First Book Friday: Mindy Klasky

Welcome to First Book Friday!

A long time ago, on an internet far, far away, there was an online writing bulletin board called the Rumor Mill. A young writer named Jim used to visit every day, learning about manuscript format and markets and writing scams. One of the people he encountered was a writer named Mindy Klasky (mindyklasky on LJ).

Mindy was a “real” writer, who had recently sold a fantasy series to Roc. I remember being in awe that this person had actually done it. Looking back, I think this was my first “Hey, I know that author!” experience. From my perspective, it looked like such a wonderful experience, all jellybeans and unicorns and rainbows.

So it’s fascinating for me to read the story from Mindy’s POV and learn what her journey was really like.

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Once upon a time, I wrote a novel. We’ll code name it NOVEL ZERO, for reasons you’ll soon discover. After a couple of weeks of poking around, I landed an agent. We’ll code name him Agent X, for more reasons you’ll soon discover.

Agent X tried to sell NOVEL ZERO for five long years, averaging one rejection every twelve months. (Yeah, I could write a separate post about how the wrong agent is worse than no agent at all, but I’ll spare you.) During my long wait, I broke up with Agent X twice, but I took him back both times.

Meanwhile, I wrote another novel, The Glasswrights’ Apprentice [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]. It had all the things I love in traditional fantasy – a medieval city, strict castes, a thousand gods. And it had a thirteen-year-old heroine who witnessed an assassination and was accused of being the killer, necessitating her masquerading through her society’s castes to find the true murderer.

Agent X took twenty-four hours to (allegedly) read APPRENTICE, and then he said that it was flawed in all the ways that NOVEL ZERO was flawed, and oh, by the way, he was breaking up with me.

After great gnashing of teeth, I searched out other agents.  On March 31, 1998, I signed a one-year contract with Richard Curtis. Then, for one entire year, I waited. I started work on another fantasy novel, SEASON OF SACRIFICE.

At the end of 365 days, no deal had appeared.

But on the 366th day, I got an email from Richard with the subject line “A Bite” and the content: “Roc wants APPRENTICE.  They asked about sequels; I told them you had two.”

I was thrilled.  Overjoyed. I leaped for the phone, only to find that Richard had left the office for the day. I started to plot sequels, spinning out story ideas that I had never considered before.

That night, I went to the theater, to see a lousy murder mystery. About half-way through the first act, I was pummeled with a brutal realization: The date was April 1, 1999. April Fools’ Day.

I quickly convinced myself that Richard Curtis was the cruelest man in the world.

I did not sleep that night. I phoned Richard’s office at 9:00 a.m. I held my breath as my call was transferred from the receptionist to my agent. I started crying when I found out that he wasn’t the cruelest man in the world.

Roc did, indeed, buy THE GLASSWRIGHTS’ APPRENTICE. My initial contract was for APPRENTICE, a sequel, and SEASON OF SACRIFICE. I quickly signed a second contract for three more Glasswright books.

Alas, the Glasswright books eventually cycled out of print. But this month, the Author’s Preferred Editions have been (finally!) issued as e-books. The series is also available, for the first time, as trade paperbacks. (You can read the first chapter of each book on my website.)

I’ve loved writing my speculative fiction novels, and I look forward to crafting many more. And I think that April Fools’ Day should be a national holiday.

Who Cares?

Things I Don’t Particularly Care About:

  • Charlie Sheen. Oh yay, the Mel Gibson rerun is on.
  • Bristol Palin’s book deal. People are fascinated by celebrities (see previous point), and often buy their books.  Publishers like to make money. The fact that a publisher thinks people will buy a Palin book is neither shocking nor new.
  • Reality TV.
  • Pointless online drama. Drama Llama sez, “Piss off.”

Things I Do Care About:

  • Con or Bust auctions run through March 6. Check ’em out. Some good stuff up for bid, and the money raised is used to help PoC attend SFF conventions. Intro post is here.
  • One space or two after a period? This used to be in the previous column, until I came across 6 Surprising Bad Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users. “on the web … double-spac­ing after a period can cre­ate ‘rivers’ within text that make it dif­fi­cult for users to find the end of sen­tences…” This is going to be a very difficult habit for me to train myself out of.
  • Whether to use…or . . . for ellipses when formatting an e-book. I asked on Twitter, and the majority favored… Yes, nitpicky author is nitpicky.  (Also recommended: unicode character … for …)
  • The fact that so many of our elected officials seem to be mainlining uncut WTF these days.

Goblin Tales, Coming March 15 (I Hope!)

I’ve tentatively scheduled Goblin Tales for a March 15 release.  Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way for me to set a future publication date via Amazon or B&N.  You click the button to put it on sale, and some time over the next few days, they get it posted.  So it might be more accurate to say the book will be out March 15, give or take a day or two.

This has been quite the learning experience. When I did Goldfish Dreams [B&N | Amazon], Steven Saus did the conversion for me.  This time I wanted to tackle that myself.

Woof.  I started by downloading Sigil, then opened up Goldfish Dreams to do some reverse engineering.  Once I thought I had a handle on the basic files and structure, I copied the goblin stories into a new .epub file and started cleaning up the formatting.  This took several hours, but I eventually got them looking pretty.  I also added an afterword to each story.  Then I started on cover art.

I had two images I was interested in using.  I never got a response from one artist, which simplified that choice.  I gained permission from Daniel Ernle to use his art, and you saw some of the process that followed.  I’d guesstimate that I put in at least four hours of work there, much of which involved small details, trial-and-error-and-backtracking, and tiny changes which were almost invisible.  (Adjusting the kerning between letters in the title, for example.)

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with feedback and suggestions, and a special shout-out to trinker for a lot of good, detailed advice.

At this point, I went back into the story files to check the raw HTML, and discovered that Sigil had inserted some junk code.  Aw, crap.  Add another 1-2 hours to clean that up.

I spoke with other authors and picked up a few more tips, like inserting a character between scene breaks instead of a blank line (since an e-reader’s repagination can result in “hidden” scene breaks), changing the code I used for blank lines at the beginning, details like that.

In the meantime, I was also drafting descriptive text (the equivalent of the back-of-the-book blurb) to be posted on Amazon and B&N, adding front- and back-of-the-book material, and e-mailing myself the work-in-progress to see how my iPhone rendered the file.

All total, we’re probably looking at 10+ hours of work spread over several weeks. I’ve also sent review copies to two potential reviewers.  Normally, I think reviewers should have much more time to read and review a book, but I didn’t want to push the release back another three months.  This may be an example of my impatience getting in my own way.

Looking back, it will have taken just over a month from the time I decided to make an e-book of goblin short stories to the time it goes on sale.  And remember, these are reprints — previously-published (and more importantly, previously-edited) stories.  Original/unpublished material would have required more time, as would a proper window for review copies.

Overall, it’s been a good experience.  A lot of work, but I’d probably do it again.  Who knows … if Goblin Tales does exceptionally well, I might have to take some of my other published stories and repeat the experiment 🙂

Harper Collins and the Expiring E-book

From Library Journal: “In the first significant revision to lending terms for ebook circulation, HarperCollins has announced that new titles licensed from library ebook vendors will be able to circulate only 26 times before the license expires.”  The idea is that this matches the average number of times a print book can be checked out before it falls apart and needs to be replaced.

As you might have guessed, this has not gone over well.  There’s the usual cry to boycott the publisher, lots of anger, a Twitter hashtag, and plenty of accusations that HC is stuck in the past and doesn’t understand the future of publishing.

My agent weighs in here: “I’m of mixed emotion on this. I don’t think it’s prima facie a heinous thing to do because businesses do need to adjust to changing business models … On the other hand, it pisses off customers.”

I came across one author suggesting that the idea itself wasn’t necessarily bad, but 26 copies was too few.  I.e., it’s not the principle of the thing, but the numbers.

I’m still thinking about the implications.  I love libraries, both as a reader and an author.  Libraries buy my books, and they allow readers to discover my work.  Realistically, unrestricted e-book lending could decrease the number of my books libraries buy.  If those books never wear out or expire, a library could keep all of my work in circulation forever.  Which would be really, really cool on the one hand … but could also cut into sales, and I like being able to pay my mortgage.

Two things I’m pretty firm on are:

  1. Authors deserve to be paid fairly for their work.  So do publishers and agents.
  2. I like libraries very much, and I don’t want to lose the service they provide to the community.

I keep coming back to the Public Lending Right (PLR) system used in a number of non-U.S. countries.  Basically, PLR is an author’s “legal right to payment from government each time their books are borrowed from public libraries.”  Such a system would eliminate the source of contention, at least from the authors’ perspective.  If I get paid for each checkout of my books, then by all means, keep all of my e-books forever!

I think it would be fair to split such payment with the publisher and agent as well.  And we’re probably not talking about a huge amount of cash here, at least for nonbestselling authors like myself.  But I really like the principle of the thing.

Actually implementing it could be a problem.  Libraries, like many public services, continue to be targeted for massive budget cuts these days.  I asked a librarian friend for her thoughts, and she suggested it would require some sort of tax to cover those PLR payments.  Not likely to happen any time soon, given the current political environment in the U.S.  (If things continue, I imagine a lot of libraries will have to close, which could make the whole thing moot.)

I don’t know the best way to be fair to libraries and their patrons as well as to authors and publishers.  Maybe it would be better to switch to a rental model where libraries pay an annual fee for the right to lend out a certain number of e-book titles from publisher X.  Older books could be removed from the list over time, replaced by newer and more popular releases.

I’m sure there are flaws with that plan, too.  I don’t have the answers.  But I’d love to hear what other folks think, particularly my author and librarian friends.

Critiquing the Princess Covers

I got a question over the weekend from someone who had been reading my blog, and was checking out the cover art for Stepsister Scheme.  She wanted to know how I reconciled my rather strong feminist views with the often sexualized poses used in these covers.  (This is my paraphrase of the question, for purposes of running with it in this post.)

There are so many ways to answer that question.  The simplest is to fall back on “I’m just the author, and I have no control over the covers.”  Only that’s a really weak response, and not entirely accurate in my case.  I do have some input … not a lot, but some.

With Stepsister, I asked for Talia’s pose to be changed, and for her skin tone to be darkened.  In Snow Queen … actually, I had exactly the same requests for that one.  With Mermaid, Snow was originally the one in the rigging, with Talia reclined on the rail.  I asked to have that swapped around.  Red Hood was a little different, due to deadlines and having to get a backup artist.  In that case, my input was limited to changing the palate of their outfits to get rid of all the pink.

Snow Queen is officially my favorite cover, in no small part because we’re getting away from the posed look of the characters.  This is another thing I discussed with my editor.  Those odd corsets aside, I like the emotion and the dynamic feel of this cover.  (A part of me wants to write more princess books just to see what future covers might look like.)

Another thing I consider is that the sexualized pose isn’t necessarily inappropriate for Snow White.  Snow is openly flirtatious and sexual, and while I never envisioned her with the lipstick & nail polish look she got in Stepsister, I can also see her striking those poses, either deliberately or in play.

I should point out that it’s possible I’m rationalizing some things.  These are my books, and I’m damn proud of them.  I don’t hold to the idea that my books are my babies, but there are paralells … like the way people don’t like to see or acknowledge flaws in our children.

I have mixed feelings about Danielle.  I look at Mermaid and think yes, I she’s the kind of person who could enjoy just relaxing on the rail (if not for being seasick all the time, but that would be a nasty cover).  At the same time–  Well, one of my suggestions for Snow Queen was to show her summoning some of her animal buddies.  To show her acting, if that makes sense?  (Editor liked the idea, but the image was already pretty full.)

There’s a lot I like about the covers.  Danielle’s outfit for Stepsister, and Snow’s for Mermaid.  A lot of the detail work, like the crossguard of Danielle’s sword, the belt and pouches Snow wears in Mermaid, Talia’s weaponry in Snow Queen.  Likewise, there are things I’d change if I could.  Danielle doesn’t need to be so skinny, especially since book two is after she’s recently given birth.  Talia would not be showing cleavage.  (Snow, absolutely.  Talia, no.)

No cover is going to be perfect, and usually when I talk about my cover art, I try to focus on the positive.  A lot of people have loved these covers, but I’ve also heard feedback from people who disliked the way the protags were posed, and that’s valid too.

How do I reconcile it all?  I guess by asking for what changes I can get, focusing on the positive when it’s done, and hoping each cover will be good enough to convince most potential readers to pick up the books and give them a shot.

Thoughts and discussion are welcome, as always.

Links

A few Saturday morning links:

Samurai vs. Shadows, via burger_eater.  I almost skimmed past this, as I don’t generally watch a lot of YouTube videos in people’s blogs.  I’m glad I clicked this one.  It is both beautiful and awesome.

Judgmental Ostrich Bookseller, via otterdance.  In which the LOLstrich gets its intellectual snark on.  I was amused.

So You Want to Make an eBook, by Steven Saus.  Steven converted Goldfish Dreams to an e-book for me, and did a nice job.  He’s working on a how-to guide for writers who want to create/convert their own work and publish electronically, and is posting that guide online one piece at a time.  This is the introduction.

First Book Friday: Peter V. Brett

Welcome to First Book Friday!

Peter V. Brett is a fellow JABberwockian, and was a special guest of honor at ConFusion earlier this year.  I could tell you more about him, or you could check out his character sheet.  Yes, Brett created a D&D character sheet for himself.  (He’s a neutral good seventh level human Bard.)  In other words, Brett is my kind of geek 🙂

His novel The Desert Spear [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] will be out in paperback in the U.S. soon.

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If you love reading, odds are you have a special book. Your first book.

No, not Hop on Pop. I’m talking about the first book, sans pictures, that you picked up and read of your own free will and spare time. The book that opened your eyes to the wonder of reading for pleasure. Some of you still have that book on your shelf, while others remember it wistfully like a long-lost friend, vanished at a garage sale even though you knew in your heart it was worth more than the $.50 sticker your mom put on it.

For me, that book was The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien. When I finished reading it, I knew two things. 1) I wanted to be a writer, and 2) I wanted to write fantasy.

I wrote my first novel when I was seventeen. It was called An Unlikely Champion, and it was a fantasy/science fiction hybrid story, like Star Wars. It was also quite possibly the worst book ever written, and I never even dreamed of trying to sell it.

But I learned a lot writing it, and applied that to the next book I wrote.

And the next one.

And the next one.

It was that fourth book, The Warded Man [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], that first got the attention of my agent, Joshua Bilmes. He was intrigued by the dark, low magic world I had created, where demons come out at night. But he also pointed out some major flaws in the story that needed fixing. As a result, I ended up throwing out about 60% of the book, and writing the new sections from scratch.

The problem was that at this point, my “real” life was in full gear. I was recently married, and a new homeowner. I had a promising career in medical publishing, and friends and family to spend time with. There was never time to write, and when I griped about that, people didn’t seem to understand. Writing was just a hobby… wasn’t it?

I decided it wasn’t. It was a priority, and I needed to find a way to get it done.

I live in Brooklyn, and was commuting every day to my job in Times Square. On a good day, it was about 45 minutes on the subway each way. On a bad day, it could take two hours each way. Such is the capricious will of the subway gods.

I decided to try and make that time productive. I bought an HP iPaq smartphone with a big screen and a nice wide QWERTY keyboard. It came with a word processor that could easily sync to and from my desktop computer.

From the year, I wrote almost every day during my commute, listening to my iPod and thumb-writing on the phone. It was awkward at first, but I was stubborn, and as the weeks went by I got faster and faster. I began to make real progress, free from the distractions of the internet, e-mail, and phone calls. I was averaging 800 words a day.

I completed the second draft of The Warded Man in the first year, and started the sequel, The Desert Spear, while the first book went to market, all on the phone. I was close to halfway done with the second book when the series sold and I began to write full time from home, finally fulfilling the dream that had started so many years ago.

I still have that copy of The Hobbit on my shelf. It is a beaten up third paperback printing, missing half its cover, and bound together with so many pieces of tape that it might as well be laminated. It is also the most valuable book I own. The one I’d grab if there was a fire.

Sometimes I wonder if my whole life would be different if the first book I picked up had been horror or a mystery, a western, or science fiction. Might my imagination have taken off in a different direction, or would I have gravitated towards fantasy anyway? I guess I’ll never know.

Goblin Tales Cover

I’ve been working on cover designs for Goblin Tales, my hopefully-soon-to-be-epublished collection of five goblin-related short stories.  The cover art is by Daniel Ernle.  He created this image for my German short fiction collection Der Goblin-Held, and I contacted him for permission to use it for Goblin Tales.

Some of the things I kept in mind while working on this:

  • It’s important for the cover to work as a thumbnail, since e-book sales happen online.
  • I want this to be recognizable as a goblin-related work (which is why I used a very similar font to what was used in the DAW editions of my goblin books).
  • It has to capture the feel of the book/collection.  (I really like the way Jig looks like he’s setting off on a journey, and his expression is almost inviting you to join him.)

This is what I’ve come up with so far.  I’m not sure whether or not to keep the blurb from Publishers Weekly.  I like both color choices for the title font (though my son and my wife have both voted for the blue).  I zoomed in on Jig a bit more in the second image.

What do you think?  You can click on the pics for a larger view.

 

Writing Downhill

On a completely related note, I’ve gotten about 23,000 words done on the first draft of Libriomancer…

Realms Follow-up

Back in October, I wrote a rather snarky post (Realms Betting Pool) about the latest reincarnation of Realms of Fantasy, which had been purchased by Damnation Books.  At the time, I was not hopeful.  Damnation didn’t have the best reputation, and the owner’s defensive comments in Tobias Buckell’s blog made me want to weep for the fate of a magazine I cared about.

Four months later, I’m pleasantly surprised and a bit more optimistic.  Damnation hired on most of the same staff, including Shawna McCarthy and Doug Cohen.  For the Folkroots column, they’ve brought in kept Theodora Goss, who makes everything better simply by being Theodora Goss.  They’re buying new fiction and art, and they got the February issue out pretty much on time.

I also really like the look of the February issue.  I could nitpick font, but overall I think it’s a good cover.  (Compare this one, the first under Damnation Books, to the “fishboobs” cover that marked Realms’ previous relaunch.)

Since I voiced my skepticism back in October, it seemed only fair that I follow up by stating publicly that I might have been wrong.  I hope so.  This is only one issue of the magazine, but it looks good, and I would love to see the magazine continue.

Has anyone picked up a copy of the February issue?  What did you think?  And for the authors, have you submitted to the new incarnation of Realms, and how did that go?

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