Has a publisher held your book hostage for 35 years? Here's a way to get the rights back, legal and free.

 I actually sold my first book when I was a pre-teen, okay, 24 years old. That was back in the Dark Ages, pre-internet, heck, pre-personal computers. There was a huge publishing boom then-- paperback originals-- and I know there are many like me who assumed then that the "7-year-limited-license" meant that the publisher only got the use of the book for 7 years. Silly me!

 In fact, publishers had all sorts of ways to keep extending that license without our permission, keeping our own books from us for decades with minimal payment and no new contract.

But... Congress enacted a rule allowing artists of all kinds (Paul McCartney used this for his old songs) to regain the rights to their works after 35 years post-sale. There's now a five-year period where we can easily reclaim the rights to our own works. 

You can learn more about that here:

https://libraries.mit.edu/news/reclaiming-copyright-2/14404/

Reclaiming your copyright after 35 years: a new opportunity    

Starting in 2013, authors began to have the ability to reclaim copyrights they transferred to a publisher in 1978 or later. Copyright law permits authors to reclaim their copyrights 35 years after transferring rights for purposes of publication. Authors interested in reclaiming copyright need to file a notice in advance, according to a designated timetable.

Reclaiming copyright allows the author to make new publishing arrangements, including making the work openly available on the web, or taking advantage of new economic opportunities.

Take back the rights! :)

Alicia

Serial fiction site

I don't know anything about this site, except that a few writers I know say they have made $ posting their books in a serial fashion here: Radish Fiction.

Check it out and see what you think:
https://radishfiction.com/writer.html

Can you write serially? I have in the past, and it was fun, but I've gotten so skittish about deadlines these days.  I think I'd have to have a story that "wrote itself" the way some blessedly do. Or I suppose write the whole book first, and then just release it chapter by chapter.

Alicia

New-old interactive storytelling

I am really interested in how we can change the "shape" of storytelling to take advantage of all the new media. Here's a good example of an update of Pride and Prejudice which uses Twitter and Facebook to develop the story and interactivity.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/the-new-old-way-to-tell-stories-with-input-from-the-audience/280682/


I once designed (on paper, how retro) a story-in-a-website. It was going to be set in a small town on Lake Michigan (I'm still planning on using this invented town somehow), and this was the town's website. So I'd planned that you could click on, say, the hardware store link and get the story of that family, and click on the pizza parlor link and get a conversation between a boyfriend and girlfriend who were breaking up, and the mayor would have blog, and there would be legal notices and of course the police reports, and...

Well, great idea, but all the story parts I came up with were boring! Now I'm thinking maybe I'll have short stories associated with each link, not sure what now, and they'll all be connected through the website and town. But they'll be pretty traditional short stories.

Anyway, is this something you've thought of? Any fun (and abandoned) ideas we could empathize with?

Alicia

Reinventing Your Story: Part 1: Why reinvent?

 Why reinvent?
It used to be that you had one chance to sell a book to any given publisher, agent, or customer. If the book you wrote wasn't the book they wanted, well, you took the battered manuscript out of the SASE envelope, sighed, and went back to Writer's Market to find another possible market. (Anyone else remember those days?)

Once in a great while, an editor would send a "revise and resubmit" letter, and you might get another chance... but usually that wouldn't work out as a sale either. Publishers often had pretty strict guidelines for genre books, and no matter what they said about wanting "fresh voices," they really wanted "more of the same, only better." Or they wanted something quite specific, or what they wanted one year they didn't want the next, and if you didn't hit the bull's-eye on just the right day, you were probably out of luck. (I speak from long experience of just barely missing many sales....)

But things are different now. The market has changed so rapidly, we're all scrambling to catch up. And the publishing industry, always so slow to learn from their mistakes, is at least becoming a bit more wary of wholesale and arbitrary rejection. No one wants to be like one of the nine supposedly smart editors who rejected the first Harry Potter book. They are starting -- some of them-- to look beyond and consider what might sell in the long run-- a wonderful series idea, a great imagined world, a compelling voice. An author with one or more of those might be worth talking to, even if the offered book isn't quite right.

Agents too are realizing that the easy sales they had gotten accustomed to aren't so easy anymore, and that their captive clients are feeling more liberated and expecting something more than just another sale to the same old place and the same old contract. Agents have always talked about longterm partnerships with their clients, and some even meant it-- but now that's getting to be a necessity. Authors have other options now, and agents are having to think of ways to make themselves useful, including helping to manage an independent publishing career. In this case, they also will need to consider more intangible aspects of an author's craft, including the ability to self-promote and use social media. Again, the book might not be "just right," but the author might be.

Finally, even those authors who have decided to forego the traditional route and don't have to hit the mark with publishers and agents still might have to face the most discerning of all critics, the reading public. Readers now are much more likely to choose an AUTHOR rather than a single book. (If they like the book, they want more from the author.) But readers can be capricious, turning away from a book because of a single word in the description, or because the book seems too dark or not dark enough or too derivative or too innovative, or… That's one reason they can be so loyal to authors they like, and why they are often willing to take another chance if the "problem" has been fixed.

Problem is -- authors have to find the readers/publishers/agents who will want these books... and sometimes that will require making major changes in a book with an agenda of getting that longterm relationship.
So the good news is: We're getting more second chances!
The bad news is: We have to take advantage of those second chances!
Let's talk about ways to take an existing book and reinvent it to take that second chance.

 Alicia

Reinventing Your Story: Part 2: Types of Reinventing

2: Types of Reinventing

Let's talk a bit about types of reinvention.

There are three big categories, and we can deal with them each in new topics:

1. Reinvent the book. This happens when something has changed and the book that seemed just great no longer works. For example, my last book was written as a women's fiction, but sold as a mystery. Big surprise! The mystery plot was pretty lame. Why? Because I wrote the main plot to be the heroine's life journey to recover from a divorce. Sure, she had to solve her ex's murder along the way, but the big triumphant climax was her getting over her fear of disappointing or losing her son. Cough. I had to beef up the whole mystery thing, put in clues, motivation, suspects. All that stuff mystery novels usually have.

A friend of mine right now is trying to turn an old manuscript aimed at Harlequin (that is, a "category romance") into a "single-title" romance, which means, at minimum, adding in a subplot or two and deepening the interaction with other characters.

Another friend wrote a young adult novel in third person and the publisher likes it... but wants it in first person.

There are, these days, many reasons we might want to perform major surgery on what is a pretty good book (and complete too).

2. Reinvent the author. We used to just have to change our penname, you know, to let go of the baggage associated with our author name! But now, everyone knows that Jane Romance is really Bill Suspense, so it takes more than a name change.

Why would you need to reinvent yourself as an author? First would be after a long series of rejections if you're unpublished. But even published authors might need to start over after a long dry spell, or when the market for their type of book has dropped out, or if they've somehow screwed something up so that readers have started a boycott, or they were caught up in a scandal, or had some serious health issue that derailed them, and "Amy Author" is no longer a good person to be in the intense new publishing world.

3. Reinvent the career. In some ways, this is the adventure of the new millennium. We're all reinventing our careers, whether we want to or not. All the old verities are discarded, and what used to work to make for a great career might not anymore. And all the street savvy you might have picked up along the way might not do much to help you avoid all the new pitfalls.

Reinventing a career might involve discarding an agent or the entire "legacy publishing industry." It might be about changing genres or learning how to navigate social media or how to do your own negotiations. It might mean going from being just an author to being a business. It might mean finding and fixing a brand.

We'll just talk about reinventing the book now. For the moment, what would you say is your current situation? Anyone need/want to reinvent? Are there other categories?

Reinventing Your Book: Part 3-- Type of Story

3: Changing the Emphasis of the Plot

Reinventing your book.

First, think about what isn't working.
I found that if you can define what needs to be changed, you're halfway to changing it.

Let's go over the major categories, and share with us if you have other thoughts.

Say the book is fine, but it's a romance with a mystery subplot, and the publisher loves your voice and your characters, but wants it to be a mystery with a romantic subplot, for example. Or you decide that you want to make it a mystery because it will be easier to sell that way. At any rate, you've decided you need to flip the plots.

Most books don't just have one plot. They'll have what they call in the films an "A" plot and a "B" plot.

The A plot is usually the one that reflects what genre or subgenre this book is in, so if you wrote the book as a romantic comedy, say, the A plot is probably the journey of the romantic couple to fulfilled love.

The B plot is usually an important plot, and might actually take up as much space as the A plot. If you, for example, have your romantic comedy couple solving a crime, the mystery plot would be the B plot. If they are trying to rid the town of zombies, the B plot would be a horror plot. Because the B plot is usually so important to the structure of the story, it's fairly easy to beef it up and – if you need to—make it the A plot.

So let's start just with plot structure, and then scene structure.

Plot Structure:

Sometimes it's just a matter of emphasis and sequence that determines which of two major plots is the A plot, and if you fix the sequence, you can go a long way to flipping the plots.

You have probably absorbed a whole lot of "story grammar" and have done this instinctively or by learning: Usually we start with the A plot. That is, in the first scene or first chapter, usually we'll have the couple meeting if it's a romance, or a body being discovered if it's a mystery. We might have a slower opening, but we're still hinting in the opening what the main conflict/plot will be (like heroine has decided she'll quit dating –romance—or she's talking to her mom about how much everyone hates the mayor- mystery).

So if you want to flip the A and B plots, start there at the beginning. Revise the opening slightly so that the first hint of what's to come is the plot you now want to emphasize.

For example, in my women's-fiction-turned-mystery, I originally had the first scene between the heroine and her ex-husband involve her complicated feelings about him and his hints that he wants to move back home. When I flipped the plots, I kept all that "divorce heartbreak" stuff, but punched up Don's confession that he was getting sued by an angry client, and moved that up first. It took a bit of rewriting, but now the opening has changed subtly to make it a mystery opening.

Similarly, the A plot is usually the one fully resolved in the climactic scene (which is usually the second-to-last scene in the book). Again, it might take some rewriting to get the murder plot, say, resolved in that scene. But if you can do that, you'll be sending the structural message to the reader that this is at base a mystery novel.

Scene Endings:

The great script doctor and workshop leader Robert McKee offered this invaluable tip for establishing the genre (or sub-genre, or just major plot): End the turning point scenes, particularly the "inciting incident" (first turning point), on a moment that reflects the chosen genre. Sometimes this just means extending the end of the scene and closing on a comic note or a horror note or a mystery note. That is, you don't have to rewrite all the turning point scenes… just the ending.

This is quite helpful if you have been getting rejections that say, "You're a great writer, but this doesn't fit our romantic comedy line," and you just know that it's a romantic comedy. Look to the end of the inciting incident scene (which is probably in the first or second chapter). Does that end with a moment that reflects the chosen genre?

Let's try an example:

Tom is fairly young. Under 30. Start the scene
however we want, couple paragraphs maybe of Ordinary World or whatever
works here.

Out of the blue he gets a call from a funeral parlor, saying that his
Uncle Walt has died and is there and Tom was listed as next-of-kin. (Keep
in mind that we're going to be making choices all along, and every choice
leads to another choice-- you make a million choices in every scene, and
only some are conscious. And some can be deferred, so we don't have to
decide yet whether uncle Walt is his blood uncle or an un-related
godfather.)

(We also presumably will have to decide at some point whether Tom knows
Uncle Walt and is grieved by his death, or barely knows him, or has never
before heard of him and can't figure out how Tom's name appears as
next-of-kin. In a cozy mystery, for example, usually the murder victim
isn't personally important to the sleuth. So if you're, say, switching from a suspense novel—which has intense emotions—to a cozy mystery—which does NOT have intense emotions, you might want to make Uncle Walt more of a distant relation so Tom doesn't have to grieve.)

So he goes to the funeral parlor. Here maybe some internal conflict--
maybe when he was 19, both his parents were killed in a car accident and
he had to handle all the details, and ever since ge's avoided funeral
parlors. Now notice-- if we go with that backstory, that heavy tragedy in
the past, we are immediately darkening the tone of the book.
If we go with the death, and if it's going to end up a comedy, it's going
to be a dark or black comedy. One of the issues that comes up a lot with
openings is what I call "inappropriate emotion", and I don't mean
actually the character's emotion, but the emotion that the events inspire
in the reader. The opening and backstory do have to be tailored to the
scope of the book-- and, as we're seeing, it's really important that you
know as you draft, or as you revise, what your story IS.

If you mean this to be a suspense thriller, sure, go with the tragic backstory, and also maybe
make Uncle Walt a real uncle and close to Tom. But if you want to make it a cozy
mystery, the "coziness" comes from detachment from the bad
circumstances-- the victim is usually someone not well-known by the
sleuth or is actively disliked. And the internal conflicts are minor,
more quirks or annoyances than traumas.

If it's a deep dark wrenching romance, go with the tragedy. If it's a
sweet romance, or a romantic comedy, see if you can come up with another
reason Tom hates funeral parlors.

Think about connecting the conflict-causing backstory to the type of
story. For example, in a romantic comedy or a cozy mystery, that might be
something kind of jolly but embarrassing, like when he pledged his
fraternity in college, one of the challenges was to steal a shoe off a
cadaver, so ever since, he's been squicked out by funeral parlors.

Just keep the backstory appropriate to this scope. I can't tell you how
many contest entries I've seen where the story is supposed to be light
and there's some huge tragedy in the past, or when this is a "serious"
story, maybe a romantic suspense, and it opens with a "cute meet" or
clever comic scene. It's just jarring, and it makes me wonder if the
author is actually INTO her story. If she were into it really, she would
feel the right feeling as she wrote and conceived that first scene.
She would be sensitive to the effect this whatever choice had on the
reader. Again, begin as you mean to go on! Don't bait-and-switch the
reader. So if you're switching MOODS here—like from a serious romance to a cozy mystery—make sure that the backstory is changed to reflect the new choice.

Okay, so there's some stuff that goes on that is consistent with his
backstory and the tone of the story and the scope of the story that
influences HOW he meets the funeral director and what they talk about.
But at some point, the funeral director takes him to "the chapel" and
there's the coffin, and the director discreetly leaves Tom alone to pay
his respects to Uncle Walt.

If this is the initiating event scene, something's going to happen,
right? And the END of a major scene is when the disaster (or "surprise"
if we want to be politically correct happens.
Disastrous things can happen all the way through the major scene, of
course-- after all, getting a phone call that your uncle died is pretty
disastrous- but THE disaster should come at the end of the scene, to
impel the reader to the next scene. Yes, it's the cliffhanger, but it
doesn't have to be all dire and scary. The point is to disrupt the
trajectory of the story, derail the scene protagonist, and start
something new going. So the end of the scene can be some kind of question
or mystery or puzzle or problem—and you can shift that to reflect the new choice of a plot.

Okay, back to Tom and Uncle Walt. Tom is alone in the "chapel". Soft
lugubrious music is playing on the speakers. The room smells like (choose
one that fits your tone/scope-- lilacs, disinfectant, death, Tom's own
sweat, expensive wood....). The light is dim. He approaches the coffin.
It is (choose what fits) an expensive mahogany and satin casket, or a
plain wooden box, or a ridiculously elaborate shiny white boat with
gleaming gold handles.
The lid is (choose what works for the new choice) closed. Open. Half-closed.

He goes up to the coffin. (Does he have to open the lid?) He sees....

Now here is where you delineate the scene ending – the
disaster/surprise-- which makes this a major scene, but also a major
scene for THIS TYPE OF STORY.

Let's say this is a mystery. What would he see if this is a mystery?

Let's say this is a horror story. What would he see, or what would
happen?

Let's say this is a comedy. What's going to happen? (And what if it's a
black comedy? What would happen that's different?)

Let's say that this is an adventure story. (Tom, I suddenly realized,
could be a Navy Seal!

Let's say this is a thriller.

Let's say this is a family drama.

Let's say this is a suspense novel.

Let's say this is a romance. (You can have a woman come in if so... but
why? Who?)

What if it's a romantic comedy?

What if it's a sweet romance?

What if it's a dark romance?

Let's say this is a paranormal/occult story.

Let's say this is an urban fantasy.

Let's say this is a literary fiction novel.

Let's say this is a near-future s/f post-apocalyptic dystopia.

Now very probably in the original, you're ending that scene on the moment that reflects that original type of story. So say you end with Tom seeing his father's signet ring on the corpse's hand and grabbing at it and knocking the coffin over and spilling the body on the floor—a comic ending.

If you're changing the A plot to a romance, you might just move the romantic meeting to right here—he dumps the body out, and in walks the funeral director's daughter… who will become the romantic heroine.

Go through the major scenes, the turning points, and look at the ending moments. Can you change most of those to reflect the shift in A plot?

Questions? Suggestions?

Reinventing your book. 4: Reinventing the Length

Reinventing the Length

The most effective length of books varies, of course, and you should write the book to the length you think the story needs. But if later you decide for whatever reason that the book would be more effective longer or shorter, here are some tips to make that easier.

Longer: Today's new adult readers read 700-page books (okay, all starring Harry Potter) when they were 10 years old. So they won't be intimidated by length. Whether a long book would be more marketable as one volume or two or three is a discussion for another time. And you never want to stretch a short plot into a long book—the threads get pretty frayed then!

However, you might be looking at an older category book (written for a line like Harlequin Intrigue or Berkley Prime Crime), and considering expanding it to single title length, which is generally between 75K and 100K words. You don't want to just add more words—that's like drinking milkshakes to bulk up your muscles. Add length by adding complexity.

One way to do that is to add an additional major plot. Shorter books naturally tend to have a single central plot (a romance will have a central romantic plot, a mystery a central crime plot), and any other storyline is generally reduced to subplot level, starting further into the book and being resolved earlier than the main plot. Rather than adding more subplots—a lot of subplots often leads to confusion—beef up the subplot that is most connected to the main character's emotional or psychological journey and make it clearly support the main plot.

For example:

Character journey: In this romance, the heroine's father died when she was a child, and her mother married again and moved her far away from dad's family. The subplot might be about reconnecting with the family—phone calls, setting up a visit—but it's resolved quickly because the original purpose was just to get her back to dad's hometown where she meets the hero.

What's her emotional journey? She's moving perhaps from a fear of abandonment to trust? That's a good journey for a romance, as learning to trust is a major step on the way to love. To lengthen the book, consider having that subplot of reconciling with the family take place over most of the time of the book. That will mean adding conflict—that is, to make it a full plot, you can't resolve it in Chapter 3 when she starts interacting with the hero.

If you want to have her start with fear of abandonment, you could have her—instead of reconnecting –before- she comes to town—keep quiet about her identity, come to town, and scope out the family before revealing herself. After all, if she's afraid of abandonment, she might think the family kind of abandoned her by losing contact. So she could come to town, planning to observe her relatives in secret before deciding whether to approach them. This would add a motif of disguise that could complicate the budding romance (is she open with him about her real identity and connection to the town?), and if you make him have some issue with the family (business or political rivalry, maybe), this would add a further conflict to the romantic plot.

That is, add conflict, not words. This will affect the entire story, of course, and require changes in most existing scenes and additions of new scenes, so this isn't a task to take on lightly. But it's a choice we witness a lot these days as authors go back to perfectly good category books that didn't sell back when category was king. Now they have a real option—keep it short and try to sell it as is, or add 10-30K words and sell it as a single-title.

Just as common these days is the decision to shorten a book. This is more the norm for me as I always write too much and have to cut on the order of 35K words just to get it down from "epic" length to "single-title" length. So I know there are different kinds of "too long." Take a few days and read over the book as it is. Is the plot too long and complex for the length you want? Or (as always in my case) are there the right number of scenes, but the scenes themselves are too long?

Diagnose the problem before you start cutting! You don't want to end up just cutting words when you really would do better to cut out a subplot or combine several scenes. It can really help just to boil the plot down to an outline with a line or two of summary for each scene.

See if there are some scenes where only one plot-important thing happens, or none at all. For example, I've edited books where the only really essential event is that the sleuth finds a clue. In that case, could that paragraph or page about finding the clue be moved into the previous or subsequent scene, so that one scene can be eliminated? What I like to do then is find whatever in that scene is important (either to the plot or to the author—you know what I mean, the perfect sentence of description, a great interchange of dialogue) and start stripping away everything else in the scene. What's essential and/or worth keeping? Move that into an adjacent scene.

Also look for scenes that basically do the same thing (like the hero twice encounters his prime suspect downtown) without any escalation of conflict. You might not need both those scenes. Another place you might find extraneous scenes is in the beginning. We often write long openings because we're trying to get to know the story and the world, but that might mean that we start a couple scenes before the story really begins. Leisurely openings can be interesting, but if you're trying to trim your book, you probably can't afford extraneous scenes.

Now if you're like me, you might have just the right number of scenes, but spend too much time on each. When I decide to cut the length of scenes, I start at the beginning. Often I can cut a couple paragraphs right from the first page of the scene. I also replace long explanations of motivation or action with a "narrative bridge" of a few words, like "She gave up, too exhausted to continue." I also look for redundancy, where I show something in the action, and then explain it again in introspection—I cut out the introspection unless there's no way for the reader to get the point of the action.

Trimming like this can really improve the pacing as there aren't pages of narration between important events. (By the way, it's always painful for me to delete my passages, so I just cut them and paste them into a "cut file," just so I'll have them if I need them. That makes it easier!)

To cut radically, as when you are trying to turn a novel into a novella, you probably have to get into the very structure of the plot and simplify, first by cutting out a subplot or two, and second by streamlining the conflict. The main conflict might have to be simplified so that it can plausibly be set up, intensified, and resolved in 150 pages. Think about diminishing the internal conflict. In a longer book, perhaps a man can get over being unjustly imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, but for a shorter book, you could diminish that to an unjust accusation without any imprisonment (maybe he got off because of a hung jury), so that he just has to vindicate himself, not deal with the ramifications of having been in prison.

Reinvention takes re-imagining. But I've found it much easier to do when I am clear about what the book IS and what I want it to be. Just asking the questions about whether I need to change the plot or just the scenes gets me half the way to determining what reinvention will transform this story and make it new.

What reinvention situations have you encountered? What did you do?

Editing today

I was asked for advice on becoming a book editor, and of course, as a young friend calls me, I'm the dreamkiller. I go around being "realistic" and/or "negative" and killing people's dreams. It's a thankless job, but maybe someone will thank me someday. SO THIS IS JUST MY OWN EXPERIENCE! OTHERS MIGHT BE FAR MORE POSITIVE AND HELPFUL!

Anyway, there aren't many editing jobs in the old traditional ways, frankly. New York is full of laid-off book editors. So most now are working free-lance, doing copy editing, proofreading, rather than acquiring and taking a book into production for a publishing company. (Those jobs still exist, but there aren't as many as in the heyday of the 90s. It will help, no doubt, to be young and cheap and willing to live in an outer borough.)

As for me, my advice to a student thinking of a career in editing who still wants one even if there aren't many jobs in the traditional book publishing sense:

1. Absolutely take a couple advanced grammar classes, especially those which deal with syntax, if you're going to be doing mostly actual editing (and not the whole book acquisition-production process). Editing is a valuable skill, and in some demand, but you really have to understand how written communication works to fix it when it doesn't. 

2. Get familiar with the sort of editing required for web-based writing (like websites), as that's where much of the work is going to be. If I were going to do it all over again, I'd study document design too-- not coding, really, but laying out the text on a page, choosing graphics, all that, just like they used to do for magazines.

3. Free-lance editors generally work for authors, not publishers, and on a free-lance basis (no benefits, no guarantee). That is, the authors are trying to get the book ready for submission to a publisher, or ready to self-publish. You have no power to say, "This is good enough" or "You're rejected." You have to work with what they send you. This requires a level of interpersonal skill that equals the level of technical skill required.   Most authors think what they write is wonderful, and maybe it's not, but they're the boss. You have to make it as good as you can, knowing that often you're not going to end up with a great book. And you have to "fix" without being critical. It's a lot harder than editing used to be, when editors could just reject books they didn't think were good enough.

The breakdown for types of editing, from an author's perspective:

There's the story (content or main) editing, which identifies problems in the story structure, like that the hero tends to whine and the heroine sometimes acts irrationally, and that there are these two big scenes that

ought to pack a punch and don't, and that there are three endings and no beginning. This will be examining things like motivation, logic,conflict, and drama. Plot, character, structure, scene, sequence.

There's the line-editing, where prose problems are identified and fixed, particularly on the sentence and paragraph level-- things like making all those darned one-sentence paragraphs into, you know, actual paragraphs; and determining which fragments add to the conversational aspect of the voice and which just annoy; and replacing static and vague verbs with stronger ones. This is probably the most time-consuming aspect, and the one most likely to result in conflict, because this very much involves the author voice.

There's copy-editing, which is where the Chicago Manual comes in. :) This is the step that readies the manuscript for publication, where grammar mistakes are rectified if they weren't in the line edit, where potential mistakes are identified ("Didn't she have blue eyes in Chapter 2?"), formatting is standardized (all chapter headings the same), and research is questioned and checked. 

Then of course, there's proofreading, to find and fix typos, duplicated or dropped words, formatting errors.

The last two are what authors often seem to think are "editing," and yet,when they come to an editor, they aren't clear about that being all they want. I recently was talking to a writer who said that she wanted her

book "edited" and was shocked when I said for a "full edit" she'd be looking at maybe 5 cents a word. (Of course, many editors work for much less.) As we talked, though, I realized she only wanted copy-editing and proofing, which don't do much to change the story or voice. She didn't WANT to change the story or voice, and so shouldn't go out and hire someone who is going to make a bunch of suggestions she won't want to follow. (Whether she ought to make big changes is another story... but it's her book, and she should decide.)

As writers, we should get to know our process, and our strengths and weaknesses before we send the book out.  And an editor is sometimes not what we need to help us with those weaknesses. Probably most writers do need a copy-edit and proofread, just because those involve fairly arcane decisions and training, and it's next to impossible to do that close a reading of our own work. But not all need story-editing. Not all need line-editing. I would say I don't actually need line-editing, as I'm pretty strong on the prose level. But

I can never tell when the tension has dropped in my plotting, or when I love characters a tad too much so that readers will be alienated. So at the story level, I often need help, which is why I have a great critique

group, and brainstorm a lot with several discerning friends. 

Great storytellers are not always great writers. But a great storyteller probably doesn't need a content editor-- she already has good "story grammar," knowing how to pace and dramatize and characterize. She might need help, however, making the prose match the story.

"Wordsmiths" might not need much line-editing, as they already experiment and edit sentences as they write. They might, however, benefit from story-editing, because they can't always see the big picture of plot and

character and scene. 

Free-lance editors have to get authors to state what editing they want, and they're in charge because they're paying.

I work mostly free lance these days, but of course those who work for a publisher or a company are having different experiences (and probably vacation and sick time too).

Alicia

Is the Internet the Death of the Novel?

I found this article by Toby Litt really provocative, addressing some of the worries I have about how the rapid advance of new technology could spell the end of our old medium. It's mostly a lament, but it did spark thoughts about what sort of form "story" can take in the future. It doesn't HAVE to be in the shape of a novel. After all, The Odyssey was an epic poem, the dominant form of storytelling for many centuries, and while the form isn't used much anymore, stories still get told.

Anyway, what do you think? How can stories take on the methods of the Internet, or would it be better for novels to go on and provide a respite from the insistence of email and Facebook and all that?

Is the death of the novel coming? Will with it die the more contemplative forms of story?

Alicia

Rights reversion

First: I AM NOT AN ATTORNEY. Theresa is, so she can smack me down if I'm wrong on all or some counts.

Second: This will be of limited interest if you don't have old publishing contracts. Then again, if you see a publishing contract in your future, you probably ought to research this: Reversion of Rights.

Third: Goodness, we writers sure are quick to kneel down and let the industry beat on us like a hard rain.

When I "sell" a book to a publisher, I'm not really usually selling it in the sense of giving them all rights to the book in perpetuity in exchange for some doubtlessly inadequate amount of money. (I have done that with a book or two, sold all rights forever. I don't advise it-- depends, however, on the $$. :) I am instead "licensing" the book, giving the publisher the right to publish, distribute, and sell the book for a certain period of time under certain conditions. The contract spells out the conditions (like usually the publisher must publish the book and have a certain number of copies for sale within a specified timeframe). Most contracts have some end -- they are not in perpetuity, and aren't supposed to be.

So as nasty as most publishing contracts are (and I've signed a lot of them, and usually they're so nasty attorneys consulted have to take antacids-- "there's an option required, but no consideration for it???"), they usually do have a "reversion clause". That means that if the publisher doesn't keep the book for sale in a certain quantity, the rights can revert to the author. The weird thing is-- this is part of the nastiness--  there is a specified time to the licensing period (seven years is common). But the publisher can often "retain rights" past that period by keeping the book in print and for sale.

Notice "in print" used to mean they had to go to the expense of printing and shipping physical books. Now "in print" can mean virtually no expense for the publisher, as it might mean just having an electronic version available for sale. Many contracts used to have specific requirements for this (like one of mine was that the publisher, to keep the rights, had to do a print run of 10K), but more and more, the clauses are pretty open, so that just having it for sale on Amazon might be enough to keep the rights. This is pretty pernicious, IMHO.

Another truly pernicious part of some of these clauses is that the rights claimed include "all rights including those not yet invented". In the 90s, electronic books hadn't been invented (not really), and so now many publishers are saying that, even for books 20 years old, they "own" not just the print rights (which have long since lapsed probably) but also have the right to put out an electronic edition whenever they want. And sometimes they do that, not to earn any real money or goodness knows to pay royalties to the author, but just to do a rights-grab-- you know, in case I turn out to be the next Stephen King or something. (Don't hold your breath!)

Many of us were puttering along, sadly giving up on old books. After all, we couldn't afford to get new versions printed, and anyway, the near-monopolistic control of bookselling until recently made it hard to get popular fiction self-pubbed books into the stores (not impossible, but hard). And even though we knew that our old publishers weren't likely ever to sell our books again, it wasn't like any other publisher was eager to reprint old romances or Westerns. So we just went on, assuming those books were lost forever. But then came, finally, the wonderful hardware that would present our wonderful books to new readers, and a host of new online booksellers to let us reach those readers. And all at virtually no cost! A miracle!

That's when many of us unearthed those old contracts and started trying to get our rights back to those old books, which could now reach a brand new audience.

The first mistake was thinking we needed to "request the rights back." In fact, usually we just need to "serve notice that the rights have reverted." That is, the publisher needs to do something affirmative (put out that new print edition, maybe) in order to keep the rights after a certain period where the book has been out of print.

What's been happening a lot is that an author will write to the old publisher and say, "I request that you return my rights to (title)," and the publisher JUST NEVER RESPONDS.  I can't tell you how often I've heard authors moan about books lost because the publisher never signed off on this rights reversion. Cough. Of course, every contract is different, but really. A publisher can't just ignore the letter and retain rights. We authors need to remember, these are OUR books that we licensed to them, often for pennies, and the contract did not cede the books to the publisher forever. And if the publisher doesn't respond to the letter, that means they have refused or neglected to assert any claim. (And even if they do assert a claim, that doesn't mean they have one. We as the creators have a claim. They probably don't if the book has been out of print. Check the contract. Hire an attorney. These days, it's worth it.)


Our serving them notice of the intention to take back the rights does not need their approval (depending of course on the contract, etc.). We just need to be able to prove (maybe registered mail receipt) that we did in fact serve them the notice. Sometimes there's a waiting period after service-- mine was 60 days. If they didn't do whatever that affirmative action was (10K copies in print for mine) in those 60 days, then the book is mine all mine again. Forever.

In fact, I've sent rights reversion letters about ten times. Once the publisher responded promptly with a letter recognizing the reversion. Once the letter came back (publisher out of business). Four times the publisher waited many months before finally sending the letter of acceptance. Four times I never heard anything. Every single one of those books, I put up for sale as soon as the specified waiting period was up. I never waited for the publisher to get around to responding to the letter. And if the publisher had responded by refusing? I'd send another letter saying, "The contract period is up. I've served notice of reversion. Your rights are terminated." They're welcome to come to Indiana and sue me. (They won't. They'd lose, so why bother?)  I don't mean to be cavalier, but we should not allow fear of litigation that probably will never happen get in the way of claiming our rights to our books.

Now there are all sorts of tricks publishers have used to get around our own ownership of our own books. I wish they'd put that much ingenuity into marketing books! And more recent contracts have been much more restrictive in the rights reversion clause. However, if you're signing a new contract, this is one clause it will pay to keep author-friendly. If you have an agent, talk through what you want and insist on getting that. And decide if you're willing to go to the mat to keep eventual control of your own work.

To tell you the truth, I'd advise giving up rights for a long time only if this is otherwise a great deal. It's one thing to license a book for $2500 advance when you can get the rights back in 10 years. It's entirely different to pretty much give the book away forever for a piddly advance, especially now when there are so many other options. There are many reasons for accepting a traditional publishing contract, and go for it if that's what you want. But I have to say I am very glad that my early contracts had what in retrospect was a pretty loose reversion clause so that now I'm making far, far more money selling the books on my own. Yeah, you know, when I was 32, I didn't look ahead and think that I might want the rights back 20 years later. But I did, and I'm really glad I asserted my rights and took the books back and offered them up for sale. I would not sign a contract now that pretty much took all rights unless the money was pretty darned good.

And I have to say this to publishers. Stop being obnoxious. This rights grab many of you are embarking on is alienating authors and driving us away. We have other options now! And often you're grabbing rights you have utterly no intention of exercising. Hey, you make money for us, you don't have to grab the rights! We'll rent them to you very politely. But if all you're going to do is hold on to rights to deprive us of benefitting from our own work? Well, how very Gordon Gecko of you. You need us more than we need you, and it really is about time publishers realized that.

I recently heard a publisher say, "These books are our intellectual property!" Arrgggh! No! They are the intellectual property of the person whose intellect created them. The author. Maybe instead of being nasty and asserting control over our own creations, publishers should try to be equitable and reasonable and offer us a reason to license our books to them. What a crazy idea. But you know, it just might work. Publishers can no longer rely on a near-monopoly to corral authors into the publishing paddock. If a book is good enough for a publisher to want it, it's probably good enough to be sold by the author herself. (Not that publishers are all that reliable in choosing books that will sell well. Many books that got rejected by the big publishers became bestsellers. I have one of those, as a matter of fact, published by a small press and rather lucratively. Not quite -- not near-- a seller like Harry Potter, of course, which was rejected by a dozen publishers.) And in that case, the publisher will need to make a good sales pitch about what the author will gain from this relationship when there really are other options.

And if worse comes to worst, after 35 years creators have the right to terminate anyone else's use of their work.
It's a limited period (five years, I think), so set your clock. Also this means all copyrights should be mentioned in your will and specifically left to one person (to reclaim the rights, the person has to have more than 50% ownership, it sounds like). You might not live to get your rights back under the termination law, but your heirs can.

Anyway, let's just stop talking about "requesting our rights back" or saying the publishers "gave us the rights back."  These are our rights. We need to know how to contractually assert our ownership. But usually we still own them, and they are OUR intellectual property, and publishers will do well to recognize for perhaps the first time in decades that authors are not "fodder" but rather essential partners in the bookselling trade. And if not, well, now we can go it alone. The liberation of saying that! Ah. I'll say it again. Now we can go it alone.


Alicia

Back in the saddle-- Non-American spelling

Hi, it's only been a month! Who knows where the time goes. Nowhere productive, I'd say.

Anyway, back again. I'll try and post more. I really want to post about what I call the Tyrannosauruses, the powerful industry professionals who are still powerful as the industry changes. But that will come later. Now I'm thinking about something much more trivial-- non-American spelling and formatting.

An Australian author who has been "dinged" in writing contests for her Australian word choice and formatting asked if she should try to standardize everything for American readers, or trust that they really can read English that isn't American. Good question!


 I think there are realities at issue here. First, of course Americans are perfectly capable of reading other forms of English, and publishers' worries about that are generally unfounded. Harry Potter, after all, managed to sell fairly well despite the terrible handicap of a British author using British terms. :)

American Publishers
However, those publishers will say, "We have a house style. We're not going to change that style (including spelling, punctuation, formatting) just for one author." And they're right too. Their editors and copyeditors and proofreaders and software are all geared to their own country's style. So if you sell a story to an American publisher and use "colour" instead of "color", expect it to be changed. No big deal. House style almost always rules. Even Harry Potter, after all, showed up in the US edition with double apostrophes for quotations! The publisher might be wrong about the ability of American readers to figure things out, but
there you have it. Those of us who have spent decades battling with "house style" tend to counsel choosing your battles when it comes to the copy edit. You know, "Okay, so they made Grandma into a friendly cocker spaniel. And they Americanized my spelling. Which should I go to the mat for?" :)

A couple thoughts-- will writing the story in your own style cause a publisher to reject you? Probably not, especially if the story is set in Australia. But don't be surprised if after buying the book, an American publisher sets the copy editor on all the URs. Probably they'll be gentle with your wordchoice (torch instead of flashlight), but monstrous on your punctuation. Just keep reminding yourself that JK Rowling had to put up with this too. (AS Byatt once wrote a funny article about having her British book Possession Americanized, with the pallid hero kind of Rambo-ized because the publisher assumed that American readers couldn't
abide a "slight" hero.)

Independent Publishing
And what if you're not going through a publisher but publishing it yourself? Well, then I'd say, go with what makes for a better experience for the reader, who is the only other person to consider then. Most readers who look for indie-pubbed books are very experienced readers who appreciate an author's voice, so don't worry that they'll be upset-- they're probably the least likely people to object to this. I would probably in the subtitle of the book or description make sure "Australian" is in there, like (title): An Australian Love Story, or in the description, this story, set in Australia.... the author, a native Aussie.... That is, give them a signal that this isn't Amy American's book. Then they have fair warning that if they are offended by non-American spelling, they should steer clear.

Contests 
As far as contests, really-- ignore any comments that don't make sense to you. And I say this as a chronic judge. Sometimes judges comment on things just to have something to comment on, and they don't mean for it to be taken as holy writ. And sometimes they DO mean for it to be taken as holy writ, but they're wrong or this is some individual issue they care about and no one else does (I have a lot of those ). If what they say sounds wrong to you, just ignore it.
And if you're being scored down for this, I'd complain to the coordinator of the contest.

I'm one of those who loves the slightly different "taste" of British books and those single quote marks, so go for it.
Alicia

The five bad habits of good writers

I did a guest blog in the spring for Jane Perrine on the Five Bad Habits of Good Writers, and thought I'd move it over. I start with the person/writer and end up with the businessperson/writer.
 

 1. Bad habit: Thinking that you have only one book in you. Many writers start out because they want to tell one particular story, a story that’s been inside them for a long time. They write that story in a white heat, and then… then what? Are they done being a writer now that they’ve written that one book? No. If you have one book in you, you have more than one book in you. In fact, now that you’ve gotten this story down, the story that has preoccupied you for years, you might find that you’re liberated now to invent new stories. And you’ve learned something about your writing process and about the structure of a story that will help you when sheer inspiration fails. (And besides, you can always write a sequel to Book #1. Did the Harry Potter series end after his first year at Hogwarts?)

2. Bad habit: Writing 3-chapter proposals, one after another. It’s tempting, yes, to just move on if an idea doesn’t work or a proposal doesn’t sell. But don’t get into that habit. Serial quitting wreaks havoc with our writing process, makes us feel like impostors instead of real novelists, and leaves us empty-handed when an editor says, “What else you got?” And now, when we can sell our books directly to the reader with indie publishing, it’s great to have a few uncontracted novels to put up for sale. But no one is going to buy a dozen partial books. Try to push past that third chapter and finish at least a sketchy first draft. You’ll probably find you fall in love with the book!

3. Bad habit: Deciding you’re good enough and have nothing to learn. You’re never good enough. You’ve always got more to learn. We all do. The moment you decide you know enough and write well enough, that’s the moment you stop being a writer and become a hack. You don’t want to be a hack, do you? Of course not. So with every book you start, determine what you want to learn, whether it’s how to design an action scene or how to hide clues or how to embed more metaphor into your verbs. And then apply yourself to that lesson. Do research. Experiment. Find models in authors who do that aspect well. This will make the writing process more interesting, and will also help individualize each book. And finally, this will help you stay current with what’s going on in fiction, as you’ll be open to new ideas and new techniques.

4. Bad habit: Making business relationships personal. Your agent is not your mother, and your editor is not your friend. You might think they’re terrific. They might think you’re terrific. But let me brutally frank here. You have to be emotionally able to fire the agent if she stops working for you. You must be ready to stay with a publisher that has fired your favorite editor.  Loyalty is a virtue, but temper that with discretion. Too many writers have thrown their lot in with another industry professional who doesn’t in fact have the writer’s best interest front and center. (Nothing wrong with that—everyone must deal with her own career.) This is not a big problem unless you make the relationship personal, so personal loyalty is expected on one or both sides. I’m speaking as someone who made this error and couldn’t fire an agent who just about tanked my career. (We were best buds! How could I fire her when she was losing all those other clients? Was I going to be a traitor too?) Business relationships are about business. Save your love for your family and friends.

5. Bad habit: Forgetting that this is all about the reader. When we start to write, quite naturally it’s all about us. We have a story to tell or a problem to work out.  Then when we start to submit, it’s going to be all about the agent and editor—we want to craft the query letter and the book to capture the attention of the elite industry professional who can make our publishing dreams come true. That’s all perfectly normal. The danger comes when we forget that the whole purpose of writing novels is to connect with readers. When we do what touches or moves or surprises our reader, we will be fulfilling our mission. This means we have to stop being defensive. If our work doesn’t entertain the readers, we should find out why. Often we can make that connection without losing what we personally love about our story—but we can’t get to that point if we decide the reader doesn’t matter. The reader matters most of all. That’s why we write.

The publishing world is changing radically, and we have to change with it. So next year, I might have five different bad habits to report!

So— can you add to this list? What are bad writing habits you notice in yourself and other writers?

Alicia

Going with the flow

There is an old saying in publishing. "Money flows toward the author." This used to describe a pretty clear-cut way to distinguish scam artists from legitimate business partners. If money flowed toward the author, whether as royalties or advances or some other payment form, then the deal was legit. If the author had to pay any money for anything, the deal was questionable at best and a scam at worst.

This bright-line test is a little dimmer in the age of direct publishing, but the basic principle still holds true. As an author, you should get paid for your work. You might have to pay someone else to craft the container (the digital files or physical book), but your piece of the package (the writings inside the container) should still earn you some form of payment. You might have to pay another creative professional to make part of the package, such as the cover art, but this is only fair because they, too, should get paid for their work.

Money flows toward the author whether you publish traditionally or through new methods. Does this mean it's bad to give away promotional copies of your book? No, because that is a form of promotion or marketing, and if done correctly and if luck is on your side, it will result in a flow of money toward the author after the freebies are distributed. That is, PR and marketing efforts are not in the same category as paying someone else to publish your work (vanity presses) or handing over copies of digital files to pirates. If an expenditure now can result in your enrichment down the road, it might be a worthwhile long-term investment. But if someone else will make money on your work now, and you are hoping that leads to money for you later, you're probably playing a sucker's game.

What about this blog? We give away our posts for free, after all. Yes, but we sell other things in other ways, and this blog accomplishes two things: it raises awareness of our expertise, and it allows us to build a network within the community of authors. This leads to other forms of payment, such as private editing work or paid workshops. So this blog is a form of PR, in a sense, even though it probably has a low ROI -- so low that it would be fair to say we do it for fun and an occasional cash bonus. 

In any case, the current climate makes it a little difficult to know when an expenditure makes sense and when it is a scam. Some people take a total-DIY approach to publishing because they are afraid of getting taken by one of the many con artists claiming to act for the benefit of the author. Some people take a "fuck it" approach and distribute everything for free on the theory that pirates will steal it anyway. Neither of these approaches make much sense if you're taking a long view of your career.

Money flows toward the author. But this doesn't mean you can release a shoddy DIY product and expect it to prosper, and it doesn't mean you should spend every waking hour policing pirate sites. Today, it means the same thing it meant yesterday -- you will form business partnerships with people who can help you bring the best possible product to the market. In traditional publishing, those partnerships are formed with agents and publishing companies, who in turn form partnerships on your behalf with distributors and retailers. All of you have the same goal, to maximize the flow of money toward the author. The bigger your flow, the bigger their flow.

In nontraditional publishing, those partnerships are formed on different sets of principles, and for some parts of the product, you will pay flat rates for services instead of paying per-copy shares. Yes, this means money will flow away from you during the production phase.The trade-off is that you retain more control over the final product and you keep a bigger slice of the per-copy pie during the retail phase. With luck and work, money will still flow toward you.

So how do you know if you're getting taken? Where does the money go? Where does the money come from in the first place? For example, there are file-sharing sites where authors voluntarily upload their work for free. In theory, readers then show up, download the files, and leave reviews for other readers. Some authors view these sites as a way to build readership. But where does the money come from if the readers aren't paying any fees? From data mining, most likely, and you're not seeing a share of that revenue stream. So you're giving away your work so that someone else can profit from user data. This seems like a bad arrangement to me.

If you want to give away some of your work, do it in a controlled manner designed to reap long-term benefits. Post a free story on your website, or arrange for freebies through a retailer or review site that can generate paid sales after the free period expires. You might be very eager to build readership, but don't be so eager that you sacrifice your career, enrich strangers, and serve as a warning to others.

Theresa

Antitrust law suit against publishers/Apple for price-fixing

I'd like to echo Kris Rausch-- we really can't tell what this antitrust suit will mean. The issues are so complex even attorneys and judges don't understand everything about these lawsuits. But here's her take on it, and she has a link to a site which explains more of it.

But already everyone in the bookworld is nervous, not that I blame us. I mean, the industry gets pneumonia whenever anyone sneezes. And Apple being involved complicates. (It's always hard to tell if Steve Jobs fans are actually just against anyone against Apple, which is, we hear, now the richest company in the history of the world... who knew? Anyway, Apple doesn't need our pity... this won't set them back one fraction of a percent of stock price.)

Anyway, I was remembering perhaps the most important legal case since Brown vs. Board of Ed-- the AT&T antitrust case. I remember everyone back then was muttering, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," about "Ma Bell's" longstanding  monopoly. And yet, I look back on what telephoning was like before that and marvel.We put up with that? I remember when it was ILLEGAL to have more than one phone in your house. Yes, illegal. My granddad was afraid my grandmother would be upstairs and have heart trouble and not be able to get downstairs to call an ambulance, so he somehow got a second phone--- really, you couldn't even buy a phone back then... you could just rent one from ATT, and they let you have only one-- and he spliced a cable and hooked up a phone up in their bedroom.. and a few weeks later, the police came as the phone company had noticed this and filed a complaint against Grandpa.... somehow I doubt that company would have willingly let us all have throwaway cellphones.)  So maybe this new lawsuit will hasten the demise of cheap paperbacks or lead to even more editors being laid off... or maybe it will lead to something amazing.

The Web, cellphones, even fax machines would never have happened without the forced breakup of the ATT monopoly. (The technology for most of that existed, of course... but was suppressed.) Our world was quite literally transformed by that lawsuit. And no one could have predicted it at the time. All that was clear was that progress abhors a monopoly.

I doubt anything so transformative will come out of this case. After all, the genie's out of the bottle-- we already have open access to our own sources of publication (which really was suppressed for decades by the gentleman's agreements among distributors, publishers, and booksellers). So all we know is it's unlikely to go backwards-- we're never going to go back to a model of publishers utterly controlling access to the marketplace. And if Amazon gets more pissy and starts strangling royalties, well, Amazon has gotten pretty powerful in 20 years, but it doesn't control the internet (yet :).  There will now be other options. The sad thing about this lawsuit is all it really shows is how desperate the big publishers are to keep control, and yet how impotent they are, having to use one behemoth (Apple) in the war against another (Amazon), and not even getting it right, as usual, a day late and a dollar short. (Better to use that dollar to PAY WRITERS.) 

Anyway, I do look back at the ATT breakup (which most of us thought was bad at the time) and realize how much came out of that, and it's cautionary, that's all. Who knows. But progress, once allowed, can't be stopped, and interestingly the ones progress empowers tend to be the ones without power earlier. (That is, writers.)

Alicia

"Pre-published"

There's a debate going on over whether the term "pre-published" is annoying, crazy, accurate, or a harmless affectation. What do you all think?

I have no problem with it generally, but I do think if I heard that in a pitch ("I'm a pre-published author and...") or saw it in a query, I'd probably first think-- mark of an amateur!-- and then shrug as all that matters is the book really.

Some are adamant that "author" means published and "writer" means unpublished, but I call myself a writer and I've been post-published for decades. :)

Methinks these distinctions are going the way of the buggy whip anyway, but hey, life is short. No need to borrow annoyance.  But I teach in college, and there are many "pre-professional" majors, and I don't have a problem with the notion that it takes a while to get to be a professional, and there's nothing wrong with being in that time period.

Anyway, terminology. Just words. What about the attitude? I'd say "ingratitude" is the attitude that actually does annoy me-- the people-- writers, students, whatever-- who think that they should be ostentatiously not grateful for your help because "it's your job" or "you get your jollies this way."

Alicia working herself into a rant so as to avoid a mess of grading-to-do
Alicia

Just to Clarify

Many questions regarding my post yesterday. One of them is important enough to post about. Several of you asked whether this clause came from one of those agents helping an author self-publish.

No.

These particular agents have no hand in any self-published material. They don't read and provide feedback on manuscripts, format or typeset them, or provide cover art. They don't write jacket copy or arrange blurbs. They don't upload anything, and they don't download anything, and they don't provide networking assistance.

They do nothing. It could easily come to pass that you would self-publish a work without them even seeing it or being aware of it. And yet you would owe them a commission on it. It could even come to pass that you would have This Book with them, and while they shop it, you upload That Novella as a self-published work. They fail to make the sale on This Book, and yet they are still entitled to a commission on That Novella. (One of you argued that this would never happen in the real world. Maybe not -- certainly it should not -- but the language I saw would allow this exact possibility.)

I could draw lots of analogies here to help you understand how damaging this is. Imagine you bank at Big Horrible Bank With Protesters Out Front. And every time you make a transaction at this bank, they charge you a quarter. You don't mind paying the fees because you figure they've earned them. It's fairsies. But then you open another savings account at another bank, and the Big Horrible Bank With Protesters Out Front is now claiming that you owe them a quarter on every transaction made at the new savings account, whether they ever touched the money or not. So when you find a ten dollar bill in the grass and decide to deposit it in the new bank, BHBWPOF wants a commission on that. And when your grannie writes you a birthday check from a bank other than BHBWPOF and you deposit it into your new account, you owe BHBWPOF a commission on that. And so on. "It's only fair," they say, "because by using our banking services, you learned some things about using banking services." Yes, and they were paid for it, a quarter every time you made a transaction at BHBWPOF.

Just remember what you own and what you pay for. You own your brand. You own your skills and knowledge. You might pay someone to help you improve those things, the same as a soft drink company pays ad agencies to craft memorable, brand-building commercials. But that doesn't mean your ownership is suddenly converted to co-ownership. It means you paid for a service.

One of my friends said, roughly paraphrased, "It used to be my trad pub that made my house bills and insurance payments each month. Now they can only make the house bills, but my self-published books are covering my insurance. Just barely, but they're covering it. If I have to give that up or split it, I would have to get a day job again. I can't take any more cuts to my income."

To that, many industry professionals would respond with a shrug. If this one drops out of writing, ten others are waiting in the wings to take her place.

That attitude and reality has scared authors into accepting bad terms in the past. But the difference then was that there was only one path to publication, and that path ran through the people offering the bad terms. Now there are other options. Is self-publishing the savior of everything? No. It changes some rules of the game, but we're all still playing the same basic game. Nevertheless, it's an important change because of the way it empowers writers. Don't give away that power. Don't even give away 15% of it.

Theresa

Sign of the Times?

I heard a disturbing rumor -- and I have to repeat, this is a rumor, not something I saw personally -- about an agency contract that takes a standard commission on an author's self-published books. Self-published. So the author would be contractually obligated to pay 15% of their self-published royalties to the agent even if the agent has never laid eyes on the book.

The theory behind this is that the agent is "building" the author's career through traditional sales, and the author benefits from that in direct published sales, so the agent is entitled to a cut.

This is utter garbage, of course. Not every tenuous connection creates an entitlement. What's next -- if you write on your day job, they can take 15% of your day job salary, too? Agents act as brokers, selling books to publishers and earning a commission on those sales. Why should they ever be entitled to earn anything without performing the work?

You know what's really going on here? They're gambling that you're more desperate than they are. They're pretty desperate, some of these agents, because sales and advances are falling across the board, so agents are taking hits just as much as anyone in this business. Or, to put it another way, 15% of nothing is nothing. Actually, that's 15% of 8% or whatever your trad pub contract calls for. But your direct pub royalty rate is probably anywhere from 30% to 70%, depending on how you distribute and price the book, so 15% of that is a bit more of a cut to the agent. As an added bonus, it's free money because they didn't have to lift a finger to earn it.

But there will be some writer out there who's been struggling to break in and who sees this as the one chance to do that. And they'll sign away their kidneys and lungs if they think that will get them a good book deal. So what's 15% in perpetuity on work the agency never sold? As long as the agent signs you, it's all good, right? No. Not right at all. For one thing, you don't know that this agent will ever sell a single thing for you. Plenty of authors are signed but never sold. You don't know whether this agent will treat you well or screw things up for you -- and if you don't understand that agents can screw up a writer's career, you haven't spent much time talking to writers about agents.

Don't get me wrong. A good agent is worth every (legitimately earned) cent you pay them. If you get a good agent, thank your lucky stars and buy them chocolate. But how do you know what kind of relationship you'll have with your agent when you're at the signing stage? Oh, you can go by reputation. Maybe Agent Alice has a great reputation because she represents a bestseller or two. But sometimes these powerhouse agents focus all their attention on the stars. They take you on in the hope they can get a star deal for you, too, but if they can't, they're stuck with you just as you're stuck with them. That's how their stables get filled with authors who wonder why they can't get a call back.

And reputation only tells a partial story. In this business, in public, we're all quick to praise and slow to criticize. (Notice, for example, that even though I'm not hiding my annoyance at this contract provision, I have not named the agency or the agent. I might be mouthy, but I'm not that stupid.) If you don't share a confidential relationship with at least one of the agent's clients, you might not be hearing the whole story.

Be smart, kids. It's a cruel and treacherous world we're living in.

Theresa

ETA: Since this post went live this morning, I've received confirmation of two agencies doing this. One was the original agency that prompted this post, and the other is a mid-sized agency with questionable ethics. Anybody know what the AAR has to say about this?

Editing and rights

RWA reports that at least one publisher (let's guess which) is suggesting that authors who get their rights back shouldn't use the edited book as that's a collaboration.  (Let me say quickly that RWA's position-- they got an attorney brief-- doesn't support this at all.) 

This is pretty pernicious. (For one thing, the finished book is usually copyrighted NOT to the publisher or editor, but just the writer.)  RWA suggests that everyone in this position should check their contract's reversion clause (none of mine, btw, say anything like that).

RWA does point out that material actually written by the publisher's employees, like the back cover copy, might be better left unused. (And the cover.)

Anyone have experience with this sort of situation?

I'm getting the idea that everyone wants to get yet another piece of the pie.

Alicia

Young author imprint

Here's an article (rather hagiographic for my tastes) about a Harper line that seeks out (and awards small advances to) young authors with books that might not get a good reading elsewhere.  One tactic that jumps out at me is that they might do a small print-run (usually that's going to cause the book to fail), but they are willing to go back and do further print-runs if the book seems to be catching on. That's the sort of action we seldom see with big publishers and "small books," but the willingness to go back to print is essential to create the sort of slow-burning seller.

One of the worst aspects of publishing since the 90s has been the willingness-- eagerness-- of publishers to declare a book a failure after it's been on the shelves a month. We know that "word-of-mouth" creates sales, but it takes a while for those mouths to get talking, and it does no good if the book is no longer available after a month or two.  This is another advantage that the demon Amazon has over physical bookstores, and e-books have over print-- being able to depart from the "limited inventory" model where the shelves have to be cleared for the next month's offerings. That's also an advantage that small imprints have over large-- there aren't 16 more titles coming out next month!

It's always seemed to me the most cruel aspect of publication, that the books we spent a year on disappear in a few weeks, that there's often no chance of a slow success. I'm wondering if the future will hold

Don't like the "small advance" model, of course, because that often means that a publisher can abandon a book early without much cost. But it's such a dysfunctional notion, and anyway, so few authors get big advances anyway... hardly seems worth fighting for.  I mean, how many of us ever got decent advances, even in the "golden era"?
Alicia

Defining a Few Terms

We've been talking pros and cons of direct publishing a little here lately. So when Matt Zandstra (@inflatableink) tweeted a link to this Guardian article, it caught my attention immediately. But maybe not for the reasons you might think.

The article is about an author, Polly Courtney, who successfully self-published two books. That landed her a 3-book deal with Avon HarperCollins, a reputable big publisher with one of the best PR machines in the industry. Their publicists are ace. Their marketing is top shelf. So this is why I sat up straight and paid attention when this author announced she was dropping her publisher and going back to self-publishing because of their marketing approach to her titles. How can this be? Is the best in the business no longer good enough? I mean, we all hear about the tailspin every day. Marketing and PR efforts are dwindling, authors don't get good support, etc., etc.

So I read the article. And this is what I read:

"[T]he real issue I have is that it has been completely defined as women's fiction. … Yes it is page turning, no it's not War and Peace. But it shouldn't be portrayed as chick lit.... The implication with chick lit is that it's about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams."

That sound you hear is my mental brakes squealing as my ability to empathize with this author crashes. I say that in full awareness that the article might have been slanted to create this reaction. Perhaps those are not exact quotes. Perhaps the author got it right during the interview, but it was transcribed incorrectly. So I don't blame the author, and I certainly don't hold it against her.* Lots of people would read this article and not have my reaction to it. But those people? Probably aren't all that aware of the way books are marketed in this industry.

And the article's implication is that neither is the author. The implication is that an author who is complaining about her marketing is so unaware of marketing terms that she can't distinguish between them. Knowledgeable people read that and think, "She's cutting herself loose from one of the best teams in the industry because of how they slotted her, and she doesn't even know that these slots she mentions are not interchangeable."

So, I responded to the original tweet from Matt to suggest that there might be a credibility issue here, and we had a nice chat about it, and Matt asked me to define some terms. I attempted to do so in 140 characters, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew this should be blogged. Ergo:

Women's fiction = an umbrella term to define a broad segment of books targeted at women readers. For marketing purposes, this includes chick lit, romance, family sagas, old-fashioned glitz novels, what some call "weepies," and some mainstream and upmarket stuff. It's an important market segment because women tend to buy and read more books than men. (Note: Romance writers tend to use the term "women's fiction" to describe all stories for women which are neither romance nor chick lit. I disagree with that usage, as do some of other publishing pros I've talked to over the years. But it's not a problem as long as you're aware of who you're talking to.)

Romance = a type of women's fiction in which the central plot involves the formation of a romantic bond between characters. These stories are folkloric in both origin and structure (as we've repeatedly blogged about -- just click the structure link in the tag list on the sidebar for a sampling). They are close cousins of fairy tales or wonder tales, which are also forms of folklore. It's an important market segment because romance readers tend to buy and read lots of books, and they tend to buy only (or mostly) romance, so they're good customers. Consequently, before the arrival of chick lit, the overwhelming majority of books for women were romance novels. (And some family sagas and glitz novels, but mostly romance.)

Chick lit = a type of women's fiction about a young woman reaching maturity or coping with adult issues for the first time. These stories are akin to coming-of-age tales given that in our modern world, adolescence typically ends in a person's mid-20s. First real job, first real relationship, first steps toward financial independence, what it all means, a girl's place in the world -- these are the themes of chick lit. Romance can form a part of that, but doesn't have to. These books caught fire in the 90s and sold as fast as they could be printed, proving that women readers were interested in things other than the classic romance. In some circles, they were heralded as a feminist success because they portrayed women's full lives, not just their romantic lives. (That statement misunderstands the nature of romance novels, so please, romance novelists, no need to chide me.)

So maybe you can see why saying, "They defined my books as women's fiction," doesn't state a problem if, in fact, the books are aimed at a female readership. And maybe you can see why defining chick lit as "about a girl meeting the man of her dreams" muddies the distinction between chick lit and romance. Again, this is not meant to be a knock on this particular author, who may have had legitimate concerns about her cover art and other aspects of the marketing, and who for all we know never said these exact things*. But perhaps it should serve as a warning sign. Know the industry. Use terms precisely. If you're going to burn a bridge, be able to explain clearly why you lit that match.

Theresa

*I suspect that the Guardian misrepresented the author's words, in fact, because they tend to toss around the term "chick lit" as a pejorative to stir up controversy. And their disrespect of romance writers has led to worldwide protests. So I think they probably either screwed up or misquoted her on purpose. And I do still think that the Avon team is crackerjack, despite whatever may have happened here.