Just The Caffeine Talking

How to Authorify, Part 2

A Darkling Sea sat on my disk drive until 2012, when two things happened.

The first was that David Hartwell invited me to his Hard SF Minicon in Westport, New York — chronicled here. That was a very entertaining weekend and gave me the opportunity to meet Gregory Benford in person. Mr. Benford apparently enjoyed my short story "Balancing Accounts" and sent me my first fan mail from an established professional. I don't know if he suggested adding me to the lineup for the minicon, or whether Mr. Hartwell knew he liked my work.

While I was at the minicon, David Hartwell let me know that he wanted to take another look at Darkling Sea. The publishing market had recovered somewhat, and Tor Books was more willing to take on new writers. So I sent it to him again.

The second big change was that I got an agent. One of my short stories, "The Alien Abduction," caught the eye of a film company, and they offered me a little money for an option. I knew that I knew nothing about rights negotiations, so I cold-emailed several agents, including the redoubtable Ethan Ellenberg. 

The words "movie offer" have magical powers. I got several replies to my email, but Ethan was the quickest. So he got to represent me with the movie people. We eventually worked out an initial option of $1, but I had representation — someone whose job is to pester publishers and editors, and generally do all the things I'm really bad at doing.

My newly-caught agent and my newly-recovered editor haggled out a contract, while I did a complete end-to-end revision of the manuscript before sending it in. The editors requested some changes, most of which were definitely improvements.* The publisher set a publication date, and a whole bunch of other people started working on the book: a freelance copy-editor (who did a fantastic job of keeping track of alien words and futuristic technobabble), the art department (who found a superb cover artist), and the marketing specialists.

Once I had the text in final form, the book more or less passed out of my hands. I started working on The Next Book and The Book After Next. But once the book actually appears in stores, I'm going to be working hard again. This is my first novel, so I naturally want it to sell well — both because that means income for me, and because a strong showing means better "push" from bookstores and the publishers for all my subsequent works.

That means I'm going to be shuttling around New England during the first couple of months after the book comes out, visiting bookstores to do readings and autographings. I've also been working with "my" publicist to come up with some fun Web extras to support the book.

Right now it's the calm before the storm hits. I'll chronicle the actual tempest of book promotion as it happens.

*Another note to aspiring authors: listen to your editors. The odds are good that they do know what they're doing, and have the perspective to notice flaws to which the author is blind. Moreover, if you agree with most of their suggestions, that means that when you contest one, they're more likely to take your objections seriously.

How To Authorify, Part 1

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.

 

Three Thumbs Up

Rounding out the trifecta with Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, now Booklist also gives A Darkling Sea a starred review in their December 15 issue. Apparently 2014 is going to be the year of big eyeless lobster-like aliens in literature. Get on the bandwagon now and start writing your erotic Darkling Sea fan fiction!

Read an Excerpt From A Darkling Sea

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, the Tor.com Web site has an excerpt from my forthcoming novel A Darkling Sea.

(Inside joke for SF people: now I know how to sell a story to Tor.com. Write it as part of a novel, and sell the novel to Tor.)

Two Thumbs Up

Publishers Weekly just released their review of A Darkling Sea. Short summary: they like it.

I may need to hire a contractor to alter all the doorways in my house so my head will still fit through them.

Winter's Tales

Winter has arrived. One can go by the calendar, using either December 1 as the start of the "winter months," or use the Winter Solstice. The latter is beloved of radio disk jockeys and talk show hosts, who love to announce on December 22 that "this is the official beginning of winter" and mock those anonymous eggheads at the Naval Observatory or wherever who didn't notice we've had snow on the ground for a couple of weeks.

I go by the weather. When it feels like winter, it is winter. That's how our preliterate ancestors figured it. In New Orleans that means winter arrives when there's a nighttime frost, typically in January. And in Massachusetts it's winter when the snow falls and doesn't melt away. Fall is the season of red and gold fading to brown, but winter is the season of white.

Winter is also the traditional time for story-telling. In spring you're out planting, or tending the newborn lambs. In summer you're weeding, gathering hay, stockpiling firewood, picking early crops, and maybe going off to raid those bastards down the river who stole some cattle last year. And in fall you have to get in the harvest. Winter is down time, and the long nights in higher latitudes encourage that.

Families would gather around the fire in wintertime, and tell stories. During the year-long winter of 1816, Mary Shelley and friends made up Frankenstein and The Vampyre, essentially creating the modern horror genre over a long weekend. Even as late as Dickensian England, there was still the custom of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. (Which survives in the form of the annual Dr. Who Christmas special on the BBC.)

Storytelling is a custom which has sadly fallen out of fashion. People read stories and watch stories and listen to stories, all created by skilled professionals. The few storytellers around nowadays are also skilled professionals. Amateurs don't tell stories much any more.

So I'm going to propose a challenge for this winter. We've had "NaNoWriMo" and "Movember" and who knows what all else. Now it's time for "Winter's Tales." The rules are simple: before the first green shoots of spring appear, everyone should tell at least one story.

You have to have an audience, obviously. It can be one person or many. Firesides are optional. The story must be told verbally, though you can write it down later if you want. The story itself can be fiction or a reminiscence or even a tall tale. I'm going to use a little executive fiat here and say that jokes don't count. A story that's funny is fine, but actual set-piece jokes aren't stories.

You get bonus points if the story is original, but that's not mandatory. A spirited retelling of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" or "The Golden Arm" is much better than a long pointless account of the time you had to spend all day in the airport because your flight was delayed.

In springtime I'll return to the topic, describe my own storytelling efforts, and let my vast readership tell about their own. Until then: it's story time.

 

Thumbs Up

The first reviews for A Darkling Sea are starting to trickle in, and Kirkus Reviews has a very favorable one. It's very gratifying to see that other people enjoy what I've written. I hope everyone else likes it as much.

Up to the point at which the publisher accepted my final draft, Darkling Sea was "my" book. I thought it up, I wrote it. I typed all the letters. But once they took it, it's no longer entirely mine. It belongs to the talented people at Tor, it belongs to typesetters and printers, bookstore buyers and reviewers, and ultimately it will belong to the readers.