I think online scams like this catch a lot of people unprepared. They think if they aren't being asked for money from the start, then this can't be a con game. But some of the scam artists out there desperately want their victims' attention and sympathy and belief, and the money, if they get around to asking for it, is secondary.
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melissajm asked: Has anyone asked about the best way to get an agent yet?That's something we haven't talked about in a long while. The best way is basically the old-fashioned way: research to find out the agents who represent the sort of things you write, then query those agents. The research part is made a little easier by the fact that more agents now have blogs and websites, which will list the genres they represent, their current clients, and instructions for how to query them, three big things you need to know before you query.
(And you should read Writer Beware's Thumbs Down Agency List. This also lists all the things to avoid, like agents who try to charge you fees, who want to shuttle you off to an associate who will "edit" your manuscript for a fee, who haven't actually ever sold any books. Don't get scammed.)
There are also general writing sites that will have lists of agent names, addresses, and emails. That's a good place to find a list of agents, but it's very important to look them up individually and get as much information as you can. Not every agent represents every genre; sending a query to them for your SF/F novel when they don't represent SF/F is a waste of your time and theirs. Every agency has different guidelines for sending queries, and you need to know what they are so you can follow them exactly. It's sad, but just carefully following the guidelines will put you ahead of a huge number of the other people sending queries.
There are also pay services that will send out queries for you. Don't use those. They're basically spamming hundreds of agents at a time, without following anybody's guidelines, and they aren't worth the money. Nobody likes to be spammed.
There's also this service AgentinBox, where you post your queries and agents will look through them and contact the writers they're interested in. It's a neat idea, but I can see some problems with it. Unless it's policed scrupulously, it's a perfect hunting ground for scam agents who charge fees or people who want to be agents but have never actually sold a book before and don't really know how to go about it. It also looks like one of those things that's going to work brilliantly for a few people and not at all for most of the others. I don't think people should rely solely on it; you also need to do your own research and pick the agents you want to query, so you're more in control of the process.
I know there are also conferences where you can pay a fee to schedule pitch sessions with agents. I've never been to one and don't know much about them, so I don't know how useful they are. It sounds like it's potentially expensive, and again, like something that will work brilliantly for a few people and not at all for everybody else.
tinpra asked a really good question: A friend of mine who's doing a writer's workshop was apparently ripped to emotional pieces because her prof is anti-speculative fiction. Have you encountered a lot of this kind of sentiment regarding your own writing? Has it really mattered or effected you?Yes on the first count and no on the second. When I was in college I took a general fiction writing workshop class, and it wasn't helpful at all. My prof wasn't an asshole, so he didn't rip me to pieces, but he did make it clear that he didn't get what I was doing and he saw no point in getting it. It didn't bother me as much as it could have, because I had already done SF/F specific workshops in Austin and Houston, including Turkey City, and I knew that while my work wasn't ready to sell, it wasn't crap, either. But Texas has a huge SF/F community with a lot of writers, so I was lucky.
Encountering that kind of attitude is pretty common. The British SF/F newsletter Ansible collects quotes in the "As Others See Us" sections that are hilarious and infuriating, and many of them reflect the same attitude that my fiction prof had -- that the SF or fantasy elements in a story somehow render the characters in that story into something else, something different from the characters in a non-genre book. They seem to think that SF/F characters, whether human or alien, aren't undergoing any kind of emotional journey and that a normal reader is somehow incapable of identifying with them because holding a raygun or a magic wand somehow takes you out of the realm of human experience. I think that's it, I actually have no idea. I can't explain an attitude that's so completely alien to my way of thinking.
I'd already been warned in SF/F workshops that that would probably happen in a general college fiction writing class, so I wasn't too surprised or thrown by it. (Though on the workshop day where the prof spent an hour and ten minutes talking about one student's two paragraph poem, and five minutes talking about my 10,000 word fantasy story, that was kind of a weirdly awkward experience. The other students noticed it too and the guy with the poem was twitchy with embarrassment by the end of the class.) I think it's a bit easier now to find college writing classes that are more genre-friendly, and sometimes you can find them online. (I believe
planetalyx teaches one.) If you can't find a genre-friendly writing class, it might be better to look for SF/F workshops associated with the local SF/F conventions (like the one ArmadilloCon does every year). Though one problem I've seen with SF/F workshops is that some people tend to look at them as a way to prepare a story to sell, and if you don't sell your workshop story, it somehow makes the experience useless. Most people in the workshop (unless it's a special invitation-only thing for more advanced writers) are probably not going to be at that level. A good SF/F workshop will help you figure out what's right and what's wrong with your story, will give you a chance to learn how to interpret good and bad criticism, and provide an opportunity to talk about writing with people who get what you're doing and are doing it too. I got a huge benefit out of the workshops I went to, but I never sold a story out of one.
In college, I got a lot more benefit as a writer out of just taking literature classes, and that's what I recommend whether you can find a good writing class or not. My favorite was a class in Russian Science Fiction, which introduced me to a lot of different techniques of writing, plus some great authors I hadn't heard of before.
That's just to get a book into the stores. What makes a book sell is when the publisher not only gives wholesale discounts and allows returns (so the stores might actually order it), but pays for the book to be placed face-out in the front of the store in the "new book" tables or racks, where it gets much better visibility. (There was a trend for a while where a few romance writers were asking their street teams to move their books from the back shelves to the front of the store whenever they visited a bookstore. Chain bookstores usually rent out that space to publishers, and if the publisher's rep comes by and find the space they paid for is being occupied by other books, the store can get into big trouble. The solution was usually for the bookstore to immediately remainder any books that had been placed in the front by customers.) Publishers also have sales reps who will be presenting their current list of books to the buyers for the chain bookstores, and talking them into ordering them. Vanity presses don't do any of that.
On that depressing note, happy Thanksgiving to everybody who's celebrating this week!
I was talking to a friend last night about Nanomorwrimoing, and we got into world building, and places to start. I tend to want to start with the characters, and what kind of people I want them to be, and then come up with a world, culture, etc that will provide the elements and environment that would create those people. It also helps to know a little bit about where you want your plot to go. Are you going to be staying in one place, a city or forest or island or whatever that you can create in more detail, that you're going to need to know more about how it functions, what resources the inhabitants have, level of technology, and so on. Or are you going to be moving around, passing through places that you can paint in broader strokes, that your characters won't need to know much about. You can spend as much or as little time as you want with world building, as long as you've got what you need for your story. A fantasy with a gritty realistic tone may need more detail than a surreal fairy tale.
Are there any web sites that talk about world building? I keep thinking that I've heard about some, but I may be misremembering.
ETA: A friend posted this link on Facebook, and it's great if you need to see something happy: A soldier's dog greets him when he returns from Afghanistan.
Jackie Kessler explains in detail how Harlequin Horizons is a vanity press, not a self-publishing service: Harlequin Horizons versus the RWA:
A-ha! Here’s a big clue that aspiring authors better have their eyes open. Yes, the press has the name “Harlequin” on it. But even though you may think this means you’re a legitimate Harlequin author, you’re not. Oh, and Harlequin won’t distribute Horizon books. Horizon books won’t appear “in stores next to your books.” Well, gosh, if you’ve written a romance, and you get it printed through Horizon, it won’t be shelved in romance! Want to know where it will be shelved? Simple: It won’t.
They won't be sold online through the publisher's site, either.
Keep in mind:
- Self-publishing: author keeps all the money after paying expenses.
- Vanity publishing: publisher keeps majority of the money and the writer pays all the expenses.
Now self-publishing isn't easy; a self-published book usually sells less than 200 copies, even if the author promotes it like crazy. But it's still a better option than a vanity press.
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A link pointed out by
beth_gis: Revenue Reality of a Bestseller If I published only one book a year, and it did as well as this one, my net would be only around $2500.00 over the income level considered to be the US poverty threshhold. This was a book that was on the New York Times Bestseller list.thanate asked: What kind of research do you tend to do when you're writing about things that take place in a notably different climate and ecology from the one you're used to?If it's a real world climate and ecology, I'd try to find articles or biographies written by people who live there, or visited there. National Geographic can be very handy for this. If it's a created world ecology, you can do the same thing for its closest real-world equivalent. You basically need to know enough to give your descriptions verisimilitude, and to give the reader just enough detail to make them feel what the characters are going through, without bogging down into a travelogue.
Still taking writing questions here.
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My cousin Kelly Overton was in the episode of Three Rivers last night. Last year it was very neat to see her on Psych, where she got to be all evil and everything.
ETA: meant to link to this: A Black Gate article on National Novel Writing Month
I have to take Tasha to the vet this morning for her yearly exam, so let's hope that doesn't turn into a prolonged and exciting-in-the-bad-way experience.
They didn't have cool things like this when I was a kid:
Shared Worlds Teen Writing Camp: Registration Now Open
Registration is now open for the 2010 teen science fiction/fantasy writing camp Shared Worlds. Shared Worlds is a unique two-week inter-disciplinary experience on beautiful Wofford campus in Spartanburg, South Carolina. (It’s also fun!) A number of scholarships will be made available. The official sponsors of the camp include Tor Books, Wizards of the Coast LLC, and Realms of Fantasy. SF Signal and io9 have also provided support.
Instructors for 2010 will include Spiderwick Chronicles creator Holly Black, critically acclaimed YA and adult authors Kathe Koja and Marly Youmans, Nebula Award winner Michael Bishop, writer and gaming expert Will Hindmarch, and World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer, plus Wofford College’s own Dr. Christine Dinkins, philosophy professor, and Jeremy Jones, lecturer and camp director. Artist Scott Eagle will also conduct a workshop during the camp. Although the full 2011 roster will be announced later, Shared Worlds is pleased to note that Philip K. Dick Award finalist Minister Faust and Nnedi Okorafor, winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature for her novel Zahrah the Windseeker, have both accepted invitations to attend as visiting writers.
BookLife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer This is Jeff VanderMeer's new site: Welcome to Booklifenow.com, a site that serves as support for and a supplement to my new book Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer. My book is somewhat unique: a manual that’s about how to be a writer in our new media age, but with the spotlight on sustainable creativity and sustainable careers rather than on new media tools, although tools are an integral part of the discussion.
For the new writers getting ready to try Nanomowrimo for the first time, here's two of the basic mistakes I see beginners make:
1) Using stereotypes. Not just the obvious racist or sexist stereotypes, but all stereotypes, any stereotypes. They're a sign of sloppy writing and sloppy thinking. Think about every character in the book, even minor characters, as a real person, with feelings, attitudes, a past, a future, an agenda of his or her own. You don't have to tell the reader all of that, or even any of it, but you have to know it, because it should color how that character speaks and acts.
2) Thinking about what you would do in a situation instead of what your character would do. If your character is a tough adventurer, and you are a tiny person with stress asthma, make sure your character approaches challenges and difficulties like a tough adventurer. And vice verse.
ETA: FTC Guide re Endorsement Update
book rec: An Old Chaos by Sheila Simonson, author of Bar Sinister, Lady Elizabeth's Comet, the Lark Dodge mysteries. Really enjoyed this, though it's the characters that make this book rather than the mystery. (disclosure: I did not get this book free from the author or the publisher, but from a gift card sent by a friend not associated with author or publisher for my birthday. See, this could get old fast.)
art site: Kris Kuksi the sculpture is incredible.
Some people have probably already heard of this site, but it was recommended on the Black Gate blog: Query Shark -- book queries critiqued.
Agents have been getting huge numbers of online queries this year, to the point where it's overwhelming, and a huge number of those queries do not follow the submission guidelines posted on the agency web sites. They don't send it in the right format, they don't include the right information, they query for genres the agents do not represent. They waste time, the agent's time, the author's time, the intertube's time, everybody's time. Like I told the group in my program at WriterCon, if you just carefully follow the submission guidelines of whatever you are submitting to, this will put you ahead of a surprisingly large percentage of other people. It's sad, but true.
I've also got a small collection of publishing information sites and articles for new writers on my web site.
book_wench (Cassandra Chan) has an interesting post on the problems she had writing her most recent novel. (which I'm really looking forward to reading.)I've had similar problems with books, where I got so far down the wrong track I couldn't see daylight. It's a very frustrating feeling, when you know you've gone wrong somewhere, something in the plot is just not working, your vision of the book is not meshing with what you seem to be doing now, but you can't put your finger on what went wrong where. To me, the solution always seems to come in a lightning bolt and be blindingly obvious, to the point where I can't remember how I got on the wrong track when the right one was right there, all the time.
(and I highly recommend her books. They're mystery novels set in Britain, and the first one is The Young Widow)
puddleshark asked: Question: I love the Ile-Rien books, but I came across them quite by chance - they never appeared in bookshops and were never promoted in the United Kingdom. What happens when books go out of print? Can the author regain the rights to sell them to another publisher?Thank you! And basically, yes. Unless they're work for hire (like media tie-ins where the rights to the world/characters/etc are actually owned by someone else and only temporarily licensed to the publisher), if the book is no longer available anywhere, your agent can ask the publisher to return the rights to the author, so then you can try to resell it.
I've gotten the rights back to The Element of Fire, City of Bones, The Death of the Necromancer, and Wheel of the Infinite. The Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy is still technically in print, and is available on Amazon and B&N.com, but it hasn't been in bookstores for quite a while and dealers at the cons I've gone in the past year have told me that it's nearly impossible to get copies from their distributors.
scottedelman has a link and pictures of the books found in the place where Jaycee Lee Dugard was held captive for 18 years -- most were sf/fantasy. It's very eerie, to see books there by people you know.texanfan asked: What is your favorite thing (book or short story) that you have written and why?Of the published books, I think I'd have to say The Ships of Air. I'd wanted to use the Queen Mary as a setting in a fantasy novel for years, since I first went there in the early 90s. And it was the first time I'd written a direct sequel, so that was a fun experience, being able to start with an already established world and get deeper into all the relationships and characters. And I really loved those characters. And the plot involved exploring a new world to a certain extent, which is something I really like to write. There was just a lot of fun stuff I wanted to do in that world that I finally got a chance to do in that book.
Still taking writing questions here.
circe_tigana asked: How do you organise your preparation & research notes when you're working on a project? With all the amazing world-building you do I'm assuming you must have copious notes you need to refer back to and keep in some semblance of order!And have you found some amazing software secret re: the above that you can share? I'm trying Scrivener myself but am not yet fully convinced...
I actually don't have any usual system, and I don't use any programs for writing except the word processor. When I'm going for a specific time period and look, I'll do some reading for research before I start, and make notes of things that I want to use, either on paper or in a separate document in the same directory where I'm saving the book chapters. Once I start the book, I only do specific research, when I realize I need more detail for something, and that usually goes right into the book. So I tend to wing research the same way I tend to wing plotting. :)
Has anybody out there used Scrivener? What did you think of it?
Still taking writing questions here.
teenygozer as a published author, do you find it necessary or desirable to continue your education in writing? I mean, do you still take classes and learn now things that you find you can apply to your writing? Or do you just find reading people's work is what teaches you new things?I think it is necessary and desirable, because I don't think anybody ever gets to a point where you know everything there is to know about writing. For one thing, I think your process and your ability, does, or should, change over time, the more you do it. I don't take writing classes, because I don't have the time or opportunity; most of the classes or seminars I'd want to take tend to be in other cities or states. I try to push my envelope and try new things, read new things, authors I haven't read before, etc.
Still taking writing questions here.
toliver asked: While you are writing something that you hope will be published, do you also write "for fun" things at the same time? Meaning, bits/stories you know will never see the light of day but you write it for yourself, just for fun or other reasons. Do you have several stories going at once (for publishing) and turn to the others when you need to think about something different? Does that help your process?Yes, I usually do. It helps me to keep writing even when I'm stuck on whatever my main project is. I also still have a lot of "I can't do this" issues to overcome. Those are basically when you sit down and look at the blank page and think "I can't do this" and it really doesn't matter how many times you've done it before or how far you are into the book or story. ("I can't do this" is one of the many manifestations of Impostor Syndrome.) So it helps me to have other things I'm working on to poke at, because once I get moving on one thing, I'm more likely to be able to get moving on the others.
Another way to get past the "I can't do this" mental block point is to always try to stop during a scene or at a point where you know what needs to be written next, so when it's time to work on it again you have some built-in writing momentum.
Still taking writing questions here.
From WriterBeware: Postage Promotion: From publicity companies (some competent, many not) to the marketing packages hawked by self-publishing providers such as AuthorHouse (typically overpriced and largely ineffective) to completely worthless pseudo-services (email blasts, online catalogs, book fair "representation"), self-published authors these days have near-unlimited opportunities to spend money on self-promotion.
Such as this one, from self-publishing service Outskirts Press: put your book cover on a postage stamp.
This reminds me of the Hercules/Xena stamp people. Back in the day, they would steal fan art off websites, use it to make fake stamps (claiming that they were real ones issued by other countries) and sell them on Ebay.
Again, I put up a Paypal tip jar, though I still feel weird about it. If you've already donated, I really appreciate it and please don't feel obligated to donate again!
The other stories recently posted to the web site are The Potter's Daughter (from Elemental, the Tsunami Relief Anthology) and The Forest Boy (original to the web site).
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sorka42 asked: Have you ever had an editor not like where a chapter went or ask for a rewrite? and if so how do you handle that?I've made changes to all my books based on the editors' comments. It's usually just tweaking what's already there, like asking to tighten up a scene, add more tension, clarify something that's confusing, pare down or remove a scene that's redundant or unnecessary, along those lines. I've never had an editor want me to change anything that would fundamentally alter the story or characters, it's always been trimming or fluffing what's already in place. If an editor does ask you to change something in a way you really don't like, you should talk to her about it and try to work out a solution you can both live with.
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