Category: Publishing (page 1 of 2)

On further reflection

February 3, 2016 / / 0 Comments

I dashed off yesterday’s announcement post in a frenzy of excitement, so I thought I’d try to be a little more reflective now that I’ve had some time to calm down.

I learned a lot from querying and submitting Blood Road. I wasn’t entirely new to querying, but the whole landscape has changed drastically even in the three years since I queried my first novel. Social media, especially Twitter, is such a huge part of the publishing world now. Which leads to my first point:

The slush pile still works.

I participated in several different pitch events on Twitter while querying Blood Road: #SFFpit, #PitMad, and #Pit2Pub—all with no luck. I was actually an editor’s pick for the #Pg70Pit contest, but I had no requests in the agent round. Pitch contests are a wonderful new way to skip the traditional querying slog and interact directly with agents and editors, but they may not work for everyone or every kind of manuscript. They didn’t work for me. Plain, old-fashioned querying did.

It’s a slow business.

That said, I queried Blood Road for eight months—long enough to become disheartened and to doubt myself and my manuscript, especially when I read stories of authors who went from query to request to offer in a matter of days. Publishing can move very quickly; it can also move extremely slowly. I think it’s worth pointing out that it will be more than four years from when I first started writing Blood Road to when it will be on shelves—a reminder that it doesn’t really make sense to write to trends, at least not if you’re a slow writer (like me). They won’t be trends by the time the book comes out.

I couldn’t do it alone.

I had three dedicated beta readers for Blood Road (shout-out to Mary, Hazel, and Akiko!). Their feedback and support have been invaluable. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to my network of writer friends on Twitter and the QueryTracker forums—and of course to my family, who have to put up with this craziness. Thank you to each and all!

Now the countdown to Fall 2017…

Self-promotion and social media

June 2, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Image by sqback on SXC.hu

There’s a lot to be said for the freedom of self-publishing. To have complete creative control over the book-production process—it really does have a great many pros (and a few cons, of course, as with any sort of freedom. There’s definitely a social-contract aspect to publishing.). Lately, though, the thing I’ve appreciated most about being a self-published author is that I’ve got the freedom not to promote myself.

If your social-network feeds are anything like mine (and if you’re in the writing community, they probably are), then you’re being steadily bombarded by promotional tweets and posts—a constant clamoring for attention by authors and publishers. There are ways to do promotion tastefully, and certainly some promotion is necessary—I know I like to draw my followers’ attention to book giveaways or Amazon deals, etc. But it gets exhausting, and I have to admit I’m not at all likely to click through to an author’s book if they’re clogging my feeds with their promotional posts. In all honesty, I hate posting to Twitter and Facebook about my book. And, incidentally, I haven’t noticed a significant increase in sales when I do it. I’d venture to guess that a lot of people feel the same way I do about self-promotion on Twitter or other social-networking sites. It’s irritating, not effective.

The counterargument, I suppose, is that I should have known what I was signing up for when I decided to self-publish. Especially for self-published authors, it’s our own responsibility to market ourselves, unless we’ve the budget to hire a professional publicist (I don’t). So even if I find it distasteful I just need to grit my teeth and get it over with. But here’s the thing—I’m self-published. At the end of the day, the only one setting marketing goals is me. And if I’d rather leave off the spammy promotional posts and use my Twitter and Facebook feeds for real, meaningful dialogue, that’s my prerogative.

In my case—maybe for others, maybe not—self-publishing came with this worrisome need for self-affirmation, the need to prove myself a real author. Thus the need to be pushing my book constantly, reminding people that I’m here, I exist and I’ve written a book! How refreshing to realize I don’t need to do that. I have the freedom not to talk about my book. If readers discover my book through interacting naturally with me, that’s great, of course; but it needn’t be the be-all, end-all of my presence on social media. And that’s a weight off my mind.

[Housekeeping notes: I apologize for being so inactive lately. Most of you probably know that I moved to Japan back in March, and in some ways I’m still adjusting to new routines. I haven’t had much time either for writing or for this blog, but I do check in on Twitter fairly often, so please feel free to follow me there: @9inchsnails.]

In which she admits to being elitist

February 14, 2014 / / 6 Comments

I think most of what is called “elitist” is a mask for anti-intellectualism — I mean, there is such a thing as excellence.

The above is from a 1992 interview with Susan Sontag, the transcript of which I read here. It’s a great interview filled with wonderful reflections on writing and literature and it touches on something I’ve been thinking about for a while—ever since I decided to self-publish His Own Good Sword, possibly ever since I started thinking seriously about publishing at all. There is indeed a strong anti-elitist current running through the modern literary landscape, exacerbated and best illustrated by the boom in self-publishing and the exploding popularity of events like NaNoWriMo (which last year had nearly 400,000 participants worldwide), but by no means limited to the ranks of self-published writers. Words like “elitism” and “gatekeepers” connote stuffiness and obsolescence. To be elitist is to be out-of-touch with the state of modern publishing. After all, writing is democratic: everyone should have the right to express their creativity in words.

The problem is that when you write—and especially when you choose to make your words known to the world—you’re entering into a great conversation that’s been going on for thousands of years. While it’s not mandated by some sort of Writing God that you pay careful attention to what’s gone before you, what’s already been said, it certainly makes you seem presumptuous when you don’t—when you consider yourself ready to engage in the discussion with a minimum of preparation or with no preparation at all. Everyone has the right to write, but with that right comes responsibility: to listen, to learn, to be aware of your context, above all to read, and especially the classics (and not just the 20th-century classics; the roots of contextualization need to go much deeper).

As writers we’re told constantly to be immersed in our market. This means reading what’s currently popular, particularly in our chosen genre. This is problematic. This is equivalent to building an economy around one export item, making yourself entirely dependent on that item; and then when the demand shifts or you’ve used up all your resources you’ve got nothing to fall back on. Essentially writers need to diversify if they want staying power. (There’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy if you write YA contemporary. If you argue that there is, perhaps it says more about the state of YA contemporary than anything else.)

If it’s elitist to argue that writers should strive for contextual awareness in the landscape of literature, then I have to admit I’m elitist. But in all honesty it’s remarkably humbling to realize your place in the conversation.

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