Hard Work

Got a rejection for a short story yesterday. I’m not too upset; I think I shoehorned my entry into the theme and it didn’t quite fit. I only have one thing out there now, and that’s Prodigies with a major press. The likelihood of this being accepted is very low, I’ll admit, but it will still hurt a lot if I get rejected.

What from there? Try to shop out the dev-edited version of Voyageurs, which is short at 70,000 words but we’ll see. Work on the rewrite of Apocalypse (which will take a few months at best guess) and send it back to my dev editor. See what tweaks might help Prodigies‘ saleability and shop it back out. Send Whose Hearts are Mountains to dev edit. See if I can salvage Gaia’s Hands in case Apocalypse gets sold and it needs a prequel. Write something else, maybe finish Gods’ Seeds.

It’s hard work, and so far has been fruitless. But if I’m going to be published, I want it to be my best, and my expectations have been raised by beta-readers and dev editors and my own revelations about where my stories could go.

Someday, I hope,my hard work will bear fruit.

Fantasies, Aspirations, and Goals

The average self-publisher sells about 250 copies of their work.

Hearing this statistic floored me. I have no doubt that it’s accurate. It’s just that — that’s not a lot of copies. I thought I was being conservative when I set a goal of 400 copies if I self-published.

I thought I was being realistic when I ruled out thousands upon thousands of copies and the New York Times bestselling list. It turns out that my scaled back fantasies — even the 400 copies if I self-published — are too unrealistic. Without realistic grounding, our aspirations are set by our fantasies, and our aspirations in turn set our goals.

It’s time for me to figure out how to pare back my goals, fueled by fantasy. My fantasy was that I would have an agent and would find a publisher of size (say, one of the Big 5) and go on a book tour where someone else made the arrangements for me and I didn’t have to buy my own copies to sign and sell.

In a way, this is freeing. This makes me realize that having 20 readers of my blog is perhaps normal, and that the agents who reject me need to so they don’t starve, given the odds of someone picking up a book and reading it.

It also means that I will never get external validation of my work if I gauge success by my fantasies. How many readers is “enough” if the average self-published book gets 250 reads? What does a rejection mean if the object is not quality but saleability?

My goals will stay the same:

Get picked up by an agent or publisher, avoiding vanity presses and publishing mills

If the above doesn’t work, research and develop an effective self-publishing strategy, avoiding self-publishing scams

What changes are the standards for success. I’m still working on scaling down my expectations. This will be difficult.

Author Mills and the Vulnerable

Last night I learned about author mills.

Author mills, sometimes known as vanity presses, are publishers that publish small runs of books for many, many authors. What do they look like? (Wikipedia, 2019)

They go for quantity rather than quality of authors; they may have thousands of authors passing in and out of their presses.
Almost no editorial gatekeeping (i.e. editing and other quality measures)
They only publish small runs of high-cost copies
They expect you to buy your own copies to sell
Once you publish with them, they own your book and the rights to it.

The relationship, in other words, is non-reciprocal, and the author has paid, essentially, for services traditional publishers would supply themselves.
After getting all the rejections I’ve received, I’m scared that I’m vulnerable to such an approach. “Wow, someone wants to publish me!” is a powerful lure after a long, difficult, dry spell. And this is what the author mill counts on — the starstruck desire to see one’s name in print on a book cover.

Falling for an author mill because one hasn’t found an agent/publisher yet is like getting into a relationship with a narcissist because one has had a dry spell in dating. Both look like they fulfill dreams, yet drain the dreamer dry with nothing in return.

The ways to guard against this?

Value yourself and your writing
Know the signs of an author mill
Research before you commit.

A great source with more information on author mills can be found here.

References

Strauss, V. (2010). The perils of author mills. Available: http://www.victoriastrauss.com/advice/author-mills/ [Feb. 20, 2019].

Wikipedia (2019). Author mills. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author_mill [Feb. 20, 2019].

Trusting the Process

I have been trying to lose the last twenty pounds of weight for over a year.

I’ve lost 65 pounds so far, doing it responsibly with well-balanced eating. No go; I’m still 20 pounds heavier than I want to be. After a year of eating a well-balanced 1350 calories a day and seeing no progress, I talked to my doctor, who sent me to a healthy lifestyles educator. I met with her last week, and she hooked me up to a machine that measured my metabolism.

The conclusion: I wasn’t eating enough calories. She put me on a well-balanced 1633-calorie diet. In a week, I lost three pounds — and gained it right back again.

I could, at this point, give up because of the lack of quick results, or I could trust the process and keep going. It’s early days yet, and I haven’t truly lost any ground, so I’ll trust the process.

I face a similar thing in my writing. I have learned to use dynamic words when writing, lessen my dependence on is/was/were/has/had, read my draft out loud while editing, found beta readers and developmental editors, learned to write a better query letter, organized my queries using Query Tracker, sent more queries than I can count, and I haven’t found an agent to latch onto me. For now, I’m trusting the process of writing well and marketing well through queries. This might change — I’ve set my date to self-publish at January 2, six months after I sent that first three chapters to Tor in a fit of bravado.

Trusting the process is hard. I want instant results. I want my reward for working hard and utilizing new skills. I want this twenty pounds gone and I want to be published. But sometimes, I have to sit back and trust that the process is working its magic behind the scenes.

My chat with the publishing coach — part 1

As I noted in these pages prior, I am trying out two publishing coaches (this happened by accident when I realized I’d verbally committed to two different people). I spoke with coach #1 yesterday and this is what I learned:

1) My cover letter needs to be more personal. I had no idea of this — I’m used to writing business letters, and that’s what I did. I rewrote my cover letter keeping this in mind.

2) I need more of an online presence. This blog, for example, is an online presence, but few people know about it. I have a twitter account which posts links to this blog. I’m putting up a page on Facebook and have invited friends — but few people etc. etc. In other words, I haven’t been letting the agents into my online presence. I’m fixing this.

3) I have a writing quirk that could be dropping readers out of the story — and it shows up on the first page. The quirk is that sometimes I give background in a blunt manner rather than through narrative or other storytelling. I break the adage “show me, don’t tell me”. My publishing coach is going to look for this in the first 50 pages; I need to edit the rest of this.

Being a serious writer, it turns out, is hard work. In my arrogance, or perhaps my ignorance, I thought my writing was publishing-ready when I finished it. I thought all that was needed was to proofread and change up some awkward language.

At the same time I’m grateful for my coaching and editing and I’m sighing about having to go through the document again.

But hello, online presence! Thanks for sharing the day with me!

voiceless

To be a childhood abuse survivor is to exist without a voice.

Nobody hears when you tell them to stop. Nobody hears when you tell them why you’re crying.

The pain of being voiceless gets better, but the desire to be heard never goes away. It permeates one’s being like a curse that has settled into one’s DNA — “Until you get people to listen to you, you will never be whole.”

Sometimes you get people to listen to you, but it doesn’t break the spell. It never will, because it cannot erase the memory of adults saying, “Are you sure?” and shrugging off your story because you are a child and they are trusted more than you.

This is what mixes up with my feelings about getting published, and it has complicated my decisions about publishing. I want to be heard but I want to be true to my experience and ideals as well. The data from Kindle Scout doesn’t bode well for me. The last two days I’ve gotten less than 20 nominations a day; my writing doesn’t grab people. I have to accept this and go on.

My next step will be to self-publish this first work (despite the fact no one will likely not read it in the swamp of Kindle) and I’m probably going to quit querying. I then have to consider whether I will continue writing just for myself. Writing takes lots of time and I don’t have a muse to energize my soul right now, so my writing is up in the air.

So I hope you’ll stick with me and keep supporting me:

One step forward — Kindle Scout

I have taken an intermediary step between agents and self-publishing for one of my books — I have submitted my book details to Kindle Scout, and this is what should happen:

In 1-2 days, I should hear whether they’ve approved the book for eligibility
Then they submit it to a “campaign” where I see how many upvotes I get.
At the end, if the book gets enough votes, it gets published.

The best book cover free editing software can buy.

Why this process? Because it’s vetted. Self-publishing otherwise seems like throwing the book on the sea and hoping it floats. If it comes to that, I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t dream of being a NYT bestselling author. I dream of someone reading my book and liking it.

Face it, though, I’m afraid of rejection again. I’m confident that I write well, but wonder if my ideas are publishable or whether I can stand up to a popular vote. I’ve never been popular, after all.

The book may be too gentle for people who read things like “The Meth Chronicles” and vampire stories. I’m a flower child at heart. I believe in the Peaceable Kingdom and the strength of small groups to change the world. I love people in both the general and specific sense.

I’m not going to beg you to support me on Kindle Scout if I get that far. But I want you to think about it, because it’s my dream. And please, please, any support you can give me (preferably something that reaches my eyes or ears) would make me feel better about the process.