Notes for a Workshop on Writing and Publishing
Zoomed by Holderness School 1/24/2022
My publishing experience
I was a salaried writer for magazines and a computer company.
I wrote a book for hire.
I sold a novel to a major publisher through an agent.
I self-published a couple of children’s books.
I wrote three books under contract to publishers of technical books through an agent.
I became an eBook publisher.
And now my novels are being published by a small independent press.
After college, my first job was with a publisher of technical trade magazines, such as Circuits Manufacturing and Electromechanical Design. Starting salary $105/week.
There I was able to turn my ignorance of the technology into an advantage. Often, experts in one technical niche don’t understand experts in others. Because I knew I didn’t know, in my interviews, I kept asking questions until I had a grasp of the subject matter so I could clearly explain it to others. After four years, I was the editor of Electronics Test Magazine.
On my own time, with what I learned about offset printing from the magazine business, I self-published a couple of children’s books at a time when very few people were self-publishing. And in my abundant free time, married with four kids, I researched and wrote a historical novel set in Russia, Ethiopia, and Manchuria around 1900.
Then I took a job at Digital Equipment (DEC). It is now defunct, but back then, it was the second-largest computer company in the world, with 130,000 employees. I wrote the company newspaper and a newsletter for the company’s 20,000 managers.
Following up on a lead for the company newspaper, I met a former DEC salesman who had become a literary agent. He liked my historical novel and sold it to a division of Houghton Mifflin.
While at DEC, I learned about and became fascinated with the internet when it only included universities and government agencies and the companies that supplied them with computer products. Soon after it, the web went public in 1993. I became part of a small team focused on exploring new business opportunities, The Internet Business Group. DEC soon came out with AltaVista, the search engine everyone used before there was Google. I was assigned to write a book about it, the first consumer-oriented search book—The AltaVista Search Revolution. For a year, that was all I did. It was a work for hire, so the copyright wasn’t in my name, and I didn’t get any royalties. But they put my name on the cover, and I picked the agent who sold the book to a publisher and built a relationship with her that proved helpful later. I became the company’s Internet Evangelist, and they sent me around the world to deliver speeches intended to convince people that there were business opportunities on the internet.
At the end of 1998, after Compaq bought DEC, I was laid off. I immediately called myself an independent internet marketing consultant, and with the contacts I had made, I was soon earning more than I had at DEC. The agent who had sold the AltaVista book alerted me about publishers looking for specific kinds of books about the internet. For each of those, I wrote an outline and an initial chapter or two and got contracts for Online Shopping the Lazy Way for Macmillan, Take Charge of Your Website for Mighty Words (a short-lived eBook publisher), and Web Business Bootcamp for Wiley.
Meanwhile, back in 1995, I had met the editor of National Braille Press and learned that the blind needed books in electronic form that they could feed into their screen readers that converted text to voice. On the side, I took public domain books that were freely available over the internet and edited them to make them easy for the blind to read. I put the books on diskette and sold them on consignment through National Braille Press, one book per diskette. I set it up, so it paid for itself, so I wouldn’t have to waste time applying for grants.
When the initial internet business bubble burst in 2003 and the internet consulting business disappeared, based on my experience with eBooks for the blind, I morphed into an eBook publisher. I put over 20,000 classic public domain books on four DVDs, organized so you could click on a cascade of tables of contents, and the book you wanted would appear on your computer screen. I sold that entire library of books for just $149 and subsets on CDs for much less. I sold them through stores at eBay and Yahoo.
Six years later, when Amazon, Sony, and Barnes and Noble started selling eBook readers, I morphed my business again, reformatting my books to sell them through their online stores. Due to competition, that business (eBooks of public domain works) gradually evaporated.
I’m now 75. I live in a one-bedroom apartment with 4000 books. At this stage of my life, I have no responsibilities. I read, and I write. Since I’ve been here, I’ve written eight novels, a book of essays, and a book of jokes over the last four years. Five of the novels have been published. They are all available at Amazon as eBooks and as print-on-demand paperbacks. The most recent was Shakespeare’s Twin Sister. A sixth is in production now. I finished the eighth a month ago. That one is called We Met in Ithaca.
Overview of publishing opportunities and resources
There are many jobs where you can get paid to write what others want you to write — newsletters or technical manuals or advertising or content for websites.
If you want to write nonfiction, first, you should establish yourself as an expert in some subject area. Then with an outline and a chapter or two, you can try to get an agent, who will then try to sell that first book. And after that, your agent may alert you of possible assignments for which you could put together proposals. Often the publishers/editors come up with book ideas and then alert agents that they are looking for authors to write them. It’s a lot harder to convince someone to publish a book based on your idea, which is what you have to do for your first one. In any case, you’ll only have to produce an outline and sample chapters to get a contract. In general, publishers/editors don’t want a completed manuscript. They want to be able to shape the book to fit what they perceive as the marketplace.
The fiction marketplace is much more difficult than that. You need to have a completed manuscript, to begin with. And you need to have an agent before one of the top publishers with marketing clout will even look at a brief description of your work. Five megacompanies have bought up many of what once were independent publishers. Penguin/Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan. The old imprints often remain, but these five control the business. They command the attention of reviewers at well-known media and command shelf space in what remains of physical book stores.
The agents who work closely with such companies and the acquisition editors at those companies think in terms of categories. They look for books that are similar to ones they have sold before. They are looking for books that fit neatly into specific narrowly defined genres that adhere to tried and true formulas. Think Harlequin Romance.
There’s lots of competition, but if those are the kinds of novels you like to read, you should give it a shot. If you are successful, that’s a job like any other job. You’re basically a writer for hire.
You can find lists of agents and the categories they are interested in through Writers’ Marketplace and many other websites. Just search for “literary agent.” When you have finished and rewritten and rewritten again and thoroughly polished your first novel, write a query message and email it to agents who specialize in your sub-genre. Look online for advice on how to structure your query message. Also, check the websites of prospective agents for details on how they want to be contacted and what to include in your message, and how to format any sample text (if they ask for that). You’ll be lucky if you get any reply (aside from an automatic acknowledgment of receipt) from more than one in fifty. On request, send the complete manuscript, following their detailed instructions. If you are lucky enough to catch an agent’s interest, you may get a request to rewrite. And if you are lucky enough that the agent sells your manuscript, perhaps in a year or two, you’ll probably be asked to write again, perhaps more than once.
At some point, you might want to try small independent presses. A few have survived. And many new ones have cropped up to take advantage of opportunities with eBooks and print-on-demand. In this case, you send your query message directly to the publishers rather than to agents. They typically publish a few dozen books a year. That’s in contrast to Penguin/Random House, which publishes over 15,000 new print titles and over 70,000 new eBooks a year.
These smaller publishers typically issue books as print-on-demand and/or eBooks. Print-on-demand means that a digital file is used to print a book whenever it is ordered. That means there is no need to guess market demand and order print runs, and there is no cost of inventory. It also means that your book won’t be on bookstore shelves, except locally, if you can convince a store to take a few copies on consignment.
They have little or no clout in the marketplace and no marketing budget. It’s very unlikely that the books they publish will be reviewed by major media. The author is expected to do most if not all of the marketing.
Many of the newer small publishers offer a “hybrid” plan, which means that the author does the marketing and is expected to pay some of the costs of production.
At the bottom end of the publishing world, there are “vanity” publishers who expect the author to pay all costs, for whom those author payments are the main if not the only source of income, with all or nearly all of the proceeds from sales going to the author, and with the expectation that only the authors themselves and their friends and relatives will ever buy copies.
As for short stories, very few large-circulation magazines print any stories at all. The few that do, like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, typically only include one story per issue, and those generally are by well-known authors. Many small magazines pay very little or nothing but publish excellent work. Each year the best of the stories and poems from small magazines are included in the annual Pushcart Prize book. Buy a copy. Read and enjoy. That will give you a sense of where you might want to submit your stories. Then check the publication’s website for submission requirements. Some only consider submissions for a few months out of the year. And many expect you to pay a submission fee of $5-$25. Even if your work is sometimes accepted, over time, you are likely to spend more in fees than your receive in payment.
You can also build an audience and get feedback by participating in websites that let you post just about anything. Medium.com is excellent for that. They have a monthly or annual fee, but it’s well worth the price. I’ve been playing there for a few months and get a small monthly payment based on the number of readers who access my work. For me, so far, with about 150 items published, that has only amounted to about $20/month, but that more than covers the membership fee. I’m also a frequent Twitter user, with 16,000 postings, mostly jokes, and 16,000 followers. I do it for the fun of it and in hopes of building a reputation as a writer.
There are many websites that can help advance your writing efforts. For instance, Grub Street offers courses and, for a price, will link you with a published author to get detailed feedback on your novel. For about $300, thespunyarn.com will have three experienced beta readers look over your work and provide detailed feedback. You can find developmental editors and copy editors online who, for hundreds or thousands of dollars, will help you improve your manuscript and make it more likely to be accepted. Submittable.com makes it easy to submit your stories to magazines, pay their submission fees, and keep track of what you have submitted where. Zoetrope.com (which was started by the producer Francis Ford Coppola) lets writers read and comment on one another’s manuscripts. By reading the work of others, you earn the right to have your own read. And there are many online groups where authors react to one another’s work and/or share their experiences in trying to get published and market the works they have self-published or published through small presses. Search for them at Meetup.com.
Questions
Some of you are interested in the what and how of publishing. Others are interested in the why. I’ll try to cover all of that in this brief time. I’ll start with the why, what matters to me.
How do you define success as a writer and as a professional? How has your definition changed over time?
When asked as a child whether I would like to become a doctor since doctors save lives, I replied that we all die; doctors just postpone that. What matters is to have a reason for living. I wanted to become an author because authors can help people realize what they can and should do with their lives.
I used to think of success in terms of fame and fortune. But, in today’s world, if that is what you want, you’d be better off buying lottery tickets.
Ideally, I would like an audience. I’d like to interact with readers of my work and learn from the exchange. And ideally, I’d like to become part of the dialogue that writers carry on with one another from one generation to the next.
Now I realize that we understand through making and doing. Writing fiction is a way to understand the lives we might have led as well as the lives we are living. It’s a way to sense what I might feel and perceive and think if I were in another body. It deepens my understanding of who I have been through the stages of my life and of the people I have known. The process of creating characters and trying to bring them to life helps me imagine what it might be like to feel and perceive and think if I were in another body. Why live just one life when you can live many?
Over the last few years, the novels I’ve written are independent stories but with overlapping themes and styles. Each novel presents a different view of reality, a different way of trying to understand the mysteries of life.
Considering turning real-life stories into “fiction,” any thoughts about the process?
Start with your experience but change the names and let the characters come to life. Don’t let what you think of as the facts weigh you down, like an anchor. Let the story grow and take you to unexpected places.
Why does Hollywood pay so much more for movie rights to published books than for original screenplays?
Marketing is the most difficult and expensive element in publishing and movie making. If a publisher has successfully marketed a book to a broad audience, that reduces the marketing cost and also the risk for the movie production company that adapts it.
Self-publish or seek an agent? Which is most beneficial?
Could you address self-publishing? (Cheryl Borek ’13)
Today, thanks to eBooks and print-on-demand, it’s easy to design, produce, and distribute books, but marketing is very, very difficult. More than 2 million new book titles are published every year. If you write for a narrow, easily defined niche market — like a particular flavor of romance novel — and if you have built a network of friends and fans, maybe you can sell a lot of copies. But that is a steep uphill road. If your aim is to make money, that’s not a good use of your time.
But if you are writing for the love it, take the plunge.
Many people, like me, write because they enjoy the experience of writing, the sense of accomplishment they get from finishing a novel, and the insights given.
Jane Smiley’s book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel provides helpful advice about the process of writing novels and conveys much of the pleasure of doing it. Remember, many people run marathons and enjoy doing so even though they have no expectation of ever winning.
