If you attend as many conventions as I do, you’ve probably heard about the importance of developing a writer’s platform. There are several books and articles on the subject, including this book featured on Writer’s Digest entitled Why All Authors Need A Platform Before you start thinking about your writer’s platform, I recommend considering what your overall online reputation is first.

“Search” Matters

Through my experiences in online marketing for different companies, one of the most common forms of “discovery” for a person’s name or brand is to simply type it into a search box. (Right now, Google holds the majority of the search engine market share worldwide and in the U.S., but the search engine traffic is constantly changing.) Search engine results pages continually “breathe,” offering different results depending upon a variety of factors.

Search is often referred to as “natural” or “organic” search, and is a key component for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For any professional, search is extraordinarily important for visibility into your online reputation, for two reasons: One, it’s widely used by many people and two, it’s a “free” way to find information about you. Keep in mind that search engines don’t “care” if you have a writer’s platform or not. In fact, there’s a good chance you already have a reputation on the internet. Do you know what yours is?

Tracking Vs. Managing Your Online Rep

Everyone who has ever posted something online has an online reputation whether they like it or not. Managing a reputation, however, is a different story. Google Alerts are a great way to help you track your current online reputation, but that tool has its limits because it doesn’t tell you a) where you rank for your own name in Google or b) what people are typing in to find you online. You can, through Google Webmaster Central, see some great data not available through Google Analytics. If you haven’t set up Google Webmaster Tools on your website, I highly recommend it.

Tracking your online reputation is only part of the story. Next, you have to figure out how you want to manage and foster it. Take a moment and think about the content you’re posting on various websites and forums. Are you comfortable with complete strangers reading what you’ve posted? What about your employer? Agent?

Online reputation management not only includes monitoring what people say about you, but also your strategy related to what, when and where you post your content.

Your “Content” Comfort Level

For a variety of reasons, I take a pretty careful approach to what I post online. Internet content can be tracked, dissected, read, copied or pasted at any time on any website, regardless of when it was posted. Because of that, I have a broad variety of topics I typically do not discuss online including: personal finances, health problems, politics, religion and family, relationship or job troubles and data related to my book sales or popularity of posts. (Mind you, I’m not perfect.) On occasion I have whined about a bad case of the flu or talked about politics, but for the most part I steer clear of these topics. Why? Here’s my reason once again: at any time, anyone, in any place, can read anything you’ve ever posted. Your “audience” may include complete strangers that live in different countries, but also past, present and future friends, employers, agents, publishers, readers, family members, teachers, colleagues, etc.

When you post content online, it’s important to understand what you’re comfortable with people knowing about you both now, but also in the future.

Tarnished Reps and Their Effects

Unfortunately, there has been a rash of writers that publicly argue with agents, bash reviewers (or delete bad reviews), talk about their “evil day job” or even beg for money. It may take years, if not months, to build an online reputation, but all it takes is one flame war to bring it down into the gutter. (For a funny take on this read my post about How to Ruin Your Online Reputation in Ten Easy Steps.) If the idea of managing your online rep isn’t complicated enough, keep in mind that popular authors may have different methods of managing their online reputation than aspiring writers, simply because the volume and quality of posted content is dramatically different.

People have been sued, accused of plagiarism, lost their jobs or publishing contracts, gotten divorces or have ended long-term relationships over poorly-worded exchanges online. The things that you write not only affect your desired readers, but also the readers you least expect. Sure, you can delete your unwanted activity, but you might find that it’s more difficult than you thought. Twitter, for example, allows you to delete Tweets but they currently still show up in their Twitter search functionality for a period of time. Depending upon when you delete blog posts or other content, it can take up to six months for your content to fall out of a search engine’s index.

With that in mind, do you know what are you comfortable with sharing publicly?

Of course, the question that every author wants to know is whether or not a bad online reputation affects the sale of your book. It’s not uncommon for buyers to research things they want to purchase online before they go to a brick-and-mortar store in their area; no amount of web analytics data will show how many people do just that. While retailers are often obsessed with conversion (e.g. How many people that visit my website buy directly from me?), selling massively-distributed products (like books) online is extraordinarily complicated. Besides a typical buyer’s behavior, there are dozens of factors that may affect online sales including: technology, seasonality, paid advertising, SEO, social media, brand awareness, trends, etc. So the short answer is, “No one knows.”

“You” Or Your Rep?

While I believe you definitely want to be genuine online (especially if you network offline as much as I do), I also think you should define what you’re comfortable sharing for public consumption. Because you don’t have control over your audience, developing your online persona can be pretty difficult. After all, different people will find you interesting for different reasons. Your “reader” could be your editor, your neighbor — even Donald Trump!

So take a minute and search for your name. Seriously. You’ll be glad you did. Ask yourself a few questions to help you make your own decisions about your online reputation. “Am I ranking for what I want to rank for?” “Is my website up-to-date?” “What are people reading about me?” “Are the claims I’m making accurate?” Taking a peek at what content ranks for your name is only one aspect of online reputation management, but it’s a good place to start. (If you have a name that’s pretty common, I recommend adding a keyword like “author” or “writer” after your surname in your content to help your readers find you more easily. Be sure to read up on how to optimize your website for more information.) Remember, the old way of thinking said that if you searched for your own name, you were being vain. The new way? It’s essential to ensure that people not only find “you,” but also that they are left with the impression you want to leave them with.

In the end, remember that the web does not distinguish between your “online” writer’s platform and your online reputation. That’s something you’re going to have to figure out how to do.

About the Author

Monica Valentinelli is the content and web analytics manager for the digital sheet music retailer and publisher Musicnotes.com and the project manager for the horror and dark fantasy webzine Flamesrising.com. Monica is an aspiring novelist working on revisions for her first novel; she has several non-fiction, short fiction and game writing credits to her name including her recent work for APEX MAGAZINE Vol. III, Issue III and FAMILY GAMES: the 100 BEST.

To read more about Monica, visit her blog located at www.mlvwrites.com.

Whenever I’m at a convention, one of the more common questions I am asked is: “Do I need to have my own website?” I always counter with, “Well, what do you want to use the website for?” Several have answered me either with the proud declaration “To get published, of course!” or “To sell my books!”

Having an online presence may or may not translate to your desired action, in part because your presence really is about “you” as a person rather than “you” the author. With today’s technology, the two are not mutually exclusive. Even if you post personal things on one particular corner of the internet, doesn’t mean that other professionals won’t read those comments and form opinions about you. In this way, a website can help you manage either the “first” impression that people have about you or a designated location you can send your readers, editors and other professionals to. There are pros and cons to having your own website that depend upon where you are in your career and what message about yourself you’d like to share.

It is easier than ever before to create a website that looks polished with a small budget. Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress are a boon to many writers because they allow you to schedule content and update your website fairly easily. Depending upon how you want to treat visitors to your website, you can do all your website updates (e.g. if you have a blog component in your website) weekly, and then set your content to automatically post. Since the technology does exist to “do-it-yourself,” many people (authors or not) are drawn to the idea of having their own presence online.

A website can help leave a positive first impression if it’s designed well and your content is professional. (By designed well, I mean easy-to-use and easy-to-read.) Typically, I recommend not posting extremely personal content on your personal website, because you really don’t know “who” the audience is going to be. It could happen that your neighbor, a random reader, or an HR professional stumbles across your website. For this reason, I tend to use different tools for different reasons. My own website (located at http://www.mlvwrites.com) is very different from my LiveJournal or my Facebook account because my content varies depending upon where I’m writing it.

If you’ve never been published, but you are an aspiring author, having your own website might actually work against you depending upon the content you post on it. For example, if an agent “googles” your name and comes across a website full of bad poetry or rants about not getting published, chances are you have potentially left a bad impression in that person’s mind. However, a web presence can work “for” you. Short writing samples and discussions about the craft of writing can show a positive attitude and an enthusiasm for the industry.

If you have been published, your website can also help your readers find a point-of-contact for you as an author. Once you have a website, you’ll need to maintain the technology and occasionally update it with news about your career or your writing for your readers. That strain on your time can work both for and against you. In one respect you’re providing content about you or your books for your devoted readers. In another, if you don’t plan on being online very much you might view those updates to be a chore. Some readers react positively to a static presence; some don’t. While you can’t control what your readers think of your site, an “official” web presence can be a really positive thing for your readers and your “author’s brand” because your news is coming from another authoritative place

For any website, whether you currently have one or not, I feel that the most important thing to consider is what message you are trying to convey. Even though a website isn’t a guarantee that someone will “discover” you, I like to think of it as a tool that you can wield rather than regard it as a room you’re hoping someone will stumble into.

About the Author

Monica Valentinelli is the content and web analytics manager for the digital sheet music retailer http://www.musicnotes.com and the project manager for the horror and dark fantasy webzine www.flamesrising.com. In her spare time, Monica enjoys writing fiction, and has over a dozen game and fiction credits to her name including: “Pie,” a short story found in the Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas, her recent novella “Twin Designs” which was part of the collection Tales of the Seven Dogs Society, her flash fiction piece “Prey” on Pseudopod.org with more works on the way.

To read more about Monica, visit her blog located at www.mlvwrites.com.

Jump-Starting a Stalled (Or Dead) Career

by John Gregory Betancourt

“Jump-Starting a Stalled (or Dead) Career” is Copyright © 1997 by John Gregory Betancourt. All rights reserved.
This article may not be reprinted, linked to, or otherwise redistributed (in its entirety or in part, via the Internet or any other means), without first obtaining the prior written consent of the author.
(No, he won’t withhold such permission unreasonably. It’s just polite to ask.)
This document may also be printed out and archived for personal use.
This document may be distributed free of charge by a teacher or other educator for a writing class.
ALL OTHER USE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
If you wish to reprint this article in another format or medium, please email John Betancourt (wildside@wildsidepress.com) for rights availability.

INTRODUCTION

Let’s get a couple of things straight up front. First, this essay is aimed at people who (like me) had published a few novels . . . and then found themselves abruptly unable to sell another one. It’s not for beginning writers, though parts of it may prove useful to beginners. Second, this essay won’t provide a quick fix. If you botched your career as badly as I did mine, it’s going to take a lot of work to start it on the right track again (if it can be done at all). It’s taken me 7 years to get to the point I feel confident enough to do sample chapters for an original novel again and think it has a strong chance of selling.

Let me start by outlining what happened in my own case. I know exactly why my career imploded — in fact, I can pinpoint not one, but two different factors (that happened simultaneously for maximum career damage).

The short version: In the mid 1980s, I was selling science fiction to Warner Books and fantasy to Avon Books. (I was a teenager; they were the bottom of the market and receptive to new writers.) My initial failure as a science fiction writer was due almost entirely to poor sales, directly attributable to:

• Warner having lousy distribution for its science fiction line
• I had the bottom slots in Warner’s SF list
• My books received horrible cover art
• My books received godawful cover blurbs and back cover copy

My last original science fiction novel (Rememory, Warner Questar, 1990) — a political mystery novel (“more than worth the time to read it” — Locus) about people who have been genetically engineered to look like cats — featured a very dark cover with Kirstie Alley, a Cylon spaceship from Battlestar: Galactica, and something that might have been a reject from the Cats! play on the cover if you squinted. It sold 4,600 copies. All told, a real deathblow to any career. Thank you, Warner Books. My editor subsequently told me that he could never buy another book from me under my own name there. This policy continues 2 editors later. (Important lesson: burned bridges don’t rebuild themselves.)

My first fantasy novel from Avon sold much better — enough to turn a small profit for the publisher, my editor told me, and I was promising enough for them to buy a second fantasy novel. Which they proceeded to sit on. And sit on. And sit on. I was on the bottom of their list; my books were the first bumped when they wanted to move things around. Finally the publish-by date in our contract passed, and my agent tried to renegotiate without success: in exchange for letting them keep the novel, he wanted it bumped to a better slot. When Avon refused, he withdrew it. John Douglas — who was the senior SF editor at Avon at the time (but not my editor) — advised me that this was a career mistake, but I listened to my agent. (Douglas was right. But so was my agent — if Avon had been allowed to push me around this way, they would never have treated me better later on. So it became a lose-lose situation. And of course I lost.) The sales figures for Rememory were available by then to other publishers, so … dead as a fantasy writer, too.

After trying unsuccessfully to sell proposals for my next novel few novels, I backed away and decided to rethink things. I was fortunately enough to get a job in publishing — SF editor for Byron Preiss Visual Publications — so I threw myself into it and started to find out how the industry really works and what could be done to relaunch a really botched career. It’s taken me 7 years, but I think I’ve succeeded. Over the last 2 years alone, I’ve put more than 600,000 copies of my novels into print. (My in-print total is just over a million books now, if you include anthologies I’ve edited. By the end of 1997, I’ll have more than a million novels alone in print.) So I think I can speak with some authority, especially as I prepare to return to writing original science fiction novels again. And this time, as I’ve said, I’m reasonably certain I can sell them.

Mindset is important. You know you have some talent. You wouldn’t have been able to sell that first novel otherwise. But that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your writing skills. Keep an open mind. If someone offers you advice, consider it carefully. You never know, but it just might be incredibly useful. Every time I think I’ve learned it all, someone says something to me — even just a sentence — which has a profound effect on my writing. [Note 1]

Keep your calm. Concentrate on fixing the problems with your career, not finding fault with yourself or others. I know a lot of bitter failed writers, and their anger is always self-destructive. Some of them refuse to read SF trade journals because they find news of their peers’ big advances depressing, especially when they can’t sell their own novels. I know from experience that it’s easy to fall into self-pity. For quite a while, I was bitter about how publishers had screwed up my career. Ultimately, though, I kept coming back to one thing: these were my books, not the publisher’s. If I had known more about what I was doing at the time, I might have avoided some of the traps I fell into. Knowledge equals power. Find out all you can about publishing, do your best work, and avoids the pitfalls you know about: that should help the next stage of your career take off.

I feel very strongly that all good writing — no matter the subject, as long as it’s somehow related to the field — is helpful to your career. If you can’t sell novels, try short stories or non-fiction.

When I decided I wanted to keep writing science fiction, I realized I needed to keep my byline visible. Since magazines don’t stick around very long, I decided to concentrate on anthologies. But it would not be enough for me just to place a scattering of stories in anthologies. I wanted readers to come away from reading a Betancourt story thinking that mine was the best in the book. (Or, short of that, one of the best.) This is not as hard as it sounds. It simply means doing your best work, no matter what the anthology. I suspect from nearly two decades of anthology reading that quite a few established writers take invitations to theme anthologies for granted and turn in slap-dash work for quick money. There are usually only 2-4 top-rate stories in any given theme anthology, and the rest are competent but unexceptional.

Did concentrating on anthologies help my career? I’m not sure. But it certainly didn’t hurt, and it kept me writing. And both LOCUS and SF CHRONICLE singled out some of my short stories for praise. A few years, I earned more writing short fiction than I did when I was selling original novels.

Several years into my career collapse, I decided to pursue work writing media fiction. (When I say “media fiction,” do not think just of STAR TREK and STAR WARS. There are lines of novels based around just about every science fiction, fantasy, and horror series on television or the movies, from THE X-FILES to HERCULES to SEAQUEST to QUANTUM LEAP. There are also gaming companies and computer companies who want to turn successful products into book franchises.) Writing media fiction is not for everyone, however; if you don’t like the idea of working in other people’s worlds, you shouldn’t try. Yes, the money is tempting, but it’s better in the long run to produce excellent work.

I found that in media fiction, a failed science fiction writer actually has a few advantages:

• You’re a professional writer, familiar with deadlines and writing at a publishable level
• You’ve shown that you can complete a book-length work of fiction
• You’re available immediately for that rush job (hey, you don’t have any other books under contract, right?)

Media fiction can undo some of the harm your career has suffered. Let’s face it: books are a commodity from a publisher’s standpoint. If you’ve failed as a writer before, a publisher will view you as damaged goods. After all, why take a chance on relaunching an established low-level writer when a new writer might REALLY take off? (Yes, I am paraphrasing a real SF editor’s words here.)

Media fiction, on the other hand, is driven not so much by author as by series. An editor wants a competent writer, someone who will do a good job on time for a reasonable advance. Your sales record plays no part in selling you for a project, just your talent. Consider these immediate benefits:

• You’ll sell tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of books
• You may end up on best-seller lists
• You’ll be paid a lot of money

Down-sides? There are a few:

• It’s work for hire.
• Deadlines can be insane.
• You have to please many people besides your editor
• Literary snobs will doubtless look down on you for “selling out.” Just as many before you sold out, ruining their critical respectability. Like Joe Haldeman, Orson Scott Card, George Alec Effinger, Jerry Pournelle, and James Blish,to name just five. Yes, that’s sarcasm. But the snobs will still look down on you. Myopia is part of the snobbery.
• It’s a trap. You can become very content writing one or two media fiction books a year. Maybe more. With some series, that’s enough to provide a comfortable living. I didn’t become a science fiction writer to work in other peoples’ universes for the rest of my life. Occasionally, sure. But I have my own stories to tell, and I assume others do, too. Never forget that media fiction is a means to an end.

Many writers do not take media fiction seriously. In my opinion, this is a bad career move. You want to impress ANY reader who runs across ANY of your work, and you especially want to lure your media fiction readers over to your original books, when you return to writing them.

Look at it this way. If Writer A sells 25,000 copies of his brilliant new mass-market paperback and generally pleases his audience, and 20% of them decide to buy all of Writer A’s other books, that’s an added 5,000 readers per book. If Writer B sells 500,000 copies of a Star Wars novel and 2% of them are impressed enough to buy all of Writer B’s other books, that’s 10,000 extra readers she has added. You see how quickly it can help.

There is one other publishing option open to failed science fiction writers: working for book packagers. Book packagers — excuse me, book PRODUCERS, as they now like to be called — are the broker-dealers of publishing. They create book projects, sell them to publishers, and then do (or arrange to have done) all the work, taking a percentage off the top. (How much? As much as they can get away with! And you would be shocked at how much they HAVE gotten away with. And with writers [and agents] who should have known better, too.)

Any published science fiction writer is of potential interest to a book packager. A packager has a single goal: to make money with as little effort as possible. To do this, he must provide books of an acceptable quality to fulfill his contract with a publisher. As a science fiction writer with a number of novels to your credit, surprise, you’re a desirable commodity!

A packager will view all professional writers this way:

• you’re a pro (meet deadlines/finish books/write well, etc.) In short, you know what you’re doing and won’t require any real training to do your job well.
• your name might well sell a few extra copies

But all is not as it seems in packager-land. There is a de facto tier system among the books. When I worked for a packager, anyone could look at what our science fiction division turned out and see what out “A” and “B” list was.

“A” list books and series included prestige hardcovers (for example, the “Dragonflight” line of YA fantasy hardcovers which Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc. produced for Atheneum). The “B” list included most series books set in worlds created by famous SF writers (or created by us after licensing the rights to their works). “B” books appear only in mass-market paperback.

“A” list books often have top authors attached to them before they are sold to publishers. Often they won’t exist if the top author doesn’t agree to take part. As a result, the top author gets a strong deal: usually 50%.

“B” list books are sold based on the nature of the project. Any author can be plugged in to the project to write it; it doesn’t matter WHO writes it as long as it’s done quickly, competently, and most of all cheaply. “B” list books are cash cows … and the packager views them that way. An author can expect perhaps 25% of the money received from such a book. The “B” list can further be divided into series written by a single author and series written by multiple authors.

“A” and “B” list books generally are pretty easy to tell from one another. I can think of only one such project, in fact (Roger MacBride Allen’s excellent “Robot” novels based on the work of Isaac Asimov — which were published in hardcover in the U.K. and trade paperback in the U.S.) where what might have been a “B” list series became an “A” list series because it was handled so well by everyone involved, from packager to author to publisher.

Let’s look at “A” list projects first. Most of these carry a certain prestige: hardcover or trade paperback publication, plus the packager’s interest and attention (which generally results in better-than-average cover art and cover copy). Generally, I think writing an “A” book for a packager is a good idea for anybody, if the money is acceptable and your time allows.

“B” list books, though, are a different story.

The multiple-writer series is becoming increasingly rare, since it’s easier for a packager to assign a whole series to a single author. (Advantages: less continuity problems, a single voice in the narrative thread, and less paperwork and mental juggling. It is MUCH easier to keep track of one author than six.) It also allows a packager to offer a much bigger contract to the author: $5,000 for one book doesn’t sound as appealing as $30,000 for six books, does it?

But consider these disadvantages:

• Most packagers are notoriously slow to pay. This is because they aren’t the publisher, and you must not only wait for the publisher to pay the packager, you must wait for the packager to pay you.
• Over the last 5 years, I have yet to see a “B” list series book earn out its advance; this means the author does not receive more money in royalties. (Foreign sales are few and far between, but they do provide some added income.)
• The author expends great personal time and effort on the project; the $30,000 example cited above sounds good, but if the project takes all of your writing time and energy for 24 months (1 book every 4 months), suddenly it’s $15,000 per year. That’s barely better than minimum wage. Okay, maybe you can write them in 18 months (1 book every 3 months): that’s $20,000 per year. Or you can hack them out in 12 months (1 book every 2 months) and never mind the quality.
• If the project fails, the writer is going to be blamed as much as the packager. (Maybe moreso: it’s in the packager’s best interest to shift the blame to you. It can be as subtle as the packager saying to the editor, “Well, I know Author A’s heart wasn’t in it, so we’ll use someone else next time who can give us one hundred percent of his effort.”)
• If the project succeeds, the credit will go to the licensed property as much as to you. (“It sold because it was based on Famous Writer C’s “XANTHOIDS OF THE UNIVERSE” series, not because New Writer B wrote it.”) And to some extent this is true. But it was your writing that kept readers coming back for the next 5 books of the series.
• I have yet to find a writer who didn’t emerge from a 6-book fast-deadline series feeling burned out.

I’m not saying NOT to write a “B” list book for a packager. Just that I, personally, think it’s not helpful. It will give you some money, but your time is better spent elsewhere if you’re interested in building your career. Early on, when these series books were new to the science fiction field, they had a novelty value and could attract some attention. That day is long past. Proceed, if you must, with open eyes. And I STRONGLY suggest you never deal with a packager unless you have a good agent. A VERY good agent. [Note 2]

I do not have an agent now. I did for nearly ten years. Firing him was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, since he was a good friend. He even came to my wedding.

But when I decided I wanted to jump-start my career, I decided I had to handle my own books in a more hands-on manner, talking to editors myself, doing my own submissions, etc. This is not for everyone, but I know I’m giving my own work all the attention it needs. I wasn’t getting that from my old agent, who had a lot of clients and only so much time to devote to me.

Caveat: If (when) I need an agent again, I will go out and get one. I’m not ashamed to admit it when I need help. Most of what I have been doing, though, is media fiction with a boilerplate contract, so having an agent would not have gotten me more money or a better deal. [Side comment: I also know a good deal about contracts from having worked as both a literary agent and as a book packager. If you feel at all uncomfortable in submitting books, or in handling contracts, get or keep an agent for that. This article is based on my personal experiences; what works for me might not work for you.]

ADDENDUM: I have acquired a new agent since writing this article. He is proving incredibly useful. By removing myself from the negotiation process on my next book, I have allowed him to ask for more money — a lot more — than I would have asked for this book on my own. He is trying to position me as a “big” author with a lot of breakout potential. Wish us well.

1. Prepare a quote sheet to include whenever you write to an editor. This can be pulled from published reviews or (with permission) quotes from famous friends and colleagues. Don’t be ashamed to ask for a quote if you know someone famous who has read your work & they raved about it to you. (On the other hand, don’t pester famous people you don’t know who HAVEN’T read your work!) Keep your quote page to a single side of a single sheet of paper.
2. Put up a home page on the World Wide Web (the Internet) to promote your work. Ask your Internet Service Provider for more information; you may be entitled to a free home page through them. Or visit SFF.NET (http://www.sff.net) for information on obtaining a free home page. (Internet Impaired? Do not despair! Chances are you have friends who are Internet Enabled. They might even put up a web page for you, if you ask Very Nicely. In fact, they might WANT to put up a home page for you, but be too shy to ask. If not, they can probably steer you to someone who can. Several active SFWA and HWA members supplement their writing income with web page design services, too; ask around.)
3. Keep in touch with the science fiction community. (You don’t have to live in Eugene, Oregon.) Read the trade journals. Visit online places where other SF and fantasy writer congregate and participate. Write letters to friends. Find the other pros in your area and invite them over for a barbecue: whatever it takes. Remember, although writing is a solitary activity (under most circumstances), you are not alone. Many others are going and have gone through the same things you do. If you ask for advice, chances are someone — or many someones — will freely give it. The science fiction, fantasy, and horror field share a long social tradition and are very helpful. But only if you ask.

Publishing is a mess. No brief article can possibly tell you everything you need to know about every single publishing company. And yet you cannot simply trust your publishers to do their jobs right and make you a best-selling writer. There are a few things you MUST know. I’m going to generalize here, so please bear with me if these comments don’t quite mesh with Publisher X or Publisher Y.

A publisher puts out a specific number of books each month. These books appear in many different genres — best-sellers, mysteries, thrillers, horror, science fiction, romance, etc. Out of the science fiction books — let’s say there are 5 mass-market paperbacks for the same of simplicity — each is assigned a specific slot.

Slot #1: Science Fiction Lead Title. The publisher puts foil on the cover, die-stamping, a few ads in trade journals, and makes available some advertising money. Maybe springs for a book dump or an endcap in the stores.

Slot #2: Fantasy Lead Title. The publisher puts foil on the cover, die-stamping, a few ads in trade journals, and makes available some advertising money. Maybe springs for a book dump or an endcap in the stores.

Slot #3: Reprint of hardcover. The publisher expects this book to sell reasonably well, since the hardcover did okay and got some great quotes, which are plastered all over the covers. Maybe a big picture of the book in the company’s SF ads for the month.

Slot #4: Original fantasy novel. Fantasy sells better than science fiction, so this book gets slot #4. No promotion, except for a tiny mention in the company’s science fiction ad for the month.

Slot #5: Original science fiction novel. No promotion, except for a tiny mention in the company’s science fiction ad for the month.

With only five books to choose from, you would think a bookstore could automatically order all of them, right? Not so. Think of how many publishers are out there doing science fiction and fantasy, then think about them all competing for a small number of rack spaces in the some bookstore.

Depending on how much rack space is available in a given month, a publisher will almost certainly order the two leads (one science fiction, one fantasy). These two slots are usually reserved for writers who are already best-sellers. The rest of the slots get assigned to books which are not expected to sell as well. The fifth slot won’t sell many copies at all.

You want to get your books into as high of a slot as you possibly can. If you can persuade your publisher that you’re going to be the next William Gibson, more power to you — you deserve the lead slot.

Realistically, once you return to writing fiction, and before you negotiate a contract for that new book which your editor wants, you MUST find out which slot your book will be assigned. Don’t be afraid to speak up. The editor must have some idea of where the book will appear or that editor wouldn’t be able to make an offer. (The offer will be based on how many books the editor estimates his or her company will sell. Part of determining this number comes from doing a P&L — profit and loss estimate — which deals in part with how many copies will be sold and at what cover price. An editor must have an idea of what slot a book will go into before he or she can do a P&L.)

If you’ve worked years to make your great comeback with your brilliant new novel, do you want it going into Slot #5? If that’s the best your editor can do, ask if he or she can leave that as an open offer while you look elsewhere. You can always come back later, if you have to. It is more important to find a publisher who is committed to doing your book right, or you’ll wind up right back where you started.

A 3rd or 4th or 5th slot does not have to be the kiss of death. There is a second figure which is just as important as the total number of your books which have been shipped into stores. That’s the “sell-through” — essentially, the percentage of books sold. If you ship 10,000 copies of your book in slot #5, then you sell 9,500 of them the first month and reorders start pouring in, of course the publisher is going to notice. A 95% sell-through is remarkable and excellent. It doesn’t happen often. You can bet that everyone from sales-reps to bookstore owners will order extra copies of your next book as a result, to meet the anticipated demand. And that your next book from the publisher will get pushed up to a higher slot.

Conversely, if you’re in the lead slot and you ship 50,000 copies to sell 5,000 for a 10% sell-through, you can bet that your career is going to spiral downwards pretty fast.

Middle-ground is more to be expected.

Okay: you’ve been working hard for three or four years now to restart your career. You’ve published two dozen short stories and several media tie-in novels. What now?

Clearly, if your media novels have gone well and you have maintained a good relationship with your media-fiction publisher, the time has come for you to try to sell an original novel again. Talk to your media fiction editor first. Explain that you love working on media properties, but you want to try your hand at something new. Something more ambitious. Ask them if they want to see an outline for the new novel you’ve been working on. If your media fiction editor says, “Yes,” you’re all set: your foot is in the door.

If your media fiction editor cannot support your attempt to write an original novel, look elsewhere. You now have quite a few books in print which have sold well. If you’ve hit the best-seller lists, that’s another plus. Query editors at publishing companies where your books haven’t bombed; chances are, they’ll be fairly receptive. Especially when they see that quote sheet full of raves (remember, you prepared it for a reason) and you tell them you have half a million books in print.

1. When I was just starting out, I persuaded Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. to read a short story of mine. He went through the manuscript and circled every passive verb. Ouch. If you’ve never had this done to you, do it yourself: go through a random chapter or short story and circle every instance of the verbs “to be,” “to seem,” and “to feel.” Then try to rewrite each sentence punching things up with more action-oriented words. It will bring scenes vividly to life.When I was an editor at Byron Preiss, I did this to a formerly well-established author whose career had likewise collapsed. He was disgruntled at first, and complained bitterly that his literary idols didn’t avoid passive constructions, but several months later he admitted it had profoundly affected his writing style for the better.
2. At a writer’s workshop about ten years ago, one of the critiquers mentioned that she had noticed that none of my short stories had any emotional impact on her at the end. I didn’t make her care about the story’s outcome or what happened to the characters.It’s one thing to read that a story “must involve a character changing in some way.” That’s very dry and academic and quite correct. But it’s quite another thing to come to the conclusion that character changes must bring about a mood change IN THE READER. You must in some way touch the reader’s emotions. This first short story I wrote after having this revelation sold on its first submission, to Amazing Stories.
3. Viewpoint must be conveyed paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word. Basically, every paragraph must contain at least one (and preferably more) internal cues which reflect the viewpoint character’s thoughts and feelings as he or she experiences the ongoing story. These cues can be commentary, observations, feelings, or thoughts.

My observation on viewpoint is not a hard and fast rule; I know this form of writing will not appeal to everyone … or even work for everyone. But it was my most recent Great Revelation (about 2 years ago), thanks to one of my media fiction editors. I think such a strict attention to viewpoint now gives my fiction an immediacy and a deep emotional resonance that it lacked previously. In short, it works for me. [back]

[Note 2] You cannot be too careful with your career. It is up to you to make sure your interests are protected at all times, and this is especially true with packagers. (Do not rely on your agent to protect you, if you have one. It’s an agent’s job, yes, but it’s YOUR career. The buck stops with you.)

A few things to be aware of when dealing with packagers:

• Watch for contracts which contain the line “an advance of $xx against a 50% share of ALL FUTURE ROYALTIES.” This sounds like you’re getting half of everything, but you might not be. Here is a hypothetical case: assume the packager received an advance of $15,000. The packager offers you $5,000 as an advance against 50% of all FUTURE royalties. That means the packager keeps $10,000 of the advance, and the book must earn out $15,000 dollars before you see a penny in royalties. This isn’t fair. You need to find out what the publisher’s advance was and insist on 50% of that AS WELL AS 50% of all FUTURE royalties. An easy way to get around this is to insist on 50% of all income from the text of the book. (This still allows the packager to make his profit on production work, to which you are not entitled.)
• When a contract promises (to arbitrarily pick a number) a royalty of 25% of the packager’s royalty receipts, you aren’t getting a 25% royalty on the book’s cover price. You’re getting 25% of the packager’s royalty — generally around 10%. So you would get a 2.5% royalty on the cover price. (2% if the packager gets an 8% royalty; 1.5% if the packager gets a 6% royalty, etc.)
• Packagers may mislead, misdirect, and otherwise distort the truth. Get everything in writing. Even if it doesn’t seem necessary. Then check up to make sure it’s true.

Here’s an example of how an author might be misdirected as to his or her due share of moneys: The packager creates a project with Famous Writer A. They agree that Famous Writer A will get 33.33% of all revenue generated by this project. (Famous Writer A assumes that the packager will take 33.33% and the author will take 33.33%, which seems fair.) The packager then signs up New Writer B, offering 25%. New Writer B thinks this sounds fair — after all, it’s Famous Writer A’s creation, so Famous Writer A must be taking 50% off the top, right? That must leave 50%, which the packager and New Writer B will split evenly, right? Of course not. From this scenario, Famous Writer A gets 33.33%, New Writer B gets 25%, and the packager gets 41.67%. Basically, you need to find out how much each party is taking an insist on an equitable share. If Famous Writer A really IS taking 50%, then 25 IS fair. Don’t be afraid to stick up for your own interests. Your packager doesn’t have anything to hide, right?

Packagers cry poor all the time. Ignore it. The text (which you will be providing) is only part of what a typical packager contracts to supply to a publisher. In addition, a packager may provide any or all of the following: editing, copy-editing, typesetting, proofreading, cover art, cover copy, graphic design, and/or finished, printed, bound books delivered to the publisher’s warehouse. A packager will make a profit — often thousands of dollars — from these other production chores. EVEN IF THEY PAID YOU EVERY PENNY OF THE ADVANCE FOR THE WRITTEN PART OF THE BOOK, THEY WOULD STILL MAKE A PROFIT! Don’t forget that, since it will give you extra leverage in negotiating to get your fair share.

Writing and Selling Confessions

by Michael Bracken

Copyright © 1993, 1998 Michael Bracken

(The following is adapted from an article which first appeared in The Gila Queen’s Guide to Markets #63)

It’s been said that confession is good for the soul. It’s not bad for the pocketbook, either. I know because my confessions have sold to Black Confessions, Black Romance, Bronze Thrills, Intimate Romances, Intimate Secrets, Intimate Story, Jive, True Experience, True Love, True Romance, and True Secrets.

Where do my confessions come from? While my imagination certainly plays a role in the development of a confession from concept through completion, nearly all are based on a real-life event which happened to me or to someone I know.

I’ve found that reality-based confessions are both easier to write and easier to sell, and, after discussing the basic structure of confessions, I’ll describe how I’ve turned a few of my own experiences into manuscripts and from manuscripts into money.

FUNDAMENTALS

A confession is a “problem” story. The protagonist finds herself confronting a problem–from something as simple as feeling unappreciated by her family to something as complex as spousal abuse–and must resolve the problem either directly or indirectly through her own actions. The more emotionally-charged the problem, the greater the reader’s involvement and the more “confessional” the story seems. While the structure of a confession is essentially fixed, variation in subject and theme are permissible.

A typical confession is written in the first-person from a lower- or middle-class woman’s viewpoint, though confessions written from a male viewpoint are published occasionally.

Confessions are written in a colloquial manner, almost as if the narrator is speaking directly to the reader while they both sit in the narrator’s kitchen sipping coffee.

Each confession follows standard story structure: each has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The story begins with the narrator confronting her problem. Then, if necessary, background information is supplied to the reader, explaining how the narrator came to be in her current situation. This is followed by the narrator’s attempts to solve her problem and the results of her attempts. The conclusion comes from one or more of the narrator’s attempts to solve her problem and, more often than not, is a happy ending.

IDEAS

Even though I’m not female, I’ve written confessions by concentrating on topics that are universal rather than specific to a particular gender–financial problems and relationship problems, for example.

Many of my confessions are originally sparked by events in my own life.

• For example, in “Your Eyes Tell Me What Your Lips Can’t Say” (Secrets, July, 1984), a young woman falls in love with her deaf boss. At the time I wrote the story I reported to a deaf man and, although I never fell in love with him, I learned fingerspelling and some sign language and was exposed to a few aspects of deaf culture.
• In “That Other Me My Husband Doesn’t Know About” (True Experience, April, 1985), a married woman receives an invitation to her fifteen-year high school reunion but does not want to attend. Around the time I wrote the story my own ten-year high school reunion should have been held–without, for reasons other than the ones in the story, my presence.
• The protagonist in “Married To A Loser” (True Love, July, 1992) regrets her marriage to a hard-working, blue-collar man. This was sparked by the earlier dissolution of my marriage and my thoughts on what causes someone to regret the choices they’ve made in their life.
• The couple in “For Richer, For Poorer” (True Love, December, 1992) are in desperate financial straits because they’ve both lost their jobs and their unemployment benefits have expired. I wrote this after I lost my job and my unemployment benefits expired.

Each of these examples could just have easily come from an event in your life.

If you take a moment to review all of the major and some of the minor events of your life, I’m sure you will discover any number of things you could develop into a confession.

PLOTS

Plots should be reasonably simple–describable in one paragraph.

For example:

• In “Your Eyes Tell Me What Your Lips Can’t Say,” the narrator’s mother is adamantly opposed to her relationship with her deaf boss until it’s revealed that the mother is losing her hearing and his presence is a constant reminder of her own future. After the narrator confronts her mother, the three of them come to grips with the situation.
• In “Big Spender” (Black Romance, September, 1987), a woman becomes engaged to a man who seems to have money to burn. When she discovers that her fiance is deep in debt and behind on payment of his bills, she breaks off the engagement. She’s scared to be involved with a man who treats his finances irresponsibly because her father was the same way and her family lost everything. When her fiance finally discovers why he’s been dumped, he goes to a credit counselor and starts to put his financial life in order. This convinces the protagonist of his love and they get back together.
• The narrator of “Afraid of the Dark” (Bronze Thrills, June, 1988), is a rapist’s only surviving victim. She is afraid to leave home, but develops a tenuous relationship with the police officer who found her and who periodically checks up on her. The rapist comes back to kill her, and the police officer arrives during the attack and rescues her. She marries the cop.
• The narrator of “Married to a Loser” regrets her marriage to a hard-working blue-collar man. She had the opportunity to marry the man who became the plant foreman where her husband works, as her mother constantly reminds her. When her husband is elected union shop steward and has to interact with the plant foreman, the issue comes to a head. The plant foreman and his wife are invited to their house for dinner. During dinner, he’s crude and he treats his wife like dirt. The narrator discovers exactly what life would have been like if she’d married him and she realizes how much better off she is with her husband.
• The couple in “For Richer, For Poorer” are in desperate financial straits because they’ve both lost their jobs and their unemployment benefits have expired. The narrator’s husband collects aluminum cans for recycling and a few days a month he works as a day laborer at the local plastics plant. One day he finds $3,453 in a dumpster and they agonize over what to do with the money. Finally, the narrator convinces her husband that they should search for the money’s rightful owner. They return the money to its owner, who turns out to be the father-in-law of the plant manager. The plant manager offers the narrator’s husband a job as the night watchman at the plant because–thanks to the narrator’s insistence–he’s already proven his honesty.

BEGINNINGS

Confessions can begin with a description of the problem, or can begin with action. I prefer to begin my confessions with action, especially if I can begin with an emotional confrontation between two characters.

“Why won’t you make love to me?” I asked as I leaned over the movie theater’s candy counter. “What’s wrong with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Angela,” Bob said as he fiddled with his usher’s flashlight. “I just don’t want to hurt you. That’s all.”

“Hurt me? Of course you’re going to hurt me. It always hurts the first time.”

In the first few paragraphs of “Impatient Virgin” (Jive, September, 1987), excerpted above, a young woman offers her virginity to a boy who turns her down. Jilted by the boy she cares about most and eager to lose her virginity (written pre-AIDS and published before there had been much publicity about the disease), she offers herself to another boy–one known for his sexual escapades. As she is about to consummate the act, her “boyfriend” rescues her, and they profess love to one another.

DIALOG AND DESCRIPTION

A well-written confession has a balance of dialog and description, not usually containing more than 60 percent of one or the other. The dialog is about everyday concerns–these are, after all, blue-collar people and not college professors–and it should bounce smoothly from one character to the other. Long monologues are discouraged. In the following scene from “I’m Dead In My Mother’s Eyes” (True Love, March, 1993) two sisters who’ve hardly spoken in ten years discuss their mother’s illness.

I used my chopsticks to chase a piece of chicken across my plate. “How often does Mother go to the doctor?”

“Almost every week,” Lillian said, “between chemotherapy and her check-ups and everything else.” She scooped more fried rice onto her plate and continued, “And Dad can’t drive anymore, so I have to take him shopping every Saturday.”

“Why can’t Dad drive?” I asked.

Lillian appeared surprised by my question. “You didn’t know? No, I guess not. Last year he failed the driving test. It surprised the hell out of him, but it was for the best. I don’t think he ever was a good driver, but the past few years his abilities deteriorated. I think something’s wrong with his depth perception, but I can’t get him to see an eye doctor.”

The dialog in this snippet not only helps define the characters, but moves the plot forward at the same time. In the same story, description is kept simple in order to emphasize the horror of cancer. The narrator describes her mother in terms most readers can comprehend:

My mother sat huddled in her lounge chair, a shawl she’d crocheted nearly twenty years ago wrapped tightly around her thin frame. Only a few dozen wisps of kinky gray hair prevented her from looking like a prune with eyes. The chemotherapy had taken a heavy toll.

This gives the reader a mental picture of the mother without being excessively detailed. Don’t ever stop the action for long passages of description because you’ll lose the reader.

SEX

Sometimes the primary subject of a confession is sex–too much, not enough, too kinky, not kinky enough, with the right person, with the wrong person, with the right person for tthe wrong reason, with the wrong person for the right reason–and some confessions aren’t about sex at all. Even so, nearly every confession deals with sex in one form or another, because it’s a natural part of any loving relationship.

• In “I’m Dead In My Mother’s Eyes,” I avoided the issue of sex almost entirely, but the narrator’s husband shows his concern for her through repeated touching. He takes her in his arms, holds her hand, and in the most loving scene:
  

  He continued rubbing my shoulders and my neck, relaxing me. The tension flowed from my aching shoulders as his fingertips worked their magic on me.

• In “For Richer, For Poorer,” the protagonist and her husband have not made love in quite sometime. He hasn’t been in the mood because he feels unworthy of love. When he finds the money, his passion returns and …
  

  Jeremy … leaned over the back of the couch and kissed me. It was a deep, passionate kiss, though from an awkward position. Jeremy hopped over the couch and slid down beside me. We kissed again and our tongues met in a fiery dance.

  I felt the warmth of his body pressing against mine and I felt myself responding to it. He lifted the nightgown up and off of me, spilling most of the money to the floor. Then he lay me back on the couch and began smothering me with kisses.

  My body ached for him, every inch of skin screaming out for his attention. It had been so long. He urgently caressed me with firm fingers and soft lips, knowing–as all loving couples do–exactly what I desired. Before long, the heat of passion had grown from glowing embers to roaring flames and I could restrain myself no longer.

  I opened myself to him like a flower to the sun and he took me as a bee drawn to nectar. Our bodies were so familiar after years of marriage that words were unnecessary, for each of us knew when the right moment had arrived.

  Time stood still in our living room as we rediscovered the rhythms of love. I let him guide me ever higher, until we could control ourselves no longer and we shuddered together in love.

The sex scenes in a confession don’t get much more explicit than this, and need not even be this explicit. Whether you write a detailed sex scene or you cut to the next scene the moment your protagonist slips into bed, you can not ignore her sexuality.

ENDINGS

The end of a confession should summarize any lesson the narrator has learned. This summary is not always subtle.

• The married narrator of “That Other Me My Husband Doesn’t Know About” receives an invitation to her high school’s fifteen-year reunion. She destroys the invitation, just like she destroyed the invitation to her ten-year reunion. She was extremely sexually active as a high school student but has since moved away from her home town and started a new life with a husband who–she thinks–knows nothing about her past and who–she thinks–won’t love her anymore if he finds out. Her husband finds the invitation and insists they attend. The more excuses the woman thinks up and the more she tries to hide her past, the worse her internal torment becomes until finally she reveals everything about her past to her husband. It turns out he’s known all along and it doesn’t matter to him. He loves her. At the end of the story, the narrator says:
  

  As I finished getting ready, I knew that now I could handle anything that happened at my reunion. I knew I could handle it because I had Bill at my side, strong and supportive and, as he had always been, full of love and tenderness.

• In “Desperate” (Bronze Thrills, April, 1988), the narrator and her husband decide to blackmail his ex-wife with nude photos he’d taken during their honeymoon. His ex-wife is now married to a prominent surgeon and she is highly visible in the community because of her charitable activities. At the last minute, he receives a job offer. They meet his ex-wife, hand her the photos, and refuse to accept the money. The narrator concludes:
  

  Ever since then, I’ve realized that desperation can sometimes drive even the best people to do things they know are wrong. I’m just glad we were lucky; even though we almost lost our balance, we walked on the thin wire of desperation and made it to the other side without falling off.

• The narrator of “Battered Wife” (Black Confessions, June, 1992), divorces her husband and moves across town to start a new life. She spends her off-hours as a volunteer in a woman’s shelter where she assists a woman who’s just left her abusive husband. She also begins a relationship with a co-worker at the convenience store where she works. One day her ex-husband appears unexpectedly. His anger flares. He grabs her and is about to strike her when her new boyfriend appears and chases him away.Later, the woman she’d been helping ends up returning to her abusive husband. The story ends when the narrator compares her fate with the fate of the woman she’d been trying to help:
  

  “There is one small ray of hope, though. Her husband agreed to enter counseling.”

  I unconsciously crossed my fingers and silently wished Ellen Harper the best of luck. She would need it. At least, I no longer needed luck. It had taken a year, but I’d put my life back together, and I’d found Parker. My future looked bright.

MANUSCRIPT BASICS

Confession magazine editors are seeking stories ranging from 2,000 words to about 6,000 words and they expect you to present your manuscript in a professional manner. Each story must be typewritten–never handwritten–on 8-1/2″ x 11″ white paper, double-spaced and on one side of the page only. Your name and mailing addresss should be placed at the top of the first page of the manuscript. You may wish to add your phone number and/or your social security number as well. One variation from the norm is the use of bylines: don’t. Confession magazines do not normally print bylines, so there’s no reason to put one on your manuscript.

Each confession should be submitted separately, one per envelope. Enclosed with each submission should be an envelope that you have addressed to yourself and upon which you have placed sufficient postage for your manuscript to be returned.

IMPORTANT POINTS

There are three important things to remember about the confession markets:

1. Confession magazine publishers purchase all rights.
2. Confession magazine editors edit heavily.
3. Confession magazine editors expect you to sign a release attesting to the veracity of your story.

THE MARKET

At the time this article was updated in July, 1998, the primary publisher of confessions, Sterling/Macfadden Partnership (233 Park Ave. South, New York, NY 10003) produced at least twelve regularly-published confession magazines.

Caucasian titles include Modern Romance, Secrets, True Confessions, True Experience, True Love, True Romance, and True Story. Black titles include Black Confessions, Black Romance, Black Secrets, Bronze Thrills, and Jive.

Each publication is independently edited so a rejection from one magazine is not necessarily a rejection from all of the magazines.

Response to a submission takes from one to twelve months. Submissions are usually accepted or rejected as is; I’ve rarely had an editor request a revision.

Sterling/Macfadden purchases all rights and publishes what they accept in a timely manner. Payment is made at the end of the month of the cover date of the issue your confession is published in, and is based on a per-word rate that varies from submission to submission.

RESOURCES

Two books I found particularly useful when I first started writing confessions:

• Feldhake, Susan C. How to Write and Sell Confessions. Boston: The Writer, Inc., 1980. ISBN 0-87116-123-0.
• Palmer, Florence K., and McClain, Marguerite. Confession Writer’s Handbook. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1980. ISBN 0-89879-032-8.

CONCLUSION

I hope the information I’ve provided will help you understand the opportunities available to would-be confession writers, the fundamentals of turning an idea into a complete story, and a few pointers about marketing and selling the finished manuscript.

Keep one thought in mind as you return to the keyboard to create your own confessions: If a middle-aged male like myself can write and sell confessions, so can you.

Stalled Careers, Writer’s Block, and Monsters Under the Bed

by Melisa Michaels

Hello, my name is Melisa and I’m a survivor of bad sales records.

There’s a reason I’ve opened with a line that sounds as though it belongs in a twelve-step meeting. A twelve-step program wouldn’t be a bad plan for writers whose careers have stalled out. It’s something “nice people” don’t talk about, but it can happen to any of us, anywhere, at any time. It can be life-threatening, it’s something outsiders assume one could have prevented, and it responds well to therapy. Sharing horror stories would show us that we are not alone and that we are not to blame: sharing the trials and tribulations of our recovery would show us how to accept responsibility for the things we can control while relinquishing responsibility for the things we can’t: and sharing our secret shame would show us that it is not, in fact, shameful.When my career crashed and burned, I didn’t know any of that, and there was nobody to tell me. I was isolated as many writers are from any sort of peer group. It had been six or eight years since I had lived in the SF Bay Area and hung out with other writers, and I’d never heard of any of them failing once they got started. I had no idea it had ever happened to anybody else, and I certainly didn’t know what to do about it. I was so stunned I hardly knew how to get my shoes on the right feet in the mornings. I felt like an impostor: seven published books and perhaps a dozen short stories notwithstanding, I wasn’t really a writer after all: everybody knows that real writers’ careers, once started, keep going.

Only they don’t, necessarily.

Starting Out

From earliest childhood till middle age I was obsessed with writing. I nagged my mother to teach me how to read and write before I was old enough for kindergarten. Once I’d learned, I wasn’t comfortable if I didn’t write something every day; I used to tell people it wasn’t a vocation, it was a virus.It didn’t really bother me that it was difficult to break into print. I knew that was standard for nearly everyone, even truly great writers. I believed the common wisdom that once I’d learned to write well it would be only a matter of time till I got the right manuscript to the right editor, from which point everything else would follow automagically.

I didn’t expect to make a fortune, mind you. I knew enough not even to expect to make a living. But I did believe that getting started would be the only major hurdle. Everything I had ever heard or read about writing as a career assured me of that.

In 1979 I sold my first short story to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It was an easy step from short story sales to the acquisition of an agent, and from there to the sale of a series proposal to Beth Meacham at Tor.

I had a contract for three novels. I thought I had it made. This was the big time. I was going to turn out at least two or three novels a year for the rest of my life, and the only problem would be getting around the odd notion publishers had that a writer would be competing with herself if she published more than one book a year.

Stalling Out

The minor flaw in this reasoning is that it assumes good books will sell. And mine were good books–fluff, perhaps, but good fluff. I wrote good space adventure, Tor did its usual fine job with production and advertising…and the books didn’t sell.Nobody could understand it, but nobody could do anything about it either. Tor took a chance on three more books from me anyway, and the sales figures on those were even worse. My agent managed to sell one of my mysteries to Walker & Co., but that was the last sale. Tor couldn’t afford to take further chances with me, and editors from other houses who were interested in my work lost interest right quickly when they heard about my sales figures with Tor. The Walker book (which, incidentally, was orphaned by editorial musical chairs) didn’t sell very well either, so that didn’t help.

I went on writing as diligently as ever, still convinced there couldn’t really be a problem: I’d got my start, hadn’t I? Everything just follows from that, doesn’t it? It’s all a matter of hard work and good fortune, and I’d had the necessary bit of fortune, so all I had to do was work hard. Now that I was well started, everything I wrote that was fit to publish would get published sooner or later. That was the way things worked.

About the time I finished the best book I’ve yet written, I realized it had been something over a year since my agent last responded to a letter from me. Still believing all was essentially well with my career, I fired her and took the new book to a new agent, where I learned that its subject (rock stars) was unmarketable in its genre (mystery). She liked it so well that she handled it anyway, along with several sf/f proposals I had ready; but nothing sold and she went out of business after a year or so, leaving me with a new list of agents to try.

Things weren’t going quite the way I had anticipated. Somewhere in the back of my mind I began to have an inkling that the world had ended, but I have a rich fantasy life. I managed to convince myself this was an odd, temporary setback due to the crumbling midlist market, and that at any moment things would straighten up and start Acting Right. I would get yet another agent (everybody knows it’s easy for a working writer to find a new agent) and keep going.

I worked through my list of agents, and when I ran out of those I tried other lists of agents. The response was almost universal: my work was good, but they already had enough midlist writers, thanks. (Anyway the polite ones told me that. One just scrawled “No,” on my letter of inquiry and sent it back, which inclined me to kill or at least maim her should the opportunity arise. It didn’t, however, and I’ve since forgotten her name, so I’ve reluctantly decided to forego that gratification.)

I tried sending out manuscripts on my own, but the responses ranged from “I love this book but I can’t buy it” to “We don’t accept unagented manuscripts,” and I very quickly lost heart. I’d never been any good at marketing my own work, and my growing awareness of impending doom did not have a salutary affect on my abilities.

I was sitting on two good new manuscripts that nobody would publish. All my older manuscripts and proposals (those that hadn’t been lost with the loss of the second agent) had been everywhere already without a nibble. My published books were out of stock and one by one were going out of print. One day I’d been a working writer and the next I was a wannabe. I couldn’t even claim has-been status: I hadn’t “been.”

I’d never heard of such a thing. As far as I knew, it hadn’t ever happened to anyone before. I didn’t know what to do. How could my shiny new career be stalled? I’d done everything I was supposed to do. I’d worked hard, written well, met my deadlines…and failed anyway. That wasn’t right.

Writer’s Block

Since it wasn’t my fault, it had to be Tor’s fault. They hadn’t publicized my books well enough. The covers were lousy. The blurbs were inadequate. They hadn’t sent out enough review copies.Or–No. Wait. it was Beth’s fault. She changed jobs at Tor and moved to Arizona for her health without even asking me. She turned my books over to a junior editor who bought the second three from me and then left Tor, leaving all my books orphaned. Beth didn’t pick them up again. Nobody did. So it was Beth’s fault. Or the junior editor’s. Or maybe it was Tor’s fault after all, for hiring people who had lives.

Or it could be the fault of the industry, with its returns policy that gives paperbacks a shorter shelf-life than yogurt. Any sane industry knows you don’t just produce a product and throw it on the market for a couple of weeks, then call it a failure if nobody buys it. You have to back it, tell the consumer about it, convince people to buy it. And you have to make it available to the potential purchaser: there were still people who wanted my books but couldn’t get them because they were out of print or “out of stock indefinitely,” a term that lets distributors and bookstores know the book is really OP without the publisher having to admit it.

Yes, that was it: it was the industry’s fault. And Tor’s. And Beth’s. And the other editor’s, and perhaps my agent’s, and probably several others’ fault as well.

Unfortunately, not even this very careful apportionment of blame seemed to affect the situation. My sales figures remained bad. With bad sales figures, I couldn’t sell new work. And if I couldn’t sell new work, I wasn’t a writer.

So I quit writing. I’d done my best and it wasn’t good enough. I’d had my chance. Why write what nobody’s going to read, right? Now I just had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Nothing I wrote would ever be worth reading anyway, so I might as well find something I could do. Surely I had another skill? (There must be a pony here somewhere…?)

And Monsters Under the Bed

Quitting wasn’t a conscious decision, and it’s only in retrospect that I can put it in these terms. At the time I had no idea what was happening to me. I couldn’t even think of it as writer’s block; one who doesn’t write is not a writer, and consequently cannot have writer’s block.It’s just possible I wasn’t thinking with perfect clarity. Everything that I had hoped for and worked toward through some thirty-five years of my life had come to a very quiet, unspectacular, altogether insipid end. My identity and my sense of self-worth were tied up in a label to which I no longer had any right.

I truly believe that if I had known such a thing were possible, and what to do about it if it happened, I would not have wasted the years I did searching for the ideal place to lay blame and/or a second marketable skill that would take my mind off writing. I’d have been less disabled by shock and better prepared to fight for what I wanted instead of thinking I must deserve what had happened and ought to resign myself to it.

As it was, I felt like a child who’s been told there are no monsters under the bed and so leans over the edge to look…and finds monsters. The sense of betrayal (they lied to me) and shame (I believed them) was devastating. I couldn’t decide whether I was a fraud and a failure, or whether I’d been singled out by some venomous divinity for a foretaste of hell for my sins. Either way, nothing was as I had believed it to be and been told it would be, and I knew of no way to put my world back in order.

When I had occasion to mention my published books I felt embarrassed, as though it were my fault they were nearly all OSI or OP and there would be no new ones. When I tried to write I felt foolish and defeated before I began. And yet writing was and had always been the core of my life. I couldn’t do it anymore, but I couldn’t quite give it up either. I couldn’t give up the habits of thinking, and I couldn’t give up the hope. Writing was the point and purpose of life. I’d proved myself a failure at it, and I knew I should admit that and go on to something else; but there was nothing else.

Intermezzo, With Violin

For three years I fussed and fumed and felt like a failure, and did nothing to fix it. By the time I stumbled (by pure good fortune) onto the SFWA community on GEnie I had got past the blaming stage to bitter and bewildered resignation, but I still wasn’t writing. I was sitting at the computer for hours every day staring at a word processing screen, but I wasn’t writing.At first it was even more depressing to be on GEnie among all those SFWA members. I joined the club to get freeflagged so I could afford GEnie, and then I lurked in the private SFWA categories because I could. One of the first conversations I ran across there was a variation on the membership wars, with Big Names announcing that people should have to requalify at intervals for Active status because it was meant to be an organization of working writers.

They had a point, but I wasn’t concerned with that: what bothered me was the notion that if I couldn’t sell my work it wasn’t work. There seemed to be an underlying assumption that if one works hard enough and writes well enough, one’s work will sell. That was exactly what I had always believed and what I was very much afraid was true, but that had to mean either I hadn’t worked hard enough or I hadn’t written well enough, and I didn’t want to hear it.

I knew I’d worked hard enough. I’d written for ten to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for the last ten years. Therefore I must not have written well enough. That was confusing, because there were successful writers who didn’t write as well as I. Or was I deluding myself about the quality of my work along with everything else?

You Are Not Alone

For my sanity I unmarked the SFWA topics where they talked about membership, and reverted to authors’ topics. For months I listened to writers talk shop, and I struggled with writer’s block, and I went from total funk to grand optimism and back again to total funk on a daily basis. And then I met a working writer who wrote under a pseudonym because her first three books failed.I read those three books. They were at least as good as mine, probably better, and I couldn’t see any more reason for them to have failed than I could for mine to have failed.

“It happens,” she said. She was very matter-of-fact about it, quite as though it weren’t a terrible, secret shame. “We were ahead of the trend. Space adventure sells now, but it didn’t then, and we got caught.”

Concept. We wrote good books, they didn’t sell, and we weren’t to blame. And I wasn’t alone.

“I probably won’t ever be able to write under my own name again,” she said. “The chain bookstores look at an author’s sales records and won’t stock books from the ones that don’t sell. But my pseudonym sells, so they’re willing to stock her books.”

Pseudonym. New start. Try again with a different sort of book. Concept.

I’m sure it helped her that she had an agent who stood by her when her first books failed, but that wasn’t the essential difference between us. The important thing was that she believed in herself. She rejected the conventional wisdom that good books sell and that real writers’ careers don’t crash. When she failed under her own name, she chose a new one and kept on keeping on, and it worked.

I’m not saying it was easy for her, because I don’t believe it was. But she didn’t quit. I had toyed with the notion of doing what she was doing, but I hadn’t done it because I didn’t really believe it would work. She just did it. Her first books failed? Okay, she wrote new ones. She couldn’t sell them under her name? Okay, she chose a new one. No big deal. It’s a business, and you do what you have to do to sell your product.

Starting Over

In a very real sense, I hadn’t quite fully understood before that it is a business. I’d thought all I had to do was write. I had never been good at the business end of things, and I’d thought I didn’t have to be. But on GEnie I listened to writers discussing the minute details of contracts, rights, royalty percentages, sell-throughs, genre fluctuations, distributors, even publishers’ overhead (in the form of paper costs, cover art, “to foil or not to foil,” etc.), and it began to get through to me that I had been, to put it very kindly, a damned fool. I had thought it was the publisher’s and/or my agent’s job to worry about all those things, just as I had thought it was the publisher’s and/or my agent’s job to do all the advertising, review copy distribution, blurb acquisition, and so on.I was wrong. The publisher and the agent should of course do those things, but it is the author’s job to know what’s going on, to nudge them as needed, and to fill in the gaps where their responsibility, interest, or abilities flag before the job is done. I had thought it stupid of publishers to throw books on the market for a couple of weeks, then accept returns and call the books failures; yet I had been cheerfully handing my books into that system with no effort to alter or affect it, and calling myself a failure over the results. My failure wasn’t in the writing, it was in the follow-through. Perhaps I couldn’t have saved my first books, but I might have saved myself: the effort to improve those sales figures might have kept me aware that they were only sales figures, and not a measure of my worth.

The knowledge that I was not alone, that what had happened to me had also happened to others, and that some of them had known what to do, done it, and got their careers going again, made a world of difference to me. I didn’t get over my writer’s block overnight, and I’m still as ashamed of my poor sales figures as if they were my fault. But I know what to do now. I have plans and goals again, and courses of action to take. Here they are:

Publicize

The first thing a writer should do is beyond my means now, though I can certainly do it the second time around: don’t abandon your books. Don’t depend on your agent or your editor to sell them. They are your product, and their success is crucial to no one but you. Do what you can do yourself: publicize them. Make sure the publisher is sending review copies to as many reviewers as possible, including the Nebula jury no matter how unlikely winning seems. Even one Nebula recommendation can help sales.Send press releases to local newspapers, book stores, and special interest groups. Arrange signings at local bookstores. If you travel, arrange signings at bookstores in the cities you’ll visit. Some authors even visit their local distributors and chat with the drivers in an effort to get more of their books into the racks. Do anything you can think of to make your books known on a local or a national level. The initial sale to your publisher was only the beginning: now you have to sell the product to the consumer.

OP Books

For older books that are going OS or OP there are still some things you can do: get the rights back, for starters, if your publisher won’t reprint and make a new push with the reprint. (If there is a reprint, treat it as though it were a brand new sale and promote it every way you can.) Once you have the rights back you can search for a new publisher, try the Science Fiction Book Club, investigate the foreign market, and anything else you and your agent can think of. The exposure you’ll get if you can resell them is well worth the time and trouble it will take to do it. The more books you have in print, the more seriously editors (and readers) will take you. It’s relatively inexpensive advertising, and advertising is crucial to the sale of any product including your career. 

Agents

Of course if you’ve lost your agent, you’ll have to do this yourself or find a new agent. If the latter, it’s better to bring him or her new works: you can concentrate on the older books after you’re started with the new ones. Finding an agent is not as simple as it sounds, but with perseverance and good new manuscripts to market, it can be done. If you can follow the course recommended for new writers of selling the manuscript first, then hiring the agent to handle the contract, you will have a better chance at your first choice in agents. If you just haven’t the temperament to market your own work, you’ll have to be patient and persistent. Friends’ recommendations might help, if you know any writers who know and like your work. (I finally found my present agent through a friend on GEnie.) 

Orphaned Books

If your books are still in print but orphaned, the best course of action is to make the new editor fully your editor by selling her another book. Once she’s the purchasing editor for one of your books, it will be easier to convince her to give better attention to the earlier book(s) as well. Alas, the editor who takes over for another hasn’t always a similar taste in books, and so may not be willing to purchase another from you. In that case you’ll have to decide how important the matter is to your career. If you’re busy selling other books elsewhere, it may be as well to let that one slide. If you’re not selling other books elsewhere, you may feel that the orphaned book is the one to which the future of your career is hitched. In that case you must do what you can to increase its sales, but don’t spend time on it that you could be spending on the effort to sell new books. In the long run it’s always the new ones that will make the biggest difference to your career. 

Pseudonyms

Selecting a pseudonym, even when everyone involved knows it’s still you, may be all you need to do to get a second chance. Fortunately there’s no need to try to fool anyone. The idea is just to get around the bad sales history attached to your name.As a general rule, the chain bookstores will not stock books by an author whose previous books didn’t sell. It’s nothing personal: they are quite reasonably trying to maximize their profit by stocking the products that sell best. If a grocery store found that a certain brand of toilet paper didn’t sell, it would stop stocking it. It’s the same principle, with the author’s name as brand name.

If the author changes “brand names” by employing a pseudonym, the chains will give him or her the same chance they give any new author. The process starts over with the new name. If the books sell, they get stocked. If they don’t sell, they don’t.

This principle applies equally to authors who had some success in short stories but crashed and burned when they moved to novels. To the chain bookstores, the success of the short stories means nothing. They don’t handle short stories. Maybe your name at the top of the list of contributors would sell an anthology in a big quick hurry, but your first three novels failed miserably. (One or two novels might not be enough to turn the chains against your name, but three would certainly be.) My advice would be to consider a pseudonym for future novels, whether or not you continue to use your own name on your short stories. If the pseudonym sells and you want your own name back, you can always ease your way into it by having reprints say you’re you, “writing as” your pseudonym.

Genres

Switching genres, even temporarily, can also give you a new start and is well worth a try if there’s another genre of interest to you. The chainstore author-name taboo seems to be genre-specific: they may be willing to carry mystery books, for example, by an author whose sf/f failed (perhaps their computer programs have no cross-reference function). If you achieve name-recognition in the new genre, in time you may be able to return to your first-choice genre without fuss. In any case you’ll still be a working writer, which to many of us is really the important part. 

Guarantees

Writing is a business. Just as you must learn to accept the rejection of your manuscripts with some objectivity, so must you learn to accept the failure of a book (or the stalling out of a career) with objectivity. It is not you who has been rejected or who has failed. It’s only your work, and you can do new work. Eventually, even in this fickle business, hard work “may” pay off.There are no guarantees, and I’m certainly no shining example of what can happen: I haven’t sold a book since 1989. But at least I’m not a failure anymore. I’ve learned what to do, and I’m doing it. I’m writing, my agent is marketing the results, and with any luck at all I will have a new career. I’m no worse off than any beginner, and better off than some because I already know for certain that I can write publishable prose.

Now all I have to do is sell it, and I have a better chance at that than I had a year or two ago. Then, I had given up. I know I just said there were no guarantees, but there’s one: if you don’t write, or if you don’t try to sell what you write, you will certainly not get published. If you try, you may succeed.

My writing faculties are so crippled these days that it’s taken me two weeks to write this article. I’ve done it, though, and now I’m going to send it off to see whether I’ve done it well. If you’re reading it, you’ll know I’ve made one small step in the right direction. If you’re not, then I’m talking to myself and I’d best shut up and go write some fiction. Either way, I’m a writer again.

Act II, Scene i

When I wrote this article a year ago, I did not seriously believe that I would ever sell another novel. Turns out it really is a good idea to keep your manuscripts in the mail no matter how hopeless you feel: today I am under contract with Roc for two urban fantasy novels. The first one, Cold Iron, will be released this August.I’ve inadvertently followed other pieces of my advice. I’ve made a small change to my name: I started my writing career as Melisa Michaels, accepted it when Tor added my middle initial, and have now gratefully accepted Roc’s decision to drop the middle initial. Whether this would be enough to fool the chain store computers, I don’t know.

The agent I had when I wrote this was not the best for me. On the strength of an editor’s interest in Cold Iron, however, I was able to get an excellent agent to handle the contract and future sales. It really is better to wait till you have a sale to bring to a prospective agent.

Since the first manuscript to sell was a fantasy, I’ve changed genres, having never sold fantasy before. I hope to write space adventure and mysteries again, but I may have an easier time of it if the fantasy books do well.

They may, of course, sink without a trace like all my others. That’s perfectly possible. I think they’re good, but so were the Tor books. Roc has given me a great cover for the first one; but lots of books with great covers fail. In publishing, as in a TV sitcom, “anything can happen (and probably will).”

However, if another career crash turns out to be part of “anything,” this time I’ll be ready. I know it can happen, and I know what to do about it. Should I have to, I’ll just change my name more radically and keep on keeping on. Melisa Michaels is the author of six OP books from Tor, one mystery novel, and two urban fantasy novels from Roc. The first of these, Cold Iron, was released in August 1997. She would be very pleased if you would order it from any of several online bookstores. ]]> http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/stalled-careers-writers-block-and-monsters-under-the-bed/feed/ 0 http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/a-12-step-program-for-writers/ http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/a-12-step-program-for-writers/#comments Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:44:35 +0000 BrandieTarvin http://www.sfwasite.org/?p=945

A 12-Step Program for Writers

by Bruce Bethke

1. We admit that we are powerless over publishers, and that our careers have ecome completely unmanageable.
2. We believe that an Agent far greater than Our Last Agent can restore us to publications, sales, and critical acclaim.
3. We have made a decision to turn our lives and our professional careers over completely to our New Agent. God help us.
4. We have made a searching and fearless inventory of every old unsold scrap and fragment of manuscript in the bottoms of our filing cabinets, in hopes of finding something we can sell to somebody, somewhere.
5. We have proclaimed to God, to ourselves, and to anyone else who would listen the exact nature of the many failings of our former editors and publishers.
6. We are entirely ready to let someone else take the blame for the way our last book tanked.
7. We humbly hope our new publisher will not find out what we said about our last publisher.
8. We have made a list of all the persons we have harmed, in fear that one of them may someday become the new editor at Bantam.
9. We have made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except for those talentless yutzes who will clearly never become an important editor or publisher. Oh, but they might become reviewers.
10. We will continue to take inventory of our old unsold stuff, in hopes that something will germinate in the dark and suddenly and spontaneously become a best-seller.
11. We have sought through prayer and the Internet to improve our conscious contact with Our New Editor, praying that she will stay with the publisher long enough to get our latest book out the door.
12. Having had a professional awakening as the result of these steps, we will guard our new knowledge jealously. Why give the up-and-coming competition a break?

When I was teaching short workshops, I found that some beginning writers want business information in the curriculum and others hate it. One critique sheet complained bitterly that I spent a couple of hours on the business end (out of eight) and was “too commercial”. Needless to say, the only people who have ended up published after these workshops have been the ones who weren’t afraid to be commercial.

Novice writers have to take some responsibility for their own careers. The good information is NOT that hard to find. The novices who don’t find it–and don’t find it repeatedly–are resisting the truth.

Example: at a Dragoncon, I heard Anne McCaffrey talk on a 2-hour panel aimed at new writers. She talked, she answered questions, she put out a lot of good information on Copyright issues, agents, editors, contracts, and so on. Patient, firm, clear, all the above.

On her way out of the room, a young man who had been in the audience ambushed her, and asked again, the very basic-stupid question he had asked the panel twice. He was convinced that she had said what she said only because she “had” to say that in public, but in private she could give him the Magic Button to Getting Published.

There is no Magic Button. There is no such thing as a free lunch (not even when it’s charged to the editor’s plastic.)

This kind of novice will claim, to his deathbed, that no one ever told him the real secret to getting published … because, of course, he never listened. No writers’ group, SFWA or any other, can be held responsible for this kind of novice. We are not their fairy godmother, and we have too many other claims on our time to spend much effort trying to break through their fantasy.

How do I know? I was once a hopeful hobby writer myself, who had a wistful vague dream that someday a shaft of light would beam down from above, trumpets would sound, little drifts of glittering gold would land on my shoulders, and I’d be anointed Real Writer. I would know it. My mother would know it. My friends and their friends would know it. And of course editors and publishers would know it instantly. Fame and fortune awaited me; I had only to wait until the right moment.

While in this hazy dream, I didn’t seek out any practical knowledge whatsoever. I didn’t go to the library and find writers’ magazines or books on how to write. I didn’t take courses. I didn’t join a writers’ group. No: if I had the talent, someday the light would come. I wrote bits of stories and sent them to a friend who was in a graduate English program; she trashed them and sent them back. Then I’d go into a decline (mentally wailing and worry about my talent) before before trying again. (The one thing I did right, was write. At least I was working on the salable skill, if not the skill to sell it.)

The turnaround for me came when something (I now forget what) shook me out of this idiotic daze and I realized that if I wanted to be anything other than a science fictional Emily Dickinson, I would have to know some practical stuff. The “getting published” side of writing was more like “getting a driver’s license” or “getting to Europe” than having a religious experience.

I had gone from “it sure would be nice to hike along mountain trails” to reading, researching, renting equipment for short hikes, buying equipment, and finally hiking along mountain trails pretty competently. I had gone from “it sure would be nice to be able to ride horses over fences” to reading, researching, taking lessons on the flat and over fences, leasing a horse, buying a horse, and riding my own horse over fences.

So … what was this silly nonsense about a spotlight from on high when it came to getting published?

From that revelation came an immediate burst of research–which did not take long to put me in touch with perfectly good sources of information. The information is out there. It is available. You can tell the good stuff from the scams just as easily as you can in any other field. All it takes is applying the same business attitude you would if buying a car, a house, a horse. While any writers’ organization (including SFWA) may provide general information on the business of writing and the realities of a writer’s life, you don’t have to find it here–it’s in every library.

Genre-specific info is another thing entirely. By the time I went to a half-day SF workshop, I already knew about manuscript preparation, why I shouldn’t be looking for an agent yet, which publishers handled SF, and so on. I had finished three books and quite a few stories; I had been submitting stories for over a year. But I had no idea what a science fiction convention was, or why anyone would go. I knew no writers (SF or other, except for reporters at the county newspaper), no editors, nothing.

The workshop presenter mentioned SFWA and handed around a copy of the Bulletin. I had read about SFWA (briefly) in Writer’s Market; the presenter, and the Bulletin, convinced me it was an organization with something to offer. In other words, I was ready to hear what SFWA had to say.

He also explained conventions (sort of … ) and I decided to get a one-day membership to the NASFiC in Austin that year. While I did not meet any science fiction writers then (I had two sales, but nothing out in print; I felt suspended between novice and neo-pro) I had the chance to see them, watch them, and start figuring out the tribal customs. The workshop also gave me an immediately useful bit of advice (“Send your stories to an editor whose choices you already like — he’s most likely to like yours”) which was responsible for my first hard-SF sale, about three months later.

But there were over thirty people at that workshop. Many were where I had been a few years before — drifting along day-dreaming of being writers by annointment. They had never finished a story; some had never started a story. They wanted to hear that they were talented — they wanted the beam of light to come down and mark them as Instant Real Writers. They couldn’t hear the practical advice being given, and they have never sold a thing, even if they kept writing. Another group were almost ready to hear it — close enough that they formed a support group, and most of those later achieved at least one professional sale.

I’m coming on strong here, because I just spent another half-hour writing back to a newbie with a fantasy novel who is desperate to find an agent, and has gotten a nibble from someone who wants a reading fee. I spent an hour yesterday combing my files and essentially re-writing several articles for him. He came back with a bunch of “yes, but … ” sorts of things. If he writes me again, still misty-eyed because someone is willing to read his work, I’ll give up. He’ll have proved himself determined to be fooled. I have mail waiting from someone who wants me to read her work and tell her she’s talented enough to keep going — although I’ve told her before to workshop her stories in her own area (which has writers’ groups.) I’ve spent hours and hours with promising beginners (some of them now thoroughly published) when I felt they were taking in the info I could give, but I do not have the time to waste on people who want the Magic Button or the Free Lunch or the Secret Decoder Ring to the Publishing Empire.

When considering potential markets for their short fiction, many SF&F writers overlook the many non-English language magazines and anthologies published around the world. This article discusses why you might want to consider these markets, and how to go about selling to them.

Especially if you can’t read that particular language? First, it broadens the audience of readers who gain exposure to your work. If you also write novels as well as short fiction (or plan to), a resume of sales in non-English markets can assist in foreign rights sales for your longer work.

Secondly, anything you make from these sales is found money. Yes, you will generally get less for these reprints than for selling first rights in an English market, but remember that you can sell your reprints in multiple countries and languages. My foreign language sales have ranged from $20 to $200, averaging about $100 per sale — so you can easily pick up another few hundred dollars per story. That being said, many of these markets also pay only in contributor copies.

Finally, it’s fun to say that you’ve been published in X languages and Y countries. And if our writing can’t bring us some fun, then why are we doing it?

Rule 1: Don’t submit a story to any foreign language market until you have first sold it to an English-language market. Many of the top English genre fiction markets have foreign language editions or will ask for an option on foreign language rights. Selling a story to a non-English market first could jeopardize a more prestigious and lucrative English first-rights sale. In addition, it’s a lot easier to sell to a foreign language market if your story has the credentials of a major English market.

So that means you are looking for non-English markets that will accept reprints of stories that have appeared in an English market somewhere in the world. That is by no means the rule: many foreign language markets publish only local authors.

Rule 2: You are looking for markets that will accept unsolicited submissions. Most foreign language magazines publish reprints from English markets, but many make the selection of those stories themselves from a review of the top English magazines — i.e., they won’t accept a direct submission from the author. You may still end up with your story in these markets, but you have no control over the decision, beyond writing a great story and selling it to a top English market.

Rule 3: Unless you are multi-lingual, you are looking for markets that accept submissions in English and will translate your story at no cost to you. In my experience, any market that accepts submissions in English will translate at no cost. Some markets, however, will accept reprints and unsolicited submissions (rules 1 and 2), but only in the language of the magazine.

Even then, you have options. I sold a reprint to a French magazine that not only did the translation for free, but also provided me an electronic copy of their translation. That allowed me to sell the translated version to another market that only accepted submissions in French.

So the above discussion leads us to the …

Definition of a Valid Foreign Language Market:
A market that accepts unsolicited submissions in English of stories that first appeared in English language markets, and translates them at no cost to the author.

About the Author:

Doug’s stories have appeared in professional magazines and anthologies in eight countries and six languages, including Amazing Stories, Cicada, and Treachery And Treason (Penguin/Roc) in the US, Interzone and The Third Alternative in the UK, and Prairie Fire, Tesseracts ⁶, and Solaris(Québec) in Canada, as well as magazines and anthologies in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Brazil. He has upcoming stories in On Spec and the anthology, North of Infinity II.

2001 John W. Campbell Award Finalist!!: Doug was a finalist on the 2001 Hugo ballot for the  John W. Campbell Award, an international award given each year to the best new SF or fantasy writer whose first work appeared in a professional publication in the previous two years.

Whether I’m giving a bookstore reading or teaching a writer’s workshop, one of the most frequently asked questions is always, “How do I get my first novel published? What’s the trick, the secret?” The secret is that there is no trick, just skillful, focused effort.

The first step is to write a really good book. The next, equally important, step is attracting the notice of someone in a position to get it into print. Some people do this by networking at conventions, or striking up a relationship with a published author who recommends them to their publisher, both viable routes. For most of us, however, it’s a “market by mail” venture. Whether you decide to seek an agent, or go straight to publishers, you need a letter of introduction – the query. Dissected and examined critically, the query letter is an elegantly concise piece of promotional writing. You have exactly one page to introduce yourself and your novel-just four or five clean, tight paragraphs, each with its own specific purpose. That doesn’t sound so hard. We are writers, after all, right? But the devil is in the details, especially for a newcomer with no track record or flashy credentials.

That’s where I found myself a few years back when it came time to market my first fantasy novel, Luck in the Shadows. I hadn’t published any short fiction; I’d never been to a convention to network; the few published authors I knew before I was already well into the process were literary sorts with no connections in the genre world. According to the prevailing collective wisdom that persists among the unpublished, I didn’t have much of a chance.

Happily, the prevailing wisdom is wrong. It’s certainly a plus to have a few fiction credits or an influential mentor, but it’s not an absolute necessity. If it were, I wouldn’t be writing this article.

So, there I was back in ‘94, with a book I was burning to sell and no idea how to go about it. As I chewed my way through various “how to” books, it quickly became clear that the most important tool I needed was a great query letter. It’s a writer’s introduction, our calling card and, hopefully, our foot in the door.

For us nobodies, it’s basically a cold sales job; we’ve got one page to engage an agent or editor’s interest, make them want to flip the page to scan our carefully chosen sample chapters. Some agents and editors glance at the letter but read the chapters first. Others read the query and reject the chapters unseen if the letter doesn’t sing. You never know, so write the letter like it’s the one thing standing between you and success. It just might be.

Specific person
Agency
Address
Address

Dear (Agent/Editor’s Name):

I am seeking representation for my fantasy adventure novel, Luck In The Shadows, complete at 170,000 words. I am enclosing a synopsis and a sample chapter. The sequel, Stalking Darkness, is nearing completion and another free-standing book featuring the same characters is in outline form.

I love thieves and spies – those sneaky people who live by intuition, skill, and inside knowledge. In fantasy, however, they are often portrayed as dark, ruthless characters or relegated to second string roles, a la Falstaff, as useful or amusing foils for more conventional heroic types. Luck in the Shadows gives the rogues center stage.

Seregil is an experienced spy for hire with a murky past and noble connections; Alec is the talented but unworldly boy he rescues and takes on as apprentice. “I admit I’ve cut a purse or two in my time,” Seregil tells Alec soon after they meet, “and some of what I do could be called stealing, depending on who you ask. But try to imagine the challenge of overcoming incredible obstacles to accomplish a noble purpose. Think of traveling to lands where legends walk the streets in daylight and even the color of the sea is like nothing you’ve ever seen! I ask you again, would you be plain Alec of Kerry all your life, or would you see what lies beyond?” Alec goes, of course, and quickly plunges into danger, intrigue, and adventure as their relationship deepens into friendship. The interaction between these two forms the core of this character-driven series.

I’ve been writing professionally for ten years and am currently a freelance journalist. My articles appear regularly in the Bangor Daily News, Preview! Magazine, and Maine In Print. I’ve covered everything from software to psychics; my interview credits include Stephen King, Anne Rice, and William Kotzwinkle. Thank you for your consideration of this proposal. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,
Lynn Flewelling

Reading the market news in trade journals like this one can help keep you up to date on who’s where. Most agents and editors I’ve talked to say that a brief call to their office to verify the information is also acceptable.

And now, on with our dissection:

Paragraph 1: This brief opening accomplishes a number of things. It states what you’re selling, how long it is, and that it’s complete. (Some agents and editors will consider a few chapters and an outline from an unknown; most won’t. A finished novel proves that you can go the distance.)

The “synopsis and sample chapter” mentioned in this paragraph are the exact items this particular agent’s listing asked for. Giving them what they want-no more, no less- demonstrates that you’ve done you’re homework and are approaching them as a professional. If you send out multiple queries, be sure to tailor each query package and letter accordingly. No one likes a form letter. If you have other related works underway, it’s a good idea to mention them here, showing that you’re not a one-shot wonder. If you don’t, however, don’t worry about it, and don’t bother mentioning other works in a genre the agent or editor does not handle.

Paragraph 2: The “why I wrote this book” ‘graph. Those of you who are basing your science fiction epic on your Nobel prize-winning research in human genome mapping won’t have much trouble with this one. For those of us “nobodies” with less stunning credentials, it can be a bit daunting.

Most of the sample letters I found while researching queries were written by people who were, as stated above, basing their latest novel on their own research or some life-changing personal experience. In every case the author had an impressive publishing background of some sort, and none of them were first-timers. I, on the other hand, had simply written a book I really liked, so I said that and let the enthusiasm carry it. Keep it simple and direct. Don’t go on at length about your literary influences or what book first turned you on to the genre; they’ve seen that a million times. Just be sincere.

Paragraph 3: Give ‘em a glimpse of the goods. You can’t tell the whole story; that’s what the outline or synopsis is for. Just give them the flavor, introduce the protagonist, and above all, demonstrate that you can write well. How you present your book here is just as important as the story itself. Make your thumbnail description concise but lively. Try to capture what or who the book is about. In short, consider this paragraph your book’s audition scene, and know that this paragraph is the one most likely get you rejected for the right reasons.

“Right reasons?” you ask.

Absolutely. Most editors and agents are book lovers just like the rest of us, with the same subjectivity of taste. If an agent doesn’t like books about dragons and that’s your main focus, then they aren’t going to want your book and you don’t want them representing it. What you want from an agent is an enthusiastic representative for your work. With editors, you want someone who’s excited by the prospect of polishing your manuscript into a salable book and getting it on the shelves.

A wise friend once observed that the ratio between rejections and acceptances is about 12:1. What happens generally is this: Agent One reads your carefully crafted query and thinks he’s seen your idea a hundred times before; Agent Three thinks it’s the freshest treatment he’s seen of that idea in ages; Agent Seven just plain hates that sort of plot; Agent Eleven can’t get enough of it. Simple persistence and faith are required to run this gauntlet, and rejection letters do have their uses. We’ll return to this shortly.

Paragraph 4: Experience and background. Got it? Flaunt it! Don’t got it? Keep quiet.

While the freelance writing I mentioned in my query by no means guarantees that I’m a good novelist, it does suggest that I probably know how to string words together. I also tried to be creative in my spin on the subject. I’ve written dozens of feature articles for local papers, and interviewed lots of interesting people; the ones I chose to mention in the query were selected to highlight my interest in the fantasy field, and in literature and authors in general. Whether or not it impressed anyone is debatable, but it did relate to the book I was selling.

A caveat: If your background has no bearing on the novel in question in some readily apparent way, it’s best to just leave this paragraph out, or keep it brief.

Paragraph 5: Your standard polite good-bye. Don’t press them for response times, hand down ultimatums (“You’ve got two months, then I’m sending it somewhere else”), or offer to call. The market listing which provided their mailing address should also include an estimated turn-around time. Be patient and don’t expect them to meet their own deadlines to the day. However, if you don’t hear back for a month after the listed time, a polite phone inquiry is usually appropriate.

A few additional basics:

1. Stationery- Queries should be neatly typed on high quality, unadorned, 8 1/2 by 11-inch business stationery. While white is your safest bet, color-wise, you can probably get away with ivory, buff, or a light grey. Avoid brightly-colored paper and ink at all costs. The same goes for cute border prints, patterns, and dot-matrix printing unless you want your query to scream Amateur!
2. Letterhead- A plain, business-like letterhead looks sharp and conveys your address information in a professional-looking manner. If you have access to a good laser printer you can design your own, avoiding pretentiously ornate or hard-to-read fonts, and illustrations. If you are gainfully employed, do not use your company stationery, no matter how classy it is. A letterhead from “Joe Bloe, Attorney at Law” will only cause undue confusion. And resist the temptation to style yourself “Jane Doe, Novelist.” That should be self-evident.
3. The query package- As stated above, do your homework. Research each market and send them only what they ask to see. This usually doesn’t include “return reply” coupons (First Class postage is your best bet), photos of yourself, photocopies of writing samples, your resume, or manuscripts other than the one you’re currently offering.
4. Proofreading- Do I even have to address this? According to my agent and editor friends, the answer is a world-weary “Yes!” A query (or manuscript) marred by typos, blotches of correction fluid, erasure marks, or coffee stains is a red flag to publishing professionals. If you’re sloppy with something as important as a query, what will you be like to work with on a manuscript? Chances are, they’ll spare themselves the trouble of finding out. Proofread your letter carefully for errors, then show it to some other trustworthy soul. Our own mistakes are often the hardest to spot, since we know what’s supposed to be there on the page and tend to see it whether it’s really there or not. Finally, retype or print out a crisp, blameless copy of the corrected letter.

Fear of rejection is a reality for most of us. Many a good manuscript has languished in a drawer because the author just couldn’t face the possibility. Let’s face it, rejection sucks. But it’s also a normal part of the game. Sit around with any group of writers and sooner or later the war stories start flying. One-upping about who’s gotten slammed with the nastiest rejection letter is practically a sport. Rejections are our battle scars, and only those with the guts to strive earn them. Take comfort in the fact that all writers deal with rejection time and again throughout their careers. I keep a copy of Andre Bernard’s Rotten Rejections (Pushcart Press, 1990) close at hand. It’s an inspirational collection of rejection letters received by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Jane Austin for books which now grace university required reading lists.

So when that first rejection shows up in your mailbox, toast yourself with a tall glass of something very nice. It’s proof that you’re off the porch and running with the big dogs now. Later, as those dozen or so rejections pile up on the way (we hope) to that first, glorious “yes,” study them carefully. They can be a useful guide. It was an agent’s thoughtful rejection letter that ultimately led to revisions that sold my first book. The most valuable rejection letter gives reasons. Many will be contradictory. One letter will praise what the last one damned as trite, then go on to nail you for something completely different. Some will be valid criticisms, others are purely subjective. If a certain comment strikes an “Ah ha!” chord, then take a second look at your work, but realize, too, that you can’t and shouldn’t rewrite the book to please every critic.

What you do need to watch for, however, are patterns. If five out of seven agents mention that they did not understand your main character’s motivation, or that your opening chapter did not engage their interest, then you need to take a hard look at what you’re sending out.

I began by saying that there is no secret trick to getting published. You can, however, think of the process as a game. Games have steps, rules, and strategy. The better you become at these, the better you can use them to your advantage. The good query letter is one of your most valuable assets.

There’s a lot of advice floating around as to how best to achieve those first sales. Some say you should write short stories to break in. Some say better yet, write short-shorts since they take less time. Some say forget the short stuff: the real market is novels.

The answer that is right for you depends on your ultimate goal. If you just want to see your name in print, the quickest way might be to rob a bank. If you want to see your work in print, the quickest way might be to write for fanzines or other small magazines that pay in contributors’ copies. If you want to build a career, forget quick ways. There are none.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, you can probably do it if you try hard enough. With a modicum of talent and a whole lot of work, you can learn your craft and begin to make those first sales.

But What Length Will Sell?

The answer to this question is simple: what will sell to the real paying markets is the best work their editors can find that matches their editorial guidelines. Yes, they may more often have room for one more short-short than for another novella. Yes, you might therefore be able to sell three good short-shorts while remaining unable to sell one good novella.

Unfortunately that does not mean it’s a good idea to concentrate on short-shorts to the exclusion of novellas (or short stories, or novels), if what you want to do is build a career. You can’t learn as much writing short-shorts as you can writing short stories: there just isn’t room in a short-short for the kind of world-building, character development, plotting, etc. that are essential in longer works.

If you have a brilliant idea for a great short-short, by all means write it. Study the markets and get it in the mail to an editor who might like it. Then write something else. If you mean eventually to write longer works, start now.

But don’t start with the first book of an endless series in which the individual novels don’t stand alone: that will be no more useful to you than short-shorts. Works at either end of the length spectrum will teach you the least. Settle somewhere in the middle if you can, where you have room to develop all the skills you need as a writer, but where you also have some boundaries.

Short stories are adequate to develop basic plotting skills, and they will teach you word-management: you won’t have room to waste any. Novellas and novelettes will help you hone your plotting skills, world-building, and character development. Novels will give you room for more complex plotting, sub-plots, and all the skills required for the shorter works. Any length will give you practice in pacing.

Yes, But Which Length Should I Write?

I’ve been avoiding the real answer because it will almost certainly disappoint.

You must write your story just the length it needs to be.

In the final analysis, the best length to write is always the length the idea requires. Begin at the beginning and write until you reach the end. If you really want to be a good writer, don’t worry about markets until after the work is written. And don’t worry about wasting time writing some “wrong” length: no time spent writing is wasted. Not if you are writing to the best of your ability, working at it, and learning. In that case every hour spent writing is an hour spent honing your craft.

Okay, Then What’s the Secret to Making Sales?

Hard work. That’s it. That’s the secret.

The learning and honing process is unending. There will never come a day when you can say, “That’s it: I know all there is to know about writing and can sell my work from now on.” Very likely the best you’ll be able to say is that you’ve done your best, that the current work is finished, and that you think it may be marketable in its present state. (You’ll also know at that point how long the work is.) Good. Study the markets again, send it out, and start another.

Unfortunately when you’ve finished the next piece you may have learned enough to realize that the previous piece was not quite as good as you imagined at the time. Get used to it: if you’re good and work hard at this business, that will become a familiar sensation. It means you’re doing something right. You’re learning.

I Still Don’t Know Whether to Write Short Stories or Novels

One of the things you will learn to judge as you go along is how much room an idea is going to require to be told the way you want to tell it. You will learn to know the idea for a short story from that for a novel before either is written; and the idea for a short-short from either of the others. Novellas and novelettes are more difficult to tell from novels in the raw idea form, but you’ll know the idea for either from that for a short story or a short-short once you’ve had some practice.

Even then it should be your need, not the market, that determines which you choose to write. If you have an idea that is going to require a six hundred thousand word manuscript to do it justice, it would probably be best to put that one aside till you’ve made a name for yourself since really long novels are a greater risk for the publisher and therefore harder to sell; and if you happen to have an idea that’s going to come out just the length needed by one of the better-paying markets it would do no harm to give that idea priority. But for the most part, if your goal is to build a career by becoming the best writer you can be, it is wiser to concentrate on what you need to write than on what you think will sell.

But You Haven’t Told Me How to Break Into Print

Yes I have. There are five steps to the process, and each is crucial:

1. Write.
2. Study the markets.
3. Send out your work.
4. Write.
5. Write.