the geography of North America is. You know all of that is stuff that your readers are gonna know.

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Dave Dobson: And so you don't have to establish that in a fantasy or sci-fi world, you you have to explain all of those things because nobody knows how a space grocery store works and and so that's that's a big sort of gift when you're writing in the modern world and a big challenge in the sci-fi world.

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Dave Dobson: But, conversely, in the real world there are people who know a lot more than you do about certain topics, and you have to get those right, or people will make fun of your book. So, for example, in my modern day mysteries, I don't know much about guns, and so I had to go find a friend of mine from high school, and I ran all of my scenes with guns past him, and and got better ideas about how people who are comfortable with guns use them and think about them.

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Dave Dobson: And you know what the recoil and all that thing is. And I was watching a whole bunch of Youtube videos about.

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Dave Dobson: You know, stopping power and all of that kind of thing. And so that was stuff I didn't know police procedure. I don't know very well, and you know what happens after you get arrested. So I had to look up all of that. And there are people who are gonna know that

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Dave Dobson: much better than than I do. And so that's the big challenge with

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Dave Dobson: real world writing is getting those details right. With sci-fi, you can make up everything. But the challenge is to make it a world that makes sense that people could actually live in that has complexity, that you're only hinting at

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Dave Dobson: and so that's that's the fun of sci-fi, but also the big challenge. And then you also have this huge gift to a storyteller which is the ability to do things with in sci-fi would be advanced technology or alien stuff, or something like that. You know things that

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Dave Dobson: bend the rules of reality, that you don't really know how they work.

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Dave Dobson: And and that's the joy of those genres.

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Dave Dobson: But if you just throw them in willy nilly, without rules for how they operate and without limitations and specifications not that you need to explain all of those to your readers, you know, cause that gets boring. But you need to have those in your head, or your magic is just gonna be filler. Whenever you know you need something to happen that you can't figure out how you throw in, you know alien weapons, or you know some Mumbo Jumbo.

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Dave Dobson: you know, techno babble

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Dave Dobson: and so that that is both the joy and the challenge of Sci-fi writing, at least for me.

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Dave Dobson: so another piece of advice that I have ignored, probably to my detriment, is, I don't have big outlines whenever I come up with something that I think should be a cultural element in the story. I have to write it down, and it becomes a rule that then I have to obey later on, and so building the world that way is very haphazard, and runs the risk of being inconsistent.

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Dave Dobson: And so that's that's something that I'm getting better at that still is challenging.

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Dave Dobson: I also try to put a lot of humor in my books. I try a lot of different ways. Not everybody will want to do that. And you know it's it doesn't necessarily make every book better. It's an ingredient, you know. If you think of garlic or you know, Chili powder or something like that.

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Dave Dobson: Humor can make a book much more fun and much more enjoyable.

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Dave Dobson: But if it's the only goal, or if it's in there too much.

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Dave Dobson: Then the book starts to suffer for it, and so, for me at least. I always. I use the Princess Bride as a model. Everybody in the Princess Bride is saying hilarious things and are doing funny things.

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Dave Dobson: but they all have really sincere wants and needs and cares, and are acting consistently for those goals. And so in my books even the the silliest ones like Lady Isabar. I'm always trying to make sure that the story at the heart of it matters and is emotional and

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Dave Dobson: and satisfying. And so that's at least for me. I love funny things, but I also

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Dave Dobson: realize that there's more to a book than just jokes

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Dave Dobson: and try to work for that

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Dave Dobson: in terms of the rest of my process. I'm just doing these things, because I figure showing people how I made the journey to

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Dave Dobson: actually doing more writing. Full time might be helpful. I hope it is. If you have any questions about this? Certainly we can talk about them later. With the for me. Editing and revising is much less fun for me than the writing part. The writing part is discovery. It's creativity. And so my 1st drafts are awesome the revising and editing

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Dave Dobson: is work, and it's work with a goal that will make the book better. And so it's obviously work that's valuable and worth doing. But it's much less fun for me.

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Dave Dobson: And figuring out how to edit. My stuff

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Dave Dobson: is tricky. I tried early on joining some critique groups and sharing chapters and things with other folks. I found that I was usually kind of

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Dave Dobson: giving more than I was getting in terms of useful advice, and I was getting a lot of sort of writing 101

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Dave Dobson: rules that don't necessarily always apply, you know. Don't use any adverbs or or that kind of thing. You know. Each of those rules has a reason, but it's not. It's not a useful thing to

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Dave Dobson: to really polish up a book to be as good as it can be.

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Dave Dobson: I did for my 1st book, hire a developmental editor, and that was a terrific decision and really helped improve that book. I haven't done that since then.

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Dave Dobson: Because I felt more confident in what I was doing. But that might not be a great decision.

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Dave Dobson: You will, if you have friends, which I hope you do.

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Dave Dobson: Some of them can be really great to bounce stories off of, and they will read it. They know you. They will support you. They're not neutral because they don't want to hurt you. So you have to take their advice in a way that, you know, acknowledges that they have a relationship with you.

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Dave Dobson: but they are really your closest and best

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Dave Dobson: feedback. At least I have found. And so I, my wife, reads all my stuff. First, st I have 2 or 3 other friends and family members who read my stuff.

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Dave Dobson: Now that I've done enough books, I know

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Dave Dobson: how they're going to respond to different things, and which parts of their advice are going to be

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Dave Dobson: more helpful, and which are going to be less. But it's it's, you know, cultivating that and

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Dave Dobson: analyzing how they give you feedback is really interesting and can be a little tricky.

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Dave Dobson: There are other friends who won't be much help in the writing process.

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Dave Dobson: but who will share every post about your new release on Facebook? Or who will, you know help you drive your stuff to a convention if you're gonna sell it, or, you know, give you support in a lot of other ways, and that is sometimes more valuable than the folks who will read your books. So it's also good to kind of let other people know that you're doing this and lean on them in a way that's not overbearing, and makes assumptions.

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Dave Dobson: but that that can be a great way

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Dave Dobson: without spending a lot of money to kind of engage more people in your

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Dave Dobson: your community. Some of your friends and family are going to be not helpful, and you won't know ahead of time who those are.

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Dave Dobson: Necessarily. And so that that is also a learning process.

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Dave Dobson: And gradually you can sort of refine who you're sharing with. You can also make really great online friends. You know, people you've never met in the real world who will be helpful that way.

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Dave Dobson: Like, I said for my 1st book, a developmental editor. There are sort of 3 stages. Traditionally, the editing. There's developmental editing editing which looks at your story and says, How can I make this a stronger story. What are the issues with it? That would be better.

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Dave Dobson: you know, fixed or addressed in a different way. How do the characters work? That's something I totally needed for the 1st book, because it's my 1st one, and I was writing the story I wanted.

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Dave Dobson: But I was making some mistakes in terms of characterization and whiness and voice and plot that having somebody with some experience looking over was very helpful. But that's super expensive, and that's not money you're gonna make back

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Dave Dobson: quickly

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Dave Dobson: on that 1st book. And so that's something that is a challenge. If you're looking at doing this not just as a hobby.

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Dave Dobson: and maybe with resources that are limited.

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Dave Dobson: that all of these editing things are

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Dave Dobson: are challenging.

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Dave Dobson: I haven't ever paid for a full copy edit, which is another one of those pieces of bad advice

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Dave Dobson: a a good advice that I have ignored. A copy edit goes through your book and looks for you know.

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Dave Dobson: patterns of words that are not

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Dave Dobson: correct for sentences that you have word. Use that you've used too many times. Or logical flaws, or or problems in the way you're telling your story.

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Dave Dobson: And that's something that if you're really careful and a good self editor, you can often find yourself, or if you have a good set of beta readers, they'll catch that kind of thing for you, too. But a professional should catch all of those things. I've had a couple of issues where I have in a published book. Had somebody write and say they broke the ladder in the previous scene, and now they're climbing down the ladder in the next scene, you know, and I'll be like, Oh, gosh! I should have, you know.

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Dave Dobson: caught that. So there are costs to skipping that

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Dave Dobson: step. Also, I just I was just doing the audio book for Kenai and realized, as I was listening to it, that I had basically the same sentence separated by, you know, a paragraph

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Dave Dobson: about the same topic, and that was something I should have caught unedited, and the copy editor probably would have. So so that's the kind of error that you sometimes leave in there.

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Dave Dobson: Proofreading is vitally important. And I write pretty clean, but I don't write perfectly. I'm lucky enough to have a smart friend who's an academic who likes my books, and is willing to do that for relatively cheap.

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Dave Dobson: And because my book started out pretty clean and she's good, we can usually get all of the sort of grammar spelling things

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Dave Dobson: fixed before we go, software can help you a lot with that. So just the basic stuff that you might find in Microsoft word or some online sources are good.

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Dave Dobson: I haven't used pro writing aid, but it has a whole bunch of things

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Dave Dobson: that I hear other people talk about that are good.

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Dave Dobson: You can't rely on that, as you're only editing, though, that that would be a mistake, because well, just for one example, people speak in sentences that aren't grammatically correct. You know half the sentences I've said in this talk

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Dave Dobson: are run ons, or don't have the right pauses or punctuation, or that kind of thing. And so getting.

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Dave Dobson: And if I were writing them they would sound real. They would sound like normal language. I hope either that or I'm not presenting very well.

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Dave Dobson: But but a computer that's designed to just look at perfect bland text is not necessarily going to capture that the right way. So, having a human

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Dave Dobson: look at your stuff is really important.

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Dave Dobson: So yeah, that's another piece of advice I ignored is you should always pay for an editor

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Dave Dobson: and I have played with fire there and mostly come away. Okay. But but again, that's probably an investment that would have been

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Dave Dobson: better for me.

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Dave Dobson: Another part of my process. I just like showing these things. I am a total excel nerd and so I will always have stupid excel sheets going as I write my books.

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Dave Dobson: Here's an example of a graph I made for flames over frost elm. This is how funny! I think the book is over time I was trying to do a pacing and and rhythm thing so

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Dave Dobson: so that informed me if I needed a a funny chapter or somewhere.

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Dave Dobson: Well, that was mostly stupid.

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Dave Dobson: Here is the kind of thing that my pantsing. I don't know if you read all these things, but these are basically notes of every fact that I establish as I go. So it's sort of what's the coin system they talk about. Oh, a bag of gold coins. What's that gonna actually mean?

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Dave Dobson: And so I have to write that down. I if I name something I have to remember the name. If I use language in a particular way. If I talk about a foreign country, I need to remember that it's there, and what they think of it. So, as I go, this is, you know, if Tolkien was doing this, he would have you know, 30 pages of this stuff, including all the poetry that the people in the town

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Dave Dobson: no, before he starts writing for me, I'm I'm developing it as I go. And so that's much more haphazard. But I do that with sheets as I go, too.

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Dave Dobson: One of the comments that I got back from my development or developmental editor with flames over frost. Elm was.

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Dave Dobson: You probably think

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Dave Dobson: you're doing a good job with gender balance in your book?

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Dave Dobson: And I was like, Yeah, I have lots of strong female characters.

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Dave Dobson: and the editor said, Okay, what I want you to do is go through your book

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Dave Dobson: and look at the ratio of male to female characters.

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Dave Dobson: and what you will find is that you have

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Dave Dobson: many more male characters than female.

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Dave Dobson: Your book looks better to you because you're used to care to books that are completely male dominated.

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Dave Dobson: And I was like, Are you sure you know I feel like I did that well, and I went through. And actually, this is me going through every chapter

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Dave Dobson: and writing down every character

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Dave Dobson: that was met. And the editor was completely right. I had 80% male characters, even though I thought I was, you know.

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Dave Dobson: blazing a new trail for gender equality. I was sucking just slightly less than the classic fantasy and sci-fi.

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Dave Dobson: And so I went through and gender swapped a whole bunch of people, including some major characters. In my later books. I've worked in folks who are non binary and and that kind of thing, but at least as a 1st exercise, this was, a

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Dave Dobson: a better, a really informative way for me to kind of look at the book and analyze it. It's not going to be what everybody wants to do. But just process that really was helpful to me.

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Dave Dobson: This. I don't want to do spoilers here, but in one of my books there's a little bit of time travel. And this is a a diagram of how the time travel works, because I needed to make really sure I had the events

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Dave Dobson: line up on the right days. So that was keeping track of all of that. I mentioned that I had tried for some traditional publications with agents. I did. There were 2 books. One was flames over Frost Town.

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Dave Dobson: and one was, gut trouble, my 1st thriller

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Dave Dobson: and there are ways to do that. There are wealth. There's wealth of information about how to

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Dave Dobson: approach agents, and I was trying to do the absolute best I could. I looked up the agents. I looked what they had represented.

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Dave Dobson: I read their statements about what they were looking for. I even looked for you know their hobbies that they mentioned, or that kind of thing, and I wrote letters that incorporated all that stuff, and I had almost no success at all. I did get one full manuscript request for got trouble. But everyone else I was getting

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Dave Dobson: Blanket rejections, just, you know, default rejections.

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Dave Dobson: I don't. You know. There are people who have a lot more luck with that than I did.

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Dave Dobson: I don't know if it was my kind of books. I feel like it's a lot of it is just

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Dave Dobson: basically like buying a lottery ticket, you know, as long as you're doing the basics and writing a good cover letter, you're just in a fairly low percentage gain there.

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Dave Dobson: For me, you know I would do it for 4 or 6 months, and have very little success, and that's what sort of nudged me over into the self publishing. I was comfortable with that from Snood.

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Dave Dobson: where I wrote the game and put it out on my website, and then did all of the customer service and the advertising and that kind of stuff. I added a a partner later on, who did a lot of that for me as I started my academic career.

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Dave Dobson: But going it alone.

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Dave Dobson: even though it's a lot of work, and there are a lot more tasks you have to do was really satisfying for me, and a model. I use that for the doctor Esker games as well. So you know, some people are really looking for the cachet of a traditional publishing contract, and an agent, and all of that. And I was.

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Dave Dobson: But I think, especially in the modern day, there's so much really high quality stuff going out there in the indie world.

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Dave Dobson: Along with some stuff that's less high quality, that that is a totally viable way to go out and get your book in front of readers and find an audience for it.

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Dave Dobson: Some

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Dave Dobson: one of the troubles with doing that, though, is that the finances are hard to square. And so I in this sort of table here, I'm not going to read the whole thing, but, I've tried to give you an idea of

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Dave Dobson: what are the sort of ways you can do things expensively, and then the ways that I found to have that be slightly lower cost. And then ways that I think you should probably avoid. As you go. In terms of writing, you know, writing is writing, and there are lots of different pieces of software you can use. I have mostly used simple word processors. I had Scribner for a while, and it has a really great setup for remembering facts and

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Dave Dobson: posting little character notes, and that kind of thing for the way I write. It wasn't a good match, but I could totally see that it was valuable to. And I've seen people gush about using it for their books and their organization. there are also other things you can get, other tools you can use.

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Dave Dobson: but you don't need to spend a lot of money in the writing part. What I would stay away from is the sort of generative AI stuff chat. Gpt, there are a whole bunch of very low quality books being sort of spewed out onto Amazon now.

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Dave Dobson: and

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Dave Dobson: not only does it are the books, you know, objectively bad.

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Dave Dobson: but they also

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Dave Dobson: problematic in terms of how the AI models were trained, and they can get you very cancelled very hard

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Dave Dobson: if people find out that you're writing your books that way. So I really think that's something

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Dave Dobson: to avoid.

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Dave Dobson: you know, generative AI technology is interesting, and there are ways that you can use it

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Dave Dobson: that are less problematic. But for writing a whole book, you know, based on a prompt, you know. Give me a hundred 1,000 word romance, novel or something.

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Dave Dobson: I think that's really problematic, and it takes away

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Dave Dobson: the fun of creation. If you're doing that, you're doing an entirely different thing

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Dave Dobson: than trying to be a writer and tell stories the way people have for generations.

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Dave Dobson: in terms of the editing. We've talked about that. There are some folks who think that they don't need an editor, and they are almost always wrong.

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Dave Dobson: You will figure out how much editing you need and where you can get it from.

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Dave Dobson: But to assume at the beginning that you don't need it is is a path to disaster and really terrible. Amazon review.

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Dave Dobson: with covers. There are a whole bunch of people who think that they can make a good professional looking cover, and most of them are wrong.

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Dave Dobson: really good professional cover will cost you 500 to $1,000, which, again, is money that on a 1st book you're not going to make back very fast.

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Dave Dobson: There are other options that I put in the middle here, and they're pre made covers. You can get that aren't necessarily specific to your book, but might be very close to the feel of your book. You know, they might have a a spaceship on the front with ominous text, and then you can put your your title in place of whatever text they put on there. Those can be a lot cheaper. 200 or 250 bucks.

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Dave Dobson: For my part, I've generally found

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Dave Dobson: kind of an early career artist or somebody who hasn't done a lot of commercial work yet, and then, ask them to do a picture

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Dave Dobson: that relates more specifically to my book, and then I found cover designers on fiber, which is a sort of task site. If you haven't been there, it's has all sorts of people offering all kinds of services, and I found a really good Ukrainian woman on fiber who's done all the cover design for my books, and I. I provide the art. She does the design. So that's that's worked for me. And I could get a cover done that way, usually for 250 bucks something like that, and you know mine aren't

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Dave Dobson: the most earth-shaking, you know.

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Dave Dobson: covers of all. In some cases, although I think some of them are pretty cool. But I'm also getting them to a expense level. That's manageable, I would say. Don't do it yourself unless you know that you're a trained

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Dave Dobson: artist and designer.

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Dave Dobson: I would also say, obviously, you can make your own choice on this. But the generative AI, as far as art is concerned, is also

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Dave Dobson: pretty problematic. Obviously the generative art.

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Dave Dobson: General AI is trained on art that in many cases is taken without permission.

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Dave Dobson: Also from a more practical end of things. A lot of people

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Dave Dobson: will boycott authors entirely if they suspect that a cover was done with generative AI. There's a very strong

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Dave Dobson: sentiment out there that could cut you off from

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Dave Dobson: from potential readers.

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Dave Dobson: So just know what you're doing as you go through that I would say that it's easy enough to avoid that.

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Dave Dobson: And

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Dave Dobson: you know, moral and all of that kind of

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Dave Dobson: stuff, too.

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Dave Dobson: In terms of actually getting a file that you can publish. There are a lot of ways that are actually

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Dave Dobson: pretty easy to do on yourself, especially for ebooks. I use, Atticus. I have used caliber. Caliber's Free Atticus has a 1 time Fee that's a hundred or 125 bucks.

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Dave Dobson: Both of those are really great. I've heard good things about vellum.

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Dave Dobson: if you are, you know, handy with computers.

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Dave Dobson: Those are very good ways to get your book formatted by yourself. It'll take some tries and some learning to get to it. But that's definitely a way that pays

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Dave Dobson: really good dividends. And isn't that hard to do. Paperbacks are harder than ebooks. Ebooks are basically glorified HTML files.

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Dave Dobson: Whereas the paperbacks

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Dave Dobson: you actually have to do all the page breaks and the page numbers. And you know, if you want to add, section breaks and that kind of thing.

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Dave Dobson: You have to make sure all of that's working, and the margins are right.

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Dave Dobson: So that's a little trickier, although programs like Atticus and vellum will do

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Dave Dobson: better job at that than than they used to, and certainly are a little easier to use than word.

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Dave Dobson: There are some companies I have this vanity and scam press thing down here. There are some companies that will approach you and say that they will do all of this stuff for you, including

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Dave Dobson: publication and editing, and all of that. Usually they are looking for a big fee upfront, and they will expect you to sell a certain number of books afterwards. Anytime. A publisher is asking you for money.

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Dave Dobson: They are not an actual publisher.

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Dave Dobson: and you know there, there's a spectrum of how skeezy these folks are.

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Dave Dobson: but definitely go around and ask questions. If you're approached by one of these or attempted by them.

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Dave Dobson: Because there are a lot of really low life people running that kind of thing and preying on people who are early in their career. Science Fiction writers of America and other groups have warning lists

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Dave Dobson: for groups like this that are that are no good

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Dave Dobson: and so definitely check those before you sign a contract or get sucked in.

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Dave Dobson: once your book is out there marketing. Here's some things that I have found that are low cost for for getting your book out to readers. There are a whole bunch of really great discord communities now that deal with fantasy and sci-fi, and also on Facebook and some other places. And so those are great places to meet other authors to meet readers

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Dave Dobson: to take part in. You know, book activity. Some folks are tempted to go in there, and you know, dump a link or a promo or something for their book, and then leave. You'll have a lot better results if you actually take part in the community in ways that don't relate to pitching your own book.

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Dave Dobson: And so that is something

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Dave Dobson: that can be super fun if it's something you enjoy, which, if you're a sci-fi writer. You're probably also a sci-fi reader. But it's a really great way to to kinda

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Dave Dobson: find your people that way.

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Dave Dobson: A lot of people have. Really good experiences making videos and images on Instagram and and Tiktok. I haven't done much of that because I try to focus on things that I enjoy and trying to produce videos myself.

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Dave Dobson: Is not something I I'm good at or enjoy.

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Dave Dobson: But if that's your thing, that's a really great way to to meet readers. There are a bunch of readers on Tiktok. Many of them are romance readers, but they're also

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Dave Dobson: thriving, fantasy and sci-fi communities there, too.

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Dave Dobson: There are a whole bunch of blogs that will actually review Indie books. And you just need to ask. And you have to ask a bunch of them, and sometimes you have to send off copies, and sometimes there's a long wait, or it never happens. But that can be a no cost way to get some really good attention to your book, and to give you quotes you can use in your marketing and all that kind of stuff

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Dave Dobson: running an author. Newsletter is a is a great thing to do. One thing that people do is

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Dave Dobson: you can create stories or

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Dave Dobson: or novellas, or prequels, or even whole books that you're willing to give away for free

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Dave Dobson: and then, if you sign up to swap those free books

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Dave Dobson: in exchange for signing up for your newsletter, you can get a whole bunch of people into your newsletter fast. You can also trade mentions with other authors and the sites I have on your story, origin and book. Funnel will let you do that pretty easily.

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Dave Dobson: And that'll help you build more people into your newsletter. Some of those people will be freebie seekers who really aren't that interested in you or your writing, and they will often unsubscribe or not open your messages.

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Dave Dobson: but eventually you will end up with a you know, some fraction of your newsletter audience that is actually really into your stuff, and that can be rewarding and fun.

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Dave Dobson: And it also is a way to get yourself some exposure without

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Dave Dobson: without spending a lot of money.

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Dave Dobson: So yeah. Those free things they call reader magnets in the biz can be really helpful. And you just need to produce a couple of them. Be willing to give them away for nothing.

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Dave Dobson: Getting short stories out there in anthologies or to magazines is really helpful. I've gotten into one anthology with the fantasy story. And

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Dave Dobson: I wrote a mermaid horror story they got picked up by another journal. And so that's a way to kind of get your stuff out there in a way that even can make you some money and also

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Dave Dobson: get your work in front of readers, because that's the thing. You

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Dave Dobson: you are a small sort of

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Dave Dobson: pinprick of light in an enormous universe, and and building up that

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Dave Dobson: light into something that shines farther, is what you're trying to do the universe that you're appealing to is larger than you're ever going to reach.

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Dave Dobson: But your ability to kind of expand who is exposed to you is really what's gonna make you

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Dave Dobson: more successful? I've taken part in a lot of Indie book competitions. There's a Sci fi one. Spsfc, that's taking entries actually, right now. Spf, bo! The self published Fantasy blog off is a huge contest. Has 300 entrants every year. Bbnya has a small entry fee, but is also very large. Each of those will get you. You know, some reviews, some mention on

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Dave Dobson: on Facebook and Twitter posts and that kind of thing. It will also get you access to the community of fellow authors and readers who are part of those, and that is invaluable because those communities are generally really great, and they are also your target audience for books.

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Dave Dobson: So that's been a really cool, low, cost thing for me

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Dave Dobson: a lot of authors are using Kickstarters. I haven't done that.

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Dave Dobson: I think it's more useful once you're established, and you're doing a special edition of one of your books, or something like that. So it's more of a way to get some money to support your writing effort rather than to support the release of your 1st book, or something like that.

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Dave Dobson: There are also some group sales that you can enter if you're willing to discount your books for a few days.

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Dave Dobson: and Naritus runs a really great one of those, and there's some others.

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Dave Dobson: And then the other answer is just to write more books. The more books you have out the more sort of

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Dave Dobson: bait on a hook. You know that you have out there. The more likely if somebody likes something you've written. Then there's more for them to go look at. And so you not only attract more potential readers, but you've got more to feed them once they find you. So that's that's great.

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Dave Dobson: These are just my books. I've entered in the contests and each of these has produced some publicity for me Kenai actually won the whole Spsfc last year. So that was surprising to me, but also really great.

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Dave Dobson: It was one of 221 books, I think, there. And so that's been a nice piece of

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Dave Dobson: free publicity, in addition to just being a really cool feeling

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Dave Dobson: that I'm not a total poser

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Dave Dobson: and then a bunch of my other books have reached semi finals in various contests here, too.

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Dave Dobson: So like, I said. Each of those has come with some free publicity to an audience that's really

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Dave Dobson: valuable.

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Dave Dobson: So I'm gonna I want to leave enough time for questions. And I've talked a lot here the slides are going to be available online. I've got some things here that have worked for me and not worked.

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Dave Dobson: That you can look at and see book. Bug feature deals are by far and away the best thing that I've done. I wanted to run through some of my numbers here. Audio books are really expensive. I haven't had much of a return on them. So that's that's something that you might want to wait a little bit to get into, unless you're a narrator yourself.

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Dave Dobson: In terms of my history. I've been doing this since 2,019, you can see that my

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Dave Dobson: sales are going up the big blue line. Here is a single promo from book bub. So remember when I said, book. Bub promos are super useful. That has been

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Dave Dobson: a whole bunch of free books downloaded and moved me from about 35 reviews on Amazon to 512 now, so that is invaluable.

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Dave Dobson: this is paid sales. I had a 99 cent sale again through book Bub in 2023. You can see that 77,000 books downloaded versus 6,000 paid for is a a terrible ratio. But giving away a lot of free books does get you exposure. I also am in kindle unlimited. And so I have all closing on, you know, 2 million page reads in kindle unlimited, which is a choice.

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Dave Dobson: It limits you only to the Amazon sort of sales ecosystem, but it it can get you a whole bunch of readers and some income as well. I would say about

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Dave Dobson: 40% of my income is from kindler limited there.

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Dave Dobson: and that's been going up nicely

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Dave Dobson: And this is my total for 5 years about $12,000.

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Dave Dobson: That sounds really great, except that I've spent more than that each year. Here's my expenses from last year. You can see that's about $7,000, including big chunks on advertising

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Dave Dobson: and

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Dave Dobson: So that leads me to kind of this developmental stages of an indie author career thing that I made up a couple of weeks ago that I kind of like

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Dave Dobson: and I've been struggling to move to the right on here. Obviously, whether you're making money or not isn't a a great metric of whether you're a valuable author or not, but it is a milestone. You can pay attention to. I'm somewhere here in the the purple. I've got a bunch of

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Dave Dobson: books out I'm sort of figuring out what works and doesn't in marketing. I'm not yet bringing in a profit year over year, although I have a pretty good income year over year

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Dave Dobson: and so that's that's where I'm at. I know a bunch of people who are over here, and actually, you know, paying their mortgage with their books. I am nowhere near that yet.

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Dave Dobson: But that's possible, and just take some perseverance. All right, that's the slides. Let me go ahead and take questions that you've got.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Alright! Thanks so much, Dave. If you have a question that you have not submitted yet, go ahead and get that in, and we will try and get through as many of these as we can.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Okay, starting at the top, Graham says you said, you're a pantser. Have you ever tried to write at least a basic outline. Why or why not? And how did it turn out.

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Dave Dobson: So the only time I have done an outline is when I get to that 60 or 70%.

357
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Dave Dobson: Mark! And things are getting too hard.

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Dave Dobson: and then I will often outline okay, what needs to happen before the book ends. But I have never started a book with an outline, and I would say, only 2 books have I actually outlined

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Dave Dobson: with that amount of detail

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Dave Dobson: towards the end. So, but that is very much. A

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Dave Dobson: one side of the spectrum.

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Dave Dobson: you know. Quirk to me.

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Dave Dobson: and I would say, that's not gonna work for everybody, and not necessarily even a great idea. But for me. That's how I've done. I don't. I don't outline at all

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Dave Dobson: if I can help it.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Nicole asks, how does one find a good editor for a book?

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Dave Dobson: Okay. So the what I did was, I searched around and found 5 or 6, and then looked at testimonials from customers.

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Dave Dobson: And I think I looked into finding a good one. They don't do editing anymore, so I can't recommend them

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Dave Dobson: to you all.

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Dave Dobson: One thing that I think I see people doing now that would be really helpful is getting involved in some of these author communities on discord on Facebook and asking

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Dave Dobson: people for recommendations, because a lot of people will have

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Dave Dobson: really good relationships. They've developed with editors.

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Dave Dobson: Also, you know. Make sure you look you can. You can ask anybody.

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Dave Dobson: Anybody who's a good editor will give you a chapter for free, and give you the feedback that they would give you on that chapter. So it's kind of like, you know, when you go to a lawyer and you have a free hour to talk about your problem before you, you know, pay a retainer. So that's a really good thing to do. They will also have testimonials or sample feedback that they've given on a website. If they're a good editor. So those are all things to look for. But really, you know, recommendation from somebody who's actually paid for and used

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Dave Dobson: somebody. Service is the the gold standard there, in terms of the

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Dave Dobson: how it should work.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Dee would like to know the contest you mentioned the Spsfc. What do those initials stand for?

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Dave Dobson: Self-published fantasy. Sorry self published Sci-fi competition.

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Dave Dobson: Spsfc. And it's run by. Well, it was founded by Hugh Howey, and it's in its 4th year this year, and it takes any genre of sci-fi

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Dave Dobson: no entry fee, and then you go through. It lasts for 8 or 9 months. They go through a series of rounds, and they're a whole bunch of judging teams. It's really great. And Spfbo is similar for fantasy.

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Dave Dobson: So yeah, I can't say enough good about that community. It's awesome.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Brian would like to know if you can talk us through how you have used book, Bub, in a little bit more detail.

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Dave Dobson: Sure. Yeah. Okay. So book. Bub offers a bunch of services. They offer ads that they show in their newsletters and on their sites I have paid for those and gotten nowhere.

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Dave Dobson: That has been a terrible experience for me. They also offer a new releases for less things, so you can put out a book, and they say, Here, you can get this book for not much money, and they'll send that out to everybody. I paid a couple of $100 for that and got 2 sales. That was terrible

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Dave Dobson: kind of thing. But the thing that does work is they have this thing called the book bug feature deal

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Dave Dobson: and you apply for those. And one of the valuable parts of book Bub for their users is that those are curated.

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Dave Dobson: And so you apply. You say I have a book. I'm willing to discount it or make it free.

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Dave Dobson: and that's why it's the featured deal kind of thing, and then Bookbab will decide which of the many submissions that they get they will accept and send under their users.

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Dave Dobson: and that is really expensive. The last one I did, which was a worldwide one from my what grows from the dead, for my mystery cost me $720. So it's a huge chunk of money to give out.

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Dave Dobson: Then they will send it out, and you will get a whole bunch of downloads in my case. There were. I had had

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Dave Dobson: 40,000 downloads of all of my books in 5 years, and in the one week the book Bob ran. I had another 30,000 downloads of that book alone. So that's the kind of size of

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Dave Dobson: the impact that it can have.

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Dave Dobson: and it spiked my page rates on kindle unlimited, and that's where I made back the

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Dave Dobson: the cost of it was those Page reads, if you didn't have the kindle, unlimited revenue and you were doing a free book. It would be hard to make back the the investment, but it did jump all of my reviews to really high. And now

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Dave Dobson: the book is constantly in front of people. Amazon has kind of a self reinforcing algorithm. If something is successful, they will show it to more people. And so if you can get yourself up in their rankings even for a short time.

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Dave Dobson: then your book will start to sort of spin off more readers. And

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Dave Dobson: and so that's that's been really useful. I did a book club feature deal for my 3 main novels in the Frost Helm Series, the Inquisitors Guild Series, and sold it for 99 cents, which is nothing, you know. I get 33 cents or something for each sale. But those all counted as sales to Amazon's algorithm. I sold a few 1,000 of them, and so made enough to make that the

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Dave Dobson: the cost for it. So so it's really the only kind of thing that

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Dave Dobson: has had a consistent, positive return of what I've done. Other things have been sort of hit or missed.

399
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Dave Dobson: But yeah, you do have to keep applying to the book bubs

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Dave Dobson: to try to finally get one, and I've probably applied 40, 50 times and gotten maybe 6 or 7 of them. So it's a it's a rough process to get accepted.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: As an avid reader, I can say I get the book Bub emails every day, and I have a shameful amount of ebooks in my tbr on my kindle that I have not gotten to yet, because it's so tempting to keep buying them. So book Bub is awesome.

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Dave Dobson: Yeah. And the free ones, you know, a lot of people are, gonna get them and never look at them, and they'll just, you know, never have mattered. But but there are percentage of people who totally read them and review them. And

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Dave Dobson: so it can be really useful as an author.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We only have a couple of minutes left, so I'll just try and pick through a couple more. We have an anonymous question.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: You said, you develop better habits after your 1st book. Can you expand on that.

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Dave Dobson: Yeah. So one thing is, it just became more of a focus of what I was doing.

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Dave Dobson: And like, I said, I started writing in streaks. So I would say, I wanna get this book done by, you know, end of October, so I can do something else in November, and then I would start to write every day and make progress, and that is just so much more steady and continuous than my process had been before.

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Dave Dobson: I also got better at at identifying

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Dave Dobson: how a story was going to play out and in writing better characters. So I didn't have to stop and revise and

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Dave Dobson: and edit or rethink things.

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Dave Dobson: I also started working on projects that I had given up on, and going back and figuring out what was wrong with them.

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Dave Dobson: and then fixing them so both Darros and outcast crown came from

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Dave Dobson: starts that I had made that I wasn't happy with, and then I came back to them, and

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Dave Dobson: and was able to to kind of

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Dave Dobson: shed some fresh light on. So time helps, too, and just thinking about it.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: And we will close with another anonymous question, what's the best advice you ever received on writing.

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Dave Dobson: Oh, man!

418
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Dave Dobson: I that's hard. I think.

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Dave Dobson: Remember why you're doing it

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Dave Dobson: and do it because you love it.

421
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Dave Dobson: and then it will be better, and that will show in your

422
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Dave Dobson: in your books.

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Dave Dobson: because if you're doing it to make money, or you're doing it to match a particular genre that's popular, you know. You're not doing it with the kind of sincerity that's going to make your book. I think the best that it can be.

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Dave Dobson: And you know, and I know

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Dave Dobson: people chasing publication, and readers often

426
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Dave Dobson: make different decisions about that. But for me, that's always been

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Dave Dobson: what I've tried to do and work that way.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Well, thank you so much for being here. This was a great presentation. Thank you to everybody who came and brought your questions. We will have the slides and the replay up on the hub soon. And we have our last session of the day starting in just an hour. So thank you all very much, and we will see you then.

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Dave Dobson: Alright! Thanks everybody for coming. I hope it was useful.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Hi! Everyone.