I wrote my first novel during the summer I turned thirteen.  It was terrible but not unlike the movie City of Angels (the angel was a woman in my story—yeah, I know, they’re supposed to be sexless creatures, but the movie got it wrong too).  I’m a born story-teller and should have bitten the bullet and become a writer, journalist, or something similar, but I decided to take advantage of the Sputnik panic (read:  $$$$ for studying) and become a scientist.  No regrets there.  It put a lot more PB&J sandwiches on the table for my kids (better said, arepas, empenadas, sobrebarriga, papas criollas, yucca and maduros—we were living in South America for a long stretch of time).

Nope, no regrets.  I kept writing and reading and recording my experiences and now I am, finally, a full-time writer who incorporates that life-time of experiences into his writing (I often wonder about young MFAs who have none).  I’ve been writing full-time long enough that I thought it might be appropriate that I write about some of my experiences with this new digital publishing paradigm shift that has revolutionized the world of publishing.  Since I’m opinionated, this is in my free wheelin’ op-ed blog to allow others to comment (all part of the fun).  Here we go, a summary of what works for me.

Write about anything?  Hardly.  Whether fiction, non-fiction, or blog post, you have to write about something that excites and motivates you and will interest your intended reading audience (in my case, the universe).  If fiction, a good yarn; if non-fiction, some good info; if a blog post, something new and thoughtful.  Be your own harshest critique.  Nonetheless, realize that you, your family, and your friends might just be a bit biased.  Use critique groups if you must, but the same comment holds.

Remember that members of critique groups, agents, and book editors are just gatekeepers who decide on the marketability (potential success) of your work from past experience.  They have no more idea about readers’ future likes and dislikes than you do, although they pretend to.  In fact, there is ample evidence that crystal balls only exist in fantasy novels, not on agents’ or publishers’ desks.  Examples of groundbreaking authors who were dissed by the establishment abound (Clancy, Gibson, and Grisham, to name three—you should know all three names and many others, as well as the new subgenres they generated).

Many people will smack you with the overused adage:  write what you know.  Here’s another adage: take that with a grain of salt.  It’s much more important to write about something or someone that excites or interests you.  In my recent serialized novel Evil Agenda, I wrote about Sierra Leone.  I’ve never even been to Africa.  Yet I could find out enough information to make it a plausible locale.  In the same novel, I wrote about “Needle Park” in Zurich.  I was there once and the scene I describe is approximately what I saw (minus Sirena, of course).  If I hadn’t told you, could you have determined the difference?  Same with the ISS in my YA sci-fi thriller The Secret Lab.  Clearly I haven’t been in space, but I get excited by the thought of it (even before Sputnik).  I hope some of that excitement carried over into the novel.

Hire an editor for your MS?  Only if you need one.  Many people do—or another set of independent eyes, at least.  If you’re on a tight budget, do it yourself…very carefully.  I’m a reviewer as well, and I tend to pick at the nits until they’re bleeding.  Use your word processor to search for misspellings, overuse of adverbs (search for –ly words, especially after dialog tags, for example), misuse of reflexives (search for –self words), and so forth.  There are many writers’ blog posts and help forums about common mistakes that you can search for.  The grammar checker helps too, especially for catching things that pass that spell checker (there vs. their, it’s vs. its, etc), and overuse of the passive voice.  For my YA novel, I even used the language level calculator—a help, but probably not very accurate, since it just checks vocabulary, not concepts.

I do all the above on the computer.  I spend so much time on my laptop it is now like the rebel leader that pops out of the guy’s chest in Total Recall (or, on bad days, like the cute little fellow that pops out of the guy’s chest in Alien).  I then print out my entire MS.  Seeing it in hard copy is almost like having a set of independent eyes.  Holding the entire MS in your hands allows you to check things like POV, characterization, scene, timeline, and distracting contradictions (Bill has a blue shirt on page n and a red shirt on page n+1) while sitting in your recliner with your Jameson’s pretending you’re just an average reader, albeit with a jaundiced eye.  Scribble notes to yourself in the margins.  Use lots of red ink, especially on the first draft.  Fix the problems you find.  Then iterate.  Painful, yes, but also necessary.

The activities outlined in the last two paragraphs are minimal things to do to your MS before you send it to an agent.  Your MS has to be as good as it can be, even if you end up formatting it for Smashwords.  Is an agent necessary?  The answers people give to that question are rapidly changing.  J. A. Konrath and Barry Eisler think that agents are just gatekeepers for the big publishing houses (hereafter called the Big Six—these include the Hatchette Book Group, a name I love, even though they tried to soften what they do with the -te).  Even smaller publishers (don’t blink—they’ll soon be gobbled up by one of the Big Six; for example, Hatchette owns Little, Brown, and Co., together with all its subsidiaries, and is owned in turn by Lagardiere, France’s answer to Walt Disney, Ted Turner, or Rupert Murdock) generally require agented works and, if they don’t, the book editor serves the same role as agent.  Agents definitely get it wrong many times (I mentioned Clancy and Grisham already).

I guess I’m old-fashioned, up to a point.  Up to now I generally send a book out to N agents.  After N rejections, the old legacy publishing model tells you to throw the MS in a drawer and forget about it (or ye olde circular file, but that’s a bit drastic).  In today’s digital publishing environment, you have other options.  You should consider them in the case that all the rejection slips say something like “This is not right for me at this time—good luck with your writing.”  Assuming that you have followed all the rules for submission (don’t send a sci-fi or fantasy novel to an agent who only wants non-fiction), these agents are doing you no favors and have, in fact, wasted your time.

The phrase “…not right for me…” says it all—this agent doesn’t want to consider anything out of his or her comfort zone (which, of course, is the comfort zone of the publishers she has previously sold to).  Clancy wouldn’t have had a chance either.  So, if your rejections all say something like this, or if an agent even loves your MS but can’t sell it to anyone, you might want to consider digital self-publishing.  This is not vanity press—you no longer have to invest in a 1000 to 5000 book run.  For pBooks, it’s POD—the publisher prints as the orders come in.  For eBooks, buyers just download the appropriately formatted file (Kindle’s mobi is the most important, so you want to do at least that).

It’s possible that agents are a dying breed.  They’ll have to at least redefine their roles or go the way of brick and mortar bookstores like Borders.  Their role as an employment safety valve for journalism students and MFAs is definitely in jeopardy.  I’m sorry for them (the agents—the students will survive by choosing another profession)—I really am.  It’s a tough business and they’re being hit hard.  Morover, as many eBook authors are quick to point out, legacy publishing is an organized scam perpetrated on authors (the Hatchette without the –te)—you can make more money publishing and selling your own eBooks and you can get them published nearly as fast as you can write them.  In the legacy world, the agent takes a cut, the publisher takes a cut, and the author doesn’t make much at all.

So, pBooks or eBooks?  Both are published by the Big Six now, as well as their more traditional hardbacks (you know, those books interior decorators use to dress up a snob’s house).  They’re trying to catch up to the digital revolution but many pundits think that train left them behind in the station.  When I returned to writing full-time, I started out with POD pBooks (i.e. trade paperbacks).  Full Medical had N about equal to 200 and even a few kind words from agents (the scherzos threw everyone in a tizzy).  N was 50-100 for about everything else (my patience was wearing thin by then).  My multiple personalities—old curmudgeon versus young rebel—are  debating the whole legacy publishing thing now.

I’m exploring eBook publishing and am becoming more and more convinced that Konrath and Eisler have it right (that they’re successful is irrelevant—they’d be successful independently of their media choice).  First, if you’re going the digitally self-published route, why bother with pBooks?  The cost to publish a pBook is much higher than an eBook.  Spend the money saved on marketing.  You’ll need it.  (See also the remarks about editing above.)  eBook publishing might also be the death knell for many pBook-only publishers.  Infinity Publishing, the company that released all my pBooks, with the exception of Full Medical, jumped on the eBook wagon, for example, but their lag time and price is no longer competitive with other services.  (Their graphics artists make great covers, though.)

Useful websites?  I put a short list in “Steve’s Writing” and I wrote about my selection criteria a week ago.  You will find a wealth of info on the internet…but don’t go so much into overload that your muses get constipated!  In particular, everyone has opinions about marketing—some of it good, some of it so-so, and some of it just plain crap (Sturgeon’s Law definitely applies here—look it up).  In the latter, I count e-mail newsletters.  Sure, I read a few, especially those about cheap marketing ideas (I have a generous personality but no money), but if you’re going to write a weekly newsletter, why not get more exposure and write a weekly blog?  Newsletters are so last century.

What works in marketing your eBook?  Sweat and mostly luck, I guess.  Most of us have very little money for marketing.  The internet is a marvelous media for basically doing word-of-mouth marketing to many people if you understand word-of-mouth to mean via computer (but heed those Total Recall and Alien warnings above).  I’ve never had as many friends in my life as I do now on Facebook (VR is great—my Facebook friends don’t care if I shave or use a good deodorant—they don’t even know!).  Those TV trailers and N.Y. Times full-page ads you see are reserved for the Pattersons, Baldaccis, and Kings—the Big Six publishing gods only smile down upon already established authors, especially N.Y. Times bestsellers.  Everyone else gets squat (Hatchette without the –te)—unless the author pays for it himself.

Everyone tells me it’s about platform—author website, social networking, blogging, e-mail newsletters, etc, etc.  The bottom line:  readers have to know your book is out there, and maybe something about you, before they’ll read your damn book.  Even then, it’s often the case that they’ll read your book only if a friend recommends it (a Facebook friend counts).  The competition is tremendous—even very good authors are not being read.  The average Jane or Joe Author is competing with those best-selling authors who do have the big marketing budgets.  One option: the average Janes and Joes must band together and help each other out.  I do the best I can along those lines, as a reviewer of mostly indie-published books and writing arguably useless blog posts like this one.  You should do your part too—it comes back many-fold, or so they tell me.

Have your chances improved?  Probably not, because anyone, absolutely anyone, can write a book nowadays.  It’s a readers’ world and readers’ tastes will define what’s wheat and what’s chaff in the publishing marketplace (that might not reflect the true quality of a book—I’m thinking that many good books get lost in the noise).  eBook prices are falling to the point that eBooks from the Big Six are suffering (from what I’ve seen, in addition to being expensive, they tend to be of inferior quality in their formatting, probably because they’re the Big Six’s second or third priority); they can’t compete with the bargain eBooks that are released.  However, look on the bright side.  Before, with the gatekeeping by agents, editors, and the Big Six publishers, you almost had no chance at all—every writer was subject to their whims about what should be published and their pitiful royalties after her or she was published.  Moreover, the author had very little control over his product.

Nowadays you can enjoy writing a book, especially if you’re like me and feel that you have a few good stories in you, or some skills you want to pass on to the next generations, and you can watch your book become reality, easily for eBooks and with more difficulty for pBooks.  It would be more fun if you had a million readers, but few of us will be so lucky.  (I will feel blessed if I just recover my costs.)  However, as they say with the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play.  So, go out and play…and enjoy your writing.  It also helps if you do a lot of reading too.  Try some of those eBooks from indie authors.  I have consistently been surprised at how good some of them are.  Take a look at mine while you’re at it!

I hope you enjoyed these thoughts on a business that would now surely seem strange to a 20^th century writer back from the dead.  I often wonder what Phillip K. Dick would do in today’s environment (probably become an insurance salesman for AIG).  I await your comments.  In particular, agents and MFAs, have at me…en garde!

In libris libertas…

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2011 at 4:00 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.