Publishing manners: Only responds if interested

Dean Wesley Smith, one of the contributors to the freebie manual Write Good or Die, has a post on "But why would you... insult writers like this?"

The post is well worth reading, covering the growing habit of professionals in the publishing industry to not bother responding to queries. Dean rather eloquently points out that they do it because they can.

Previously, writers had no choice, but now the balance of power is shifting away from the middle management and to both ends of the real business--connecting writers and readers. Over the course of my own career, I watched the lack of response happen. In the late 1990s, you could pretty much count on getting a form rejection within three months of your submission. That was when publishers still looked at manuscripts.

After that, publishers started requiring agents, and agents responded to their newfound power by raising their commission from 10 percent to 15 percent. The corporate publishers merged, smaller presses folded, and soon we had the Big Six that we know today, although there are still some established small and specialty presses. All this moved the selection of marketable books into the hands of a very few people, which also caused them to be busier than ever.

The net result was that there were few of them and many, many, many writers. It was actually easier to ignore almost all writers, because they really only needed a few. Even if the 100 best books ever written all showed up at the same time, they'd still only buy five of them. Same with the worst 100 books--they'd still need five.

But that's not an excuse to ignore writers. If a writer spends a year working on a manuscript, even if the story is dog slobber, it deserves a "No, thank you." Of all the ways traditional publishing contributes to its own demise, I can't help but feel the "Only responds if interested" policy is a subtle but revealing detail about where modern publishing has arrived.

Perhaps the decline was inevitable, but it could have been embraced with a little grace, and then perhaps more writers would be saddened at the loss. As it is, we're not even sure it's any loss at all.
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Free download now available

The manual Write Good or Die is now available for free download in numerous electronic platforms at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13037. It is also available through Amazon (at 99 cents) and Scribd, coming soon to Mobipocket, Nook, and iPad, and as a PDF through numerous sites, with a print-on-demand version through Amazon and other retail outlets on the way.

And as it rapidly got downloaded this morning, it took all of an hour for someone to post a review and observe that the correct grammatical usage is "write well." I knew that was coming! But sometimes you have to break the rules, or go around the crowd, or follow unconventional advice. All I know is our contributors have sold millions of books, been on best-seller lists all over the world, and are having a lot of fun being successful. Hopefully you'll get something out of it. Please feel free to spread the book around.

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Pen names?

The traditional considerations for using pen names? A) You were a respected professional in your "day job" and didn't want your fantasy dabbling to detract from your standing; B) publishers, for their own reasons, wanted you to only write one book a year and let you slowly starve; C) your sales had tanked and you needed to ditch yourself; D) you were writing in vastly differently fields and styles and needed a clear distinction so as to not upset fans; E) there was the real possibility that someone would shoot you if they knew who wrote that book.

The mainstream publishing industry wants you to stick to one type of book and easy-to-shelf brand. The advice you get from editors is solely for their convenience--and it makes good business sense, because a single book is hardly worth building a campaign around, because its useful life is too fleeting. But if it's only a mild stretch, you should stick to your own name whenever possible, because ultimately you are your brand, and you should always care more about yourself than you care about the industry, or the industry cares about you. If Stephen King can do It and Misery, The Shining and Dolores Claiborne, and Koontz can do all his stuff, it's perfectly acceptable for you to just write You Books.

Publishers have legitimate logistic reasons for carefully controlling the flow of product, due to inventory issues, bookstore needs, production considerations, and marketing concerns. But in this new digital/POD era, it's actually smarter to have everything out at the same time--there is very little reason to dole out content in measured paces, unless you have a specific gimmick or campaign that requires timing. That's true for authors as well as publishers, though authors have the ability to react more quickly and with less to lose. And your books cross-promote each other, building your brand, which more and more is something that can last a lifetime rather than popping up in three-month bursts in the middle shelves of a bookstore. Be yourself whenever possible, and when you're not, make sure you have a good reason.

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Kevin J. Anderson

Kevin J. Anderson is the author of more than one hundred novels, 47 of which have appeared on national or international bestseller lists. He has over 20 million books in print in thirty languages. He has won or been nominated for numerous prestigious awards, including the Nebula Award, Bram Stoker Award, the SFX Reader's Choice Award, the American Physics Society's Forum Award, and New York Times Notable Book. By any measure, he is one of the most popular writers currently working in the science fiction genre.

I first met Kevin in the 1998 Writers of the Future workshop, where he was serving as instructor. He provided me one of my first cover blurbs and our paths frequently cross at conventions, various projects, and WotF business. From the "writer with no future" with 800 rejection slips to one of the most successful and hardest-working writers in genre fiction, Kevin to me is the definition of "professional." He contributed an article, "If I Only Had the Time." You can imagine what it's about.



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Clarifying supporting clauses

Clarity is one of the keys to effective writing. Confuse the reader once and she glances over at the television set, the XBox, the iPod, or the romantic interest. Confuse the reader two or three times and you might want to reconsider your future career as a the next Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling.

Stray clauses are one of the killers of awkward prose, and I've always preached that if you can function competently at the sentence level, all the rest can be learned through study and practice. We'll get to comma usage later, but for today, let's take a look at descriptive clauses.

I recently edited a manuscript sample that contained a sentence "He killed his wife and children as they were asleep in their beds with a shotgun." I can't be sure, but I assume the killer used a shotgun, not that the warm-and-fuzzy family cuddled up with shotguns and teddy bears at night. The sentence could be made clearer either by shifting the descriptive clause closer to the "acting agent" (the man who used the shotgun) or totally restructuring the sentence.

One possibility is "With a shotgun, he killed his wife and children as they slept." Simple and effective, though not very artful. Personally, I would build a little suspense and use a series of short sentences--"The shotgun was cold in his hands, but warmth radiated from his sleeping wife..."

My first draft of a newspaper story I wrote this morning contained the sentence "Watauga County Republican Party chairwoman Pam Blume encouraged her fellow party members to work hard during Saturday's meeting..." I immediately caught the error, because she wasn't asking conventioneers to work hard just for that hour on Saturday, she wanted them to work hard during the entire election year. I moved the clause to the beginning of the sentence and ended up with "During Saturday's convention, Watauga County Republican Party chairwoman Pam Blume encouraged her fellow party members to work hard in the election year."

The basic lesson is to place the supporting or related clause as close the the subject as possible. An ancillary lesson, learned through years of mistakes and revisions, is simply to not write anything you have to revise later. Leave out the bad parts. Write good.
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Gayle Lynds, Queen of Espionage

We are pleased to have two contributions from author Gayle Lynds, whose advice has some weight--she's a professional journalist who turned her sights to fiction. Gayle has contributed two articles.

New York Times bestseller Lynds is the award-winning author of nine spy novels and has been called the "Queen of Espionage." Her newest, THE BOOK OF SPIES, is due in stores March 30 and is the beginning of her first series. Lee Child writes she’s “today’s finest espionage writer,” while BookPage claims: “Lynds has joined the deified ranks of spy thriller authors like Robert Ludlum and John le Carre” and the London Observer says simply she’s “a kick-ass thriller writer.”

I met Gayle through the Killer Thriller Band at the inaugural 2006 Thrillerfest, when she was helping organize the awards ceremony and musical presentation of The Killer Thriller Band, in which I was participating as bass player. (Alex Sokoloff, one of our singers, is also in Write Good or Die). Thanks, Gayle!

Douglas Clegg and Alexandra Sokoloff on board

I am very pleased to have two brilliant and generous folks joining the project. Douglas Clegg practically co-invented (with MJ Rose) the Buzz Your Book concept and will offer tips on querying and promoting. Alexandra Sokoloff is a screenwriter and novelist with a great insight on storytelling.

Clegg is the author of more than 20 books, including Isis and the Vampyricon series, and was an e-book pioneer with the release of several e-serial novels in the late 1990s, and is a personal inspiration to me.

Sokoloff's books include The Price, The Harrowing, and The Unseen, and she's also the author of Screenwriting Tricks for Authors (And Screenwriters!). I taught with Alex at Deborah Leblanc's Pen to Press (a great workshop, by the way) and I learned more from her in a week than in the previous 10 years on my own.

We're assembling the initial version now to release through Haunted Computer Books, and since it's organic, we'll update and revise as the 21st Century unfolds.