According To Hoyt

Since I’ve realized how much publishing has changed and decided I need to try something different, I’ve been realizing how much and how fast things are changing all around us and I’m no longer surprised at the economic turmoil the world is in – I’m only surprised it’s not worse.

We will steer away from the political implications of this and – for now. I’ll probably do a post on it for Classical Values later – because they feed into and are fed by this (of course) and concentrate on what is going on with various career and professions.

First let me share a nightmare I had when I was a teen, of driving down this road, and the car stops responding to the pedals and when I try twisting the wheel, it comes off in my hand and the car just speeds on, faster and more out of control until I wake up screaming.

Turned out it would be a an omen about my publishing career so far. Okay, joking, though there’s a grain of truth in it.

That nightmare has come back as an image that plays itself in my mind when I hear of another fast-change that people don’t seem to negotiate so well.

Change always happened. I mentioned the secretarial field, but that change was relatively slow. I was talking to a friend the other day who told me her father in law – in his nineties – and his cronies lament the disappearance of “a good secretary.” They do this because the tech of their lifetime has informed their view of the world. I don’t know how many of you ever used a typewriter particularly for a long and/or complex document, but doing so is boring, slow and near-mindless work. You train yourself to let your fingers take the flow of work – eyes, fingers. And if you’re not a robot – and few people are – you then go back with white out and cover up all mistakes and type over them. This made typing demanding, boring and low status.

These gentlemen retain the low-status idea, and therefore will not type their own documents, even if they could.

This type of idea slowed change at first. Not just in secretarial – I worked as one in the early nineties, and yes, taking dictation was part of my duties – but in all other fields, including writing, the first defense is “but we’ve always done it this way.” And “but it’s not prestigious.” Even now, I’m still facing enquiries from people I mentor and other beginners about how to get traditionally published because “it’s more prestigious.”

That’s how humans work. We’re apes, guys. We have our status markers and our distinctions, so everyone in the band knows how great we are and gives us status-preference.

So status-seeking and tradition slowed things up for secretarial transition, but they don’t seem to be holding as strongly in other fields. (In music and books this might be complicated by the fact that the industries were trying their hardest to commit suicide when technology did the equivalent of people at the foot of the bridge and started shouting “Jump, jump, jump.”)

But I’m starting to see the signs everywhere of the sort of slow domino pile-up we’ve seen in writing for five years (Kris Rusch says ten, and she might be right, but if I came in at the beginning, I only noticed it halfway through – which makes sense.)

For instance, I took the kid to register for his senior year in highschool, and had a strong feeling this too shall pass away – and soon – particularly for those who can afford it. (It will linger, I think, much longer, as a warehousing system.) This is fed of course, by my having home schooled the same kid 4 years ago and having found that I actually needed to do very little of the teaching. Even though we didn’t join the local home schooling league because the situation was temporary and designed to work with some issues he was having, I could avail myself of online classes, recorded lectures and a lot of other “help.”

After a while the kid started picking those and pulling rather than being pushed, till the hardest thing was to test him.

Well, as “advanced” as the field seemed to me when I wadded in, it was actually primitive compared to now, where there are a lot more schools, classes and even testing services. But, more than that, it is amazing how much of this is being integrated into regular public school and college. My kids will often do tests from home (on the weekend, which my husband finds an abomination against youth.) There will be units that are put online, rather than taught in school. And, of course, preliminary reading, at least to find sources, is always done on line.

I don’t need to mention travel agents, right? An acquaintance of mine was training ten years ago to be a travel agent, on the idea that it would provide for her the rest of her life…

Phone books. We still get them, every year. They get dropped on our front porch. I confess they retained some use for us even after we were looking up phone numbers on line – we used to take them in the car with us, so if we were out, we could quickly look up the address of a restaurant or store. Uh… now we have GPS (or as we call it around here, the recalculator.) How many people worked on or for phone books?

Stores… Well, book stores are hurting. I don’t know a lot about the others, but I wonder how much competition online shopping is providing. I know for a fact that Christmas season is nowhere near as crazy in terms of parking and local shopping, and hasn’t been since well before the economic crisis.

And I’m making a prediction right now – remember this is hard, particularly about the future, so there’s a good chance I’ll be wrong – that in two/three years those of us/you whose jobs lend themselves to it will be mostly working from home, with maybe a day or two at the office a week. It’s also possible – I’m seeing this in computers – most people will be “piece-jobbers.” I.e. that most people will be working as loosely attached short term contractors or free lancers for many different companies. What will make up a “full time” job will actually be a patchwork of single-short, by the job payments.

Of course there are businesses that don’t lend themselves to this. Long distance trucking, for instance – not unless tech really moves fast and comes up with an automated way to do this. And I suspect farmers will always have to have contact with dirt and animals. But most of our jobs will come to work like this, perhaps even manufacturing.

This has always happened. It will always happen. It’s just it’s coming REALLY fast, and it’s affecting people in all age ranges, from beginners to long-established. It’s a great leveller, in a way.

And it’s not that most people are losing their status symbols. Most people are losing their security: pensions, retirement, salary. And most people don’t like that.

If I had a dime for everytime I’ve heard this week “I don’t know how I’ll make money in the future” or “I don’t know how I’ll survive the next year” in the last week, I’d have close on two dollars, and only one of these people was side-related to publishing (journalism.)

If I’m hearing this other people are. And I’m not making light of those fears. I have some of them myself.

So, I’m going to share with you what I feel will be the right way to survive, no matter how tech is tossing your field (and mind you, this is a gut feel. I’ve found my gut is usually ahead of my brain. Probably relating to relative size.) Also, I’m practicing futurism without a crystal ball, so beware.

I’d recommend the following:

1 – try to get ahead of the change. Antecipate where it will move next, and try to be there before it hits. (I.e. anticipate that traditional publishing might become a legal/financial liability in the next year, and have some work that doesn’t depend on them, so all your books don’t vanish when a house or two collapse.) But keep a foot in the old ways of doing business, as long as viable, to ease the transition financially and to edge bets if you’re wrong.

2 – brainstorm. This works best in a group, of course, but try to figure out ways your business is going and what the way to make money will be near and long term. It helps to read blogs of people in your business, and to read between the lines.

3 – Diversify. If you think there’s a chance in heck that the field you trained in can still feed you, diversify within it. I don’t need to tell anyone I write in three different fields, (at least) and am not afraid to write in more, right? If you’re not sure, see if one of your hobbies will clean up as a part-time job alongside the first.

4 – Work harder than ever before. Well, you’ll have to, to start the new way of doing things while keeping a foot in the old. But this is also a good thing. Busy people rarely have the time to panic. And you’ll feel like you’re taking charge and controlling your fate to some extent.

5 – If you’re a student, think about how your training will translate to a future of telecommuting and contracting. Some can’t be and this might be a good thing at least short term. (More on that later.) For instance, the kid who wants to be a surgeon is probably somewhat safe.

6 – If you’re just starting out, try to come up with better ways of breaking in. So no one will give you a job because the industry you were aiming for is dying or convulsing. Think in terms of creating a job.

7- Think about moving. We can’t yet. Tied by my husband’s job. But if telecommuting becomes standard, you’re going to be competing across the world. Talk about the ultimate outsourcing. A lot of us are already doing that to an extent. BUT more importantly, you’re going to be competing across the nation. Dare I point out that prices in NYC are not the same as in Hays, Kansas. Yes, NYC offers other things too, in living close to “the center of everything” as a cousin of mine put it. BUT beyond that, and besides that, a lot of other cities, medium to small to all sizes in between that are not NYC don’t offer that kind of advantage. What they offer – offered – till relatively recently was being near possible jobs. As that changes, their real estate will suffer more than the real estate nearby, in cheaper locations.

I’m not saying you CAN move yet, but start considering it. Start considering your move. Start browsing realtor.com in your spare time.

I’m telling you right now there will be vast movements of people, and being ahead will mean you’ll lose less money, and perhaps even make some. I don’t know your requirements. And I’m not saying you should go to the countryside. Myself, I’m a city girl and view “telecommuting job. Must move to neighborhood where I can walk to everything” as heaven. And there are cities which got whacked enough with the price drop stick they might be very reasonable – depending on where you are and what your equity is. But… start thinking about it, so you’re ready to jump.

8 – Create a network of people in your field and related fields. As a writer, I’m starting to make contacts with artists, proof readers and such.

9 – if you’re thinking of doing a jump, and your future endeavor will be contractor (say, from employed editor to copyeditor/free lance editor) give your future company a name. Get a DBA. (Or incorporate.) Give it a web page. Some people will find you that way. It will also make it easier for people to link and recommend. (Hint, though, if you’re a free lancer working with writers, put some prices for basic services up on the page. I have this way of going “if it’s not there I can’t afford it.” And heaven knows I’m often wrong, but there it is. If I’m considering a job as “up in the air” I don’t want to enquire. You’ll email me forever. So just put prices up there. Better chance of getting work. For artists and such I’d put something like “rights to my stock” and “For commissioning prices start at x, contact for more details.”)

10 – Don’t panic. (Get a towel if needed.)

And feel free to share any advice/ideas you have, that I didn’t cover. This is by no means an exhaustive list.  I’m as scared as everyone else and trying to get hold of the situation.

No, I’m not about to announce I have burnout. On the contrary. I’m about to analyze why I don’t have it.

Burnout is the reason I don’t have anything coming out in 2011. But the burnout occurred in 08/09.

For those of you who are not acquainted with the inner mechanics of a writers life (at least as it was, even as it’s passing from this world) for me at least things worked like this: send out proposals. Hear about them over the next six months (year. Two.)

Proposals are normally an outline and the first three chapters. The problem with this for me is that once I hear the character in my head – once I’ve done the preliminary work to have him/her be that real to me – then getting the rest of the book written is just a matter of time.

But let’s take me in 03, when the Shakespeare series had tanked spectacularly and I didn’t have anything else sold. We were paying on two mortgages, I had kids in elementary and I needed to sell. (Yes, I could have found a job, but the only job I’m qualified to do – free lance translator – takes as much time establishing yourself as writing. Sometimes more. Then there’s secretarial, and technology hit THEIR job before it hit writing. When every executive keyboards, secretaries are few and not particularly well paid. In fact, they’re barely above retail, which was my other option. Both of those would require me to leave the kids with someone and neither job pays enough to cover that.)

Particularly because my name was burned, I couldn’t count on selling everything I sent out. There was no point just writing a new book and sending it out. Chances were very high it wouldn’t sell.

So in the space of six months, I wrote seventeen proposals. And it almost killed me. Because I’d just got INTERESTED in writing a book, when I had to drop it and write the next proposal. And the next. And the next. And all the while I was perfectly conscious that I might never sell any of these – that these characters might die being born; that it was quite possible no one would ever see my clever world building.

Then the books sold. They sold as series, and they sold in such a manner that I was “locked” doing four to six books a year. And of course, I still had to do the occasional outline. It was around this time – I think 07 – that an older friend in the field took me gently to task for writing too many books a year, which was seen as a sign I didn’t care enough about any. But I really didn’t have much choice. By 07 the field was crazy enough that if I didn’t stay on the treadmill, if I said “No” to any given contract, it could very easily be my last.

I’ve said before I can write six books a year. I can. It’s different though when I have to, and when I have to regardless of what else – illness, kids issues, etc – is going on in my life at the time. It’s also different when the book is not necessarily the book I’m burning to write, but simply the one that’s due next.

I could recognize the symptoms, including the frequent illnesses. When you don’t give yourself any way to escape the unbearable, your body gives them to you. What I didn’t know was what to do about it.

It got so bad while writing book five of the musketeer mysteries (at a time I suspected they were going to cancel the series anyway) that I had trouble keeping in mind where I’d left the characters two chapters back. I’d flip back to see what I’d done, and by the time I came back to the current page I didn’t remember it, again. Super betas had to step in to help with that edit.

Being able to recognize burnout, I bought a book called something like “overcoming burnout.” It identified three main causes to burnout. Any of them could induce that “smoky” feeling, but if you put the three together, it because a perfect storm.

They were:

Poor pay – this entire time, I was working weekends and holidays, trying to keep up with obligations, writing 4 to 6 books a year for… around thirty thousand dollars in the good years, twenty thousand in the bad ones. For those outside the US, twenty thousand is a “retail salary”, not beginner but not spectacular. How is that possible at four to six books a year? Well, to begin with the mysteries never paid more than 6.5k (And the last one paid less.) Also, books get paid in three “bits” – one for contract, one for delivery and one for publication. Contract is usually the biggest chunk, so the next two payments will not give you a great annual income. And of course you don’t sell new series every year.

Overwork – again, while I might choose to write four to six books a year, and while I CAN technically write a book in three days, there is a world of difference between writing it because I’m burning to do it, and writing it because its number is up. Particularly when the proposal was written years ago and the world has gone “dead.”

Lack of Control Over Career – once the books left my hands, that was it. I had no more control. My contribution was only one and perhaps in many ways the least important of the factors determining whether that book would sell and the series would go on. Arguably more important was the cover – over which I had no say – the “position” of the book in the “scale of push” the house determined to make. I really couldn’t tell them “you will push my book, so that there are at least three in every store.” And don’t tell me that’s related to the quality of what I turned in. It’s not. How much push/how much they’ll work on the cover/etc is determined when they give you the advance. I.e. on proposal, which as any writer knows is but a pallid image of the real book. (At least for me it is.) You could turn in spun gold, and no one would know. I know of at least one friend’s book whom no one in the house read (though the copyeditor did, of course) after turn in. I had to watch in mute horror as the third musketeer was given a cover that spine-out was indistinguishable from the first, and cover-out, because of the cover design, made you look really close to make sure, for instance. As a mystery reader I knew this would kill the series. There was nothing I could do.

So I realized I was headed for the perfect burnout, if I wasn’t there already. The problem is the solutions the book advocated “get another job” or “work for someone else” or… Were all impractical… or all required me to walk away from writing. And I couldn’t do that.

But all the same, I let my contracts taper out in 09, without sending any proposals out. I couldn’t bring myself to write coherent proposals. (I tried for Toni, who’d asked, but they didn’t make much sense. In fact, Darkship Renegades is as different from the proposal it sold under as any book I’ve ever written.)

And if the above is taken as a whine – it’s not. I was lucky to have a job and to keep writing. Most of my midlist friends weren’t so lucky. BUT the job I was lucky to have was grinding me to bits.

In 10 I wrote one book on spec and that because I wanted to. Weirdly that helped, even though that book has sold unspectacularly and heaven knows how it will do in marketing. And now I’m under contract again, and under contract for a lot of books. But it feels different.

First because I can take breaks between those to write indie short stories (and soon a novel) to put up. This means I can do something where I do have control over my career. Second, I can see next year from here, and next year will probably be half and half indie and not. Which means I get a lot more control back.

The burnout book was right. Changing one of the factors helps. Now, mind you, it’s entirely possible I can’t figure out how to make money in the new model. But I think I’ll figure it out. Yes, I could have done without this upheaval at this time in my life, otoh without the upheaval how long could I have kept it up?

So it’s all for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. And lest we feel like the lone ranger, secretaries got their field upended before we did. For most of them it has meant lower pay, but for some it’s meant much higher pay as they’ve learned new specialties: accounting programs; research; marketing. Secretaries should have been run out of jobs in the hundreds, but they weren’t. They stayed. They changed. They found a way to continue making a living out of things that if you squint still look “secretaryish” but are a lot more complicated – and possibly rewarding – than just sitting at a machine, clean-typing copy after copy of documents. (And when I said there were few openings above, I meant for someone like me, who doesn’t know specialized software or have another side-specialty.)

Am I rah rah about indie? About half and half. The other half is terrified that I’ll never find my footing in this new world. But others have gone ahead of me, and I intend to learn from them.

However, the commenter who told me on my blog that indie I’d have no excuses for any failure got it upside down. Will I fail? Oh, once or twice, at least (probably more) my books will be duds (and probably not the ones I expect.) BUT at least I’ll know I failed at my own hands. I can’t explain why but this feels much, much more bearable than watching a series be killed by a decision I didn’t make and to which no one seemed to pay much attention.

Beyond that, indie allows me to do stuff to keep some control of my other series. For instance, because of that lag above, Darkship Renegade will come out almost two and a half years after Darkship Thieves. In the old market place that was a killing lag. So I’m going to try to do a couple of novellas not with Athena, but in the same universe, and get them out there between now and the summer of twelve. That I can is an enormous innovation. (Before, I might have tried to, but the lag time in getting things published in magazines, even if accepted right away ranged from a year to two.)

The refinishing mysteries will be at least as late, and then I’ll have to figure out if I can continue the series on my own. But until then, and before the fans kill me, I will do a series of self published mysteries set in the same town, with the characters of Daring Finds as secondary characters.

And so, I’m no longer crispy on the outside. I might still be flakey on the inside. Am I sure this will all work out wonderfully? Well… no. But let’s put it this way – I couldn’t go on much longer the way I was. My health – physical and mental – wouldn’t allow it. So, I have one more chance. I intend to take it. I intend to grab it with both hands, and hang little bells to its feet.

Wish me luck.

　*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

It never ceases to amaze me how sure people are that they know what other people should do.

A certain class of people you expect this from, because they have a vested interest in thinking everyone else is an idiot and incapable of tying his own shoes or wiping the snot from her own nose. After all, the more incompetent the individual is, the more power to those who crave power and who constitute themselves authorities over others. It’s the nature of the beast.

But I wish it started and stopped there. It doesn’t. And the only reason I’m surprised by this is because I’m stupid. After all I grew up in a village (Yes, yes, like Miss Marple, right…) and therefore I should know that even when there’s no payoff in power and money and pensions for life, some people SIMPLY know how things are or should be done and believe they’re the natural police of how everyone should live.

So I shouldn’t even have been shocked when I stumbled upon the blog that was doing the usual lament about how the problem is that indie published books will be mostly cr*p and that the gems will get lost in the muck. Frankly, THAT part of it is a valid argument, something rational people can discuss. I think it’s wrong – miles and miles of wrongitude – but then I’ve been at the vanguard of the ebook thing starting with fanfic, and my perspective is slightly different.

THAT part of the blog is completely understandable.

The other part isn’t. That is the part where this writer – as far as I can tell a beginner – starts laying about against what she calls Nanos and, incidentally, Amanda Hocking who has sold (roughly) three metric boatloads of books give or take a ton.

You can think whatever you want of Amanda Hocking – or any other wildly successful author – G-d knows I do. I haven’t read her yet. I love Harry Potter against my own best judgement (well, I can see the mistakes in craft. BUT that’s not what counts, is it? What counts is does the story carry you?) I loved the three first Anita Blake’s (despite the fact characters changed hair color and height without notice throughout the book. Which, incidentally was a grievous copy editing error.) I haven’t been able to make it into Twilight, possibly because it reminds me of the sickish sexual fantasies I had as a teen and pre-teen (which probably is at the root of its success.) I think Dan Brown … No. Not going there.

Still, they are all mega bestsellers. I’m not. They did something right that I’m not doing right. I don’t care what I personally, as a reader, think of their books, the LAST thing I’d do is give any of these people advice on how to write. Or how fast.

And here we come up against it – how fast.

Of all the ways to judge a book, the LAST one I’d advise is how fast that book was written. In traditional publishing (and among bestsellers too) you find both people who take ten years to write a novel and people who write a novel in a week. And you can’t tell the difference from the product.

Look every writer who has a modicum of experience in the business has got over the idea that the way he writes is “the only true way.” Yeah, we were all there at one time. But all you do when you tell someone “first you start with the plot” or “a character is the only way to start” is stand on a soap box and scream at the top of your lungs: I’m a raw beginner.

To be honest, few writers do this. Instead we gather in little worried knots at parties and say “so, are you a plotter or a pantser” – trying to get confirmation that we’re doing it right, or one of the ways that is right.

But heaven help me, every writer – with a half dozen exceptions, yours truly, Kris Rusch and Dean Smith among those – THINKS they know the one true speed to write a book. More importantly, every writer knows that if you do it any other speed it will be terrible, terrible, I say. Cats and dogs living together. The end of the world.

And every writer – with the few and exceptional excepted of course – is wrong.

Not only isn’t there one-true-speed to bind them all, there isn’t even a right speed for any given writer. I’ve written novels over three years, and I’ve written a novel in three days. Incidentally, the one I wrote in three years is unpublished (and unpublishable) and the one I wrote in three days is my highest grossing work. BUT that’s probably just coincidence.

Some novels come to me fully formed and limited only by my speed in typing them in. As Agatha Christie apparently said, the novel is finished, it just needs to be put on paper. BUT some other novels come out drip and drip, a page at a time, each one hard fought for. Both of those extremes are unpleasant. The first means that my husband has to get forceful on the subjects of food and at least cat naps. The second means I clean the house, kick the cats, pick fights with friends, anything to distract from what feels like an extremely slow and painful birth.

The final quality has nothing to do with how fast I wrote it. Nor does it success or failure.

I confess there have been years of one book and years of six. That usually had more to do with my state of health and the press of contracts than with the books or their quality.

I’ll also confess I Nano. Or I try to. Since November for us involves two family birthdays, a major holiday and USUALLY a trip out of state, many years I don’t make it, but I always mean to.

I will also mention that the author of the blog post that prompted this seemed to think the philosophy of Nanowrimo involves not editing at all. Unless it’s changed out of recognition, it doesn’t. When I’ve done it, they tell you that you’ll have to edit. Also, 50k isn’t really the size of a commercial novel these days, so you usually have to write at least another 30k.

Of course I think people should edit, no matter how fast they write. Weirdly my 3 day novel took less editing than the others, but that too I’m fairly sure is just a coincidence. Each book I do takes at LEAST three passes (and no more than five, because otherwise I kitchen sink it – i.e. throw in everything but) – one for story (depending. Actually the slow books are the worst at this point, since my idea of the story changes while writing it, which means I might have a beginning, a middle and an end, all different books.) Then one for mechanics (foreshadowing, emotional shading, length of segments) and cursory language. At this point it goes to betas. When it comes back, unless the betas found MASSIVE structure issues (hasn’t happened yet, but G-d knows it could – knock on wood they don’t find these in DSR) I correct minor mechanics and do a serious language pass. Then, depending, it either goes to secondary betas (the unsullied ones, who get to see the thing in its finished glory) or it goes to publisher. (It’s a judgement call.)

The NORMAL time for all this is three months, which is why I don’t like doing more than four books a year. (This might change, when, say, the kids are out of the house and I have fewer distractions.)

This is the normal for me. Doesn’t mean it’s normal for anyone else. It certainly doesn’t mean it’s superior. I have a colleague who rushes at a book in two weeks, and finishes it in that time, and for the record he sells WAY better than I do. And I don’t need to bring up George RR Martin, do I? Because if I had to write a book in six years, it wouldn’t even be readable. I’d completely lose the plot. BUT clearly it works for him.

Of course, part of what makes that normal for me is that I’ve done it so often. I used to have a cleaning lady come in and in two hours she did what it took me a whole day (dust, vacuum, clean bathrooms, scrub kitchen, clean fridge) and did it WAY better than I did. OTOH some people are just naturally fast. My older son’s first book was written in something like three weeks when he was thirteen. It’s profoundly odd (everything he writes is) which might make it less commercial. BUT it’s a perfectly functional novel, with beginning middle and end and better than many a novel I’ve read. He’s now been fighting the second for five years. Does that mean it will be bad? Well, no. It’s just that the novel itself is coming out differently and also that he’s learning and that takes time and… who knows? It just means it’s different.

So… as a reader, judge other writers any way you want to, including “I don’t like his font.” As a writer too, for all I care. But don’t hang up your belief you’re better than “them” on how fast (or how slow) they write. DO NOT sling insults around based on how fast people write. And, oh, btw, do not try to spit on mega bestsellers. The spit always falls back on you. You can have your private opinions about them, but this is a small field. Perhaps your interest is in awards or literary recognition and not money. Fine and dandy. But these people are successful in the way they set out to be successful. Leave them alone. Who died and made you arbiter of taste, Petronius? (And it would help you to remember how Petronius the Arbiter died.)

I’ve had people who write much slower – or differently – than I help me along the way. Some significantly. I have friends up and down the field, at all levels. At this time and place, the goodwill of your colleagues is more important than ever.

You do your work and you leave them to do theirs. In any way they wish to. And however fast or slow they wish to do it.

You don’t have to like it. You just have to let them do it.

Stick with that and you’ll find it’s the beginning of wisdom.

A propos nothing, except the fact that today feels like a day for comfort food, since apparently while I was setting the yard in order and trying to clean my office, the market has been crumbling, here is…

You thought you couldn’t afford comfort food, but auntie Sarah’s comforting meatloaf dinner is (relatively) cheap and low in carbs (since that’s what my family is doing diet wise — it works for us.)

Get two pounds ground turkey (you often find it on sale and I stock up when it’s on sale at around 99 a pound) and two pounds ground beef.  Throw in the mixer if it’s equipped with a bread hook.  Toss in two cloves of garlic, mashed, salt and pepper to taste, dash of worcestershire sauce, italian spices if you feel whimsical and that last glass of wine that’s sitting at the bottom of the bottle from last night’s dinner.  Add two eggs.  Mix well.  Shape like meatloaf, toss in the oven for 15 minutes at 425, then lower to 325.  (Takes me about an hour to finish cooking, but we’re at high altitude, so your time may vary.  Juices will run clear when it’s pricked.)

Meanwhile grab some green beans which are usually pretty cheap, (about 99c a pound at our neighborhood grocery store) wash them and cut their ends off.  Spray an oven-going glass dish with non-stick.  Rub beans all over with olive oil and a little soupcon of garlic.  Dust with salt and pepper to taste, then dust with parmesan cheese (lightly) and pop in oven after oven has cooled to 325.  (If you put it in oven above 400 glass will pop.)

While that stuff is cooking, cut up a romain lettuce and coddle an egg (tell it it’s a good egg and keep it from disappointments.  No.  Just put it in boiling water for a minute!)  In a bowl mix thoroughly five tablespoons of olive oil, three table spoons of vinegar, a quarter teaspoon of mustard powder, a dash of worcestershire, clove of garlic, egg (sans shell) and one mashed anchovie.  Toss in about a quarter cup of parmesan cheese.  If you have a hand blender, hit the mixture for about a minute.  If not, do the best you can.  Put the cleaned, cut up romaine in a bowl, dust with parmesan and toss in a few caesar-flavored almonds (or croutons, if you’re not on low-carb.)  If you’re feeling fancy, rub the bowl with garlic before putting the lettuce in.

Voila (or if you prefer Shakespeare heroines, Viola!) I don’t know how expensive the meal is in your area, but in ours the whole thing rounds out to about $12 and feeds two adults and two teen males, with meatloaf leftover for lunch the next day.  Which, as my dad would say, is better than a kick in the fundament.

Good beta readers are more precious than rubies and their worth is above gold.

They’re also about as rare. And every writer needs them. And most writers don’t have them. And more writers than ever are going to need them as the publishing process opens up and as there are fewer editors to go around.

So, in no particular order, here are some facts about beta readers:

1- your beta readers are not a support network. Oh, they can be that, too. My beta group includes several people who are the ones to tell me it’s a bad idea when I start having loving thoughts of putting my head through a cultivator because it would hurt less than some of the phases of the so called career.

Yes, your mommy or your boyfriend or your cat can be beta readers for you. However, when they’re your beta readers, they need to take off the comfort hat, the hat that gives you cookies and tells you you’re the best writer in the universe (what, your hat doesn’t do that? Strange.) Instead, they need to put on their reading hat and be brutally honest about your book.

Of course, if your book is the best thing since Ogg the caveman carved his initials (he’d just invented the alphabet) on his cave wall, they should tell you that too (yep, happens to me all the time, why) which brings us to the next point.

2- your beta reader is not your torturer. Yes, sure, they can be that too. What you do in your private time is entirely your private business and please – please, please – don’t share. (Or for the love of heaven, if you do put it up on Amazon and see if someone pays you for it.)

Of course, if your book has issues your beta reader should tell you. Watch out though for the emotionally laden designed-to-hurt sentences, like “I hate this book” or “this is the worst thing ever written.” Or “How could you write something like this?” or “You revealed your moral turpitude in this book.” (Yes, I got that once, but not from a beta reader, just a writers’ group member. Shortly thereafter he stopped being a writers’ group member – I wasn’t the only one he slammed this way – I think he’s still unpublished.)

If you do get this type of critique, and if it is from someone who’s given good critique before, assume their cat just bit them, their boyfriend is sleeping with their lawyer and maybe they’re a little jealous. Ignore it. If this person has never given you good critique, then it might not be worth your time training them to become good beta readers.

3 – your beta reader is not your copyeditor. Again, yeah, sure, they can be that too. My beta readers include (now! Yes, I’m bragging) a professional editor (actually two, though one of them doesn’t get all the books because he doesn’t have that much time. I save him for specific ones.) So, of course, I shall be informed about my crimes of commission and omission about the English language.

But while the beta reader can mark things that really bothered him or threw him out, and can even – if it relieves his feelings – do a second pass and quickly mark typos, this shouldn’t be his main focus as he reads your book.

This is important because almost always the first time I ask a person to beta-read, that’s all I get. A long list of typos. It’s what most people have in their heads as “helping the writer” I think. But here’s the thing, unless I specifically tell you this is going indie, someone else is going to do that. Heck, even as indie, someone else is going to do that most of the time. Also if you’re betaing, you’re doing this before my last pass which is almost always a “language pass.” Phrasing will change.

More importantly, your job is far more important than typos. It’s to tell me “Why are they doing this on chapter three?” Or perhaps “Um… you know humans can’t jump that far, right?” Or “You haven’t mentioned this device before.”

Your job is other things too, which will be in the next point.

4) Your beta readers are your reality check. By which I don’t mean just the above “you know humans can’t….” I mean far more than that.

By the time this book is done, you’ve been living with it for months, sometimes years, or occasionally in my case all of Wednesday afternoon (ow, I’m joking, I’m joking, stop hurting me) and you are so into its bowels that you have no idea what the outside world looks like anymore, much less what your super duper novel will look like to the outside world.

Engineers eventually turn on their engine or put weight on their model bridge; fashion designers have someone put the clothes on; you send stuff to beta readers.

It’s important that the beta reader can give you a general impression “this is at least as good as your last” or “what were you thinking?” and also more specific things like “that thing he did with his tongue when they kissed? EW!” Or “why on earth did she get turned on by the smell of hydrogen peroxide? People don’t do THAT.” Or “Uh… why does your character go from crying to happy with no explanation?”

5 – Beta readers are not born, they’re trained. Of course, you have to be careful never to put them in the same aquarium because otherwise… Oh, wait. That’s fish. Beta readers, yeah (the writer is not even slightly punchy today. Not at all. Carry on.)

So how do you train a beta reader? By having them read, of course. And getting their opinions. And asking them questions.

The first time, it will take a lot of questions because if they’re like every other beta reader I’ve ever had, they will try to give you a list of typos and be convinced they did their job. It’s best to tell them up front “mark that in the manuscript.” The second level is for the beta to try to put his helpful little nose in things he’s not qualified to comment on. So you’ll get a secretary telling you that your physics are wrong or your aunt who’s never seen a gun in her life telling you “that Glock should have the safety on.” Treat them kindly in this phase. They really don’t know what else to do and ARE trying to help.

So, what kind of questions should you ask? I don’t know. Depends on what you, personally, need feedback on. Knowing that is almost an art in itself. I always start with “Is this a book or a cabbage?” Because it’s important to be told “well, it’s words and all, but it just sort of meanders. Were you going somewhere? Or is this just a way to dirty pages?” (I’ve never yet been told that, but I don’t put it past me to manage to write a cabbage or a fish one of these days. It could happen. I’ve been told that with short stories.) Then I usually take care to let the experts who helped me research read the book. You see, I have trouble holding some info in my head, and curious things happen to science when plot hits it. So it’s good to have a note that says “Sarah, dear, gravitational forces don’t work like that. Try this!” (These are the advanced betas, the ones who are also writers and can suggest plot to wrap around the science.)

And then, because I have issues putting the emotion on the page – I do, I always feel like it’s TMI – I ask things like “Does X make sense? Do you understand where Y is coming from? How do you feel about Z?”

And, for people who have betaed for me a long time, things like “Is the emotional denouement too slow?” “Do you think the book is depressing” etc.

The point is that I can’t train your betas. In fact, inheriting betas from another pro can sometimes be disconcerting. You’ll get a bunch of notes on things that you’re not even vaguely unsure about and the apologetic “well, he always asks me about this.”

Betaing is like marriage – only in this case polygamy good! – you accustom yourself to a reader, the reader accustoms him/herself to you.

There is a noted side effect though. After a couple of years, even betas who had never done fiction seem to come to you and go “I have this story…” And then it might be time for you to train as a beta reader.

For those of you wondering why I’ve been so silent, no, I’m not dead.  Darkship Renegades is now in the hands (well, the electrons) of beta readers.  Shortly, they should let me know if it’s a novel or a fish.  It was a long job of proofing, because I seem to have been exceptionally typo-ey while writing.

And now I’m going to see if there’s still a floor underneath all the cat hair.

If you need something to amuse you, check out older son’s Ninja Nun Comics.  (No, this is not my fault!)

A lot of the comments (and some of my posts) relating to the changes in publishing here have been a sort of astonished shock at how slow publishers are at “getting” it. I don’t know if it was here in comments that someone mentioned the tactics designed to “herd the consumer back into hard covers,” starting with delay in publishing ebook, moving on to some really badly formated ebooks, passing through the fact that they’re priced at hard cover price.  These moves actually only seem to hurt both hard cover and ebook sales.

The image in my mind is of Lord Cornwallis surrendering to George Washington, and the song, weaving through the air “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Yes I know, there’s a good chance that never happened. But these folklore moments persist because they capture something profound and revelatory. And at the time, if not now, it would be understood that to Cornwallis this was far more than a simple military defeat. It was the upending of what he had always known about the world and his place in it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Men are social creatures, but the specific kind of social creatures we are is hierarchical creatures.

Those people who posit – or have faith in! – an equalitarian human past, before civilization corrupted us have never read about the social organization of chimps or baboons; or they’ve been mainlining Jean Jacques Rosseau without knowing it; or they cling atavistically to the idea of Eden even though most of them are not religious.

Humans, like all apes were designed to live in a band where social organization had very fine grades. As such, we have finely tuned hierarchicy-sensing devices and certain set ways of responding to certain types of social organization.

What started the idea for this post going was the Passive Voice’s article entitled Your Agent Is Not Your Mommy. He’s talking about how many authors post about “my agent right or wrong.” (He’d probably be really shocked about how some authors talk about their publisher/editor.)

His reaction is this:

To PG, these kinds of reactions seem weird and a little icky, but mostly adolescent, maybe even babyish.

They’re sound like a shy sophomore who has a giant crush on the high school quarterback and slips anonymous love notes into his locker. Bobby can do no wrong because he’s just so cute and wonderful and she knows he likes her because he said hi one time in the hall between classes.

Or (rolling away from sexism), they’re like Napoleon Dynamite after someone agreed to go to the dance with him.

This is a business relationship, not a girls and boys club. The class of trust that speaks to PG in quotes like these is a mommy trust or a clingy best friend trust, a deeply codependent and needy trust. If the agent terminates representation, it will feel like a breakup instead of like switching to a new doctor.

Here I must make a full confession. I never felt this way about Lucienne, because she was my fourth agent. Until we’d worked together for about five years I didn’t believe it was even semi-permanent as an arrangement. And besides, until we worked together about two years I didn’t unbend even to the level that most people do in business relationships (you know, the occasional joke, etc.)

BUT when I sold my first book, and learned the editor has heart trouble, I remember feeling incredibly afraid she would die. Because – see – after thirteen years trying to break in, I had this foot in the door, and if it accidentally closed, I might never be published again.

Was I icky to my editor? I was never particularly demonstrative one way or another in public with any of them, but I know I spent many years in a state of cold fury at one of my editors without daring to be anything other than very cordial in person. (This, btw, is not good for the soul.)

I think I was icky to my agent before Lucienne, agent #3 – perhaps not in public, but in my head. Look, she never sold anything for me. Regardless of the fact I sent her little – she should have asked for proposals, when I was in a strange mood where I thought I should write a book out – what I sent her rarely made it out of her office and what did got rejected so fast it probably caught fire on re-entry. It doesn’t in any way justify the fact that I had a near breakdown when she dropped me. But again, I thought I would be locked out of publishing forever.

And it wasn’t only authors who were icky. The editor who gave me ulcers referred to agent #3 – a very junior, starting out agent – as “the incomparable X.”

I’d been listening to a Heinlein short story when walking before I read that Passive Voice post. And the story I’d been listening to (talking about slavery) said something like “when an economic system is like this, then slavery is inevitable.”

Perhaps that was why I cast about for political/economic equivalents to all the fawning you used to see towards agents and editors. And found them. The one that came immediately to mind was North Korea, where Dear Leader is always referred to as Dear Leader, even though his people are starving, and is acclaimed as a poet, a fashion icon, a dietician, a…. You get my point.

I’m not suggesting any editors or agents are the equivalent of Kim Jong Il, of course, (Oh, please, when is the last time your agent or editor could slam you in jail! I’m not that stupid.)

What I’m suggesting is that publishing as it existed had certain similarities to a totalitarian regime. We knew, or learned very quickly, that if you made the wrong move, you could be shut out of publishing forever no matter how talented. More importantly, we knew that how well we did in the marketplace had less to do with what we put between the covers of the book than how the book was packaged, marketed and pushed, all things over which the writer had no control whatsoever and all things over which their editor (and after the change in model to have the agent be the only way to access the editor, the agent – which makes me wonder for those who are older in the field than I am, if the way agents were treated changed) had power. It became a matter of “upset the agent and your book might never sell to an editorial house or might sell for a low advance and as ‘disposable’ which is, of course, how the editor will regard it too.” Or “upset the editor, and your book will print a thousand copies and be instantly remaindered.” Even worse “Don’t make yourself special to the agent/editor and your book will languish uncared for.”

So… is it any surprise that editors and agents alike got the “dear leader” and the “brilliant aesthetician” “masterful business person” treatment? Hell, most writers I know didn’t say anything else, even to themselves in the quiet of their own heads because they didn’t want to admit to any discrepancy.

This is called Preference Falsification and it explains why once a revolution tips over into “likely to succeed” things change so fast and people will seem to become turncoats wholesale. Because most of them had been lying in public and private and often in their own heads about what they would prefer.

I’d say the epublishing revolution has JUST entered that phase. Even a year ago, I sat on a panel next to a writer heartily defending his poor publisher, who couldn’t survive on $5 an ebook, because it cost far more than that to produce and who would be, against their will, forced to fire him if his hardcover sales didn’t pick up, even though he was selling a lot of ebooks. He was begging people not to buy ebooks. He was full of empathy and defenses of his publisher, and at the time, since I already knew a) how much it costs to produce an ebook b) that more than likely his publisher was making a lot of money off his e-sales, this nauseated me a little and like the Passive Guy I thought “is this Stockholm syndrome? Why?”

Well, because we’re hierarchical by nature and when the hierarchy is not based in meritocracy but on fawning and submission to the leader, regardless of what the leader does, this system results.

So why would the publishing hierarchy react rationally to what’s happening? For years they’ve been making huge errors and were still called brilliant and wonderful. For years, they cut themselves off from the feedback of the market but had authors (and at conventions “fans” who were wanna be authors) tell them how exquisitely correct they were in holding back or pushing the books they did. And now suddenly people are telling them they were wrong? They made mistakes? Suddenly, the levers of power and money they used don’t work? HOW can that be possible?

They’re frozen in error, behind the wheel which just came off in their hands, with the brake pedal and gas dead and the gear shift not responding. Of course they are reacting badly and making bad decisions. People in shock often do.

Meanwhile writers are jumping out the windows (and some from the trunk) to save themselves and not a few are finding more efficient conveyance.

Just like the sick fawning should have told us there was something wrong with the system, the bizarre, lurching decisions of the hierarchy of publishing should tell us they’re in shock and not reacting rationally.

“If ponies rode men and grass ate the cows” “If writers fired their editors and published themselves”

Just What Tune was in the Air when
The World Turned Upside Down?

The title of this post is based on my friend Dave Freer’s* The Elephant of Surprise, a brilliant parable on finding bestsellers that compares it to shooting elephants through a keyhole of an apartment in NYC.

The part of the text relating to this post is this:

And he gives the grayness a 50 mm slug through the door and rushes out to start butchering his new fortune. Because it was gray, it was probably a pachyderm, right?

And once in every 1 000 000 times it might even be. The rest of the time he’s obliged to hastily butcher the mailman in a once gray shirt with a final demand letter, and sell him as finest wild boar. Or he’s shot a mouse on stilts peering in the keyhole. Or merely shot a gray day.

Dave is of course going on about how hard it is for any editor/agent to guess what will be the next bestseller – particularly since bestsellers have to sell to people in areas of the country these people rarely set foot in. It was hard even when they could control how much shelf space a book got, how many copies of it were sent out, how much push distributors were told to put on it, what cover it got, and to a large extent what press it got. In the days of Amazon it is much harder. But most publishing houses work still on the presumption that they’re always right, or if they’re not it is because that mailman was deliberately impersonating an elephant and therefore they can’t be blamed.

You’d think that when a book comes out and fails to earn its advance or fails to do as well as the house claims to have hoped, the editor would be first in line for firing. After all, they’re the ones who are paid to anticipate public taste. They’re the ones who bought the book, the ones who picked the cover, the ones who decided (okay, in conjunction with the sales force, but most editors these days are also “Director of marketing”) how much distribution and publicity it should get.

It’s never that way. When a book tanks spectacularly, it’s always the writer who is at fault. Even though (like my very first book) the volume might never have made it to the shelves. Even though the cover might have given no clue what type of book it was. Even though people who were actively looking for the book couldn’t find it in the narrow window of a month or so it was available, and stores were reluctant to order or reorder after that – it’s always the writer’s fault. It’s always held that there was something about the combination of words, the way the writer uses language, the characters? Perhaps the way the writer named the characters? Which the poor publisher couldn’t have anticipated and which caused the book to tank. “He was impersonating an elephant, yer honor. Why else would he wear a grey shirt? How was I to know?”

Of course, publishing and marketing a book, in the expectation of its selling really well is always, always a risky business. The system is after all chaotic. In the two years it took for books to wind their way through the publishing grinder, the public appetite for vampires might wane. (It has been predicted for 20 years. Haven’t seen it diminish yet, myself.) Or your competitor might bring out a book that’s almost exactly the same. Or your main distribution channel for this book might collapse. Blaming the writer saves the publishing house having to rotate editors so fast that they barely warm their chair. This, of course, is because beancou… er… Business majors demand a bestseller every time. Which is like demanding that you win the lottery every week and win only the main prize.

However, like most such convenient things, possibly EXACTLY because it’s irrational, it’s become unquestionable. This is why, for instance, agents refuse to submit your work to an editor under a “completely closed” pen name. The “closed” pen name will be closed to everyone else BUT NOT the editor. The editor has to know, you see. Because, you might be a mailman impersonating an elephant, and the editor has to know before he shoots you. Aka, before he gives you a bestseller’s advance, when you’re a lowly midlister.

This insistence tells you that “A writer will always sell x books regardless of what genre he/she writes in, and what type of support the property gets.”

Mind you, if you look at recent years – say 10 to 15 – you’d think so. But that’s because publishers could to an extent control distribution. But look further than that, and you realize this idea is completely insane – as it should be, at first sight, because if you think people would always the same, in all genres, visualize Agatha Christie writing quest fantasy or Stephen King writing Regency Romance. Yet, if either had for some reason (and the labyrinth of submitting often pushed people in very unnatural reactions) started in those fields and tanked, in the “now passing from this world” system it would be assumed they were no-hopers at Mystery and thrillers as well. For real life examples, meditate on the career of Stephen Donaldson. Or look at how well known Agatha Christie’s romances are now, even though her mysteries continue to sell. Or take one of my favorite authors, Georgette Heyer. I have re-read to shreds every one of her regencies since Dave Freer forced me to read her seven years ago (I thought she had romance cooties – smiles sheepishly.) Her historicals I could take or leave. And, sorry, but you can’t pay me enough to get through one of her mysteries. I’ve started two and abandoned them unread.

Not only should it be obvious that the book is the book is the book, but that just because a given author has had a string of duds (particularly when the market is rigged to order to the net, meaning your first failure or success sets up the rest of your career) it doesn’t mean his next book won’t be a brilliant success. And if you can’t evaluate the book without looking at the author’s sales figures, then there’s something seriously wrong with your evaluation methods.

There is no logical reason the publisher needs to know who the author of the book “really” is. The illogical one, other than sales figures, is that publishers sometimes think they’re Hollywood. One manifestation of this was “we want beautiful people” or “we want people with an interesting life story.” Both of these are insane because 90% of authors get no promotion or tours, so what they look like or their life story doesn’t matter.

However, I knew it was widespread when, after the collapse of my Shakespeare series, my editor tried to get me to write an autobiography because I had an interesting life story. Which is true, in a way, except all the interesting parts belong to other people and between libel laws and relatives I’d prefer don’t disown me, (not to mention the ones who are armed to the teeth), or who don’t deserve the notoriety, I can’t really tell much of it. Besides, the idea that my life story would make me famous and therefore sell my fiction seemed utterly backwards to me.

Writers are not actors and publishing caters to quite a different frame of mind than Hollywood’s star factories (which from what I can see aren’t doing so well themselves, these days.) I will confess I find Terry Pratchett mad sexy, but I find him so because of his mind. I’m fairly sure if I’d met him on the street without knowing who he was, I’d never even have noticed him. And while his lifestory is interesting now, because of the early onset Alzheimers, I and all his fans very much wish it weren’t QUITE so riveting and tragic.

We are people who tend to be far more interesting when making up stuff. It’s our job. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a book from the heyday of pulp, and then turned to the back and looked in astonishment at the picture of the coke-bottle-glass wearing nerd who’d written this riveting tale.

So, there are NO logical reasons why pen names should be open to publishers, except… Well… so the result can be fixed and justify their prejudices.

I’ve been a mail carrier in a grey shirt for years and been forced to shout ahead so they know who I am. But perhaps, just perhaps, given half a chance, I could be a were-elephant.

* If you aren’t reading Dave’s adventures settling into his adopted new home in Flinders Island, Australia, give yourself a treat.  Dave is unfailingly interesting.  Follow The Flinders Family Freer Blog.  You won’t be sorry.

Sorry to be so late posting today, but it’s been another of those “being nibbled by ducks” day, and the post I have in mind requires some thought so as not to appear to be maligning people I’m not in fact maligning. (And in case it isn’t obvious, this post will be about the business model that’s now crumbling, not any of my agents past or present, living … wait, they’re all living as far as I know, so that’s enough.)

In the way these things do, an unrelated comment and a post over the last week have worked themselves into a post in my head. The comment was by Jeff Dwyer, who I understand has for some years been an agent, working mostly in children’s picture books, and who is now to some extent mothballing that part of his business, according to a separate comment.

He said, in part:

One of the benefits of aging is hindsight and one would hope an acquired perspective. As I read this post, I remembered when the slush pile went away and the submissions began to flood into our agency mail box. We’d had dinner one night with a publisher who had just announced that she wasn’t accepting unagented submissions. I complained that she was forcing us to become her non-compensated first readers, and she smiled and said, “Yep. We’re no longer paying first year Radcliffe grads $25K plus benefits to read thousands of submissions that we won’t acquire.” Soon, it was apparent that we’d become gatekeepers for the editors whom aspiring authors wanted to reach. It placed the agent in a position of need in the publishing food chain, and agency world grew. Outsourced legacy publishing editors had a second act when they received the pink slip. They could take their Rolodex with them and sell work to their old friends. With the evolution of indie publishing, the role of the agent will continue to diminish in importance as will the role of legacy publishers.….

I think I came into the business – in the sense that I started to submit and trying to break in – shortly after this. To me, this was “business as it’s done” but may I say that from the very beginning it seemed to me that there was something wrong with this idea. Of course I can perfectly see how, from a publisher’s point of view this made perfect sense. Outsource costs.

Perhaps part of the reason it made me nervous is that while I was a raw beginner in publishing, I had vast experience from the fast-moving, crumbling/building work of computer programming, if at a remove and second hand. It seemed that every time a computer company got in trouble, it fired its entire R & D department and decided it would just be fine and dandy to buy new startups with fresh ideas. The results of this were always the same for all the companies my husband worked for. In fact, this was such a reliable precursor of collapse that my husband would start looking for work the minute they made this move.

When publishing as a business made this move it was different, of course. It was different in the sense that they were the only providers of a form of entertainment that most of us were – let’s face it – hopelessly addicted to. On the other hand, the whole idea put my hackles up.

For a long time, I thought that this was only in the personal sense. When I started trying to be serious about writing and submitting, I was a newly wed. More, I was a newly wed whose qualifications for earning money were completely useless in my adopted homeland. I could not teach – my teaching certificate wasn’t valid. And as for translation, I didn’t even know where to look for work. (Lest we forget this was year 10 bi (before internet) or so.

How broke were we? Well… let me see, printing paper was a major expense, and I routinely typed/printed both sides of a page, numbering them differently, for the drafts to go over. Stamps even for sending out short stories, were a major expense. And yet, it soon became obvious my novels were coming back unread.

The more up to date books on how to break into the business, informed me with a heartbreaking breeziness that of course no one ever got anywhere by just sending stuff over the transom these days, and that the way to break in was to go to a few conventions or workshops, make personal contact with editors/agents, and then from there springboard into publication.

Look, we didn’t even know WHAT conventions were. My husband didn’t grow up in fandom of any sort – he’s a mathematician! – and his parents weren’t involved in writing. Oh, the information was out there, and I gathered it over a few years (before internet, remember?) but then I came up against the hard fact that I either didn’t have the money or I didn’t have the time. Because in those few years I found a job as a multilingual scientific translator BUT then I had (I think) a week of vacation time a year. I had trouble getting time off to attend a friend’s wedding in another state, and the cons attended by editors/agents (usually the bigger ones) took about five days. The workshops took longer, particularly Clarion.

The thing is if you’re going “these obstacles aren’t insurmountable” – of course they weren’t. And eventually a very kind editor who shall remain nameless as I do not wish to embarrass him, to whom I’d been submitting my short stories for a few years wrote to me half in exasperation to say if I wanted to attend Clarion he’d (I don’t remember what he said exactly) help me get in and give me a “scholarship” to pay for it, because how close I was and yet how far away was driving him insane. At the time I was in the beginning of a very complicated pregnancy that eventually resulted in Robert Anson Hoyt, but that was not (I know. The kid looks like my husband) the editor’s fault. So the obstacles were not insurmountable. Not if you were gonzo enough to keep trying to get in despite everything in your way.  (How many people are that crazy-persistent is a matter for another blog.  How many promising writers lacked the insane persistence and had only normal levels is something I can’t even hazard to guess.)

But eventually the system came to annoy me as a reader and not as a writer. Because after five or so years of this, it became obvious to me – I don’t know if to anyone else – as a reader that the perspective and breadth of books was narrowing. I’m not talking politically or even socially. I’m talking about a certain… pov, a feel. All the books – even the ones that purported to be about a quite different sort of person – had that breezy, easy feel of people who thought that “just go to a workshop or a convention” was perfectly reasonable advice.  Or they dwelt lovingly upon poverty-porn — the idea that some great benefit attaches to being dirt poor.  They all (save for a few highly publicized cases) betrayed the perspective of people to whom a couple thousand dollars and/or two weeks off meant nothing. People who by and large were in two narrow ten-year age bands either side of me (the older ones already had agents and access and the younger ones had time for all the conventions and workshops) had all attended the same colleges, gone to the same shows, spoke in the same slang.

Now it might have been more obvious to me because I didn’t grow up in the US, but these books could be incredibly opaque to someone who didn’t know the right labels, hadn’t watched the “right” tv shows and wasn’t listening to the same music. A lot of the characterization seemed to depend on these touchstones, and while I could infer them from the context – of course I could. I was used to reading stories about cultures I didn’t live in or know first hand – it detracted from my “reading for pleasure” feeling.

Was I alone? I don’t think so. I might have felt it earlier. However, I know at one time – say the seventies – a 70 thousand unit laydown was the kiss of death for a book. Nowadays it will put you on the bestseller list and cement your reputation forever.  The number of people buying and reading new books has decreased that much.  (Yes, I know there are many other factors.)

But the only problem of the system wasn’t access. Access is where it began. I can’t blame the agents for not wanting to sift through piles and piles of raw slush and therefore giving preferential treatment to people they saw face to face or people who had already sold and needed the agent only to close the deal. Agents are after all human.

The problem was deeper than that. And I realized it when reading my friend Dave Freer’s parable on this called The Elephant of Surprise. It is nakedly a parable on finding bestsellers, and it covers the same ground I covered here, but in far more disguised and insanely witty manner.

At the beginning (though not in as straightforward a manner as it sounds) he states of editors:

He knows what people want to read, and so he’s a key employee, in case any accountant is thinking of making anyone redundant.

This was, in fact, the claim of editors “we know what people want to read.” (We won’t touch on the ancillary “or should want to read.” That’s a perversion best left to the interpretation of psycho historians.) THAT is an editor’s job.

Presumably when slush was filtered through houses, the slush readers were imbued with the feel of the house, if for no other reason that their job was finding what a particular editor wanted to read. After a year or so, I suspect a slush reader would get very good at it or be fired. This means the editor had a good chance of what landed on his desk being relatively “highly tailored.” Or else it was just everything that was “readable and caught my attention.” From then on, the editor could apply his highly specialized filter. This meant “I have a hunch about this property” was as personal as it could be.

When the selection went to agents, agents of necessity filtered by the properties that would bring a “bidding war”. I.e. the ones that were more “universal” in nature.  Gone would be the quirky selections that went something like this “I know this is fantasy and Mike likes science fiction, but this novel feels SF, so I’m going to pass it on to his desk. If he isn’t in the mood, he’ll see “fantasy” on the cover letter and put it aside.” It was a much bigger deal for agents to pass on a book an editor wouldn’t be interested in, particularly one that caused the editor to go “What was so and so thinking?” because that could mean less attention to their next submission and eventually could mean the agent’s career. This meant that of course the books passed on would be “safe bets.”

Look, I hate getting presents from people who don’t know me very well. And by very well I mean live with me. Why? Because inevitably they are the sort of generic gift that embarrasses me, like a jar of expensive sauce because they know I like to cook… But isn’t a sauce I’d ever use in anything and/or contains something I or my family are allergic to. (There are exceptions to this, of course. Some people have a gift for giving. However, the vast majority don’t.) Or someone will know I crochet (neurotically – why?) And will give me yarn, while I only do filet crochet. It’s been found I’m not alone. Studies have revealed that gifts are usually something like 80% inefficient in being something the receiver actually likes and can use, much less something they’d choose for themselves.

I suspect books to publish are even more difficult to get “right” than gifts, particularly when “gifting” a wide set of people.  Going through the agents applied that sort of filter – twice.

Yes, I’ve heard all the excuses. “It’s the internet. It killed books.” “It’s TV, it killed boks.” “It’s games, it killed books.” To which I have to say, “It’s bwshwa. Humpty Dumpty didn’t fall – he jumped.” Harry Potter – which got through the filter by being immensely successful in England FIRST should have proven that. Instead, it seems to have given editors and agents the misguided idea “we shall buy YA only.”

As Dave put it, it’s mighty difficult to shoot an elephant through the keyhole of an apartment in NYC. And when the problem is always the elephant’s: “The mailman was impersonating an elephant, yer honor. I’m harmless.” then you never have to face this fact.

The publishing industry thought it could isolate itself from the market and survive. (There are other facets to this isolation, and I’ll take on Impersonating an Elephant tomorrow. But the two layers of semi-clueless semi-informed different-purpose filtering made for a pretty big problem.)

It is grim but true that the market always wins. It’s not a matter of how things should be, but how things are. Economics are no more a philosophy than mineralogy is a philosophy. Either there’s gold in them there hills or there ain’t. Nothing you can think/dream/say will change reality.

As the publishing industry is finding out. Hopefully fast enough to save itself.

Why do people write? Is it natural talent making the path easy for them? Is it that some people have so much to say? Or is it a compulsion, akin to a need to wash one’s hands early and often?

I don’t know. I doubt natural talent. I’ve known too many naturally talented geniuses who never seemed to understand that they should study the craft or even apply some rational thought to their work.

I also doubt people who write to send a message. Oh, certainly, writing like raising children are ways to pass on a certain way to look at the world. In fact, it’s almost impossible to do either without transmitting to others certain ideas about how the world is organized or works. Mind you, both are an uncertain deal. Both are as likely to make people determined to oppose you as to make them believe as you do.

Compulsion probably comes closest. I’ve never met a writer who didn’t feel a strong need to write.

But by itself compulsion is not enough. Compulsion can be satisfied by writing snippets and bits and “fun parts.” A writer can easily spend her life hiding away to write and produce nothing of more interest than the “fun parts” of books. Since the rest of the book remains in her head, this amounts to a “cut scenes” reel, without the story to lean on. Watch those for any movie, and tell me what you’d have got without the movie.

Look, I’m going to level with you. Writing, real writing, the sort that produces a full novel, particularly the sort that produces a novel that someone – editor or a significant number of readers – will pay for is hard. REALLY hard.

Is it as hard as ditch digging in the hot sun? I don’t know. They’re completely different skills. Speaking as someone who has always enjoyed heavy, sweaty work outside, there are days that ditch digging appeals infinitely to me. When that need gets too strong I go play with power tools or dig up my long-suffering garden.

It’s tough working with your hands, under the sun, and it leaves you sweaty, hot and achy. But it doesn’t leave you worrying about how plausible this character you made out of whole cloth is, or whether readers will run screaming from your fight scene or… It doesn’t make you worry obsessively about things that exist only inside your head, which, frankly isn’t a safe endeavor.

Worse, writing to sell involves constantly playing chess against yourself, being both players in a single move. Or more plainly, it makes you second guess how total strangers will view your work. You might have lived months or years with these people, this civilization, this murder mystery, in your head; you might know everyone in your made up small town AND their little dog too, but you have to present them in such a way that a stranger will understand the story and get introduced to these people naturally. It’s not as easy as it seems.

When I was young my mom designed clothes. Then she retired and designed clothes only for me. Since she retired when I was about twelve, I remember that second phase better. Mom would sometimes dream up, draw and start building something, and forget some major detail where the work intersected with real life. For instance, in the late seventies, she was trying this body-suit on me, and pinning it in place and a problem occurred to me. Took me a while to ask her about it because, well, she was the professional. Surely she knew what she was doing. And then I said, “Mom… uh? How do I get out of this?” I’ll never forget her stricken look.

Yes, that’s right. After weeks of drawing the suit, planning the construction, etc. She had forgotten it needed to somehow open and close so I could get in and out of it.

If you have that sort of major design fail with your novel – which trust me, I’ve seen very often and committed once or twice – it’s usually not that obvious. People don’t read into the novel far enough to tell you, “You idiot, your character doesn’t want anything. He just whines and has stuff happen to him.” They just read the first chapter or the first page and go “blah. This didn’t engage me.”

In fact, depending on how much talent you have, people might not know what’s wrong. Or if they know what’s wrong and tell you, you might be incapable of hearing it. If I had a dime for every time I’ve had a conversation with a newby that goes something like this, “It’s not a bad concept but you don’t have a plot. Your character is feasted, adored, loved and patted on the back.” “Oh, but you missed how he had a horrible childhood. I mentioned it in three paragraphs on page three.” “Okay, but compensation for a horrible childhood might be good therapy. It’s not good plot.” “Oh. Well, I’ll have an anvil fall on him on page ten. That will fix it.” “No, you don’t have a plot.” “Maybe he’ll go mad and kill his cousin on page 348 and then spend the rest of the book lamenting it.” “Er… what?”

Without going into other major pitfalls of learning how to do the thing – which would become a manual on how to do the thing – let’s establish that writing novels is hard. It is not as depicted in books, movies and the occasional TV series all about “gathering the material” which involves fun adventures and looking cool. Writing involves a lot of time alone with yourself. It involves a lot of time cursing the keyboard and stalking the house muttering that “Why couldn’t they just fix the spaceship? And what’s with the three legged horse?” while your family members jump out of the way. (Or if they are my family members – two of which, my husband Dan and older son Robert are writers, and the third of which is a writer-in-denial right now committing poetry [and he’s not even apologetic!] – trying to stop you and going “Okay. Tell me why they can’t just fix the spaceship. And what the heck is with a horse in the spaceship? You know that’s been done, right?”)

Worse than that, writing for a living involves navigating a world which until very recently was so loony (and probably will seem even loonier, even if it gets more rational) that I could never get any of my non-writer friends to understand that there was a difference between agents and editors. Heck, the writer in denial in the house confuses them too. (No, I’m not going to insert snark here, mostly because it was a fight I didn’t want to get involved in to begin with.) I tried to explain to my friends about a dozen times, “No, see, the agents work for me. I work for editors.” They would scratch their heads and go “But either can reject you, or say a project can’t go forward. How come?” until I said, “oh, never mind. So, how is that promotion thing at work coming?”

Writing for a living means that: when you’re not actually typing, people think you’re taking time off; most people don’t consider what you do real work; people feel free to project upon you whatever they think writers are “so, you write about women having sex with vampires?” is something I often hear (I can honestly say I’ve yet to write one of those.)

Writing for a living means people assume you’re rich “but why can’t you pay for an $800 a month office? I googled you and you have seventeen books out. J. K. Rowling only has seven and I saw this program…”; people assume you have more control over your career than you did till now “why did you put this cover on your book? It’s ugly.” People want to share their bounty with you “I have this idea for a book” and everyone knows how to write better than you do, “Now, when I write my vampire book, when I retire, there will be lots of hot sweaty sex between chicks and vampires. That will sell. Maybe you’re not J. K. Rowling because you don’t have enough sex between hot chicks and vampires.”

So for most of us it’s an intensive learning curve, hard work, low pay, low prestige occupation. Oh, and it makes the neighbors think you’re weird and possibly a sex fiend.

I have no idea why other people writes. I’m not even sure about why I write, but here it is:

As difficult as it, I write because it is a continuous challenge. I’ve taught and I’ve been a multilingual scientific translator, both demanding jobs. But compared to writing they’re a piece of cake, and they become routine. In writing I invent the job everyday. It’s sort of like building the road and being the first to drive on it. It never gets stale.

As low prestige as it is, I write because I can compete with myself. I never understood status symbols and money beyond enough to be secure tends to leave me cold.

As little as I care for “honors” I write because I want to be read. Story telling implies someone listening to the stories. There isn’t anything more gratifying than getting an email telling me “I was having the worst day of my life, till I read….” And getting five or six of them in a day is better than a standing ovation. These days when I have a few fans, I write because of the pitiful letters asking for more Kyrie and Tom or Thena and Kit, or even “what happens next in the Magical British Empire?” I often find myself putting a note in and going “oh, so and so will love knowing there will be kitty dragons of sorts.”

And most of all, of course, I write because I can’t avoid writing. I write because as far as that goes, I’m a machine for turning world into story.

And this is why I struggled for sixteen years to break in, why I have refused to let the screwed up establishment kill my career, even if it meant writing six books a year (they’d bury my career and it would shove its head out of the grave screaming “Brainz” and lurch merrily on), and why I am now, when the mid century is running full tilt at my face, I am in a way starting anew, in a field that has changed so much as to be unrecognizable and which will require me to learn marketing, as I’ve learned other things in the past – things that weren’t immediately and obviously part of story telling.

Because I can. Because I must. Because I am writer.

And you? Why do you write? And if you don’t, why do you read?

*(Yes, there is another post by that title here – by my friend Tedd Roberts whose Rat Lab is linked from the side bar)

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*