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Why I Turned Down My First Book Deal

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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Wednesday Wrant – What is this ebook thingy?

I don’t really have a whole lot to rant about this week, but ever since I self-published my first novel on Kindle, I’ve been paying more attention to people’s feelings about books vs. ebooks. There’s a wide swath out there, and to be truthful, I’m getting kind of sick of it. So, you know, I’m gonna add to the slush pile of book vs. ebook hoopla.

Yes, I love physical books. I love the smell of the pages, the feel of the cover, the crack of the spine. I get that curling up with a good book is an experience, and I get why people would think you can’t have the same feeling with an ebook.

Except that you can. And it’s actually easier. I can huddle under the blanket, arms and all, prop the Kindle up against my legs, and turn the page with just my thumb, without even needing to move my arms. Take that, Snuggie… and you can keep the book light.

I tried explaining the fact that I published my book on Kindle to my mom, which was probably a mistake in the first place. After about five minutes of going over the process over and over, she simply asked “When will it be available in print?” Then, when I did a CreateSpace paperback edition (for her, and my family who feel the same way about dangerous ebooks), she asked me what store she could buy it in.

She doesn’t have a credit or debit card because he tends to lose them, so she sent me some cash to get a CreateSpace paperback that I could autograph and send back to her. I’m not saying that a signed book isn’t valuable, but in the time that it took her to mail the letter, me to order an author’s copy, CreateSpace to ship it to me, me to sign it, and then ship it to her, she could have bought my book on Kindle 1,036,800 times. And that’s just a 12-hour day.

I volunteer at the library a couple hours a week. I love seeing all the books, the pretty covers, seeing parents reading Dr. Seuss to their kids. But I also have to sort those books. I’m not sure how many germ-infested books live at our branch at the library, but I’m pretty sure my Kindle could hold about half of them – no sorting, no shelving, no late fees.

I read more on the Kindle. Yes, Kindle books tend to be shorter, but I can set my Kindle on the treadmill at the gym, stick it in the pocket of my purse, all things I can’t do with a physical book. I do read physical books on my recumbent bike day, but it’s way easier on the Kindle. I typically have 2 books going at any given time – an ebook and a physical book – and I pretty much always finish the ebook first.

When we moved to Austin, we went through the inevitable stage of divesting of all the random shit we don’t use, which included – I shit you not – 8 boxes full of books. Oh yeah, and we still have 5 or 6 boxes of books in our storage closet that won’t fit on our bookshelf. What are they doing there? Nothing. To get to them, I’d have to go digging through boxes. When I want to find a book I want to read on the Kindle, I go to the index. If I don’t have it on my Kindle, I can browse Amazon right from my Kindle and get it. I don’t have to put on pants to go to the store, and I can get the Kindle edition for about 1/5 of the cost of a physical book.

I love both kinds of books, and I don’t see either of them going away any time soon. The bottom line, though, I’ve sold over 400 ebooks. Any idea how many paperbacks I’ve sold? 3. And I know the 3 people who bought them. Ebooks? They’re the future, and you can pry them from my dead, lifeless fingers like I’ll pry the physical book from yours. Stop squawking about how ebooks are destroying everything. It’s evolution. Get with it.

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KDP Select Promotion Day 1 Report

As part of the KDP Select program, which I detailed in a previous post, I get five days within each 3-month period where The Redheaded Stepchild is available for free download on Kindle. You can choose to have 5 adjacent days, 5 spread out days, or any combination thereof.

I chose to spread out my days for some maximum effect. The days I chose were mostly arbitrary, the first one being January, Friday the 13th. In case you can’t count, that was yesterday, and here’s how it shaped up…

I tweeted the freeness of the book 3 or 4 times throughout the day, and I posted it on this blog. I also let my Facebook friends know, but more because I knew some of them got Kindle Fires for Christmas, and I feel like a bastard asking my friends to pay money for a book where they know all the characters. That was it. As far as I know, the free-ness wasn’t mentioned in any other tweets (I have a watch on the phrase “Redheaded Stepchild” on Twitter).

Yesterday, I had over 300 people download The Redheaded Stepchild on Kindle. The actual number is somewhere between 307 and 342. (It was 308 when I went to bed and 343 when I woke up, and I know I actually sold one for money a couple days before). I don’t care who you are, that is fucking huge. I mean, I’ve had some sales here and there, but I’ve never had more than 300 even look at my book’s page in one day before, and I usually knew who was buying on any given day. I probably know 300 people, but I don’t know the 300 people who downloaded my book yesterday.

I know, I know, I don’t make a dime on any of those 300 sales. Do I care? No. I know people like free shit. Hell, I like free shit. A lot. The point is, if all of those 300+ people like it, that’s 300+ people who positively review my book, tell their friends about it, or lend it to a Kindle friend. If all those 300+ hate it, I don’t lose any money when they ask for a refund (suckers) and I get 300+ negative reviews, and my book still has the Gigli effect (people will check it out just to see how bad it REALLY is).

But the bottom line is this – I have over 300 new readers, and books in hands is more important to me than money and sales. Not to mention, I still have 4 more promotion days from now until the end of March, so keep your eyes peeled if you missed this first promotional day. Or spend the $3 instead of getting that large coffee.

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The Joy of Editing

fter years of pimping my first novel to agents and publishers, I’ve decided to quit stalling and self-publish the thing as an e-book. Why? Well, there are lots of reasons, in no particular order:

  • Indie ebook authoring is the way the market is going. Every time I read something from an author who has gone independent and e-book only, it only reinforces that I’m making the right decision.
  • I know my book’s good enough to be on shelves. I got one offer for a book deal from a publisher (it was a really shitty deal, and I was right not to take it), and got requests for a full manuscript from two agents.
  • It will keep me from being lazy and making excuses about why the book hasn’t been published yet. I can’t blame anyone but myself.
  • Every day I don’t self-publish my book is a day I’m not making money (thanks J.A. Konrath), and I could use it.
  • The Redheaded Stepchild is not my greatest work. I have better stories to write and it’s time to get this one under my belt and move on.

So, what are the main functions today’s publisher offers, since I can get my books in the hands of readers without a publisher getting them on pages and on a shelf in a bookstore? Primarily, editing and cover art. I’m doing both of these myself, which may be a cardinal sin, but hey, if I’m going to be a starving independent author, I need to play the part.

In addition, it’s been more than 5 years (seriously? seriously.) since I wrote The Redheaded Stepchild, so I felt like I had the level of dramatic distance needed to be more objective than I would have been right after I wrote it. And I think I do, for the most part. I’ve taken a lot of measures to make my main character a little stronger (she was a lot whinier than I remembered) and I’ve caught a lot of technical errors I am both embarrassed by and know I would have missed years ago.

The first pass of editing is now complete, and I’m moving on to phase 2. In phase 1, I was mostly cutting – deleting details that didn’t add to the plot development, took away from the character’s persona, or were just weird. Now I am adding – adding details that will help make my character stronger and my plot more believable. I think after phase 2, I will be done editing, because I am getting to a point where I think “gee, that’d be a great detail to add,” only to add the detail then find the exact same thing a few sentences later.

Editing is a necessary but thankless task, and the biggest part of every writer’s life. I can’t wait to hire someone to do it for me next time 😛

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An incredibly full day at SXSW

Yesterday, I finally made it to a 9:30 session, and the lack of energy and sparse crowd in the room at the Digitally Rebranding the Republican Party session. Still, I love politics and even though I am not a republican, I do know they need to get with the program, technologically speaking, so it was still good to see.

I then hit up a session called Making Content Relevant To Me, Here And Now. It spoke mostly to making searching for information better, and improving suggestion engines. I learned about a site called Hunch that helps people make decisions based on interesting questions. To keep the political trend, I learned Republicans prefer iceberg lettuce and Democrats like arugula. I’m too poor for arugula, and find iceberg bland, which might give more insight into my political views than I think.

The panel I really came here to see was A Brave New Future for Book Publishing, and it did not disappoint, except that it left a taste in my mouth that publishers are relying heavily on the advent of the iPad and winning the ebook pricing war to solve a lot of their problems. They reiterated some of the problems publishers (especially big ones) are having, since 80% of books that get published never make back the money invested in them.

But I was challenged to think of the book in a different way, by separating the stuff in the book from the book itself, separating the content from the container. Anymore, the book is no longer the mothership for readers; it’s the content. And even the representatives from the big publishers (Macmillan, HarperCollins) admitted they are built for a world that does not exist anymore.

Instead, the publisher is becoming more of a service-oriented model instead of a dry goods manufacturer. This allows the authors to have the connection with the audience (since they are the ones the readers want to hear from). For instance, HarperStudio, the digital wing of HarperCollins, is profit-sharing with its authors.

They asked the question of what the new players in the book publishing game look like compared to the hardback world:

  • The author of the future: engages its audiences and makes the readers part of the writing process, and gets a following and a community in place before engaging the publisher.
  • The publisher of the future: uses multimedia to reach new audiences, like vook.com who includes video books with author interviews and much more, competes with individual writers, and sees themselves as providing a service instead of owning writers and their works.
  • The editor of the future: looks more like a movie director or producer, who does the line-by-line editing second and decides the best vessel and medium for the delivering the work first.
  • The book of the future: may be delivered in any format, for example, the same novel could be delivered as a $1.99 ebook, a $5.99 paperback, and a $23.00 hardcover, each of which offers something a little different.

I could say more about it, but I would just be reiterating things I’ve already said in some way. You can see my tweets from the session at #futurebook also. The thing that I will say bothered me was that the session seemed to be suggesting writers to write to the market instead of writing what they are passionate about. Even the screenwriting panel I was in advised against that, and they’re Hollywood.

I finished the day watching a podcast recorded with writers from the Onion, College Humor and the Obama Girl, about cashing in on humor, and began the night with some kick-ass parties, most notably with the creators of Found Footage Festival, which was freaking awesome.

This morning, I’ve got a Texas-sized headache and have yet to leave the hotel. And I have no idea how these girls are walking all over Austin in heels.

A Brave New Future for Book Publishing
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