A Publishing Contract: When Jupiter Aligns with Mars

By Eileen Vorbach Collins

Finally, after a year spent fretting over the difference between a synopsis and an overview, what to include in a proposal, which comp titles are actually comparable, and submitting my manuscript to more than 20 small presses I had three offers for publication.

The first was contingent on my changing the structure, because “essay collections don’t sell.” I’d need to rewrite the book in a more traditional memoir format. Excited to have an offer, I considered it; even spent some time working on the rewrite. But it went against my vision for the book. I want it to be read in the bite sized pieces a bereaved person can manage.

We bereaved can’t focus. Our attention spans are gnats, buzzing around our heads for seconds at a time. By the time we’ve read one chapter we’ve lost our place, can’t remember how we got here. Where are my keys? Did I feed the cat? What month is it? Do I even care?

The second offer came from a small press with some good titles and interesting cover designs, though after a call with an editor, that one didn’t feel right either. It’s hard to explain. The edges were jagged. There was a vague unsettledness and I felt myself holding back, my enthusiasm waning. But who am I to be picky? Shouldn’t I grab the first offer I get? Alliteration notwithstanding, what fun I would have withdrawing all those submissions. “I’ve accepted an offer of publication. Thank you for your consideration.”

Sure, we all dream of a traditional publisher, not necessarily one of the big five, but a press with some heft. A well-known name. An editor who shares our vision. A robust social media presence.  Some gorgeous cover designs. But the universe opened her arms to me through the little press that accepted my manuscript. To paraphrase the well-known song from the musical  Hair, for once “Jupiter aligned with Mars.”

The offer came from Apprentice House, a small university press in Baltimore, my hometown. Loyola University is my alma mater. It’s where I first started writing about my daughter’s suicide for what became my master’s thesis.

As I looked at the books Apprentice House had published, I noticed one by Michael Olesker, a former syndicated columnist for The Baltimore Sun newspaper. His wife was one of two midwives at the Baltimore Birth Center where my daughter entered the world. Although not present for the delivery, she came to our home the following day for a postpartum visit. Seeing her name brought me back, full circle, to the time of my daughter’s beginning.

When I started thinking about requesting blurbs, one of the first people I thought of was an associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins whom I’d met because of a serendipitous flyer posted in an elevator when I worked as an RN at the hospital. He taught a popular course in bereavement in the Pastoral Care program at Loyola. I contacted him and he asked me to send the manuscript.

Whether I’ll get that blurb remains to be seen, though I marvel at how everything is finally coming together. I’ve seen it happen so often now, for writer friends. I still grapple with feeling happy about it. How can I be happy to be publishing a book that I wish I could not have written? Writing the essays in this collection was sometimes excruciating. Why couldn’t I put it behind me? Why couldn’t I move on?  

To write about grief, especially the suicide of a child, feels risky. The stigma is real. Will readers judge me? After all, what the hell kind of mother could I be? My child took her life and I’m capitalizing on it, seeking attention by writing a book. Even including some humor. What the hell is wrong with me?

I can only tell you that when newly bereaved, I wanted nothing more than to read authentic stories by real people who had survived the most terrible loss imaginable. Stories that would show me it was possible to find a place of bearable sorrow. I hope my stories will do that for someone else. 

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Eileen‘s work has been published in SFWP Quarterly, The Columbia Journal, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her essay, “Love in the Archives,” received the Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction. “Two Tablespoons of Tim” was the winner of the Gabriele Rico Challenge Award. “How to be the Mother of a Dead Girl” was a finalist in the Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest.  Eileen’s forthcoming essay collection received a Gold Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association and was chosen 1^st runner-up unpublished book of the year.

Witness: Selling Memoir Without Platform

Memoirists have it rough. Be a great writer. Tell a compelling story. But first, shake your tail on TikTok until a million people know who you are!

I’ve written before about how platform isn’t social media—social media is an amplifier for messages you’re already sharing in other venues, and a way to stay casually in touch with your audience and your literary community. I divide platform into two categories:

• Audience grown from the author’s entire life’s work and career, in which the book is a logical next step conveying their existing mission to the world.

• Audience created to support a forthcoming book, built from more intense work over a shorter time

Ideally, both kind of platforms build on what you already love to do and have spent your life caring about. But you don’t actually need any platform at all. Memoirs can sell with very little public presence: perhaps a few essays establishing the author’s public affiliation with the topic; an awareness of where the audience for that topic exists and how the book can reach them before and after publication; just enough social media that the author understands how to use it when the time comes to amplify their messages around the topic.

The key word here is topic.

A memoir exclusively focused on a personal story is almost impossible to sell—to an agent, to a publisher, to the reading public—without either an enormous public platform, existing connections in publishing, and/or National-Book-Award-level prose. Sorry. That’s the breaks. Work on your writing, figure out the reader takeaway, query small presses, consider self-publishing.

But a memoir centering a topic—an issue percolating through the zeitgeist; a closer look at a past cultural moment; something wrong with society that you personally experienced and impacts a lot of other people—is much more likely to gain the support of a traditional publisher.

In a topic-centered memoir, you’re not just the narrator—you’re a witness.

Your story is still important, but in the larger sense, it’s not about you. It’s about the reader, and a larger issue they’re already fascinated by, or that it’s important for them to become fascinated by, as told by someone with personal experience. Your story weaves in and through the topic, paired with research, interviews or anecdotes, with thoughtful commentary, and importance beyond your level (or lack of) personal fame.

Unlikely to sell: This dead person meant a lot to me and gosh it took a lot to move on with my life.

More likely to sell: Planning for death in a climate-crisis world.

Unlikely to sell: I tried to kill myself and recovery was financially incredibly hard.

More likely to sell: A look at our troubled healthcare system from the perspective of both caregiver and patient.

Unlikely to sell: I survived a violent crime.

More likely to sell: How our nation handles this particular violent crime is deeply wrong.

Each of the selling authors is not just the narrator, but a lens on a larger cultural concern. Their story is an example of why we should care, or an illustration of how we could handle our own situation. Not just what happened, but why it matters.

What does writing a topic-centered memoir look like before and during the writing process?

Brian Watson recently wrote about starting out with hybrid intentions but generating a personal-story focused draft:

My outline followed a unique format—one I know now is called hybrid memoir. I wanted to intersperse the things that I experienced with some thoughts about the culture as it shifted around me. There was data on the number of AIDS cases and fatalities swelled in the US. I could describe how Japan’s gay community evolved in the years before the Internet. And so much more.

When I started writing in September, however, the memoir—its original title, I Should Be Dead By Now, was grim—almost wrote itself. My first draft, completed on the last day of 2020, set most of the interspersions aside. The exorcising of memory consumed me to the tune of nearly 110,000 words.

But early readers (including me!) loved his now-few digressions on the history of gay porn, Japanese culture, and coming out in the 1980s. Watson set out to revise his entire draft, even though it felt like an enormous undertaking:

The research might have struck me as too much work when the actual, coherent transcribing of my memories was already a lot of work. Or I might have worried that those cultural backgrounds and deep-dives would bore readers.

Will it sell? We’ll find out soon (go Brian!). But many agents and editors I’ve spoken to agree: it’s much easier right now to sell a memoir with a larger cultural focus, one that illuminates something we’re all thinking about right now—or should be.

Ask yourself, how does my story reflect an important moment in our history or a problem we should all be aware of? How are my experiences reflected in and reflective of my culture, and how should that culture change? What will I need to research or investigate to support my point of view about this topic?

Traditional publishing is far from your only viable path. Maybe the memoir you personally feel called to write centers entirely on your own story. Maybe you already write National-Book-Award-level prose, or have 8M followers on TikTok (go you!). But if what you really want is to traditionally publish, to see your book in the wider world, and to reach more readers who need your words, it’s time to explore—and write!—how your story speaks to culture.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the cohost of The Writers Bridge, a monthly chat about publishing, platform, and just plain getting people to read your book. Join her Tuesday April 25 for Selling Memoir Without Platform, live and free on Zoom. Sign up for the list and you’ll get the link and the replay link.

The Third Way: Publishing Without an Agent

By Suzanne Roberts

Anyone who grew up around the time I did suffered through a number of school-sanctioned terrors; one such terror was dodgeball. I was one of the weaklings who could not dodge the ball fast enough. The school bullies always aimed for my face to see if they could smash my glasses. Sometimes they did. I have heard this game is now banned at schools around the country.

But even worse was the way teams were picked. Two captains took turns picking their team, one by one, while the rest of us waited to hear our names.

My name always came dead last.

I bring this up because our childhood shame resurfaces when we feel unwanted or rejected as adults, and I’ve watched this play out in a number of writers’ groups on Facebook. There’s a theme among those who are sending agent queries. In a word, these writers are bereft. Querying agents makes them hate writing. Or they’re about to give up and self-publish.

I’m here to say that you don’t have to choose between querying agents and self-publishing—there’s a third way. My writing career has depended on publishing with an independent press. I’ve published seven books with independent presses, and though I’ll never end up on bestseller lists, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive.

Disclaimer: I could never self-publish because I have a severe case of imposter syndrome; I very much need someone else to be the gatekeeper. After publishing four poetry books with tiny literary presses, I queried a memoir, Almost Somewhere to over 100 agents. Ten or twelve requested the full manuscript; I spoke to several on the phone. One said she very much liked my book but couldn’t sell it because I was “untested in the market.” She said, “You know poetry doesn’t count, right?”

Talk about a dodgeball to the face.

For the most part, the agents I spoke to were kind. I could tell they liked my book but knew the market better than I did, and mine wasn’t a book they could sell to a commercial press. Many authors will hear this, and it’s easy to feel rejected, but thinking about publishing as a business—which it very much is—helps. Maybe you have written a very good book, a brilliant book even, a book that readers need. That’s a very different thing than an agent knowing a book will sell enough copies to make it a worthwhile investment for a commercial press.

I sent Almost Somewhere to the University of Nebraska Press, and they agreed to publish it. My advance was zero (which made me laugh when anyone called it a “book deal”). Yet my book sold through the first printing before release, date and  13,481 copies in the 10 years since—not counting audiobooks or translations. For a commercial press, those numbers are tiny. For a university press, they’re excellent.

 After Almost Somewhere was published, an agent approached me. I was thrilled. And of course, I already had another book (or two) I was working on. Someone was picking me for her team! But the gap between her and my vision for a second book was too large. She kept calling my memoir a novel (her list was mostly women’s upmarket fiction, which wasn’t what I was writing). We parted ways, and I sent my next two books, Bad Tourist and Animal Bodies, to Nebraska. Every time, it’s been a good fit.

I’m nearly finished with another memoir, one that may or may not have “market potential.” How do I know? That’s not my job, so I’m not thinking about it just yet. If I query agents again, I’m not going to let it make me hate writing. The joy has always been in the process of writing and revising sentences the best way I know how. Sure, it would be nice to have someone help manage my career, another person who is invested in my work (since my mother and my dog are both dead). But I’m not going to stand around on the blacktop waiting for my name to be called.

I won’t let my childhood shame seep into writing life, even though at times, rejection feels like the slap of that hard ball on skin. I’ve been doing this long enough to know the writer’s life is full of rejection. I tell my students that even when their books come out, there’s always something more to lose: not getting reviews, not making “most-anticipated” lists, not winning awards, not selling many books. So the best thing they can do—that we can all do—is to focus on the one thing we control: the writing itself.

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Suzanne Roberts is the author Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail, as well as four books of poems. Named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic’s Traveler, Suzanne’s work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women’s Travel Writing.

A Picture’s Worth 75000 words

By Damhnait Monaghan

Shortly after she sold my debut novel New Girl in Little Cove, my agent sent me an email that made my giddy heart droop:

“You are going to need (and want) a professional author photo for your book jacket.”

Need? Maybe. But want? Nuh-uh.

Still, I went to my bookshelf and pulled down a few books to study the author photos, examining clothing, props and arm placement. Black-and-white or colour? Smiling or serious? Toothy smile or close-lipped? Who knew?

I googled a few articles, learning that your author photo should be a slightly better version of you. You on a good day, maybe your best day. I briefly pondered the appropriateness of using one of my wedding photos. They were only twenty years out of date. Then I put the whole thing out of my mind. There was no rush.

Then the U.K. entered a national lockdown. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t book a photographer, but the thought crossed my mind that a pandemic author photo had at least one advantage—the bar would be significantly lower. Most of the time during lockdown I wore a bra and brushed my teeth. Me on a good day meant I’d probably brush my hair, too. It seemed manageable. But weeks turned to months; my hair grew longer and greyer. I read another article that encouraged me to think about the message I wanted to send with my image. (Please buy my book?)

Now that I couldn’t book a photographer, I almost wanted one. My agent chimed in again. It was important to be happy with my author photo—who knew where it might be reproduced—but a talented amateur photographer was also an option.

I wasn’t sure there were any talented amateur photographers in my COVID bubble. My husband had recently been called upon to take my picture for passport renewal. Smiling was obviously prohibited—I suffered a prolonged bout of the giggles. The final image? My eyes squeezed shut, my mouth wide open, looking away. On balance, a professional seemed a better choice.

When the lockdown restrictions eased, I leapt into action. The photographers in my area mostly seemed to specialise in weddings. (Maybe I could still fit into my dress?) But I found one who also did portraits, and liked the samples on her website. She’d never taken an author photo. I’d never had one taken. A perfect match! Even better, she was free on the same day I’d booked an appointment at my hair salon. Hair? Check. Photographer? Check. Alas, unlike my wedding, this time there was no string quartet and even more disappointing, no open bar.  

I chose a favourite top, applied light makeup and met the photographer outside for the surreal experience of a one-on-one photo shoot in my back garden. I followed her directions to sit, stand, lean against a wall. I stared pensively into the distance, then faked laughter. If laughter was required, I thought, maybe I should’ve booked my husband after all.

While she clicked away, the photographer asked about my novel. As I gave her my elevator pitch and mentioned my long, tortuous path to publication, I forgot to worry about how I’d look. Instead, I reflected that despite all that was awful in the world, there were still things to celebrate. 

The next morning, I received an email and filled my computer screen with dozens of images of me. Scrolling idly, I wondered how I would narrow it down to one photo.

Alas, on closer inspection it was too all easy.  

Why had I worn a top with cap sleeves? The beefy arms on display (surely just the camera angle?) meant many shots were quickly rejected. Likewise, the fake laughing. Lips firmly closed was definitely my better side. And it’s best to draw a soft-focus filter over the puckering in my trousers crotch in some of the photos. Cropping is your friend, my friends.

Luckily, if someone takes several dozen pictures of you, there are bound to be a handful of contenders. Examining five in greater detail, I realized what might be meant by “the message” I wanted to send. In my favourite photo, I’m standing in the shadows, beside a tree. But something about that dark background and my knowing look didn’t seem to fit with my debut novel—a light-hearted romantic comedy. (As one of my friends said, ‘Save that one for when you write a psychological thriller.’)

Like any true diva, I asked for input from my people: my sister, trusted friends and my agent. As I waited for their feedback, I was struck by the similarity between the author and wedding photo shoots. On both occasions I was happy, excited, and a bit nervous about what lay ahead. Perhaps it was no surprise that we all chose the same photo: me in front of white hydrangeas—a favourite wedding flower. If only I’d worn that dress. It even had longer sleeves.

Damhnait Monaghan is an award-winning flash fiction writer. Her novella in flash The Neverlands won Best Novella in the 2020 Saboteur Awards. Her debut novel New Girl in Little Cove—a light-hearted fish out of water tale—is out now with Harper Collins. A German edition will be published in early 2022. Find out more at www.damhnaitmonaghan.com

No One Wants to Steal Your Book

The cheeseburgers are your book

You may have heard from a beginning writer, “What if an agent steals my idea?” Or “What if a publisher prints my book and sells it without paying me?” Or “What if someone pirates my e-book?”

You may yourself have wondered, why is it customary not to copyright one’s work before beginning the submission process? Isn’t registering with the Library of Congress protection for writers? Doesn’t that little circle-c scare off plagiarists and pirates?

Not especially.

In fact, putting the copyright symbol on a manuscript submitted to an agent or publisher is the mark of an amateur. While an agent isn’t going to turn down a fantastic book because the author jumped the gun on copyright, it is a tiny indicator that “This author may have misconceptions about the publishing industry and I will have to educate them as well as trying to sell their book. They will need more of my time than a savvier author might.”

In North America and Europe (and most other countries), all artistic work is copyrighted from the moment it’s created in a fixed form. When you write it in a notebook, or type it into a Word doc, you establish ownership of your creation. What registering copyright does is allow you to sue for damages. Until your work is actually published (at which point copyright will be registered with the publisher’s help, or by you as an indie author), or unless you are an author at the Stephen-King-Nora-Roberts level, there aren’t many damages to sue for.

Actual piracy—copy-pasting and repackaging the text of a book and selling it as your own—happens rarely. It happens primarily in China, India and Egypt, markets with avid readers and low per-capita incomes. Foreign pirates do not care about your registered copyright, and you will not be able to find and sue them. If you discover a photocopy of your novel in a Cairo souk, your best bet is to figure out how to reach those fans and sell them something else (or at least get an Amazon review!). In North America, most piracy happens with textbooks and in category romance, and pirated copies show up after the book is published. If you’re writing one of those genres, by all means do more research, and learn how to file a copyright infringement claim with Amazon. But for memoirists and most fiction writers, our enemy will be not piracy but obscurity.

What if someone in my writing group steals my idea?

Remember that party you went to, and that person came up and said, “I have a great idea for a book! You write it and we’ll split the money!” Remember how ridiculous it was that they had absolutely no conception that writing a book is difficult and time-consuming and puking out ideas is the easy part?

It’s not possible to copyright an idea, and ideas are rarely original. Execution is what matters. The level of labor, time and expense needed to rewrite someone else’s book is unlikely to be taken on by anyone good enough to actually do it. (with the notable exceptions of Shakespeare and Stephen Sondheim). Writers able to skillfully repurpose the plot of a stolen manuscript already have their own books to try and sell, and usually, their pride.

What if I query an agent and they take my idea and give it to another writer?

Legitimate agents receive far too many submissions already—if they like your idea but want a different take or another writing style, chances are very good they have already received another submission doing exactly that. They may well sell a book that sounds a lot like yours; they almost certainly didn’t need to steal it.

What if a publisher steals my book?

Legitimate publishers don’t make enough money off books from debut authors to bother stealing a debut book. Just like agents, they already got six versions of that story, and they picked the one they liked best. Even scam publishers don’t make money by stealing books—they profit by charging authors to publish. If they steal your book, who’s going to pay them?

Do your research. As you go through the submissions process, this reputable webpage from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America covers common scams (including specific, named agencies and publishers to watch out for) and Victoria Strauss has guidelines to finding a legit agent. I strongly recommend reading the archives of Writer Beware Blog for common scams and shady practices, as well as names of predatory publishers and fake agents.

Our greatest protection as unpublished writers is that nobody wants to steal our work. Yes, that sounds a little sad. But just as “worth publishing” is not “worth stealing,” so too does “not worth stealing” not mean “worthless.” Our second greatest protection is our own voice. What makes our work worth an agent’s time, a publisher’s investment, and a reader’s money, is what we bring to the page, beyond an idea or even a particular plot. West Side Story “stole” Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet “stole” Romeus and Juliet. But the transformation of ideas from one author to another resulted each time in something unique…and words so distinct, they are impossible to steal.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the editor of books published by Penguin Random House, Mantle, Knopf, Hachette and many more. Not completely appalled by her editing style? Find out about Project Novel, an MFA year crammed into eight weeks. Or just join the mailing list.

With a Little Help from My Friends

By Dorothy Rice

For some, writing is a solitary act, best done in the privacy of a room with a door. Others lack that luxury and find their muse on a favorite couch corner or in a coffee shop. You may require utter silence or prefer the murmur of voices, music and the hiss of espresso machines. While the setting and circumstances vary, it’s still a private conversation between your mind and the page. Alone, we grapple with ideas, wrestling them into shape.

Sharing our writing is the other side of the coin. Our thoughts, transformed in that magical, creative space, become part of a broader conversation.

Eight years ago, when I began to pursue my belated writing dream in earnest, I’d recently retired from a 35-year career in environmental protection. With what I now see as blind, beginners’ luck, I located a journal (thank you Duotrope) that accepted reprints of previously published work. An essay of mine (first published in a community college journal, American River Review) was reprinted in the Winter 2013 issue of the Still Point Arts Quarterly.

The Quarterly’s Editor, Christine Brooks Cote, also the founder/publisher at Shanti Arts, became interested in my father’s art (the subject of the essay). The Reluctant Artist (Shanti Arts, 2015) a full-color art book/memoir, became my first published book.

A book about an unknown artist by an unknown author, published by an independent press in an atypical format, was never destined to appeal to a wide audience. Yet thanks to the encouragement and support of colleagues I’d met taking classes and joining writing groups in my community, I was able to participate in half a dozen readings and events and share my father’s artistic legacy.

In the four years since, I’ve become enmeshed in my home town Sacramento’s literary community. One friend says of me that I, “write around,” a joking reference to my promiscuity in searching out opportunities to write and share with others. I’ve participated in workshops, classes and writing circles, convened submissions parties in my home, and provided comments on countless stories, essays and manuscripts for friends and colleagues.

Whenever I can, I attend readings and events to support other authors. I also read for literary magazines—beginning with Narrative, where I volunteered as an Assistant Editor for several years, and now as a member of the Hippocampus Reading Panel. Reading for journals is a rewarding way to give back to the journals we love; reading hundreds of submissions sharpens my internal editor.

As one outcome of my growing literary community, the launch for my second book, Gray Is the New Black: A Memoir of Self-Acceptance (Otis Books, June 2019) was a vastly different experience than my first time out.

916 Ink, the literary nonprofit where I now work part-time facilitating writing workshops for area youth, hosted the event in their “Imaginarium”—an inspiring space filled with prompts, empty birdcages and whimsical clocks. Sacramento-based press River Rock Books, sold their recent releases alongside mine and 916 Ink staff were on hand to recruit volunteers and spread the word about the importance of creative writing in children’s lives.

Jan Haag, a friend and author who trained me in the Amherst Writers & Artists Method (AWA) and welcomed me into her AWA-style writing group years ago, introduced me. A handful of critique partners and fellow authors joined me in “acting out” scenes from Gray Is the New Black. Joey Garcia, critique partner, author, and founder of the Belize Writers Conference led an informal Q&A. One sister served up literary-themed cocktails, another dished out black-and-white snacks (I couldn’t come up with any appetizing gray foods!). The launch was a party, a celebration, not only of my new book, but of Sacramento’s vibrant and growing literary community.

The “then and now” contrasts continue: I forged enduring writing friendships at the first conferences and workshops I participated in five years ago, including One Story’s Summer Writers Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. Though we are spread around the globe, the writers I met continue to cheer one another on via Twitter, Facebook and on-line writing communities.

Journals that have published my work have been generous in spreading the word about my new book. Longridge Review interviewed me about Gray Is the New Black on their blog. Thanks to Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, I’ve connected with dozens of creative nonfiction writers and readers over the past three years.

Writing, even when it flows, can be lonely work. Sharing, whether one-on-one, online, in writing groups or via publication, closes the circle. Finding visible, tangible proof of this widening circle has been one of the most gratifying outcomes associated with the publication of my second book.

Four years of forging connections has transformed my life as writer and author. The Beatles, then Joe Cocker, sang about getting by with a little help from their friends. I’m singing from that same songbook, with a lot of help from my friends.

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Dorothy Rice is the author of Gray Is the New Black: A Memoir of Self-Acceptance and The Reluctant Artist. Her essays and stories have been widely published in journals and magazines, including Hippocampus, the Rumpus, Brevity‘s blog, and Longridge Review. A perennially-blooming author, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside, Palm Desert, at 60. Find her at www.dorothyriceauthor.com and on twitter @dorothyrowena.

The Stories We Tell the Agents We Tell Them To

By Paul Skenazy

Literary agents: can’t find one, wish you had one, wonder if yours is the right one. The web is full of complaints about agents, but fuller of questions about how to get one.

Anyone have experience with agent X, Y, Z? Is he/she trustworthy? Will they get behind my book and pitch it to publishers?

Then there’s the followup:

She loves my memoir but wants me to revise it.

He says my childhood needs tear-filled nights and more drugs.

They want Dad to swear and yell but he didn’t.

Those are harder changes for a memoirist than a novelist, who at least has latitude to invent. But how far should one go to meet an agent’s vision when it defies your own sense of the story you have to tell?

I must have been rejected by forty agents while querying my novel, Temper CA, about a woman, Joy, returning to the Gold Rush town where she grew up to attend her grandfather’s funeral. I wrote to agents who represented books like mine; agents recommended by a matching service (for a fee); agents I approached with recommendations from well-published friends.

Then I thought I’d found my soul mate. I sent Agent A my manuscript on a Friday and he emailed me on Monday: “Dear Paul, I read your novel through in one sitting. It’s very, very well done. My wife … thought it read like an Elizabeth Strout novel.” He sent the book out immediately to a publisher he was sure would be interested.

That was in February 2016. The publisher said no. Another publisher found the book too “quiet,” too slow out of the gate.

Agent A asked me to revise. Instead of Joy’s psychological crisis, A suggested an anti-heroine: “Everyone’s looking for literary fiction in which the heroine has an unapologetically dangerous side. Books like Gone Girl…The Girl on the Train…” His idea: Joy kills her grandfather but implicates her father. “Have the stakes build as she reveals some dark childhood story about the relationship between her, her father and grandfather… Crime novels are a much steadier market than ‘literary’ novels. If Camus were writing today, we’d no doubt market him as crime fiction.”

Keep the setting, keep the names, write a new novel.

When I got done with self-pity I set to work. I spent three months creating crimes, motives that crossed and double-crossed, secrets behind secrets behind secrets. What I didn’t do was turn Joy into a murderer. My agent’s disappointment was clear: “It’s been a long time since a novelist without a fiction-publishing track record took so little of my advice.”

I was hurt and angry, but I tried again. An alcoholic Joy killed her grandfather and implicated her bastard of a father. I felt like I was writing pornography.

To counter that self-betrayal I simultaneously wrote a second, parallel novel, closer to my original story, and sent him the thriller and the not-thriller. Maybe I could convince Agent A that my book was worth his time by letting him read it alongside his book.

The thriller grabbed him in the opening chapters, he told me, then it flagged. Too much backstory, memory, psychology. No publisher would be interested. He read twenty pages of the not-thriller and dismissed it.

I was done. A year after signing, we parted ways. I returned to earlier drafts, incorporated ideas from my year of inept revisions and rewrote once more. I made the novel mine again.

This story has a happy ending. A friend connected me with a former small-press publisher who wanted to represent a few writers. She liked my manuscript and offered suggestions about where I might slow down, dive more deeply. I had a residency at Playa, a beautiful sequestered landscape in Oregon’s high desert. I altered some stories—true and apocryphal—from oral histories of the Oregon outback and melded them into my Gold Rush town. I left Playa in September 2017 with a 60,000 word draft and spent the next month whittling to just under 40,000 words. I submitted my revised Temper CA to a novella competition—and promptly forgot I’d entered. So many years of contests and rejections: this one seemed as hopeless as the rest. In February 2018, I told a friend the book was ‘dead in the water.’

The next morning I found out Temper CA had won the Miami University Press 2018 Novella Prize. As I cried on the phone, I realized I didn’t know which version of the manuscript I’d submitted—there had been so many.

Temper CA, will be published in January 2019. Miami has been extraordinary in their editorial work and I feel lucky to have landed where I did with a book I’m proud of.

This is not the book Agent A read two years ago. The story did need more volume, though poisons and patricide weren’t the right noisemakers. I did need to get out of the gate faster but that didn’t mean a hundred-page dash. Joy isn’t always a trustworthy narrator, but that’s part of what she herself needs to learn, not a way of deceiving a reader. Temper CA is the story I hoped to tell about family and landscape, failure and forgiveness. Agent A praised the book I wrote, then told me it didn’t work. Thanks to his misguided suggestions, I produced a book he would not like.

Agents are the gatekeepers of the publishing world and as fledgling writers we’ll do almost anything to get in. But not quite everything. Learning what we can’t do teaches us about what we can, who we are, and what we want our literary worlds to be.

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Paul Skenazy taught Literature and Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published essays, stories, and book reviews in a range of newspapers and magazines, as well as critical work on James M. Cain and other noir writers. Temper CA will be available January 8, 2019. You can preorder the novella through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and your local indie bookstore.

Photo credit: Shelby Graham

Going Hybrid

35 miles per bale

On Tuesday, we talked about publishers soliciting authors in the guise of a publication offer.

That’s not a book deal. That’s a (slick) commercial for their services.

But for some authors, “hybrid” publishing works. Could it be right for you?

Old-school vanity publishers know their terrible reputations, and many have rebranded as “hybrid.” They charge authors a “contribution” that pays their costs and a healthy profit margin. They don’t care if your book sells—they already made their money. You may end up with cartons of unsold books, text badly or not-at-all edited, dreadful covers, crappy page design.

True hybrid presses offer a legitimate package of publishing services. It costs more than self-publishing—they still profit before selling your book—but you’re not doing it all yourself. Hybrids can provide a smoother publication process, bookstore placement, reviews, and some of the legitimacy of an imprint.

Is hybrid right for you? Well…

1) Do you want a long-term writing career?

“At least I’ll be published” is the worst possible reason to go hybrid. Low first-book numbers make it harder to sell a second book. It’s better to be a debut author than one who’s sold under 10,000 copies—publishers want a positive track record or no track record at all.

Going hybrid, at least one of you thinks you won’t sell many copies. If the publisher thinks you’ve written a bestseller, they don’t need your money. If you think you can do better, pursue traditional publication or explore self-publishing.

But if you’re up for tenure, a reputable hybrid press gives you a resume credit. If you’re launching a public-speaking career and selling books after every motivational speech, you’re busy marketing yourself—let them handle cover design and proofreading.

2) How much energy do you have for marketing?

Even Big-Five published authors end up marketing their own book. But hybrid (and small independent/university) presses often lack media contacts. Does your potential publisher display at industry events like the Frankfurt Book Fair or BookExpo America? Do they have readings or signings at regional book festivals? Do they have a list of radio station managers to contact? Check their social media for links to author interviews and reviews in national media. If they can’t market your book in places that cost money or connections to enter, they aren’t doing anything you can’t do yourself.

If you’re newsworthy in a way related to your book—you just summited Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen or Sherpas; you gave six organs as a living donor; you’re a former child actor just out of rehab—then marketing isn’t your obstacle. Hybrid away!

3) Are you in a hurry?

Traditional publishing takes time. Your book comes out much faster with hybrid or self-publishing—sometimes at the cost of lower-quality editing, design and printing. But good hybrids have an established editing and design pipeline to scoot your book right through. If you’re dying of cancer or facing a major book-selling event next month, you may want to pay for publishing.

4) Do you want your book in bookstores?

Traditional presses can get your physical book on a shelf. Bookstores have near-zero desire to carry self-published books, so that’s where an imprint helps.

Go to your favorite bookstores and check for books by your potential hybrid press. Give titles and ISBNs and ask a clerk they’d stock those books or only special-order them.

Ask the hybrid press about returns and the retail discount. If it’s not “we take returns” and the industry-standard 55%—red flag!

5) What’s the royalty split?

Self-publishing, you control the price and get all the profit. Traditional publishing trades a chunk of the net for marketing and reputation. Hybrids take what you agree to give them…on top of the money you paid to publish. Before buying their package, make sure you’re OK with your percentage.

6) Do they want subsidiary rights like audiobooks, TV/movies, or foreign sales?

Red flag. These should stay with the author who pays to publish. It’s unlikely the press will market these rights anyway, and they don’t have enough skin in the game to demand a percentage.

7) Will they edit? What are the editors’ qualifications?

Is your book really done? Like really, really done? Is there still a nagging feeling in your heart that it could be better? Ask what kind of editing will be done, and by whom. “Our in-house editor proofreads” is not the same as helping your prose sing and your story hang together.

8) What are their actual, printed books like?

Order a couple titles. Is the paper thinner than you expected? Do you see typos, blurry print, bad layout? Is the cover art just plain ugly? Pull out books in the same genre from your shelves and make a table display. Do the hybrid books belong?

9) Due diligence!

• The Independent Book Publishers Association has set guidelines for hybrid presses. This is the bare minimum of legitimacy.
• Search the publisher name + “scam.” Search again on Absolute Write (make a free account for better info).
• Check Writer Beware, a wonderful resource that details bad-faith agents and publishers.
• The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have a list of what to watch out for when approached by a publisher.
• Read Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer for a greater understanding of the industry.

Going hybrid might be the right choice for you. But go in with your eyes open. Hybrid publishing is not a “book deal,” it’s a package of services you purchase. Make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

When The Publisher Calls You

Hold on a sec, I got some thoughts about your memoir

You open your email, and O frabjous day! A publisher has come calling! They’ve seen your work in a literary magazine and wonder if you have a chapbook, or would like to be in their anthology.  Or you didn’t win a contest, but your work “shows merit” and “deserves to be published.” Maybe you wanted a faster process than querying agents, or figured your work better suited a small press, so you cast out to a few publishers, and one has bitten.

You read a little further. This publishing house “considers work for both traditional and hybrid publishing.” If your book is seen as better suited to a hybrid deal—perhaps due to “the difficulty in placing the books of new or untried authors, as well as the general increased competition in publishing today”—the publisher feels “that it may be necessary to ask for a contribution from you.”

Maybe it’s even right up front: We’re a hybrid press. Our package costs $XXXX, and you can add on additional services at $XXX, $XXXX or $XXXXX.

The email is reassuring. Someone has recognized the quality of your work. After all the hype about “platform,” someone wants your book based on your writing. You don’t have to hit 10,000 followers or make mailing-list spreadsheets. It’s a relief.

But most of the time, it’s not true.

Not (technically) a scam or a fraud. But a well-designed system to separate hopeful authors from hard-earned dollars, waste their time and leave them with unsold, often un-edited and poorly-designed books.

Remember the old saw about things that seem too good to be true? That maxim goes hand-in-hand with another cliche: You can’t cheat an honest man. You can only sell a five-dollar diamond ring to someone who thinks he’s ripping you off.

Writers who seek hybrid publishing “deals” aren’t grifters. But they are to some extent sidestepping the work of getting published. Submitting and pitching to small magazines, medium journals and mass media. Blogging/newsletter-ing to build their core audience. Going to readings and events, collecting names and emails. Being a literary citizen. We’re all looking for a lucky break, and lightning may well strike, but it usually strikes while we’re in the middle of the process. The process that sets us up to be able to sell books once we do get that publishing deal.

Most authors who pay to publish end up doing the real work anyway. Pounding the pavement to get their book in a few stores. Emailing the target audience (key demographic: “everyone I know who has ever read a book”). They’ll do that work with a larger cash investment than traditional publishing and far less potential monetary reward than self-publishing. Their copyright may end up in the publisher’s hands—the publisher who may also now own all their subsidiary rights.

Remember that part about “the process that sets us up to be able to sell books”? Memoir, creative nonfiction and self-help are hard to sell without “platform.”  Basically, the number of people who will buy your book or spread the word about it. Platform can be:

• social media followers (10,000+ real followers who engage with your posts)
• a speaking career (at major events where books can be sold)
• group membership (i.e., a nationwide service club or large religious organization; a class of people like “patients suffering this disorder”)
• writing articles or essays about the book’s subject matter, and publishing them in medium-to-major mass media or significant literary journals
• a public career like radio show host or TV presenter

Without platform, a traditional publisher doesn’t want to buy the book because they can’t sell the book. It’s also hard to self-publish without enough people to sell the book to. Unfortunately, so many books come out each year that, without a built-in audience, it’s rare for readers to discover and purchase any single book. Novelists still market hard, but for some there’s an existing base of blogs, reviewers, and genre fans to help the book get momentum and word-of-mouth. Nonfiction books by non-famous people are usually not newsworthy, so the writer needs an existing audience who will spread the word and buy the book themselves.

One of the things you can do to start momentum for your work is to revise sections of the book as possible magazine or newspaper articles, and seek publication in mass media. You can also turn chapters into self-contained essays to submit to journals. Whether you end up with a traditional publisher or a self-supported plan, getting your work out there will help future sales, and help you gauge your audience. Memoirists who publish a “hot essay” (the legendary venue is Modern Love, but there are plenty more places) often get offers from traditional publishers, or have agents seek them out.

Legitimate publishers have writers beating down their doors. Unless a writer recently did something very newsworthy, made a big splash with an essay, or regularly speaks at large events, publishers don’t come to us. We go to them. Self-publishing is totally legit, but you can coordinate it yourself, and publish with Createspace, Lulu, Smashwords and/or Ingram. That’s more work, but usually costs less, and you make all the money and keep all the rights.

Sometimes a true hybrid publishing deal can be the right choice for some authors. On Thursday, we’ll talk about what a good hybrid deal looks like, why you might want one, and questions to ask the publisher.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

Does It Matter If I Never Publish My Memoir?

By Karen Pickell

More than a year ago, I completed a draft of a memoir I’d been wanting to write for a very long time. It’s hard to say when the need to tell this story began. I started keeping journals as a pre-teen, and I’ve continued to fill notebooks throughout my adulthood. I signed up for my first creative writing class when I was 32 and pregnant with my oldest child. While my kids were toddlers, I began exploring my memory, crafting short pieces that I wasn’t sure would become a connected whole. In 2009, when I was 41, I applied to graduate school with the intention of writing a cohesive memoir. After I earned my MA, it took another two years to figure out how to shape my story from beginning to end.

Strangely though, since I finished the draft, the urgency I once felt has faded. It’s been usurped, I think, by fear—fear of being seen, of being known, even though being known is what I wanted most, because I’d felt unseen and unheard for much of my life.

My fear is multifaceted. My story cannot be understood without saying who and what have caused me to feel small and invisible. Some writers have waited until the secret keepers died before telling their stories. We are conflicted by our loyalty to those from whom we’ve always sought permission to speak. We don’t want to inflict pain, despite the pain we’ve experienced ourselves. We are afraid that if we tell our stories, ties to important people in our lives might be irreparably damaged or, even worse, severed altogether.

I’m uncomfortable with the possibility that by publishing my memoir I may hurt someone close to me, but I’m also afraid I’ll be hurt myself by the reactions of my loved ones. Am I resilient enough to withstand the very real possibility that some may try to discredit my own lived experience?

Was I fair in my writing? Did I talk enough about good moments, happy times? Then again, maybe my telling is too subtle, tries to make things sound too normal, when so much was not normal at all.

After so many years of writing, I’m no longer sure I’ll try to publish this book. I’m already a better person and a better writer for having completed the draft. I’ve begun to trust my voice and I’ve learned to see a long project through to completion. I kept the promise I made to myself to finish writing the story.

But I suspect that if publishing my memoir wasn’t important to me, I wouldn’t be sitting here anguishing over it. My original need to be known lingers and won’t be satisfied by confining my story to my hard drive. I want to connect with others who’ve had similar experiences, to help them also be heard and seen and known.

Money’s always nice, but I didn’t set out to write a book as a means of earning income. The respect of the literary community, though, does matter to me, which raises another fear—that my writing isn’t good enough to communicate my experience clearly and my motivation for telling this particular story will be misunderstood by readers who don’t know me in real life.

I’ve read takes by successful authors on the fallout from publishing their own stories—a gazillion different opinions on the ethics of memoir—and I’ve developed my own pretty strong opinion: I think everyone has the right to tell their own story, being careful to include only what’s absolutely necessary from the overlap with others’ stories, and that it’s best for each writer to trust their own judgment when it comes to anticipating consequences in their relationships.

It turns out that I’m the one who must give myself permission to release my memoir into the world, negative reactions be damned.

If I decide to publish, I’m certain someone will find something in my memoir to criticize. It’s possible some people won’t understand my story or won’t like me very much for publishing it. Will I like me if I publish it? Will I like me if I don’t? Will I respect myself? Answering these questions won’t banish my fear, but will help me find the courage to proceed.

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Karen Pickell holds a MA from Kennesaw State University. Her work has appeared in Bluestem Online Quarterly, Conte, and in several independently published anthologies. She founded the website Adoptee Reading Resource and she blogs at karenpickell.com. Originally from Ohio, Karen currently lives in Florida.