It’s been almost exactly a year since I made the announcement that Ellora’s Cave would not be publishing my book after all due to the fact that they were going out of business and cancelling all contracts.
This time around, the situation is different, although the result is approximately the same. NineStar Press, the publisher I signed with in May, stipulated from the outset that their acceptance of my book for publication was contingent on me working with them to reduce the size of Part One (which is the first third of the book).
I fully intended to honor that agreement, but once we got past the generalities and shifted to the actual editing process, I wasn’t willing to make some of the cuts that the editor thought were necessary.
Yes, I’ve been haunted by the stereotype of the self-important newbie author who thinks every paragraph that went into the original manuscript is a golden masterpiece, that every utterance is sacred. I’ve tried to avoid being the kind of author that publishers and editors tell war stories about at conferences, and I hope I’m not parting company from NineStar leaving too much of a bad taste in their mouths, but, yes, I’m admittedly picky about this manuscript. I’m not seeking to get a book published. I’m seeking to get this book published.
Since we weren’t able to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement about the cuts, and could not reconcile the impasse, I requested to have my rights reverted back to me. The folks at NineStar were very prompt and cooperative once I made the request, which has enabled me to resume querying immediately.
Oh well… other authors have talked about wallpapering their room with rejection letters. I guess I’ll get to be one of the few who gets to wallpaper a room with acceptance letters and contracts that still didn’t quite result in a published book.
On the one hand, I’ve had rather rotten luck so far – the first publisher going out of business and irreconcilable creative diffs with the second – but it also means two different publishers bit. I’ll find a third.
This post was reposted from my blog. Cleared with the moderators in advance
My condolences. Heartfelt condolences. Getting your book into print can be a real bitch. I know – I’ve got three that I’ve been pushing for over a year. You, at least, have had more success with this one.
Take heart from the fact that two publishers said “yes” to the book as an indication that it IS publishable and of interest. I’ve never heard of a book getting this far with two publishers before events shut it down.
Perseverence is all. Persist and ye shall be rewarded.
Well, not wishing to threadshit, and in full sympathy with not getting the book published, I have to say, would you benefit from having an independent editor, that you pay, take a look at it?
With all due respect, having read your posts here and in your blog, you sometimes have a tendency to be a little repetitive. And sometimes hard to follow. Obviously, I don’t know what the problem was with this editor, but there’s an oft-quoted phrase in the industry about killing your darlings.
I would say, get it professionally edited. Note that a decent editor will probably charge you a lot, and someone who doesn’t probably isn’t a decent editor. Then self-publish it, which can be done easily, with tools available at no cost on the internet. Lots of people here have done it, including me (I republished a book originally out with Ballantine after getting the rights back). The big cost and the one you shouldn’t skimp on is editing. And, I guess, the cover. You already have plenty of ways to optimize the marketing of the book, once it’s out.
Generall good advice, Hillary N. Suze; before Ellora’s Cave died, I had the services of their in-house editor Susan Edwards, who did line by line cleanup and had me change some things (especially a tendency to write overly long sentences and overly long paragraphs). I’m not averse to getting another editor on board. Less interested in self-pub unless all other options are exhausted. Self-published books don’t get real review and have trouble getting access to distribution channels.
Bummer, but, really, that says it all. You weren’t willing.
I’ve sold a handful of stories here and there, and when an editor says, “Cut,” I cut. It’s no fun…but you just have to be coldly professional about it. They’re the guys with the money.
Very sorry for your disappointment – and ours, too, because, like panache45, I’d have enjoyed owning a copy. Still, there will be other editors and other publishers, and you’ll write more books (please do!) Next time, do as the real pros do, and “kill your children,” i.e., make the cuts, no matter how much it hurts.
It sounds like you may be burning bridges in front of you. You are seeking niche publishers in a niche market, and the last publisher sounds like they were very eager to let you out of your contract. Those war stories at conferences? I doubt that they happen only at conferences. You don’t want to get a reputation among your small list of possible publishers as someone that is too much hassle to deal with.
As a reader with no published works and with no connection to publishing, I think a good general rule of thumb is to look at the edits that the professional editors at the professional publishers ask you to make and ask yourself “how many millions of copies of books have I sold so far?” If the answer to that question is “none millions,” then you should listen to their advice. (And even when someone sells enough millions of copies that they are Too Big To Edit, their work usually suffers because of it.)
Professional publishers don’t tell you to make edits to screw with you, they tell you to make edits because they think your book needs work to be publishable and sellable. If you want your book to be published as-is, go for a vanity publisher that will print out copies of whatever you pay them to print out.
In the initial offer, I was told that NineStar wanted to publish my book, contingent on me working with the editor to shorten Part One, which is the first third of the book. I said yes, contract was signed, then I got nervous and asked approx how many words he wanted the wordcount reduced by. The editor said it wasn’t a specific wordcount, he was concerned about redundancy. Embedded in that email reply was a suggestion that I pick out five or six scenes representative of that period.
Turns out he meant “Pick out five or six representative scenes and get rid of the rest of Part One”. I didn’t realize that. I thought he meant to use that as an initial strategy for writing less redundantly or something.
I wasn’t amenable to replacing 111 pages’ worth of writing with perhaps 9 or 10. It would not be an edited version of the book if that were to happen, it would be a massively different book. Part One of the book shows the main character* going through adolescence and doing his first forays into actual sexual expression. This is formative; it’s ground zero for explaining most gender and sexual orientation development sufficiently, and all the more so when trying to explain an identity that people haven’t run into before.
The whole point of the book is to put the readers in a good vantage point while I “show, don’t tell” them what it means to be this way. It just doesn’t work to start off in college. Attitudes and reactions already in place by that age were formed by the years prior, the years that the editor wanted to cut.
Just putting that out there again. I’m happy with my decision.
I may do that some day. But not yet. I’ve only queried 31 publishers (compared to 1000 literary agents). Of those 31 publishers, 2 have said “we’d like to publish your book”. When reach the point that I’ve queried every single small publisher (of the sort that will accept queries from authors as opposed to queries from lit agents), and they’ve all said “no”, that’s the time to contemplate self-publishing. But self-publishing is the equivalent of running for office without a political party: you don’t get anywhere with it unless you’re prepared to dump jaw-droppingly huge amounts of money into the process to publicize your project. Self-published books don’t get reviews. They are seldom taken seriously by academics considering what to order for their courses.
“main character” being me insofar as it’s a memoir
Out of curiosity, what do the publishers want cut, and what do they usually want an author to cut? Is it that they want your book to be *more *formulaic, *more *trope-ish? Is it just that they’re more likely to view things through a lens of “fluff” - “let’s cut out 50 pages of fluff” and you and them cannot agree on what is fluff and what is not?
Okay, to be fair there are edits and there are edits. Couple of notable examples:
The Stand by Stephen King. Original manuscript was “too long” so an editor went at it. Poorly. Ended up with characters that had no seeming purpose, storylines that seemingly went nowhere, and the book only survived because it was, overall, a damned good story told by a damned good storyteller. When the original was republished in its entirety, the book sold like hotcakes and everyone I know who’s read both agrees the huge “unpublishable” book is infinitely better. This is one where the editor should have been shown the door with no ceremony. If The Stand had been King’s first book and treated thusly it might have derailed his entire career.
Second example, Robert Heinlein’s own edit of Stranger In A Strange Land, which removed, IIRC, about 60,000 words total. He did a masterful job of it. By the time I read the unedited version I’d read the originally published version probably twenty times so I could see clearly what had been cut from the manuscript. I have no hesitation in saying the unedited version is better–it’s richer, more fully fleshed out and very entertaining and yet the original version is perfectly readable and suffers only in comparison. This is an example of how to edit a book correctly. Or “brightly, brightly and with beauty.”
I have no idea where the edits proposed for AHunter3’s book fall on this continuum, but I can say that it’s by no means a slam dunk that every editor is right about where and how much to cut from a manuscript.
As I’ve said, this is my second publisher. The editor I worked with at Ellora’s Cave, the first publisher, made no overall requests that I was uncomfortable with. She wanted a couple places where I had stuff like “then I went over to where the others were and they seemed surprised to see me at a pot party” to be changed to "I walked over; Sam lifted his head and his eyes widened; Chris said “Whoa! I thought you were way too square to hang out with a bunch of stoners!” or equivalent, and she wanted, in particular, for me to find and chop up my longer sentences and longer paragraphs. She didn’t say anything about Part One being a problematic part of the book.
So the feedback I got from the guy at NineStar is unique to him. He wanted to cut the first 100 pages, give or take – not cut them down, but cut them OUT and start the entire story off about 5 years later than where it starts in its current form.
Oh yes. I’ve had dozens of beta readers, including a handful of Dopers, and although not everyone has given me as much feedback as I’d like, I’ve had quite a bit of it.
There’s no denying that the intensity, the extremes of violence and angsty loneliness and desperate “what the fuck AM i then?” identity-questioning, all that, kicks into high gear in early adulthood after seeming to smooth out during high school; and while the bullying in 8th grade is portrayed as pretty intense stuff, the story arc of Part One by itself is that an uptight authority-worshiping rigid teacher’s pet kind of kid – who got that way in large part because he was girlish and got picked on and teachers used to protect him – comes out of his shell and tries to normalize and function socially and has some successes and starts to blossom.
If you were to ask me for something to compare the “feel” of Part One to, I’d direct you to She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb – it’s not a lot of action or suspense, it’s a slow evolving of a complex and somewhat damaged main character who has a lot of pathetic characteristics but is aware of them and has bravery and endurance as well, and we end up liking her and rooting for her.
And maybe that’s not the kind of book that NineStar was interested in publishing.
I’ve read this book in several different forms (loooong-ass original, shortened version, professionally-edited version) and I think the first section is essential to the story. Absolutely essential. It would not be the same book if the 111 pages of the first section were replaced by 9 or 10 pages. A little more tightening up would be fine, but you can’t just cut 100 pages from the beginning of the book and have it be the same book.