It was the first anniversay of my dad dying, earlier this week. I took some time off to think about a few things. I called my mother, who'd gone down to Sydney to stay with my brother for a fortnight. And I worked.

I feel like I've had a pretty poor time of it the last twelve months. The poor state of my bank balance would attest to that. For a long time last year I wasn't able to do much beyond drag myself through the week, stare at the screen a lot, and grind out the weekly columns. I rarely blogged. It felt like I got nowhere with any book writing.

It still feels that way. But I was talking with a friend last night and I realised I had actually written two manuscripts in the last year. The first drafts of THE CRUEL STARS and THE GOLDEN MINUTE. I'm still chipping the last couple of chapters out of the rock face of the latter, but I am close enough to imagine typing 'The End' in the next few days. (After which I'll put it out to my beta crew).

I'm also thinking of taking the Burger back to it's origins as a simple diary of each day's work, at least for a little while. It helps to track what you're doing and it'd take the pressure off feeling the need to (ugh) generate content.

Anyway, as I said, for those up for it, the new Smith and Cady will be available in beta next week. It's looking pretty good, but it always helps to have fresh pair of eyes look over it.

I've been meaning to spool up the Burger again, and have decided to run a few old bits from Alien Side Boob here this week as a subscriber drive, and a way of reminding myself to come here every day and fucking post something.

I had a Hell of a time of it last year, and the Burger suffered for it. I'm hoping and planning to be a lot more productive in 2018 and it'd be nice to get the clubhouse repainted and a couple of freshly stuffed beanbags here and there to spruce the place up.

Last week I submitted the first draft of THE CRUEL STARS to Random House, or Random Penguins as they now are, I guess. Or maybe Penguin House. This week, I'm having a planning session to lay out my deadlines and get all my various workflows in balance. Item one: take fewer media commissions, do more book writing.

I'm not sure yet how to program regular blogging time in the schedule, but that's part of what I need to work out.

I think I've figured out what I'm going to do with the Burger, for the next twelve months or so, anyway. I've been feeling guilty and anxious about the amount of time I'm not putting in here. So guilty and anxious that worrying about it has been taking up even more time and energy than simply posting would have.
It's all down to time and energy, and how much I don't have any more. Family commitments aside, without the safety net of big publisher advances I have to earn every dollar that comes in. The last 12 months have proven I can do that, but it's hard work. Good work, and fun, but hard. I'm looking at my whiteboard right now, where I have my major projects for the year listed. All of them 100 000 word novels.
The Cruel Stars.
World War 3.1
The Golden Minute. (The sequel to A Girl in Time).
Sleeper Agent. (A conventional thriller).
Stronghold. (Dave Hooper 4)
In addition to this, I have my remaining media commitments and my new investment in Alien Side Boob. That turns out to be a lot of work, writing a private column to a standard that people are willing to pay for. There's also the fanfic collections, a couple of collaborative projects I'd like to work on, and a screenplay for A Girl in Time.
It doesn't leave a lot of time left over from blogging. And yet I'm not willing to simply close down the Burger. As I explained in a comment in the entry below, I trust this place and the people here in a way that I don't trust, say, my 3000 closest friends on Facebook. I can put out a call for beta readers here and know that the manuscript isn't going to turn up on BitTorrent 24 hours later.
But I don't have time to run a full service blog any more. Not for the next 12 months anyway, while I get my indie publishing business up to full speed. Last year was just proving the concept.
So what I've decided to do is keep the Burger open, but basically as a link blog. Mondays Tuesdays and Fridays I'll put up a link to and an extract from whatever column I have written that day. That will mostly be it. I won't be writing book reviews or movie reviews or even personal entries unless something really strikes me. I just don't have time. As more of the fanfic entries come in, I will publish extracts from them. And as my own books come due for release, I'll drop sample chapters here, but also at Medium, FB etc.
That should be enough to keep the place ticking over, but not so time-consuming that I hesitate to even open the page.

I realised yesterday, with a strange, contrary mix of emotions, that I now have more people subscribed to my book club than Fairfax has journalists on its payroll. A lot more, actually. The latest round of layoffs, another 120 jobs to go out of an already shrunken newsroom would have landed as a heavy blow in Sydney and Melbourne. I have no idea what effect the cuts will have in Brisbane, but I can’t imagine we’ll dodge the bullet again. It’s not just the newsroom, of course, the freelance budget has also been slashed. You can expect a lot more opinion pieces on the op-ed page to be written by politicians, lobbyists and the various urgers and bagmen pimping for vested interests and what they used to call in the 1930s “the money power”.

My Saturday morning column in the Herald was cut two weeks ago, although there was no announcement made. Wendy Harmer spilled the beans when they gave her the arse as well. It was gratifying to be a trending topic for a couple of hours as readers vented their anger, and then moved on to the next outrage-of-the-moment. As the media world contracts, I can feel my own acceleration away from it gathering pace. This has been coming for years, and I’ve been preparing for it for a long while now, but of course doing everything it just the right moment is a matter of timing.

I sat down to do some schedule planning yesterday morning, before the Fairfax announcement, looking at which books would be finished when, and even more importantly at what point they might start turning a profit if they’re ever going to. It looks like Cairo should be ready for distribution to bookclub members by mid April. It’ll be free and exclusive at jbismymasternow.com before dropping into the online retailers. But it’s not really meant to make money directly, simply to drive subscriptions to that mailing list.

The first real pay day comes with the launch of the two Hooper ebooks, A Protocol for Monsters, and A Soul Full of Guns, most likely on May 30. Given the way ebook payments work, I’ll probably see a return from them in September. Before then, of course, I have to cover the costs of production from my own pocket. Each novella length title, averaging 30-35K words, costs about two grand to drop into the channel. Stronghold, the first full length novel I’ll publish myself will probably top out at $3K+.

I have no idea what happens next at Fairfax, or whether I’ll have any part to play in it but I’m pretty sure that ten years from now my media commitments will be zero.

That’s why I’m sucking up the pain of building an independent income stream through my own ebook line. It is painful and difficult to do while managing the collapsing business models of old school media and book publishing, but the prospects for turning it into a sustainable business are a lot better than simply sitting in place and wishing for the best.

I’ve been pondering where the Burger sits in all this. It doesn’t have the firepower of Twitter or Facebook for channelling traffic and generating sales, but it does have a role to play. It’s a kind of complicated role, actually. In one sense it’s a simply place to retreat, like the bar in Cheers where everybody knows your name. We have a lot of social capital invested here, a lot of trust built up. That’s why I’m comfortable calling for Beta readers here, for instance, but nowhere else. If I did the same thing anywhere but the Burger, I am certain the raw drafts of those ebooks would be in the wild within days.

The Burger also gives me somewhere to write things that need more than 140 characters, on topics that would make most readers outside this joint scratch their heads. The people who follow me in the wider realm of social media have no interest in discussing things like naval strategy or a submarine program – not unless it’s to complain about all the kindergartens you buy for the cost of a Collins boat.

Finally, the blog can and does work to build the mailing list and provide a place for me to sell books directly, or at least via associate links to collect a little extra cream off the cover price. I’m talking to Dan about redesigning the site to foreground this stuff in the near future. He’s done yeoman’s work in the background getting a store set up. I’m not ready to cut the ribbon yet but for anyone interested you can have a look here.

I probably shoudn't have done that. I probably should have written the second last chapter of Cairo instead. But they backed a truckload of money up to my door.

What could I do?

*tears our last of hair, rends sack cloth*

WHAT COULD I DOOOOO?

I'd been putting off a return to Facebook for a long time, but I'd known for at least a year I'd have to slink back there with my tail between my legs. It's the advertising. Increasingly online ads are served up by either the Book of Face, or el Goog, or nobody.

Building a mailing list, I had no choice. Facebook's creepy omniscience makes it too powerful to ignore. It is the stalker at all our windows.

Still, I can try to control things. I've set up an offical JB Books page where I wont be posting cat videos or personal info. It's all about the merch.

Go like the page. They tell me that's important.

I've been testing out the advertising back end, which is insanely powerful, but which has a bit of a learning curve. It's chewed up a couple of mornings now, putting me behind schedule with Cairo. I've got the Page working as I want now, however, and can get back to the book, which is two chapters from done.