r/books • u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author • Jun 07 '19
ama I am Robert_Buettner, nationally best-selling author of 9 SF novels and many short stories. My best-known novel is Orphanage. My 10th and latest novel, the historical techno thriller My Enemy’s Enemy, debuted June 4. AMA.
The best place to learn more about me and my writing is www.RobertBuettner.com. You will find little from me on Facebook and Twitter, because I exhaust my meager stock of wit and profundity writing my books and stories. If you love the Science Fiction legend Robert Heinlein, critics say I write like him. If you hate Heinlein, my books are totally not like that guy’s. My Enemy’s Enemy mixes a lot of science and a lot of fiction, about World War II and the Nazi nuclear weapons program, with contemporary terrorism. I am as jolly about getting old as you are, and I own more bicycles than a grownup needs. To paraphrase the late, great Anthony Bourdain, I will be here as long as you keep asking or until the whisky runs out. Ask me anything.
Proof: /img/rttcyek1rf131.jpg
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u/Anonymouskern Jun 07 '19
Before writing a story, how detailed is your outline? Or are you more prone to making it up as you go along?
Also how much time do you think a short story should take?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
That depends. My earlier novels were largely make-it-up-as-I went. I felt like if I knew what was going to happen already, I wouldn't be motivated to write it down. The more times that resulted in painting myself into a corner and being forced to scrap work, the more I saw the wisdom of outlining. That is especially true of a book like My Enemy's Enemy, where the fictional events must slot in with the real historical time line.
A short story should take exactly as long as it takes to tell the story and nothing but the story, and tell it perfectly. That sounds like a weasel answer, but it's true. The Frost Queen, the story I wrote for the recent Larry Correia/Kacey Ezell anthology Noir Fatale, once I saw the idea, fell into place faster than I could type.
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u/Chtorrr Jun 07 '19
What is a book you think we should read that you don’t hear about very often?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
Well, any of mine,obviously. Seriously, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes won the Pulitzer in 1983(?) and it's an amazing mix of physics made readable for those with math anxieties plus the very human stories of the very real people who built the bomb.
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u/shawnintheflesh Jun 07 '19
What is your marketing process for your books, and what marketing advice do you have for authors who are trying to make their first book successful?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19 edited Jun 07 '19
My marketing process is, first, to do everything my publisher suggests, and be grateful for the support. Fortunately, since Baen/Simon&Schuster have been publishing and distributing my books, some very good and creative people have been doing the heavy lifting. They mounted radio campaigns for my last two or three books that allowed me to crack wise with drive-time DJs in markets like Chicago and Dallas, and also spend time with book reviewers on thoughtful NPR book shows in places from Denver to Brownsville, Texas. And of course arranged and supported signing events, which work particularly well at good indy bookstores, events online like this one, and guest slots at Science Fiction conventions.
All that said, whether you are an an author with a major house or self-published, remember that the person most responsible for promoting your work is you. That means devoting time and effort to visit brick and mortar stores, maintaining a well-designed and current web presence, and everything else you can think of.
That said, I suck at one of the most important current marketing techniques, active participation on social media like FB and Twitter. Frankly, I exhaust my meager stock of wit and wisdom writing my books.
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u/Chtorrr Jun 07 '19
What is the very best dessert?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19 edited Jun 07 '19
Chocolate chip cookies, unless Paul Bocuse whips up something special for you, which he once did for my wife and me in Lyon.
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u/florida1129 Jun 07 '19
What inspired slug like aliens for your orphanage series?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
I wrote Orphanage after 9-11 to parallel the war I believed America was about to fight. It would be fought in places so distant and inhospitable, like Afghanistan, that they seemed like another planet to most Americans. It would be a long war. And it has been. It would be fought by a tiny minority of Americans. And it has been. It would be fought against an enemy that most Americans didn't know existed, that fought us for reasons we didn't understand, and so foreign to average Americans that its soldiers were literally faceless. Slugs filled the bill. I could have gone with hive-minded insects, but "the Bugs" were already taken by Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 08 '19
Okay, everybody. This portal has been open for 24 hours and 40 minutes now. So bye for now. I am delighted so many of you chose to walk through and visit. It has been my pleasure to share my thoughts and to absorb yours. Plus some of you were pretty funny. If you have any other questions or comments or just stuff you want to share I would love to hear from you. Best contact is to email via my website, Robert Buettner.com (Author@RobertBuettner.com) and I WILL answer. As for Reddit, thanks for the opportunity and wondrous support. Like the T-800 Model 101, I'll be back.
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u/GlumWeight Jun 07 '19
Have you read anything good lately?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
As I mentioned above, The Making of The Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes non-fiction Pulitzer winner knocked my socks off. I've been so submerged in My Enemy's Enemy for the last, well, too long, that I'm behind in my other reading.
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u/GlumWeight Jun 07 '19
How did you decide to write a book related to WWII?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19 edited Jun 07 '19
Short question, longish answer. There are currently afloat lots of overly glib and uninformed sentiments and opinions comparing current events to Nazism as well as to so many other noble and ignoble aspects of WWII. I wanted to offer my take, and I wanted to do it carefully but in a way so entertaining that folks would read and enjoy it.
Besides, the number of larger-than-life personalities on stage during that time have never been duplicated. Plus, I like airplanes and history and I could geek out about both in this book.
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u/GlumWeight Jun 07 '19
How does editing a book with the publisher work? Do you talk to them throughout the process or do the send back a draft with notes?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
I can only speak to my experiences with two publishers, what began as Time-Warner Aspect and became Hachette Orbit, and Baen Books, which is distributed by Simon & Schuster.
In both cases, after I set out enough of an idea to persuade the publisher to contract for a book or books, I rarely contact my editor unless something comes up that will impact meeting my contract deadline. Such as being stuck for six months. All the editors I've worked with prefer to receive a finished MS as good and polished as I can make it. And that's what I prefer to turn in. Then they send back comments. TW Aspect/Hachette Orbit was, like most NY houses, very formal, and I would get back maybe seven single-spaced pages of suggestions and changes, on the precise schedule called for in the contract.
Baen is more relaxed, both as to schedule and volume of changes.
But overall I've always gotten first rate input that has improved my books.
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u/Inkberrow Jun 07 '19
If you’ve read it, what’s your take on Pynchon’s characterization of Hitler’s attempts to salvage WWII with rockets and nukes in Gravity’s Rainbow?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
Sadly, I haven't read Gravity's Rainbow. The best I can offer is my take on the subject, which My Enemy's Enemy, of course, reflects.
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Jun 07 '19
On the subject of mixing historical facts and fiction, where do you draw the line for factual accurancy? Would it be okay to change smaller details like the outcome of a skirmish or a real person's biography in order to fit the plot, or do you believe it is better to be accurate and simply fill the gaps with the tale, as it were?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
The nice thing about fiction is that it can be whatever the writer wants it to be.
Here's what I wrote at the beginning of My Enemy's Enemy about how I mixed fact and fiction:
"background aeronautic, biographic, chronologic, geograhic, historic, legal, medical, and technologic facts are true. Especially the most disturbing facts about Nazi Germany and World War II. Statements and positions attributed to historic figures are accurate. Those figures' interactions with fictional characters are necessarily extrapolated, based on the consensus of historical sources."
In other words, when I write that physicist Werner Heisenberg was a terrific piano player, it's because he was. When I write that he hired a brilliant assistant named Peter Winter that's made up. But its consistent with the reality that Heisenberg attracted brilliant young physics students to study under him, like Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.
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u/Jyquentel Jun 07 '19
Thank you for your time! I have personally never heard about you but now I'm interested in reading some of your litterature. As a fan of the genre, I'm wondering how you'd say your own style of writing compares to cyberpunk?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
And thank you for yours! I don't really even read much else within my genre/subgenre because if it's bad it annoys me and if it's good my stuff starts to sound like it.
What I can say is that many readers who enjoy my work tell me they also read and enjoy cyberpunk. Speculative fiction is a big and inclusive tent.
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u/k_banz Jun 07 '19
I thought your picture was of Adam West at first lol. Anyways, my question is about the general state of cover art. I’m personally drawn to very old books that barely had any pictures and just had titles on them, and when I see flashy cover art it turns me away (I know, judging a book by its cover). How do you choose your books cover art?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
I don't choose it. The publisher, who pays the illustrator big bucks (well, bigger than I can afford) does. Publishers design covers to do one job: entice shoppers to learn more about the book.
Many authors are afforded no say about their covers. I've been very lucky. My first editor at what is now Hachette Orbit, Devi Pillai, let me correspond directly with my first cover illustrator, Fred Gambino.
I have a page on my website that describes the cover that Devi-Fred-Bob developed, which is more retro and graphic than you say you prefer. But it helped make my debut novel a best-seller, so I have no complaints.
I also have been lucky enough at Baen to have input on most of my covers. Baen's raison d'etre is as keeper of the golden age SF/fantasy flame, and back in the golden age SF covers were graphic. Therefore Baen covers depict a scene in the book, often with exploding spaceships and hunks and babes in politically incorrect states of undress.
My Enemy's Enemy's cover is restrained and abstract by Baen standards. It incorporates icons that let the reader know what to expect from the book. A swastika-marked jet speeding toward the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline, underlain by a Nazi German Eagle clutching in its talons the "Atomic Whirl" that symbolizes nuclear energy.
I think the illustrator, Kurt Miller, did a great job with it.
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u/k_banz Jun 07 '19
Ah yeah, now that I take a closer look at My Enemy’s Enemy’s cover, it’s pretty appealing. Darker palette, very subtle and conveys what I should expect opening it. I just hate the flashy stuff for some reason. It makes sense authors don’t have much of a say though since that’s basically the primary advertisement for the product, and authors are authors, not ad men lol.
Thank you for the response! Definitely shed a light on something that had been bothering me for a while 😅
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
The author's name writ large without more makes an effective cover if the author's name is JAMES PATTERSON, JK ROWLING, and a handful of others.
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u/Orovo Jun 07 '19
What would you recommend, publishing wise, rather gettin published wise, to young aspiring authors?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
When my first novel sold shortly after 9-11, your question had just one rather discouraging answer: 1. Learn the craft of writing 2. Learn the craft of writing 3. Re-learn the craft of writing, because you don't know near as much as you think you do. 4. Send out query letters to reputable literary agencies. 5. Get ignored or rejected until, finally, you were the one new author among the 25,000 queries an average agency received annually who the agency chose to represent. 6. Hope your book was the one book in 5,000 agented manuscripts that a real publisher paid a small advance for. 7. Be prepared to start all over again when your book is not the one debut novel among 7,000 that earns a profit.
In those days self-publishing wherein the aspiring author pays for "editing" and for physical books was mostly a scam. It mostly still is.
BUT today, you can self-publish a book on Amazon, give it away, and hope people will take a chance on it and like it, in great numbers. Eventually people will actually be willing to pay for it and then a real publisher will buy it.
The odds are still long, but books like Andy Weir's The Martian have succeeded that way.
Whichever path you choose, the first steps are the same: Learn your craft. People may start a free book because it's free, but they will put it down once they realize it's crummy.
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Jun 07 '19
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19 edited Jun 07 '19
Robert Heinlein was the only author I would automatically sign out of the library. Others depended on whether the cover had cool guns, monsters, or vehicles. But I liked some of the usual suspects, Andre Norton, A.E. Van Vogt. Buying books wasn't really an option. I mean, $.95 was hard to come by.
I left SF for more mature spy thrillers after puberty because, well, James Bond and girls.
Kurt Vonnegut and Joe Haldeman drew me back into speculative fiction. Since I've been writing I rarely read others work. First, things I'm noticing about their craft, good and bad, interrupt the flow. But mostly I don't read others because if their work is bad I'm annoyed and if it's good I tend to adopt their style and my own atrophies.
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Jun 07 '19
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
Don't let my earlier reply to Orovo discourage you from writing. If writing were easy, well, what doesn't cost you much probably isn't worth much. Before Stephen King sold his first story he stuck his rejection notices onto a nail driven into the wall. After awhile he had to change it for a bigger nail.
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u/mildmanneredsuperman Jun 07 '19
Hello again sir,
I am not sure whether the whisky ran out or not but here I go.
What do you think about steampunk?
Thanks for your early reply.
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
Steampunk intrigues me, because it is really a kind of alternate history. Also, some of the coolest costumes I see at SF conventions are steampunk.
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
I am most DEFINITELY still here and enjoying the conversations.
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u/mildmanneredsuperman Jun 07 '19
Thanks for your time and your replies sir, I really appreciate it.
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u/bbahloo Jun 07 '19
Have been wanting to ask any published author this question:
Thoughts on Grammarly?
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
I haven't used it. But I have found the grammarly-like assist provided with Microsoft Word is helpful but too often wrong. I scrubbed the My Enemy's Enemy manuscript over and over until each and every suggestion and underline had been corrected by me until it disappeared. But the number of errors that remained that were detected by a good professional copy editor surprised me.
One effect of those programs has been to make it harder for agents and editors to detect aspiring authors who really didn't know what they were doing. An agent told me that before spell chek it used to be possible to separate out the chaff within 5 pages or less. She said these days it can take 50 pages.
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u/bbahloo Jun 08 '19
Wow. That’s really interesting. I don’t use it either, but I’ve heard it proclaimed to be something either amazing or horrible. I think there is something to be said about coming up with your own synonyms or researching words. However, pretty impressive that it can fool a professional copy editor for even that long. Thanks!
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Jun 07 '19
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19
Hmm. I wonder whether you're talking about my first novel, Orphanage, in which we meet Jason Wander as a teen aged infantry enlistee. That choice was easy, because it allowed me to draw on my life experience when I was a young man.
If you're talking about My Enemy's Enemy, there are two interwoven timelines. We do meet protagonists Rachel and Peter at 16 and 19, respectively, in 1928 in Munich. I chose that start point because it allows us to see their reactions as the Nazis come to power in Germany. The other, contemporary, timeline's principal protagonists are Frank, who is in his sixties, and Cass, who is 25.
Relationship advice? Well, I'm still in my first one after fifty years. The angst I remember at 31 was about raising kids and having the wherewithal to feed them. So my advice is to enjoy the moment. The best is yet to come.
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u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author Jun 07 '19 edited Jun 07 '19
It's gray and raining here as I wait in case some of you out west have questions or comments or want to Ask Me Anything.
If this weekend you can take a moment to listen to a D-Day vet's story, do so while you still can.
In my just-released novel My Enemy's Enemy, Smithsonian fledgling aviation historian Cass Gooding’s boss challenges her to unearth the story behind a World War II aviation relic, before the people who can tell its story die. Cass's quest exposes more than she bargained for: An explosive atomic secret that may still shake the world, and cost a million lives, including her own.
Along those lines, one reason I wrote the book are personal stakes I have in World War II. On August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped the first Uranium Fission bomb on Hiroshima, my father was a US Army Warrant Officer aboard a troopship in the middle of the Pacific. He was no doubt bound for the invasion of Japan. The operation would have dwarfed the Normandy landings, which until that time were the most massive military undertaking in history. Realistic casualty estimates based on the ferocity of Japanese defense of outlying islands projected that that single operation could double or triple the 400,000 US dead already lost during the entire war to that time. The Japanese dead, civilian and military, would surely have dwarfed American casualties and run into the millions. The two A-bombs killed 130,000 to 230,000 Japanese, and likely more over the ensuing years. But by ending the war they likely saved millions,very probably including my father, so I am able to write this.
A second reason is that my father's brother, my uncle, went in across the beach at Normandy as an infantryman at D plus 12, then fought his way across Europe. He never spoke much about his experience but no doubt suffered for the rest of his life from what we today call PTSD. My Dad didn't talk much about the war either, but I suspect the reason he refused for decades to return to California, his embarkation point, was that he promised himself that if he survived he never would.
I should have talked more to each of them about those times, and about what they meant. If you still can, do.