Installment 1:
A month and a half has past since
I began living a writer's dream. After thousands of rejection notices, whether
by snail-mail or email, I received one that congratulated me on a great novel
I'd submitted merely a week before.
Upon receiving the message in my
inbox, I figured it was the usual, expected 'thank you for recent submission'
that always before the 'but' followed, excusing the current economy or trends
in publishing for why my manuscript was not deemed worthy of further
consideration – or words to that effect. Having received other emails at the
same time, I glanced at the other description headers, looking for an excuse to
delay opening and reading yet another rejection.
It came so soon. Ordinarily, after
a submission, it's weeks if not months before hearing anything. This time it
started off differently, as if the planets aligned for a magical moment.
Anyway, I was hopeful but not optimistic as I clicked on the message and it
opened.
You see, I've been submitting a
lot of my older material to publishers - things I wrote a decade or longer ago
and have revised to the point that I felt comfortable submitting it for
scrutiny. This one manuscript was different. It reflected my more recent
writing, something I conjured from nothing a little over a year ago and posted
as a series of installment on Fanstory for immediate feedback.
At the time of writing I was in
the middle of dealing with some rough, uncertain times, having left a job and
being forced to move for financial reasons. In the midst of all that confusion
and frustration I began writing a fantasy story titled Fried Windows (In a
Light White Sauce), a quirky tale about two unforgettable ladies a computer
tech runs into while making a delivery of a new system. Five thousand words
later, I posted the first two installments and, based on the feedback, tweaked
it into a pretty good story.
A couple of members wanted to read
more of the story, so over the course of the next few weeks, I posted some
other stories that shared characters and a few threads of continuity,
essentially giving a real world anchor of back story to the fantasy while also
following the main character on his returns to a world where everything is
possible, just like every five-year-old kid believes.
With a rough plot emerging, there
was a nucleus of a novel, but at the time, I didn't pursue it. Concurrently I
was writing a novel that was about the same main character several years later.
Fried Windows served as a bit of background for the other novel in progress.
After fourteen or so installments, the series of short pieces concluded for the
purposes of presenting it in rough draft, and I moved on to other projects.
Always I considered the work several related short stories. In the back of my
mind I figured I might write some other stories connecting things together as
chapters in book, smoothing the rough edges and expanding the vague conclusion
into something more definitive.
This past April, I started
uploading a number of my novels to Amazon for Kindle, basically everything I
had submitted to publishers without success. Toward the end of that month, I
decided to submit the first two installments of Fried Windows as a single short
story to an online magazine. With the assistance of another writer serving as
an editor and proof reader, a version came about that flowed fairly well. After
sending the story via email I waited for a response expecting rejection.
For whatever reason, I took the
fateful step of continuing to read the rest of the stories. You see, I was
pretty confident the short story would be bought and published. In the process
I wrote another story with the same characters and in the process filled in one
of the known gaps in the plot connecting the otherwise discreet stories. I
posted it on Fanstory and received favorable reviews and some helpful
suggestions.
Around mid May I received a
rejection email from the magazine to which I had submitted the original short
story. Being honest, from the message, it didn't sound like they read it but
who knows. The rejection sounded like a canned notice. By then I was already
well into working with several stories reassembled into the sequence as a rough
novel. Spending a week, I revised the entire story so the plot had connections
between chapters. Doing that required composing four additional chapters, none
of which were ever posted on Fanstory, mainly because of time constraints and
my intention to publish the finished book on Amazon for Kindle which, as many
of you may know, requires that the work not appear anywhere else in digital
form. After another revision, I added a few more things to the story, tweaking
it into something that read like a novel.
The 'final' pass through the story
took another week, concluding on the last Friday in May. As I prepared it for
uploading to Amazon, I receive notice through Twitter of a new follower, this
time a publisher Not a huge thing, there are dozens if not hundreds of small
publishers on Twitter. I followed back but decided to check out their links
from Twitter to Facebook and from their the website.
Unlike other publishers I have
checked out on Twitter, this one seemed to be more about marketing authors and
their books rather than charging authors a fee to enter a contest or submit
manuscripts for publication. The submission guidelines seemed straight forward
and there was an interest in the sort of story I had written. After spending
the rest of the day working on a query, a brief blurb about the book and a
synopsis, in the evening I formatted the book as explained in the guidelines.
Around midnight, I assembled the package and attached it to an email that I
sent to the publisher. The instructions told me it would take four to six weeks
before I heard anything. – nothing unusual.
The following Monday, I received
an email from an acquisitions editor confirming receipt of the submission and
informing it had been entered into their evaluation process. What was odd about
the email was that it suggested I check the status in two weeks if I hadn't
heard anything. I settled in to work on another project while I waited.
A week later, I received another
email, directly from the publisher. I saved it until the end of the list of
emails. When I opened it, at first, I doubted I was reading it right. It began,
with the word 'congratulations'. Not knowing how to react, I did what you might
expect. I checked to make sure it was actually sent to me, pertained to the
book I submitted, and even then, I got up from my small desk and walked around
the house for a bit before returning and rereading the note.
It requested a convenient time two
days later for a conference call. Absolutely elated but still skeptical, I
responded with my availability and my cell phone number. During the days
between I went through the story and reread it. I mean, I reread it as a reader
not its author – which is hard to do. No revising, no editing, not even fixing
the few typos I'd missed that I suddenly noticed. I jotted those down along
with the page numbers so I could go back later. The first eleven chapters
flowed so well I wondered who wrote them. It was a rare, magical experience for
me, reading something I wrote but did not want to change. Yes, that euphoria
wore off in time, but it was something special to feel.
By the time I answered the phone
call on Wednesday, I'd reread the complete book, fixed the typos and had an
idea or two for amending the plot a bit toward the middle. Still clinging to
hope that this was a real breakthrough with a publisher, I reserved complete
acceptance of the reality pending my conversation. There are many stories I
could tell you about ego-press publishers contacting me over the years. I'm
sure many of you have similar experiences.
Of course the publisher did her
research on me, visited my Amazon author's profile, Facebook and Twitter pages.
She told me she read my autobiographical piece on Amazon, which is sort of
humorous and self-deprecating. Also, she read the reviews for my books that
have been posted on Amazon, few that they are.
The overall feeling from the
outset was more akin to a job interview. Foremost she asked me why I was
pursuing publishing through her company, in that I have posted several
self-published pieces on Amazon. After explaining my present situation and my
dissatisfaction with going it alone because I lack the resources to promote any
books properly, we continued with a conversation that lasted for over an hour
and a half. When we ended the call, she told me to expect a phone call
regarding an acquisition contract and in the meanwhile, start a final revision,
which she allowed a month from the contract signing to complete.
A few days after a phone
conversation regarding a contract I received a draft to read and review. I
jotted down a few questions and noted some things I wanted to negotiate. It
seemed fairly routine from previous experience, except I needed to discuss a
half dozen things and I didn’t like the secondary rights. For those who don't
know, secondary rights are for anything resulting after the story's publication
and promotion such a movie and TV rights. The publisher will work on those
things through my assigned publicist once the book's marketing plan is
developed and mutually approved. I signed the final version of the contract in
three places and returned it. According to what I've been told the publishing process
will take the remainder of this year.
I will be posting short pieces
about what is going on. Usually it will not be more often than once a week
because I don’t have the time to devote to anything more and, frankly, I'm not
sure I would have that much to talk about. There is a weekly conference call on
Thursdays with either the publisher, editor, publicist or cover designer,
depending on where the book is in the production process. During this time I
will be approving the editing suggestions.
The first step is structural
editing. I'll explain what that is in the next installment, since it will be
mostly about that subject and will extend for the next few weeks. The official
announcement is today, Wednesday, July 17, 2013. The finished product will be released
sometime early next year, probably February or March. I receive the full
schedule tomorrow. I'll let everyone know.
Hopefully, these reports will be
of some general interest to others. The reason I'm doing
this is that is not to receive reviews, though I welcome comments for these
postings. I will try to answer any questions if I know the answer.
For those wanting to know what it
is like to publish a book through a publisher, this is it. There are
similarities between publishers but process varies as well. For example, this
publisher uses an accelerated 32-week schedule. Some others take as long as
64-weeks or more to produce a book. This publisher does not advance against
royalties but offers a higher royalty payment. They do this to plow more
resources into the production budget for the book which is over eighteen
thousand dollars. The costs and royalties are based on projected sales of ten
thousand books. I want to sell more, but I would be ecstatic if I sell that
many books.