I Don't Believe in the Publishing Fairy Anymore

Once upon a time, about nine years ago, I finished writing a book. I wrote those glorious words, THE END. It was THE END of years of dreaming, hoping, wishing, and working. It was THE BEGINNING of my education in the other half of what goes into making one of those rectangular, paper things with shiny covers that you find on the shelf at the library. Now that I'd written a book, of course the next step was to get it published. But that was going to be easy, right?

I had this idea in my head that if I was a good little girl and fed the mice and did my chores, the Publishing Fairy would descend with gossamer wings and a sparkly wand and grant me a publishing contract. All I had to do was sit quietly my the corner by the sooty fireplace and send out a few query letters now and then.

Eh, it ain't happening.

I'm a proud admirer of the members of our crew here at the Scribblers Cove who didn't sit around waiting for the Publishing Fairy, but instead went and got their own ride to the ball. Sue and Emily have both found success in the self-publishing arena. I know they both work hard at self-promotion, but that's not much different from authors who go the traditional publishing route. At our last SCBWI-Hawaii conference I asked a friend who recently published with a traditional publisher how her second book was coming along. She rolled her eyes and said, "I had no idea how much less time you have for writing after you're published." Then she went on to talk about book signings, school visits, and all the things she does on the internet to promote her book.

No matter which way you do it, publishing isn't a happy ending. It's another beginning.

I'm still all starry-eyed about going to the ball, but I'm taking a different approach now. I don't want to have to run off at midnight because I'm afraid my gown's going to turn back to rags. No, I want to be there because that's where I belong. Not long after I finished my first manuscript, a friend of mine gave me a great book on writing style that was even better than a magic ball gown. My writing improved almost immediately, and I went on to read and study several more books on the craft. About five years ago I started going to writing workshops and conferences, which not only taught me more about how to create great books, but built a network of helpful, supportive friends who were doing exactly what I was doing. Since that first time I wrote THE END, I've written four more books and now I'm about to start a fifth. Most of all I'm trying to develop habits that will carry me not just to publishing, but sustain me throughout a full writing career.

See you at the ball.

Adventures in Cover Design

As most of you know, I have two writing careers. One is as traditionally published Emily Mah, who sells her science fiction and fantasy stories to magazines. The other is as indie published E.M. Tippetts, who is an experiment on my part to try my hand at all the different aspects of the publishing industry. Up until this point, I've always had my novel covers designed by professionals, but this week I've taken the plunge and put one of my own covers out there.

My bestselling book so far is Someone Else's Fairytale, and so I've been writing a sequel. I wanted to design a cover that would work as a template for all the books to come after it. So, here it is, the first cover I designed and put out there:

I debuted this cover on Wattpad, where Fairytale is a featured novel (as of Wednesday). I've since uploaded it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. The images are all stock art off Shutterstock. The leather texture is from Scrapgirls, as is the gold tone effect (I purchased a commercial licenses). The swirly patterns are royalty free brushes that my professional cover designer used, and my knowledge of how to put it all together comes from digital scrapbooking. Yes, really. That's how I learned to use Photoshop, from JessicaSprague.com and her online classes :-)

This first cover's gotten a positive response, so I put together a mockup for the second cover:

This is the book I'm working on right now. I debuted this cover on my site, (www.emtippetts.com) and people have been very positive. I need to make a few changes. I'm going to play with what word I put in the magnifying glass. Maybe "crime" or "police" might look better than just "ot cr". I also need to fix the title block. It's crooked, but nobody noticed that, right?

Now, I suppose I should tie this up with some intelligent, meaningful comment, but to be honest, I am so exhausted I can barely see straight! I launched the German edition of Fairytale, also on Wednesday, and have been writing over 2,000 words a day on Damsel, so as soon as I finish this post, I'm stumbling off to bed ;-)

Launch day for Castles on the Sand

Many of you will remember me advertising my Kickstarter campaign to get a Kirkus Review for my novel, Castles on the Sand. That campaign was ultimately successful, and Kirkus dubbed the novel: "A fast-paced blend of high-stakes drama and average teenage concerns (sex, appearance, friends), capped with a welcome message of hope."

You may also remember my post on how to make a book trailer, in which I showed the trailer for the book: 

Today, the book was released on Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and Smashwords, and I shall update my little section of the righthand sidebar accordingly!

Making my own book trailer

Okay, so last year I decided to take my unpublished chick lits and indie publish them, because I had nothing to lose. They weren't making any money sitting on my hard drive, and agents and editors all told me that they liked my writing, but that no publisher was touching chick lit with a ten foot pole, not for a new writer. Furthermore, they're Mormon chick lit. I'd already published one book with one of the major LDS publishers and at the end of the day decided it wasn't worth the hassle for the very limited exposure I got in such a tiny, regional market. So, why not see how it worked in the national market? Fast forward eight months and I am making more money from my indie novels than I am from my science fiction short stories, and I've been paid pro rates on my short stories for years, but the gap keeps on widening as the novels sell incrementally more each month. I never thought I'd be a self published author OR a chick lit author. It's funny the twists and turns life takes sometimes. Nowadays I love being both traditional (as Emily Mah, the science fiction/fantasy author) and indie (as E.M. Tippetts, the LDS chick lit/YA author) and what I especially love about being indie is all the skills I have to learn. I know so much more about how a book goes together, gets seen by readers &tc. nowadays, which can only help my traditional publishing career, I think.

So I decided to try to make my own book trailer. I should have kept my first ever draft, but I saved over it. When I realized that it was worth showing a before/after, I did save one of the older drafts.

The images are from Shutter Stock, which is also where a lot of cover designers get the raw material for their cover art (including me), and the music is from Premium Beat. Since I don't have the talent or resources to do a live action trailer, I knew I had to invest a little into getting professional images, and especially into music. Premium Beat does movie trailer music, as in what people in Hollywood literally buy for their trailers. The site has a cheaper rate for us small time indie folks. What is absolutely critical in any business you start up is to be thrifty, not cheap. The idea is to get good value for money, not avoid spending it altogether. If you can only afford a slideshow trailer, then you pay good money to make it the very best slideshow trailer you can afford, and if you can do live action, invest in making it look professional. Having a bunch of your friends in a park speaking Old English with people throwing frisbees in the background is a complete waste of your money. Having no trailer is better than having a bad one.

Sooo, I had to see if I could make a "not bad" one. Here is the first "final draft" version I created:

As I said, the above trailer was my first "final draft", where I thought, "Okay, that'll work". Only it doesn't. There are many, many flaws in it, but the ones I spotted were:

1) No reference to my website. Oops. Duh. I should have that in there because this trailer is embedded in other sites all over the net, including Goodreads, Facebook, and Amazon. It's therefore not enough to mention my website only on YouTube, as not everyone will even see the YouTube page.

2) The text flashes by too fast in parts: Now this is a hard one. My problem is that I'm a speed reader, as in a super speed reader, as in I read Twilight in one day and part of another book too. When the last Harry Potter novel came out, my husband and I were both reading it on a plane. I sat on his right because I was soon one page ahead of him, and within an hour, I was half the book ahead of him. Therefore, I do not have a good concept of how long it takes people to read the text. If they can't read it, that's really ineffective. I'm not sure I was able to fix this one entirely, but I think I made it better.

3) The placement and formatting of the text is weird in places: "Her boyfriend is devoted" has a weird indent in part of it. "the senior class psycho" displays right over a large white portion of the picture for a long time, and worst is the end. I have my sand castle image there, and you'll note the title and my name are positioned to crash right into it. All of this was due to my using Microsoft Movie Maker and it's not intuitively obvious how to position text with that program. I finally figured out that if I had blank lines before or after the text, that would move it up or down the screen.

4) Poor timing of images: I couldn't fix all of this because I don't really know what I'm doing, but where possible I tried to line up more of the image changes to the beats in the music. I think Microsoft Movie Maker offers very limited capability on that score. Some of the images are too slow, like the diary excerpts. You don't actually need to read those, so those can flash by much faster and just give the gist.

5) Too much text in some frames: I really was conscious of how long the whole trailer was because a lot of ones I've seen go on too long. But I figured out in the end that this was a scripting issue more than a trailer editing one. Trailers that go on too long try to cover too much of the plot and get into subplots. Here my experience submitting manuscripts came in very handy. I only talk about the central plot with just a few hand waving hints to subplots in the setup. Given I'd kept the script tight, I could afford to take more time to display less text per frame and keep it on screen long enough for the person to absorb it.

Is the final product perfect? No it is not, but I think it is better, and given it's my first ever book trailer, it's not a complete disaster. See what you think:

Kickstarter campaign underway for the next E.M. Tippetts novel

As many of you know, I've got two writing careers. I've gone the traditional route as a science fiction and fantasy author and sell short stories to magazines, sub novels to agents and editors, and have been working on that for over a decade. Then last year I watched the indie movement get underway and really wanted to jump in an join the fun. So I revived my old chick lit pen name, E.M. Tippetts, and indie published two novels.

The rest, as they say, is history. Fans have been so incredibly supportive and I make a very respectable supplementary income from my novels. Now I'm in the final edits of my next project, and I'm turning again to my fans for some support. I would really like to get a Kirkus Indie review for this next project, so I've launched a Kickstarter campaign to cover the cost.

For those of you who don't know Kickstarter, it is a fantastic resource for independent artists of all stripes. This'll be my first campaign, but not the last, I hope!

 

How to tank your career

Yes, I'm posting late. The long post I drafted earlier this week got eaten by Blogger. I will be saving this one every other keystroke. An all day class and now EasterCon sort of consumed the rest of my week. EasterCon is the big UK science fiction convention, where I've been spending time with old friends. The Guest of Honor, George RR Martin, and I were in the same writer's group for a while. And get this: he's up for the Hugo for best novel, as is James SA Cory. James SA Corey is actually a pen name for cowriters, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Ty is George's personal assistant and Leviathan Wakes, the novel that got nominated, is the first one he's ever written. Ty met George and Daniel while out in New Mexico to visit me. He and I had been friends for years before that.

I'm going to be kind of rambly because it's late and I'm exhausted. Sorry about that. Okay, focus Emily!

On my blog I've been doing a series called The Indie Experiment about my experiences in indie publishing, and I have one last post to do in the series, so I'm posting it over here since it applies to both indie and traditional publishing. It's my list of ways to tank your career. It isn't an exhaustive list, please feel free to add more items in comments. In my eleven years working on the professional writing thing, ways I've seen people tank their careers:

1) Decide you're too good for your readers. Ever heard an author complain that their readers are too stupid to "get" what they write? The best place to find people like that? Not on the bestseller list. Just sayin'

2) Feel entitled to the royal treatment. I was talking with George this weekend about various other mutual friends and non-friends and he filled me in on someone who demands that s/he get the same treatment George does. You probably have not heard of him/her, s/he does not have a commercial success like Song of Ice and Fire and the associated Game of Thrones HBO series. George wasn't cruel or insulting when he spoke of this person- George isn't arrogant or disdainful like that -but he did detail how poorly this strategy was working for said writer who will remain nameless.

3) Complain about your publisher/cover designer/editor/etc. Listen, this isn't about kissing up to everyone or believing that everyone else on your team is flawless, it's about respecting the fact that they're on your team. Consider this scenario: You ask your favorite author why their book had an awful cover. Which answer makes them look good? "Yeah, that loser cover artist is an idiot. I think he had a drug problem. I hate the cover." Or: "The cover artist is a guy named Barry Madeupname. Great guy. I can see why the cover might not appeal to everyone, and it's fine if it doesn't appeal to you. Hope it doesn't put you off the book, though. I assure you, the inside is still all me." It's all about class. Show some.

4) Talk about yourself non-stop. When I spoke to Ty Franck the other day, I suspected he was up for the Hugo even though the news hadn't broken. How did I guess? He expressed the hope that someone else whom we know and respect would be nominated. Rather than gloat and make smug remarks, he expressed a desire that other people not feel left out. Ty is a likeable person. It's easy to feel unreserved happiness for his success, which I most certainly do. In the end of the day, art is an expressive process and we're all part of a larger community of people who lay it all on the line emotionally day in and day out. Selfish people are worse than the proverbial bull in the china shop.

5) Whine and beg for readers. Writing is like dating, and desperation scares people off. No matter how low your sales are, whining will drive them down lower. Even if you aren't the hottest in the market, behaving like you could be once the right readers come along will make all the difference.

Okay, a long, rambly, and not comprehensive list. There are many that I missed, I know!

Paint Me True out for Nook

Hey everyone,

I finally got Paint Me True out in Nook format! It's up for the promotional price of $.99 until Thursday, when my next novel, Someone Else's Fairytale, comes out. Thanks, everyone, who's shown support and bought my book so far.

Once I finish all this formatting craziness, I can get back to reading. I've got Open Minds and Darkspell cued up on my Kindle.

Non-responders, how do you record them?

Like Rebecca, I took a break from submissions over the holidays, and have just now gone back to my files to look at what pieces are where. I've got a ton of non-response entries, and I've noticed they've become more and more common as time goes on. I define a non-responder as someone who doesn't reply within the time they say they will, or who doesn't reply within six months for a short story or query. Though I have gotten responses up to two years after I wrote the person off as a non-responder.

Now if it's a short story market or someone who wanted to review something exclusively, I always chase those. I write a follow up email or letter, and if I still get no response, I send another communication to withdraw the piece from their market so that I can resume submitting. If it's an email query, which more and more agencies prefer, I assume that no response is a rejection because they no doubt get a million queries a month and just can't respond to all of them.

What do you do with the snail mail queries, in which you enclosed an SASE? I haven't been chasing these down, though perhaps I should. I only bother when the person says that I should in their guidelines. Those of you who have chased these, which method did you use? Another snail mail? Email?

My records are getting rather full of non-responders!

The Tao of Publishing

While we be pirates here at The Cove, I've been pondering the correct philosophy behind successful writing, by which I mean sales of books and cold hard cash.

We're pirates, are we not?

Seriously, as I embark upon my first querying adventure, I feel the desire to develop a philosophy to battle the crazies that come with repeated rounds of form rejections, partial requests, and other potential teases.

Should I query fast and furious, with the philosophy that finding the elusive "perfect match" with an agent is really a numbers game? After all the numbers are stark: hundreds of agents, thousand of writers, even more manuscripts, and only a few matches made each year. Right?

Maybe.

Should I query in rounds, using the feedback (or not) to improve my query/partial/full, with the philosophy that an agent search can be your best source of professional feedback for improving your work? After all, these agents only bother to give feedback if you've interested them, and they have gobs of industry insight. Right?

Maybe.

Or perhaps my philosophy needs to be not one of fighting the randomness with strategy, but rather with patience.

"When the spring comes, the grass grows by itself." - Tao Te Ching

Chinese character for Tao, or The Way

I ran across this article on the Tao of Publishing. It's a couple of years old (eons in the publishing world) but still makes a lot of sense. Much of the publishing world is capricious at best and utterly random at worst. What makes one published novel a bestseller, while another languishes on the shelves? Why does one beautifully crafted manuscript get passed over, while another is auctioned off because mermaids are hot, hot, hot this year? Why is middle grade boy fiction the rage today, but not last year . . . or next? Did the middle grade boys disappear? Maybe they discovered that time portal after all!


The article posits that it's human nature to strive to find patterns and reason, even when there is only randomness. And the harder we strive to contain the randomness into a well reasoned box, the further we get from being successful.

This reminds me of the Wall Street Journal's dartboard theory, which is that throwing darts at the WSJ pages for stock picks will beat the professional managers every time (and they almost always do). The idea being that by not over-thinking your stock picks, you capture the long term upward trend toward success that buying (and holding) your investments will bring.

This is going with the flow of the universe, a Tao of Investing.

While I'm far too fond of free will to believe in fate, I do believe that it's possible to mess things up by over-thinking and trying to rationalize random processes. Also: this leads to a madness of sorts, where you are paralyzed by the impossible.  I firmly believe the only people who ever succeed at the "impossible" are those who have an open heart and keep trying.

1) Have an open heart: by which I mean be open to critiques, changes in the industry, and improving your craft. All of these things put you on The Way to writing success.

2) Keep trying: by which I mean do all the things that are necessary but not sufficient for success: write and write well; query wide and long; write more and better; try again.

In the meantime, enjoy the parrots, the company of your fellow pirates, and the process that allows you to bring stories into the world. Because in the end, there's no better job.

Aye?