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redbootsindoriath · 2 years ago

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Hi, Hwestalas from AO3 here! Earlier today, I happened to be thinking of Mablung’s lovely turquoise scale-freckles, and that set off a sudden explosion of curiosity about a half-dozen different details of your CoH Pirate AU. So I just had to ask…How did Túrin breathe while growing up in a mostly-undersea kingdom? Does he have some awesome magic way of breathing underwater, or did he just keep his nose and mouth above water the whole time? (I'll put the other questions in a new ask.)

Is the drawing where Mablung and Túrin seem to be arguing part of the scene from after he accidentally kills Saeros? The sarcastic look on Saeros’ face is so Saeros! And I love how Túrin is wearing an outfit that makes him look almost like a land-form merman! It sounds like the sort of thing he would do in his youth. Evidently he changed clothes later… but was that after he met the pirates, or before? Did they know he had been raised by mermen?

Oh, and if Beleg can get out of work by pretending to be dehydrated (I LOVE that comic!), can mer-people really get dehydrated or did he make up the entire concept? And does it play some role in his medical condition when Túrin finds him in the unfriendly clutches of his pirate crew? Anyway, thanks for all your drawings and fan-theories! I've had so much fun looking at this blog. Hope you're doing well!

Oh dude it's been forever since I had an excuse to think about any of my CoH AUs! This is very exciting. I actually already had the answers to most of those questions written down in a big master document. I'm going to put the answers under a cut here.

"How did Túrin breathe while growing up in a mostly-undersea kingdom? Does he have some awesome magic way of breathing underwater, or did he just keep his nose and mouth above water the whole time?" I cheated and stole the typical kissing-or-being-kissed-by-one-of-the-merfolk-grants-you-temporary-immunity-to-drowning explanation. This is why Túrin banished himself to above the water after the Saeros Incident™. Hard to keep living undersea when you keep having to come up for air every few minutes because you aren't associating with the seafolk anymore. In this AU I've decided that a kiss will grant you somewhere from a couple days to a week of underwater breathing; I haven't set an exact time limit yet. There are also a lot of air pockets within Menegroth, including many of the common areas. This is to allow the rare non-merfolk guest and/or prisoner to move about without having to be kissed every couple of days (since that could be a bit awkward for someone unaccustomed to the culture). And the rare non-merfolk prisoner would be easily contained if they were left without a kiss in air-pocket quarters separated from the surface by a mile of underwater corridors. Also, a kiss from a sea spirit (like Melian) earns you a slightly longer time span. So whenever Túrin is in Menegroth he probably gets his sea kisses from his foster mother rather than from one of the merfolk, but when he's out with the march-wardens he's stuck with having to get his kisses from them.

"Is the drawing where Mablung and Túrin seem to be arguing part of the scene from after he accidentally kills Saeros?" It's from that moment right after he attacked Saeros, so yes and no. "Then Túrin took up a drinking-vessel and cast it in Saeros' face, and he fell backward with great hurt; and Túrin drew his sword and would have run at him, but Mablung restrained him." So Saeros is still alive at this point, but not for long.

"The sarcastic look on Saeros’ face is so Saeros!" Thanks! :-)

"And I love how Túrin is wearing an outfit that makes him look almost like a land-form merman! It sounds like the sort of thing he would do in his youth." Yes, he was given clothes made of scales that would last longer underwater than other kinds of cloth. It has the side benefit of keeping him from standing out so much from the merfolk appearance-wise.

"Evidently he changed clothes later… but was that after he met the pirates, or before? Did they know he had been raised by mermen?" I imagine he changed clothes as soon as he reached land, although that's one section of the AU that I haven't entirely settled on yet. But since in canon the Gaurwaith didn't know where he'd come from, I guess it would be best to leave their pirate counterparts ignorant as well. So the scale cloth will have to go; maybe he raided a clothesline in some human shoreline village before meeting the pirates. All the crew knows is that "Neithan" is an eerily good swimmer, especially when fully underwater, and they're all too afraid of him to ask him why.

"Oh, and if Beleg can get out of work by pretending to be dehydrated (I LOVE that comic!), can mer-people really get dehydrated or did he make up the entire concept?" This is 100% a thing that can happen. Merfolk die if they don't have access to any water for more than a couple of days. Heck, even real-world humans die after three days without access to water. The difference is that merfolk need to be able to get the water on their body in addition to drinking it. The quickest and healthiest solution for a mostly-land-dwelling merman or mermaid is the occasional full-body submersion (or, in a pinch, standing out in the rain for a while) to keep from literally drying out. Prisoners in Angband are given just enough water to keep them barely alive but constantly miserable. There are a lot of warning signs before they die, like the scales getting dull, the merman or mermaid getting progressively weaker and having trouble monitoring their method of breathing, and of course eventually unconsciousness.

"And does it play some role in his medical condition when Túrin finds him in the unfriendly clutches of his pirate crew?" Absolutely yes. It always bothered me that Tolkien told us that elves can go for a very long time without food or water, and then almost killed one of the oldest and strongest elves by tying him to a tree for a couple of days. I'm sure there's an explanation but it still seems inconsistent; so I "fixed" that in this version by having the pirates tie him to the mast and then ignore him. Algund "accidentally" spills a bucket of water on deck next to the mast on the second day, which is the main reason Beleg is able to make a quick and full recovery after Túrin gets back (and also the reason that any of the pirates are still alive five minutes after Túrin gets back).

Thank you so much for asking about this AU! It's still one of my favorites. Here's Túrin rescuing Beleg from the pirates except it's a meme.

#the man the myth the legends #three shinies #everyone deserved better except mîm #canon is great and all but what if #he's a pirate #my trash #sometimes i overthink stuff #don't mind me #yo somebody talked to me #/end classification tags #okay so there are a good number of reasons i've not been very active lately #but one of the dumber ones is i reeeeaaaaaally don't like the changes made to both the app and the browser version of tumblr #like what #all my formatting #i try to be so consistent #and tumblr is MOCKING ME #i don't want merch #i don't want a checkmark #i don't want to do tumblr live #i just want my curly quotes back :-(#anyway there are other reasons i've been so inactive lately but we don't need to get into them right now because this post is about pirates #and none of the reasons are about pirates #and here's the obligatory ''sorry i'm out of practice with art'' tag

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not-poignant · 5 months ago

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Hi Pia

Feel free to ignore if this is unwelcome, but have you ever thought about publishing traditionally to sublimate your income and draw in new readers? I know you've self published two books already and that you didn't feel like they did very well, but maybe the experience would be different if someone else was in charge of marketing and all the other business stuff?

Obviously everyone's experience is different but as an author myself who's published both trad and self, traditional publishing has been a completely different experience and has allowed me to focus more on writing because I'm not the one responsible for advertising/marketing/financing anymore.

There are a ton of literary agents nowadays that want to represent diverse and lgbtqia+ fiction, some of them even in Australia.

Websites like Reedsy, AgentQuery and Jerichowriters have extensive directories to find literary agents.

(This is lengthy folks so I'm putting the other two parts (and my response) under a read more! Also putting it under a read more so the anon can skip my response since it's very 'here's all the reasons I can't do this' and they just might not want to read that, lmao)

(continued -> )

Trad publishing houses have better resources for marketing and helping authors get more attention than any self publishing website could.

Obviously most authors, unless they're really prolific, don't get a huge advance (the average is between $1000 - $5000) but getting your foot in the door or on the traditional publishing "ladder' so to speak can have a huge benefit for your serials. Because it gives you more exposure. Plus it's in the agent's best interest to find a publishing house that accepts stories that contain darker themes and negotiate the best deal for you.

For some reason places like Amazon and the like accept and keep up more "dark" books that are traditionally published than they do with self pub ones. Maybe because they have more respect or leniency for publishing houses? I have no idea. But you could use this to your advantage. I think I remember you mentioning that writing novels felt quite isolating to you? But you already have 2 completed novels (3 if you count the fae one) that you could potentially revisit or rewrite to your liking and get them represented by agents.

You already have a loyal readership and that's very attractive to trad pub houses and agents.

As well as trad publishing, you could also make s simple website that doesn't require much maintenance. It could be just a landing page that says something about you and then has links to your tumblr and patreon where you're more active. That way you increase the chances of getting your serials found by additional readers and also come across looking more "professional". Not that you're not professional now. You are and I admire you greatly, but the unfortunate reality is a lot of people still judge by appearances and some will be more drawn to an author's website than a tumblr page, at least at first. So I think having a simple landing page would open up another door for you to benefit from.

Trad publishing is work but definitely not as much as self publishing, and you can continue on with your serials. Getting an agent can be time consuming but I personally believe the pros outweigh the cons and I also believe that your stories would be a huge treasure to the growing lgbtqia+ market. Seriously there needs to be more!

These are just suggestions and thoughts and like I said before, feel free to ignore. But I know you've mentioned wanting to grow your career in the past and I genuinely believe you can do so with some of these pathways.

Okay, my response. Posting this because firstly I think the suggestions could work very well for other authors reading this! And I hope they take the advice to note, and secondly because I haven't talked about this for a hot minute so let's talk about it again.

So the TL;DR is yes I have considered traditional publishing. I have actually been traditionally published in short stories, poetry, and also had my art published on covers and re: interior illustrations. But my Fae Tales works got soundly rejected when I sent them to publishing houses that were doing open calls for that sort of material. I've never heard back from an agent and I never expect to, heh.

Now for a bit more detail

I have been traditionally published before (it's how I got my writing out there long before I ever wrote serials), and yes, I have approached publishers with my writing since then. In fact Tradewinds was written for the traditional publishing market, and it got soundly rejected, and then shelved. The reasons it was rejected ran the gamut from 'I don't like that these fae eat humans no one is going to relate to these people' (while the editor then went on to publish vampire books idk) to 'There's too much worldbuilding you can't expect readers to keep up with this' to 'Your stories are too long, no one wants to read characters talking all the time.'

Meanwhile in my online serials I was getting feedback like 'my favourite chapters are the ones where the characters just sit in a room and talk' lol.

The traditional publishing world is also not quite as utopian for most authors as you make it seem. I'm friends with a lot of authors who are traditionally published because that's the world I came from, and unless they're solely in KU and doing generic rapid release formula romances, none of them are making that much money. Certainly not enough to live off. It may have been that you were very fortunate, anon, but I know hundreds more traditionally published authors that left trad pub to make money, and I know about 5 in trad pub personally who are making enough to live off of.

Only one of those is really writing what she truly loves to write, and even then, publishing houses have refused to commit to her entire fantasy series (and she's regularly in 'Top 10/20 Women Fantasy Authors in the World' lists) and forced her to finish the series prematurely. Something I never ever have to worry about in self pub.

The reality is that in trad pub these days, you're still in charge of most of your marketing unless you're one of the big earners for the publishing house. In fact I'd be expected to keep even more of a social media and marketing presence than I do now. I don't do almost any of the things you're supposed to do as an author in marketing to be appealing. I don't have a Facebook author account. I don't have an Instagram author account. I don't maintain or regularly send out newsletters (which automatically puts me in the like 0.05% of authors who make money doing this lmao).

I don't know if you ever have looked that closely into what m/m publishing houses expect from most of their authors, but the newsletter swaps, cover releases, review circuits, interview circuits and more are fucking grueling. We're expected to be responsible for our advertising and our marketing to a fairly massive degree. Some traditionally published in m/m still have to pay for their release blitzes out of pocket. These publishing houses, by and large, do not offer advances. You say most authors don't get large advances. I don't think most authors in this arena get offered advances at all unless they're somehow miraculously acquired by a Big 4.

We're expected to have an already established social media presence because of that (that's why it's so appealing to publishers that we have social media presences already, anon, so we can market, they can save money, and we still see only a minimal cut from the royalties).

And you still have to focus on your finances, because publishing houses like Dreamspinner straight up didn't pay a whole bunch of authors for so long they destroyed careers. They still haven't paid some of their authors. And they're still running a business and people still buy their books.

Trad publishing houses have better resources for marketing and helping authors get more attention than any self publishing website could.

This is true if a) they're a big publishing house and not an indie publisher of which most LGBTQIA+ publishing houses are and b) they're willing to use them on you.

The authors that make the most money get the most resources. If they believe you're going to earn back your advance and move thousands or tens of thousands of units per book, then yes, you will get those resources.

I have been told so many times now - even from friends who run publishing houses, including one who works at HarperCollins - that my work will never be mainstream enough to have broad appeal. They literally told me not to keep trying re: trad pub, because that was my dream for a long time. These folks have given me rock solid advice in the past, it's one of the reasons I'm doing so well now via Patreon + Ream. But they were like (paraphrasing) 'you don't write 60-80k romances and you don't want to and that's not your strength anyway, you're multi-genre which makes you hard to market, you write psychological and literary trauma recovery which is hard to market, you write character studies which are hard to market, publishing houses often don't commit to series anymore if the first two don't move units and if they pulled the plug you'd be contractually obliged to never finish that series until your contract was up.' I could go on, but it was like yeah...actually. Fair.

They do, but most publishing houses want very formulaic dark romance which is not what I write.

I have a 300k omegaverse slowburn that still hasn't had any penetrative sex in it, anon. Publishing houses don't want that. They don't expect anyone will wait 4 full length novels to get to literally a single penetrative sex scene.

But you already have 2 completed novels (3 if you count the fae one) that you could potentially revisit or rewrite to your liking and get them represented by agents.

If I rewrote them to my liking, trad pub wouldn't want them. They'd be too long! I think agents etc. take one look at me and go 'oh god, no thank you!' I'm not an easy sell, by any means.

Plus I'm very e.e about all of that with the knowledge that they then give me only about 10-15% of the royalties on the sales, vs. self-pub where I get around 70%, or subscription where I around 80% of it. When someone subscribes to me, they don't have to worry about 85-90% of their subscription fee going to a publishing house. I don't have to think about how many thousands and thousands of books I'd have to sell to make the same amount that I do now via subscription.

As well as trad publishing, you could also make s simple website that doesn't require much maintenance.

If it was that simple, I'd be doing it. I don't mean this in a facetious way, I mean it in a: I've made a lot of websites, in fact I run one at the moment not connected to my writing (I've been running it for so long it's now in its 20s and can probably has a driver's license). I find it so tedious that I barely remember to check in on it. But forgetting about it means there's always maintenance to keep up with when I get back to it.

Running websites is simpler than it used to be, but it's still not simple. There's hosting and hosting costs, there's server changes, there's back-end maintenance etc. I'm considering it for down the track, but there's a reason I decided to go the route of Patreon over my own site. There are authors (like Christopher Hopper) who actually do subscription through their own domain, but it's a lot of work.

Even placeholder sites are still work. They need updating, details change, story titles changing etc. Maintaining my Patreon + Ream About pages is enough, they're always both a little out of date, lol.

Not that you're not professional now.

Oh no, I mean from a 'traditional publisher looking at me to see what kind of candidate I am' I'm really not though. Like I said, I don't have the newsletter (100 subscribers who get one newsletter a year is not really a newsletter), I don't have the Facebook/Tiktok/Insta/Twitter/Bluesky/Threads accounts, etc. I write multi-genre across multiple steam levels, and I'm allergic to writing serials shorter than 150k. One of my best performing original serials was an 800k contemporary story with no sex in it but a lot of BDSM. It can't be marketed as clean or sweet, it's not high steam, an entire chapter is 'boy saves snail from rain.' Also he was cruel to animals, so not exactly what I'd call a sympathetic main.

And yet that story did so well for me via Patreon + Ream, because people want the kinds of stories that publishing houses generally don't want and I happen to be writing them.

Anon I just literally do not believe an agent would want to represent me. I have 0% belief in that. Not from a self-deprecating angle but from a 'I am not a good bet for the trad market' perspective. From a 'I have so many friends who are trad pubbed authors who stare at me like I'm insane for writing serials as long as I do' perspective. From a 'professionals in the industry have told me it's amazing I'm doing so well in serials because there's no way they'd take a risk on what I'm doing' perspective. From a 'just because it's queer and diverse doesn't mean it hits literally any other thing a trad pub is looking for' perspective. I've been doing this for 10 years. There are agents who represent work similar to mine who know what I'm doing and wouldn't touch me with a ten foot pole. They're not missing out on a trick, they know I'm not broad appeal, and they're right.

Also the only way I'd have the energy to manage trad pub is by quitting serials. And honestly, I never found trad pub all that much fun while I was doing it for non-novel stuff. It was fine, and it is nice to have my stuff out there, but it was a ton of admin and a lot of going back and forth between people who really only care about marketing a product, and that's great and what they excel at! But I'm too disabled to turn this job into something crushing just to potentially make more money, I'd rather just quit and go back onto a full Disability Pension. I can't see any way I still get to write the stories I want to write, in the way that I write them, and be remotely appealing to a single reputable trad pub or agent.

Also *gestures to everything in this article*

#asks and answers #pia on writing #pia on publishing #i appreciate your thoughts anon #and i'm so happy it's working out well for you #and that you're able to live off what you're doing #you are one of the rare outliers in the world of publishing #and i truly wish you all the success in the world #i do think a lot of your advice will go to help a lot of writers who sometimes check in #at my tumblr #but yeah no i don't even write that much 'dark' stuff in the classic sense #of what trad pub wants #right now the publishing world that i'm adjacent to #seems to view me as some kind of oddity #'i don't know how he's making an income off all this stuff that we know would never work for us'#'how odd and strange'#'best leave him alone'#most authors are thankfully not doing what i'm doing #in which case yes they should absolutely consider agent representation #and looking into trad pub #unfortunately i'm not like a CS Pacat #even though she's a role model for me #and when i tried to write for the more traditional market #which was perth shifters #i honestly really struggled

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