I happen to be a voracious reader, as I believe most authors are. While it’s true that my main purpose in reading is for the sheer joy of it, I also learn a lot from other writers. It’s one thing to be able to point to a book and express your appreciation of it; it’s another thing, however, to break it down and be able to analyze the specific things about it that worked so well. The ability to analyze technique is important for any aspiring storytelling.

Over the years, no author has taught me more than George R.R. Martin, through A Song of Ice and Fire. His books are brilliantly conceived and executed on every level. Praise for them is almost universal.

One of the many things I’ve learned from Martin is the art of juggling multiple characters and points of view. The means by which he intertwines his stories requires a deft hand, and over the years I’ve taken note of how he does it. One such method I’ve observed is that even when his characters are divided by entire continents, his novels are held together by powerful overarching themes.

And yet not all readers agree that Martin has successfully managed this aspect of storytelling in the two most recent volumes in his series. After bringing his third novel to the edge of a precipice, his fourth novel has been accused by many fans of being a letdown. Boring. Filler. In fact, if you were to poll Martin’s fanbase, you would probably find that a majority holds this opinion.

So, what happened?

This summer, I dove into a reread of the series. As I was coming to the concluding pages of that dramatic third novel, I came across this, a proposal for combining the fourth and fifth novels of Martin’s series and reading them concurrent with each other. The two books take place at the same time, each of them featuring different sets of characters but both proceeding as direct sequels to Book 3.

I decided to alter my reading plan. Instead of tackling the books separately, I decided to intermix them. Let me just say that my reading experience was educational. In a hundred little ways, it becomes clear that these two books and their disparate storylines were never meant to be disparate at all. They are thematically linked. They play off each other in surprising ways. They inform each other. Together, they form one of the best epic fantasy novels I’ve ever read; separately, they’re serviceable parts of a yet-incomplete whole. In short, there’s nothing boring about them.

To me, this serves as an illustration of the importance of stories complementing each other. Intertwining stories and character arcs is a delicate, sophisticated business, and when you mess with this balance the overall work suffers in ways that can be complicated to pinpoint. A great story is the result of many interlocking pieces.

My current work in progress has six viewpoint characters spread across three or four disparate plotlines (depending on how you count it). In order to shrink my novel to a more manageable length, it was suggested to me that I could extract several storylines and split them into different volumes. I thought about this, then divided the chapters, reorganized the material, and found that while the separate storylines were complete in and of themselves, they weren’t nearly as strong as when taken together.

Incidentally, if you feel the individual storylines in your work in progress could stand on their own two feet without the support of the larger volume, you may want to ask yourself whether or not these storylines are as strong as they could be. Perhaps the more interdependent and symbiotic the various aspects of a novel are, the better. In the future, I know I’ll be using the so-called Martin Effect as a gauge.

One of the things I love about the Fictorians blog is that it offers publishing insights from every possible point of view. Still unpublished and looking for a way to break in? We’ve got you covered. Are you self-published and looking for help marketing and promoting your book? We’ve got a bunch of those. Traditionally published superstars? Check! A big goal of ours is to provide both information and inspiration for writers wherever they are on the publishing track.

Looking back over the last month of posts, I find myself humbled at how far I still have to go and encouraged that there are so many possibilities. Sometimes the publishing world can seem so daunting that it’s hard to keep going, to keep dreaming, but upon honest reflection there’s a lot of really good news mixed in with the bad; the future of publishing is brimming with promise. When I take stock, I realize that there are so many ways to capitalize. The deck may not be stacked in everyone’s favor, but when is it ever? Everyone has to face a tough uphill climb.

As fellow Fictorian Brandon Lindsay wrote on Monday, the statistics make the publishing forecast look more ominous than it really is. If it’s true that the majority of authors are going to fall on their faces, there are probably some factors playing into their failure that you can avoid.

The first factor is quality-and with the market overly flooded (the cloud), good quality is a rarer commodity than ever (silver lining). Whether you’re a prodigious talent or you dedicate yourself to learning the craft, you have a good shot of catching someone’s eye down the road; keep at it and hard work pays off. A platitude? Well, sure. But all the pros, every single one of them, agree on that score, so it has to be more than a mere platitude.

The second factor is ingenuity and perseverance. If you write a lot, constantly improving yourself and building your body of work in anticipation of a future payoff, you’re likely to be rewarded. If you write sparingly and wait around for a lucky break, chances are it’ll never come. Great success comes to those who pursue it the most doggedly. To me, it’s almost an issue of magnetism. I acknowledge that success isn’t inevitable (the world just doesn’t work like that), but it’s more than a long shot if you’re doing everything you can to secure it. Most of the pros I’ve met agree on that one, too.

And who am I to argue with the pros?

When it comes right down to it, of all the possible perspectives I could take on writing and publishing, the rosiest is the pro perspective. They’ve already made it, so they can look back at their careers knowing that all its various components ended in success. If you know that your story ends with success, that makes success inevitable. Well, I’m not there yet, but just for a minute let’s pretend that I am; for now, I choose to view success as inevitable, to see the end of my career from its beginning.

From this perspective, the road forward doesn’t look so bad at all.

The battle wages on in the dialogue between aspiring self-publishers and dyed-in-the-wool traditionally-published authors. Well, perhaps I’m overstating the situation to call it a “battle,” since all sides seem to coexist magnanimously at the moment. Though who can say what the future will bring? One need look no further than the U.S. Department of Justice’s recent decision to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and the industry’s leading publishers to see that the pressure is steadily building.

Here on the Fictorians blog, we’ve periodically discussed the pros and cons of either approach, and indeed, in the following weeks and months we’ll be devoting even more column inches to the subject of self-publishing. And that’s only to be expected, since most aspiring authors are in that awkward in-between stage of deciding whether to go it alone and start uploading our manuscripts to the Kindle Store or hold back in the hopes of securing a lucrative (or limiting) deal with a New York giant.

Noted this past Sunday in our blog’s weekly Sunday Reads feature is a thoughtful article by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, in which she draws several compelling analogies to explain the current state of affairs in the publishing world. Her position is sound (at least, to my own sensibilities) and her composition lengthy (hard to be helped), and I recommend you set aside a few minutes to peruse it.

After painting an elaborate and persuasive picture of the virus threatening traditional publishers (which is scarcity thinking, and if you don’t know what I mean by that, clearly you didn’t follow my link in the previous paragraph), she comes to a familiar premise. Instead of working tirelessly and placing high expectations on one manuscript, one should produce and release as large a backlist as possible. Instead of one book selling millions, you may end up with dozens of books selling hundreds or thousands. Ultimately, it’s a numbers game and the more titles you have to your name, the better.

I’ve heard this counsel before, and theoretically it’s great advice. Especially if you’re already an established or midlist author. If you’re just starting out in your career and have no (or few) readers outside your immediate friends and family, it goes down about as palatably as a wheatgrass smoothie. “Well,” one might say, “sometimes the truth hurts.”

Why does it hurt? Isn’t this good news for new writers? Well, this is a case where Rusch isn’t really talking to me, the new writer. She’s in the desirable position of having an existing readership… and I think she’s more or less speaking to her peers this time around. That’s her perogative! After all, it’s unavoidable: sometimes advice from established writers doesn’t speak directly to newbies. The truth is the truth, and it caters to no one. If an established author like Rusch never manages to write another bestseller in the remainder of her writing career, a long backlist of titles will indeed keep her afloat, selling hundreds or thousands of copies in place of a million-dollar golden egg. Rusch argues that it’s not altogether important to hard-sell a manuscript upon initial release, or reach a big audience, because if the book is worthy the audience will, eventually, come to you. The speed of a book’s success isn’t paramount, even if that success is inevitable. It could take fifteen years. Or much longer. She calls it “understanding the long tail.”

I agree with her. I respect her opinion and can find no basis to quarrel with it. She’s almost certainly right on all counts.

Which is, unfortunately, a little disheartening, because for fresh-out-of-the-gaters like me, speedily finding an audience remains a priority. It must, or else becoming a successful full-time writer is even further away and out-of-reach than ever. Can I wait fifteen years or longer for my dream to realize? I just released a book this year that I’m certain is good enough to secure an audience-but I really need that audience to find it now. I’ll be thrilled whenever they find it, either this year or in the summer of 2030, but if it takes until 2030 I’ll still be mired in my day job. Alas.

Mind you, I’ll never give up on this dream, and I’m not threatening to. I’m just saying that my day job really gets me down sometimes…

It always baffles me that more people don’t get excited about Leap Day. It’s not a holiday. In fact, this year it’s just a typical Wednesday. The morning shows might make some casual reference to the calendar oddity, but apart from that it will go largely unremarked upon by the world at large. A much bigger deal will be made of Groundhog Day, which is pretty mind-blowing when you stop to think about it. (Yes, I’ll say it: Groundhog Day is ridiculous.)

Maybe I’m just overly intrigued by calendars in the same way that I’m overly intrigued by maps (I could stare at them for hours, flipping through a 50-State Rand McNally American Road Map like I flip through a hair-raising novel). I mean, think about it: it only happens once every four years!? This is like violating the laws of physics! Every day happens once a year, but for this one awesome exception…

Silence. Crickets.

See, not a lot of people get excited about this. We get really excited about Christmas, which happens annually, like almost everything else in the calendar year does. Shouldn’t Leap Day, by extrapolation, be four times as awesome as Christmas? As New Year’s? As your birthday? And of course, if your birthday happens to fall on Leap Day, that makes it extra anticipatory. Take a moment to raise a glass to all those extraordinary thirty-two-year-old eight-year-olds.

Who’s with me? No takers, huh?

The thing about Leap Day is that it almost doesn’t count as a real day, right? February 28 is the last day of February and March 1 is the first day of March, case closed, but every four years we briefly fall into the twilight zone of Leap Day. I think of it as a day to experiment, to take time to work on or achieve something that might very well fail spectacularly. If it does, well, we’ll pretend it never happened. Kind of like Leap Day itself.

So, shelve that work in progress! Churning out a 200,000-word fantasy doorstopper? Take some time to write a few pages of comic fluff. Be eclectic; try your hand at crafting a stage play. Eke out that Babylon 5 Londo/G’Kar slash fiction you’ve had on the backburner for ten-plus years. Channel your inner Louis C.K. and piece together a stand-up routine.

Remember: what happens on Leap Day stays on Leap Day.

As for me, I’m going put the final touches on my plans for that big quadrennial Leap Year party I’ve been hotly anticipating for the last 1,460 days and leap myself into oblivion.