getting published

3881106024_78b5dec349_b — By Flickr’s Steve Schnabel

Our guest today is Deborah Batterman, author of Shoes Hair Nails (short stories) and Because my name is mother (essays). She is a Pushcart nominee and took 3rd place in the Women’s National Book Association 2012 Short Fiction Contest. Her stories and essays have appeared in anthologies as well as various print and online journals, including Akashic Books Terrible Twosdays, Every Mother Has a Story, Vol. 2 (Shebooks/Good Housekeeping), Open to Interpretation: Fading Light (Taylor & O’Neill), and Mom Egg Review, Vol. 14. Her Kindle Scout novel, Just like February, is a coming-of-age story framed by the passions of the 60s and the AIDS crisis of the 80s.

The road from completed manuscript to publication is more often than not a long and winding one. If ever there was a leap of faith that got me thinking outside the box, it was this foray into reader-powered publishing. I may not have gotten the desired result, but unlike those rejections which writers are no stranger to, this one comes with an affirmation of readership: in a word, if I build it, they will come.

Connect with Deborah on Facebook and Twitter.

American Idol for Book Lovers?

Writers are nothing if not gamblers. Hours and hours of hard work, draft after endless draft, characters who live inside our heads until, one day, we say, “Out!” in the hope that someone, maybe lots of people, will take a chance on what we’re offering.

Self-publishing, especially via print on demand and digital books, certainly has opened a world of possibility (not to mention gratification of a more immediate kind) for writers tired of and/or impatient with traditional channels. At the same time, there’s every good reason that legacy publishers, large and small, maintain a certain allure, even if a publishing market in flux has forced them to take adaptive strategies for survival. Then there’s that hybrid mode, otherwise known as vetted self-publishing. And now reader-powered publishing.

Do I dare? I asked myself when I first got wind of Kindle Scout. It had all the feel of a kickstarter campaign—i.e., drum up support for a book before it’s published—with more than one big advantage: you’re not asking for funding and you have the power of Amazon behind you from the get-go. I weighed the pros: my book featured on Amazon for 30 days; a chance to ‘unbox’ myself from the routine of submitting queries and excerpts/waiting for responses from agents/editors, get a direct sense of reader interest. The cons? Even if there was no escaping the “American Idol” for Book Lovers sense of it all, could I bank on literary merit in a contest more designed to rack up votes for genre fiction?

Get Out of your Comfort Zone

More to the point, I reasoned, getting out of one’s comfort zone is always a good thing for a writer. Day-to-day tenacity may be what we rely on to get the job done, but fresh insights so often happen when we step away from routine. Case in point: I thought I had really nailed my pitch. Until Kindle Scout asked me to put those telling details into a 45-character one liner and a synopsis/description of 500 characters or less. No room for even a wasted syllable here, it’s an exercise that forces your hand, demands getting a real handle on what you think your book is ‘about’. Isn’t that question we all hate being asked? If you’re anything like me, you start with an idea/an image/a sentence that pops into your head. You have a sense of characters who, at their best, take on a life of their own. You think about the underlying themes, the story you thought you were telling that took a 45-degree turn somewhere along the way. Now you’re being asked to reduce it all to pithy details, catchy phrases. Can’t help but call up a phrase from a Cold Play song: Nobody said it was easy/ No one ever said it would be so hard.

[Read more…]

From left to right: Porter A, Therese W, Kathleen B, Vaughn R, Keith C (looking dejected) and Donald M at 2014 UnCon. — From left to right: Porter A, Therese W, Kathleen B, Vaughn R, Keith C and Donald M, preparing to submit their work to publishers.

In the late 1990s, I wrote a short story—my first ever—and submitted it to The New Yorker. It was a really amazing piece of fiction, one that reflected dozens of minutes of toil and revision. I do not remember the plot (which suggests there was none) except for one detail: the female character sits on a therapist’s couch, and, wrapped in a blanket like a burrito, floats into the air and–poof!–vanishes.

I am certain this 7,000-word work of art was roughly 7,000 words too long.

More than fifteen years later, I see how many things were wrong with that experience. First, the piece was a piece of garbage. I did not know how to write a story, and I had no one guiding me through the process. I should have sought advice from someone, if not another writer, than at least a friendly barista or the wine guy with the radio voice at the Safeway where I buy cheap Riesling.

Wrong thing #2: I had the gall to submit to The New Yorker. Sure, I had read The New Yorker, usually while waiting for my dental appointments, usually looking at the pretty cover or the cartoons because the stories were, well, a little uppity in my opinion. Perhaps I thought that the inclusion of my story would endear me to the other works of fiction. But certainly, even if my story had been an actual work of art, I was not familiar enough with the publication to know whether it would be a good fit.

These days I am a better writer with a better understanding of story structure, and yes, I carry around suitcases of humility. I have given up trying to like The New Yorker’s fiction and instead peruse People while waiting for my dental checkups. And when I submit an essay or a story, a grant proposal or retreat application, I do so in a much smarter way.

In 2015, I (someone who lives with bipolar disorder 2) got involved in an organization with this goal: reduce the stigma of mental illness by sharing our stories and serving as a resource to others with mental health conditions. With this in mind, I wrote an essay about mental illness in a marriage. Once again I aimed high, and after much revision based on my critique partners’ feedback, I sent the essay to The New York Times. Seven weeks later I received a form letter rejection from the editor: Dear Sarah Callender . . .

A form letter rejection feels crummy. And submitting smartly doesn’t eliminate the possibility of rejection.

After receiving the form letter rejection, I threw a fifteen-minute pity party, then told my puppy I loved him about fifty times. He wagged and replied fifty-one times that he loved me back, and I started researching other places where I could send the piece. After all, it’s the first rejection that’s the hardest. And the second and the third and the fiftieth, and honestly if one more well-intentioned, kindhearted person tells me how many rejections Rowling had before Harry Potter was acquired, I might shriek. She had her manuscript rejected twelve times. Twelve. Big whoop.

But rejection forces me to consider and reconsider just how badly I want to be an author. It tests my mettle and keeps me improving my craft. It reminds me of the importance of knightly (and daily) chain mail. Although this mental illness essay experience had the same result as the vanishing-burrito fiasco, I had gone about writing and submitting it in a very different way. And I felt good about that.

I’d love to share what I have learned about submitting essays, op-eds, short fiction and grant applications. [Read more…]

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