Write (Stuff) People Want To Read

Write Shit People Want To Read

Our topic heading is my sole writing mantra. Our topic tonight is not so much writing, but rather the non writing aspects of the writing craft.

I am convinced that the greatest novel ever written is riding around in someone’s trunk. It may have been read, once or twice, by someone other than the author, but there was a point where our aspiring artist decided that going even one step further with it was not worth the bother. Or simply beyond the author’s capacity.

In a simple world our author would mail it off to someone who might do the work some good. A few types of people might come to the mind of our author. Perhaps being a direct sort of guy, he sends it to a publisher. I myself have done this. In fact, I once took this exact approach and netted myself both an acceptance and an advance for my trouble.  But I did at least do enough research to know what sort of things the publisher wanted.  And I knew that the publisher was open for direct submissions. (Plus the group in question had published something else of mine.) Our guy just might have about the gumption it takes to look up Random House’s address and send it there.

And what are our wordsmith’s chances with this approach? The same as a popsicle in hell without a stick. By without stick, I mean he nets less than nothing unless he included a SASE and/or return postage. I’m not sure what they do with books that just come to their doors, but I am sure it is not pretty. And I am fairly sure that whatever the process is, reading the thing is not a part of it.  Sending a manuscript direct to a large publisher is a good way to get it introduced to the maintenance department staff, not the editorial department staff.

Sucks, I know. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense. The sages will say that its analogous to showing up at a major league baseball game with your hat and glove in tow and expecting to play in the game.  The sages are essentially wrong, but that’s the way the publishers think of themselves, so the sages are effectively right.

So let’s upgrade our author a bit. If he doesn’t want to go through all of the intricacies of getting his work somewhere where his work might be seen, he can always just self publish it. I have been here also. Start a blog. Put your stuff on a website.  To be honest with you, it beats the small press.  (Which is why the small press has largely vanished.) It’s fine for expression. If you write stuff people find interesting, people will find you. They find me. There are even several ways to sort of make it pay.

All of this is a good thing and probably as far as most aspiring writers need to go. If you attract a million readers with whatever it is you do, the publishers quite possibly may find you. The rest is in the quality of what you present. Focus on that and you can’t go wrong. Doing this itself is toil enough.

There are ways to take the “look at me” monkey up a notch, but I am not entirely sure they are worthwhile. The more exposure I have to any portion of the writing process  that doesn’t cleave entirely to honing the craft itself, the less enthusiastic I become. I’ve taken my own peculiar orbit to get here. My now honed conclusion is: Not every new frontier is equally laden with rewards commensurate to effort expended.

When it comes to our pal with a trunk inhabited by the greatest novel ever, I think we can just introduce him to the Blog form and call it a day. Assuming it is a masterwork, he need go no further. Post it. Eyeballs will find it. And Ta-Dah, you’re 50 Shades of a Millionaire by the time your mean old publisher makes you take it down because they would like to cash in on something they only know about now because 50 million other people found it first.  Oh, to have such problems!

On the other hand, so far this model has only worked with porn. (I am saying that 50 Shades is porn.) But there are dozens of nitwit blog and twitter ideas which have amounted to cash in the creator’s pocket. And it all started with some doofus typing and pushing the post function. If this is now straying to the world of fiction, all the better. 

So we need go no further. Read on if that sort of magical thinking isn’t in your cue. I warn you it gets bleaker. Woe unto thee who seeks to live the literary life. (See the HIL-GLE website fiction feature The Literary Life for my dated take on this.) Your future is damnable.

James Joyce is dead. If James Joyce started writing today, he would get as far as having a blog and that would be it. And it wouldn’t be a blog people flocked to. There are a few dozen other authors I could name here. I’m not saying the Jame Joyce route to literary fame is now dead ended, but rather the path involves a process I would like to call Blowing People.  

Ok. That’s a bit harsh. (Though accurate.) Most of our literary lions of old minted themselves fairly much the way they do today. In short, they get into an Ivy Level school and then flounce about spewing artistisms. They either then come to jot drivel in the latest idiom or come up with a spew of gibberish all their own. Do this right and you’re the next Joyce or Faulkner, but it’s a lot of knee pad time. Timing however is everything and the vast majority of proto lit lions sidetrack into a genre with faded luster in lit reader circles—so they go onto be advertising copywriters or lit professors. But the key was getting into a snooty college.

Artist colony? Submit to lit magazines? Look, I don’t know everything. My thinking is that artists colonies are great for people who can leave the Prime Material Plane—either because they live on trust funds or because they…are bums. (Really, the trust fund kids are bums, too. I suppose it’s more honorable to live in an artist colony than it is to join Adbusters and fly about starting meaningless protests.) Lit mags are fine, but you should be warned that most are cliques. The people who get published are 90% known to the publishers. If you want in, hang out and suck up. At any rate, nothing all that Earth shattering has rolled out of either the lit mags or the artists colonies in a coon’s age. Unless you measure having someone who is destined to live in a boiler room publish 400 copies of your work on vellum in chapbooks some form of success, then perhaps this is not for you. Frankly, it’s no better exposure wise than blogging. And no vellums are killed when you blog.

I briefly dated this poor woman who had graduated from a music academy prior to embarking on a career in show biz. Her and her band were impoverished types, touring the US and Europe in “bong water and jizz” vans, just barely making enough pennies to move onto the next venue. Invariably they would run into a band manned by trust fund types who traveled with their own roadies and lights. And they would have to wait as the trust fund babies who opened broke their up their staging between acts.  A number of the trust fund bands her and her crew butted heads with went on to fame and glory.  My gal pal went onto… temp work, music teaching, trying to break into the music scene in another genre. Sadly, in the arts as well as everywhere else, the well heeled have a considerable leg up.

Then there’s self publishing. This is what Writer’s Digest and The Writer and any number of magazines go on and on promoting.  For the most part, this is a bad idea. (Unless having a garage full of 1000 copies of the same book with you for years is a good idea.) Anyone can print a book—or pay to have one printed.  And anyone can can yams. If you want to sell your own home canned yams or self published books you will soon discover that there is no distributor willing to touch either. The distributors and retailers of such things what their materials vetted.

With good reason. I have in my possession a self help book put out by an email acquaintance of mine which might have caused some trouble for both the retailer and the distributor. It seems my pal lifted whole swaths of text from other people’s works to fill out his problem solving epic. He did attribute these lifts, but he didn’t exactly ask for permission—and the lifts were fairly extensive, going on for pages and pages. This is something an editor would have caught and even a low level publisher prohibited. And that was only the start of what was wrong with this book.

There’s this guy I run into at a certain convention year after year. He writes in a somewhat narrow genre and has now self published three novels. I used to get emails from this guy all the time. Spam mailing and attending conventions had become his full time life activity. His production standards are sterling and he is personally a fine salesman. But the book… yikes. Each year he sits around waiting for someone to give him an award for his series. And each year he is dutifully passed over, partially because no one other than the writer’s mother has read the books, but mostly because the person giving away the awards is himself a small press operator who mysteriously only awards his own writers. I have vowed to not be any of these people nor play in any sandbox like this.

Then there is E Book publishing.  I haven’t had a lot of luck with my own effort, so take what I have to say as the testimony of an EBOOK LOSER. I’m not sure the form is horrible or a dead end, but it is nowhere near as easy as blogging or even web hosting. I personally may even put out the next edition of Weird Detective Mystery Adventures out in E Book form. For fiction, however, it seems a little less than the promised land.

There’s a turn on the old Bobby Vinton scam going on in E Book land. Bobby Vinton, for those of you under 100, was an old popular music performer. Vinton famously manufactured his big break in show business by vanity publishing his records. He then hired people to go into the stores and buy them out. News of the sales at these stores led to increased orders from other outlets, which led to airplay of his song, which led to an actual recording contract.

Cliques of the E Book people are essentially doing the same thing. Author wolf packs are buying each others book’s and then posting reviews of each other’s books. In the process, the ratings for the clique rise somewhat high enough for the people prone to buying the Dollar e book selection to actually see their titles.

For those of you without friends, some of the e retailers have also provided the aspiring author with a method of jacking your ratings by PAYING THEM MONEY. A writer acquaintance of mine has now sold five books and given 50 away through this scheme.  Again, I do not want to be any of these people and I do not want to play in this type of sandbox.

So that leaves me where? I can dead end my aspirations to the freeware for all portion of the electromagnetic publishing spectrum—Blogging and Web Hosting—and hope I gain enough attention to have my work matriculate into some form that pays. Or I can goose my odds a bit by attempting to land an agent.

Did I just spend all that time telling you to get an agent? You had to sit through my story about gal pals and music and bong water and jizz for that? If only it were so simple.

I have had three literary agents. All of them were flat out frauds. All three of them advertised widely, one of them in the New York Times. They were all essentially vanity agents. They just wanted my money. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. No one had yet explained to me that there was an entire industry—bulwarked by Writer’s Digest—that did nothing but take money from aspiring schnooks with books.

I remember this long voice mail from one agent telling me how she thought my work was fit for film treatment and on and on. She called collect. Before the operator cut her off, she quickly added “but I really need that $50.00 readers fee” to get the ball rolling. Then I had another agent who essentially said that he was able to run his guild more efficiently than other New York firms “through the power of computers.” I think his bit was that he burster faxed sales letters to “all the big publishers” and then fielded their offers. As I recall, this agent’s big lit client was actor Anthony Quinn, who was about 90 at the time. This firm also wanted fees for this and that. They also cautioned me that in exchange for continual payment of fees, I was to NEVER CALL THEM. One agent was so bland about what he did that he sent a “Book Doctor” advertisement back with his mailing. His bit was that he would only look at works which had “seen the doctor” first.  

So be warned. There’s a whole fake agent scam going on out there. This is somewhat subservient to the new writer’s conference scheme. Here you pay an inflated fee for some time with a lit twit who group critiques the manuscripts of attendees and then sends you off for ten minutes of face time with a “real agent” whom the conference has paid to be there. I have never heard of anyone landing a deal at these affairs. And the whole thing smells.

So you need to go find yourself a real agent. This means subscribing to a magazine other than Writer’s Digest or The Writer. Most genres will have a magazine which covers their field. All of the major fiction genres do. Or you can go to the bookstore. Find a book like yours and see if the writer mentions his agent in the preface. Make a list of the agents that you’ve found and then check out their websites.

And then send them what they want.

This is where I am right now.

I have been working on a pleading letter and a synopsis, which I may share with the class. I’ve already made one mistake and sent out the letter before it was fully done. I have since had the letter work shopped and think I can boil it down to its pithy essence.

It does occur to me, however, that if I was any good at crafting elevator pitches, I would have a much better gig than genre fiction writer.