INSIDE PUBLISHING

No, Really, Why Do You Write?

March 28, 2019 By Heather Webb 61 Comments

https://wallpapercave.com/dark-sea-wallpaper

A friend of mine recently asked me why I write. She found she couldn’t answer the question herself, not anymore. She’d lost the love, and she was hoping something I’d say, as well as the other writers around her, would trigger an awakening in her. She wanted to find her path back to the career about which she had once been so passionate. I think we all go through this at one time or other, when life at home becomes difficult, or when everything in your writing career goes wrong. The rejections become unbearable, you lose an agent, your editor leaves and you’re left orphaned. Your sales aren’t what you hoped and there’s question as to whether or not your next book will be picked up at all. Then there’s the dreaded: “Sorry, you’ll have to take a pen name because Jane Doe is dead.”

I’ve recently suffered a painful rejection from someone I didn’t expect. A reminder that no matter how many books you have in print, no matter where you think you are in your career, your books, your ideas, your style are subjective and you can be rejected as easily as someone who has never sold a book before. I don’t think “established” authors talk about this enough. How often we still suffer various forms of rejection. Each book is like an audition, and your work may or may not be selected for the competitive publishing schedule. (This is why it must be about the writing, but I digress.) In any event, one never really grows accustomed to rejection, not really, and when it happens, I think many of us find ourselves asking the same question:

[Read more…]

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The Ghost Worlds Within Me: A Novelist’s Journey

March 22, 2019 By Guest 37 Comments

We’re thrilled to have multi-published author Stephanie Cowell back with us today for a guest post!

Stephanie is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart and Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet. She is the recipient of an American Book Award. Her next novels (she hopes!) are Blanche and the Water Lilies (the story of the profound help and influence of Monet’s widowed daughter on his last great water lily paintings) and Robbie, a love story set in the English midlands 1900 between a young male artist and a married man. Her work has been translated into nine languages.

You can learn more about Stephanie’s work on her website.

The Ghost Worlds Within Me: A Novelist’s Journey

I first heard them as a young child, murmurs of another time and place. A low man’s voice, laughter, footsteps, a door closing. I was very young and quite alone a great deal. By the time I was eight, I had an imaginary friend. Where he came from I don’t know and only I could see him. He was lonely like me. I had to protect him.

My friend was my stability; I was an only child and the fractures in my parents’ marriage were running down the walls. I hid inside myself and in my room with the ghost worlds and ghost characters who assured me they loved me. They’d always been there for me. In a way I existed through them.

Where did the voices come from? Of course I read constantly and my ghost characters partially grew from my reading but also from deep inside me. By the time I was twelve, they became stories hand scribbled in a black-and-white school notebook. Museums, old houses, graveyards, empty streets inspired me. Then I banged out my worlds on my mother’s old typewriter. In my late teens I published several stories and then left writing to sing because writing was too lonely.

But the ghost world waited inside me and in my forties, it began to emerge again. I wrote four novels in seven years and at the end of that time, an editor from a good publishing house called me and said she wanted to buy my first novel with an option for the second. I lay in bed very faint the next day. I was about to open my inner world to strangers.

That book and the four that followed were great gifts …the things that happened to me, the people I met through them (including indirectly my husband and many dear friends), the events and the very welcome checks which paid for many extra things for my family. It was more than I could ever expect. And I found a lovely agent.

Then phrases began drifting into my world from agents and editors, ones I had not heard before: “Can you get your sales up?” “You write beautifully but that subject isn’t salable.” “Can it be about her brother rather than her love story?” “Nobody wants to hear about…” “You have to build a platform….” “We need more of a social media presence from you…”

I wanted to please the publishing world. I wanted them to want me. But with my novels that editors and agents said they wanted, my writing became forced and stiff, and they asked me, bewildered, “What’s wrong?” With the books I wanted most to write, I often received back the words: “Too difficult to market.” I thought with despair, “What does the publishing world want from my writing? What do I want? – and suppose they are different things?”

I found myself in the middle of what I fled from as a child: an entirely unpredictable world.

Finally I wrote my writer friend Susan and miserably confided in her. “I’m thinking about stopping, not writing any more novels. Pulling books together is too difficult and what they want from me is too difficult. Since I no longer work in a day job, I could work on my languages, take up country dancing, volunteer for the community garden. But I’m feeling so sad.” Suddenly my rich life full of friends and culture and travel seemed meaningless.

She wrote back at once, “I’m sure you DO want to keep writing because writing is what you do ― and being an author is who you are. Not ONLY who you are, but a major part of your identity. I think not writing would make you feel kind of rootless and depressed. It’s second nature.”

Yes, rootless and depressed…that is just what I felt, and I was wretched. So after five published novels and at least six more in draft form, I found myself asking what I wanted from writing. [Read more…]

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The Book Contract ‘Red Line’

January 3, 2019 By Sophie Masson 2 Comments

Recently, I presented a research paper at a publishing conference which was themed around the experience of negotiating, and signing, book contracts. The paper, based on a series of interviews with Australian-based authors, publishers and agents, looked at all kinds of questions around book contracts. One of the questions which aroused a lot of interest was the idea of the contract ‘red line’—when do you know, whatever side of the publishing table you’re on, that you need to walk away? I thought WU readers might be interested to read some of the things people said.

General comments:

All publishers and all creators are different, but they all need to be able to communicate clearly with each other. If a creator is uncomfortable with discussion at the contract stage, this is a good time to consider whether there is a good fit with the publisher (publisher).

The time to walk away is when an author or publisher comes to believe they won’t be able to sustain a positive relationship any longer, because if you can work together and communicate effectively then there may still be a way forward, regardless of the written contract (author).

I think you should walk away if you feel unduly pressured into making decisions that you are not comfortable with. Perhaps another publishing house may suit you (publisher).

If the publisher won’t negotiate on something important to you, don’t sign. Once you sign the contract you’re bound by it, no matter how unfair it is. Authors have more options than ever before to get published, so just walk away (author).

What about specific ‘red lines’? These ranged from: [Read more…]

But How Much Are You Reading?

October 19, 2018 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) 30 Comments

Listening Up

For me, it’s always a kind of relief to write a piece for Writer Unboxed. That’s because you, Unboxed one, are among the most consistent elements of publishing.

Writers tend to work through the upheavals of the industry by focusing ever more intently on writing. This actually is not the pathway taken by many others in the industry.

As economic and market forces bash and bang up the business, company people (rightly) believe they have a mandate not only to adapt but to innovate, to look for things that will accommodate and/or ameliorate the changing circumstances of a creative industry in profoundly changing times. The industry! The industry!

And so my reporting at Publishing Perspectives and at The Hot Sheet have a lot to do with change: lots of trial and lots more error, fits and startups, big trends that fizzle in under two years, minor fads that flatten everybody’s expectations, and the abiding difficulty that this industry has in understanding itself as part of a major entertainment complex that has overtaken it.

On that last point, it’s not everyone. I love the exceptions: some of publishing’s brightest leaders are working well to associate themselves with studios and other production players to reposition bookish content for survival in a screened landscape.

But another thing I value in the Writer Unboxed community is the authorial viewpoint that, of course, isn’t always factored into industry thinking.

And today, I’d like to “provoke you,” to use a pleasantly over-strong term, to give me your input on an important distinction that I fear some in the business may be overlooking, and that I’ll bet many in the author corps are not.

Let’s say that there’s a difference in the content and the act: the story and the reception of it.

Heres what I’m on about. As you know, publishing’s shooting star at the moment is audiobooks. Oh, those double-digit gains. The Association of American Publishers just reported that between January and August of this year, downloaded audio was up 37.5 percent over the same period last year, by far the biggest gain in all publishing. And this is being replicated in other world markets we cover.

Audio is hot, hot, hot. (As long as it’s downloaded. Physical audio in the same time-period comparison tanked by 24.6 percent. We don’t need no stinkin’ CDs or cassette tapes, thanks just the same.)

So big is audio that at The FutureBook conference in London in November, my former associates at The Bookseller will be staging a full day of audiobook sessions–there’s an entire audio conference running parallel to the main stream. (And we could have bought stock in headphone makers, you know.)

As I’m sure I’ve bored you by saying before here, my own pet pleasure in this thing about audio is that in some markets like the UK (but not yet in Canada, we just learned), guys are leading the way in audiobook sales. Yes, guys. Outbuying the women in books. Sounds like another planet, doesn’t it? But it’s true. As long as it’s audio, the guys are in the lead. They don’t like reading, but they like listening, especially while doing other things, surveys show.

But that brings me to my provocation for you today.

[Read more…]

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Bucket List for Writers

October 9, 2018 By Keith Cronin 33 Comments

sometimes you just gotta say bucket — Um, I don’t think this is the kind of bucket they’re talking about…

I believe it’s healthy to have goals. After all, having something to aim for can give us a sense of purpose, and can help us keep our efforts focused. We often hear of “the writer’s journey,” and I think it’s an apt metaphor, because this can turn into a VERY long trip. For those who manage to stay on the path, there are many milestones along the way – along with many hurdles.

While a writer might start out with a single goal (e.g., write the damn book), if that writer is serious about getting published, she might soon find herself adding multiple items to her to-do list. Armed with this list, off she goes on her journey!

And then, reality sets in.

For most – if not all – of us, it soon becomes apparent that this whole writing-and-publishing-a-book thing can take a while. Sometimes quite a while. Given how long it can take to get a writing career off the ground, a writer’s to-do list can start to resemble another list that has become popular in recent years: the “bucket list.”

Note: For those not familiar with the idiom, this is a list of things you want to accomplish before you kick the bucket. (And for those of you not familiar with what “kick the bucket” means, it’s a reference to an ancient – and anatomically challenging – romantic ritual involving a large bucket, three pairs of oversized steel-toed boots, 12 gallons of tapioca pudding, and 23 well-trained riverdancers, preferably double-jointed. Honest.)

For today’s post, I’ve attempted to assemble a typical bucket list for an aspiring writer, based on a combination of my own initial plans, accomplishments to date, and ongoing goals. As my journey has progressed, the items on this list have tended to shift and evolve – if you ask me next week, my list might look quite different. But for today at least, here’s my first stab at a bucket list for writers:

1. Finishing your manuscript

This is huge. Seriously, this could be the only item on your list, and it would still be a MAJOR accomplishment. By completing a manuscript, you’ve done something 99.999999% of the population hasn’t done.

Even more impressive, you’ve done something that probably 98% of the people who ever said “I should write a book” have never gotten around to actually doing. So if you have done it, you should congratulate yourself on a significant accomplishment, and celebrate it in whatever way you see fit. (Caveat: you might want to avoid celebratory activities that require a large bucket, three pairs of oversized steel-toed boots, 12 gallons of tapioca pudding, and 23 well-trained riverdancers – even if they’re double-jointed. I’m just looking out for your safety here.)

2. Signing with an agent

Okay, if you’re self-publishing, this won’t be on your list. But since I started my journey back when stone tablets were still more common than e-books, this represented a well-established rite of passage that I was eager and determined to complete. [Read more…]