eBooks and the Slush Pile

Over the last few weeks I’ve come across lots of discussion about eBooks, the future of publishing, and how the career of a writer is changing. Most of the time I come away from these discussions confused at the amount of information that is out there and needs to be absorbed just to begin to understand the problem. But then it dawned on me:

Ebooks are the new slush pile.

Now, this may not mean anything to most writers today because over the last thirty or forty years most publishers have given up the slush pile. The slush pile was a long and honored tradition of publishing houses accepting for review manuscripts that arrived unsolicited. No agent had sent them and no editor had requested them. They arrived because the writers had enough confidence (or demented ego) to believe that a stranger would buy their work if just given a chance to read it. And sometimes they were right. Thousands if not millions of mss went through the slush pile, but rarely did any one stand out enough to be read from beginning to end, and then to capture the reader’s attention so thoroughly that he or she decided to pass it up the line. If you know how the slush pile works, you know why surviving it is a rarity.

An editor assigned to manage the slush pile was usually new to the business and had many other duties. Her job (and it usually was a she) was to glance quickly through the mss (read page one, check page 200 to see if the author is still on the same topic and can still write, and read the last paragraph to see if the writer is still sane) and select an appropriate rejection letter. The editor signed this, usually with a pseudonym. (Unless you’ve actually worked in a publishing house, you have no idea how many people will show up uninvited and unexpected, insisting on seeing “their” editor.)

If the editor happened to come across something that seemed truly remarkable, she might read more, and if she read the entire mss and liked it, she then had to persuade a number of other editors, all senior to her, that here was something worth looking at. Considering the known writers the other editors were working with, the slush editor had her work cut out for her. And this is where eBooks come in.

There is no longer a need for a slush pile. Any book published in eBook format is in essence sent out into the world’s largest slush pile. Many of these books will die or disappear after selling half a dozen downloads to the author’s friends and relatives. These results are in essence kind rejection letters (“Thank you for letting us review your mss; I’m sorry to report that this isn’t for us”).

Few novice writers will reach the heights of Amanda Hocking, who sold upwards of a million ecopies through her own efforts. But she is proof that there still is a slush pile and that it still works—by word of mouth, she sold her books one reader at a time, working her way up the scale of readership, until she had an audience that would return again and again.

Tags: editing, slush pile, writing, Amanda Hocking

Six Rules for Success

Mystery writing conferences are a great opportunity for those of use who work at our craft in isolation most of the time to get together and renew our enthusiasm. This year’s Crime Bake was one of the best, and I came away with lots of things to think about and new books to read. The panels brought a lot of new names and topics, but through it all, writers came back to a few main points about writing and the life of a writer. These are worth keeping in mind no matter who the writer is—the author of a bestseller, of a first book, or of half a dozen mysteries that sell modestly. So here they are, the qualities of a successful writer as reiterated by a number of writers who have achieved a range of success.

First, be persistent. Writing the novel takes time, selling it to a publisher takes time, producing it takes time, and selling it to the book-buying public takes time. It can take twenty years to become an overnight sensation, so keep working year after year after year, and you will continue to learn and grow and eventually get there.

Second, continue to study your craft no matter how many stories or books you have published. There is always more to learn, always something you can do better. Do you struggle with dialogue? Listen to how people talk, transcribe conversations, practice set pieces with two people encountering each other in a café or on the street. Write things outside your comfort zone—write a thriller short story if you’re used to writing traditional stories, practice a fight scene, describe a place you don’t expect to use in a story and how your character moves through it. Read, write, learn.

Third, write with your whole self. This usually comes out as write from the heart, or write what you love to read, or write what you want to read. But however you phrase it, you as the writer must be fully involved in the task of writing the story; if you’re not involved, your reader won’t be either. This also means, write without thinking about who will publish it. Forget what happens when you’re finished—just write the story.

Fourth, forget about following trends. By the time you finish your book, the trend will be petering out and the editors will have moved on to something else. Even worse, if you’re writing to a trend you’re liable to be writing poorly, writing something that you don’t truly care about, and it will show.

Fifth, don’t complain about how hard this business is. If it were easy, every single person you know would be a writer and everyone would be successful (how that would work out mathematically for book sales I don’t really know). Don’t complain about the agents or editors or reviewers; they’re not going to change for you or anyone else, and they are, for the most part, doing a great job in a difficult business. Their life isn’t any easier than yours. Your job is to write, and leave the rest of it to others.

Sixth, accept the fact that luck will play a role somewhere along the line, so be ready. Write that book, send it out, and show up at events and conferences. You want to be ready when Lady Luck decides to smile on you.

There may be more core rules than these six, but I think these are pretty sound. As I listened to the other writers talk and share stories, I could hear these rules underlying their commitment to their writing.

End-of-Book Rituals

I would be the first to admit that I have a few quirks, but I like to think that most of them are harmless. One that I have learned to live with is my end-of-book ritual simply because this is a compulsion I can’t control.

Whenever I finish a book, as I just have, I know that it is really done because I throw myself into this ritual. I no longer want to read the manuscript over again and again, find something to fix, improve, change for the sake of changing. Instead, I have an uncontrollable need to clean up my office, and this means going through drawers, files, shelves in the closet, to pull out old notes and articles and whatever other paper I can find to recycle. I’m not happy until I have at least one paper bag stuffed full of paper, and I usually need at least two bags to feel I’ve done my duty and satisfied this demonic drive.

If you were to ask me (and please don’t), I’d have to say that I have no idea where all this paper comes from. (And we’re going to be a paperless society? But that’s another topic.) But I sure have a lot of it, and some of it is years old. How did I miss it the last time I did this? I finish a book at least every two years, but the paper keeps piling up—reviews of books I mean to read, recipes I want to try, articles I’m sure I can’t live without or promised to send to a friend, old research notes and cryptic notes to myself.

I wish I could say I was at least methodical about this, but I’m not. I just start rifling through the first pile of paper I come to, perhaps the one crushing the basket where I keep the mail (yes, that’s another story), or the one underneath my notebook on the current mystery novel, or the one on the windowsill that’s been great insulation against the drafty sash during the winter months. Sometimes I start going through my desk drawers, and that of course leads to old manuscripts I set aside when I became convinced the story wasn’t working (and then that leads to . . . and that’s yet another story).

My ritual is harmless, good for the environment, and probably good for my soul. Other writers have other rituals—going out for a celebratory drink that might last for days, emerging from the writing room to meet children who have grown six inches, eating that rotten apple hidden in the desk drawer. I have a friend who didn’t pay bills for three months, and whose desk was such a mess that she had to take bills and checkbook to a restaurant to find a table to work on in order to pay everything.

My writing rituals are as important to me as any of those created to mark the major turning points in a person’s life—birth, marriage, death, and all the other significant steps along the way. The rituals of beginning, stages of the work, and the ending tell me that I’m moving along, and sometimes are expressed in an instinctive way before I realize consciously, fully, where I am, or that I’ve reached the next stage. At the halfway point in a book I suddenly feel like I’m leaning over a precipice and go through an automatic review of where my characters are, as though they too are hanging off a precipice (as indeed some of them are).

I know these moments are coming, wait for them, expect them, and move through them because they tell me that the book is moving along as it should—they are the current of the ocean I sail on. And because such stages can’t be forced, nor can my feelings about them be concealed or denied, I know the book is progressing the way it should. The ritual is the manifestation of my deeper feeling of the life of the story.

Right now, a large paper bag stuffed with all sorts of paper is sitting out on the sidewalk waiting for the recycling pickup, and I am free to contemplate my next writing project, knowing that the initiating ritual will overtake me before I have made a conscious decision to begin. But that’s another story.

Final Payment, the next book in the Mellingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva, is now sitting on an editor’s desk, waiting for a yea or nay.

Ruminations on Choices

Over the last several months I’ve come across three writers who set out to write one book and were nudged into another direction by an agent or editor. All three ended up with a successful book, but one that bore little resemblance to the one they began, and each one has had a different reaction to the entire experience. I’ve listened and sympathized and tried to imagine how I’d feel if I faced the same dilemma—accept the editor’s guidance and produce a successful book, or hew tenaciously, even stubbornly, to my original intent and produce something more satisfying to me but probably less successful.

I’ve had plenty of experience writing for hire, and have gladly used my skills to produce textbook chapters and whole books on topics that hold little personal interest for me. Writing is a skill I have, and I’m glad to apply it to whatever comes along—and pays reasonably well. But I haven’t been put in the position of having to change my original intent in a book or essay that I developed.

This is where many of us, myself included, are ready to think, and say, that we’d hold out and produce the book that was true to our vision. We’re idealists, or we like to think we are, willing to stick to our principles. We believe we know what the best book on this topic is, or the best one we can produce, and we want to see that one make it into print. Or, perhaps we’d go in the other direction and say, yes, of course, we’d do whatever the editor wanted without a second thought. We’re professional writers and we write to deadline, producing what the client wants—a speech for a conference, a grant for several thousand dollars, a book review, an article on laws protecting animals. Writing is writing, and the advance tells us we’re expected to produce something that will sell. Or, maybe we’re born negotiators and we size up the “opposition” to our idea and try to find the middle ground, something we can still commit ourselves to passionately while incorporating the editor’s or agent’s suggestions. The real experiences of my colleagues haven’t been quite like this.

One writer, an accomplished academic, told me that it took her over a year to figure out what was going on. During the entire writing process, she’d thought the editor was obtuse, difficult, and perverse in her suggestions. After months of this tug of war the editor signed off on the final manuscript and said to the writer, “You were so hard to work with—you were deaf to our instructions. Your book proposal was just a way to find out if you could write—we didn’t really want that book. We wanted someone who could write. We knew what the market wanted. You sure made it hard.” At the end of the whole thing my friend felt like giving up writing.

Another writer came to believe that she can’t finish her book without the help of an editor, or book doctor, as they are now less flatteringly called. She submitted her manuscript to one person after another, getting advice, some hands-on writing, and approval after approval. The final manuscript feels a bit homogenous, bland, but definitely polished. This is the result of the school of thought that holds if it is well written, the story or narrative will emerge—somehow. I suppose that gives away my view—there’s more to a good story than a polished sentence, and the writer should have buckled down and written her own book.

A third writer started out with one narrative and followed the agent’s suggestions to produce another, something different from anything she’s written in the past. I watched the book develop and even I’m not sure when it changed course and became a completely different book. Even a proposal for a crime fiction series is likely to elicit suggestions from the editor on the direction the series should take—types of protagonists, settings, plots.

The experiences of these writers seem to announce the demotion of writers, but they are balanced by the new opportunities, reflecting the kinds of changes that are taking place—writers have less and less control over their work, and writers have more and more opportunity to control their work. There’s more work-for-hire writing, less support from traditional publishers, and more opportunities to self-publish and actually sell our own work via Internet and even traditional avenues.

When I started writing fiction in college, the goal was to write well, yes, but also to write truly, authentically. Now, to even say that seems self-conscious and pretentious, and yet the vision of this kind of work lingers.

My three friends have books they’re somewhat satisfied with, and certainly are pleased with the success they’re having. But when I listen to them talk, I hear in at least two of them that bittersweet sense that somehow their book got away from them and became something else, something they like but something that is not quite theirs.

For anyone who writes the underlying goal has to be to write something that only that person could write, taking advice as it comes, keeping the sensible and abandoning the rest, using it to help make the work stronger. I don’t know if we really are beset with more challenges to producing a book according to the writer’s own vision than writers in earlier decades or centuries, or if the challenges are the norm for working in a commercial world, but at least they make me think deeply about what I want any particular work to be, and that always makes for a better book.

The world of the writer today makes me think of the advice that people in social services often hear—change is the constant, attitude is the variable. This is what I keep in mind whenever I start any new project--I let it go, follow it, and learn as much as possible from the whole experience.

Writers and PR Photos

Writers are called upon to do a lot of different things beyond writing—teaching workshops or large classes, organizing and running conferences, serving on awards committees, soliciting donations from other writers for worthy causes, marketing books, and more. Many of these require the dreaded PR materials—a bio and a photograph. (It seems a mean irony that the joy of the solitary profession of writing now comes with the dreaded publicity tour.)

I have figured out a number of bios, but the PR photograph is something I avoid as much as possible, which is why most people think I’m ten years younger than I am. But this month I had to come up with something new, so I have studied publicity photographs to get a sense of what my options are and what I should try for. If I had known this exercise was going to leave me so depressed, I wouldn’t have bothered—I’d have substituted a gray blank with a little circle drawn in.

Publicity photos of writers come in a variety of types. First, there is the serious look—face front, eyes studying the photographer, not a flicker of humor anywhere, an expression almost of accusation for anyone wanting the author to engage in such frivolity. Some of these even come with an uplifted eyebrow, a furrowed brow, a down-turned mouth to emphasize the somber nature of the personality of the creator. These are the authors of serious books—about revenge, dark mystery, rogues of the business world, and worse. I suppose writers (and others) go for the serious look because it makes one look weighty and implies that anything this person is associated with must be significant. Just look how somber they are! We are meant to take these writers seriously—and I do—but alas, when I try to look like that, the photographer tells me I look unwell and would I like to sit down? When I say I’m fine, I’m usually told to relax, don’t look so grim.

The same frontal look with a smile reveals the sexy, the polished, the makeup artist, the good friend, the man or woman with a great sense of humor. For me, I just look like I have a double chin.

Then there’s the pose with props, including glasses or hands—the hand on the face, below the chin, resting on a shoulder, clasped behind the head, on the throat. My all-time favorite is the hand and fingers splayed across the face so you can barely identify the person behind.

Lots of photographs come with other props, usually a pet—a cat but also dogs, horses, and other moving breathing creatures—but also items indicative of the topic of the book. For books about cooking, the author standing over a big brass pot or a tray of food always works. And the most obvious one—books—is sometimes the least workable for me because my bookshelves are stuffed with books and pottery and stacks of paper and old artwork and CDs.

And of course, there’s the setting—with a city in the background for anyone who travels or writes about exotic places. This one would work for me if I could remember to get a photograph of myself when I’m traveling, which I can’t seem to do. The background is a great idea, as long as it supports the theme of the book and, in my mind, reduces the image of the writer. Part of setting is the clothing—a suit for a business book or a person in a yoga outfit for a fitness book.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be comfortable having my photograph taken, but while I was working out what might work, I looked over a lot of photographs of other writers and came away with the unexpected feeling that there really are an awful lot of nice people in this business, if their photographs are any guide. A few faces smiling back at me were sometimes artificial and posed, and obviously so, but many more of them had expressions of delight and curiosity and wonder and friendliness. I could imagine more than one saying, Omigod, that really is my book you’re looking at! I really did it! I wrote a book! The warmth and enthusiasm in the other women who must have fretted about double chins and lank hair and dull wardrobes and all the other unimportant things in a life put an end to my fussing. For heaven’s sakes, it’s only a photograph.

So I stopped procrastinating and finally got a photograph of me in front of my bookshelves—books and me, half hidden behind a hand, looking pinkish with no makeup, but at least recognizably me. And now, thank you to all the other writers who have gone through this cheerfully, leaving your portraits to encourage me.

(If you want to see the final selection, check out my website. www.susanoleksiw.com)

The Future of the Book

Last week I enjoyed one of the treats of being a published writer. My local bookstore, which I have patronized since it opened in 1967, held a reading and signing for me. Even though it was a small group, I still felt some anxiety about what to read and how to discuss my newest book, Under the Eye of Kali, but deeply pleased that I had a new book and could talk about it to others.

Near the end of the evening, two other writers and I got into a discussion of publishing on Kindle and self-publishing (not the same thing, but easy to conflate). I haven’t tried Kindle yet, and sometimes I think about it for my earlier books that are out of print, but I am very reluctant to resort to self-publishing in any format, especially in Kindle or the like, for any of my several mss sitting rejected on my closet shelf. But I am increasingly in the minority.

This is not a lament about the end of publishing as we know it, or the problem with a marketplace packed with self-published books that no one has vetted and are probably for the most part unreadable. No, all that may be true, but right now I prefer to see the opportunity in this dismal situation—dismal for traditional writers, anyway.

It occurred to me recently that those of us who have over our working years redirected our retirement savings into keeping afloat the local bookstore have a unique future ahead of us. A friend who is moving got me thinking about this when he explained that he and his wife had hired a “stager,” a woman who works with a real estate agent to prepare a home for showing to prospective buyers. The stager walked through and told them how to rearrange the furniture, which pieces of artwork to remove or re-hang, and, unequivocally, to get rid of the books. “No one reads anymore,” she said. And they removed the books.

A private high school library recently threw out all its printed books, in order to become an online resource center—no more books, not even packed into bookshelves against outer walls as “good insulation,” as my father-in-law often said.

With the Kindle and a generation of people like the “stager” and the headmaster of a certain prep school, books will become rare and unusual and hard to find. Children will grow up not knowing what a book is, what it looks like, how it weighs down the hand or a backpack, how it is used page by page. This is the opportunity.

People like me, who have shelves and shelves of books, old ones and new ones, falling apart ones and carefully protected ones, good ones and nastily critiqued ones, will in essence have a treasure for a museum. We will open our doors to the curious, to show them the BOOK, not to read, of course, but to observe and study, like a vase or a statue. Little children will cry, “But what does it do?” “Does it move?” “Can you change the color?” Parents will shrug and pull out their Blackberries and tweet their children’s cute comments to their grandparents, who will be sunning themselves in tropical New Jersey.

The museum will also be the site of psychological testing. For those who want to graduate to a higher level of functionality in the world, they will have to visit a museum and prove that they can read an entire book, from beginning to end, in a reasonable period of time and remain focused on the topic. And one part of the test will be recognizing that there is a single topic being developed. This person will be awarded a Certificate of Consciousness.

There won’t be nearly as many museums as you think in this future. Alas, to my surprise, I often visit friends, people I’ve always thought of as intelligent and interesting and well read, and discovered not a single book in their home. But there will be enough museums scattered across the country to ensure that everyone has at least a reasonable chance to see one book in his or her lifetime, not to read, but to see, like visiting a Da Vinci (a real one, in oils) or Van Gogh.

None of this means that there will be fewer books written. Alas, no. But they will be written entirely on little phones and other such devices, and instantly erased if they don’t live up to the standards of the software evaluating spelling, punctuation, grammar, and thought (defined by vocabulary and sentence structure). If nothing else, the number of mss floating through cyberspace from agent to agent will decline, but the number on Kindle and other such formats will explode. But by then the length of an average novel will be reduced from 100,000 words to 10,000 or fewer, to make it easier to read at traffic lights or while waiting in line for coffee.

Drinking coffee will not be allowed in Museums, except by the owners.

Level Best Books at the Crossroads

Early in June the three editors of Level Best Books got together to talk about the future of our project. We had read most of the 70 plus stories and were looking at our schedules. This would be our eighth anthology.

Level Best Books grew out of a desire to publish a collection of short crime fiction by The Larcom Press, for which I was a co-founder. When we closed down the press, along with all of our projects in the pipeline, I felt especially sad about the anthology. In 2003 I approached Kate Flora and Skye Alexander, and over lunch in Gloucester, Level Best Books was born. I had started out only with the idea of finishing the anthology started by Larcom, but the idea took hold, and so began our series of anthologies. Together we published three, but then Skye moved to Texas, and thus outside the New England writing community. Ruth McCarty joined me and Kate in a seamless transition.

The Level Best Books anthologies have been a pleasure from beginning to end, but also a lot of work. We set as our launch date the weekend of Crime Bake, so that we could introduce our book, Undertow, and new writers, and sell books to the ideal audience. The pattern was set, and with the second anthology, Riptide, the cover and interior design was too.

Each year we tried out different names, drawing up lists of weather and New England related terms, poring over possible cover photographs, and reading dozens of stories. We enthusiastically commented on the growth of individual writers over the years, the expanding list of contributors (and sometimes of the definition of New England, but, alas, we are traditionalists—just the six states for us), the consistently good reviews. This project had no downside except time.

And that was the issue. We put in our own money and made it back every year plus a little more (very little more); we loved the stories; we loved the covers; we loved the writers. But we still had only 24 hours in any one day, and 7 days in a week. There was no flexibility in producing the book because our deadline, Crime Bake, was the only way to get the books the publicity they needed to make back our costs. I had the job of editing, laying out, proofing, working with the printer, to get the book done on time. We printed 1,200 books every year, and Kate had the job of delivering books to bookstores, libraries, and individuals who purchased the book. She handled most returns and invoicing. She and Ruth set up events and nudged writers to set up more.

In case I failed to make the point—this is work. And all three of us have other responsibilities, and they were starting to close in on the little free time we had. As we sat down in early June, each one of us knew this year could be tough. We thought about taking a year off, or trying to push through just one more year, but in the end, the problem was now—not enough time to do the kind of job we have done for the last seven years.

Seven years is a long time, and seven anthologies are something to be proud of. So, this is where we stop, on a high note, proud of what we’ve done, glad we did it, and mindful that other opportunities will come along, for us and for all the other writers we worked with.

But there’s more. I wrote the above valediction in early June, before we knew there might be a second act for Level Best Books. The cooperative will not come to an end, though our involvement in it will. Four writers, all known to us and much admired, have stepped forward, and will continue the work of publishing the annual anthology of crime fiction by New England writers. So, to Mark Ammons, Kat Fast, Barbara Ross, and Leslie Wheeler, welcome and good luck and congratulations. I eagerly look forward to the next anthology, only a few months away.