Writing

The Publishing Lottery and Other Insults

Dear Anonymous Commenter,

Thank you for taking the time to comment on my post about Self-Publishing Myths.  While the poor grammar and spelling were annoying, (something you might want to work on as you self-publish that second book), I was struck by this part of your comment:

“Lets be realistic- how many people get published through traditional publishers? When people used to ask me if i was published i would ask them if they had won american idol.
Its not about talent, its about pitching, luck, who you know and the stars aligned!”

I spent way too much time thinking about your words, trying to find a response that would capture the true depth of my feelings.  I came up with the following:

Bite me.

To elaborate, you wander over to the blog of an author who’s published five books with a commercial publisher and proceed to explain that talent and skill and work have nothing to do with it; I just got lucky and knew the right people.  Because the right people will happily risk their careers to publish their friends’ books, even if those books suck.  Is that the line of pseudologic you’re following here?

From what I’ve seen, this sort of nonsense usually comes from one of two scenarios:

  1. You drank the Kool-Aid from one of the scammier vanity presses and bought into their crap about “traditional publishers” being run by evil overlords who live only to crush the souls from peppy young writers like yourself.
  2. You submitted a few times, got rejected, and decided to take your toys and go home.

You go on to say, “My books are good, as im sure a million unpublished books out there are.”  Right.  Much like everyone who tries out for American Idol is sure their singing is good, and that they deserve a major record deal. 

Because it’s so easy.  Because anyone can sit down and crank out a great story.  Heck, my cat hocked his breakfast onto the keyboard last week and produced a dandy little flash piece about zombie squids.  Everyone’s wonderful and brilliant, and it’s just a lottery as the Publishing Gods roll their d1,000,000 to see which of those worthy candidates shall be chosen.

Most of the people who get rejected from American Idol are sent home because they suck.  The ones who make it to those final rounds are the ones who’ve worked their asses off to learn how to sing.  Writing is the same way.  It takes time and a lot of work.  No magic fairy is going to blow sparkly story dust up your butt and transform you into the next J. K. Rowling.

I understand if you’re frustrated.  I know it can be discouraging trying to break in as a writer.  I’ve been there, and so has every other commercial author you so casually dismiss as “lucky.”

You chose to go the self-publishing route.  Maybe because your unique creative vision was too special for the New York publishers.  Maybe you really are as good as you think you are, and the entire publishing industry was just too blind to see it.  Maybe not.  I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care.  I wish you all the best, and I hope you’re happy with your choice.  But if not–if you’re going the passive-aggressive “publishing is mean and out to get me” route to console yourself–could you please at least keep it to the privacy of your own blog?

Thanks.

Are Booksignings Worth It?

Booksignings were always part of my mythic dream of the Published Author.  I couldn’t wait to have my own flyer in the bookstore window, to be sitting there with a stack of my books.  A friend even bought me a fancy pen to use at my first signing.

January, 2005. That's my 'PLEASE buy my book' face.One of my earliest booksignings was for the Five Star edition of Goblin Quest [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy].  Considering I was pushing a $25.99 hardcover by an unknown author, it went pretty well.  Much better than the one a month  later at B&N, when I sat there for two hours without selling a single copy.

Last week I drove out to Ann Arbor for an event at Nicola’s Books.  These days I’m better known, with five books in print, all available for the more reasonable price of $7.99.

Eight people showed up.  They bought a lot of books, which was great (gotta love Christmas shopping), and I enjoyed hanging out and chatting.  But as I was driving the 60 miles back home, I found myself wondering if it was worth it.

I sold maybe 20 books at that signing.  At $0.48 per book, that’s just under ten bucks.  That doesn’t even cover gas.  Even my best events, the book launch parties I do at the local Schulers, don’t have much financial payback compared to the time and work the booksellers and I put into them.

But it’s important to look at the long term.  I’ve built up a wonderful relationship with the folks at Schulers, and as a result, they stock more of my books than any other store.  I do really well there, in large part because they hand-sell my work.  At Nicola’s last week, I left about twenty signed books which will go back on the shelf.  So even if the signing doesn’t go well, you’re building relationships with booksellers and leaving signed stock that will continue to move after you’ve left.

There’s also the “sneezer” factor.  Tobias Buckell describes sneezers as the ones who get excited about a product early on and talk about it to their friends and family.  Person X might buy a single book, but if they enjoy meeting you and like the book, they’re more likely to go out and spray that enthusiasm all over the place.  I can think of individuals who have sold dozens of my books through word-of-mouth recommendations.

But for every well-organized, “successful” signing, there are others where you and your rapidly-wilting ego sit at a table for two hours while a total of four people wander by, only to have a bored staff member later comment, “Saturdays are usually slow for us.”  (Leaving one to wonder why the store invited you to come out on a Saturday.)  Or the store that ordered only a handful of books that sold out before I arrived.  Or the one where the CRM  doing the event was fired the week before, and they had no books and no record I was even supposed to be there.  (Always call ahead to confirm!)

Basically, the magic is gone.  I’ll continue to do signings, particularly my book launches at Schulers.  I’ll happily do autographing sessions at conventions.  But I’m not going to call every bookstore in a 100-mile radius trying to schedule events, and I’m not going to feel like a failed author if I don’t have at least ten booksignings set up for every new book.  It just doesn’t feel like the best use of my time and energy.

What do you think?  As authors, readers, and booksellers, are signings worth it?

Girly Books

From time to time, I get an e-mail or a comment from male readers who enjoyed my goblin books, but are hesitant to pick up Stepsister Scheme or Mermaid’s Madness because they look like they’re for girls.

My reaction to this is all over the place.  The goblin books went over well with younger boys, and I can understand why a teenage boy might be hesitant to walk around with a book that has three women surrounded by swirling pastels on the cover.  I also think it sucks that we’re still raising boys to think it’s shameful to be caught reading something “feminine,” but having been a teenage male myself, I can understand that reluctance.

I like the cover for Mermaid better, less because we lost the pastels, and more because I think it’s just a great image.  But I still get the questions.  This is obviously a book about three girls, so doesn’t that mean it’s written for girls?  (Much as Name of the Wind was written for red-haired boys, and the Zombie Raccoons anthology was written for decaying scavengers.)

I’ve said in multiple interviews that I wrote Stepsister for my daughter, in response to the Disney/Barbie princess infestation we went through at the house.  So in a way, these books are written for girls.  Or at least for one girl.  Which means … what, exactly?  I don’t even know what a “girly book” is.  I assume it’s shorthand along the lines of:

Boy Books = Action/Adventure; Girl Books = Romance
Boy Books = Plot/Idea-centric; Girl Books = Character-centric
Boy Books = Explody things on the cover; Girl Books = Chicks and pastels

There’s value in being able to find the kind of books you want.  If you’re into character-oriented fiction, you want to be able to discover those books in the store.  You don’t want to buy a book, take it home, and discover that what you thought was an action-packed vampire adventure is actually a 400-page relationship angst-fest.  I get that.  But trying to classify those preferences by gender, with all of the stereotyping and judgement that goes with that?  It doesn’t work for me.

Josh Jasper wrote a piece over at Genreville about genre shame, and about being male and reading romance novels.  “Why should I be ashamed of reading something fun when women aren’t?  The answer is that I’m afraid of being judged by people I don’t know, whose opinions don’t really matter, about something they have no real business judging me over.  Social conditioning is strange and stupid.”

When you ask me if Mermaid and Stepsister are girly books, the answer is that I don’t even know what that means.  I don’t want to know.  I can’t tell you whether or not you’ll like the books, but I can try to give you an idea what they’re about and let you make your own decision.  In a nutshell, the princess series is about:

Fighting and magic and family and fairies and revenge and unrequited love and requited love and hairy trolls and sailing and a three-legged cat and flying horses and wolves and drunk pixies and sewer goblins and enchanted swords and mermaids and friendship and ghosts and strong women and not-so-strong women and also some men and birds and rats and lots of ass-kicking.

It’s bad enough we still try to force people into fairly rigid gender roles.  Do we really have to do it to books too?

The Conspiracy Against New Writers

• I’ve got a book signing 12/17 at 7:00 at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor.  Just in case any of you A2 folks need Christmas gift ideas 🙂  The last time I did an Ann Arbor signing, we got one of the nastiest blizzards I can remember.  I’m hoping this doesn’t become a pattern.

• Dragovianknight made this wonderful Christmas LJ icon from the cover of Mermaid.  I love it!

• For those of you who read electronically, Fictionwise is running a pretty nice sale.  Looks like 40% off of short fiction, and 50% rebates on e-books.  (Including my own stuff.)

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Came across a post responding to the pay rate discussion and protesting how the snobby pros are pulling up the ladder, trying to keep new writers out.  I know a fair number of successful authors these days, and the idea that pro writers are scared of the newbies and spending all this time and energy working to exclude them … is kind of dumb.

Of all the things I worry about, of all the things that can hurt my career, new  writers don’t even make the footnotes.  Many pro authors go out of their way to try to help new writers, and to repay the help we received.  Most either celebrate the success of the new folks, or else simply don’t have the time or the interest to notice them.  But nobody’s trying to keep the newbies down (no matter how much Publish America and their ilk try to convince you otherwise while they take your money).

How can I put this delicately?  The biggest reason it’s so hard for new writers to break in is because most of us suck when we’re new.  Myself included.  I wrote hundreds of thousands of words of utter crap while learning how to do this.  Sure, I was discouraged by all the rejection.  I felt shut out.  I had my days where I felt like a martyr and a victim.

But believe me, it had nothing to do with pros being scared of me as a newbie, or conspiring to keep the good markets all to themselves.  It had nothing to do with editors only buying work from Big Names.  It had to do with the fact that my work wasn’t good enough yet.[1. Ann Leckie wrote a very good post deconstructing the “write better” advice, including some of the assumptions and flaws with that advice.  Worth reading.  http://ann-leckie.livejournal.com/141905.html]

If you disagree with what folks are saying, that’s one thing.  Sometimes the pros are wrong.  Do your research and make your own decisions.  But if you’re going to argue, please try to come up with something better than The Grand Conspiracy Against New Writers?

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Short Fiction Pay Rates

A week or so back, John Scalzi tore into Black Matrix Publishing for their short fiction pay rate of 1/5 of a cent per word.  Black Matrix responded, explaining that this is a “labor of love.” They never implied that they were a pro market, and isn’t a token payment better than none at all? (I believe Publish America uses the same rationalization with their $1 advance.) Scalzi promptly shredded their arguments.

Cat Valente weighed in as a “mid-career author” who writes a lot of short fiction.  Sarah Monette offered a third perspective, including examples of her own fiction which sold for fairly low rates, and a discussion of when and why she chooses to submit her work to semi-pro markets.

Looking at my own bibliography, there are two stories I received no payment for, and at least a half-dozen more that fall into the semi-pro category, whether that’s a $5 flat rate or a penny a word.  A careful reading will also show that this stopped around the end of 2003, after I “sold” a flash piece to a royalties-only e-book that, as far as I can tell, never sold a single copy.

Around 2004, I began submitting only to markets that paid SFWA pro rates (Then three cents a word. ETA: Current SFWA pro rate is 5 cents/word). Not because I was insulted by lesser pay rates.  Not because I felt exploited by the smaller markets.  But because my goal as a writer was to be read.

Publishing in those smaller venues was good for my ego.  Of course it feels better to be accepted than rejected.  But aside from that ego boost, those sales did little else for my stories or my career.  Sure, I could go out and buy a slice of pizza with my earnings.  But almost nobody read my work.

The contributors got their copy, so it’s possible some of my fellow authors glanced at my story.  Maybe.  (Authors, how many of you read every story in every contributor copy of an anthology or magazine?)  Aside from that?  Well, one friend in college did pick up a copy of World Wide Writer, so that’s something, right?  What’s World Wide Writer, you ask?  Oh, right.  They were a tiny startup ‘zine that died after two issues.

I don’t use pay rate as an absolute rule.  Sure I’d rather make $250 than $25.  But I sold a story to Andromeda Spaceways recently, and they pay significantly less than 5 cents/word.  On the other hand, they’ve been around a long time, put out a nice magazine, and have a good reputation and readership for a semi-pro.  There are a handful of others, publications that pay less than pro rates, but have earned a lot of critical acclaim or developed a broader readership.

In general though, minuscule pay rate correlates to minuscule readership.  I suspect there are more markets listed on the for-the-luv page at Ralan than there are readers for those markets.

When I started aiming for pro markets in 2004, several things happened.  I got rejected more.  I was forced to improve as a writer.  And eventually, as I broke into those markets, more people began reading my work.

Is Black Matrix exploiting writers? Token payment is better than nothing. (Chtulhu spare us from markets promising “exposure” as compensation.)  But there’s “token” and there’s “spare change I found in my sofa.”[1. Deleted for unnecessary snark.] I don’t believe Black Matrix is trying to scam anyone.  But I won’t submit to them, and I wouldn’t recommend them as a market for new writers who want to build a career and be read.

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Why I Haven’t Written a 4th Goblin Book

At least once a month, I receive an e-mail or a comment asking if I’m going to do a fourth goblin book.  The answer has always been, “Probably not.”  I can think of only two situations wherein I might consider writing another goblin book:

  1. DAW offers to pay me a million dollars[1. Or any publisher, for that matter. I’m not picky.].
  2. I come up with an idea for a goblin story that is both new and exciting to me as a writer.

The thing is, in my brain, Jig’s story is finished.  I’ve shown him and his fellow goblins growing and changing over the three books.  I leave them in a very different place in book three, and I like that.  I like that we got to see Tymalous Shadowstar’s story as well.  I like that we got closure for some of the other characters and situations from book one.  It feels done.

Sometimes I wonder if I made the right call, if maybe I should have kept going with the series.  Jig has some wonderful fans, and he really was a fun character to write.  (Not to mention the goblins were making great money over in Germany!)  And then last night I caught the rebirth of Scrubs.

This is a show that “ended” after season eight.  I thought they had a wonderful series finale, and I was very impressed at how they handled everything.  It worked.

And then they decided to keep going.  I don’t know why.  I don’t know if it was a purely commercial decision, or if someone honestly thought they had more stories to tell.  All I know is that it was painful.  Many of the characters had crossed the line into caricature.  The stories felt repetitive–things we had already seen in earlier seasons.  The whole thing felt hollow.

I hope they’ll improve as the season progresses, and I’ll keep watching to see where they go with it.  But those two new episodes affirmed for me why I don’t just sit down and write a fourth Jig book.  If I wrote it because the fans wanted it, or for money, or for any reason aside from my own love and excitement over a new story, the odds are that I’d lose the heart of those stories.  I’d end up with the same kind of empty, repetitive caricature I watched last night.

I was disappointed when Scrubs ended, but I enjoyed the series, and I loved and respected the way they wrapped things up.  As a fan, I find myself wishing they had left it there.  And as a writer, I don’t want to do that to my own fans.

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Why My Books are Not My Babies

From time to time, you come across authors talking about how their books are their babies.  I’ve been thinking about the release of The Mermaid’s Madness [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy], and decided to see how well the analogy holds up.

Part 1: Creation.  It took me one year to finish the manuscript that would become The Mermaid’s Madness, and that’s without my editor’s revision requests.  It took me mumble minutes to finish … er … well, to finish my part in the creation of what would become my child.  (On the other hand, at least my wife didn’t ask for revisions!)

Part 2: Prepublication.  It takes roughly nine months for a human baby to develop and be born.  It took about ten months for finished copies of Mermaid to start showing up in bookstores.  In both case, you have some beautiful milestones along the way.  The first ultrasound and the first glimpse of your cover art.  Preparing the baby’s room, and redesigning the web site to make room for the new book.  The baby analogy holds up better here.

Part 3: Release.  Labor is not a fun experience.  We were back and forth to the hospital several times.  The doctors tried and failed to induce labor.  In the end, both of my children were born via C-section, basically cutting my wife open and tugging the kids out.  This is not a gentle process, folks.  It was like trying to remove a basketball from a too-tight package.  The books, on the other hand?  My publisher shipped ’em to me in a Fed Ex. box.

Part 4: The Real World.  Very few people will tell you your newborn baby looks like a cross between a bulldog and a California Raisin.  People have no such reluctance when it comes to reviewing your new book.  The real baby is snuggled, fed, burped, bathed, and rocked to sleep.  Your books will receive no such love.  Some will be forgotten in the back room.  Others will linger on the shelves, along with tens of thousands of others.  Those lucky enough to find a home will have their spines cracked, and after a brief relationship, will end up squeezed onto a bookshelf and left there for months or years to come.

Part 5: Letting Go.  Your baby will likely be with you for at least 18 years.  Your book?  You’ll be lucky if it’s still on the bookstore shelves to celebrate its first birthday.  Within a month, many of those books will be setting out on their new career: stripping.  Front covers are wantonly ripped away in an orgy of shelf reorganization, and soon you’ll find these prematurely aged paperbacks discarded in back alley dumpsters.

Part 6: The Next Child.  I’ll be honest, I rarely think about Mermaid these days.  I’m lavishing all of my love and affection on Snow Queen.  This will be my seventh book.  I hope to pop out at least thirty over the course of my career.  Forget octomom, I wanna be tridecadad!  Children, on the other hand?  I love both of my children dearly, but I don’t know whether I could handle a third.

In conclusion, myth busted.  A book is not a baby.  Tune in next week when I talk about how dingos ate my book.

Blurb Ethics

• Thank you to everyone who’s offered new and autographed books for the DV Book Drive.  I’ll be continuing to collect books through about mid-December, at which point they will be delivered to the shelter.

• I’m still taking entries into the Mock Cover Contest, too.  I’ll pick the top entries and put those up for a vote early next week.

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Way back when, after I sold Goldfish Dreams to a small publisher, I started hunting for blurbs. I was fortunate to get some great ones, but I remember the individual who e-mailed to say he hadn’t read the entire book, but offered a blurb anyway.  Better still, when I pointed out that his blurb contained spoilers, he invited me to just rewrite it however I saw fit.

I’d like to say I took the ethical path and declined.  Alas, I was young and desperate. I rewrote the blurb, e-mailed it to him for approval, and slapped his name on it.  I rationalize it by saying at least he approved the blurb, but it’s not my proudest moment as an author.

Years later, I was reading Julie Czerneda‘s comments about blurbs. I can’t remember exactly how she said it, but I came away thinking of blurbs as a contract, a matter of trust between reader and author.  If a blurb from me has any impact at all, it will be because you’ve read my work, and you trust me as an author.  You trust that I wouldn’t recommend something I didn’t like.

Over the past few years, I’ve begun getting more blurb requests, which means I’ve had to decide how I’m going to approach this.  I find myself thinking about that blurb I got for Goldfish Dreams, and the one I got from Julie for Goblin Quest [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy].  Guess which one means more to me?  Guess which of these two individuals I want to be like.

That’s led to some uncomfortable moments.  I’ve had to tell several friends that I couldn’t blurb their books for one reason or another.  Sometimes the book just didn’t work for me.  That makes for an awkward conversation, but I also try to be honest.

I had a different experience a few months back.  Jennifer Estep sent me an ARC of Spider’s Bite [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy], which comes out in January.

It’s not a bad book.  I like the idea of using elemental magic in urban fantasy.  Gin has the strong female thing going, which I generally enjoy.  And the story is definitely a page-turner.

I still declined to blurb it, and a part of me continues to wonder if I’m overthinking it.  Spider’s Bite, like a fair amount of urban fantasy, is a pretty “adult” book.  There’s violence and bloodshed, as well as fairly graphic sexual content.  It’s a very different style than my own work, and that’s where I hesitated.

If my name were to show up on the cover, what would that signal to my readers?  What expectations does that create?  Will someone pick up this book expecting light, fun fantasy like Jim Hines writes?

I’m sure there’s overlap between Estep’s readers and my own.  People read a wide range.  And It’s not like my blurb is going to scar some innocent, wide-eyed young reader for life by tricking them into reading sex and violence.

But I wasn’t comfortable with it, and I’m continuing to try to understand where that’s coming from.  On that note, I would love to hear your thoughts on blurbs.  What is and isn’t appropriate, what works and what doesn’t, and so on.  As an author, where would you draw the line?  As a reader, what makes you lose trust with a blurbing author?

The Nebula Thing

• Still taking title suggestions for the mock urban fantasy cover contest. And for anyone who missed it, that entry inspired Paul Abbamondi to do his own urban fantasy mock-up with Jig in a traditional cover pose. Click to view the awesomeness.

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So Nebula recommendations are now open for all works published from July 1, 2008 through the end of this year. I was actually surprised to see how much I had that qualified. Being the trend-following guy I am, I figured what the heck.

Novels:

The Mermaid’s Madness [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]
The Stepsister Scheme [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]

Novelette:

“Red’s Tale” in The Faery Taile Project. November, 2008.

Short Stories:

“The Creature in Your Neighborhood” in Strip Mauled. September, 2009.
“Mightier than the Sword” in Gamer Fantastic. July, 2009.
“The Red Path” in Terribly Twisted Tales. May, 2009.
“Gift of the Kites” in Clarkesworld Magazine. October, 2008.
“Original Gangster” in Fantasy Magazine. September, 2008.
“Images of Death” in Imaginary Friends. September, 2008.
“The Eyes of Ra” in Cat Tales. September, 2008.
“Ours to Fight For” in Realms of Fantasy. August, 2008.

If you’re in SFWA and are interested in reading any of these, including the novels, please let me know.

More importantly, I wanted to use this as a reminder about the 2009 Humorous SF/F Roundup.  I will continue to add qualifying works to the list until the end of 2009.

The prevailing attitude is that humor and comedy are somehow lesser works.  (Much like SF/F in general is often viewed as lesser–mere escapism.)

I’ve received mail from people in hospitals with dying relatives, people dealing with death, divorce, and other crises, and I can tell you this–escapism matters.  Humor matters.  Reading a well-written book that allows you to escape the pain and stress for a few hours, that might even allow you to smile or laugh for the first time in weeks–it matters.

For that reason, I would love to see one or more humorous pieces make the ballot this year.

Updatery

• First off, a quote from author C. C. Finlay: “The third law of writing: For every fiction there is an equal and opposite re-fiction. For example, if there is The Hobbit, eventually someone will inevitably write Goblin Quest.”  I am much amused.

• The SF/F Humor Roundup is up to 22 short stories and 12 novels.  So far, so good!  I’m working on guidelines to try to cut down on blatant self-promotion.  I don’t mind authors recommending their own work, but I don’t want a list of 30 stories from every online nook and cranny.  I’m thinking of limiting self-promotional recommendations to one short story and/or one novel.  What do you think?

• I’ll be heading to Windycon tomorrow.  I’ve got the Manly Baen vs. Womanly DAW panel Saturday at 10, an autographing session Saturday at 2, What are Kids Reading on Sunday at 10, and I’ll be reading my muppet werewolf tale on Sunday at Noon.  Hope to see some of you there!

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I realized I haven’t done an actual writing update in a while.  After finishing the revisions for Red Hood’s Revenge, I started back in on Snow Queen.  I struggled through the current chapter, but it was painful.  The whole thing felt like it was stuck, and I had no idea where to go from here.

Some of the more experienced writers probably know exactly where I’m at in this manuscript.  That’s right, it’s the dreaded 30,000 word slog.  Every book I’ve done for the past five years has hit this same point, where my outline falls apart and the story crashes and burns.

Fortunately, I’ve done this enough times to recognize it.  The solution for me?  Step back and rewrite the outline.  When I’m first planning a book, my brain can’t hold the whole thing.  So I outline and do the best I can, but by the time I’ve typed 25K-30K words, I’ve changed enough that the outline no longer works.

I’ve spent the past week outlining, and I’m just about ready to dive back in.  I’m not going to start over from the beginning, because I’ve found that just wastes time for me.  But I’ve made notes about what to change in the rewrite, and more importantly, I’m excited about some of the new ideas and directions I’m taking in the rest of the story.  I’m also surprised to realize I don’t know how this book is going to end.  I honestly don’t know whether or not certain characters will survive.  That’s kind of fun 🙂

So there’s where I’m at with the writing.  Book three is done, book four is underway, and the back of my brain is quietly percolating ideas for the next series.

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