Welcome To A World Without Windows - Great News

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.