Tag: publishing

For Those Who Might Have an Interest in Such Things

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From the Twitter feed of Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Tor Books:

James Frenkel is no longer associated with Tor Books. We wish him the best. We’ll be contacting the authors and agents Mr. Frenkel worked with to discuss which editor here they’ll be working with going forward. This process will take some days or even weeks, so please be patient if you don’t hear from us instantly. Finally, if you had something on submission to Tor via Mr. Frenkel, you’ll need to resubmit it via some other Tor editor. If you don’t have a particular editor in mind, you can re-submit it via Diana Pho (diana.pho@tor.com) who will route it appropriately.

This has been, as they say, a public service announcement.

Meanwhile, I’m getting ready for this weekend’s Readercon (in a hotel! with air conditioning! never mind the literature — the air conditioning!)

Pop-Up Targets, Unexploded Land Mines, and Snakes in Cans

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These are things that can disrupt your day, ranked in order of ascending troublesomeness.

A Pop-Up Target is something unexpected that requires immediate action, but which you have the resources and ability to deal with promptly. A suddenly necessary payment at a time when the bank account is flush, for example, or an unanticipated piece of time-critical paperwork. The target jumps up, you deal with it, and you move on, slightly more adrenaline-charged than you were before.

Adventures in the Writing Life Version:  The FedEx delivery man shows up on your doorstep Thursday afternoon with a package containing a stack of unpleasantly familiar paper and a cover letter:  Dear Author–here’s the copyedited MS for your next novel.  Please go over the copyedits and get them back to us by this coming Monday.

What you do:  Cancel your social engagements for the next 48 hours.  After a few seconds’ more thought, cancel the rest of your life for the next 48 hours.  Check your local FedEx pickup to see what’s the absolute latest you can hand over the MS and still expect it to show up in New York on Monday.  Check your bank account to see if you can afford that much money.  (If both your budget and the publisher’s schedule really are that tight, phone your editor.  Ask if you can FedEx the MS back to them on their dime, because otherwise it’s coming back to them by Priority Mail.)  Buckle down and get to work on going over the copyedits, and be grateful that you aren’t having to deal with a Copyedit From Hell.

An Unexploded Land Mine is something that you thought that you’d already dealt with, or that you were supposed to deal with and forgot, or that somebody else completely neglected to inform you about back when it should have been dealt with. Some land mines are relatively mild; others can blow you sky-high. What they have in common is that “I should have known about this one, dammit!” quality that adds a touch of frustration and outrage to the whole deal.

Adventures in the Writing Life version:  “What do you mean, I didn’t send you back the signed contracts!” Or, “No, you didn’t tell me you wanted a map for the front of the book and a glossary in the back!” Or, “I thought you were going to handle asking for blurbs, and now you’re telling me that I have to do it?”

What you do:  Send back the signed contracts with a profuse apology for your absent-mindedness, and promise never to be so flaky again.  Grit your teeth and draw the damned map and make up the damned glossary.  Take a deep breath and make a list of writers you know who might be willing to come up with a back-cover blurb for you, then start writing letters.

And then there’s the Snake in a Can. Like the trick jar labeled “peanuts” with the spring-loaded snake inside, these show up completely unexpectedly and leap right out into your face. Also, sometimes the snake is real. A heavy-duty snake has the ability to disrupt your whole life for days, if not weeks, if you can’t manage to stuff it back into the can.

Adventures in the Writing Life Version:  Your publisher goes bankrupt without warning.  Your agent, with whom you have a warm personal relationship and who has been a prime force in building your career, gets hit by a truck while crossing the street in midtown Manhattan.  The company for which you’ve happily written three potboiler tie-in novels and with whom you’re under contract for a fourth suddenly lets go all their in-house publishing staff (including the editor of your novel in progress, with whom you’ve had an excellent relationship) and replaces them with people you’ve never even heard of.

What you do:  Don’t keep all your writing eggs in one basket.  Maintain good relationships with everyone in your field, to the extent that it’s possible, so that if you’re suddenly swimming for your life in a rising flood you have people who might throw you a lifeline from the shore.  Resign yourself to the fact that sometimes bad stuff is going to happen that isn’t your fault, and that you can’t do anything about, and that is going to mess up your life more than it messes up the lives of the people actually responsible — but don’t let yourself dwell on it for too long, because dwelling on it only uses up time and energy that you could be spending on writing something better for people who will respect you more.

Another One from the Department of Bad Ideas

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What do I think about the recently announced Kindle Worlds development?

I think it’s a really bad idea, from the point of view of just about everybody but Amazon.

John Scalzi, unsurprisingly, lays out why it’s a bad idea considered from the viewpoint of professional writers in general.  (Short version:  Alloy Entertainment and Amazon between them take all rights, and there’s no up-front advance to sweeten the grab.)

The blog Letters from Titan covers some of the troubling issues raised from the fanfic community’s point of view.  (Short version:  Conflict with the community’s traditional gift economy; potential for attempts at corporate control; restricted subject matter by comparison with the anything-goes world of unauthorized fanfic.)

My own opinion?  Kindle Worlds isn’t going to give the world more high-quality fanfic; it’s going to give the world more lousy media tie-ins.  And I say this as someone who has in her time written original fiction, tie-in fiction, licensed-property fiction (I was one-half of Victor Appleton not once, but twice!), and, yes, fanfiction.

Tales from the Before Time: Springtime Surprise

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Today’s mail brought us the spring royalties on the Mageworlds e-books (available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other e-book retailers.) The pleasant glow this cast over the morning brought to mind another springtime royalty period, some time ago — and thereby, as they say, hangs a tale.

The first thing you need to know is that the book in question was an anthology of short stories, Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters.  We’d contributed a story to the anthology — “Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen” — and had been paid a good rate-per-word for it; and that, we thought, was that.  Because the second thing you need to know is that most of the time, the on-acceptance payment for a short story, whether in a magazine or in an anthology, is the only money you’re going to see from it.  Every once in a while, though, a particular story will turn into one of its author’s good children, and continue generating revenue, sometimes in unexpected ways.

The next thing you need to know is that Book of Monsters came out at the peak of the early-nineties middle-grade and young adult horror boom, when the Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark series were filling up the bookstores and selling like very scary hotcakes.  Not only that, it hit the shelves in October of that year, just in time for Halloween.  It also had some really good stories in it, which probably helped a little bit as well.  At any rate, the anthology not only sold, it sold in sufficiently large numbers that it earned back its advance in the first royalty period.  (This is a thing that never happens — except, of course, for the one time when it does.)

Fast-forward to the following May.  By that time, we’d forgotten all about the anthology and our short story in it.  The money we got for the story had gone to gasoline and groceries long before, and we knew better than to expect anything more from that direction.  Meanwhile, our elder son, whose birthday was coming up, had been agitating for some time for a mountain bike, and we in turn had been pointing to the bloodless turnip that was the family budget and saying, “Think again.”

Then an envelope arrived in the mail, and in that envelope was a royalty check for roughly ten times what we’d been paid for the short story in the  first place.  Our eyes bugged out like a Tex Avery ‘toon’s, and the next thing we did, after carefully replacing the check in the envelope, was call Bruce Coville and ask him if that royalty payment was for real — because, as we said to him, we’d hate to deposit it and then have it turn out that somebody in the publisher’s accounting department had slipped a decimal point.

Bruce assured us that the check was real; and we, in turn, said to our elder son, “Happy birthday — let’s go down to the bicycle shop.”

That story continued to be one of our good children.  The anthology generated royalties for some time thereafter; there was an audiobook edition, for which we got an additional payment; and we later expanded and reworked the short story into a middle-grades novel for Harcourt, which in turn had a French edition from Hachette.

The thing is, though (and I suppose that it’s the moral of this tale) — you never can tell in advance which of your stories is going to be the good child.  All you can do is give each one of them your best shot, and then wait to see what happens.

The More Things Change

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I’ve said for a long time that the generic publishing-industry headline is “Big Changes Ahead for Publishers; Writers to be Adversely Affected.” Most working writers — like self-employed freelancers in other fields — have by necessity got their strategies fine-tuned to meet the current conditions.  Any change in those conditions is going to make their strategies unstable or unworkable, and they’re going to have to devote time and thought to changing them, instead of spending that time and thought on writing.

Understandably, this does not make writers happy.  It’s hard to concentrate on long-term strategy when you’re dealing with the fact that a previously-reliable part of your income stream has suddenly dried up or gone wonky. The body and brain have this inconvenient habit of insisting on “Food — now!” without caring whether or not there’s money in the bank to pay for it.

In It for the Long Haul

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It’s one thing to write a polished, even gripping, opening chapter (since opening chapters are the ones most frequently workshopped and otherwise shown around, they’re usually the ones that get the most feedback.)  It’s another thing to maintain that level for an entire novel.

Unfortunately, structure and pacing are important to editors when they get around to judging the whole book.  Editors want to see whether a writer can sustain interest through the long middle parts without letting the pace of the story flag,  and whether he or she can avoid getting distracted by unnecessary details and by subplots that go nowhere,  and whether he or she can resist the temptation to skip important plot and character stuff and rush the story in haste to get to the end.  They also want to see if the writer can in fact end a book effectively — not winding things up too fast, not dragging the end out too long, not failing to supply a sufficiently impressive fireworks show for the grand finale.

In truth, however, messing up the middle of the book is far more likely to be fatal than not being absolutely perfect at the end.  By the time the readers have reached the final chapters, they’ve invested enough time and thought in the story that a lot of technical problems with the ending will be forgiven, just so long as the readers don’t feel cheated of something they’ve come to feel is owed to them by the story.  Any number of really good writers have wobbled on the dismount, as it were — Tolkien ended the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least three times before finally letting his readers stagger off into the appendices, for example, but most of his readers don’t feel cheated by the excess.

But this is why editors want to see the traditional “three chapters and an outline” even for query letters, and why the first thing they’re going to say, when you eventually get a nibble, is, “Send me the whole book.”

The Nature of the Beast

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Most writers (and by that, like most writers, I mean “most writers who are like me, but not the other ones”) don’t spend a lot of time before or during the writing of a particular piece in fretting about whether it’s straight science fiction/fantasy or magical realism.  We write the story, and worry about determining its genre afterward — or we let the editor and the publisher and the readers worry about it, which is easier, and lets us get on to the next project.

There are a lot of theories about the difference between straight science fiction/fantasy  and magical realism.  For my money, the big difference between the two is that in straight sf/fantasy the non-realistic elements are meant to be regarded as actually there and actually happening (the elves are real and physically present elves; the spaceship is a real spaceship and not — or at any rate, not just –a metaphor for escape; the zombies really are a shambling undead menace and they really do want to eat your brains); but in magical realism, the non-realistic elements serve mainly as extended metaphors.

That’s an incomplete definition, of course.  In my more cynical moments, I suspect that in the end the determination of the story’s genre will be done by whatever market you sell it to.  If it goes to one of the mainstream markets — places like The New Yorker or The Atlantic† (hey, why not think big?) or one of the literary magazines — it’ll probably be classified as magical realism, or possibly as “slipstream” if they’re trying to be genre-friendly.  If it goes to one of the sf/fantasy magazines, then it will be known as sf/fantasy for the rest of its natural life.

My own inclination, with an edge-case story like that, would be to try for the mainstream commercial magazines first, on the grounds that while they’re a long shot, they pay really well and publication there brings instant recognition.  After that, unless I had a strong reason not to want my story identified as sf/fantasy, I’d probably bypass the literary magazines and go straight to the sf/fantasy mags, because by and large the literary magazines pay more in prestige than they do in cash.

†It used to be The Atlantic Monthly, but they changed the name after they stopped putting out twelve issues a year.

Mr. Melville Submits a Proposal

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Any writer who’s ever tried to put together a proposal package for an editor or an agent knows the unpleasant truth:  Writing a proposal sucks.  You have to make up a summary version of something that you’re telling at novel length because you haven’t got any way to say it that’s shorter; and you have to put the prose equivalent of false eyelashes and fishnet stockings onto something that is — you devoutly hope — subtle and understated, or at least is naturally flashy and dazzling and not some tasteless imitation of the real thing.

Take heart.  And consider the example of Herman Melville, who in 1850 wrote to his English publisher:

“In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer. Should you be inclined to undertake the book, I think that it will be worth to you 200 pounds.. Could you be positively put in possession of the copyright, it might be worth to you a larger sum — considering its great novelty; for I do not know that the subject treated of has ever been worked up by a romancer; or, indeed, by any writer, in any adequate manner.”

This is an effective proposal — the publisher in question bought the book.  Consider what it does:   It lets the publisher know when the projected work is going to be finished; it describes the nature of the book in terms of how it would appeal to the reading public (it’s a “romance of adventure” in an exotic setting — “the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”); it lets the publisher know of the author’s special qualification through personal experience “of two years & more”; it demonstrates that the author can think of the project in commercial terms and is willing to negotiate.

Wisely, the proposal doesn’t say, as Melville later did when he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

This is the book’s motto (the secret one), Ego non baptizo te in nomine – but make out the rest yourself.†

Melville didn’t enjoy the commercial side of writing (“Dollars damn me,” he wrote — to Nathaniel Hawthorne, again; the long-suffering Hawthorne deserves a gold star) but he could make himself do it when he had to.  And if he could, so can we.

†Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli — “I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil.” It’s one of Captain Ahab’s memorable lines from Moby-Dick.

More Thoughts on Rejection

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Anybody who writes for money is going to become, perforce, an expert in the types and levels of rejection.

There’s the generic form rejection, which usually reads something on the order of “Your manuscript does not meet our needs at the present time” — which may on rare occasions mean “Your story was so bad it made our eyeballs bleed” but which usually means nothing more than what it says.  Your manuscript didn’t meet their current needs, whatever those needs may have been.  Maybe they bought a story similar to yours just last week; maybe your story was an awkward length and they already have enough stories of that length in inventory to keep them supplied for a year; maybe you happened by chance to write upon a subject that gives the editor hives.  Or maybe your perfectly competent story just didn’t quite push the editor’s “Buy This One!” button.

(That last is a dreadful stage to be at in one’s writing career, by the way.  It’s like perpetually getting B-plusses and never quite getting an A; it’s like watching everybody else in your high-school class get asked out on dates while you’re spending your Saturday nights at home with a good book. A lot of aspiring writers give up at this point.  A lot of others turn bitter and morose, and are left unable to enjoy themselves when they finally do make that first sale.  The only consolation to be had is that everybody who’s eventually sold their writing has gone through this stage first.)

Then there’s the personalized and encouraging rejection, wherein the editor takes a minute or so from a busy schedule to add something like “Keep on writing!” or “Try us again with your next.”  These notes are good and flattering things.  The wise aspirant doesn’t take them as an invitation to initiate a personal correspondence,† but files them away in the “Attaboy!” (or “Attagirl!,” as appropriate) folder to take out and contemplate on those grey and rainy afternoons of the soul that writers are so often prone to.

Then there’s the rejection letter with specific suggestions:  “Shorten this by 500 words and I’ll give it another look” or “This isn’t really our sort of thing, but you might consider sending it to Anne Editor over at Marketable Magic Realism.”  In those cases — for heaven’s sake, don’t be dense.  Shorten the story and resubmit, or send it over to Marketable Magic Realism post haste with a note in the cover letter to the effect of “Joe Editor over at Rivetty SF suggested I send this to you.”

Maybe you don’t think your story was magic realism; maybe you think it was hard sf.  (You’d read Rivetty‘s submission guidelines, after all; that much of a newbie you aren’t.)  And maybe you’re right.  But editors make their reputations by knowing how readers are going to see these things, and Marketable Magic Realism‘s checks clear just as well as those from Rivetty SF Stories.  Take the money and run.

†Really, don’t. The last thing you want to do is inadvertently consign yourself to some editor’s Creepy Stalker file.

Some Things Never Change

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Found while looking through my bookmarks the other day,  a blog post from back in 2010 talking about something even earlier:

A (personalized and encouraging) rejection letter from William Dean Howells, in 1900.

I don’t know if Howells also had a stack of pre-printed “your manuscript does not meet our needs at the present time” letters, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that he did.