10 posts tagged “publishing”
No, not just that general category of weird things writers do, like watch you too closely because they're clearly trying to figure out how to transcribe your behavior into a character sketch that will be incorporated into a character you'd never want your behavior ascribed to. And not weird stuff like spending 42 minutes engaged in a deeply personal and hurtful internal debate about whether it's okay to use that semi-colon. Not that other weird thing that involves an eccentric hat and a fake foreign accent. I apologize for that on behalf of writers everywhere. We just can't help ourselves sometimes. Which is why we do that weird thing with our trash cans on trash day. Sorry. It's a compulsion.
Specifically, I'm talking the weird things that writers do on the internet. Here's the latest:
Many agents suggest that writers with professional websites (as opposed to whatever this is), look more attractive to agents and publishers, because they appear to have a grasp on using the internet for networking and marketing. As a result, lots of writers create websites and blogs and whatnot, in hopes that someday an agent or publisher is going to Google them and find their website. (The next part of this fantasy goes like this: "Gosh, what a great website. I was on the fence, but I am definitely going to offer this writer a multi-book contract.")
I never bothered, because...well, because I was the literary equivalent of a cave-dwelling ascetic hermit. I didn't publish. I just wrote. Mostly as a form of self-punishment. Then, two years ago, I decided to try to get published. Two painful years of rejections later, I've got a handful of short story publications and a few more coming out in spring. So, at long last, as I contemplate beginning another round of queries for a novel, I have done that weird thing.
I got a website. Under my own name. To talk about...my writing. To post links to my publications. To generally stick my ass out there, in hopes that some agent or publisher will Google me and think, "Gosh, what a great website." (Why is it that agents and publishers talk like Eddie Haskell in my head? I don't know.) So I've put up my little bio, a page with links to my publications, some pictures of my cats (OF COURSE), and I've started a blog.
Here's the dilemma: when you start a new blog, how sad and embarrassing is it when you don't have any comments on your blog? So then how to create traffic to a blog I've just started? On my writing board, I figure I'll ask some people there to go over and take a look, make some comments. I've debated whether to call upon my hoodies on Vox to make a similar sacrificial effort. That is, the folks who are in my neighborhood, who actually know who I am in real life, because I don't want to have a "leak" effect, where the two blogs are confuzzled, thereby destroying the comfort of relative anonymity I have as Redzilla. What do you think?
Normally, this is a time of year when thinking about the publishing industry makes me happy. After all, Xmas is coming soon, when I usually receive at least one and sometimes several gift cards to buy books. Add to that the fact that the nominations for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award had been made public. Then there's quiet time coming, with all the students gone away and campus deserted. Time to write.
Alas, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has rained on my parade. They have officially put their acquisitions on hiatus. This means they are not acquiring any new books. When you're a writer and one of the big publishing houses says, "We're not buying any new books," well, that's not a very shiny feeling.
No surprise, the blogosphere is chock full of writers in full-blown Chicken Little mode right. The sky is falling, they're hunkering down, oh god oh god oh god noone will ever want to buy their book.
Everybody needs to take a chill pill.
Yes, the economy is in the tank and that makes things bad for publishers, too. Yes, the credit crunch means that heavily leveraged companies aren't able to access as much as they normally could. Yes, there are probably going to be fewer books published in the next two years. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt isn't absolutely representative of the publishing industry either. They leveraged heavily to buy Harcourt and they are billions of dollars in debt, so they may be more representative of all types of companies who made reckless business decisions that are now coming home to roost.
The big three auto-makers in the US are in far worse straights, but that doesn't mean engineering students who have dreams of growing up to design cars should change their majors to agricultural engineering. We're still going to make cars. It's just that things are going to be tight for a while, and they may be different after this dark cloud lifts.
Hey, didn't we just elect a president who ran on the idea of change? Why are we so scared? Change could well be a good thing for the publishing industry, which has increasingly condensed itself into fewer, larger companies. The end result of that has been a tendency toward publishing and pushing the concept of "The Blockbuster," which tends to be a book equally loved and loathed.
This is the publishing industry that has set a precedent of paying six-figure advances for unvetted memoirs that blow up in their faces. That need to find a blockbuster often means that huge sums are paid for books that the publisher believes will sell big, and then more money is put into that book to make sure it sells big, but there are no guarantees. There is no next Harry Potter or DaVinci Code. There are just books, some good, some not as good, and readers make or break a vaunted "blockbuster." (Either because they truly love the book or they fall victim to the hype.)
This is also the publishing industry that has often preferred concept over quality, rejected good storytelling and promoted premise. If you think that's just the free market at work--the publishers produce what people want--think about how hard it can to be find a book you really want. It's that the publishers control the supply side in such a way that consumers simply have to choose from what's available, with little power to affect what's available.
If the big publishing houses fall apart, that doesn't mean publishing will stop. Books won't go away. It just means that smaller publishing houses will rise from the ashes, and that may be a good thing for all of us, readers and writers.
Hey, go buy a book, why don't you?
Apparently it's going around, but today I'm officially declaring my hatred for overseas customer service call centers. I work for a BIG university, so although I pay the bills for my department, the checks and everything else get issued out of a separate office. Naturally, they make mistakes sometimes, and then I have to sort them out.
Today, that involved a call to Amazon.com. Normally, I like Amazon. I love books and they sell a lot of them and they give free shipping. That said, I think it's going to be a loooooong time before I buy anything from Amazon again. When things go smoothly, they're great. When things don't go smoothly, you can spend four months tearing out your hair trying to get someone on the phone who can help you solve the error. On the phone, because if you try to sort it out by email, you get three dozen form emails that never address your problem. Right, Jaypo?
Look, I speak fairly standard English. I can turn off the Okie idioms. I speak slowly and clearly. Those are the positives in helping me deal with non-native English speakers over the phone. On the downside: I'm mostly deaf in one ear and can't hear very well out of the other. Also, as you know, I have diminishing patience for people who can't think on their feet.
So the last hour has been trying. That is, I was trying. The little girl on the other end, "Jesse," was not trying. It wasn't her problem really that my accounting department had mailed the check to the Amazon's corporate credit card address. She was perfectly content to keep mumbling the key phrases that appear on her screen, without any consideration for whether they were actually going to get me closer to solving my problem.
I came to Vox today planning to pitch NaNoBuyMo. National Novel Buying Month. (Yeah, I made it up. So what?)
The book industry is flagging. Stores are going under, publishers are closing imprints, buyers are getting cold feet, agents are getting nervous. Sure, it's selfish of me, encouraging people to buy books to prop up an industry I'm trying to succeed in, but it's not like I'm encouraging people to do something harmful. I'm not a tobacco executive trying to get you to smoke. Reading's good for you.
After my experience this morning, though, I'm going to make my encouragement more specific. Go to a local bookstore and buy a book. If you know someone who's trying to sell a novel (you do), go a step further: buy a first novel by somebody you never heard of. (Easy to check on the author bio flap. Susie Smutzenheimer lives in Idaho with her 9 cats. This is her first novel.) That's how the more modest writing careers are made--people buying one book at a time.
I wish you well with any customer service dealings you may have today and I hope you enjoy your book.
I bitch enough about the part of writing that isn't fun: researching agents and magazines, querying and submitting, getting my hopes up and swallowing rejection.
Today, let me just mention the part of writing that's fun. I mean, really, laugh out loud fun.
It's when a story idea hits me like a bolt of lightning. I'm out walking and by the time I get home, the whole story is there: characters, plot, dialog, climax.
It's when I spend several hours a day feverishly writing everything I can think of to do with the story and the characters. Not just the important, dramatic stuff, but the mumbled conversation two characters have over breakfast when they barely know each other or what a character thinks about as he's pumping gas, watching a stray cat sniff around a trash dumpster.
It's when I spend the rest of the day thinking about the story. Sitting at the dining room table, having what amounts to a conversation with a character, in which I say, "Why would you do that? What were you thinking?" And getting answers. Having him lean back, light a cigarette, and say, "I'll get to that, but do you got something other than this faggy import beer?"
It's when I look forward to boring situations, because I spend that time thinking about the story. Or I miss out on interesting things because I'm far, far away. Halfway through a movie, I don't know anything about it, because I haven't been paying attention. I look up from my desk and Hubbicula is moving his lips, has been moving his lips for a long time, and then I realize, "Oh, he's talking to me. I wonder what about?" (sorry, honey, that's just how it is.)
Above all, it's fun when I've been doing all of this for months and then one night I sit down and realize, I really only have one scene left to write and I know what's going to happen in it.
So, pardon me if I'm giddy as a school girl, but the rough draft is done. Now begins the really fun part: editing!
It's probably not the best sign in the world when the phrase that describes how you're feeling is lifted straight from a Merle Travis lament on coal mining. I'd like to say that I don't owe my soul to the company store, but since I owe my soul to the bank, it's not much different.
The debt part I've been feeling for several weeks, but I didn't feel older until the new faculty hire came in to get her keys. She's ten years younger than I am, just finished her Ph.D., and this is her first real teaching job--an assistant professorship. It's a big deal, the kind of thing that you have to work hard to get. I have to keep reminding myself that the reason this 20-something little pipsqueak has achieved this is that it's what she wanted. I have to remind myself that I didn't want the PhD or the professorship. Sometimes, working in this environment, it's hard to remember that.
All the same, here I am, the day before my 37th birthday and I feel tired. I ought to feel a bit cheered up. Unlike 2007, which was a zero sum year on the writing/publishing front, 2008 has been quite a bit better. I've had five short stories accepted for publication* and I've gotten a few nibbles on one of my novels. Still, it seems like there's so much work ahead of me with no guarantee of results. I guess I am getting old, because I think I need a nap.
*For my friends, who are curious, here's a list of the upcoming publications.
Cortez is reported to have burned his ships in order to destroy in the minds of his crew the possibility of retreat. (Historians still debate whether he burned them, scuttled them, or simply ran them aground.) Whether he did or didn't, Cortez didn't invent the idea of burning your ships. In the 3rd Century BC, Chinese general Xiang Yu burned his ships at the River Yangtze. He took it one step further. He destroyed his troops' cooking pots, as well, as a motivator for conquering their enemies. There was no way back and they had to win to survive. You might expect mutiny after something like that, but Xiang's ploy worked.
A professor in behavioral economics at MIT recently conducted an experiment in decision-making that mirrors the aspect of burning ships. Participants in the experiment played a video game in which they could earn real money by being willing to destroy other opportunities for earning money. The problem was that most participants in the study couldn't bring themselves to destroy those opportunities, even if it diminished their returns. They couldn't burn their ships.
What does that have to do with writing? Today I'm convinced it has quite a lot to do with writing. Yesterday, in keeping with the theme of the week, I received another rejection on a short story. Looking at the rejection, however, I didn't feel my usual set of frustration and sadness. Instead, I had a little epiphany. The story, honestly, wasn't one of my better ones, but I'd gone on putting the energy into submitting it, because I couldn't let it go. It was downright silly to waste any more time on it, when I didn't think it was that good. I just had some sort of sentimental attachment to it, because I wrote it. So, I simply pulled it off my submission roster. I felt better immediately and I can put that energy into preparing to submit a different story.
At the risk of sounding like I believe in this sort of thing, I'll note that shortly after I made that decision, I got an acceptance for another story in the mail. I don't believe the two are related, but I do believe that sometimes you have to burn a manuscript to move forward.
At long last, Dana Fredsti is here to blog about her experience getting her first novel published. Dana is a mystery novel, short story and screenplay writer, B-movie actress (okay, C movie actress), zombie aficionado, exotic and domestic feline advocate, swordfighter, wine lover and beach glass junkie. You can visit her online at DanaFredsti.com.
Getting published is not an easy thing. And how’s THAT for a most simplistic stating of the obvious statement you’ve read in a while? But it’s true. I’m sure there are publishing urban legends the equivalent of Lana Turner being discovered in Schwab’s Drugstore; some of them might even be true. But most of the time the instant success stories are fabricated by publicist spin-doctors. The kid who wrote Eragon, for instance, self-published the book and promoted it relentlessly with the help of his family, building up a readership at fantasy conventions and such before being noticed and then picked up by a major publisher. Good for him, btw!
The first draft of MURDER FOR HIRE: The Peruvian Pigeon (henceforth referred to as MFH) was written in a month, by my best friend Maureen and myself. We alternated chapters and character POVs and wrote the entire thing longhand. I had semi-legible handwriting back then (it’s since deteriorated into ‘I should be a doctor’ illegibility) and Maureen printed instead of using cursive, so it wasn’t too hard to transcribe it with my step-dad’s then state-of-the-art word processor. He had a snazzy dot matrix printer. Remember those? The ones that used the paper that came in perforated folds and you had to separate each page and remove the side strips? Yes, folks, that’s how long ago we wrote the first draft. There were a few gaping holes in the story; places where we’d scribble ‘need action here!’ or ‘this doesn’t make sense. Fix! But we pretty much had what we thought was a pretty smokin’ first draft. In fact, we thought it was so good, we sent out a slew of query letters before we’d even typed the thing up. We figured we’d have a few months before hearing back from any of the publishers (this was back in the days when you could still send manuscripts directly to publishers and have a shot at it being read), which gave us plenty of time for typing and tweaking. Imagine our surprise -- and panic -- when we got a reply with a request to see the entire book from an editor with St. Martin’s Press less than a week after sending out the first batch of queries.
This prompted a three day and night marathon of revisions and filling in those holes as we typed it up. I did the actual typing because I was the better typist. Maureen sat in a chair next to me and added her opinions/commentary as I typed. We were hopped up on chocolate and/or Beringer white zinfandel for most of the marathon. The sugar/caffeine/alcohol cocktail combined with sleep deprivation made us very loopy by the last night (and all of this no doubt account for some of the things that made their way into the finished first draft). I still remember typing madly at 3am by the light of the word processor and a small desk lamp when Maureen suddenly said in a singsong voice, “Dude, if you were a supermodel, would you rather be Cindy Crawford or Paulina what’s-her-name?” After staring at her in disbelief, my reply was a borderline hysterical “I don’t know! I don’t know!” before turning back to the computer and continuing to pound the keys like some insane pianist. Maureen, btw, preferred Cindy Crawford. I still haven’t made my choice.
I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that St. Martin’s Press politely declined to publish the first incarnation of MFH. Maureen and I are still both a bit mortified we thought it was even close to publication-ready when we sent it in. But talk about a wasted opportunity. The mystery market wasn’t glutted at the time, we’d gotten a crack at a major publishing house without even trying…and we blew it because we didn’t have the common sense to make sure our finished product was a: finished and b: well written before sending off query letters. Points for hubris, same points taken away for stupidity.
It took me approximately 16 years from the time the first draft was written to get MFH published. During that time span the manuscript was: stuffed in a drawer (or the electronic equivalent) for a few years; underwent massive rewrites at least 5 times; waited patiently while query letters and the first three chapters went out to agents and publishers; collected many rejection letters, and was occasionally sent out in its entirety to interested parties. Sometimes it was returned with polite ‘no thanks, not what we’re looking for’ and twice it was returned with ‘we like it, but it needs work in these areas.’ So I’d do rewrites and try to fix the problem areas indicated, but could never get it to the point the interested parties actually wanted to publish it.
During this same 16 year period I had short stories and essays published and a couple of screenplays produced, but I couldn’t seem to break through the wall of book publishing. I really wanted to get MFH published and had built a pretty solid emotional and creative barrier that got in the way of really committing to another novel project. My break finally came because of a writer friend, Brad Linaweaver, who’d read every draft of MFH (except for the first one, which is buried in a secret crypt never to again see the light of day) and thought it deserved to be published. He championed it to James Rock with James Rock Publishing Inc. and after a long wait during which James Rock read two incarnations of MFH, it was accepted for publication in February 2007. It was a long road to publication, but so worth it to finally hold the finished bound copy! Now I’m on the long road of publicity, but that’s a story for another day.
Please feel free to post any questions you have for Dana, and she'll be around to answer them. Meanwhile, The Peruvian Pigeon is for sale at amazon.com and other fine retail establishments. Thanks, Dana!
As I mentioned many months ago, my good friend Dana Fredsti has recently had her first novel published. As part of her book promotion, she's doing a blog tour, and on Saturday, she'll be coming to my blog!
So, be sure to come visit on Saturday to check out Dana's guest blog post. I don't know what she'll be talking about, but I guarantee it'll be interesting. After all she's a former B-movie actress who volunteers at a big cat refuge, and she just had her first novel published. Lots of possibilities. Plus, I believe there will be some sort of give-away for select commenters. Perhaps a copy of her book.
Still, you go on trying, or you give up. If you go on trying, that's fine, but if you give up you have to possibilities. You can go on writing in obscurity or you can give up writing. I guess I'll go on trying.
The one sure thing to diminish one's own sense of suffering is someone else's suffering, and the news is always good for a dose of that: Woman Dies after Falling Behind Bookcase. She was 38, just a little older than I am, and while trying to adjust the electrical plug to a television, she fell behind a bookcase and asphyxiated because of the inverted position she was in. The creepy part: her family didn't find her for almost two weeks. They had called the police and were searching for her, putting up missing posters. Until--and you can see this part of the story coming from a mile away--they noticed a strange smell coming from her bedroom. Two weeks they'd been worrying about her, and she'd been right there in the house with them.
So, it's the same old story, no matter what your doubts or fears, you can go forth today glad to be alive.
In Tampa, I belonged to a novel writers critique group. One of the members was a secretary like me, and often marveled that I had so many novels in progress. During one of our meetings, she said, "How do you find the time to do so much writing?"
I just smiled and said, "I steal it."
For years, I had plugged along, writing a story here, a story there. I had a couple of novel ideas that I had been chipping away at for years. I also had a job at a non-profit, where I was either overworked and overmanaged or completely ignored. At one magical juncture between micromanagement and indifference, the big boss (we called her Cankles, because her calves transitioned to her feet without any intervening ankles) moved my office. We were tight for office space at the main office, and I was on the bottom rung of the importance ladder. So, with two days notice, they moved my office to the donation warehouse, where the organization had a thrift store.
That first day, alone in my empty office in a back storeroom, with just a computer and a handful of office supplies, I did what I should have done all along. I started stealing time. To begin with, it was out of necessity. The first week, no one had hooked up my office phone or moved my filing cabinets across town. I couldn't even do my job. So, I turned on the computer and took out my journal, which was full of notes on a novel I wanted to write. I wrote about 5,000 words the first day. The second day, I wrote 10,000. By the end of the first month, I had more than half the novel written.
By then, of course, my phone was hooked up and my file cabinets were there. I could have gone back to my job, gone back to doing what I was supposed to do. Except by then, I was so incredibly bitter about my job. I was cut off from everything, and peole just kept trying foist more responsibility onto me, as though my office were some magical blackhole into which work could disappear. Turns out, they were right.
I started hanging out with the warehouse people; in the same way a religious cult will get their claws into you when you're lonely. Luckily, the Warehouse Gospel was the Joy of Slack. They were all minimum wage employees, and as far as upper management was concerned, minimum respect employees. The warehouse people saw it as their duty to steal time. If you do the math, it's hard to disagree. If you make $240 for a 40 hours week, that's $6 an hour. On the other hand, if you only work 30 hours a week, you're making $8 an hour.
So, I finished the novel, although I still haven't found a publisher for it, and I started another one. Eventually, I left that job, when it became clear that at some point there would be a reckoning about the work that I had not been doing for months. I went back to teaching English Composition at a local college. Then, I found the church secretary job, and I finally learned the lesson of the Warehouse Gospel: you can do your job and steal time. I wrote another novel in the two years I was at the church. I figured out early on that I could do my job in about 5 hours a day, leaving me the other 3 hours to write. No one ever even noticed.
Which leads me to my current job. It's not difficult, and it certainly doesn't require 40 hours a week to get the work done. When my work is finished, I siphon a few hours off the top for my writing. Some days, I spend all day working. Some days, I spend all day writing, like today. The next novel is going well.
Still haven't managed to publish any of them. Turns out I'm a better writer than I am a salesperson. I'll work on that, during my stolen time.
