Category: Mention Monday

Meanwhile, in the traditional publishing world…

Published by Kelly on September 3, 2012

Despite my literary fame and bestseller rankings exceeding 50 copies sold, I still make time to submit my shorter works to literary journals the old-fashioned way, including my poetry and short stories. Well, to a certain extent. There are still some journals that are SO old-fashioned with the way they do business I won’t even bother. This includes:

Ones that don’t accept simultaneous submissions. If you don’t want my work to ever be under consideration with another journal, but you won’t respond to me unless you accept my work, and it’ll be at least six months before that might happen, have fun.
Ones that don’t accept electronic submissions. You want me to print my work? On paper? Then send it… in the mailbox? Okay sure. But first, let me fly on back to 1989.

Last week I had a poem get accepted by a literary journal. I’m always excited and thankful when a journal accepts my work, despite the fact that none of them pay anymore, but I always lament having to withdraw my work from consideration from every other publication I sent it to. For this particular poem, I only had five other journals to inform, and this was how it all played out.

The publication that accepted my work received it back in May.
Two of the publications I submitted to required that withdrawing one of my poems meant withdrawing them all.
Three of the publications I submitted to just earlier this month.
One of the submissions I actually had to pay for, just like a contest with an entry fee.
The publication that accepted the poem has published my work before.

Compared to the last time I had to inform a bunch of journals that a work of mine was accepted elsewhere, this was much easier. Why? For one, I only submitted electronically, so there was a digital paper trail I could follow just by searching my email and logging in to my submission manager. For another, most of my submissions were done through an electronic submission manager (the costs of which some journals are defraying by passing the cost on to their submitters – see above) so withdrawing from submission was as easy as clicking a button.

Oh, and the number of times I submitted this poem to other journals before it was accepted? 19, as best as I can tell.

Keep your eyes peeled for my poem Culley’s Pub: An Elegy to appear in the next issue of Foliate Oak Literary Journal – whenever that may be.

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Audiobooking ninja!

Published by Kelly on August 13, 2012

I’ll be the first to admit that I am so far behind the curve with the audiobook craze it’s semi-sad. I always said I didn’t think I could get into audiobooks even though people like my mom were into it. I recently figured out that the iPod Touch my wonderful boyfriend got me is perfect for ear-reading.

The first book I ever tried to read via audiobook was Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. It was for a summer class, and I had a really hard time getting into the book, so I thought I could help myself out by getting the audiobooks from the library to follow along with. Even then, cassettes were a dinosaur means of listening to anything, so I unfairly judged all audiobooks based on a book that was not for me on a medium that no one used anymore. (That was the only class I ever dropped.)

Ten or so years later, I realized that audiobooks were available in a digital format, available on Overdrive from my library (since I am not a bjillionaire who can afford the ridiculous price tag publishers put on audiobooks), and amazing for specific activities, and way better than simultaneously reading and ear-reading.

RUNNING: I wish I’d discovered audiobooks back when I was training for my marathon. Now that I live in Texas, running outdoors doesn’t happen all that often, and audiobooks are what keep me sane running on the boring old treadmill.
WEIGHTLIFTING: Yep, this is my favorite activity of all time ever. Yes, I am being sarcastic, but it’s an important part of the ole regimen, and listening to an audiobook is a great way to lose count of reps. Not really.
SEWING: It’s one of the primary ways I distract myself when I should really be writing, but adding audiobook listening to the mix does at least make me feel a little more productive.
PUTTING AWAY LAUNDRY: It might be my least favorite activity of all activities, but I don’t want to delegate it in the event that the clothes don’t get put away in the right place. Dammit, dog, why won’t you pay the same kind of attention to *clean* underwear? Sorry – TMI. My point, audiobooks make it more tolerable.
VACUUMING: Yes, you could listen to the buzz of the vacuum, but an audiobook is much nicer.

Not-so-great activities: riding the bus. You’d think it’d work, but it’s a surprisingly crappy experience.

I felt the same kind of ambivalence before I got into e-books, but when I took up e-books, I began reading 2-3 times the amount I did with paperbacks. Now that I’ve added audiobooks to my repertoire, it’s more like 3-4 times what I was reading before. I’ve read 49 books this year, and I feel like a multi-tasking ninja!

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Library Bookspotting for July

Published by Kelly on July 30, 2012

As many of you know, I volunteer once a week at my local branch public library. While I would never dream of bashing another author for his or her efforts (yes, even Stephenie Meyer), I often come across books that make me giggle (A Look At Uranus) or just say double-you-tee-eff a few times. Because many of these are just too good not to share, I’ve decided to make this a monthly feature on the site called “Library Bookspotting”. Are you looking for an RSS feed icon? It’s over there —>

I’ll also be live-tweeting a book each week while I’m at the library if you want to watch me on the Twitterz. For now, I’ll just share all the ones I have snapped pics of so far.

Oh yeah, did I mention I am in Texas? Of course I am, because there is no way this book could exist anywhere but in Texas. For those of you who don’t know, Colt McCoy was the quarterback for the University of Texas, and is a regular folk hero here in Austin. The premise of the book was about Colt’s upbringing on a farm in rural Texas with an evangelical Christian family that worshipped football (as most of Texas does), just in case you couldn’t tell that from the ridiculous cover.

I’ve been curious about the images O’Reilly uses on the cover of their technology books for a long time. A book on XSLT with a horned owl on the cover? I suppose it makes about as much sense as anything else. But this one? Just how does an Olde West-inspired heist, complete with firearms, represent Open Source and Free Software Licensing? Are they implying the software is highway robbery? How could they? It’s free!?

Yes, this is a graphic novel (a young adult graphic novel, I might add) called “Night Head.” Now yeah, I’m sure that this didn’t originate in the US, but you’d think someone would take a second look at the title to make sure it means what you think it means. And definitely before putting in the young adult section of a public library. Yikes.

This is a children’s non-fiction whose sole purpose, I believe, is to train crazy cat ladies from a very young age. For the record, I am a dog person, and I would never tell my dog a riddle because she is too dumb to even understand the difference between food and dirty gym socks most days.

For some reason, mystery books (especially those in a series) have the cheesiest titles I’ve ever seen. For the record, cahoots is one of my favorite words, but even for this feline-themed mystery series, this title is REALLY reaching.

You can find all these books at your local library, but you don’t have to take MY word for it…

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Semi-finally, a best indie book of 2012

Published by Kelly on July 2, 2012

Some time ago I entered The Redheaded Stepchild in The Kindle Book Review‘s “Best Indie Fiction of 2012” contest, in their literary category.

I have to admit it made my July when I looked at their list of semi-finalists this morning and found my name. They’ll announce finalists in September – but for now, I can smile knowing I have a nice gold sunburst to add to my very short list of accolades.

Happy July, everyone 🙂

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Traditional & Indie Publishing: Weapons in the Author Arsenal

Published by Kelly on June 25, 2012

I finally finished writing my second novel, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook on Saturday. Yes, hooray. No, hold the champagne. Now is when the *really* hard work begins: engaging my beta readers, rearranging stories, revising, and editing, editing, and more editing.

Not to mention, deciding how I want to publish, revising my shameless query letter, and beginning the soul-sucking process of sending out queries to publishers. As faithful fans of the Kelly Hitchcock literary flavor know, I self-published my first novel, The Redheaded Stepchild. I don’t have anything against traditional publishing, I just grew tired of the querying (and rejection) process and believed what everyone turned around and said about it – that it wasn’t marketable enough. Yes, this was a nice way of saying “Your first book is about you, which is a little self-indulgent, don’t you think? Plus, you know no one gives a shit about you, right?”

Portrait of Woman in Ink is quite a bit more marketable, I think, and has a much more focused appeal (for those not familiar with the literary adventures of Kelly Hitchcock, it’s a collection of short stories about women and their tattoos). As such, I think it’s more geared toward a more traditional publishing road to perdition. Since this site is wholly my personal ramblings, I feel no shame in saying that it is my personal opinion that authors should not limit themselves to one method over another: self publishing versus traditional publishing. How can you extol all the virtues and bitch about all the drawbacks of each form if you haven’t done them both?

I’ve traditionally published shorter works – short stories, poems, essays, but I have yet to traditionally publish a book. I want to give it a try with Portrait of Woman in Ink, even though I know it’ll be a soul-sucking process full of rejection and self-loathing. Why? Because it’ll be worth it. And yeah, when it goes out of print and I am 80 years old (but still hot), I’ll turn around and self-publish it. By that time, I’ll have a rabid fanbase of no less than 37 people who crave the Kelly Hitchcock literary flavor with a ravenous bloodlust, except for word blood.

Also, I turned 30 last week. Go me.

What do you think? Is it truly an “Us V Them” (indies vs. traditionals) world out there, or should all serious authors dip their feet into both?

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The End. No wait… The End. No wait…

Published by Kelly on June 4, 2012

For my money, the hardest part of writing a book is figuring out where to end it. With my first book, The Redheaded Stepchild, it took me nearly two years to figure out an ending. The book was chiefly about the complicated relationship I had with my ex-stepmother, and even when that relationship was over, it wasn’t really over in my mind, so pinning down an ending was difficult. Even though I could pinpoint our last interaction, it still didn’t feel like “the end” in my mind. So I did what any writer does when they don’t know how to end a story: I picked an ending, and I went with it.

I’m working diligently on the last chapter of my current work in progress, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to end it. Why? Because this last chapter is the chapter about me, and I don’t know this particular story of my life ends. For those of us who write autobiographically, or semi-autobiographically, as my case may be, endings are unbelievably hard to write. What’s keeping from finishing my book is the decision to either wait to see how my story shakes out, or just make something up.

What do you think? Is making up an ending cheating? Or do I pick an ending and go with it?

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Why I Turned Down My First Book Deal

Published by Kelly on April 16, 2012

Loyal fanbase, you are, I’m sure, already aware of the fact that it took me seven years from the time I wrote my first word of The Redheaded Stepchild until I published it. What was I doing in that time besides getting divorced and attending wine and cheese parties for one? I was querying publishers and agents, building up an impressive collection of rejection letters, which I often used to line the litter box back when I could stand cats. I had my copy of The Writer’s Market and I was going to go through every entry in the book until I found that rare Prince Charming gem all writers hope for: the right publisher for my book, and one who was willing to take a chance on me.

Five years from the time I wrote the first word, I finally got an email from an acquisitions editor at a publishing house, while playing pool and drinking beer in a dive bar on a visit to my hometown. My book was in the batch they were going to accept during their next publication period. I probably played my best lifetime game of pool that night, because I was over the moon, thinking I’d finally gotten the big break I deserved. I won’t say who it was – because as you can tell from the title of this post, I turned them down anyway…

The happiness ended the minute I started digging deeper into the company and I got the contract. For the most part, it was pretty standard for what I read in the reference book, except for the following teensy line items:

They weren’t going to let me have any input on the cover. They were going to throw my book over a wall to their creative team and give the nod to whatever came back. Still, the covers I saw looked pretty good, so I was willing to go with it.
They weren’t going to give me any marketing support. Sorry, but my minor in advertising in promotion did not prepare me for how to successfully market my book. When I asked about this, they gave me a stock response about how the author is the best person to do the marketing because they are closest to the project. Okay, true, but don’t you guys do this like, professionally? I’m just a wordmonkey.
And here’s the kicker… they wanted me to pay them a “non-refundable deposit” as remuneration for taking a risk on my book.

Um, yeah… that was the red flag for this redhead. When I told them I was uncomfortable with this, they sent me a list of their author references as a way of reassuring me that I would be happy, successful, and quickly earn back my “refundable deposit” if I took the deal. I read all the references, but then I went and found the authors’ websites. Most of them had long since given up on their books from this publisher or hadn’t published any more books, but there were a few still kicking around, so I contacted them. They all told me the same thing… it was not the greatest decision they’d ever made in their lives.

But still, this was a book deal, a real one, the thing I had been waiting for for five years of my life. Who was I to say it wasn’t good enough? I’m a nobody, and they want to take a chance on me. I did what any girl would do – I called someone smarter than me. Specifically, my most-likely-to-succeed counterpart from high school (or would have been, if I’d been popular enough to even make that section of the yearbook’s radar), a lawyer pal with a lot of contracts experience. No, he’d never seen a book deal contract, but a contract’s a contract, right? And yeah, he said it sucked. He wasn’t going to tell me what to do, but he didn’t mince words about the drawbacks of the contract. He was even kind enough to draw up a list of suggested revisions, reminding me than any contract is just a starting off point for negotiations, and that if I really wanted a book deal, I should fight for one that worked for both me and the publisher.

Well, negotiation must’ve been Swahili to them. I emailed my carefully crafted list of negotiable revisions to their people. And waited a week. And emailed them back, asking if they’d had a chance to view my revisions, to which they assured me their legal team was giving it “careful consideration.” Then I waited another week. And emailed again. Finally, they came back and said they weren’t willing to make any concessions with their standard contract (gee thanks… you coulda just told me that 2 weeks ago). I wanted a book deal. I really did. But this one smelled an awful lot like the rejection letters after the litter box got a hold of em, so I politely declined, determined that I had not yet found my Prince Charming of publishing. And had another wine and cheese party for one.

But… that’s not the end of the story… tune in next week, when I tell the story of “Why I Self-Published.”

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A Parley with Carmen DeSousa

Published by Kelly on April 9, 2012

Today I am joined by fellow author extraordinaire Carmen DeSousa. I recently read DeSousa’s debut novel She Belongs to Me and enjoyed the hell out of it. I invited her here today to talk about her novel, writing, and reaching self-actualization in the Author’s Hierarchy of Awesomeness.

KH: Where and when did you first get the idea for this book?

CD: Honestly, I just started typing. I’ve seen a lot in my life, and my husband was a police detective, so I’ve heard hundreds of stories over the years. One line in a country song can put an entire story in my head. One day a comment a line popped into my head of what a guy might say to his girl and I wrote an entire book off the one line, and the funny thing is, I haven’t even used the line yet, but it’s coming. I am the epitome of a pantser.

KH: Your book mixes romance with whodunit. Which do you enjoy writing more?

CD: I will not read a strictly romance novel, but then again, I don’t have much interest in just a mystery novel either. If I had to choose, I’d lean toward the whodunit, but I like a fifty/fifty mix. I would classify my novels as romantic-suspense. Although my third book will lean more to women’s fiction, and my fourth novel has a slight paranormal aspect—no vampires though.

KH: She Belongs To Me is the story of Jordan and Jaynee Monroe. Are there people in your life who you drew on for inspiration for Jordan and Jaynee’s characters?

CD: Yes. And that’s all I have to say about that. 🙂

KH: She Belongs To Me is your debut novel. From inception to publication, how long did it take?

CD: Twenty months

KH: Why did you decide to go with 5 Prince Publishing for She Belongs To Me?

CD: This is a long story, so I’ll cut right to the chase. I had several options on the table with agents, publishers, and of course self-pub. But in the end, going with a smaller publisher, allowed a more intimate situation and enabled me to maintain more control of the final published work. All the books end up on Amazon anyway, so this was the best choice for me to get my first book to readers quickly, as I have many more stories to tell.

KH: Aliens, love at first sight, writer’s block. Which of these is real?

CD: Without a doubt, love at first sight. I don’t get writer’s block; I just move to a different story.

KH: What’s your next big project?

CD: Land of the Noonday Sun will be available spring of 2012.

When Carmen DeSousa was in college, she wrote her first novella. Her professor wanted something that entailed drinking and fishing—he was a huge Hemingway fan. Well, he sure received a surprise when he read her short story. It did have drinking and fishing, but there was nothing funny about it. It was sad; it was real life. Luckily, he enjoyed it, even admitted she was the first student who ever made him cry and that she had potential.

Unfortunately, it just wasn’t in her future at the time. After all, she needed a roof over her head and food on her plate. At seventeen, she was on her own and a career as an author just wasn’t feasible at that juncture in her life. At that time, if you didn’t live in the mecca—aka New York—you didn’t stand a chance, or at least that is what her peers insisted. So, she set out to conquer the business world, and she did. She spent the last decade and a half in sales, rising to the top of a Fortune 500 company.

Now fifteen years later, she’s back. And guess what, it’s a new world where dreams really do come true. Her first novel, She Belongs to Me, has reached bestselling status and is currently in the top .5% of eBooks on Amazon. But more importantly, she has many stories waiting to share with her wonderful readers. She’s waited twenty years to share her love of the written word, and hopes that you will be just as excited as she is.

She loves connecting with avid readers, so please feel free to connect with me via the links below:

Twitter

Website

Facebook

Goodreads

Thanks to Carmen for joining me today, and thanks to all of you for reading and checking her out!

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The End of My KDP Select Era

Published by Kelly on April 2, 2012

The end of March marked the end of my three-month enrollment for The Redheaded Stepchild in the KDP Select program. If you’re unfamiliar with the program, I explained the crux of it in an earlier post. There is an option to automatically renew enrollment in the program, but I’ve decided I’m done with KDP Select. Here’s why:

Over the 3 months, I didn’t have a single “borrower”. These are people who have Amazon Prime and can borrow from the Kindle Lending Library for no charge, while the author gets a cut.
I think the free ebook promotion has worn out its welcome. There are so many independent authors putting their books up for free now that it’s impossible to get to them all after awhile.
Author “support” sites have figured out that they can monetize on author’s promotional days, asking them to pay a premium so they can give away more of their books for free.
The success of a free promotional day no longer seems to translate to as much success after the promotion is over. The Amazon rankings in “free” don’t carry over to the paid days.

Don’t get me wrong, The Redheaded Stepchild is my first book and I don’t expect to make a fortune on it. It’s just the first step in building my “long tail” of success. But if I really want to get my book into the hands of more and more readers, I need to be on more and more sites. And I think $2.99 is an impulse-friendly enough price that I can keep building on that success. Not to mention that if I decide to offer my book for free sometime, Amazon will price-match it.

Because I am a huge nerd, I wanted to look at the data of my promotions and see what kinds of trends were there:

The first day, the KDP Select giveaway was fairly new, I tweeted like crazy, blogged, and it paid off. The second day, I decided to see how much impact my own efforts had, and only sent a couple tweets. The third day, I stepped up the efforts, made sure I was featured on a few promotional blogs (before they figured out that they could monetize on this process), and again tweeted like crazy. The success was pretty unparalleled, as you can see. I did a 2-day promotion while I was at SXSW because I wanted the people I met to have the opportunity to download it for free. I didn’t have much time to tweet about it, plus the network was overloaded with tweeting nerds, so the success wasn’t as big. I also wanted to see if consecutive free days had any compounding impact.

Also, my best dates were about a month apart. I’ve heard from other KDP Select authors who’ve expressed that subsequent promotional days didn’t yield as big a return as a previous one a couple of weeks earlier. This seems to be the same for me. I did, however, sell more books in February than any other month, so I can’t complain.

It was an experiment, more than anything else, and I wanted to try it out so I could see if it worked. I can’t say it was a total failure or anything, but I don’t think I’ll be doing it again for awhile. I want to get my book back in other channels, and I’m not too worried about how this will impact getting my book into the hands of more readers. The common denominator in all my successful days wasn’t KDP Select – it was me. The more effort I put into getting the word out about my book, the more downloads I had. It’s been fun, KDP Select, but I think we need to see other people for awhile.

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5 Reasons I Won’t Buy Your eBook

Published by Kelly on March 5, 2012

Maybe it’s just because I’m a big cheap-o, but I am pretty selective about what I will and won’t buy for my Kindle. Granted, I still buy more books now than I ever have, but I got to wondering what the formula was for me moving on to the next book on the digital shelf, and I think I’ve got it figured out…

5. Your product description sucks.

I know as much as anyone how hard it is to talk about your own work and summarize what could very well be a decade’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears into a 2-paragraph blurb that will make me want to buy it, but you’re a frakking writer. Think outside the box or something. If your product description has all the punch of a 200-year-old sea turtle, I’m gonna move on. Oh, and if you describe your work as a Hitchcockian thriller, at least spell Hitchcockian right (yes, I actually saw that one). As a Hitchcock, this offends me greatly.

4. Your book cover sucks.

If your book cover looks like it was created in Microsoft Word, uses Papyrus font, or clip art (yes, I have seen clip art), you probably need my money so that you can hire a real designer, but I’m still not gonna give it to you. Also, if your book cover is a romance that explores no territory beyond rippled chest and heaving bodice or a thriller that doesn’t go beyond crime scene tape and a bloody knife, I’m pretty sure I already know everything I need to know. Pass.

3. Your price sucks.

I don’t care if your ebook price was set by the publisher, if it’s more than about $7, I’m not buyin’ it. If your ebook costs more than your paperback or even worse, your hardcover, then I’m really not buyin’ it. There’s absolutely no reason for an ebook to cost that much. If you’re big enough that your publisher is charging more than $8 for your ebook, I can probably get it at my library.

2. You told me to in your Twitter Auto-DM.

“Thanks for following me! I know you’re just gonna love my sci-fi fantasy adventure novel! Go buy it right this minute!” Um, no. Did it ever cross your mind that maybe I don’t particularly like sci-fi? Or fantasy? Or novels, even? I could be an attractive porn star who wants to be your “friend” for all you know. And guess what… I don’t know you. I don’t know jack about your writing style or if it would be my cup of tea. Why don’t you let me trade some tweets with you and let me decide for myself. If I like your snarky wit, I will buy your shit. But you auto-DM me, I’ll never give you or your work the time of day.

1. Your reviews suck.

Yep. Reviews matter. If I read in your review that your book is filled with point-of-view shifts, verb confusion, and spelling errors, I’m going to run in the other direction. If you manage to pull off a brilliantly interesting product description but 17 out of 20 people say your book is boring, I’m going to be inclined to believe them. On the other hand, I’m not going to be turned off by a couple of honest, but bad reviews. I understand that my book isn’t for everybody, so if a negative reviewers talks about painfully introspective and action-lacked your book is, I might just open up my wallet for you.

Take heed, authors. Oh, and thanks for following me! I just know you’ll love my book…

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