Tag: publishing

Bad Contracts and Worse Contracts

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Some contracts are bad.  They get their hooks into the author’s copyright; they have restrictive option clauses and punitive indemnity clauses; they want to grab not just world publishing rights but the right to publish in all forms everywhere forever, including Mesopotamian baked-clay tablets and electronic transmissions to the Oort Cloud.

Other contracts are worse than bad, they’re unconscionable.  They do all of the above, and they don’t do the one thing that could possibly induce a professional writer to sign them, which is to offer good money up front.

Just about every professional writer has signed at least one bad contract, and they’ve usually done it for only one reason:  they needed that up-front money, and they needed it right then.

Once in a while, in this business, you may need to sign a bad contract.  The roof may leak, your kid may need emergency orthodontia, the IRS may be demanding more blood than your normal turnip harvest can provide.  If that’s what you have to do, then do it with your eyes open and deposit the check before it can bounce.

But nobody, ever, has any reason to sign an unconscionable contract.

Things It Doesn’t Help to Complain to the Author About:

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The cover art for their book.  You may hate it with a passion; you may think that it misrepresents both the plot and the theme of the book in the worst way possible; you may feel that it reeks of sexism, racism, classism, and other -isms as yet unknown to social science.  Complaining to the author will not do any good, because in the hierarchy of people who have a say in a book’s cover art, the author ranks somewhere just barely above the office cleaning crew and the folks in the mail room.  With the rare exception of publishing’s 800-pound gorillas, the author’s traditional role in the selection of cover art is limited to bitching about it afterward.

Problems with the printing and typography of their book.  If your copy of the book has Chapter 27 replaced by an equivalent number of pages from Love’s Tacky Splendor, that isn’t the author’s fault.  Bad stuff can happen to good books when they go to the printer, and somewhere out there is a printing of Love’s Tacky Splendor that has Chapter 27 replaced by a chunk of impeccably-researched hard science fiction.  Those readers — and that author — aren’t going to be pleased about this either.

Problems with the sales and availability of their book.  The author’s control of these issues is approximately zero point zilch.  Finding out that there are no copies of their book to be found anywhere in the entire state of North Dakota is not going to make them any happier.

In all of these cases, as it happens, the appropriate entity to direct your complaints to is the publisher.

What’s in a Name?

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It’s a sad fact that short stories and novels have to have titles.  If they didn’t, then there’d be nothing to put on the spine of the book, or in the table of contents for the magazine or the anthology.

This means that the unfortunate writer, after having labored for weeks or months on something that may have lived quite happily with the designation “NewNovel.doc” or “short story in progress” or even “that thing in the green notebook”, now has to give his or her brainchild an actual name.  Cue angst, flailing, and general unhappiness.

Composers have it easy by comparison.  They call a project “Concerto Number 3 for Xylophone and Orchestra in B-flat Minor” and get away with it, where a writer who tried to run “Space Opera Volume Three with Blasters and Scaly Aliens” past an editor would only get laughed at.  (Oddly enough, though, the same writer could probably get away with using that title for a short story — there’s a lot more room for weirdness and wordplay in short story titles — but not more than once.)

Desperate writers do have a few resources they can turn to in their quest for a title.  Quotations from Shakespeare are always good; likewise, quotes from the Bible.  And if the Bible and Shakespeare don’t come through, there’s always Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.  Pulling a relevant or evocative phrase from the book itself also sometimes works.

If all else fails . . . console yourself with the thought that most editors know that thinking up titles is not necessarily a part of the common writer’s toolkit.  If an editor likes your book or story, but thinks that the title sucks, he or she will tell you so.  And at that point, it’s perfectly okay to turn the job over to a professional ask the editor for suggestions.

What’s in a Name?

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New writers often ask, “Do I need a pen name?”

The answer, usually, is “No.  Unless, of course, you do.”

What do I mean by that?  Let me unpack a bit.

There are several reasons why a writer might have a true need for a pseudonym, of which security is the biggest.  A writer who is engaged in saying things about powerful people and entities to which those people and entities might take exception, for example, may choose to write under cover of a nom de plume, as Jonathan Swift did when he wrote a series of political pamphlets about English fiscal policy in 18th-century Ireland under the pseudonym of “M. B. Drapier.”

Similarly, a writer whose regular employment involves working with or for people who might look askance at one of their employees having a commitment to something other than the job might use a pen name to keep the two lives separate.  Writers who work for the government, or for the military, also fall into this general category.

Then there are the writers who, for whatever reason, don’t want their friends, or family, or co-workers to know that they write — or sometimes, to know what they write.  Schoolteachers, for example, are expected to be as above reproach as Caesar’s wife — if you’re teaching eighth-grade English as your day job and writing steamy romance novels on the side, you probably don’t want the school board to catch on.  (Not even if half of them are devoted readers of your other persona’s literary output.  They’ll just ask for your autograph out of one side of their mouths and decline to renew your contract with the other.)†

Sometimes the decision to use a pseudonym is driven by economic reasons.  An author whose previous output had a lackluster reception, or which fell prey to one or another of the assorted bad things that can happen to good books, may choose to start over under a pseudonym.   Opting for this course of action used to be a closely-guarded secret, rather like going into the Witness Protection Program, but readers are more savvy, usually, than publicists think, and the cats in those cases never stayed in the bag for long.  These days, the economy-driven pseudonyms are more about what the marketing types would call “establishing brand identity” — this is the pseudonym for the author’s YA work, and this is the sf/fantasy pseudonym, and that one over there is for mysteries and thrillers, but everybody knows that they’re all the same writer at the keyboard.

And finally, you get the writers who chose to write under a pseudonym because they don’t like the name their parents stuck them with, or they like their name just fine but know in their heart of hearts that nobody outside of their particular ethnic group is ever going to be able to pronounce it, let alone spell it right or shelve it correctly in the bookstore, or they prefer to draw a hard line between their writer-persona and their everyday-persona for some reason that is private and particular to them.

†My parents were teachers. It didn’t leave me with a high regard for school boards or school administrators in general.

Tales from the Before Time, Round Two

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All writers have a few horror stories to tell.  This is one of ours.

It happened quite a while ago, back when one of the ways that young (or youngish, anyhow) freelance novelists made their grocery money was by writing work-for-hire YA series novels for book packagers.  The way the process usually worked was like this:  a book packager would come up with an idea for a six-book series — I’m still not sure why six was usually the magic number — and sell it to a publisher.  Then the book packager would find one or two or even six hungry writers to write the individual volumes, based on a series bible created by the packager.  The deadlines were usually short, the pay was usually low, the royalties were in almost all cases nonexistent, and the series bibles were either laughably nonspecific or so nitpicking as to be ridiculous.

But groceries have to be bought, so there we were.

We’d written the second book in a YA series which shall remain nameless, and I flatter myself that we’d actually done a pretty good job working within the constraints of the project.  We’d finished the manuscript and turned it in; we’d done the necessary revisions; we’d gotten back the copyedited manuscript and gone over it and turned it back in; we’d gone over the galleys and sent them back in; and as far as we knew, we were done.  So we packed up the mini-van and went down to New York for a few days to visit my husband and coauthor’s old family homestead — and returned to find an “attempted delivery” FedEx notice on our front door and a “Call me right now!” message on our answering machine from our editor at the book packager.

What had happened while we were away:  The cover flats for the novels in the series had come back from the printer  (in packager-land, in those days, the covers were often printed before the novels were even written), and only then did the editor discover that the graphic designer had made the spine of the novel too small for the contracted word length of the novels in the series.  Reprinting the covers was out of the question — too time-consuming and too expensive.  Instead, each of the novels in the series was going to have to lose 10,000 typeset words.

We were lucky.  We got a copy of the galleys (that was the FedEx package), and I got to go through it removing single words and parts of sentences with a pair of tweezers sharp red pencil while keeping a running count of the total on a handy scratchpad, which meant that by the time I was finished, the novel — while considerably attenuated — at least still made sense.  The first novel in the series had entire paragraphs and even whole scenes removed with a hatchet by the editor, because it was scheduled to go to the printers the very next day.

(Before you ask:  I don’t know what happened to the graphic designer.  But I do know that it always pays to be nice to the publisher’s art department, because if they decide that they don’t like you, they have it in their power to do dreadful things.)

A Truth Universally Acknowledged

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Thanksgiving dinner is essentially a Pie Delivery System.

This year we’re having apple streusel, cherry streusel, and pumpkin.

Things I’m thankful for, as a writer:

Word processing technology, because it hands over most of the mechanical drudgery to mechanical drudges.

The internet, and in particular the web, because it lets me do research without having to travel many miles over hedges and stiles in order to be physically present in the same room as the text, or on the same hillside as the view.

Editors, because they work to make my books not just better, but as good as possible.

Publishers, because they do all the hard work of production and distribution so I don’t have to.

And readers, because without them I’d just be talking to an empty room.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, if you’re celebrating; and have a good day anyhow, if you’re not.

You Never Forget Your First Time

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First publication, that is.

My first publication ever was a three-sentence paragraph on tadpoles.  No, I’m not making this up . . . I wrote it in first grade, because when I was six years old I thought that the whole egg-tadpole-frog thing was fascinating.  And my mother thought the paragraph was cute enough to send in to the “By Our Readers” page of Jack and Jill Magazine, which accepted it.  And then didn’t print it until I was in the fifth grade.

(If I’d known then what I know now about slush piles and backlogs, I wouldn’t have been so surprised.  But what does a fifth-grader know about publishing?)

My first paid publication was also my mother’s idea.  I was in the eighth grade, and prone to writing dreadful poetry.  She sent in one of the slightly-less-dreadful pieces to the “By Our Readers” page of our church denomination’s national youth magazine, and they accepted it.  They also sent me a check for three dollars and seventy-five cents (which at that point in time was three-and-a-bit times the cost of a paperback novel), and I was so deliriously happy that I ran barefoot to our next-door neighbor’s house to share the good news.

It was high summer in Texas and my feet got stuck full of sand-spurs, but I didn’t care.  Somebody who wasn’t related to me had liked something I’d written well enough to pay me actual, spendable money for it.

My fate was sealed.

Rejection is Your Friend (Sometimes, Anyhow)

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There are a lot of small press start-ups these days — the rise of electronic and print-on-demand publishing has lowered the bar for entering the business by quite a bit.  This is, I think, a good thing; small presses can take on books that have small (but dedicated) audiences, books that the major publishers might not want to take on.  But it’s an unhappy truth that if you have a lot of small press start-ups happening, not all of them are going to succeed.  In fact, a lot of them are going to fail spectacularly.

Unsurprisingly, this does not make life easier for writers.  Sure, once you’ve finished your book, you’ve got a lot more places to send it than writers did just a couple of decades ago.  But now you can’t just ask, “Is this publisher likely to accept my manuscript?”; you also have to ask, “Is this publisher likely to stay in business long enough to publish my book and pay me what it earns?”

This requires research, and listening to the industry chatter, and watching which way the wind blows.

One thing that you can listen for, when publisher-shopping: Does the publisher in question reject more manuscripts than it publishes?  If so, that’s a good sign.  One of the things publishers are for is rejecting manuscripts — they do it so the readers don’t have to.  Readers trust the publishers to have sorted through the vast piles of truly dreadful material and pulled out the good stuff.

“Truly dreadful” isn’t an exaggeration, by the way.  The industry term for unsolicited manuscripts is “slush,” and it’s exactly as uncomplimentary as it sounds.   Probably 99% of it is absolutely dreadful. Anybody in the world who can afford the price of a ream of paper and some postage can send in an unsolicited manuscript, and on a bad day at the publisher’s office, it can seem like most of them do.

I’ve read slush. Publishers who accept unsolicited manuscripts tend to put off reading them for as long as possible, just because most of them are so very very bad; as a result, sometimes the editorial department will declare a “slush kill” and draft all the editors and editorial assistants and — sometimes — visiting writers and just about anybody else in the office who’s known to be literate and in possession of a pulse, and there will be a massive effort to go through as many manuscripts as possible and sort out the utterly at-first-glance unpublishables from the ones that might merit a longer look by somebody a rung or so higher up the ladder.  A lot of things get thrown out at this stage: obvious plagiarism; blatant insanity; sheer incompetent prose; stuff meant to be taken seriously that nevertheless has the first reader giggling insanely; stuff so utterly dull from the very start that going on to the next page is a chore.  Most of what’s left still isn’t going to get published; not being actively dreadful isn’t the same thing as being good.

None of this is fair. Publishers aren’t in the business of being fair to aspiring writers. If they’re in the business of being fair to anyone, it’s to the readers, who are trusting them not to provide a bad product.

So if the small press where you’re interested in submitting has a track record of rejecting manuscripts that don’t meet its standards, that should count as a point in its favor.

Why Movie Novelizations Tend to Suck

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Not all of them do, of course; nevertheless, when it comes to novelizations, suckitude is the way to bet.  Most of the time, though, it isn’t really (or at least, not entirely) the writer’s fault.

Reason number one:  The writer probably didn’t have that much time to work in.  The publisher wants the book to come out at the same time as the movie, and the studio doesn’t make the book deal until fairly late in the game (because in the grand Hollywood scheme of things, the novel tie-in is roughly as important as the Halloween costume and lunchbox rights.  Or maybe less.)  This leaves the writer facing the directive, “We don’t want it good.  We want it Tuesday.”

Reason number two:  The writer probably didn’t get a copy of the actual movie to watch before writing the novelization.  The studio doesn’t give those out to just anybody, and novelists aren’t even anybody.  The writer would have gotten a copy of the screenplay for the movie; if the writer was lucky, it would even have been the version of the screenplay that actually got filmed, and not some earlier — and superseded — version.

Reason number three:  The novelizer has to please not only his or her editor at the publishing house, but also the person at the movie studio who’s in charge of maintaining consistency and creative control.  This effectively prevents the writer from doing anything innovative or unusual with the material.

Reason number four:  A screenplay is a bare bone to make a good soup with.  It’ll run, typically, about 120 pages, of which a lot is white space.  A knock-down brawl or an epic swashbuckling chandelier-swinging duel may be set down on the page as just “They fight” — presumably on the grounds that the second unit director is going to be handling that sequence and will have his own ideas.  (The novelizers will count themselves lucky if the chandelier bit gets a mention, because viewers of the movie are going to remember it, and will complain if it doesn’t turn up in the novel.)  In any case, the fictional form that matches most closely a film in length isn’t the novel, it’s the short story or novella; but you don’t see novella-length tie-ins crowding the bookstores.  If an author has been charged with making an 80K or even 120K novel out of a standard-weight screenplay, and if he or she isn’t going to be allowed to make up additional story material to fill things out, then the only alternative left is going to be shameless padding.

So the next time you’re reading a novelization that isn’t one of the rare handful of actually pretty good ones, pause a moment and spare a kindly thought for the writer who strove to give the publisher and the movie studio the very best novel that they could get by Tuesday.

A Literary Blast from the Past

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To be specific, it’s the original contract between Harper&Brothers — one of the ancestor firms of current publisher HarperCollins — and Herman Melville for Moby-Dick.

Publishing contracts haven’t changed all that much since then; they’ve just gotten longer and more complex.  Melville, wisely, had representation, in the person of his-brother-the-lawyer.  (Literary agents in the modern sense — if Wikipedia is to be believed — didn’t become common until the 1880’s, and Moby-Dick was published in 1851.)