Self-Publishing, Part Whatever

While I was at the Durand Fantasy Expo on Saturday, I ended up talking to several other authors and publishing folks about self-publishing and print-on-demand.  Here are a few of my thoughts from the drive home.

1. Dear self-published authors: As a writer, I am not your target audience.  I can’t count the number of times authors, mostly (but not always) self-published or PoD, have tried to hard-sell their books to me.  Just don’t.

2. Self-publishing seems to work pretty well for comics and graphic novels.  This is something I’ve noticed over the past year or two.  Maybe it’s just me, but a lot of the self-pubbed/PoD comics I’ve seen are just plain good.  A while back, Jane Irwin gave me copies of Vogelein: Clockwork Faerie and Vogelein: Old Ghosts.  They were well-done, and I enjoyed the stories.

A lot of web comics seem to go the same route, using small PoD printers or self-publishing, and producing very nice products.  It makes me wonder what we on the prose side of things could learn from the comics folks.

3. Self-publishing takes a lot of time and work.  My very first book, a mainstream novel called Goldfish Dreams, recently reached the end of its contract with Fictionwise.  I’d really like to put the book out there on Kindle and maybe in a few other places.  Thus far, I’ve done absolutely nothing on this project.  I only have so many hours, and I also have to write my next book.  It makes me wonder — if I was fully responsible for the entire publication process, how much longer would it take to release each new book?

4. People will believe anything that protects their egos.  “New York editors don’t want good stories, and won’t take new authors.  You’re better off without an editor, because they’ll destroy your unique vision.  Self-publishing is better, because publishers only pay 6-12% royalties.”

There are times when self-publishing can work.  However, many of these claims are total crap … but they’re crap that protect the ego, and thus people choose to believe and defend ’em.

5. I’m outnumbered.  There were a handful of other authors there on Saturday.  As far as I know, I was the only “traditionally” published one there.  A lot of people kept checking out my books and saying things like, “So I have to go to your web site to get these, right?”  Um … sure, you can go through my web site.  Or you can walk into most any bookstore in the country and pluck one of my books off the shelves.

I don’t know what to think about this.  I know the technology has gotten better and more available, and this is going to mean a lot more authors taking advantage of that technology.  But it was an odd feeling.

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Please note that I’m not bashing self-publishing.  As I said in #3, I’m planning to use it myself.

Anyway, questions and comments and discussion are welcome, as always.

First Book Friday: Marie Brennan

Welcome to First Book Friday, an ongoing series exploring how various authors sold their first books.

Marie Brennan‘s fifth book, A Star Shall Fall, came out earlier this week.  She’s scheduled to be a Guest of Honor at the Sirens Conference next month.  Also, she recently invented the iPlatypus.  (2 of these 3 facts are true.)

She turned 30 on Wednesday. Once you finish reading about her six-year journey from writing Doppelganger to seeing it on the bookstore shelves, go wish her a happy birthday.

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The first book I sold was the second book I wrote. It was pure chance that I didn’t write it first; the ideas for both came to me around the same time, in my senior year of high school. I could tell, even then, that both were different from the ideas I’d had before; they were richer, more substantial — worth finishing. Yeah, “finish what you started” wasn’t a skill I was terribly good at in those days; I had lots of fragments of novels lying around, but nothing that amounted to more than scattered scenes. Not until these two ideas happened along.

Doppelganger [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] (later republished as Warrior) was mostly written in the summer of 2000, parts of it while on an archaeological dig in southern Wales. (I recall writing a few scenes with my laptop balanced on an air mattress while the wind tried to blow my tent down around me.) Finished in August, cleaned it up, started shopping it around.

For those who have never tried it: this is a slow process. I queried at least fifteen agents, maybe more, but the really slow part was publishers; there were still some back then who would consider unagented manuscripts, but I could only submit to them one at a time. My closest call was with Roc; the editor read my query and asked for a partial, read the partial and asked for the full manuscript, read the full manuscript . . . and passed. Altogether, that took about nine months. (I wrote a whole other novel in that time, one I hope to dust off and sell someday.) But I wasn’t as aggressive about querying agents as I should have been, and after a few years I’d run out of publishers who would look at my book without one.

In the interim, I’d done something smart: I’d written other books. Three, in fact, not counting the one before Doppelganger. So I kept querying and submitting with new material. But in autumn of 2004, after letting this book gather dust for a year and a half while I debated what to do with it, I decided to try a long shot. I’d heard that sometimes you could send a query letter — no sample, just a letter — to publishers that didn’t take unsolicited submissions; if an editor followed up, then you could sneak in the back door, so to speak. I mailed off three, to Bantam Spectra, Del Rey, and Warner Aspect. Spectra never replied; Del Rey wrote back to say they meant it about not taking unsolicited submissions; Warner Aspect asked for the manuscript.

Precisely four weeks later, I got a phone call from the editor. She said she’d shown the book to her boss, and her boss had reminded her that they didn’t buy unagented books. So I should go get myself an agent.

With an offer pending, it’s a lot easier to get attention from agents. I contacted two immediately, and hit it off with one, Rachel Vater; I’m still with her today. December 8th, 2004, she called to say she’d hammered out the details of the offer from Warner, and I gave her the go-ahead to accept it. April 2006, it was on the shelves, and it’s been going strong ever since: two editions, enough printings that I’ve stopped counting, three foreign language sales, and it earned out its advance within the first few months. I think of it as the Little Book That Could.

(If you’d like to know what happens after you sell your first novel, I’ve got a multi-part essay on my site that follows Doppelganger through the process.)

Thursday Miscellany

I’ll be at the Durand Fantasy Expo this Saturday, for anyone in the area.

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I missed a friend promo yesterday, ’cause my brain sucks.  Yesterday was the release date for my friend Deborah Blake‘s new nonfiction book Witchcraft on a Shoestring [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon].

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Fixing one problem with a car should not require trips to four separate car repair places.  I’m just saying…

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Signal boost from cloudscudding from yesterday’s post:

I just launched “The Circus of Brass and Bone”, an apocalyptic steampunk serial story and podcast that follows a circus traveling through the collapse of civilization.  I’m doing this to raise money for my mother’s cancer treatment–she was diagnosed with Stage3c ovarian and endometrial cancer while working at a school in India, so she doesn’t have health insurance. Coming back to the United States for treatment means both my parents had to give up their jobs,too.  And because of their choice of careers–helping others–they don’t have much in the way of savings to fall back on.  All donations go to pay for my mother’s cancer treatment and related costs.

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Finally, I haven’t done a LEGO bit in a little while.  My Facebook friend Karen Gould sent me a link to her husband’s recreations of medieval castles in LEGO. What makes this especially cool is that he’s done Harlech Castle, which was my starting point when I designed Whiteshore Palace where Danielle et al. from the princess books live.

Whiteshore Palace is, well, white, and I modified the scale and design a bit, but this is probably the closest I’m going to get to a LEGO set for one of my worlds.  Click the pic for more.

Friend Promo

I’m very fortunate. I’ve got a lot of very nifty friends and acquaintances, both the real-world and the online variety, and sometimes I’ve just got to show them off.

To that end, I’m declaring this an open “Promote Your Friends” thread.  Please feel free to post whatever cool projects or accomplishments your own friends have been up to lately.  (If you’re on my jimchines.com blog and your comment doesn’t show up, let me know and I’ll rescue it from moderation.)

Let the promo begin!

  • My daughter Clara was promoted from purple belt to third brown in Sanchin-Ryu on Monday.
  • Seanan McGuireis currently in Australia at Worldcon, where she’s a finalist for the Campbell Award for best new writer.  Between her Toby Daye books and the success of her zombie thriller Feed, I think she’s got a good shot at bringing home the tiara.
  • Lynne Thomas, editor of Chicks Dig Time Lords (and my archivist!), has a new project: Whedonistas: A celebration of the worlds of Joss Whedon by the women who love them.
  • My friend Steven Saus has a story online called The Burning Servant, part of a chain story project founded by Mike Stackpole.  (Stackpole sounds like he’s doing a lot of interesting stuff … I need to check that out!)
  • Elizabeth Moon is a well-known SF writer, but she’s also a very good blogger.  She wrote a great post about gender bias in publishing last week.
  • John Kovalic provides a very nice, pointed comment on race and gaming in this Dork Tower strip.  (Check out the follow-up strip, too.)[1. I’ve never met Kovalic or talked to him much online, but we swapped a few e-mails and he provided a great blurb for Goblin Quest, and I figure that’s good enough to include him here!]

Finally, my author friends have some new books out.

Your turn.  What nifty things have your friends been doing?

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Doctor Who?

Normally I try to answer most blog comments, but yesterday involved a broken car, broken garage door, and other assorted chaos that kept me offline for most of the day.  My thanks to everyone who commented and shared their own stories on yesterday’s post, and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to respond to them all.

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I have a confession to make. Despite ranking at the very top of the geek hierarchy, there has always been an unforgivable gap in my geekness.  I’ve never watched Doctor Who.

I remember as a kid, getting a few glimpses of this weird guy in a scarf who apparently flew around in a blue phone booth, but it looked way too cheesy.  Then there was that robot dog thing…

These days, it seems like half the people in my SF/F circle are Doctor Who fanatics.  Not to mention that Torchwood thing, which apparently raced to cult status in its own right.  So one day I was crashed out in my hotel room at a con, and I spotted an episode with David Tennant and something about quantum statues that only move when nobody’s looking.

Cheesy, but intriguing.  I ended up watching and liking the second half of “Blink,” the episode that won the Hugo Award.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.  I saw that BBC America was showing Doctor Who, and programmed the DVR to start recording ’em.  I figured it was time to see what the fuss was about.

I’ve now watched a half-dozen episodes, all with Tennant as the Doctor.  It’s interesting.  I keep mentally contrasting the show with Star Trek.  Doctor Who is much lower budget, sometimes over-the-top, and yet … more often than not, it works.

Take the opening scene of “The Girl in the Fireplace,” when The Doctor says how disturbing the ticking of the clock is … since the clock on the mantel is broken.  Star Trek would have used louder, more dramatic music and lots of special effects and not done half as good a job creating a foreboding atmosphere.

And Tennant is just fun.  “I’m the Doctor, and I just snogged Madame de Pompadour!”  He’s so damn full of himself, and generally having such a good time … I don’t know if that’s a part of the character or just this incarnation, but I love it.

It doesn’t always work.  In Fireplace, I rolled my eyes at the random spaceship horse.  And given that the Doctor knows time passes more quickly on the other side, Narnia-style, how did he not see that ending coming?

Then there’s The Doctor’s meeting with Satan.  “What does the devil need with a starship?”  So much better than Star Trek V’s take.  (But I know that’s not saying much.)

Overall, I like it.  Even if the Cybermen are a blatant ripoff of the Borg.  (No, wait … strike that.  Reverse it.)  Even the ridiculously over-the-top moments, like The Doctor lighting the Olympic torch.  I like how they do so much with so little — a child’s drawing, or a simple statue — concentrating more on ideas and story than flashy effects.  Heck, the episodes with better effects seem weaker to me, overall.

I’m still ignorant about a lot of things, and we’ll see what happens when we move into other series with other doctors, but I think it’s safe to say my assimilation has begun.

Clara’s Hamster

Note: this story doesn’t have a happy ending…

Last December, my sister-in-law talked to us about buying a hamster and cage for our nine-year-old daughter Clara.  I was a little hesitant, but we said yes.  It was the right choice.  Come Christmas, we went to my in-laws’ place and swapped gifts.  When it was Clara’s turn, we brought her back to the bedroom so she could see the little teddy bear hamster in his new cage.

Her reaction was pure, wide-eyed, hands-over-the-mouth joy.  She’s always loved animals.  She has a fish, and she’s raised frogs and butterflies, but this was different.  This was rainbows and unicorns and true love at first sight.  She named him Sammy.

She took better care of that little guy than I ever did with my pets as a kid.  He nipped her a few times in the beginning, but she was very patient, making sure he got to play every day, that he got his treats, and eventually taming him so she could pet him and carry him around.

And then he figured out how to open his cage. More

First Book Friday: Lynn Flewelling

Welcome to First Book Friday, an ongoing series exploring how various authors sold their first books.

Lynn Flewelling started writing “just for the fun of it.”  Today she’s the author of eight published fantasy novels, as well as a highly popular LiveJournal.  She talks about the decade-long journey of writing her first book(s), and some of the potholes along the way.  If you’d like to meet Flewelling in person, check out Writing on the Waves, where she’ll be teaching a writing workshop during a  week-long cruise.  (Let’s see Clarion top that!)

Oh, and she’s also a were-otter…

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I spent nearly ten years writing what ultimately became my first two fantasy novels, Luck in the Shadows [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] and Stalking Darkness [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon].

The proto-manuscript began as an idea in a notebook on a Maine beach, something just for fun, and just for me. I wasn’t seriously considering becoming a fantasy author. It was my little private project, something I showed only to my husband, who liked it. Then I showed it to a friend, who liked it. And more friends, who also liked it. So I says to myself, “Self, maybe we should try to finish this Thing—just for fun.”

I took that path, but it gradually bled into the idea that I was putting an awful lot of effort into the Thing and maybe I should have higher aspirations.  Somewhere along the way I took a week-long writing workshop with an author whose work I really admired, and she liked my proto-manuscript very much. She wasn’t a fantasy author, and didn’t have the right connections to sell it, but her faith in my work made a huge difference.

So after a decade or so of just-for-fun-turned-obsession, I found myself with a gigantic novel to sell. The next step was to teach myself to market. That took months. I did my homework and sent out carefully crafted query packets to dozens of carefully researched agents. The rejections began to roll in, most of them generic postcards. But one agent did tell me that the Thing was too long, and that I should split it in two and add a plot arc to be resolved in the first book. If I did that, she’d look at it again. I took her advice, spent months rewriting, and she still rejected the book.

But her advice was sound. Not long after that a very good agent took me on and sold the book to a major publisher in a matter of months. 

Looking back, I can see lots of things I wish I’d known or done differently, but there’s also a thread of tenacious effort even in the face of my own doubts that continues to surprise me.

There is a side story, though. While I was looking for an agent, a writer friend sold her SF book directly to a major publisher. She urged me to submit my book to him, which I did. He didn’t like it and I found out from my new agent that now she couldn’t submit my book to any other editors at that house, due to professional etiquette. Newbie blunder of major proportions. But as I said, she quickly sold my book to another major house, so it all ended happily.

Another by product of the journey was an article I wrote for Speculations called “The Complete Nobody’s Guide to Query Letters,” which has since been reprinted Moira Allen’s The Writer’s Guide to Queries, Pitches & Proposals. It can also be found at the SFWA website.

Author photo by Bernard Landgraf.

Back from Vegas

Back from Las Vegas. Friend is successfully married. Yay!

After getting up at 4:00 a.m. on Monday to check out of the hotel, return the rental car, and catch our flight back to Michigan, I’m still a bit brain frazzled.  But here are some random thoughts from the weekend…

-No, I did not gamble.  Not out of any moral stance, but because I’m good at math.[1. I’m not mocking those who choose to gamble for the fun of it — I do understand the thrill.  But I don’t have the money to spare on this particular pastime.]

-My agent sent me a $700 Czech check right before I left.  My car immediately broke, requiring $700 worth of repairs.

-All of the lights in our hotel room used fluorescent bulbs.  I applaud conservation efforts, but find them rather ironic in Vegas.

-Effective immediately, the Mission: Impossible theme should be played on piano as part of the opening music at all weddings.

-I have once again forgotten how to tie a tie.

-I get way too stressed about travel arrangements, schedules, and details.

-Michigan sometimes gets so cold your snot freezes inside your nose. Vegas and its 110+ temps, on the other hand, dry your snot to the consistency of gravel.  (Because I know you all wanted the Vegas snot update!)

-Delta airlines did a surprisingly good job in terms of handicap accessibility, including providing wheelchairs, getting us where we needed to go, taking my wife’s walker onto the plane, and when possible, moving us to a seat closer to the front.

-Dear TSA: I have no explosives in my sandals.  Thanks for checking, though!

-If someone writes a Jim C. Hines is Awesome blog post, my friends will give me a hard time about it when they see me.

-Jellyfish are nifty.  This is a video I shot at the Mandalay Bay Shark Exhibit.  (The tanks were too dark for photos, but video worked pretty well.)

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First Book Friday: Tobias Buckell

Welcome to First Book Friday, an ongoing series exploring how various authors sold their first books.

Carribean-born Tobias Buckell is a busy guy.  In addition to his four published novels, including the New York Times bestselling Halo: The Cole Protocol, Buckell is the founder of SF Novelists, a full-time freelancer, and the father of one-year-old twins.  He and I share an agent, and it was through Toby that I connected with the folks at JABberwocky.  He took time to share the five-year roller coaster ride that led to the publication of his first book, Crystal Rain.

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Back in 2001 I met my agent, Joshua Bilmes (of JABberwocky Literary Agency). We were introduced by another author, and we chatted politely in the hallway. I’d only sold a few short stories by then, and written a novel proposal, but not continued work on the novel. It was a bizarre mix of Caribbean expats and a reborn Aztec nation, created by strange aliens, all set on another planet that had lost contact with Earth. I called it a Caribbean steampunk lost colony world sort of novel.

Now, I knew that agents usually didn’t snag authors based on partial manuscripts, so when Joshua gave me his card and told me to send the partial manuscript along, I’d pocketed the card and done nothing. 9/11 soon had our attention, and there were short stories I had not yet finished.

But some time later in the fall or early winter, my phone rang and Joshua’s voice came through the other end. He wanted to know why I hadn’t sent that proposal along. “Oh,” I said. “You weren’t just being polite!”

Just before Christmas, he called back to say that if the whole book was as good as the first three chapters, he’d represent it, and that I should write the book.

I spent a good chunk of 2002 writing the first draft of the first novel I’d ever attempted: Crystal Rain [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon]. Airships, cyborgs with dreadlocks, battles at sea, funky aliens…  I had a total blast writing the thing, and I tried to imbue it with all the energy I could. But showing it around to various people I trusted revealed flaws, and throughout a chunk of 2003 I workshopped it. Joshua had some rewrites for me as well. We sold it to Tor in 2004, and there were edits and rewrites my editor wanted. I remember sitting in the basement of our newly purchased house sweating over the novel line by bloody line.

It came out in February 2006.

Having your first book launched is supposed to be the most magical, exciting thing. And I had a small taste of that. But two days before my launch I was informed I was going to be laid off, and my attention turned quickly toward trying to assemble a life as a full time writer/freelancer years before I had planned to try that.

It worked out, and now I get a lot more time to write. But it was a hell of a roller coaster ride, having a new book out while trying to basically invent a new job!

Judging the Past Through the Lens of the Present

Today’s rant comes courtesy of debates about Robert Heinlein.  Tor.com has an ongoing discussion about Heinlein and his work, one which has spilled into Twitter and a number of blogs.  Stirring up the anger and ire: claims that Heinlein and/or his work is sexist (possibly racist as well?)

Responses to these claims range from the thoughtful to the religiously righteous.  Fair enough, as the initial accusations probably span that same range.  But I want to focus on two kinds of responses.

1. “[I]t is fallacious to judge deceased writers by the political fads and fashions of the modern era.”  I.e., it’s unfair to judge Heinlein, because his work is “a product of the time.”

Taking that train of thought further, is it unfair to judge the American colonists for the attempted genocide of the Native Americans, because that was just a product of the time?  Is it unfair to condemn slavery, because times were different back then?

Historical context is important.  It’s also good to recognize the lens through which we’re analyzing a text, whether that lens is political, theoretical, or whatever.  And I’m well aware that many countries view the United States’ attitudes toward racism and sexism as a bit wacky.  But to claim that just because your perspective is, like Heinlein’s, grounded in a particular time and culture, it’s therefore invalid and/or fallacious is … well, a little silly.

I can read Tarzan and recognize that views on race were different in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ time.  I can also argue that, given Tarzan’s casual murder of blacks in the jungle, and a text that treats these incidents in precisely the same way as the hunting of animals, there’s racism here.

Is the historical context different than if the book were written today?  Sure.  And I recognize that my own moral framework is far from perfect.  Does that mean I’m not allowed to feel disgust at Tarzan’s joy in killing “savages,” or to talk about the racism in that portrayal?  Give me a break.

2. Then there’s “How dare you call Heinlein sexist?”

There is a valid point here.  As an author, it makes me uncomfortable when people blur the work with the writer.  I’d hate to think of someone reading the goblin books and deciding Jim C. Hines is a closet cannibal, for example.  The work =/= the writer, and I think we need to be aware of that distinction.

Going back to Tarzan, it’s clear that Tarzan never considers blacks as human.  For much of the book, he doesn’t even view himself as human, for that matter.  This is the character’s attitude … but the text never questions this attitude.  Even after Tarzan learns of his own humanity, he never makes the connection that those dark-skinned beasts were people.  The text supports Tarzan’s view, and you can argue that this is due to racism on Burroughs’ part.

But there are those who’ll say “racist” or “sexist” are the nuclear option, nothing but insults intended to destroy the recipient.  If you dare utter those words, you aren’t interested in conversation or discussion; you’re just name-calling, trying to slander poor Burroughs.

…which makes it kind of difficult to talk about issues of race and gender and discrimination and so on.  But then, sometimes I think that’s the point: to shut down discussion.

If you want to examine the distinction between author and work, and to argue for one or the other, then great.  I love debating literature and exploring different interpretations.  On the other hand, if you’re just going to say “Hey, you called Heinlein the S-word!  You can’t do that!!!”, then to me, you’re simply announcing your unwillingness to discuss or listen.

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