Category Archives: Professional

career, outward projection of you and your works

A Newbie Writer’s Take on Random House’s Hydra Imprint

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There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the new Random House eBook imprint. Scalzi outlined its awfulness, SFWA has declared Hydra not to be a qualifying market, Random house responded… the discussion is, shall we say, ongoing.

The thing that strikes me about this whole mess is that I feel what Hydra is offering is basically another flavor of vanity publishing.

When you’re just starting out as a writer and have no major publications under your belt and no real reputation, you get asked a lot if you’re planning on self-publishing. At least I’ve gotten that question a fair bit. And being the responsible over-researched writer that I am, I sought to understand the differences between being published by a publisher, large or small, and publishing your book on your own. I wanted to make the right decisions for myself and do what would make me the happiest in the long-term.

A lot of things go into making a book go from your finished draft to something people might want to buy. Editing, for one. All the editing. The editing for content and continuity, the copy edits. The book-formatting, making it go from a Word document to epub or whatever-all format you’re working in. Cover art. Advertising. Marketing. Promotion. It’s a lot of work.

Frankly, I just want to write stories. I’m not so naive as to think that I can simply throw manuscripts at the wall and eventually something will stick and then I can wash my hands of the whole thing. Increasingly, authors are taking on portions of the promotional work for their books. But by and large, publishers take on a fair bit of the heavy lifting of transforming a book from manuscript to bound pages on a shelf. And I’m kind of lazy, so I’m pretty stoked on the concept of having someone else do that work for me, while paying me for the right to distribute my work.

So here we have two models: one model, where someone pays me to distribute my work, take a cut of the profits, and share a cut of the risk; and the other model, where I distribute my own work, keep all (most) of the profits, take on all of the risk.

But there was a third model out there, that people rarely talk about in a positive way. It’s a model where you pay a publisher to publish your book. The term for this is “Vanity Press” and I don’t think I’ve ever really heard anybody in the industry seriously discuss this as a good model for a career. It’s basically the worst of all worlds: You pay someone else to put your book together, and are expected to carry the burden of distribution. The vanity press has no real vested interest once the book is packaged. They have their money, they don’t need to work to sell your book.

Which, to me, sounds a lot like what Random House is offering with the Hydra imprint. Pay them to put your book together (not directly, of course, these fees will just come out of any money your book makes), and then you split the profits. Oh, and unlike self-publishing where you keep your copyright, and unlike traditional publishing where there are explicitly set periods on the copyright, Hydra keeps the rights forever. Meaning if your book takes off, you can’t scale up to a better deal. You the author take on the bulk of the risk and only keep a percentage of the reward. It’s a watered-down vanity press.

To be honest, even as a newbie like myself who would very much enjoy seeing her book available for other people to read someday, Hydra sounds like a bad deal. I feel like Random House believes that putting their imprint’s name on my book is a privilege for me and I should be happy to get it. It comes off to me as condescending and frankly we authors deserve far better.

EDIT: 03/12/2013 @ 3:30P Pacific

Well. The Internet moves fast, don’t it.

Shortly after my previous post about my thoughts on the Hydra contract, Writers Beware made a post on Hydra’s updated contract. And to be honest, it sounds like a pretty decent improvement. It makes me very optimistic that they were so willing to take on criticism and to respond in a respectable manner, and actually consider the problems with their contract. It also makes me happy that the backlash actually had some impact here. One of the concerns was that if something like this went unchallenged or unedited it could become the New Normal. Thankfully it looks like Random House listened.

Predicting the Past

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Lucia St. Clair Robson was born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in South Florida. She has been a Peace Corps volunteer in Venezuela and a teacher in Brooklyn, New York. She has also lived in Japan, South Carolina and southern Arizona. After earning her master’s degree in Library Science at Florida State University, she worked as a public librarian in Annapolis, Maryland. She now lives near Annapolis. The Western Writers of America awarded her first book, Ride the Wind, the Spur Award for best historical western of 1982; it also made the New York Times Best Seller List and was included in the 100 best westerns of the 20th century. Since then she has written Walk in My Soul, Light a Distant Fire, The Tokaido Road, Mary’s Land, Fearless, Ghost Warrior: Lozen of the Apaches (finalist for the 2003 Spur award), and Shadow Patriots, a Novel of the Revolution. Western Writers of America awarded her latest novel, Last Train from Cuernavaca, the 2011 Spur for Best Western Long Novel.

One of the slyer ironies of writing about history is that making up stuff doesn’t always mean it’s not true; and declaring something to be fact doesn’t guarantee that it is. Now and then someone will say he only reads non-fiction, to which I reply, “You think you’re reading non-fiction.”

The most talented and conscientious historians don’t know what really happened before they were born. And even if they were around for the excitement, anyone who’s attended a high school reunion knows what a trickster memory can be. Same class, same teacher, very different recollections.

When writing about the Apaches I consulted John Cremony’s entertaining memoir. Cremony was on the Boundary Commission surveying the new border after the Mexican War of 1846-48. He reported a particular rifle being used to send a bullet across the nether end of the Apache leader, Delgadito. Delgadito thought he was out of range and he was doing what Apaches so often did. He was mooning the soldiers pursuing his raiding party. The fight was called on account of laughter, and historians report that Delgadito didn’t sit down for a while.

When I gave the manuscript to a gunsmith friend to vet he said the rifle in question wasn’t produced until two years after that moon shot. In the fifty years between experiencing the event and writing about it, Mr. Cremony must have forgotten the exact make of the gun. The question then becomes, what other details did he mis-remember?

Historical research is like interviewing witnesses at the scene of an accident, except that the accident happened a hundred years ago. Also, the witnesses don’t speak your language, someone was shooting at them at the time, and they have a vested interest in protecting the good names of the drivers. The best we chroniclers can do is collect as many reference points as possible, then triangulate on the truth.

I’m not claiming that historical novelists should be given the sort of credence accorded academicians. We are professional liars, after all. But I see the relationship between fiction and non-fiction as symbiotic. I depend on the work of historians for facts to weave into my stories. On the other hand, novels often motivate readers to seek out more information on the subject, if only to see if the preposterous events described actually happened.

I wish I could remember who said, “I never let a story get in the way of good facts,” but well-written historical non-fiction can be as compelling as fiction. Generally speaking, though, novels have more potential for connecting with readers on an emotional level. And if history isn’t about emotions, what is?

A well-researched historical novel gives an added dimension to facts. The reader and the novelist make an unspoken pact. The reader says, “I know you’re lying to me, but I’ll suspend disbelief on the chance that together we’ll arrive at some greater truth.”

Historical fiction explores the consequences and motivations of human nature. It allows readers to absorb the sense of another time. Novelists must do more than report events. They have to re-create the world in which those events took place.

Novelist L.P. Hartley once wrote, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” It’s not enough for a novelist to know who the generals were, how their troops were deployed, what they carried, and what they wore.

What technology was available? What were the current medical advances? What did people talk about in the taverns? What slang did they use, what jokes did they tell? What sort of hanky-pank did they engage in? (I’m always amused by people who are horrified at the notion of our ancestors engaging in hanky-pank).

There are times when a generalist such as a novelist uncovers more information than a specialist because she casts a wider net. In a used-book store in San Antonio the owner asked if he could help me find anything. I told him I was writing a novel about the Mexican War. “I have just the book for you,” he said. “It lists all the books that have been written about the Mexican War.”

I thanked him, and said I had quite a few books on the subject and was looking for other sorts of information. He took umbrage.

“How can you write about the Mexican War if you don’t know everything that’s been written about it?”

I told him I needed to know how to cheat at monte, how to fool a sucker into buying a horse with glanders, what the soldiers used to polish their brass buttons, and what the cure for cholera was in 1848. I think I had him at cheating at monte, but he also found me a good book on horse trading.

Now and then I stumble across information that historians have missed. A Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of a biography of Andrew Jackson mentioned that Will Rogers was related to Sam Houston’s Cherokee wife, Tiana Rogers. Other writers picked up on it and mentioned it in their own books, but it wasn’t true. Two men named John Rogers lived among the eastern Cherokees and both moved west about the same time. One was Hell-Fire Jack (Tiana’s father), and the other was Nolichucky Jack. The award-winning biographer mixed them up, which was understandable since the Cherokees were a sidebar to his main subject.

On occasion imagination has come closer to reality than could be expected. This is when stuff that’s made up turns out to be true. One of Hell-Fire Jack’s descendants telephoned me one day. She introduced herself and said the family wanted to know where I had gotten some of the stories in Walk in My Soul. I told her I had read them or made them up. “No,” she said. “Those are stories only the family knows.”

Another reason I like to write fiction is that I can go where historians can’t, or shouldn’t… into the back alleys of speculation. That’s not as irresponsible as it sounds. A lot of it is common sense and the linking of disparate pieces of information. For instance: male alligators are aroused by B-flat. We know this because someone asked a French horn player to serenade his captive gators. B-flat sent them into courtship mode and they converged on the hapless musician to see if they could score.

So, in writing a novel about the Second Seminole War, I described General Winfield “Fuss and Feathers” Scott’s campaign to surround and surprise the hostiles in the Florida swamps. For a guerrilla war in a quagmire he brought along a military band and to boost his troops’ morale he had the band play a concert after dinner. The Indians attacked and I imagined the poor musicians taking cover behind their tubas and trombones. But I also imagined the band hitting B-flat and the area coming alive with horny saurians.

I noticed that at least one historian wondered why the Mexicans would have called on St. Jerome in the battle that gave Geronimo his name. St. Jerome, the historian said, was a scholar. Because I had written a book about the Catholics of early Maryland I happened to have a few books on saints. One of them mentioned that there were two St. Jeromes, one of whom was a soldier. I don’t know if that had anything to do with Geronimo’s Mexican name, but it’s a possibility.

In recent years, charges of revisionism have been leveled at writers of historical fiction and non-fiction alike. Maybe that’s true in some academic settings, or in history books written to stir up controversy on the talk-show circuit. But let’s face it, people have been revising history, either deliberately or inadvertently, since the first cave man exaggerated the size of the saber tooth tiger that got away.

They say history is written by the victors, but that’s only half true. Much of our past was chronicled by Victorians as well. I call those accounts wishful history or proto-revisionism. A lot of clap-trap has been passed off as history— George Washington and the cherry tree, the line in the sand, Osceola driving his knife into the treaty. My personal favorite is the army report that referred to a Comanche leader as Buffalo Hump. According to one book on the Comanches, he was named after an entirely different part of a male bison’s anatomy.

History is messy and sexy and smelly. It has odd angles and sharp edges. It’s not easy to wrap up in neat packages with pretty paper and ribbon. To try to imbue the past with present-day sensibilities is bone-headed; but correcting myths, errors, and misconceptions is not revisionism.

As for errors of fact that creep into my novels, I can’t take all the credit for them. I either found them in non-fiction sources and was fool enough to believe them, or when triangulating on the truth I didn’t allow enough for windage.

Have Pen, Will Travel

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Keith Souter is a Scottish-born writer living in England within an arrow’s shot of ruins of a medieval castle. A part time doctor, he writes medical books and general non-fiction books. He also writes crime fiction under his own name and Westerns as Clay More. Souter’s novel Raw Deal at Pasco Springs was reprinted as the debut title in The Western Fictioneers (e-book) Library.

Many moons ago, as a youngster I used to sit riveted to the floor in front of a small nine-inch, black and white television and watch suave Richard Boone as Paladin, a gentleman gunfighter solve some mystery or dispute, using both his brains and his weaponry. He gave out calling cards with the picture of a white chess knight and the words ‘Have Gun- Will Travel’ emblazoned across it. For that half hour I was transported back to the Old West.

It was not long before I discovered the joys of reading westerns. I devoured all the novels that my father had lying about the house by the likes of Max Brand, Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. I dreamed of being able to conjure up tales such as they were able to tell.

I started writing children’s stories for magazines when I was studying medicine at Dundee University in Scotland. Inevitably, I longed to have my name on the spine of an actual book. It was then that I came across that old adage, ‘write about what you know.’ It is one of the nuggets of writing wisdom, except it can be a bit of a stumbling block, because it is often misinterpreted.

In my case as a medical doctor I assumed that it mean that I should write a medical thriller or maybe a medical romance. The problem was, that I worked in medicine and didn’t want to spend my thinking and writing time in medicine. So I had several false starts on various non-medical novels, and like most writers I have a drawer full of opening chapters for several books that never saw the light.

Then it dawned on me. It didn’t mean that I had to write exclusively about a medical world, but that I should use my medical knowledge to really make a character stand out and be believable. Or I should be able to drip in details about drugs, operations, or snippets of medical history. And that is just what I did in my first western novel Raw Deal at Pasco Springs. I did the same with several other westerns before turning to crime! I created an island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and peopled it with believable characters, including the local doctor, who doubles as a police surgeon. And here my Inspector McKinnon can solve crimes using his brains rather than depending upon forensic science and DNA.

Crossing one genre gives you the confidence to do it again. The bridge that I use, which allows me to adopt the ‘Have Pen – Will Travel’ approach, is medicine. I am able to create believable medical situations. For example, I have very much enjoyed doing this in the ‘shared world’ of Wolf Creek, where my character, Dr Logan Munro is the town doctor. Similarly, I use it in my historical novels, which are set in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

In addition to fiction I write non-fiction books and here again I cross genres. I write about medicine and health, which is an extension of my work as a doctor and medical journalist, and I write books about sport, science, history and games. The bridge is not always medicine, may be another of my special interests. As a western novelist I have immersed myself in nineteenth century history. One result was a book that linked up Victorian quackery, magical entertainment and fraudulent spiritualist mediums, Medical Meddlers, Mediums and Magicians – the Victorian era of Credulity. It had all been sparked by my interest in the pseudo-science of Phrenology, which was in vogue in the nineteenth century. Phrenologists asserted that the lumps and bumps on the head reflected the convulsions of the brain, and that the character of an individual could be determined by having the head read by a phrenologist. From a Victorian perspective, it was totally plausible. Having written the book I picked up my pen and travelled over to the Wild West and wrote a tale for Western Fictioneers’ latest anthology Six-Guns and Slay Bells: a Creepy Cowboy Christmas. My story is called Snake Oil and is about a creepy phrenological snake oil salesman.

I then travelled across another genre, this time back to my roots as a children’s writer. My latest novel The Curse of the Body Snatchers is for 8-13 years olds and is set in Victorian London. It too is a ghost story with a mysterious phrenologist and mesmerist. And the plot revolves around medicine. Essentially, my message is that you don’t have to set your story in your relevant world. What you can do is drop in a character that shows your expertise. That way, you can use your pen to travel across the genres. Happy travelling.

The Time Management Triforce

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It’s rare, the author who doesn’t have to pad their schedule for extra time. They do exist, and they know themselves intimately. Their health habits, productivity foibles, available time and intended schedule. Though they too can be felled by unintended life and schedule changes, the rest of us often operate on a less clear picture of ourselves or not too distant futures. Unpredictable health—ours or that of family—further complicate our ability to navigate our schedules with a clear head. Writers have to be a lot of things to themselves, and project manager is one of them.

There’s a strong temptation to take on projects for money, to continue publishing regularly—and while those aren’t inherently bad they can lead to unpleasant consequences. Getting locked into a contract for a product or publisher we end up disliking, taking far under what we’re worth, or doing it ‘for the exposure’ are things that qualify as unhealthy for our careers.

People, as the saying goes, die from exposure.

So how do we prioritize what to say yes to, and what to say no to? Half our careers are about making spinning plates look like something a toddler can do.

I bust it down into a few things.

  • Payment (monetary or otherwise)
  • Bandwidth
  • Impact

 

Payment might be monetary, trade, or even a favor. Monetary payment scales—for charities or for certain markets I will accept substantial rate cuts or even do it for free. I’ve done some projects as a trade, editing something because I’d later get graphics help on a project of my own. When it comes to magazines, news outlets, or fiction, payment breaks down into it being about what I get out of it in terms of monetary/trade gain, and platform. I’ve sometimes blogged for highly reduced rates or for free because the platform afforded to me by the publisher was valuable enough to equal out the loss in money or bankable favors. I don’t recommend piling your plate with platform not payment assignments, but consistently doing them over time around your other projects becomes one more way to build your audience. Great platforms and poor paychecks can create readers that follow you to other projects. Won’t be all the readers, but a few dedicated fans can go a long way.

Bandwidth is all about my emotional, physical and time limits. If I say yes to something, from a one-off blog post to contributing thousands of words to a roleplaying game text, it’s going to hit all three. Writing’s fatiguing, and it takes a lot of time. If I say yes, I have to have the time to do it. Preferably with a long enough lead time to build in some padding for unexpected events, but I’ve done short stories in under a week, and proofed a 65,000+ word manuscript in under a day—the literary equivalents of making a turn on a dime. How’s the rest of my schedule, both personal and for work? What about my boyfriend’s schedule? I want to keep my own scheduling needs in mind, but if you have a partner, or a family, you also have to consider what time you can sacrifice versus what time you want to see them. In a crunch, I know we won’t see each other a lot during some of our projects, but building in room to see and connect with your loved ones is a big deal. If you book yourself too solid, you wipe out your bandwidth in every way, and that hits you harder—because it hits everything including that project. I can write an eight thousand assignment in a day if I have to, but I’d like to never do that again. Keeping bandwidth concerns in mind protects your ability to produce quality work, not make yourself crazy, and prevents driving work between you and your partner as a wedge of obligation.

Impact is at least in part a long game, career oriented concern. Does this assignment have any impact, positive or negative? Does this build my skills, challenge me, or expose me to an audience that may not know me? Will I learn from people I admire, something that ties closely into payment concerns. Will the name of this anthology follow me forever, and can I own that? If you’re afraid of the impact of a possibly controversial publication, weigh in with yourself on whether you can own that decision. Do you have the ability to turn jokes or rage around on others? To defuse others, or just deflate them? Sometimes a project isn’t worth the potential negative impact, long or short term. But the stomach churning days of hate mail as a journalist make me far more prepared for rejections and negative reviews. You don’t have to do projects you’re reluctant about. But a good way to step up your game is to say yes now and then to the stuff that might make you—or others—a little uncomfortable.

Payment. Bandwidth. Impact. Keep the three in mind, and you’ll be a better project manager for yourself. Expertly managed time means a better use of the opportunities we say yes to.

So go get ‘em, tiger.