Em-dash, En-dash, and Hyphen: A Quick Guide

True, punctuation — like dashes — can add flavor to your writing, but let’s get the dashes right. Not all dashes are created equally, and they have different uses and meanings. You may not realize it, but there are three dashy distinctions we need to work on as new authors.

Let’s get to it!

Em-dash (—)

The em-dash is called an em-dash because its width is approximately the same as the height of the capital letter "M" in the font set. This convention dates back to the days of typesetting when the dash's size was physically measured against the letter "M" on the typesetting blocks. Thus, "em-dash" refers to the comparable length of the dash. But what does it mean?

The em-dash is the drama queen of punctuation. It's long and loves to make an entrance, creating a pause that grabs your reader's attention. Use it to add emphasis, break thoughts, or insert an aside — just like this. It’s the length of an “M” (hence the name) and is perfect for those moments when you want to make a statement.

Most word processors translate a double hyphen as an em-dash and insert the ASCII symbol (—) rather than (--).

Here’s the skinny on how to create an em-dash in Windows.

Method 1: Using Keyboard Shortcuts

1. Alt Code: Hold down the Alt key and type 0151 on the numeric keypad (not the numbers at the top of your keyboard). Release the Alt key, and the em-dash will appear.

Method 2: Using Microsoft Word

1. AutoFormat: In Microsoft Word, you can type two hyphens (--) and then press the spacebar or continue typing, and Word will automatically convert it into an em-dash.

2. Insert Symbol: Go to the "Insert" tab, click "Symbol" on the far right, choose "More Symbols," find the em-dash in the list, and click "Insert."

Method 3: Using Character Map

1. Character Map Application: Search for "Character Map" in the Windows search bar and open the application. Find the em-dash in the list, select it, click "Select," and then "Copy." You can now paste the em-dash wherever you need it.

Method 4: Using Unicode

1. Unicode: Type Ctrl + Shift + u, then type 2014, and press Enter (this works in certain applications that support Unicode input, such as some text editors).

Here’s how to create an em-dash on a Mac.

Method 1: Using Keyboard Shortcuts

1. Keyboard Shortcut: Press Option (or Alt) + Shift + - (hyphen key). This will insert an em-dash directly into your text.

Method 2: Using Microsoft Word

1. AutoFormat: In Microsoft Word for Mac, you can type two hyphens (--) and then press the spacebar or continue typing, and Word will automatically convert it into an em-dash.

2. Insert Symbol: Go to the "Insert" menu, select "Symbol," then "Advanced Symbol," find the em-dash in the list, and click "Insert."

Method 3: Using the Character Viewer

1. Character Viewer: Click the "Edit" menu and select "Emoji & Symbols" (or use the shortcut Control + Command + Space). In the Character Viewer, type "em dash" in the search field, find the em-dash, and double-click it to insert it into your text.

And here’s how you create an em-dash in Google Docs.

Method 1: Using Keyboard Shortcuts

1. Keyboard Shortcut: On a Windows computer, press Alt + 0151 on the numeric keypad. On a Mac, press Option (or Alt) + Shift + - (hyphen key).

Method 2: Using the Special Characters Menu

1. Special Characters:

   1. Place your cursor where you want the em-dash.

   2. Go to the "Insert" menu.

   3. Select "Special characters."

   4. In the search box, type "em dash" and it will appear in the grid below.

   5. Click on the em-dash symbol to insert it into your document.

Method 3: Using Auto-Replace

1. Auto-Replace:

   1. Go to the "Tools" menu and select "Preferences."

   2. In the "Automatic substitution" section, type a unique text string that you want to replace with an em-dash, such as --.

   3. In the "Replace with" field, paste an em-dash (you can copy one from another document or use the Special Characters menu to get one).

   4. Click "OK" to save the preference.

En-Dash (–)

The en-dash, being about half the width of an em-dash, gets its name similarly from its size relative to the letter "N." The en-dash is a bit more modest, shorter than the em-dash but longer than a hyphen, and is typically used to indicate a range, like “1990–2000” or “pages 45–50.” Think of it as a connector, bridging elements together smoothly.

On Windows (Microsoft Word):

1. Keyboard Shortcut: Press Ctrl + - (on the numeric keypad). This will insert an en-dash.

2. Insert Symbol:

   • Go to the "Insert" tab.

   • Click "Symbol" on the far right.

   • Choose "More Symbols."

   • In the Symbol dialog box, find the en-dash in the list, select it, and click "Insert."

On Mac:

1. Keyboard Shortcut: Press Option + - (hyphen key). This will insert an en-dash.

2. Insert Symbol:

   • Go to the "Insert" menu.

   • Select "Symbol," then "Advanced Symbol."

   • Find the en-dash in the list and click "Insert."

In Google Docs:

1. Keyboard Shortcut:

   • On a Windows computer, there is no direct shortcut for an en-dash, but you can use the Special Characters menu (see below).

   • On a Mac, press Option + - (hyphen key).

2. Special Characters:

   • Place your cursor where you want the en-dash.

   • Go to the "Insert" menu.

   • Select "Special characters."

   • In the search box, type "en dash," and it will appear in the grid below.

   • Click on the en-dash symbol to insert it into your document.

3. Auto-Replace:

   1. Go to the "Tools" menu and select "Preferences."

   2. In the "Automatic substitution" section, type a unique text string that you want to replace with an en-dash, such as --.

   3. In the "Replace with" field, paste an en-dash (you can copy one from another document or use the Special Characters menu to get one).

   4. Click "OK" to save the preference.

Hyphen (-)

Finally, the hyphen is the author’s workhorse. It’s the shortest of the trio and is used to link words, forming compound terms like “well-being” or “mother-in-law.” It’s straightforward, functional, and gets the job done without any fuss.

Why Does This Matter?

Using these dashes correctly can enhance the clarity and style of your writing. Imagine crafting a beautiful sentence, only to have a contest judge/reader stumble because of a misplaced hyphen for an em-dash. By mastering these, you’ll polish your prose and keep your readers hooked.

So, hop to it! The next time you're writing, remember the roles these dashes play. Your story — and your readers — will thank you for it!

R

#WritingTips #PunctuationPower #NewAuthors

I’m An Amazon Best Seller!

Hey, look, Ma - I’m a #1 Amazon Best Seller!
Well … kinda.

And not just in the 45-Minute Science Fiction & Fantasy category, either. Look at these Amazon Best Seller Ranks (BSR’s) for my title, Eyes of Memory.

I’m enjoying a lot of visibility in three critical categories. The book is being splashed in front of thousands of people looking at best-seller lists on Amazon at this very moment. Hurrah! I’ve overcome the long tail!

But how did I do this? And how much did it cost?

In previous posts, I’ve written about the Amazon Sales Cycle and how the Amazon referral engine responds to positive feedback loops. When Amazon sees your title moving in traffic and sales, it does its best to promote it to others. More sales, more feedback.

Every month, I give away a story I’ve published on Amazon for five days. I market that giveaway using my email mailing list, social media (Facebook and Instagram), and Bookdoggy.com. I used a promo code Bookdoggy is running until May 10, to lower their $24/listing to a $12/listing.

That generated a bunch of freebie sales for the title, launching the referral engine. A freebie sale is a sale in Amazon’s algo, which pushed my title to the top of these lists.

But my strategy isn’t just to be read for free and forgotten. Here’s a breakdown of last two days:

Here, you can see that the freebie inspired additional impulse buys from my catalog, but take a look at last month’s results:

What’s important is seeing how the freebie offering inspired more commercial sales from other titles and more KENP reads. I’m finding that the wider my catalog and offerings, the more sales and KENP reads follow the monthly freebie promotion.

When running a similar campaign, look for secondary effects like your website metrics to shift. Here, I got a jump from my regular traffic to my website, increasing brand + product visibility.

Beyond just visits, I want to make sure that the landing page for the title I’m featuring is receiving the new traffic. Checking my engagement numbers, that’s exactly what I’m seeing. Eyes of Memory is the second-most frequented page on the site, behind the main page (Portfolio).

Here’s the takeaway:

1. A freebie sales strategy combined with a social and newsletter strategy can help temporarily boost your BSR.

2. It gives you premium visibility in the category, putting you in front of potential readers for a short time.

3. If your title converts an Amazon shopper, they may return to your catalog to purchase more titles at their regular price.

4. If your title is enrolled in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) program, the campaign may create a buzz that attracts new KU readers.

5. More readers that come to your website is an upsell opportunity, but also, a funnel/capture opportunity. Maybe they’ll subscribe to you, or follow you on social media. Those secondary effects are just as important as sales.

Alas, the results are fleeting. I’ll only be at the top of these lists for a few days while my promotion runs, and, gradually, by the hour, my number one will slip away and send the title back into BSR obscurity.

Still, after this, I hope to see more commercial unit sales and KEMP reads, social media likes or follows, website visits, and newsletter subscriptions. That will help improve my numbers for the next campaign.

You can do this, too!

R

Understanding the Amazon Sales Cycle

If you’ve been following my recent blog posts, I’ve been spending time educating myself on selling books on Amazon. I figured I’d document my process to help other self-publishers like me.

Earlier, I’ve talked about the importance of understanding the long tail. Amazon’s book catalog is 32.8 million entries deep, with thousands of new books uploaded daily to the platform. Visibility is an enormous problem. Knowing your audience is paramount: how will they look for your product? How does your book scratch their itch?

One way to overcome the problem is to ensure your descriptions and keywords match what people are searching for. That’s an organic technique where you research keywords and phrases people will use to find your book; you might even use those keywords in the book's title and subtitle to improve its search relevance.

However, optimizing Amazon and web search is just a small slice of the marketing problem. The challenge we face next concerns converting a potential customer into a buyer, and to understand that, we need to explore the Amazon sales cycle.

Your job is to write a product that scratches an itch: it must meet a need. If you think about how your product meets your niche's needs, the easier it’ll be to prepare search terms and descriptions for your book.

When they land on your book, the cover attracts or repulses the customer. It’s the first element of the buying funnel, and it has to meet their expectations.

Next would be the title, subtitle, price, and description. If these elements fail to convince customers that your book fits their needs in approximately seven seconds, they’ll click away.

Okay, if you convince them to stay, that’s a win. The next step a prudent customer might take is to read the first 10% of the book and examine the reviews. Good reviews are exceedingly important in sealing the deal.

The customer exits the funnel when they add your product to a cart. Now, it’s a buy decision. They’ve selected the work because they consider it worthy and must commit to the buy. That commitment is a conversion.

A conversion is a sale. It’s how you get royalties as a writer. Further, every sale triggers an algorithm in Amazon that addresses the fulfillment of customers' needs, and understanding that referral engine is critical to understanding the sales cycle:

• Amazon will now identify you as a preferred author and send emails to customers alerting them to new releases or updates in your catalog.

• Amazon will market Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads similar to your book to the customer.

• Amazon will note the demand for your book and — if there are increasing levels of conversions / more sales surrounding your book — your Sales Rank is increased and it starts pushing your book harder to others who share similar interests, putting your book higher in the relevance scores for searches.

• That means potentially wider audiences and more sales. Even if your book is being offered for free, it’s still increasing Sales Rank and kicking off the referral engine.

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t show us how many people land on our page and engage in our funnels or how long they languish in a cart before conversion, but any of these obstacles may prevent a sale. They’re probably on your page because the Title and Subtitle were sufficient to draw them in. However:

• If the cover is bad, they’ll click away.

• If the price is too high, they’ll click away.

• If the description doesn’t scratch their itch, they’ll click away.

• They'll likely click away if they can’t look inside the book, or, if they look inside, they can’t easily find the contents or a writing sample.

• If there is an insufficient number of good reviews (and that number may vary for people — I’ve seen estimates of 3+ reviews are just as good as 100+ reviews, and I’m more inclined to believe that as numbers become nebulous to ordinary people beyond 10) — they’ll click away.

Studying user activities with these elements, doing your market research, and getting feedback from your reader and writing communities is fundamental to walking the customer down the funnel to conversion.

Who is Hevroth Bloodgrog?

Hevroth Bloodgrog is a fictional character described in the Gammond Brandyford story, Eyes of Memory.

He’s depicted as an imposing, legendary dwarf with a rich backstory and significant cultural importance to dwarven culture within Aevalorn Tales.

Rest assured, I plan on writing more dwarven stories one day, but here’s the rundown.

Legendary Figure

Hevroth Bloodgrog is celebrated as a master builder, warrior, and the earthly son of the goddess Berronar Truesilver. His life is marked by extraordinary feats of bravery, knowledge of metallurgy, and acts of wartime heroism. He is revered for his physical strength and skill as a blacksmith and his sacrifices, including severing his arm to support a mountain and protect the dwarven people from landslides. In fact, in the story, I have him overlooking the sea as if he were solely responsible for warding against erosion of their mountain home.

Bronze Statue

In the story, Hevroth is represented as an eight-foot-tall bronze statue wielding a blacksmith's hammer, with his left arm ending in a stump. This statue, located in a sanctuary on the side of a cliff overlooking the sea, guards his people's memories and history. The statue's empty black eyes and detailed description of its appearance contribute to Hevroth's reverence as a protector.

Symbol of Dwarven Ideals

Hevroth embodies the ideals of strength, skill, and sacrifice central to dwarven culture in the story. His life's work, including the construction of Bhanboldihr and his legendary acts, are celebrated and remembered through stories, the statue, and the runes engraved around the sanctuary.

For me, the name Bloodgrog should strike up an image of a bloody brew sloshing about in a tankard . Fairly fitting for a dwarven hero, wouldn’t you say?

Catalyst for the Adventure

The quest to reach Hevroth's statue and uncover the Eyes of Memory drives the main characters, Gammond and Vongur, on their adventure. Hevroth's legacy and the magical aspects of his statue play a pivotal role in the story, providing a physical and spiritual journey for the characters seeking to connect with their past and discover their true identities.

Through these aspects, Hevroth Bloodgrog is a complex figure within the narrative, symbolizing the depth of dwarf culture and the importance of legacy, sacrifice, and determination.

R

How to Manually Select Amazon Keywords

I’ve spoken about the long tail when marketing your Amazon book. I talked about the importance of discovering your niche, mapping out your keywords, and building keywords into your title and subtitle.

Here’s how you can manually select useful Amazon keywords for your book.

1. Use Incognito Mode on your browser. This is so previous information doesn't affect what Amazon shows you.
   

2. Select “Kindle Store” or “Books” as the Amazon category to focus on the area of Amazon you’re interested in.
   

3. Start by typing in a word. Amazon immediately pre-populates in the search box. Think like a reader. Imagine how you’d search if you were a customer.
   

4. Once you've found a phrase that interests you, add each letter of the alphabet at the end of your word/phrase, and see what comes up. “High fantasy a”…, “High fantasy b”…, “High fantasy c”…

Make a list of phrases a reader will most likely look up. Mix and match the phrases in different combinations.

Amazon is showing you what it thinks to be the highest-ranking term in descending order, so it’s already showing you the demand for the full keyword.

Choose up to seven keywords or phrases, up to 2500 characters per keyword or phrase.

These will be the keywords you’d use to set up the ebook.

You can refine the keywords later by editing the book.

In fact, editing an ebook re-indexes the book, making it more relevant to A9 (Amazon’s search algorithm). The more up-to-date a book and its metadata is, the better.

R

Using Keywords in the Title and Subtitle of an Amazon Book

Amazon uses keywords and phrases in at least five specific places concerning books and ebooks.

1. The Title.

2. The Subtitle.

3. The Product Keywords at Setup.

4. The Product Description.

5. The “Look Inside”/Read Sample.

Let’s talk about two of these areas for now: the book’s title and subtitle.

The Book’s Title

It’s probably the most valuable piece of keyword real estate because Amazon wants to match against a book title directly, but it’s probably the hardest area to work in a keyword or phrase. If you could take a keyword and make it a book title, you’re optimizing for SEO in the greatest possible way, but it’s unrealistic. Few people will buy a fiction book titled “Fantasy Short Stories.”

The Book’s Subtitle

But a subtitle is nearly as good. Take a look at this example, Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldtree. When I grow up, I want to be like Travis.

It is no accident that the keyword “Novel” and phrase “High Fantasy” appears in this piece. Look at the keyword analysis.

Competition is high on the phrase “high fantasy novel” but low to medium to “novel” and “high fantasy.” It’s placed in the subtitle so it creates a good match. Let’s consult Amazon.

And look, there it is! The 5th suggestion down the list.

My Amazon Keyword Tool concurrs.

The gold score under Est. Amazon Searches/Mo indicates that the search volume is reasonable at an acceptable level of competitiveness.

This is A9 (Amazon’s algo) telling us that the phrase “high fantasy novels” is commonly searched, so, it’s got a lot of demand and is probably more expensive from a PPC point of view, but Travis here has it organically baked-in to his subtitle!

When I run the search, Legends & Lattes is the 5th book in the list. He’s at the head of the tail and doesn’t have to pay a dime for placement.

Building on SEO Principles in the Subtitle

Many factors will influence my list results, including the cookies in my browser and the history of my own searches on my account, but, even in an incognito window, I get the same result.

If you’re wondering, that’s not by some happy accident. The SEO is organic, but it’s planned.

When planning your subtitle, think about keywords, yes, but also brainstorm keywords for pain points, desired results, emotional amplifiers, and demographics.

Think about this:

How to Murder Your Husband

Not a bad title. People look for that phrase ~10,000 times a month, and it’s got low competition; few people are paying for that real estate.

But now sprinkle in a little SEO goodness.

How to Murder Your Husband:
A Woman’s Guide to Success

Yeah. You see it, right? I’m targeting married women (a demographic) who want to exit a troublesome marriage successfully. But maybe a little more:

How to Murder Your Husband:
A Smart Woman’s Guide to Financial Success

Divorce is financially painful and messy. Wouldn’t murder for a smart woman like yourself just be easier? Being poor is a pain point. And don’t you want to exit the marriage successfully? That’s ambitious! And the whole construction is rather emotionally amplifying, wouldn’t you say?

Happy April Fools.

Still, thinking about SEO when constructing your title and subtitle is an organic way of manipulating search engines to bring your titles to the head of the long tail, improve reader visibility, and, hopefully, increase unit sales.

R

Selecting the Right Keywords in Amazon as a Self-Published Author

Hey there, aspiring author!

Have you ever wondered why your brilliantly crafted articles or books aren't getting the attention they deserve?

The secret might lie in something seemingly mundane yet incredibly powerful: keywords. Let's explore keywords and why choosing the right ones is important for being seen in the long tail.

What Are Keywords?

Imagine the Internet as a giant library, and search engines like Amazon, Google, or Bing are the librarians.

When someone looks for information, they type in keywords to find the most relevant books or ideas. They're the signposts that guide search engines to your digital doorstep.

Keywords are directly related to your chosen niche—the audience you’re trying to reach who might be interested in your writing.

Drilling Into the Long Tail

Keywords are often more than just one word (they’re more often a phrase) and can be broad or narrow. A broad keyword would look like an overall reaching subject:

• Travel Books

• Fantasy Novels

• Military Science Fiction

These broad, highly competitive terms are generally meaningless as a tool for finding your book. It’s like browsing Fantasy Books in a bookshop, except that section is 40 city blocks alone. Your book’s in there somewhere, but nobody will find it.

Instead, relevant keywords drill into the long tail. They get more specific.

• Dark Fantasy Novels

• Dark Fantasy Short Stories

• Novels Featuring Female Protagonists

Notice the influence of understanding your niche here. Your readers use special terms and vocabulary related to their interests to help drill into the long tail.

For me, much of my fantasy writing is connected to role-playing games. Fantasy readers and Gamers of all stripes are my niche, so I might drill deeper into my niche using their vocabulary.

• Dark Fantasy Novels Cleric

• Fantasy Novels Paladin

• Books About Red Dragons

These are more relevant keywords that draw my audience to my work. They’re less in demand as a keyword, and fewer people search off of them, but they’re also less competitive. Fewer people are willing to bid (pay money) on those terms.

Make a List of Relevant Keywords

Start by considering keywords and phrases most relevant to your writing and work. For me, my keywords might look something like:

• fantasy short story

• dark fantasy short story

• fantasy series

• strong female lead fantasy

• dark fantasy book series

• free short stories fantasy collections

• fantasy books about witches

• fantasy witch books

When brainstorming keywords, think like a book consumer. How will people find you in the long tail? What will they be searching for? The more granular the phrase, the deeper it gets into the long tail.

Not all keywords are created equal. Some keywords are worth more than others. In the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you must understand two metrics about words: the demand (frequency) of the phrase and its competitive rank.

• The demand for a keyword represents the frequency of use; how often it gets typed into Amazon.
  

• The competition for a keyword represents what people will pay for that valuable real estate. Competition reflects how many people want to be featured first in the search results for a high-demand keyword.

For example, if you take the keyword “fantasy novel,” you’d find it has high demand and competition. It’s frequently entered into Amazon.

The price for that keyword is very high (this concept is related to Pay-Per-Click advertising, but conceptually, look at the problem as real estate — everyone wants that space, and there are people with big budgets willing to pay for the position.

But how do I know if a keyword/phrase works? How many searches per month are there for “fantasy witch books” anyway?

Using Keyword Analyzers

How do I know this? I must use a keyword analyzer. Here’s “fantasy novel” using Google’s Keyword Analyzer.

Look at the Average Monthly Searches (Demand). Although competition is high for both, there’s fewer searches for the “dark fantasy short stories” than “fantasy novel", and the bid price for the “fantasy novel” is notably higher. This is the effect where “dark fantasy short stories” is more niched. It’s going deeper in the long tail.

If there’s a lot of competition, you’re likely to be drowned out in the noise of other search engine results or from parties willing to pay to be in front of you. Because of that, you have to get closer to your niche. Just look at an Amazon Keyword Tool’s result on “fantasy novel”. This is Publisher Rocket, by the way. Dave Chesson has a great novice-level program for SEO work on Amazon.

Almost 28,000 people search for that phrase on Amazon in a given month, it returns 500+ pages of books, and it’s highly competitive, scoring 67/100 on a competitive score. Yikes.

From a PPC point of view, I’m paying less for “dark fantasy short stories” than “fantasy novels” because there are fewer monthly searches; it’s less expensive real estate. But it digs deeper into the long tail and speaks to my niche, the audience I’m after.

Finding the Sweet Spot

But here’s the catch: if you use generic or incredibly obscure keywords, you'll be in a queue behind thousands of others or in a dark, dusty corner where no one thinks to look.

The art, then, is in finding that sweet spot—keywords that are specific enough to stand out but common enough that people search for them. Something with medium demand. Ah, take a look at this.

So here we go. Closer to my niche (short stories rather than novels), more demand (100-1k searches/mo) at negligible costs. This is basic keyword research, telling me:

• “Fantasy Novels” are at the head of the tail. It’s the most searched term and the most expensive piece of real estate to rent. The competition drowns me out, and my PPC budget will quickly be eroded.

• “Dark Fantasy Short Stories” is more obscure and maybe more attractive in terms of cost, but there is little demand. Few people search for this phrase on Google in a given month. My PPC budget is more cost-effective, but I will wait a while for people to come around.

• “Fantasy Short Stories,” however, is the sweet spot. It gets more traffic, so there is medium demand, but the cost is negligible (tiny in this case). My PPC budget is more cost-effective, whereas my website or book is being seen in search results more often at a lower cost.

Therefore, according to Google, “Fantasy Short Stories” should be one of my keywords!

Well, maybe.

This is an Amazon Keyword Tool result.

Now, my Amazon tool isn’t so sure.

On Amazon, less than 100 people type it into their search engine, and the value of a 7/100 as a competitive score suggests few are trying to hone in on it. Still, that’s good for me! No competition!

But let’s go back to one of my previous ideas, Dark Fantasy Stories.

Okay, look at that! A relatively low 23/100 competitive score with a reasonable level of searches per month - 950 people typed that into Amazon in one month. To recap:

• Fantasy Short Stories - Good with Google Search.

• Dark Fantasy Stories - Good with Amazon.

So where should I use them?

• In product descriptions and keywords in the Amazon listing? Yes. Maybe I’ll try “Fantasy Short Stories” for a while before replacing it with something else.

• On my website? Yes.

• As meta descriptions for books? Like, in the subtitle of a book? Yes.

• On blog posts like … er, this one? Yes.

Tools like Google's Keyword Planner, third-party Amazon A9 keyword tools, or other SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools can help you find similar terms people are searching for, their popularity, and their competitiveness. Sometimes you have to pay for these things.

You should be prepared to pay for information that makes you more competitive, but good news: Google Keywords can be used for free.

R

Finding Your Niche as a Self-Published Author

Self-published authors face a daunting challenge: not only must they create unique and compelling content, but they must find a market for it that exists somewhere in the long tail.

Niches

It’s incumbent upon you as a self-published writer to find your niche. Knowing who you’re writing for can transform your writing journey to make it both rewarding and successful.

Firstly, understanding yourself is crucial. Who are you? What do you want to write about? What are your interests? How do your interests influence your writing?

Sun Tzu, guys: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

If you don’t understand why you’re writing and what you’ll consistently write about, stop. Go back and stare in a mirror until you figure it out.

Second, find your niche. These people share your interests and want to read your writing. Understanding your niche is crucial. This involves recognizing who your ideal readers are, what they crave, and where they spend their time online. What do they want from a story?

Whether you're penning sci-fi novels, self-help books, or historical fiction, there's a community for you. The key is to engage with these communities authentically.

Social media platforms like X, Instagram, and Goodreads offer fertile ground for connecting with niche readers.

On X, hashtags related to your genre can lead you to conversations with potential readers. Instagram allows for a more visual connection, showcasing your writing process, book covers, and themes through engaging posts.

To effectively use these platforms, be consistent and genuine in your interactions. Share your journey (writer-slang for how you go about writing), ask questions, and participate in discussions.

It's not just about promoting your book but building relationships with your readers.

Third, engage. You can be a lurker; you have to participate in these communities.

Over time, you'll find your niche audience and cultivate a community of readers who are genuinely interested in your work.

Strategy:

1. Figure out who you are and what you’re writing about.

2. Find your people.

3. Engage with them.

Remember, connecting with your niche is about quality, not quantity. A dedicated group of engaged readers can be more valuable than a vast but indifferent audience.

R

Navigating the Longtail in Internet Marketing

If you are marketing your self-published book, understanding the long tail concept is like discovering how gears in a clock track time.

Imagine walking through a market that stretches beyond the horizon, where every stall offers something unique. The first stalls you see are the largest and loudest, manned by the most popular authors. Your stall, on the other hand, is way out in the distance, further than you can see, where you eagerly await a customer to come walking by. Will they ever?

This is the digital marketplace, and the long tail is its most intriguing secret. The more you understand the long tail, the greater your appreciation for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will become.

What is the Long Tail?

Originally a term from the business world, the long tail in self-publishing refers to the plethora of niche genres and topics that, when combined, can equal or surpass the market share of bestsellers. This means authors no longer need to chase mainstream success to find their audience; there's a space for every unique voice.

Amazon maintains a catalog of 32.8 million titles. That’s a lot of books! What is seen and what sells represents an absolutely tiny fraction of their total catalog. What sells is at the head of the curve; what languishes in obscurity is in the tail of the curve.

As a new or self-published author, your book lives in the tail of the curve.

Why it Matters

The long tail strategy empowers authors by highlighting the importance of niche markets. Those catering to specific interests can stand out in a sea of millions of books. This approach benefits both authors, who can write about what they truly love, and readers, who can find books that resonate on a personal level.

Your job is to move your products up to the head of the curve through SEO, marketing, likes, recommendations, shares, good product reviews, and promotions.

Sounds expensive. It is. So how do you do this?

Leveraging the Long Tail

The long tail strategy for self-publishing authors involves identifying and targeting readers in specific niches. You must find an audience that traditional publishers have difficulty reaching.

The right niche aligns with your interests and expertise while having strong market demand. This builds authority and attracts your ideal readers from knowing your audience.

That might mean writing for a narrowly defined genre.

Authors can connect with their ideal readership by utilizing targeted marketing strategies like SEO and social media engagement.

Embracing the long tail in self-publishing opens up a world of possibilities for authors and enriches the literary landscape with diverse voices and stories. It's a testament to the power of the internet to connect writers with readers, no matter how specialized their interests may be.

The Internet makes this process easier than ever.

R

Cats and Oranges

On Oranges

Years ago, my wife and I attended a theater show where oranges were rolled onto a stage during a live performance. The actors, still thoroughly engaged in the story — dancing, moving, repeating their lines — struggled to avoid slipping on the oranges. Some, in fact, did, and when it happened, I burst out in laughter. I couldn’t help myself.

Well, my outburst wasn’t well received. Most of the audience turned to glare at me as if I was some Neanderthal who didn’t appreciate good art.

I use this story to illustrate the problem of art. A rolling orange can be one person’s serious artistic statement and another’s comedic moment. Art is entirely subjective, and what constitutes artistic expression isn’t up to us, but the judgment of our audience.

In the art of writing, we use the tools of our craft to relay a story to a reader.

We have nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs; we have intensifiers and modifiers. We have punctuation, sentence structure, and paragraph sequences. We have tools like flashbacks and flash-forwards. We have perspectives like 1st and 3rd person. We might tell more than show. We might have a story of one word, a hundred words, or a hundred thousand words. We strive for eloquence and brevity in our expression and, for some, capture universal themes of the human experience in our writing.

Oranges are our art. How well tell a story is the subjective choice we make as authors to relay how we feel it should be told. When someone judges our writing and experiences our art, they see it through a lens of their own personal experiences and biases. They might not like nor prefer the tools we used to tell it and may score us poorly. If anything, poor use of oranges may diminish our credibility in the eyes of readers, judges, and publishers.

On Cats

Cats, on the other hand. Everybody likes cats. People are obsessed with cats. People share cat pictures all day long. People love cats.

Cats are the bread and circus of writing — they’re stories readers want to read. A cat is what a reader expects when they read your story. Whether or not it’s a horror, romance, or adventure, readers have certain expectations about what that story should feel like. The major scenes. The characters. The action.

I often use the phrase “writing a good cat.” People must be attracted to the story to read it. They must want to pet and cuddle with the story, scratch behind its ears, feel good with it, and ultimately share it with others.

As a writer, my ability to “write a good cat” relates to telling a good story, regardless of the oranges I might have used to tell it.

On Writing Contests

In traditional publishing, we want to write stories with a good balance of oranges and cats.

Our oranges establish credibility with readers and publishers, and our cats compel our publishers to keep buying our stories, and readers to keep reading our stories.

Writing contests, however, are different.

Some contests are more cats than oranges; some are more oranges than cats.

In my opinion, peer-based contests like Writing Battle require a cat-heavy story to be successful. Stories must meet genre and connect with a broad audience of amateur writers. They don’t put as much weight in the oranges we use to tell the story; readers want a good cat. If you fail to tell a good cat, regardless of how beautiful your oranges, it will fail.

On the other hand, prestigious amateur contests like NYC Midnight and GlobeSoup require more orange-heavy stories to be successful. These are contests judged by more seasoned, if not professional, writers, not amateurs. The stories that win these contests must pass a litmus test on how those judges perceive the art. It doesn’t matter how astounding your cat is. You might write a very compelling and attractive story, but if the oranges don’t line up with the expectations of the judges, you will fail.

How You Can Tell

In my opinion, you can tell what a contest is like by reading their past winners.

Orange-heavy contests will showcase slow, dull, prodding stories on typical themes that are expertly told. No risks are taken, and there’s no excitement in the story — it’s all very bland and predictable — we’re bored, as readers, because we’ve read these stories before. But that’s what the judges expected, so it’s what the writer wrote.

On the other hand, stories (art) that are more exciting, out of the box, and fun to read, enjoyed by many regardless of technique, that take risks on art, are more cat-heavy. They’re the surprise hit experts didn’t expect, or, when we read them, may completely disregard traditional oranges. They’re stories that resonate with people, regardless of the tools and techniques used to tell them.

On Cats and Oranges

If we’re writing for contests, we generally have to write a good cat stuffed with oranges, or, as the picture above suggests, a good orangey cat. The story itself has to be compelling and meet the reader’s expectations, and our use of the art must not distract from the story or penalize it.

Now, in my opinion, some writers might gravitate towards one or the other.

Authors might struggle to win peer-based competitions but may excel in writing a predictable story well. They’ll shun the erratic, unpredictable nature of these contests and declare them “not real writing contests.” They’ll upturn their nose and go to where they’re appreciated.

On the other hand, the creative writer who fails in a structured, oranges-heavy contest may be so frustrated by the judges’ gatekeeping that they vow never to pay the $30 entry fee again and go home. They might even pack it in as a writer and give up.

The trick, I think, is found in adapting to the expectations of the contest and being mindful of both problems. At the end of the day, I think most writers would agree that cats and oranges make for better writing. We have to write strong, relatable stories, that people want to hold in their laps, and to do that, we often have to take risks and use our tools in ways that are exciting. Unpredictable. Even if they don’t meet the formal expectations of a literary judge.

Who is Ginny Greenhill?

Ginny Greenhill is a Ranger of the Aevalorn Wilds, sworn to protect halflings and aid others in finding their way.

I write her as bubbly, gregarious, and fearless. An excellent tracker who fights hand-to-hand with a bo stick, Ginny is young, idealistic, and loyal to the enigmatic Circle.

Ginny is a sidekick to Kindle Muckwalker — a lively bonfire to his mucky gloom — but unlike Kindle, she leans on using Druid Magic. She’s also pretty good with a lockpick. Her adventures center around protecting the hamlets, people, and creatures of the Aevalorn Wilds.

She made her first appearance in The Magnificent Maron Maloney.

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Who is Benzie Fernbottom

Benzie appeared alongside Elina Hogsbreath in A Thyme of Trouble. As Thyme was Elina’s first story, they’ve been a team since the beginning.

I write him as an overly-enthusiastic, young, naive, helpful, yet inadvertently troublemaking sidekick.

A lightfoot, young, fit, and thin - admittedly too thin by halfling standards - Benzie Fernbottom prefers to keep his chestnut-colored hair disheveled and untrimmed, his pointed ears poking out along the sides. He has thick eyebrows, a sharper nose than most, and an eager, wide smile that would give a stranger the impression he was up to something. He wears a white collared, button-up shirt with a handsome brown and green vest and matching pants cut at his knees. And like all halflings, Benzie didn’t wear shoes - he goes through the world barefoot.

Benzie is what I’d refer to as a typical halfling. I see him as good-intentioned and kind but flawed, sometimes going to extremes.

He lives a life of service in the Parishes; he’s happy and comfortable and will never leave.

I use Benzie as a way of expressing typical halfling attitudes and opinions in an environment exposed to outside ideas - the inn, the Swindle & Swine.

He might not appear in every one of Elina’s stories, but I do try to mention him or point out where he may otherwise be.

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Author’s Note: Soso

Around Mar 27, 2023, I wrote Soso in response to a Reedsy prompt to write a story about someone who says, “I feel alive.” The larger writing contest was related to spring in Japan. And happily, Soso was shortlisted! Yay!

In this story, Soso is a 400-year-old tortle, an anthropomorphized tortoise. He’s an artificer - an inventor - who makes astoundingly perfect automatons in the shape of toys. Soso is a toymaker who loves his toys and the spirit of childhood.

Soso is growing old, and I elude that he must leave for the places where tortles go to die - to the south, I wrote, beyond Shae Tahrane - because it’s warmer there. Shae Tahrane is to the south of the Aevalorn setting, and I picture it as closer to the equator. Mountains. Deserts. Savanahs. I mentioned Shae Tahrane before in The Magnificent Maron Maloney.

If Soso leaves, he’s concerned a mysterious organization known as The League will come and snatch his toys and learn how to improve upon their own automatons and craft better war machines.

Therefore, Soso sent the crow, Thomas, to fetch a halfling artificer, Artemis Teafellow. I actually pictured Soso dispatching Thomas before he started his hibernation in the fall, and Thomas had to fly out to the Parishes to track down Artemis. Eventually, Thomas found him, and Thomas had been hanging around Artemis in Ehrendvale for months. And when the time approached to leave, Thomas convinced Artemis to make a month-long trek into the mountains.

Soso’s plan is to gift all of his toys to Artemis before he leaves so that the League can’t find them.

There are some elements of this story that attempt to address the prompt:

• The cherry blossom trees are a direct reference to spring in Japan.

• The Zen-like koans offered by Thomas.

The origin of Soso comes from an artificer non-player character (NPC) that I created for a D&D campaign that I ran in 2022. This version of Soso is much older and varied a bit from my NPC, but the spirit is there.

At the end of the story, I reveal that Thomas the Crow is actually an extremely sophisticated toy. I pictured the automaton so perfect that its consciousness ascended to a higher understanding. Thus, Thomas speaks in Zen-like koans.

Unfortunately, as traveling with a Zen Master seemed uncomfortable, Soso erased his memory engrams to make Thomas a better traveling companion, resetting its hundreds of years of existence in a flash. I was accused of “killing” Thomas by a reader, but I perceived it as “resetting” Thomas. It’s just a toy, right? Meh, I’ll leave that one up to the reader. :)

What I loved hearing from readers is how much Soso reminded them of being a kid or playing with toys. Yay - it totally makes my day - that’s exactly what I want to hear! That’s the whole concept for Artemis.

Soso is Artemis’ origin story and attempts to explain why he has so many completed automatons and his fascination with toys. Artemis will gather up all of Soso’s toys and notes and take them to Ehrendvale in the Aevalorn Parishes. Foiled, the League will show up at Soso’s place to find nothing of value and eventually learn where the toys went, putting a target on his back! Uh-oh.

If you’re curious, I’ve drafted an outline of Artemis’ first novella, and we’ll see him again maybe eight months after Soso. I hope to have that project finished before fall 2023! Woot!

Who is Artemis Teafellow?

Artemis “Arty” Teafellow is a young Halfling Artificer who uses his tinkering skills to create and repair toys.

I picture him as having brass goggles atop a mess of walnut brown hair, a red scarf, a waistcoat, and a blue buccaneer jacket.

I originally wrote Artemis in the story Soso in March 2023. In that story, the great toymaker, Soso the Tortle, gave Arty a cache of complicated clockwork toys so he could keep them out of the hands of a mysterious organization called The League. Using Soso’s inventions, Arty explores and gets involved in things he really shouldn’t be getting into.

Arty is a young halfling with little life experience. He is fascinated by the magic of clockwork. I picture him as kind-hearted but naive, seeing the world as a kind of machine that operates off predictable rules. It doesn’t, of course, and he’s often flat-footed, making wrong assumptions.

His stories will involve steampunk and artificer (inventor) themes, dashed with maybe a little bit of Jules Verne, with a distant antagonist, The League, and what they represent.

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Memories in Amber

Date: Friday, March 3, 2023

Competition: Australian Writer’s Center Furious Fiction

Max Words: 500

Criteria: Must include the concept of a CHAIR; the words ALBUM, BRIGHT, and CLICK; a character who has to make a CHOICE between two things.

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The fire raged to cast a hazy, bright orange hue into the midnight sky above the river gorge. Nearby stands of pine trees were consumed by licking columns of flame, creating an inferno that filled the air with a thick layer of black smoke, causing Gisela's raw throat to burn.

“Stay here, Erika!” Gisela screamed, throwing herself out of the Jeep. On the passenger-side seat, Jinx, Erika’s Maine Coon, hissed from her cat carrier, while from behind, a neighbor’s car ladened with suitcases and garbage bags of worldly possessions raced by.

“Mom! You can’t go in there!” Erika cried, grasping at her from the back seat.

“I said, stay here!” Gisela growled, slamming the Jeep’s door to rush toward the garage. Gisela could see the skeletons of homes engulfed in a blazing holocaust only six lots down.

Bursting in, her kitchen was pitch black, and she stumbled to spill a stack of cleaned dishes, sending them crashing to the floor.

Rushing into her living room, Gisela frantically shoved rows of books from their shelving to grasp her grandmother’s album. It was a massive tome, bound in Moroccan leather and stitched with hemp cord, and weighed over fifty pounds. The woman had fled Konigsberg in January 1945, and its contents contained a century of family pictures and relics.

The heavy smoke suffocated and burned Gisela’s lungs. Gisela wheezed, struggling to breathe; she keeled in a deep cough, bracing her arm against the bookshelf. Recovering, she cradled the bulky album and lumbered to her bedroom. Throwing the album onto the bed, she rifled through her jewelry collection.

Glancing through the window, she saw the rooves of her neighbor’s on fire and the blustering, roiling wind kicking up a storm of debris and embers. Coughing, gasping for air, Gisela grunted and shoved her jewelry cabinet to the floor to tear open a dresser and rummage through its contents.

When her fingers felt the tiny shards, she grasped the necklace just a thunderous crash brought a flaming beam onto her bed. Fumes and hot ash burned Gisela’s eyes, and, shielding her head from the heat, she saw the ceiling was caving. Lunging for the book, she painfully recoiled; her fingertips burned as she reached for the album. Coughing into the crook of her elbow, Gisela turned and fled to exit her home through the front door.

Dashing to the Jeep, she swung the driver door open and dove inside.

“Here,” Gisela coughed, tossing the necklace at Erika.

“Mom?!” Erika asked, puzzled, examining the necklace. “Why?”

Clicking her seatbelt, she threw the vehicle into reverse and sped out of the driveway. Jostled, Jinx growled.

“She made it from amber found on the shores of the Baltic Sea after she left Konigsberg,” Gisela barked, throwing the Jeep into drive. Gritting her teeth, she spat, “She survived by fleeing the Russian army. I’ll be damned if it won’t survive this.”

And slamming her foot to the floor, the Jeep peeled away on the road.

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Author’s Note: The Magnificent Maron Maloney

Over the last week, I wrote a 12k-word novelette responding to four Reedsy prompts, all about cats. I’d wanted to write a cross-posted story across their prompts for a while, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to bring it up.

The story’s origins come from a 2017 D&D campaign where I created a showman villain that went about the countryside transforming children into animals. As the animals with the intellect of children were easier to control than regular animals, he could train them without a great deal of hassle. Eventually, the players would catch on to the ruse and need to fight Maron to free the children.

When I originally wrote him, I imagined him as something akin to the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In this retelling, he’s an archetypal villain, even with the waxed handlebar mustache. He’d go around to various towns and small villages, lure children to his cart of splendors, and feed them a potion that’d turn them into an animal - the first animal that came to mind when they sipped the potion. That’s pretty much who he is here, too, except in this story, he indirectly captures children and directly transforms an adult drunkard.

I think of him as a failed alchemist and a mediocre wizard. The one thing he could make well was something like a permanent polymorph potion, and the spells he had were primarily defensive spells; Gaseous Form, Expeditious Retreat, and so on. The idea was to make him slippery and difficult to pin down during gameplay. When he escaped the party's clutches, he’d no sooner show up again in another town, and the party would have to try and capture him again. There were at least three separate incidents where the party ran into him before actually killing him.

In this story, Maron’s motivations are unclear, but he’s foiled by Benzie Fernbottom, a character I introduced A Thyme of Trouble as a side-kick to Elina Hogsbreath. That tradition continues in this work where Benzie works for Elina at the Swindle & Swine and discovers something completely wrong with Maron’s animals. Benzie tries to tell people about it, notably Elina, but he’s dismissed, mostly because people are too busy and enamored with Maron. Luckily, Elina provides some kitchen magic to help reveal the truth, and combat scenes are led by Kindle Muckwalker.

This was Kindle’s first written fight scene. I imagine Kindle as a haggard, blunt halfling, a bit like Norman Reedus’ Daryl Dixon of The Walking Dead. Complementing him was a druid named Ginny Greenhill, a D&D character I made for a quick campaign at an RPG con in 2018. I saw Ginny and Kindle working together as a team, he being the muscle and she providing support. I think it played well given the word constraints, but I would like to draw out the conflict to add more richness in later editions of the story.

At the end of the story, I have Maron’s psyche consumed by a flumph, for I saw the flumph as really humoring Maron and taking advantage of his wagon to see the world outside of the Underdark. I really like the idea of a spooky visage of Maron Maloney with this tentacled creature with eye stalks sitting atop his head, wandering the dark forest, essentially sightseeing on top of a mental zombie.

The flumph is an imaginative creature and nearly a joke in D&D as a whole. I saw the flumph as an opportunity to suggest that it was Maron’s first attraction, his only real animal, and when it didn’t draw the crowds, he added children transformed into animals. The flumph uses Maron as much as Maron uses it so that it can feed on emotion and explore the world. But it’s also a wonderous possibility, a weird unbelievable thing that we want to touch, and it kind of speaks to the premise of the story. In the end, it wanders, traveling the world in wonder, seeing things for the first time. Do you remember what that was like?

A big part of this story is the power of imagination and how, as working adults, we’re often caught up in the moment and we aren’t open to possibilities. Benzie believes the animals are more than what they seem and senses a danger, yet his intuitive ideas are ignored, risking everything. Kids are like that. They see something at the moment and bring our attention to it, but we’re quick to dismiss them. If halflings are analogous to children, then Benzie is our 7-year-old, tugging at our pants, trying to get us to pay attention to what they’re experiencing.

At the end of the story, I make some big reveals about transformed people, and I specifically carved out Kimchi, an orange cat that was the favorite of Maron Maloney’s. First, I wanted to instill a wonder of who she was and where did she go. Second, I wanted to keep the character for myself; the idea of a sentient cat roaming around the Swindle & Swine causing grief for Elina was just too good to pass up.

The commercial re-write of the story will likely span 20k+ words and include more depth into the characters and the events. There was only so much I could put on the page with a 3,000-word limitation.

The story is a cautionary tale: we ignore our intuition and our imagination at our peril. If we stay too rooted in our working world and fail to listen to our hearts, then we’ll end up in a place we don’t want to be. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it an hope that I didn’t piss off the Reedsy judges for cross-posting as 12k-word story. :)

As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking around.

R

Author’s Note: Return to Me

This week, I wrote a response to a Reedsy Weekly short story competition entitled Return to Me where the prompt read:

“Write a story within a story within a ...”

At first, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t very enamored with the concept. I had no real experience writing Matryoshka-like, nested stories, and the prompt grained against my brand. I feel my style is more direct, opting toward linear narratives that can be easily consumed and digested. I hate twisting up a story like a pretzel because it meets an artistic aesthetic. Why make something more convoluted than it had to be?

Further, I didn’t feel I could write a compelling nested story in under 3,000 words. My usual model for a story this size would be three acts in 1,000-word blocks, but this story called for maybe twice the number of acts and quick transitions between scenes. I had to insert a device to transition the reader between scenes without disrupting the flow of the story.

On the one hand, I was turned off by the prompt, thinking it’d be too much work for the reward. Yet on another, it was a cool technical challenge from an accomplished short story author, Erik Harper Klass. Thinking on it, if I were taking a creative writing course, would I turn down the opportunity to try a new technique? Nah! I’d try to do the work. So I hopped to it.

Researching these types of stories, I decided on the wolfhound as a transitionary device for the reader. When the wolfhound appeared in the narrative, I signaled that we had moved on to another scene.

The beginning of the story is actually four segments in. We encounter my antagonist, Rof Mok, attending a funeral service for a fallen soldier, Wen Fak. Before that, we met Rof as a desperate thief, looting a grave near the Temple of Silvanus in Mumling. Rof Mok sins, stealing from the dead, and is rewarded by encountering the wolfhound.

The hound is a grim - an omen - that conveys a curse. Throughout the story, the grim haunts Rof Mok, driving him mad and to a point where suicide becomes his only option to escape it, taking us right back to the opening scene with Bartram.

Grims are old folklore. Grims are guardians and defend a church from those who’d commit sacrilege against it; they often take the form of black dogs. In the past, black dogs were even buried under the cornerstone of a church so that their spirit would guard the grounds. I took some license with the legend conveying a curse that followed Rof Mok around.

The nested story needed a more sympathetic/empathetic flavor to contrast against the cautionary, spooky folklore. I used the trope of a reflecting widow to weave the second story in. Reflecting on a story allowed me to stay in the past and build a foundation for Sae Fak’s backstory. I wanted to get the reader to like Wen Fak and feel sadness/empathy for Sae so that returning the ring to Wen meant something to the reader.

So what I wanted from the story was a little sweet and sour: a love story nested within a darker, more ominous one. When I read this story aloud to my beta team, I found that everyone would get really tuned in during the love story and brace for the ending. The circular movements of the story with its transitions also forced me to pause a little while reading it, and I felt it took longer to read. A more winding trail, I think, rather than a direct route, and the mind seemed to play with it well.

Thinking about transitions in that way was, in itself, a good experience and another tool in my writer’s kit. I really liked how the story turned out. I’ll definitely use it again. Bartram Humblefoot played a good protagonist to my villain and fit right in with Wen Fak’s story.

In this story, I mention that Bartram’s 66 years old, and I foresee this story taking place a few years earlier than The Murkwode Reaving.

Some “Behind Baseball” Details:

1. Wen Fak is actually the name of a Mumling NPC Fighter used in my D&D campaign. The original Wen Fak was an 80-year-old veteran that kept rolling nat-20’s and saving the party’s bacon. He was truly an awesome NPC. Wen Fak eventually died, eaten by a giant frog; I didn’t want to have to explain giant frogs in this story, and comedy wasn’t what I was going for, so I went with goblins. After I wrote the story, I shared it with all my players. They loved it and thought it was a fitting tribute.

2. I was going to write a grim into The Grotesque of Silvanus when I prepared its commercial version. That story also takes place at the same temple. I probably still will.

3. Mumling is mentioned in several of my works but most notably in The Murkwode Reaving. Bartram is a military commander for a Gaelwyn (human) city-state - Mumling - and the contention between his role as an officer and his religious calling is explored in that work.

4. In the story, I mention Brigantia, and in The Blood of the Catacomb Captive, I explored Brigantia’s wealth inequality due to its silver mines.

As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking around.

R

Who is Godwick Emberfoot

Godwick Emberfoot is a Halfling Warlock enslaved to the Archfae Aurusel, the Great Gardener.

There’s a lot to parse in that sentence. A warlock is a person who has made a pact with an otherworldly being. The magic he wields is gifted by their power. His pact is one of the chain: he’s subservient to his patron and soul-slaved. When I describe Godwick, he’s shackled at his wrists with a chain that runs between them.

His patron is the Archfae Aurusel. An Archfae is a powerful creature with the influence, understanding, and power to bend the Faewild to its will. The Faewild is a parallel plane where the fae live, typified by magic, chaos, and change. Aurusel maintains a garden in the Faewild and is a powerful creature in his own right.

Godwick is in possession of a magic item that I call a patchwork cloak. It’s nothing special - I imagine it as a dingy patchwork quilt made into a cloak with a hood. Its special power, though, allows Godwick to plane shift, to move between different planes of existence at will.

I see Godwick as a haggard soul teetering on the edge of sanity. He somehow came in possession of the patchwork cloak and wandered into Aurusel’s garden in the Faewild. He wasn’t outright destroyed, but rather enslaved, for Aurusel has work for a plane-shifting halfling. Being enslaved by a powerful otherworldly force and bouncing around between planes of existence rattles the mind, and his is stretched too thin.

Godwick’s face is marred with deep wrinkles and crevices, sullen eyes, and weathered skin. Inky-black, greasy hair, that runs to his back. His use of pact magic wears on his body. I perceive some of his halflingness as eroded in some way.

A part of Godwick’s pact magic allows him to find a familiar, a magicked spiritual companion. Godwick’s familiar is the pseudodragon Greymalken. Greymalken is a twist on Shakespeare’s Graymalkin, an old female cat, a witch’s familiar, mentioned in the opening of Macbeth.

The first story I wrote for Godwick was his connecting origin story to Greymalken entitled Bargains with Dragons.

Godwick is my answer to several characters that I’ve enjoyed in fantasy and science fiction. He wears a multicolored patchwork cloak. This is a reference to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and a comic book character named Shade the Changing Man. He’s also, absolutely, a John Constantine type of character.

His stories will be fantastical, traveling to strange places, and meeting otherworldly creatures in the Faewild.

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What is the Difference Between the Commercial and Non-Commercial Versions of my Work?

I wanted to take a moment to explain the difference between my commercial work and my non-commercial work.

I use Inkitt, Reedsy, and other sites as a staging area for my draft work and serialized fiction. When I post something there, it’s usually a draft and isn’t entirely cleaned up. I put it on these sites to gain visibility and get feedback from my beta readers.

I’ll revise the work until I feel like it’s reasonably presentable and then close the project out on the non-commercial site. And I leave it there so I can attract new readers who might be interested in my work.

Meanwhile, if I decide to take a project through a commercial channel (Apple Books, Amazon Books, and Google Books), I’ll walk through another round of editing to clean it up and make it suitable for people paying for something.

I’ll also usually change or extend the work to differentiate it from the non-commercial. I’ll often revise the work for clarity, add more content to the story, and change the ending somehow.

The idea is to, chiefly, spread the good word about halflings and Aevalorn Tales. I’d love to have everyone in the world reading my fun stories about halflings.

And so for those with the means and who would like to support me, I offer my commercial work.

A couple of thoughts here:

1. I’ll never be Stephen King. I can’t write a single title and have millions of people buy it. So I can’t write a single book and call it good. I have to write a lot to even be seen.
   

2. I’ll never retire from my writing. I do this for fun. If people pick up my commercial work, it’s like pennies were thrown into my busking hat.
   

3. I want everyone to read my stuff. Really, it’s true, and I don’t want money to be an obstacle. I mean, here, have a book. That’s what I’m all about.

Plus, I always offer my commercial work through raw files available for cheap-cheap-cheap on the website.

Anyway, there we go, and thanks for reading!

R

Author’s Notes: The Garden of Reflection

I wrote this story in response to a Reedsy prompt concerning a character that wants to disappear and does.

I wanted to draw from the idea when a person contracts a chronic disease or a terminal illness, how they might feel like a burden or inconvenience to others - how they might want to disappear.

My first thought was to make a ghost story with my bard character, Joliver Barleywood. As I started outlining, I didn’t want to trivialize the subject and felt I needed to go deeper. Jayleigh Warmhollow was a better fit; she’s my character for more complex and emotional themes.

I thought the gorgon slant was a perfect fit. It’s difficult to imagine a life where you couldn’t interact with people you love without the risk of “infecting” them.

The entry into the story takes the reader into an aftermath. The villagers tried to burn their town to destroy Uriah. The mood is deliberately bleak and sullen, and when we meet Jayleigh, she’s prepared for combat, to do whatever is necessary to restore a balance to nature.

Mythology isn’t kind to gorgons. We usually encounter them when they’re grown up, resentful, angry, and evil. They’re usually a protagonist who ends up losing their snake-ridden head. The reader’s rooting for it, of course, because we don’t want to see our brave protagonist turned to stone. That’s not how I wanted this story to end.

In this story, I wanted my reader to see Uriah as innocent: she was the victim of an unfortunate circumstance, a disease. She didn’t deserve to get her head stuffed in a bag. Instead, how can we treat someone like this with dignity?

Jayleigh wants to bargain with the gorgon and find an alternative to killing her. Like anyone who survives a chronic illness would tell you, living is harder than dying, so maybe, for some, death is a preferred option. Most in our society don’t have the option to die gracefully and on their own terms; ten states plus the DOC have “right-to-die” laws. In forty other states, the ideal value of life trumps the prolonged suffering of an individual, especially when it’d be more merciful to simply end it. When I have Jayleigh spin around and confront the townsfolk in this story, I’m really yelling at “people” who don’t have any say in Uriah’s suffering.

In the story, death always remained an option in the form of Jayleigh’s sickle. Scythes and sickles have a direct association with death, but it’s also a reference to a D&D constraint where druids can use limited forms of bladed weapons. A sickle is one.

That said, I wanted Uriah to have more options than death. Isolation is a common theme with gorgons given their curse, but I think it’s also something that the chronically ill experience. Some people withdraw from their social connections either through choice or circumstance. I felt that experience would imbitter Uriah and make her resentful; a life of loneliness was no life at all. I made a reference to Uriah as being a “baby gorgon”, like, she’s “young” and not set in her ways. Her mind hasn’t “eroded” into madness and she was still pliable. I think this is also true for people suffering from illness. Instilling hope is important to a treatment plan. Hope, in this case, was a life shared with other people, a community, that could accept her for what she was.

The Galeb Duhr is a race in D&D with a long history in the game. They’re neutral creatures and 5e even points out that they’re disposed to working with druids. Given their immunity to petrification and thousands of years of lifespan, I felt they’d make a suitable “family of choice” for a gorgon if she chose it. They offered a way out that we don’t see in mythology.

With Jayleigh’s mask, I deviated from D&D’s rules but I imagined it as something like a True Seeing spell woven into an ordinary mask. It was a convenient tool for both Jayleigh and Uriah.

I think the underpinning message is that all chronically ill have their own agency. As powerless as they might feel, they get to choose for themselves what they want out of the life they’re handed.