10 Books a Year — Writing at Amazon Speed
I began 2018 with a torn achilles and a troublesome inflamed disc in my lower back (the achilles tear happened in my sleep, the back slipped out reaching for a toothbrush — welcome to 60).
I spent half of each day in January tracking down a large errant invoice from some freelancing work the previous fall. My tech company client had already raised $152 million in venture money; I would be paid, eventually.
I broke up with my twice weekly short fiction group, put my tuchus in my director’s chair (another back pain contributor) and started writing. First, I finished up my second short story collection, Centripetal Force. I topped out my manuscript with the sixteenth short story and crept over 200 pages; time to pull the trigger.
I then launched into a trifecta of mini-memoirs, on the heels of my 2017 memoir It Happens That Fast. I wrote Briarcliff as a May birthday present for my eldest daughter Katherine. At which point, my youngest daughter Liz said, “Dad, WTH, where’s my d*mn memoir?” After I finished The Harbor for Liz in June, I embarked on a “compact” memoir of my 2015 ischemic stroke and subsequent depression, called The Guests. This memoir started out as a poem, morphed into an essay, and finally a book.
During the summer I collected all my work-themed poems in Occupational Hazards for a writing workshop and then in September, I brought a collection of 70 new poems in Wingspan. Here’s what Kathryn Van Spanckeren (University of Tampa, Professor Emerita” had to say about that book:
“Wingspan” pulled me like a canoe in a strong current. I could not put it down. It hooked me right away with that Whitmanesquebeginning, encompassing the two sides of country. We need more of this today. Deft overcoming of dualism’s coin, a Buddhist approach to subject and object, sets personal poems in national/ philosophical context. I stopped and reread, more than a few. Bravo.
John Miller, Editor of “God’s Breath” and “Voices Against Tyranny — Stories of the Spanish Civil War” added:
Jon Obermeyer is one of those poets that go right for the gut. His words are bright, penetrating, clean as a bone. In ‘Wingspan,’ he talks about tectonic plates, English invaders, and red-eye gravy in…well, a spiritual way.
After putting up six books of creative work, I decided to spend the last few months of 2018 sharing my wisdom with other writers in a four volumes of a series I am calling Penultimate Writing Guides:
* Big Splash: Writing Your First Book
* Our Story Begins: Writing Fiction for the First Time
* Brought Into Light: The Making of Memoir
* Deep Wells and Reservoirs: Writing About Family
Each guidebook is less than 100 pages, but addresses a need I had heard expressed by amateur writers and first-time authors. Several of these guides grew out of writing workshops I had been leading or co-leading.
Say what you will about self-publishing, I wrote and published 10 titles on Amazon in 2018, each one of them a distinct title. Hardly any of them exceed 100 pages, but maybe in our short-attention-span, ADD-age, books don’t have to be Middlemarch or Infinite Jest in order to matter and have an impact.
My main hiccup for the year came from Amazon, forcing me to switch over from Create Space (which I loved) to Kindle Direct Publishing (which I despise). Not only did they F-up the Cover Wizard tool, the entire KDP User Experience is clunky, wonky and slow. As I’m sure you’re aware, Amazon’s AWS servers support Uber, AirBnB, Yelp and NASA, so it’s quite shameful that the company can’t figure out an elegant solution on their own publishing platform.
What this should tell you as an author is that you can now publish as quickly as you can write. You are no longer sitting around waiting for an agent, a publisher or a printer to get back to you. If you just want to write and get the Word out there, the tailwind, the jet stream, is at your back.
2019 is looking pretty good already. I have a punch list already prepared. I may not write and publish ten books. Probably more like five or six, which would be a stellar year for anyone. Stay tuned.
