Frustrated and ignorant author signing in!
A question for anyone out there who has ever written a book, or knows the answer to my questions:
If, for instance, I would write a book about a certain group of people, and in order to collect stories pertaining to each one, I would have to interview and question them. Would most writers have to pay each person they interview, or do people just want to be in print so badly they would do it for free? how do you find these people (advertise, etc)?
How expensive is it to have a book published? Seems lately I’m seeing some pretty average Joes get their books on the best sellers list.
Any advice on starting out?
Thanking you in advance.
I assume you’re talking nonfiction. Usually, you don’t pay for interviews. If someone insists on payment, you’ll have to use your judgment. As to finding the people, that depends on what group you’re talking about.
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!! :eek: Repeat after me: Money flows TOWARD the writer. Money flows TOWARD the writer.
There. I’ve calmed down. And the answer is simple: it should cost you nothing – zero, zilch, zip, nada – to have a book published. No legitimate publisher is ever going to ask for you to send them a cent; the same for agents. If either one says you have to send the money – no matter how “reasonable” their explanation, walk away. No, run away. They are out to rip you off and, unfortunately, all too many beginning writers fall for their scams.
This is especially true for any electronic/print on demand “publisher.” Right now, they’re all going bankrupt, anyway, and are looking for ways to get more money from you, and not from selling books. The Internet has become the haven for vanity presses, and if you think publishing with one of them means anything, you’re deluded. Your friends and family will get copies (which you’ll pay extra for), but no one else.
Yes. Write what you love to read. Work your ass off getting things exactly right. Write every day and don’t stop when you finished your first book – immediately begin another.
Look for advice. There are some good writing discussions at http://www.sff.net and you can go to the Usenet groups misc.writing and alt.writing for information. Also peruse alt.writing.scams to see what to avoid. If you think you’d like a workshop, try Critters (http://www.critters.org), which has had some success and won’t rip you off.
Remember Heinlein’s five rules:
You must write.
You must finish what you write.
You must refrain from rewriting except under editorial request.
You must market your work.
You must keep your work on the market until it sells.
<<You must refrain from rewriting except under editorial request.>>
Now I wish I had the e-mail addresses of some of my fiction writing instuctors. Every one of them wanted draft after draft of stories…I never wrote more than one draft of anything, since they never actually asked to see the early drafts; I decided that the stories I did do muliple drafts for drifted farther from what I wanted to say with each revision. Then again, I got pissed when my advanced fiction writing professor had the gall to tell us " Beginning writers should only write in third person," (no one in that class had been writing for less than 10 years)so I handed in my next story written in second person. It was the only story I wrote for class that he actually liked!
I’m not familiar with the context of Heinlein’s rules, but I’d like to think that he was talking about not rewriting AFTER you’ve submitted your manuscript to a publisher and it’s begun going through the editorial process. Nothing irritates an editor more than having an author start making unrequested substantive changes when schedules, castoffs (page counts), art lists, and so on have already been set.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject, PLEASE follow your publisher’s formatting instructions. Double-spaced text (for EVERYTHING), generous margins, fixed-width font, no fancy formatting in electronic files. Your copyeditor will thank you, and will be able to do a better job of making YOU look good. Life is too short to copyedit a thousand pages of single-spaced 8-point Wacko Bold Italic.
Heinlein’s rule number 3 is open to various interpretations, and Heinlein himself was know to rewrite his work. But the key word is “refrain.” He’s not saying “don’t rewrite”; he’s saying “do it sparingly.” More importantantly, “learn when to quit.”
I know of one writer in a bunch of creative writing classes who would continue to rewrite the same story every few months. The story eventually got published, and she still brought a rewritten version!
As well you should. Third person might be easier for a beginner to master, but they need to learn how to write in first person (and yes, even in second), too.
As far as rewriting is concerned, each author is different. Isaac Asimov never rewrote (he once joked that when he wrote a novel, he’d keep typing until he’d reach 70,000 words, and then stop – and luckily, each time so far this had been at the end of a sentence).
Writing is like driving a car very fast with no sleep from LA to Chicago. Rewriting is going back, getting out of the car, using the Leatherman to cut the head off the road-killed coyote on the shoulder, & tossing the skull in the trunk for analysis later.
[stumbling in with a scotch and a cigarette, lipstick smeared]
My advice to you is the same that I’ve given three other people on this board.
Get ready to cry, tear your hair out, scream, throw things, swear and generally hate writing at some point.
I think it’s so nice that I don’t even have my first book published and it’s already so emotionally torturous that I’m jaded and cynical about it.
When an agent or a publisher says they like your book and they think it’s really good? Don’t believe them. Because three weeks later they’ll decide it isn’t. [/stumble out]
Seriously though, best of luck to you… I’m sure you’ll be more successful than me.
Get The Idiot’s Guide to Getting Your Book Published – it’s Book Publishing 101.
I agree with the above – write What you like, and write about it in the style you like to read yourself. Be enthusiastic – if you are, it will carry over into your writing and infect your reader.
DO rewrite if necessary. It sounds like a made-up story, but I swear this is true – I gave the first draft of Medusa to Pepper Mill to read, and she told me that it read like a thesis. “No one is going to want to read this,” she said. Thank goodness I have an honest critic for a wife. I threw it out and started over from scratch. (This was, to give you some persepective, about 350 typescript pages.)After I got it accepted I still had to go through the editor’s changes and suggestions. And I had to edit it myself several times. (This is another good reason to write about What you like in a Style you like – you are going to be re-reading your own book a LOT. You will come to hate your own book.)
Learn how to write a good Book Proposal. Look in books on writing (like the one I cite above). The Book Proposal is what sells your book. Make it catchy. Tell them why people will want to read your book. Tell them WHO is going to buy your book, and WHY (publishing is a business, not an altruistic venture. Even University Presses have to make enough money to keep going). Above all, be informative and entertaining.
Probably toxic advice from an as-yet-unpublished author:
I used to hate the idea of rewriting because I saw it as fascist. I wanted what my audience read to be the raw flow of emotions and ideas that poured from my heart and mind. Then I realized that like many good things, sometimes the raw emotions and ideas that pour out of you needs to be refined in order to be meaningful to an audience.
You have to decide if you’re trying to communicate or just looking to emote. If you don’t care about other people getting your point, rewriting is largely unnecessary. You are writing for therapy and the mere act of getting it out of you will do the job. If you are looking to become the kind of writer about whom people say “I just love his books, they have a tremendously important place in my life,” then you might want to consider rewriting a little more necessary.
That being said, what is helping me get through the writing process on novel number one is to resist my anal-retentive urge to make everything perfect on the first go through. I’ve spent an hour rewriting one sentence. And not one of those Faulknerian four-page sentences, either. The thing that I’m trying to do is get a story told … a heartbreaking story, as it happens, but just a story. I want the reader to be taken away with the characters I’ve given voices to, to become involved in those characters, to feel those characters’ pain and joy. But to get to that, first I have to get the bones of the story connected. To that end, I get up at 5:00 every morning and write for an hour to an hour and a half. The house is quiet and I can concentrate. Once I have all the bones connected, I’ll go back and add flesh … then soul.
You have to have a little bit of a God complex to write fiction, from what I can tell, especially if you have characters you plan to kill off.
I have a publishing question too. As I understand it galleys are what the publisher sends to the author to look over before publication of the author’s work. How many of these things are likely to be floating around for a particular book?
A couple of years ago the English department had a book sale, and they offered the leftover books to those of us who had late classes in the building. The only one that stuck my interest was written by one of my professors, so I took it home, but promptly forgot about it. For lack of anything else to read, I pulled it out last night, and was surpised it wasn’t a play like I thought (given its binding) but instead it’s a short novel with this message printed on the front of it: These are uncorrected bound galleys. please check any quotations or attributions against the bound copy of the book. We urge this for the sake of editorial accuacy as well as for your legal protection and ours.
I assume he gave this to the English department, but it seems like something an author would want to hold onto.
Bound galleys (as opposed to galleys) are strictly promotional. The publisher wants to get copies of a book to reviewers. However, if you wait until the book is published, the review won’t appear until much too late (magazine reviews are often written several months in advance). So they take the galleys (which are used in-house to check for typos; a copy is also sent to the author for the same reason) and give them a binding and cheap cover. There’s usually a warning that there may be changes, though by the time the book gets to the galley stage, the only changes are usually typoes, dropped lines, and the like.
As to their value, it depends. Bound galleys are rare, but I don’t know if there’s much of a market for them. The prof may want a copy of his own (I have a couple of mine), but probably not enough to pay for them – and if they were in a book sale, he was probably done with it. One data point: when my novel came out, the cover price was $3.50. Bound galleys were selling for $2.50.
I missed this on first read – and there is one exception: It’s pretty much standard practice for the author to pay to have an index made for a nonfiction book. As I understand it, the indexer’s fee is deducted from the author’s royalties. Many authors are attempting to do the index themselves as a result – but the managing editors I know absolutely tear their hair out when this happens. A professional index can make your book marvelously useful; a bad index (and I have yet to hear of an author who’s produced a good one) can be more frustrating for the reader than none at all.
I did my own index – God knows I couldn’t afford to pay someone for this (and the last thing I need is another deduction from my royalties). I think this must be pretty standard at Oxford University Press – they give the authors a handout on how to make your index. Now I know why they call them “index cards”.
Anyway, have a look at my index and let me know if it’s any good.
That second sentence is the key. The publisher isn’t going to require you pay an indexer first. They’ll deduct the cost from any advance. Legit agents often do the same thing for extraordinary expenses (NOT phone calls, copying, etc.) – deduct them from money they owe you.
However, neither requires that you write them a check. (The second rule is “The only time an author signs a check is to endorse it on the back.:”)
And the answer is simple: it should cost you nothing – zero, zilch, zip, nada – to have a book published. No legitimate publisher is ever going to ask for you to send them a cent; the same for agents. If either one says you have to send the money – no matter how “reasonable” their explanation, walk away. No, run away. They are out to rip you off and, unfortunately, all too many beginning writers fall for their scams.