More writers' woes

Yesterday, I posted a blog about the awful situation in the publishing business, re copy editors.  If anyone read that blog, they will know that  in effect, there aren't any.  To recap, for those who haven't or don't want to read this, the situation is basically this:  if you're a writer, and you expect to get noticed by an agent, you'd better be prepared to do your own copy editing, have a friend help you like I am(and I'm helping her, but she's much better at catching this sort of thing than I because she's had practice), or hire a professional editor.  There are, in fact, people who do this sort of thing.  But it gets worse.  A lot worse.

 

In an article about book publishing in Canada the author doesn't say anything about having to do your own copy editing. He talks about having to do your own publicity!  And I rather doubt that this is any different in the United States -- or anywhere else, for that matter.  Now in the "good old days" , if you were lucky enough to get published, the publishing house would arrange book tours for you, and newspaper and TV ads.  That's kind of gone the way of the typewriter.  This is something else you, the writer, have to do for yourself.  And writers, as a general rule, aren't that good at promoting themselves.  We are often a modest bunch.  Hence, the proliferation of writer's blogs and writer's websites, yours truly's included. Yeah, I know.  I'm nowhere near a book deal. Yet.  But still. . . .  In any case, this is just another time and money burden for the writer. It's more of a burden for some of us than for others, but I suppose, if we must, we must.

 

All may not be lost, however.  I mentioned in an earlier post about what is now called "independent publishing" that one can do things like "publish on demand" electronically, and simply let a lot of people known the book is out.  I don't know how this works, but there are now "independent publishing collectives" that find places at book fairs and the like, so that the writer can get the word out to a larger audience.  Since the publishing world is changing, and the writer apparently has to change with it, this may in time be a good way to go.  But it's too early to tell, yet. 

 

Perhaps some combination of blogging, as Robert Sawyer does -- he also has a website -- plus a website as many other authors have, plus a presence of some sort on a social networking site such as Facebook or MySpace will help the emerging writer create an audience for his/her work.  Word of mouth was pretty much what gave the Harry Potter series "buzz", at least at first.  Then the publishers knew a good thing when they saw it, and everything went from there.  The publishing business is changing, and writers have to adjust to some of these changes.  But all is not gloom and doom.  You see, most writers aren't in it specifically for the money, although that's always nice, if it happens.  If they were, they'd probably be dreaming up computer games or inventing "killer" apps for your computer.  In any case, I think that, if a writer believes in what he or she is writing, and is willing to go the extra mile, they'll find an audience in time.  It might be niche audience, but that's better than none.  So the best thing, in my opinion, is to hang in there, write the best book or story you can, and persist.  If you do, I'm an optimist.  You will eventually be rewarded for your efforts.

Anne G

Writing and publishing woes

In my previous post about The Virgin Queen's Daughter , I mentioned that the author had some trouble with certain words, and certain types of factual information.  Ella March Chase and I have something in common -- we both have writing partners that are helping us see our way to publication. The difference seems to be that both I and my writing partner seem to have a better grasp of words and grammar than she and her writing partner do.  This is not entirely meant as a criticism of her, although I do hope she finds some way to get better editing so the glaring errors I saw  in the book won't be subsequently repeated. If they are, it will be unfortunate, because there are a large number of people(and the number appears to be growing), of readers of historical novels.  And many of these readers are quite knowledgeable about some historical period. Not only are they knowledgeable, they are often knowledgeable to the point of obsession.  This could be a problem, because if they spot factual errors in spelling or grammar, or errors like "Hans Holbien", they may just throw the book at the wall.  I've done the same with writers who made far fewer spelling mistakes than Ms. Chase did, but had factual errors so glaring they practically hit me.  The last time that happened, I all but threw the unfortunate author's book at the nearest wall!  Since I'm writing what is essentially science fiction set in medieval England, I can't really say I'm a "historical novelist".  So I suppose I'm a bit more tolerant about some of these things, than some "history obsessives" might be.

 

However, whether or not readers of historical novels are "obsessive" about their fact checking isn't exactly the problem.  As my writing partner/friend said not long ago, the real problem seems to be the nature of the publishing business.  And the publishing business has changed a lot -- to the extent that there are no longer really any such things as copy editors who would catch such things as misused homonyms or words that are verbs, which are frequently thought to be nouns.  I'm thinking here of the confusion many writers have when using "prophesy"(verb) as a noun.  "Prophecy" is a noun.  "Prophesy" is a verb.  But I can't tell you how many writers fail to see the distinction, and don't think to look in a dictionary -- a tool I think every writer should have.  On the other hand, a lot of people just rely on their spell checkers, which is fine as far as it goes, but the trouble with spell checkers, as my writing partner pointed out, is that they recognize anything that actually is a word.  Thus, they will recognize "prophesy" used like a noun, just because it is a word.  The same is true with "flare" and "flair".  They are both words. I have sometimes used the thesaurus provided with each of my word processing programs, though I don't use it very often.  But use of a thesaurus might help some writers get the "right" word in the right place. 

 

The thing is, that if a writer gets anywhere close to being published, without a copy editor, these kinds of mistakes will keep cropping up.  This is not the end of the world, exactly, but a lot of readers, especially the kind that read historical novels like The Virgin Queen's Daughter, are what linguists call "prescriptivists"; grammar and spelling rules are very important to them.  I have my "prescriptivist" hackles, which is why I notice such things.  Unlike the "obsessives" out there, I don't necessarily end up ranting and raving about it, since I'm not a "prescriptivist".  Much of what these folk wail about is simply due to the inevitable changes that all languages go through over time.  As far as English is concerned, if it hadn't changed, we would probably still be speaking and writing the language Beowulf was recited and written it.  Which is complex and beautiful in its own way, but hardly understandable to most people today.  Still, this lack of decent attention to detail in the writing world is sad, but not incapable of correction.  The trouble is, it's the writers who are going to have to do the correcting, by themselves,  or with help from critique groups, partners, writing workshops, instructors, etc.  For many of us, this is an extra burden, but may pay off in the end, since a manuscript that is well-written, and "gets it right" when sent to an agent, is more likely to get published. 

 

Finally, I'm hardly perfect in this regard, and neither is my writing partner.  We've both made mistakes, and corrected each other's errors to the best of our abilities. Just last week, while merrily writing a chapter in my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals, I was describing a funeral.  I was writing so merrily, that I had the body "interned" in the freshly-dug grave.  "Intern" is a word.  But as my writing partner pointed out, I should have used "interred".

Anne G

Self-publish?

I know someone who has self-published a book, which was kind of a pet project of the author’s.  It’s not a bad book, but it’s rather odd in some ways, and it’s easy for me to see why the author couldn’t find a publisher.  And lots of people in the book business don’t think much of self-publishing.  Robert Sawyer(unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the link in my blog) thinks it’s a terrible idea, and told one aspiring writer that in so many words. My recollection is, that he essentially told the would- be author to “trash” that book and write a lot of short stories.  Personally, I thought this was a bit harsh, but  there is still an attitude in the book business, that self-published books are badly written “vanity” pieces

 

On the other hand, I was at a wedding a couple of years ago, and one of the relatives – the groom’s family – I don’t know how this guy was related – got me in a conversation about my writing.  He kept trying to “sell” me on self-publishing.  I was leery at the time, and still am, somewhat, but at that stage, I was not about to try to peddle a “half-baked” Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals, in any  form!  Besides which, if you self-publish, everything falls on you!  This includes marketing and distributing the thing, which many writers simply do not have a talent for.  So I held firm and essentially, after I got back from the wedding, which was out of town, I went back to writing. 

 

On the other hand, there is an interesting article about self-publishing in the current Time Magazine, which told several stories about authors who “did everything right”:  they wrote the proper queries, carefully submitted their works to as many agents as they could, in the genres they were writing, and still remained unpublished.  One of them simply got frustrated, plunked down $450 or some similar amount, and got her book published.  She then peddled it around herself, and a few people, including some agent, picked it up.  The end result was, the agent liked what he or she saw, picked it up, and it was published by a respectable publishing house.

 

I don’t know exactly what to make of this, since most authors don’t sell that many books anyway, published or not.  Some get their start, for instance, by writing books that sell only to libraries.  I’ve read some of these, and the writing is decent, but they are awfully short and sweet.  But on the other hand, perhaps that’s all a lot of library patrons want.  And the author can then say, somewhere down the line, “Yes, I’ve published (insert title) and  so-and-so liked it”.  Which can add to the person’s writing credibility.  Unfortunately, unless the agent is fairly open, if it’s self-published, the old attitudes may persist. 

 

I think the Time Magazine article is right about one thing, though.  And that is, that the nature of reading, and publishing, is changing considerably.  The reason for this is partly economic – though not the reasons the author of the article has listed, I think.  The author of the article accuses publishing houses of being kind of uneconomical and old-fashioned about the way they do business with writers, but in fact, one problem writers have, is that book publishing, while always interested in making money by selling books, used to be fairly “writer-friendly”.  If you had any degree of writing talent at all, they would nurture you, and you would stay “midlist” for a while, but if you were lucky, gain a following through word of mouth and the like.  But in the last twenty years or so(if not longer), publishing houses have become increasingly “bottom line” oriented; they are looking for the next blockbuster of a book – a Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter to  carry them to the next profit margin.  But in these tight economic times, people may be less likely to actually buy a book that costs nearly $30.00, especially when they may be able to get it out of the local library system(which I actually encourage, for many books, because I’m a huge supporter of libraries), or trade it with some friend, or get it second-hand.  And that’s hard on authors, too.  This is something the author actually pointed out, in the article.  Furthermore, once you pay the fee for Kindle, which is becoming increasingly popular, and again, I can see why, because I’m acquainted with a lady who actually owns one, it is far cheaper to download some book onto a Kindle and read it that way.  So people may actually end up being less reliant on bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble or Borders(which is rumored to be in considerable financial trouble anyway), and more so on Kindle-like devices.  And, in turn, this may allow a lot of authors to simply put a book on file and have it carried by Amazon.com and sold to anyone who is interested, without intermediaries.  There would probably be some fee or percentage of sales going to whoever carries these electronic books, but it is likely that an author would get a larger share of any profits.  Which, of course is nice for writers, sine few of them make a whole lot of money. 

 

In the end, I think the article may well be right, that this is the future of book publishing.  But at the present, it seems to me that everything is still in a state of flux, and it will take some time before things in the book publishing business to settle into any new pattern.  So should an author self publish?  I have mixed feelings.  I would say, “It depends”. . . .

Anne G