Today was a humbling day and one of incredible excitement.
This is kind of a long story, but I promise there is something good at the end (a couple things, actually).
Growing up, I was a strange kid. I had unusual taste in music. Even at a very young age, I was a jazz aficionado. My gateway to jazz (like a lot of people) was Steely Dan. Back when I was a kid, there were two types of people: those who had intense emotional experiences when they heard the music of Steely Dan for the first time, and those who thought Steely Dan was a joke (actually, that’s still true today. If you’re a Steely Dan fan, you understand me 100%. They still don’t get the love they deserve).
Since around the age of five or so, I was attracted to stuff in music that I couldn’t explain, but I knew it when I heard it—mainly chords, harmony, composition, emotion…other people just cared about lyrics and whether they could relate to what the singer was singing about.
Anyhoo, I wanted to be a musician for a long time. I even published a video with some of my old music on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzqZjdH0aZk
One day in high school (2002ish), I happened to share some of my music with my uncle, who was a band manager for a very popular local band that achieved international acclaim. He brought up a crate of CDs that he had picked up while on tour. He thought I should check them out. To this day I have no idea how my uncle compiled a crate of Japanese pop and funk CDs.
On the very top of the crate was an album, Natsuko by Carlos Toshiki & Omega Tribe. I had never heard of them before, but I was used to listening to music in Japanese because I collected video game music. Plus, as someone who listened to jazz, I was used to hearing off the wall stuff.
I inspected the album, and to my surprise, on the back cover was a black man sitting on a couch with some Japanese guys. I was intrigued…a black man, a member of Japanese band??
To say the album blew me away was an understatement. The Omega Tribe to this day remains one of my favorite bands of all time. I own all their work. They’re consistently in my top 10. Their music helped me get through a rough freshman year.
I was fascinated by the fact that a black man sang with them, wrote songs, and performed. And he was super talented, too.
I didn’t know this at the time, but the band was part of a gigantic musical movement in Tokyo called “City Pop,” which, in a nutshell is 80s pop infused with jazz chords, with very high composition and production value. I won’t go into it here—look it up sometime.
Anyway, I was hooked on city pop in 2002 before ANYONE in the states knew what it was. Everyone I knew thought I was crazy importing records from Japan. They didn’t see the point of listening to music you couldn’t understand. But me it was about more than that.
I always respected Joey McCoy for his story and his contribution to the musical genre, even though I don’t know much about him. I credit him and the Omega Tribe with my gateway into a genre that I have become a lifelong fan of.
In 2017, I wrote a novel called Honor’s Reserve and even named the a character of the series after McCoy. I shared a similar story of how I discovered him in an author’s note at the back of the book.
(I named every main character in my Galaxy Mavericks series after my favorite musicians. It was fun, but until today I didn’t think anything would come of it).
Fast forward to 2020, and some very interesting things have happened.
First, city pop is mainstream now. Awareness of the genre started in the early 2010s with the vaporwave movement (again, look it up), which basically made the 80s and 90s cool again as many millennials like myself reminisced about our childhoods. Then, people started looking up the original tracks that inspired the vaporwave versions and discovered city pop.
Suddenly, English speakers discovered what I had fallen in love with almost 20 years ago. (The song that pretty much blew the Internet open was “Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bNITQR4Uso. 48 million views and counting. I knew this song before it was cool.)
Now, city pop is cool, but trust me, it wasn’t like that in 2002 or even 2008. The only way you could get it (if you even knew about it) was to import records or find it in other clandestine ways. One of those ways was buying digital iTunes Japan gift cards, switching over to the Japanese version of the iTunes Store, and then searching for your favorite artists in kanji, but only then you got 30 second samples. But you could buy stuff before Apple shut it down. I told you I was serious about this stuff…
Anyway, city pop is having a moment. (Somewhat) mainstream artists like Thundercat and Benny Sings have paid tribute to it. This past year, Apple Music and Spotify onboarded a CRAPTON of city pop music—something that you would have never been able to find just a year or two ago. It’s still very weird to play city pop on Apple Music.
All those artists who found success in Japan but almost nowhere else are now having their moment, with a generation of young people who were either barely alive or nonexistent when the music was recorded. And record companies are finally figuring it out and cashing in on it (in a good way).
When I found a bunch of city pop albums on Apple Music over the weekend, I was surprised to see that there was some more information on the bands. On a random whim, I discovered that someone had created a Wikipedia page for Joey McCoy, which was really neat to see.
And to my shock, I saw MY NAME on the Wikipedia page!!! Someone referenced my author’s note in the back of Honor’s Reserve and posted on the page that I had named one of my characters after him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_McCoy
Ironically, Google Books indexed Honor’s Reserve and just happened to include the page from my author’s note where I talked about Joey McCoy. No idea how that happened, but how random is that?
And it turns out that Joey McCoy even recorded an album of his own that long-time Omega Tribe are just now discovering and buzzing about on Reddit and other places.
(I’m fairly certain that I sold a few copies of Honor’s Reserve from that Wikipedia page—it almost never sells any copies these days but I noticed a few sales right around the time this page went live).
There are a lot of people right now giving Joey his props. It seems he’s moved on from his music career, but how amazing is it that he’s still alive to see people from all corners of the world appreciating his musical skills. Not every artist gets that honor. It’s really too bad that he’s probably not getting compensated that much for the recognition.
All right, so what does this have to do with you?
Everything is cyclical.
So what you published a book that gets zero sales? What if something happens in the cultural zeitgeist 30 years from now that makes younger generations interested in your work?
Sure, it’s a long time, but you never know, right?
And, what if, instead of quitting, that you were still writing 30 years from now (if you’re still alive), and you have a crapton of books that new generations can discover?
That, my friends, is what this post is about.
Everything has its time. If an obscure 80s genre from Japan can catch on fire worldwide, then maybe one of your books can, too. Even a brontosaurus romance.
That’s why you shouldn’t give up. This isn’t the 80s, where it was hard to maintain a career if the planets didn’t align. Now, you can have a career forever and continue to get paid for your work. You just have to have the courage to write, publish, and keep your book for sale. And it can earn money for you long after you publish it.
This is the greatest time in the history of the world to be a writer.
Oh, and if you’re interested, here’s a fantastic video of one of Joey’s performances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-2LARatmjE
LESSON LEARNED & EXECUTED
Another solid ad day today. 8 out of 8 of the last days have been profitable. I’ll be creating some new ads tomorrow and reporting on some more ad work.
WRITING WHILE MOVING CHALLENGE
Research is in full swing for my new urban fantasy series. I’m very deep into it now, and I’m starting to see the story. Well, I see the prologue, but not Chapter 1 yet. Based on what I can see so far, it’ll be a ballsy story if I can pull it off. Very much in the style of my Last Dragon Lord series in terms of complexity.
From all the market analysis I’m doing so far, I’m a little off market. Actually, more than a little. But at the same time, if I explained the story to you, you wouldn’t bat an eyelash if I told you it was urban fantasy. Here we go again…
But none of this bothers me because of everything I wrote above.
What I’m trying to figure out right now is what the market fit is so I can adjust my expectations. Does this fall into some kind of sweet spot or just outside of one? I’m still writing it, but it’s good to understand because I’m probably going to do the marketing on this title upfront.
Since I’m writing into the dark and in one draft, I only need to know the first chapter before I order the cover and write the book description…
Anyhoo, I’ve gone on long enough.
URBAN FANTASY MEGA SURVEY
My friend and fellow urban fantasy author John P. Logsdon put together a mega survey for urban fantasy readers to help UF and Paranormal romance authors get some insights into what readers like. It’s a massive survey, but take it if you like UF (or write it) because it will be a huge service to the community. John and I created the UF Book Database that I talked about, so help him out!
Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe7LScGZhHfQHDrIglQjvLlP-Wn0xIg80P-d7xEHVBJ9VwLIg/viewform
Have a good night, all.
