Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (44 page)

Remember, you don't send a check to your publisher any more than you'd send a check to your boss. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or lying.

A number of tools exist these days to publish a novel yourself, both in print and electronically. Although self-publishing is an option, keep a few things in mind before deciding to go this route.

First, you may have heard about some authors who have found great success through self-publishing. Some of these stories are true, some are exaggerated, and some are untrue. However, even the true stories are the exception, as in “winning the multi-state lottery” exception. The vast, vast majority of self-published books sell a handful of copies, maybe enough for beer money. Be ready to accept that for your book.

Also, be sure that you've run through the venues of agents and editors first. Since self-publishing reaches fewer people (and I'm assuming you want your book to reach as many readers as possible), you really don't want to turn to it unless all other venues have been exhausted. And even then, perhaps you'd be better off spending your time and energy taking what you learned from the book you couldn't sell and writing another book you
can
sell.

If you decide you do want to explore self-publishing, you'll also need to do more research into the type of self-publishing you want to use. There's the
print model
, which produces physical books. You hire a company to print your novel, buy a bunch of your books from them, and sell them to readers and to bookstores. There's
print on demand model
, which creates a book that's ready to go, but only prints one up when someone orders a copy. There's also the
electronic model
, in which you create and upload a version of your book to an online service for sale, and they typically take a certain percentage of the price every time someone buys and downloads a copy. In any of these cases, be absolutely sure that you maintain control over your book and its copyrights. Also be sure that you can pull your novel from publication at any time. This area of publishing is rife with the con artists I mentioned above.

You'll also need to create a cover, have the book copyedited, design the interior, decide whether or not to buy an ISBN (the unique number booksellers use to identify your book), learn to create the various file formats for the different types of electronic book, figure out how to deal with accounting issues, ship books, and handle all the other bits and pieces that crop up when you go into self-publication.

Finally, you should have a marketing plan. Booksellers almost never carry self-published books unless the author personally visits and persuades them. This means you'll need to get out there and meet booksellers, talk to them, persuade them to carry your book. If you're going the electronic route, you need to ensure Web surfers find out about your book in a way that makes it stand out above all the thousands and thousands of other self-published e-books out there. Just uploading it to an online bookseller won't be enough. And through all this, you're still working on your next book, since a single novel usually isn't enough to sustain a career.

Some writers welcome all of the above as an invigorating challenge. If that's you, self-publishing is definitely your place. But if any of it makes you cringe, you're probably better off exploring the route to traditional publishing.

No matter which route to publishing you take, there are some things you can do to help your career — and others you can do to destroy it. We'll examine those in the next chapter.

A
great deal of a writer's career lies outside of his control. Publishers have quite a lot of power over it. So do book distributors, booksellers, and, of course, readers. However, there are a number of things that are under the control of the author. Some will destroy your career just like magic, and some can build it up with a little hard work.

It's easier to destroy than create in any business. A number of opportunities present themselves in publishing, too. You can wipe yourself out before you even get started, or wreck a fledgling career just as it's getting off the ground. I've seen a number of potentially brilliant authors crash and burn, taking some wonderful books with them. Here's how you can do the same thing.

No one will make you write. There's no boss, no punch clock, no stock-holder. There's also no one to cover for you. If you get sick, no writing fairies will magically crank out a thousand words in your absence. The same goes if you have to plan a wedding, have a child, or have a really stressful month at work. And here's the harshest part — no one will care. Not one person will care that you didn't make your personal writing goal for the day or week. Not one person will care that your novel goes unwritten. Not one person will care that you don't become an author. You have to care, because no one else will. (Well, maybe your significant other will care, but we all know the reaction people get when they say to the husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend, “Honey, don't you think you should be working on your novel?”) If you can't make yourself work on your book, you're in the wrong business.

Most people wouldn't dream of quitting their day jobs because of personal problems, but a large number of people set aside writing careers for them. In other words, they give up. This is the fastest way to end your career.

You can't finish a novel you never start — or never write.

True story time: Brenda Clough, another author friend of mine, was attending a large book festival where she came across a woman holding a book signing for her fantasy novel. Intrigued, Brenda stopped to have a look. At first glance, the novel seemed to be fairly well written, but the imprint page listed the publisher as a company well known in the writing community as a scam/vanity press, a place that sells a pile of books to the author and no one else. Brenda asked the woman why she had selected this particular company to publish her book.

The woman admitted that she had submitted her novel to a major New York publishing house, but the book had languished for too long, so she had given up and submitted to the scammers instead.

“Which New York publisher did you submit to the first time?” Brenda asked. The woman told her, and it happened to be Brenda's publisher. Suppressing a start, Brenda said, “How long has your book been there?”

“A few months,” the woman replied.

“My god,” Brenda blurted, “you were on your way! If they were going to reject it, they would have bounced it back to you in a week, a month tops. If it was there for months, it was working its way up the decision chain, sitting in people's inboxes, getting considered!”

The woman had given up way too soon. Who knows what would have happened if she'd had a little more patience?

I narrowly escaped the same fate. My first novel — the third one I'd written — went to over a dozen publishers. The very last one (Baen Books) took six months to look at the proposal and sample chapters I sent them, and finally asked to see the full manuscript. Six more months passed before they offered to buy it. Good thing I didn't send it to a vanity press.

A fantastic way to end your writing career is to stop sending your work out too soon. The time to stop sending your novel out is after it's been to every paying market, not before. Sometimes it just takes patience.

We can all name a few writers who've gotten too big for their britches. You know whom I'm talking about — the big gun who turns out thrilling or fascinating novels early in his career and then seems to slide. You pick up his latest book, realize it's awful, and wonder how someone so skilled could turn out something so dreadful. What usually happened is the author got lazy and used his best-selling clout to introduce a “no-edit” clause into the latest contract. A no-edit clause means the editor can't criticize the book or recommend changes — she has to accept it as-is. And this is always a mistake, even for the best of writers.

Listening to criticism about your writing isn't easy. It's not so much that the person is saying bad things about you — she's saying you have ugly children. The instinctive response is to snap something back in defense or storm away in a huff. What the heck does
she
know, anyway? Writing is art, and no one has the power to say what's good and what's bad.

Once you've calmed down, though, take a good look at the comments you got. I pointed out earlier that agents and editors are extremely busy people, and anyone who takes a moment to critique your work must have seen something worthwhile in there — it's much easier to hand out a form rejection. And if you submitted your piece to a workshop or other critique group, you asked for a much-needed fresh pair of eyes.

Look at the comments you received. Would they improve your writing? Are you avoiding them because it would be too much work to do the rewrites? As you read them, are you saying, “Well, yeah, but …”? Yes answers mean it's probably time to incorporate those comments into your work. Ignoring them is a perfect way to short-circuit your work — and your career.

Because we can all get better.

No one enjoys rejection. But no matter how ticked you get, the only appropriate response is … no response. You can destroy your budding career by responding with anger, sarcasm, or snark. The editor or agent will remember you, he won't be inclined to read anything else you submit, and word will get around faster than a curse. Instead, file rejections away and keep submitting your work with the thought that someone out there will eventually like your stuff.

You can really wreck yourself by howling about publishing industry people online by name. If you have a beef (legitimate or otherwise) with someone, gripe with face-to-face friends, complain to your dad about it on the phone, and mutter about it to your dog, but don't put it in print or post it online. Once those words get out there, they get away from you. Not only might there be legal ramifications, but you can get a worldwide reputation as a whiner or troublemaker and no one else will want to work with you. Professionals avoid slinging dirt at each other, and you definitely want to keep a professional face in public.

None of the professional writers I know believes in writer's block. It's an excuse, really. Complain that you have writer's block, and your friends feed you tea and cookies (or maybe scotch and soda), pat you on the head, and make sympathetic noises. It also ends your writing career.

When the work in progress won't move, change the point of view, skip ahead to another scene, write something really stupid that you know you'll delete but will get the story moving, or work on something else for a few days. Go for a walk, see a movie, work out for an hour, learn how to bake a soufflé. And then get back to the keyboard.

Writing is a solitary business. You can't do it in a group setting, with others talking to you or constantly distracting you or otherwise expecting social give-and-take. But isolation leads to mental stagnation. Other people generate new ideas and new perspectives. They keep your knowledge of the human condition current. Much as you might want to be a recluse, you also need to get out into the world. J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee produced great literature in seclusion, but only one time each.

Enough of the tearing down. There are lots of ways to build yourself up, too. None of them are magic, but these little extras can help push your career forward.

Get your name out there in as many ways as you can. Learn to use social networking sites on the Internet. If you aren't Internet-savvy, pick one site and master it, then figure out another. Many of them can be linked to each other so you don't have to post the same newsworthy nugget about yourself five different times.

Once your book gets published, arrange online interviews on other people's sites. (And be willing to return the favor.) Talk yourself up to build an audience. Host discussions about writing or topics related to your book. Hold contests for giveaways.

The main thing to remember, though, is to do what you feel comfortable doing. No one really knows how much of an impact a writer's Internet presence has on book sales. Some writers swear they'd have no career without the Internet, and some highly successful authors have almost no Internet presence whatsoever. Using the Internet can't
hurt
, which is why lots of writers use it. But if you find yourself spending more time online than writing, or if you cringe at the thought of putting together online profiles and constantly updating your status, I have one word of advice for you:
don't
.