Tim Akers

I want to talk a little bit about rejection, perseverance, and the impossible weight of discipline. But first, I’m going to talk about sports.

I’m terrible at team sports. I don’t know what it is about my particular mental twist, but that thing that happens when you’re trying to do something, and everyone else gathers around and encourages you to do that thing… doesn’t work for me. It actually makes me want to quit. There’s some kind of scar on my emotional state, a twitch in my mental bits, that recoils from encouragement. I am literally only capable of succeeding in isolation, and only as a result of self-directed determination. I am a creature of isolated perseverance.

This is why I’m a writer. There is nothing more solitary, nothing more personal and isolated, than writing a book. You will spend day after day, year after year, bleeding onto a page, reeling narrative and false humans out into the darkness, with no one to tell you if what you’re doing is right. And when you do get feedback, it’s entirely subjective and quite possibly wrong. I have a dozen readers for my works-in-progress, and they come back with different perspectives on everything I give them. You have to learn to weigh their opinions. You have to cull. You have to evaluate.

But most of all, you have to learn to trust yourself. You’re your first reader. At the end of the book, you’re really your only reader. Because you have to write the book you want to read, as well as the book you want to write. Writers-in-forum, a species of writer that’s really nothing more than a negotiated opinion, spend a lot of time talking about what sort of book you should write, what sort of book will sell or not sell, what sort of book the genre needs or what sort of character the readers need. But the writers-in-forum don’t know shit about your book. They don’t know shit about you. All they know is the public forum. And writing is a solitary task.I’m asking you to write the book you need to write. And expect it to get rejected, because it’s probably a terrible book. And you’re probably a terrible writer. But if you buckle down, ignore the endless waves of negative help, the writers-in-forum and their negotiated opinions, and write the book you need to write? The book you want to write? You might stop being terrible.But probably not. So get used to isolation. And get used to determination. Because the only difference between you and the writers you admire is how much they’re willing to fail in hermitage, and how strong they are in the dark, alone, without praise and without attention. We all go through the era of isolated failure. People only notice you once you start to succeed. And after that?It’s all light. But we’re born to darkness.

I like dogs. I’ve had dogs my entire life, always working class dogs, always big dogs. My first dog, a Bernese Mountain blend, ran with a pack of semi-feral mutts in the mountains of North Carolina for most of my youth, but he was fiercely protective of me, so I never shared the common fear of large dogs that some of my friends expressed whenever that pack trotted around the bend and overtook us on our bikes or at play. He was my dog. He wasn’t born to the leash.

This might be why it’s easy for me to look at my dog and see the wolf. For all their variety of size and temperament, dogs are an evolution of the wolf, a trick of breeding and the imposition of human will on the raw savagery of nature. Our ancestors lived in fear of the darkness of the woods and the monsters that lurked there. The wolves that lingered at the edges of our village, that loped between trees at the limits of our sight, whose howls echoed off the moon and filled our nightmares with teeth and blood and the feral stink of fear, eventually those wolves came into the circle of our campfires, rested their heads on our knees, and took food from our hands. Our fears became our best companions.

This isn’t a post about dogs. I’m sorry if you don’t like dogs, and are struggling to find a reason to be interested in this article. But I wanted to frame an idea for you, an idea about fear and the domestication of savagery, so bear with me.

This is a post about Amazon, and publishing. About the quiet domestic bliss of the traditional publishing world, and the unsettling fear that is nipping at the edges of our pleasant dream. There are echoes coming off the moon, and a lot of people are pretty worried about it. I don’t think there’s a reason to worry. I think there’s more reason to hope, but it’s the kind of hope that comes with the possibility of getting your hand bitten off.

Publishing has been pretty comfortable with itself for a long time. We’ve created a way of doing business that we find pleasing and comfortable. And I’m not just talking about the actual business of publishing. I’m talking about the entire business of readership, of writership, of delivering narrative and processing books, of distribution and marketing, all of which are virtually unchanged since the middle of the last century. Sure, there have been incremental changes, but the core system is the same.The problem, of course, is that that system of business is no longer valid. It’s no longer sustainable. I subscribe to a number of industry newsletters, and every week I have to read about how sales are down at bookstores, about how this or that indie is closing, publishing houses shutting down or merging or changing focus in an effort to stay afloat.It’s an old industry, and we’re in a new economy. And so we have to adapt.For a while now I’ve believed that the primary product of the old publishing industry isn’t books. It’s the nostalgia of books. We hear a lot of talk about the weight of a book in your hand, the smell of its pages, the experience of browsing a disorganized bookshelf and the joy of discovery at finding that perfect novel, guided by the wise hand of a bookseller. And let’s be absolutely clear, I love all of those things. But as a business model, it’s faltering, and no amount of wishing that it wouldn’t collapse is going to keep the roof up. Music went through this. Newspapers went through this. We’re going through this. And the way forward is the light at the end of that tunnel, not clustered around the pilings at the center.So. Let’s talk again about that wolf. Amazon is our wolf. Amazon is the harsh wilderness at our doorstep, the naked reality that the way readers buy books and experience stories has changed, and they’re not going to go back to an older, inefficient and largely outdated way of doing those things just for the sake of nostalgia. We need the fear of that reality to fully penetrate the industry. We need publishers and editors and marketers and writers to go to bed each night with the howl echoing off the moon, and the taste of blood in their teeth.Fear can bring change. The natural reaction is to raise the walls and stoke the fire, and huddle closer to what’s comfortable. But the wise move is to tame that wolf, to change both our expectations and our practices to match the new world. The industry as it stands is not sustainable. But the industry that might be, the one that lives just over the horizon, the one we create from the wreckage of this one… that industry might be pretty amazing.Or it might bite off our hand. But that’s better than living in fear.

Welcome, welcome, all of you, welcome. This is the new home for all the news about my books, my writing, my adventures in melancholia, and sometimes it’s the place where you’ll find valuable information unrelated to these things. Things you should know today:

1) I’ve finished the next-to-last draft of The Pagan Night. It’s off to my agent for a thorough reading, and then I’ll do a little reworking on it before sending it on to my editor, hopefully in March.

2) I’ve started working on a number of smaller projects, including a novella that expands on the Burn Cycle, and a collection of short stories for the Wraithbound universe.

3) I got a haircut.

4) My part-time job is going away in a couple of months, and I’m really going to have to figure out something to do about that. I’m open to suggestions. (My number one suggestion is that you BUY MY BOOKS)

That’s all for now. Please enjoy the site. If you have a chance, maybe take a minute to review some of my books at Amazon or on Goodreads, or maybe just wander the streets recommending my novels to perfect strangers (what is the perfect stranger? Is there, somewhere, the Prime Stranger, from which all other strangers are formed?) if you feel that will be a better use of your time.

Tim!