Interview with a Cyberpunk Author
Jason Werbeloff is a sci-fi and cyberpunk writer living in South Africa. I took the time to catch up with him and ask him questions about Star Trek, the craft of writing and then veered into self-publishing and marketing his books onĀ Amazon. Read on below to find out more about him and his books!
What part of South Africa are you in?
Iām in Johannesburgā¦ We have different types of capitols, but itās our financial capitol.
When did you start writing your shorts, your novels, your novellas? When did you start writing sci-fi?
I wrote my first book when I was 19. I was in the second year of university and it was a terrible book (laughter) I never did anything with it. I wrote and put it in the drawer.
Really?
Yeah. I think thatās generally good advice is never publish your first novel. What happens, your first novel is generally autobiographical. It wasnāt about me specifically, but there were lots of autobiographical elements and I think for a lot of writers they have to kind of get that out of their system and once thatās out of their system then they can start writing properly, so that novel wasnāt science fiction it was mainstream fiction, literary fiction, and then I wrote my first science fiction book when I was 29.
You donāt think you can re-write that first book and make it into something good, huh?
I had a look at it a few months ago. I called it back up again and I thought maybe I could rework it or massage it into something more useful and itās just terrible. Itās totally unusable, so no. No. Generally I think one shouldnāt publish your first novel. I mean there are amazing first novelists, debut novelists, I mean theyāre some phenomenal debut novels out there, but I think for the most part, thereās a lot of stuff that you have to work through, emotional stuff and writing technique stuff that you have to get through before you can start publishing good literature.
āIām a philosopher, so I have a PhD in philosophy and what philosophers do a lot of is thought experiments,ā
Iām a fiction writer too, so I want to keep talking about this. When you write where do your ideas come fromā¦ You said basically auto-biographical doesnāt sound like what you do, so you never put anything in your life in your fiction book to write a story?
I mean I do, but I guess it would be more unconscious than conscious now, so I never write a whole person that Iāve met. They never become a character, but I do take part of a personā¦ If I meet someone or if thereās an important person in my life, theyāll often have a trait, which Iāll use, but I wonāt use their entire character, so I wonāt replicate themāāāLook, Iām not sure whether itās ethical or not to use a whole person, but for me itās not about the ethics of it. Itās about the creativity. People make great characters, but not as they are. What makes a person a great character in a book is often slightly different from what makes them work as a person in real life. People are not that interesting. I mean they are interesting, but theyāre not interesting as they are. Often with a slight change theyāre more interesting, so in terms of characters Iāll often use parts of characters and in terms of situations. Iām a philosopher, so I have a PhD in philosophy and what philosophers do a lot of is thought experiments, so we think about what the world would be like if it was exactly as it is now except for one change, so what would it be like āifā and then we fill in those dots, and all my sci-fi stories could be seen as thought experiments, so we take the world as it is and make one change and I think the same applies to characters. You can take characters as they are and make one change and see a very interesting person on the page come alive.
āI love StarĀ Trekā¦ā
Whatās your favorite sci-fi movies and sci-fi books? I read a post about how you like āStar Trek Voyager.ā
I do. Yeah. I love Star Trek and Iām watching the new Star Trek Discovery as well. Not quite as good as the old Star Treks, but itās good and itās going in the right direction I think. Yeah, so I donāt know if youāve seenĀ Altered Carbon?
No.
Itās a recent series thatās come up on NetFlix. I think they released it about a week or two ago and itās based on a book by Richard Morgan, by the same nameā¦ I actually read the book recently. Reread it. I read it a few years ago and reread it recently, so that genre of fiction was called cyberpunk and thereās a number of great authors in that genre, soĀ Philip K. DickĀ is just phenomenal.Ā William Gibson, thereās a few very good authors I like to read in cyberpunk.
āI created a whole lot of stories in the universe called the ābubbleā and I alliterated all the stories and Iām still writing in the bubble, but Iām popping the bubble and moving offĀ planet.ā
Why do you use alliteration in your titles?
I needed something to tie the stories together to indicate to people they are part of the same universe and thereās various ways authors do that. Sometimes they use single word titles. Sometimes they use the same prefix for every story title, so like Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek Discovery, theyāll have Star Trek at the beginning of every title and one way I hadnāt really seen done out there was alliteration, so I started doing that and readers liked it I think, so Iām now done with alliteration. I created a whole lot of stories in the universe called the ābubbleā and I alliterated all the stories and Iām still writing in the bubble, but Iām popping the bubble and moving off planet. Itās the same universe just it afterwards and Iām no longer alliterating. Iām using the Star Trek style, minesā going to be called Star Phaseā¦ Does that sound alright to use Star Phase?ā¦ I always want feedback on these things.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Well, youāre just going to be labeled a āfanboyā thatās all! (laughter)
I suppose. Yeah, I suppose so, which is fine. I donāt mind.
How many words do you write a day?
I donāt write everyday. Firstly I write five days a week and secondly I donāt write every week. I write one month and then another month is editing, so I alternate my months and on months when Iām writing I write between two and 3000 words a day and on months when Iām editing I edit between four and 8000 words a day depending on whether itās a first edit, second or third, so first edit is a lot more intenseā¦ but by the third edit Iām doing six to seven to 8000 words a day.
Have you ever usedĀ Dragon SpeakĀ before?
Iāve tried not withĀ DragonĀ specifically, but Iāve tried other voice to talk recognition and Iām not very good at it. Maybe I need to persevere. A lot of authors like narrating. I see value in it. Itās fast. I just struggle to enunciate my stories. I feel so much more comfortable writing themā¦. Do you use that technique?
No. I have a version that hasnāt been opened that a friend gave me because I just donāt like it and i see other people using it and itās like you have to correct things and thatās enough to make me not want to use it, so itās really silly that I have a version sitting here that I could use, but I just donāt like it! (laughter)
Some authors swear by it. They love narrating, but I struggle.
I do have a voice recorder that Iāll transcribe like Iām going to transcribe this interview because Iām recording it, so Iāll do that.
The new Dragon can do transcriptions too.
Wow, so I should open it up and look at it basically (laughter) since I own it and then Iāll get back to you on how it works?
Try transcribing this interview and see how, whether it works.
Iām going to ask you some straight up marketing questions because thatās what I like to talk about anyway.
Well, thatās what I do most of the time.
When did you start putting your books on Amazon and self-publishing?
I self-published when I was 29 and Iām now Iām 33ā¦ 2013 I started self-publishing and I self-published as I wrote, so with each story that I finished I then self-published it. I didnāt create a backlog and this year Iām doing it a bit differently, so Iām creating a backlog before I publish. Iāve had a period where I havenāt published since October last year and readers are getting a bit impatient, which is difficultā¦
āYeah. Itās nice to have readers that are impatient,ā
Thatās great!
Yeah. Itās nice to have readers that are impatient, thatās true, but I feel a bit guilty about it. What Iām doing is, Iām using a strategy called rapid release, so Iām writing a whole series of books and then releasing them rapidly and that seems to work very well in terms of the algorithms
The Amazon algorithms?
It hits Amazonās algorithms well. What happens traditionally is that when you publish a book, you hit whatās called the 30 day cliff, so for the first 30 days Amazon promotes your book quite strongly for you. Your keywords get priority over other people with the same keywords if their books are older than 30 days and you get put on to the āhotā new releases listā¦ Itās very good for your book and as soon as you hit day 30 your book falls off this cliff of visibility, Amazon no longer promotes it and suddenly your bookās dead, so thereās a Facebook group run by a guy named Michael Anderle and itās called ā20 books to 50kāĀ ā¦ Their ethos is that the best way to market a book is to publish the next one, so they try to write very quickly and release rapidly. Their goalās one book a month.
Oh my God!
Yeah, so theyāre writing one book a month. Iām writing one every two months and I feel like thatās slow, but compared to how fast I used to write itās a lot faster since I joined the group.
āIām going to be experimenting with that with the next Star PhaseĀ series.ā
Thatās really interestingā¦ Iāve heard of that. A lot of people try to sell a course āWrite a Book in 30 Days,ā but recently I heard this great podcast on Joanna Pen and this woman being interviewed saidĀ write fast and publish slow, so she goes against what youāre sayingā¦
Wellā¦ their strategy is that, because of this 30 day cliff, you must be publishing at least once a monthā¦ each new book that you publish advertises your previous bookā¦ I canāt do that. I feel like personally Iād burn out if I wrote a book a month and secondly that my brain doesnāt keep up with my hands. I canāt think of ideas fast enough to write them and lastly I need to edit, so I take a month for writing and a month for editing, but I do think if you write fast and you edit and you save up all these books and publish them rapidly one after the other, so that the technique is to publish book one, publish book two two weeks later, publish book three two weeks later and then after that three weeks to a month apart. I think that works really well and Iām going to be experimenting with that with the next Star Phaze series.
How much does it cost you to put a book up on Amazon when you pay for the art work, for the book cover and everything else?
It depends. For short stories I use pre-made covers and those cost me anywhere between twenty and fifty dollars a coverā¦ His website name is goonwrite.com and heās excellent. You can buy bundles of credits, so he has thousands of pre-made coversā¦ If you buy one cover itās fifty dollars, but it gets a lot cheaper if you buy a whole bunchā¦ When Iām really stumped for a cover I use an excellent designer called BookFly and heās just superb. The problem is he has a very long waiting list, so you have to book him out up to a year in advance, so you really got to know what you want and he costs a lot of moneyā¦ but then thereās middle of the range designers as well that I use like CoverMint. CoverMint costs in the middle between pre-mades and BookFly and that cover will cost about one to 200 dollars a cover. BookFly will cost five to 600 a cover.
Tell me what āStar Phaseā is about?
I guess in a way itās kind of a stock standard ideaā¦ that the earth is dying and weāve to get off planet and itās about this ship that takes this select group of people off planet, but things are not quite what they seem and theyāre some nasty characters on board and some people that shouldnāt be on board and there are some un-likely heroes that are going to save the day.
Thatās a great logline! If I was new to your writing what book would you suggest to new readers to read first?
Defragmenting Danielā¦ It started a universe. It started the bubble and then after that I wrote a bunch of short stories, which I compiled into a book called theĀ Crimson Meniscus and the Crimson Meniscus has all those short stories plus the first book in Defragmenting Daniel, so they could buy that or buy Defragmenting Daniel directly.
So I donāt have any more questions. Is there anything else you want to talk about?
What kind of fiction do you write?
I was told I write magical realism. I have a short story collection that goes all over the placeāāāthereās steampunk, thereās fantasyā¦ When I was grad school I would write a lot of comedy and humor, so I have some stories that have just human elements that are not necessarily anything other than literaryā¦ I veered off into genre after grad school because I kept meeting all these people on Amazon and you naturally meet genre people when you venture into Amazon, so Iām pretty open minded.
Rightā¦ I have a degree in English Literature as well, so I do understand your initial push to literary fiction. Itās interesting because I think if you look on Amazon you wonāt find magical realism as a genre.
Thatās funny.
I donāt think itās a category listed. It would probably fall under urban fantasy or under literary fiction.
Well, thatās great youāre helping me with marketing! Thatās awesome!
Sure, sure. Look, Iām not an expert on this. I havenāt tried to market a magical realist book, but I havenāt seen it as a category. Also, if you have a strong female protagonist it might be considered womenās fiction or if you got a strong male protagonist it might be considered menās fictionā¦ Itās always difficult to market your books if youāre writing multiple genres. I write in a combination of genres which makes it difficult,
What are they all?
They combine all these elementsā¦ thriller, science fiction and horror and that makes it difficult because when I try to market to horror people they arenāt familiar with the sci-fi elements. When I try to market to sci-fi people they are not really familiar with the horror elements, so it can be difficult.
Learn more about Jason on hisĀ authorās page on AmazonĀ or go directly to his websiteĀ jasonwerbeloff.com.