I may have mentioned that I have a book coming out. Some readers may be interested in finding out how one gets to the point of having a book coming out. For aspiring writers who want to know how it works, or interested bystanders, here's what happened.
I started to write A Darkling Sea around 1998, when Diane and I were living in Ithaca, New York. At the time, I hadn't sold any fiction, not even a short story, but I was doing pretty well with roleplaying game adventures and sourcebooks. I thought I could write a novel, so I started making notes and coming up with a plot.
(People who have lived there may understand why it was in Ithaca that I started writing a novel about people living in an icy abyss surrounded by strange and dogmatic alien beings.)
I'm going to skip the "how I wrote it" parts dealing with the actual story and setting. I've covered some of that in a "How I Did It" piece already, and may do a longer one about Darkling Sea later.
By the time we moved to South Hadley, Massachusetts in 2000, I had an outline, which I took to a meeting of the mighty Cambridge SF Workshop. They took it apart, and I put it back together and started writing. I was also banging out short stories, and selling them, so I thought I was ready to "move up" to full-length books.
Brutal realism interlude:
I wanted to write novels instead of short stories because novels pay better. If I sell a short story, I get about six cents a word, which amounts to two or three hundred dollars. A really successful story might get picked up for an anthology, earning another couple of hundred.
If I could sell every single word I wrote, I could spend the time I devoted to A Darkling Sea on writing twenty short stories of five thousand words each. That would earn me five or six thousand dollars. Instead, I wrote the novel, which got me an advance of . . . about that much. The difference is that the novel has a reasonably good chance of earning out the advance and generating more revenue for me. Plus there's foreign editions, book club editions, and other ways to sell the same book over and over.
Moreover, it's simply impossible for me to sell that many short stories so quickly. There aren't enough paying markets. I would need to put a story into every issue of all the major SF magazines to sell a hundred thousand words of short fiction in a year. I don't think even Robert Silverberg at his most prolific managed that. (It was different back in the pulp days, when writers like Lester Dent published fifty thousand words a month, but he had a contract and guaranteed publication.)
Interlude over.
By 2005 I had a manuscript. How to get it published? There was really only one route: send it to a book publisher and see if they want it. Nowadays there are a growing number of writers who self-publish via Amazon, but that wasn't really an option in 2005.
Book publishers come in two sizes: small presses and gigantic media conglomerates. I went for the big boys first, figuring that I'd work my way down the scale until I sold the book.
By that time, I also had people to send it to. Ever since moving back to the Northeast I'd become a regular attendee at Readercon, Boskone, and Arisia. I met and got to know a lot of my fellow professionals -- including editors and publishers. In particular, I'd gotten to know David Hartwell, the dean of modern SF editors. After a little time wasted working up the courage*, I finally let him know I had a book and would he like to see it? He said yes. I spent about fifty bucks to get my manuscript printed out at the local copy shop (because it would cost a lot more than that in toner cartridges to print it out myself), and mailed that big brick of paper off to New York.
And then I got on with doing other things, because I had already learned that editors take forever to respond. The reason is simple: they have way too much to do. From my own brief experience on the other side of the desk, editors have to juggle three completely unrelated jobs. Finding potential books and getting them into readable shape is the first, figuring out how to sell the result is the second, and actually turning the manuscript into a physical book is the third. It should be an assembly line, with strict division of labor, but whenever that's attempted the result always seems to be miscommunication, unhappy writers, unsold books, and general chaos.
So editors always have too much to do, and not enough time. It takes months to get through the pile of unsolicited submissions, and a manuscript with potential takes even longer because they can't just read the first few pages and reject the damned thing. My manuscript spent about a year getting evaluated.
Unfortunately for me, 2005 was right before the financial bubble popped. By 2007, publishers were cutting whole lines and shutting down divisions. Nobody wanted to take on a new writer. The market at the time was hungry for vampire romance, not hard science fiction about alien lobsters. I sighed and kept writing. Selling short stories kept my name visible, and I worked on a second novel, a fantasy, which I hoped might be more commercially attractive. Time passed.
Next time: pluck and luck.
*Being too reticent is probably the biggest single mistake new writers make, and I certainly made it many times myself. Publishers are in the business of publishing books. You aren't bothering them by letting them know you've written one. That's like apologizing to the chef at a restaurant for asking him to make dinner for you. It's what they do.
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