“I couldn’t believe everything is so expensive in NY!” mentioned 28-year-old Lauren Orsini, who lives in Virginia, as she and her husband John will be heading to New York in a couple of weeks. She will not be trying to advertise Build Your Anime Blog on her stay. But since it’s been published on May 1, she’s been talking about it for a while. Needless to say, I thought I had to get her to keep talking about her book, and even snuck in a bit about her writing for Anime News Network. Oh, and got away with calling her by her current avatar without her noticing.
Organization ASG: How’s the year been treating you Elise? Anything great happened to you so far?
Lauren Orsini: The year has felt like a series of unfortunate events…BUT, I put out two books and I feel really good about that, especially like Build Your Anime Blog. I think this is like the fourth or fifth time I’ve been interviewed in two weeks because I’ve been trying to promote that book, and usually I’m always bowing out of podcasts because I never know what to say, I’m like, “Just let me write things!” I’m way better at writing things down *laughs* but I want to let people know about this book in any way that I can.
OASG: Yeah I was gonna ask you about that. It feels like the past month or so you’ve been on one of those authors on those press junkets. like going to places, bookstores, and promoting your book. How’s it been doing all of that?
Lauren: It’s definitely like exercising a different muscle than writing does, and one that I don’t exercise that often, but I mean, once you publish a book, the work is just beginning! You have to write about it for other blogs, I’ve been doing a bunch of podcasts, if my schedule permitted I would be printing some flyers and putting them out for Otakon and giving panels in person. I don’t think people think about this part that much, but at my publishing house where I just put out cosplay there’s someone whose job it is to just promote the book I wrote, Cosplay and The Fantasy of Role-Play, and there’s really nothing I can do because they’re promoting it in England, but she sends me emails about what they’re doing at Comic-Con and giving free copies to winners of the cosplay contest, and it’s kind of cool to hear about all the things they’re doing to promote it, so it’s like, “Oh really, it’s someone’s full time job.”
OASG: So you have someone that’s publishing that cosplay book. How’s it compare to you self-publishing your own book as opposed to working with a publishing house?
Lauren: This is such a good question. I have so many thoughts about this. I always thought that a book deal would be the ultimate pinnacle of my career. If I worked with a publishing house and they gave me an advance and if I wrote a book about a cool topic, and it was published not by me, but by a publisher, and it was printed in factories ’cause there was so many of it…I think unless you’re really famous — it definitely hasn’t been the case for me, I haven’t gotten rich off of it — and in fact, I’ve made more money off of my self-published books because neither of my contracts when I’ve written books for publishing houses allow me to retain royalties, they gave me a flat rate before I wrote the book and another upon the delivery of the manuscript…and those payments took forever.
OASG: How long?
Lauren: One of them took four months and the other one I’m still waiting for one from the cosplay book because they’re sending it in installments. Meanwhile when you self publish you do it on your own schedule, you pay for all the expenses up front, but I’ve gotten pretty good at making those really low, I think the most important thing is having an eye-catching cover by an artist I appreciate and making sure the book is typo free. But other than that, if you know HTML you can format your own book, even if you don’t know that much HTML, you can use a free program like calibre, and you can use the Kindle free preview program, and you can just export the book in ePub, Mobi, PDF, just instantly. The program holds your hand a lot, so not only is it more lucrative to self publish, it’s also a lot easier and more fun. I just decided, “I’m going to put out a book on May 1.” Meanwhile the cosplay book? I wrote that in October and November, and it’s out in some places, but it’s not out in the US yet, and after all that time because publishers take much longer.
When I tell people that I have a book deal and that I was published by a publishing house, I’ve never even heard of these publishing houses I’m working with, like in the UK it’s Carlton Limited, in the US it’s called Sterling Publishing, so it could be that I’m not working with Penguin or whatever, but people are still more impressed when I tell them that I worked with a publisher but the books I’m proudest of are the books I’ve put out myself.
OASG: On that note, you’ve worked on two books. How’s it been like working on Otaku Journalism, which talked about journalism and how you can apply that to niche blogging, and Build Your Anime Blog, which is anime blogging and what pertains to that?
Lauren: Well, Build Your Anime Blog I worked on a lot faster. Otaku Journalism I wrote in my free time, over like a year, and it was based heavily off of some PDF guides that I have been writing. I dunno, the idea of writing a book was really daunting the first time…it was also much shorter!
OASG: I bet you there was some fears in doing a book wasn’t there?
Lauren: Oh yeah, I was nervous by it. I had a lot of fears about it, I was nervous I wasn’t going to be able to complete it, I didn’t say to people, “Hey, it’ll be out on this day,” because I didn’t think I could do it. Meanwhile Build Your Anime Blog: “Oh, it’ll be out on May 1, no problem!” And I said that at the end of March, and it was, so it seemed a lot less scary the second time around. Also Build Your Anime Blog has a ton of interviews in it, so every night of the week I’d be interviewing someone over Skype and recording that, and then the next morning I would be typing it up and letting them look over it and making sure it was ok. For two weeks I did six interviews that were about an hour long, so one a night, with one day off, sometimes two a day–
OASG: And you transcribed them all? *laughs*
Lauren: Yeah. I know some people hate transcription but as a reporter I do it all the time so I’ve gotten really used to it. You kind of get into this like “Zen” state where, “Oh, an hour has passed, I’ve been transcribing forever!” So that wasn’t so bad and then writing the beginning of the book was much easier because…I guess I’ve written a book before now so I knew how I wanted to outline it…it just went a lot more quickly.
OASG: Hmm…I wouldn’t say your comfort level was different, but I guess when you did the Otaku Journalism book, it did talk about more niche things but in a sense it was a bit more broad because it talked about a few things aside from anime, but for this one, it was focused exactly on anime blogging.
Lauren: I guess it felt like my “pride” was at stake. My friend Nathan Meunier, he’s like, “Oh I wrote this book in two weeks!” He’ll like send me a draft, he’s like, “Oh yeah I just wrote this in the mornings, I got up at 4 in the morning, I wrote this before I went into work.” I’m like, if he can do this, I can do this, I can write a book as quickly as he does. And no, I haven’t written a book in two weeks! But I did write a book in two months, comparing myself to him. Sometimes comparing yourself to people you admire is not self-defeating but kind of helpful. And the second thing on just focusing on anime…I-I don’t know, I thought, “How to Build Your Nerd Blog” would be kind of out of my expertise. I did interview people who write about just manga, people who write about video games, but I’ve been anime blogging for almost six years so I thought, “This is what I know, this is what I’ll put in here, etc.” Sometimes you sacrifice a larger audience when you’re focusing on a niche, but I know about that, I know about that very well, my blog does, it self selects.
Lauren: It was like 14 bloggers, 12 interviews.
OASG: Yeah because you interviewed Evan and Ink and you also interviewed Kate and Alain so that would kind of count as 14–how did you determine what questions you wanted to ask, and what were the questions you wanted to ask but decided you couldn’t?
Lauren: I thought about questions that people ask me about blogging for a lot of it, then I thought about questions that I wanted to answer myself, I wanted questions that I had a really good response to, and I wanted someone to ask me, and I thought other bloggers would want, “I wish someone would ask me this!” And then the third group was things that I had questions to but no answers and I wanted to know how these bloggers would answer them. I asked the questions that I thought were uncomfortable. I asked about money, which was something I knew people would find very, um, personal. I mean money is a very personal subject for everyone and like when I was talking to Charles of Beneath the Tangles, we talked about religion, we talked about trolls…nothing was off limits, and I really appreciate all the bloggers for being so into it.
OASG: Yeah, the money thing was the other thing that stood out to me. I mean it’s not just anime blogging, which doesn’t seem to make a lot of money, but just blogging in general, it’s really hard. Did anything surprise you when you asked this question to everybody?
Lauren: No. I mean this is something that I think about a lot because I’ve read a lot of books about blogging and the thing to me is that for a long time I thought I was a failure because I wasn’t making my entire income off of blogging. I’ve always been around the $3o0-500 range for a long time, and I’m finding that a lot of bloggers just make a little bit to supplement their other income. What’s easy is making a little bit of money blogging. What’s hard is making your entire income as a blogger. I did interview one person in the book who does that, and he is incredible —
OASG: To be fair, Chris Beveridge…he’s been doing this for a long time–
Lauren: 17 years!
OASG: *laughs* uuhh, I guess you can consider him a blogger.
Lauren: I mean he started his blog himself. He’s not working for somebody else, that’s why he’s in the book. One of the things was there’s a lot of cool bloggers for ANN, there’s a lot of big group blogs, I just wanted to interview people who started their own blog from scratch because I thought that sent a message that anyone can do what these bloggers have done. You can just start your own blog.
OASG: After you published it, and I guess after that wave where you have reviews and critique of the book, how have you looked back on this project and what do you hope people get out of it?
Lauren: …I hope it invigorates people to start or refresh their blogs. I hope people take the advice I gave about idea generation, I’d like to read a lot more cool stuff in blogging — I know I’m not being a very good example as I’ve taken an informal…hiatus — and I think blogging should be honest and should be a lot about what’s going on with your life.
OASG: So you’ve been writing for ANN since last year correct?
Lauren: Yes, since August!
OASG: How’s it been like writing for them? Has anything surprised you compared to writing as an intern for Kotaku and Japanator?
Lauren: What’s immediately different about ANN is that I need to voice a strong opinion every time I do one of these reviews. I don’t need to be a journalist, I don’t need to be like, “This happened and then this happened,” on the anime, and that was pretty hard for me to do at first. I thought like, “Well why would anyone care about my opinion? Because oh, I am the reviewer, I’m the person reviewing the show,” so I never turned something in without making a pretty strong assertion. Sometimes so strong that it surprises myself as I write it through and I’m like, “Wow, I really had some strong feelings about this show!” The biggest challenge is making sure I’m not repeating myself and I frequently do, I frequently return to the same themes, but I try to do it in a way that’s self aware. Like say things like, “As I said in Episode 4, this story is really about redemption and we’re seeing it again with this character,” so that’s what it’s like. It’s really cool being a reviewer for ANN, I know a lot of people are reading it, and I see their comments in the forums.
OASG: I guess anime wise or anything else wise what do you have planned for the rest of the year? Should I be expecting you to be work on a third book at some point?
Lauren: I’m working on a book of short stories, short fiction. Each one of the short stories I’m working on takes place at an anime convention, but even though I’m a professional writer, I’m not a professional fiction writer and I feel like all my work is crap, so I keep workshopping it and getting nervous about sharing it. But I’m hoping to share at least some of my short fiction in November. And of course I’m always reaching out to publishing houses to get another book deal, try and write another book, even ghostwrite, I don’t need my name on that, as long as I have my name on my self-published stuff.
OASG: You gonna try and sell any fanfiction to publishing houses? *laughs*
Lauren: *laughs* Yeah, it’s called “50 Shades of Blue!” No, I will not be sharing any fanfiction, just short fiction, with original characters.
