Submitting for fun and profit (via @cacotopos and @sircamaris)

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Tom Dullemond

Sometimes I get to be lazy, by writing a post elsewhere and simply linking to it! Twice the exposure, once the work, right?

I was asked by the eminent David McDonald, winner of the 2013 Ditmar award for Best New Talent, to contribute a post to his Wednesday Writers column. I decided to compare the submit/$ ratio of a top-notch genre magazine and literary competitions.

I’m going to suggest that you write outside your comfort zone and submit to literary competitions, for fun and profit.

It’s only short, so check it out. http://www.davidmcdonaldspage.com/2013/05/wednesday-writers-tom-dullemond/

Slick Write text analysis web tool (HT: @lif_au)

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Tom Dullemond

This is a great little service:

Slick Write is a free tool that checks your writing for potential stylistic mistakes and other features of interest. Whether you’re a blogger, novelist, or student writing an essay for school, Slick Write can help take your writing to the next level. Curious? Try a quick demo, or enter your own text in the editor tab. After submitting, four more tabs will appear at the top of the screen:

I had a play around, and it broke my text into stats, critique, sentence flow and a whole bunch of funky little bits of information. It seemed to detect the style of the submitted text (ie. whether it was prose or an essay), and I assume it applies different rules to the text accordingly.

Certainly worth having a look at!

There’s a limit of around 200,000 characters, or around 28,000 words. So the service reminds you to submit individual chapters if you are planning on smashing through your novel manuscript.

Try it out here: http://www.slickwrite.com/

Self-Publishing is the Worst (HT: @annetreasure)

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Tom Dullemond

I was going to present this without comment, but any of you who know me realise that was a lofty goal indeed.

I … I don’t want to put the boot into Ted Heller for writing his article. But…well…he actually has an agent, and some books that the NYT has actually looked at. Despite the woes detailed in the story I think he’s actually not got it so bad… Ted does acknowledge that towards the end of the article, though:

Now, I happen to know a few people at magazines and newspapers; I’ve had novels published and I have an agent. But what is this experience like for Jane and John Q. Self-Publishing Author way out there in South Podunk, who don’t know anybody at all and who have zero connections? My heart goes out to them. I know why I do it (I enjoy the piss out of writing, I believe I might be good at it, I don’t know how to do anything else, and I was laid off from my last job). I cannot explain how I do it, but I really don’t know how those other people — the 99 Percent of Writerdom — can do this. Where do they find the time and the stomach?

Read it in full here: http://www.salon.com/2013/05/03/the_future_is_no_fun_self_publishing_is_the_worst/

How To Record, Produce And Distribute Audiobooks (via @thecreativepenn)

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Tom Dullemond

Joanna Penn writes this back in March, but it’s a good look at audio books. She interviewed J. Daniel Sawyer about his experiences producing audio books:

Your book is not just a physical book or an ebook. There are plenty of other subsidiary rights that you can exploit and audiobooks are high on the list because of the rise in popularity of listening during commutes or workouts, and the increased penetration of smartphones. In today’s interview, we explore how you can get into this market.

My experience with audiobooks is very limited. I listened to all of ‘World War Z’ read out by various actors, and it was great; I listened to Carl Sagan reading from ‘The Demon Haunted World’ and it made me sad.

There’s a podcast of the interview, as well as a transcript, so if you’re interested in the process of producing audiobooks it’s a good place to start. Take, for example:

Essentially, you will always make mistakes while reading. A single read when you’re really good will take about 4: 1 editing time. So for every finished hour of audio, you need at least 3 or 4 hours of production. If you’re just starting out it can be more like 10 hours production to 1 of finished audio. This is why it can be expensive to produce good quality audiobooks.

Read it here: http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2013/03/06/audiobook/

Hanging out with writers is exhilarating…and exhausting (via @LisaJJackson HT @Gretavdr)

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Tom Dullemond

Lisa Jackson on her experience at a writers’ conference, and how she wishes she could’ve absorbed more of the experience:

Writing can be a solitary life, right? Even when working in a noisy cafe, I can encapsulate myself as I focus on my work – be with/around people, yet still alone.

So when I purposely join a group of writers for a couple hours or more, it’s a bit of a emotional overload. I go from my own thoughts to learning about other writers, what they’re passionate about, what they enjoy reading and writing, and what they are currently working on.

I enjoy hanging out with fellow writers too, but I agree that the wave of personalities and stories and works in progress can be a little overwhelming. I wonder if there’s a way to compartmentalise without being utterly anti-social; some way to get the best of both worlds…

I’ll think on it and let you know if something springs to mind.

Read the full post here: https://nhwn.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/hanging-out-with-writers-is-exhilarating-and-exhausting/

I’m a Self-Publishing Failure (via @salon)

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Tom Dullemond

John Winters discusses the other, more common side of self-publishing:

An article in the New York Times claims that 81 percent of us believe we have a book in us. This sounds painful – both anatomically and for the readers of this potential deluge. In fact, extrapolated across the entire U.S., this 81 percent equates to 200 million books. Most of them no doubt about beloved dogs or written by celebrity chefs. I confess I was long among these wannabe authors. My cabinets and drawers are littered with more pages of fiction than the archives of the Nixon Library. However, recently I completed my first novel and subsequently set out after that dream of every writer: publication, followed by royalty checks of the six-figure variety.

I want to quote so much from this article, as John pushes his novel onto Amazon and gets bitten by the promotional bug after selling a few copies, pursues the dream of shooting a book trailer (“The Internet is full of tips on how to market your self-published book, and a trailer is high on the list.”) and generally continues along a path of increasingly expensive self-destruction.

There was one more avenue I’d yet to try in my pursuit of literary fame: give it away. That’s right; many self-published authors simply give the e-book version of their novel away in hopes of building word-of-mouth interest that will in turn result in sales. Roughly 800 people took advantage, and afterward there was even a sale or two.

John writes with a charming and dejected wit, so do yourself a favour and read the full article: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/02/im_a_self_publishing_failure/

The New Yorker Rejects Itself (An Experiment) (via @thereviewreview)

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Tom Dullemond

An entertaining follow up to my own little rejection story from the other day. David Cameron runs an entirely unscientific (and borderline unethical) experiment with stories published in The New Yorker:

It began as the kind of logical argument that seems airtight to anyone who has never studied logic.

If the New Yorker is the most desirable literary magazine in the world, and if the New Yorker can have any short story the New Yorker wants, then whatever story the New Yorker gets would—logically—be so intrinsically desirable that all lesser literary pubs (e.g., everyone) would pine for it. Just like the prettiest girl at the dance: the guy she picks is the guy chicks dig. Basic deduction 101.

He grabs a New Yorker published short story, rebadges it under a fictional author name, and starts submitting it to various magazines. I’m guessing most of you can guess what we’re about to find out: that publishing is often luck of the draw.

Dear reader, every single one of these journals rejected my poor New Yorker story with the same boilerplate “good luck placing your work elsewhere” auto-text that has put the lid on my own sorry submissions. Not a single personal pleasantry. What’s more, the timeframes tracked perfectly. For example, if the Beavercreek Fucknut Bulletin (not a real journal, but representative) generally takes thirty days to relegate my stuff to the recycle bin, then ourNew Yorker story—which must have been thoroughly confused at this point—fared no better.

Read the rest of his experience here: http://www.thereviewreview.net/publishing-tips/new-yorker-rejects-itself-quasi-scientific-a

A Reminder that Publishing Is Luck (via me)

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Tom Dullemond

Just a quick personal anecdote that might encourage some of you out there, particularly those who struggle with rejection (which as we have discussed, is just a fact of life for writers). It’s not just the quality of your writing that is a factor in publishing.

So, I wrote a story, which I quite liked. Normally whether or not you like a story doesn’t have much to do with its quality, but I’ve been around for a while, and I thought it was pretty good.

It was rejected a few times mostly for thematic fit, and then sat with an editor at a pretty prestigious magazine for about two months, who gushed about how great it was and moved it through the publishing process until it was ultimately rejected because they had several similar stories, or something like that. The detail isn’t important: what’s important is that it was one of the good rejections, one of those personal, ‘we love this, it’s great but unfortunately [phase of the moon/colour of the ink/ennui] etc.’

Them’s the breaks in writing, and personally a rejection like that feels like a win to me (aka validation).

Anyway, I sent the story elsewhere, to a less prestigious magazine, and it was rejected with a score this time (as this particular publication scored submissions, which I personally think is cool – any feedback is good feedback as far as I am concerned). The fun fact though, is that it scored significantly below the already low average for submissions.

Never to be upset by rejections (it’s a trained skill) I just thought I’d share how one story could both appeal to a Big Deal magazine and do several rounds of editorial reading with excellent feedback, yet score woefully at a different magazine.

Same manuscript! True story.

I hope this will make you sleep a little better. Also, I have this now, and I drink a shot every time I get a rejection. It’s great!

Don’t Query Via Twitter/Why I Don’t Read the Slush Pile Anymore (via @bloomsburypress, HT: @v11oyd)

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Tom Dullemond

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a RtFGl (ie. read the friendly guidelines) article, but this fit the bill.

Peter Ginna from Bloomsbury Press talks about his early, optimistic days, reading through piles of unsolicited print manuscripts arriving at a publisher with a stated policy of no longer accepting unsolicited, unagented submissions:

[...] but I thought authors shouldn’t be penalized just because they had not been able to find a literary agent. Perhaps I would find a work too original, too daring for the commercial-minded book peddlers to have picked it up, or discover a rustic genius who had banged out the great American novel at her kitchen table and sent it off to publishers without even knowing what agents were. After all, the tales of bestselling authors who have been discovered in the slush pile (such as Tom Clancy and Martha Grimes) were the stuff of industry legend.

What he discovered, of course, wasn’t just that most of the manuscripts weren’t really of a publishable standard: many of them were simply not appropriate for their imprint. Sending a YA manuscript to a non-fiction publisher?

They have not gone through the thought process, or done the legwork, necessary to put a well-targeted pitch into the mailbox of a specific person, they have trusted to luck or perhaps the dazzling quality of their work, or they simply haven’t thought about it one way or the other. That doesn’t mean they aren’t gifted; maybe they are naive, untutored geniuses. But it does mean they’re not professionals. They aren’t thinking about their work or their careers in a businesslike way. And that simply means the odds that they can be successfully published are really slim.

So we’re back to what I would call the Second Rule of Writing: read the friendly guidelines. It tells the publisher immediately that you have passed the most basic test of approaching your writing in a professional manner.

(Note, the First Rule of Writing is: ‘Sit the fuck down and write’). The reason it has more expletives than the second rule (which can also accommodate an expletive), is that it’s more important than the second rule.

Peter points out towards the end of his article that nowadays writers are using twitter to perform this kind of unprofessional dump-and-run, sending gems like…

Hey, @BloomsburyPress, I’ve written a teen paranormal romance. Ppl say it’s next TWILIGHT-DM me for details!

…to a NON-FICTION imprint, and then getting angry and rude when they are politely told to do their homework.

Read the full article and Peter’s suggestions here: http://www.doctorsyntax.net/2013/03/tweet-not-your-query-author-or-why-i.html

The Worst Feedback is Indifference (via @thisissethsblog)

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Tom Dullemond

This is very short from Seth Godin, so I’ve reproduced the entirety of the article below:

The worst feedback is indifference

We armor ourselves against the cutting remark, the ad hominem attack, the person who just doesn’t like our stuff.

But all of this is the feedback we get when we touch a nerve and are doing work that matters enough to care about.

No, the worst sort of feedback is no feedback at all. That means we’ve created nothing but banality.

Original here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/03/the-worst-feedback-is-indifference.html

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