I’ve Written a Book. Now What? 22 Steps to Getting Published.

I’ve had a number of people ask me that "now what" question in the last few months. There’s tons of info out here in Cyberia, but not everybody knows how to access it. And along with the good info, there’s plenty of bad—especially from predatory vanity publishers and bogus agents.

So here are some basics for the newbies around here.

You’ll see I don’t get to the self-publishing option until #22. That’s because I think the query process is the best way to learn about the publishing business as well as hone your writing and sales skills. Learning to sell a book to an agent prepares you for selling your book to readers. Because promoting and selling books takes at least 50% of your writing time, I think you should write and polish at least two novels before you think about self-publishing. 

Plus a good agent can help the self-publisher as well as the author who wants to be traditionally published. Most of the self-publishing gurus like J. A. Konrath, Barry Eisler and John Locke have agents. (And Eisler is married to one.) 

NOTE: Don’t sign any agency contracts without having them looked at by a lawyer or somebody who knows intellectual property law. Some agencies have pretty bad contracts these days, and you don't want to sign one that gives them a cut of your profits even if you terminate the relationship.

So your book has been critiqued, edited, and polished to a glittering sheen. What do you do next?

1) Celebrate!

Break out the champagne, chocolate, fireworks, old Prince CDs, or whatever puts you in a festive mood. Contact a few people who remember who you are after your time in your writing cave, and toast your accomplishment. 80% of people in the US say they want to write a book. A fraction of a percent actually do. You’re one of them. Woo-hoo!!

2) Make sure you know your genre.

This isn’t always as easy as it sounds, but pick one to three genres as a tool to help agents and publishers—and especially, readers—know what kind of book they’re dealing with. When you’re querying, make sure you use established categories like “paranormal romantic suspense” not “vampire bunny western.” Creativity doesn’t work in your favor here.

But you are allowed change genres according to who you query. Genre boundaries are oddly flexible these days. Both Charlaine Harris’s “True Blood” vampire books and Lisa Lutz’s dysfunctional-family comedies are categorized as mysteries. Women’s fiction is an umbrella that covers everything from Danielle Steel to Margaret Atwood. And anything with a protagonist under 19 can be YA (the most sought-after genres are in YA these days.)

Two caveats here: 1. don’t call it “literary” unless the writing is to-die-for gorgeous (an MFA helps.) 2. Never use the term “chick lit” unless you’re querying a small press that specializes in the genre. You’ll find it listed on most query websites, but it’s still the kiss of death in New York.

3) Research and read the latest books in your genre(s) if you haven’t already.

It’s important to have an idea of the market. A query letter is more effective if you can offer “comps”—similar titles that are selling (but not blockbusters—that looks like bragging.) Also, the authors of these books may blog or Tweet and you can follow them and get advice. Network. Find out who represents them. Eventually you might even get a recommendation, which is a golden ticket out of the slushpile.

4) Write your synopsis, hook, author bio and a basic query letter template.

You can find helpful guides in any number of places. AgentQuery provides solid basics. Most agents have similar information on their websites.Nathan Bransford’s blog gives the info in a fun and friendly way, and Janet Reid's Query Shark Blog is a boot camp for query writers. A number of forums and agent blogs provide critiques of queries—as well as Public Query Slushpile I give the basics for writing an author bio here.

5) Start a blog or build a website if you don't have one already.

Don’t spend a lot of money on it. In fact, a free blog like this one makes a fine author website. If you want to blog, I’ve got all the skinny on how to start a blog here. On some blogging platforms you can even have a static first page just like a formal website.

But if you don’t want to deal with the responsibility blogging, and you don’t have a lot of money, you can build a simple website on a shoestring at GoDaddy, iPage , HostBaby or dozens of other hosts.

Even if you have the money for a drop-dead gorgeous design, this isn’t the time to do it. And you don’t want anything you can’t update yourself. Waiting until a designer is free to change things can make your site look dated very quickly.

All the site needs is a professional-looking photo and a simple bio, with your contact information and something about your book and/or other publications. Nothing fancy. No bragging. Nothing is sadder than a pretentious website for an unpublished writer. And don't post any excerpts from your work that you're trying to sell. You'll be publishing it and making it unmarketable.

Facebook, Goodreads or other social networking sites that require membership aren’t a substitute for a website. Be Googlable, reachable and professional.

6) Start researching agents.

You can do this by subscribing to WritersMarket.com, but you can also get free information at AgentQuery.com, which has a searchable database. You can put in your genre and immediately find what agents represent your work. Then check QueryTracker.net for further information on the agents you’ve chosen and get valuable comments from other queriers.

Then start Googling: look for interviews and profiles of agents to fine tune your queries.

If you write YA, a lot of the research has been done for you by the wonderful Casey McCormick and Natalie Aguirre. They have a blog called “Literary Rambles” that is a treasure trove of profiles of agents who rep YA (worth a check even if you don’t write YA, since many agents rep a wide spectrum of genres.)

Literary Rambles was named one of the top 101 Sites for Writers by Writers Digest! Very well-deserved!!  Casey has been doing these profiles for a number of years and last year Natalie joined her on the blog. (Congrats, you two!)

7) Send out your first five queries.

You only do this after your book is finished, honed and polished. You knew that, right?

8) Start your next book.

Yes. Right now. Don’t sit around waiting to get rejected and depressed. Start writing when you’re feeling great about yourself for sending those queries.

9) Get rejections. Mourn.

Yup. You now are officially a member of the professional writing community. The one thing we all have in common? Rejections. For more on rejections, read Ruth Harris's great post on exactly what they mean: nothing

10) Send out five more queries.

Tip: If you join QueryTracker’s premium membership, you can track your queries on their site. It’s a useful service. And their forums are a great place to network. (No, I'm not affiliated with QueryTracker in any way. I'm just impressed with their great work and up-to-date information--most of which is free.)

11) See if you’ve had any silent rejections.

Go to the websites of agents who don’t send rejections. Under submission guidelines, it will say “if you haven’t heard from us within two months, it’s a no.” There will be some silent “no’s”.

Mourn. Fine tune your query. But NOT your book. Not yet anyway. Chances are your book is just fine. Queries, on the other hand, are worth taking a second (and third and fourth) look at.

12) Sent out five more queries.

Yeah. This time you think you really nailed that puppy. You’ve got it down to three paragraphs and your synopsis is 250 words of distilled brilliance.

13) Maybe get a request for a partial! (The first few chapters of your book.)

But before you send it, go to the agent’s website and double check guidelines for formatting and sending documents. Most formatting is pretty standard, and they will probably ask you to send it as a Word (.doc or .rtf) attachment. But some agents are quirky and will request something like “no italics” or “number your pages on the bottom of the page.” Do whatever they say, no matter how silly.

Celebrate.

14) Get the partial rejected.

Nobody gets their first partial accepted. This is part of the process.

It may come with a note. This will say something like “I couldn’t connect with these characters,” or “the protagonist wasn’t strong/sympathetic enough,” or “the plot is too complex/simplistic” or even “this is perfect, but I have no idea where to sell it.” DO NOT take these too seriously or start rewriting your book.

They’re mostly just polite words to say, “It didn’t give me screaming orgasms, so it’s not worth the energy it would take to sell it.”

Mourn.

15) Get a request for the full manuscript!!

Remember to check those guidelines. Some agents still want to see a ms. on paper. If so, put a big rubber band around it—do not bind—and mail it in a flat-rate box from the P.O. with a #10 stamped, self-addressed envelope inside for their reply. NEVER send it in an annoying way that requires a receipt. 

Celebrate. Get the really good chocolate this time.

16) Send out more queries. Don’t wait for that full to be read. It may take a year. It will probably first be read by a young unpaid intern. If she likes it, she’ll give it to the busy agent, who will put it on her pile of 150 TBR manuscripts.

17) Get another partial rejected. And another. Start building calluses on your soul.

But—if the rejections start to sound the same—like everybody says the same thing about your unsympathetic, wimpipotamus hero, this is when you might give your ms. another once-over to see if you can figure out how to tweak things without doing serious damage to the book.

18) Get the full rejected.

You may get some more detailed feedback on this one. Pay attention, but don’t despair. It may not be your book that needs a rewrite. Maybe you’re targeting the wrong agents or pitching your book wrong. Maybe it turns out you’ve written a domestic drama (women’s fiction) not a romance. Try changing your query and hook before you change your book.

Mourn.

19) Finish book #2.

Woo-hoo! Don’t forget to celebrate. It may not feel as momentous as your first ms. But it’s a triumph. You’re now acting like a professional writer. That means you ARE a professional writer. Even if nobody’s paying you quite yet.

20) Start all over again with #2, but keep sending out #1 until it collects at least a few hundred rejections.

If you’re luckier than me, you may…

21) Land an agent somewhere along the way here.

22) If you don’t, you may want to consider a small press or self-publishing.

This isn’t “settling” or giving up. All this means is you’ve discovered your work isn’t part of the predicted trend curve at the moment and may not be what corporate marketers think is the hot item for next season.

This is the point at which people like Amanda Hocking, Saffina Desforges, and John Locke jumped into self-publishing. And look where they landed. 

Some agents consider the successful self-pubbed ebook the best query these days, so if you’re good at marketing and you know you’ve got the best books you can write, go get yourself Kindlized. You could be the next self-pubbed millionaire. Just make sure you have some inventory before you start (Amanda Hocking had eight books completed before she self-published.)

Or if you’re a little more traditional like me, you might start querying presses that don’t require agents.

Even some bigger presses still take unagented work. If you write SciFi, you can still direct-query Daw (Penguin) or Tor (MacMillan). And for romance writers, a few Harlequin lines also take unsolicited manuscripts. There are also a number of mid-sized mystery publishers that welcome writers without agents. (Alas, Midnight Ink now requires an agent.)

Or start researching the smaller presses. There are hundreds of them. Here’s a list of presses that don’t require agents. Be sure you talk to other authors, though, and check Writer Beware and other watchdog sites before you query. They operate on shoestrings and can often go under, leaving your book in limbo and your royalties unpaid.

But I’m working with two small presses, and it’s working very nicely for me.

Just don’t let that book languish in a drawer!

What about you scriveners? Do you have advice for new writers who are beginning to learn the publishing ropes?

RUTH HARRIS NEWS!

Ruth has another new book coming soon!  

It's something completely different: 

Africa. An orphan. A love story. 



INDIE CHICKS: There's one more post! Melissa A Smith's heartfelt piece about how losing her mother prompted her to become a writer. WRITING OUT THE GRIEF is on the Indie Chicks page.

Are the Big 6 Publishers Really Dying?

Today we have a different kind of post. And yes, it's long. But our guest poster, author and publisher Mark Williams, has a lot to say. 

Mark is the co-author of the thriller Sugar and Spice —the most popular self-published book in the UK for 2011. He has also started a wildly innovative publishing business of his own, which has published three of my books. I pay attention to Mark’s observations because, as a publishing professional outside of the US (he lives part time in London and part time in West Africa) he can see a bigger picture than most of us.

I asked him to write this post because I find his predictions very hopeful. I’ve heard from a lot of you who are still hanging onto the traditional publishing dream, and you’re scared when you hear all the doom and gloom about the death of bookstores and traditional publishing.

The truth is, we have lots of reasons to be hopeful. As writers, we now have more options than ever. Self-publishing isn’t going anywhere, as Nathan Bransford said in an encouraging blogpost this week. And now Mark tells us traditional publishing is learning from the ebook revolution and they’re coming back—better and smarter. 

Best of all, Mark sees a role for bookstores in our future. A happy thing for readers everywhere.

THE RETURN OF THE BIG SIX

by Mark Williams

First off, a disclaimer, I am not anti-Amazon. 

I’m part of a writing partnership (known as “Saffina Desforges”) that owes much of its success to Amazon. We applaud the role Amazon has played in liberating writers from the shackles of the old system and look forward to their global expansion. 

So why the disclaimer? 

Because it seems that anything other than obsequious praise for “the Zon” and unadulterated glee at the widely-touted imminent demise of the “Big Six” means you must be the illegitimate child of a high-ranking CEO at Simon & Schuster, a moron with your head in the sand, or rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, depending on which day it is. 

Sadly, the debate about publishing has gradually descended into a slanging match between two opposing camps, led by vociferous and high profile minorities on both sides, who actively encourage literary apartheid among the writing classes.

1) On the one side we have the snooty gatekeepers set, the stereotype trad publishers and agents who think they know best what readers should read and writers write. You’ve read the rants: 

• “Writers only self-publish because their work isn’t good enough to be published the ‘proper’ way.” 
• “All indie books are crap and full of typos.” 
• “Amazon will become a monopoly and destroy culture as we know it.” 

2) On the other side we have the self-appointed spokespeople of the self-publishing revolution, who are busily digging the grave for traditional publishing. You’ve probably read them, too. As the Grave Diggers busily hammer nails into the coffin of the Big Six, they gleefully explain how—

• “Any successful trad pubbed writer could make more on their own, if only they weren’t so stupid.” 
• “No trad pubbed writer who has gone indie has ever returned to the trad publishing fold.” 
• “Any indie can distribute anywhere around the globe thanks to Amazon—and get 70% royalties for doing so.” 

None of the above statements are true.

Which brings us back to my opening disclaimer. As the title of this post suggests, I don’t think the Big Six are facing imminent demise, and Amazon isn’t going to become a monopoly.

Not that I think the old system was working. Anyone who has read my past posts over at MWi and elsewhere will know my feelings on the publishers who pay royalties as low as 7%-15%, reject perfectly good books on a whim, and have probably destroyed far more writing careers than they have created. I’m no apologist for trad publishing’s many downsides. 

And yes, it’s very easy to point to the books the gatekeepers rejected that became big indie successes. 

We know. We wrote one. 

We have a whole wad of rejection slips from the gatekeepers for the novel that went onto become the eleventh best-selling ebook (trad or self-pubbed) in the UK last year. 

Yes, it’s easy to mock after the event, and so very tempting. Examples are plentiful, and they don’t come much bigger than the gatekeepers who turned down Harry Potter. A story about wizards? In a boarding school? And how long?! Get back in that café where you belong, demented wannabe-writer. Trying serving coffee. You’ll never sell this drivel. 

Of course we all love stories like that. It’s what keeps us going in those dark hours when it seems the years spent slaving over a manuscript have been wasted. The countless rejection slips of John Grisham, Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are part of literary legend. 

And how we all applauded last year when J.K. walked away from her publishers to set up Pottermore and self-publish her ebooks like us mere mortals. That surely was the final nail in the coffin of trad publishing?

Not at all. 

In spite of the Grave Diggers’ boast that no successful trad published author ever went indie and then returned to the trad-pub fold, that doesn’t seem to be true.

1) J.K. Rowling just handed her latest book over to the gatekeepers rather than publish as an indie, because she valued their expertise and marketing abilities. I think we can safely say the size of the advance was not a major factor here. And can we hear the sound of coffin nails pinging free? 

2) Stephen Leather, multi-million selling trad published author who stormed Kindle UK in 2010-11 with his self-published titles and then announced he was giving up self-publishing because he could make more money for less effort with the gatekeepers. And yes, that link does take you to Joe Konrath’s blog. 

So much for the brain-drain of top writers rushing to jump on the self-publishing wagon. Yes, many are, and some are doing very well at it. But the traffic is both ways. Advances may be down (Amanda Knox aside) but plenty of writers are signing up with the trads every day. New writers. Established writers. And lots and lots of successful indie writers.

All apparently boarding a sinking ship. As the Grave Diggers tell us at every opportunity, print sales are in decline, revenues are falling and therefore the Big Six will follow Borders into bankruptcy and Amazon will inherit the Earth.

This part is true: print sales are in decline, and they’ll only get worse.

But as for the demise of the Big Six: sorry, but the Grave Diggers are hammering nails into an empty coffin. Despite the undeniable and continuing fall in demand for print books, the profits of the Big Six are up, and can only get bigger and better as digital replaces print.

Take Penguin for example. Despite the falling print sales Penguin somehow managed to make a profit last year. Penguin chairman and c.e.o. John Makinson called 2011 "the most turbulent book market that anyone can remember", but said the company's growth had been driven by "excellent publishing around the globe, demonstrated by market share growth in our three biggest markets.”

Obviously this is a one-off fluke, right? After all, everyone knows the trad publishers aren’t investing in digital, and they don’t know what an ebook is.

But let’s just catch the full statement by Makinson: …the company's growth had been driven by "excellent publishing around the globe, demonstrated by market share growth in our three biggest markets, and innovation in every aspect of our digital publishing."

A Big Six publisher? Innovation in digital publishing? Be serious! Heads in sand, remember? Deckchairs on the Titanic, right?

Consider the recent news:

• Penguin e-book revenues were up 106% year on year, equalling 12% of total Penguin revenues worldwide, with 20% in the USA. Penguin have recorded 50 million apps and ebook downloads since 2008.In 2011 Penguin launched more than 100 apps and enhanced e-books and the digital-only publishing programme, Penguin Shorts. Penguin also continued investment in direct-to-consumer initiatives including aNobii in the UK and Bookish in the US, both new digital platforms for readers. In Australia Penguin acquired the retailer REDgroup's online business, and Penguin's websites and social media channels now have a global following of more than 11 million.

• Simon & Schuster reported a similar feat in February: they’re making more money from declining print sales, and other publishers will be doing the same.

• Scholastic this past week announced beta trials of its new digital store. According to Publishers Weekly: “After more than 18 months of development, Scholastic has begun beta tests for Storia, its proprietary e-book platform for selling and distributing its trade titles as well as digital editions of titles from other children’s houses.”

Note the key words “after more than 18 months of development.” The idea touted by the Grave Diggers that the trads are sitting about fiddling while Rome burns may bring a smile to the face of anyone who ever received a rejection slip and now hopes whoever overlooked their masterpiece will rot in hell.

But the reality is rather different. Every major publisher is investing heavily in digital, and has been for several years.

The simple fact is, change takes time. Big ships take time to turn around. And before you rush in and say “Amazon can turn on a dime,” look at the reality.

Amazon didn’t suddenly produce its e-book platform overnight. Amazon has been selling books on-line for nearly two decades. It moved to ebook sales as a logical extension of an existing business, and we’re all delighted it did.

But it didn’t lead the way. Amazon didn’t invent ebooks, e-readers, e-ink, self-publishing or even the 70% “royalty”. Sony and Apple, to name but a few, were way ahead (Apple started the 70% “royalty” and Amazon price-matched).

Amazon had everything in place at the right time. The selling platform, the customer base for books, and all importantly the books themselves. The genius of the Kindle was not in the creation of the device itself, but in being able to produce an affordable e-reader and tie it to the products it was already selling – ebooks.

Suggesting that publishers didn’t see digital coming rather ignores the small point of who, exactly, was producing these ebooks in the first place. It certainly wasn’t you and me.

Amazon didn’t invest in the Kindle and then hope that just maybe tons of unknowns would self-publish and make money for them. The fact that that’s what happened is a huge bonus for Amazon but there wasn’t any master-plan.

Just as there isn’t any master-plan now to destroy big publishing by buying off all the trad published authors.

When a successful trad-pubbed writer signs up with an Amazon imprint it makes news precisely because it’s a rare event.

Amazon may have begun as a bookseller, but books are now just one small part of its empire. Does anyone but the Grave Diggers serious believe Jeff Bezos loses sleep over indie-publishers signing with the Big Six? Or conversely that the Big Six are losing sleep over Amazon signing up the odd trad-pubbed author?

Amazon isn’t a major publisher. Yes, it has a few imprints, but in publishing terms it’s a small press, albeit with its own very powerful marketing and distribution network. Yes, the Amazon imprint authors are best-sellers and make serious money – on Amazon. But where are the Amazon imprints in the NYT best-sellers list, or on the international best-sellers lists?

Comparing Amazon and the Big Six is comparing apples and oranges. Amazon is a hugely successful book-seller that is now dabbling in publishing. Amazon takes proven sellers on its own platform and repackages them and gives them heavy promo, skewing the market, to make them even better sellers.

Nothing wrong with that. And wonderful for the authors lucky enough to be chosen. But it means that Amazon is no longer a level playing field for the rest.

And what Amazon is doing hardly compares with taking an unknown name from submitted manuscript through to final product with nation-wide distribution both in ebook and bricks and mortar stores, and (where rights are available) internationally across digital and bricks and mortar platforms.

Of course the Grave Diggers will shout that any indie can get world-wide digital distribution and get 70% royalties—conveniently overlooking the fact that B&N only deliver to the USA, Apple serves about twenty or so countries and the Amazon world-rights box you tick in KDP that makes you think your ebook will be available everywhere is actually meaningless.

Why?

• Because Amazon blocks downloads to countless countries (I live in West Africa and am blocked from buying your or my ebooks from Amazon)

• Amazon also imposes a $2 surcharge per sale on countless other countries.

• Add to which the fabled 70% royalty suddenly becomes 35% if the sale is not from an Amazon-approved country (the Kindle countries and a selected few others).

Now admittedly 35% is still better than the ebook royalties currently paid by the Big Six, although these are rising and will rise further.

But let’s just examine that legendary 70% Amazon royalty more closely, it being the indie’s weapon of choice in any duel.

The Amazon 70% royalty is a myth. It’s not a royalty at all. It’s the remainder from the sale of your ebook after Amazon have taken their cut.

If you stick a book on eBay and it sells, and eBay and Paypal take their fees and hand you the remainder, is that a royalty? Of course not.

Yet when Amazon, Apple, B&N or whoever do exactly the same thing and call it a royalty we immediately start comparing with the miserly royalties paid out by the trad publishers.

But Amazon and co. aren’t our publishers. They’re our distributors and vendors. It’s called self-publishing for a reason!

And just a reminder here: This isn’t anti-Amazon. It’s just spelling out a few facts that the Grave Diggers seem intent on overlooking.

I happen to like Amazon very much. Quite apart from our own self-publishing success, I own a Kindle, carry it with me everywhere, and have only read two print books in the fifteen months I’ve had an e-reader. As a non-American, B&N digital is anyway off-limits to me, even in the UK.

Which is a point worth dwelling on.

Amazon is the world’s biggest ebook seller. At one stage it was estimated to have 85% of the ebook market, yet most objective observers would now put that at between 60%-70%, and declining. So much for Amazon becoming the monopoly that will take over the world

Amazon’s biggest rival is B&N. But B&N only sell in the US. Amazon has worldwide distribution (subject to caveats outline above). As digital reading grows worldwide so the competition will increase.

The second biggest English-language market is a case in point. Kobo have just appointed a new director of British operations and is rapidly expanding its presence in the UK, operating the ebook store for the country’s second largest book retailer, W.H. Smiths.

The UK’s biggest book store, Waterstone’s (whose flagship Piccadilly store is the largest bookshop in Europe) have a small but significant ebook store, and it’s currently being revamped as part of the new look Waterstones (sans apostrophe) with a pending partnership of some sort with B&N. Just this month B&N is holding its first ever workshop in London, as it prepares to challenge Amazon’s dominance in the UK.

Important here to understand why the UK lags behind the US in terms of digital embrace. Amazon only introduced KDP to the UK in 2010, before which only US authors could self-publish with Amazon. The Kindle was unavailable in the UK until that time. When it came it was new and innovative, and a lot cheaper than the Sony option, or Apple’s iPad, so it got off to a great start among those readers at ease with technology and gave Amazon predominance in the marketplace.

But Amazon is going to have to do much more than just sell cheap ebooks to maintain that position. The UK doesn’t even have the KindleFire yet. Yep, UK readers are stuck with the old b&w Kindle, while Kobo, Apple and the rest are all selling multi-task colour devices, to which B&N will shortly be adding with its Waterstone’s partnership.

What does this mean for the future of Amazon? Rather more then you may think.

You see, the early-adopters of the Kindle and other e-reading devices were of course those comfortable with technology. If it’s shiny, new and trendy then they must have it. And once they experienced the joys of e-reading there was no turning back.

But we’re past that phase now. As print declines further so more and more people will turn to e-readers. Partly because prices will continue to plummet, and also because as print declines further, readers will have little choice but to adopt, in a downward spiral that will see the demise of print books and book-stores.

So the Grave Diggers were right after all, it seems. No print books and no book-stores means the Big Six are facing oblivion and Amazon will inherit the Earth.

But hold on, how did Amazon start out? Selling print books. How does Amazon make the bulk of its book-related income now? Selling print books.

Print is still 80% of the overall book market. If the Big Six are obliterated as the Grave Diggers gleefully hope, exactly what will Amazon be selling anyway? The vast bulk of its print sales and a substantial proportion of its digital sales come from the Big Six.

Luckily for all concerned the Big Six are doing just fine. Profits are up, costs are down, and the future is rosy as they continue to invest in digital, create their own platforms, and adjust their business management to the new realties. The Grave Diggers might want to pretend that isn’t happening, but the facts speak for themselves.

Regardless of this, book-stores are beyond help, right? We’re already seeing it happen. Borders has gone (bizarrely this huge loss of outlets for Big Six stock doesn’t seem to have hurt said Big Six profits too much…) and B&N are – Shock! Horror! – selling products other than books. As we all know, this signifies imminent doom. Although curiously when Amazon diversify into other products it’s sound business sense. Hmmm.

But are book-stores really doomed? Not necessarily.

I’ve not been to the US recently, but I understand B&N are doing pretty well at promoting digital in-store. The Nook is on the up and up, and B&N are being pretty innovative in their approach to balancing print and digital.

Amazon soared ahead with the early adopters precisely because it had everything in place and those readers were comfortable shopping online. But that era is over. The early-adopter phase is past, and the next stage is the reticent buyers who probably never have bought from Amazon and never will.

I’m talking about the loyal book-store regulars – the ones who currently account for a vast percentage of bricks and mortar book sales, who will, when the time comes, buy the in-store e-reader and sign-up to the in-store e-reading account, not rush off and buy a Kindle.

So can book-stores survive the epublishing revolution?

Yes, they can!

You see, I have a vision of a new book-selling era where we can be digital AND have bricks and mortar book stores.

Book stores don’t just sell books. Like libraries, book-stores are cultural centers, where the reading classes gravitate. There’s been a lot of snark recently in the blogs about ill-informed staff in B&N offering poor customer service. No doubt it’s true. But it doesn’t need to be that way.

Forward looking indie book-stores and chain-stores like B&N and Waterstone’s could have a vital role in book-buying in the future. 

Imagine a book-store where you can still go and browse books, settle down with a coffee or chat with intelligent staff about the latest book from your favourite author.

You’ll find the cover and blurb on a book-sized case (think DVD cases) on the display shelves. Want to look inside? Just waive the barcode or implanted chip in front of your personal e-reader or smartphone, or the equipment available in-store, and you can see exactly what you’ll be getting.

Not silly sample pages from the first 15% but the full book, temporarily transferred to your device for examination. If you buy, it stays there. If you choose not to it is automatically deleted as you leave the store.

Maybe even in-store printable covers so you can buy the full wrap cover around and case for your shelf back home. After all, isn’t the lack of covers the big downer for digital films and music?

Book-stores can still have shelf after shelf of “books” to browse, and even plinths and window displays showing the latest releases. And yeah, those prime spots will still be bought by the Big Six for their top authors. Ah well, you can’t win ‘em all…

Now factor in the back-of shop storage space and overheads that will no longer be necessary - or perhaps will be used to store paper and supplies for POD, where any title you want can be printed and bound while you have the aforementioned coffee.

And the beauty of this is that the technology already exists and is improving and getting cheaper by the day. With print still riding at 80% of book sales there’s plenty of time for forward thinking book-stores to embrace the digital future.

The Grave Diggers will tell you Amazon’s one-click ebook buying is so simple no-one will need to shop anywhere else. No question it’s a fantastic service. I love it! But Amazon also sells boots, watches, fridges, computers... Easier to list what it doesn’t sell. Everyone can sit at home, go online and have these goods delivered to their door, courtesy of the Zon. Yet no-one is suggesting shops that sell these products are all going to close.

Book stores don't NEED to close. They just need to innovate. 

Rather like the Big Six are already doing.

*********

Blog news: Catherine Ryan Hyde’s wonderful novel, When I Found You is FREE for Kindle this weekend, and on Friday had reached # 1 on the Free Kindle books list. Anne’s piece on the “Undercover Soundtrack” that inspired her mystery The Gatsby Game is on Roz Morris’s blog, Memories of a Future Life. And The Gatsby Game is now available for NOOK! (It’s still review-less over there. If any of you marvellous reviewers wanted to copy and paste your Amazon or Goodreads reviews to Barnes and Noble, I’d be eternally grateful.)

INDIE CHICKS: This week's installment is from thriller writer Mel Comley, who lives an idyllic life in the French countryside.

Next Week: We’ll be having another give-away. I’ll be giving away one of my ebooks—your choice. 

Confessions of a Big Six Editor: The Triumph of the Slush Pile

Thanks to everybody who came by and/or commented on last week’s post on Amazon reviews. You gave the blog its own Black Friday, with a record 1200 hits on Friday alone. 9000 visits, 140 comments, and counting. It’s now our #1 post of all time!

But I seem to have seriously miffed a lot of professional reviewers who thought I was lecturing THEM—telling them not to give negative reviews.

Major, major apologies, reviewers! NOT what I meant to say at all.

Without negative reviews, the positives wouldn't mean a thing.

NOTA BENE, SCRIVENERS: BOOK REVIEWERS ARE DEITIES WHOM WE ALL LOVE AND ADORE. They are our helpers, not the enemy. They are the new gatekeepers. To learn more about how phenomenally important they are, read my post THE NEW GATEKEEPERS and my interview with book reviewer Danielle Smith here. 

The purpose of my post was to tell the non-Amazon-savvy readers in my own demographic they now have more power than they realize, and that it’s easier to exercise than they may think.

But it seems the non-savvy Boomer was me. I talked about review conventions that are kind of obvious to anybody who’s been to Amazon a few times, but are apparently (sotto voce) THE FACTS THAT MUST NOT BE NAMED. 

I didn't know. Seriously. Sorry.

But, since humans are always more likely to be more vocal with complaints than with praise, I will continue to urge fans to support their favorite authors and reviewers. 

If that gets me more cyberbullying, so be it. I still think that if you love a book, it's good to say so. And it only takes a minute. 

As I said in last week’s post, if a review is useful, whether positive or negative—say that too. Good reviewers need our support just as much as good authors. Publishing is a business, and professionalism should be rewarded.

I also want to apologize to any Boomers who got their feelings hurt when I said some of us don’t automatically think of leaving an Amazon review and may not be acquainted with online review conventions. Ruth and I are both Boomers ourselves, specializing in what Ruth laughingly calls “biddylit”—that is, women’s fiction for grown-up ladies--many of whom tell us they're terrified to leave reviews.

I assumed this was because most of us born before 1965 treat tech as a second language, and don’t have the automatic tech instincts of Millennials and Gen X-ers, but to the Bill Gateses and Steve Jobses (we’ll miss you, dude) out there: sincere apologies.

Yes, the whole durn computer/Interwebz thing was invented by us Boomers. Yay Mickey Mouse Club, the Beatles, and Woodstock!

A number of people argued that, with Amazon becoming one big slush pile, the reviews should have stricter guidelines.

I agree. 

There’s no doubt a lot of not-ready-for-prime-time stuff is getting uploaded to Amazon every day, and (OK, I'll whisper it: A LOT OF AUTHORS DO GET FAUX RAVES FROM THEIR SISTERS AND THEIR COUSINS AND THEIR AUNTS.) Those are just as unhelpful as the ones written by trolls who leave semi-literate 20-word negatives for 1000s of books they’ve never read. (Which, BTW, happens to Big 6-ers as much as indies.)

The Kindle revolution means that we bypass the gatekeepers. Which turns us—the readers—into gatekeepers.

So how do we tell if a book is part of the Konrath’s tsunami of crap  or a brilliant new find?

We have to learn a new set of skills. 

Readers can learn which one of these is more positive:

“*****5-stars: The author is a friend from church who got me to write this in exchange for bringing her tuna surprise hot dish to the Sunday social, and I guess her book is OK if you like a bunch of filthy sex in a romance novel.”

“**2-stars: This is the most brilliantly written romance novel I’ve ever read. Strong, believable characters, eye-opening insights, and a page-flipping story, but hey, it’s a romance--not exactly A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.”

But unfortunately the Amazon algorithms can’t read between those lines. They only read the stars, so that leaves more work for us, the readers. A 3-starred book is going to be way harder to find, but keep looking.

As a customer, you can also look at the book description, the blurbs and, if you’re in the US, get a hefty sneak peek into the book—usually several chapters.

That makes you a new version of the old gatekeeper: the publishing house slush reader.

So who is better to teach us than Ruth Harris, former slush reader for Bantam?

Ruth went on to become a senior editor at both Bantam and Dell—and then publisher at Kensington, as well as the author of a whole lot of NYT bestselling novels. She knows the business from all sides.

In this piece, she reminds us of three hopeful things:

1) Great careers DO start in the slush pile.

2) There are a lot of seriously clueless people out there, so if you can read and write English, know how to follow directions, and are taking your meds, you’re way ahead of the game.

3) Somebody does actually read your submissions, (although nowadays that somebody is unlikely to be paid.)

TRIUMPH OF THE SLUSH PILE

by Ruth Harris

Back in the twentieth century when I started out in publishing, publishers did not insist that all submissions be agented, and direct submissions, aka the slush pile, served as training wheels (more like hamster wheels as it turned out) for young editors.

Beginning a new job at Bantam, I was assigned a desk in the secretarial bullpen where a monster stack of manuscripts waited for me. My job was to read them to see if any might be worth passing on to one of the older, more experienced editors.

Conscientious and wanting to impress the senior editor who was my boss, I began to read, at first assiduously finishing one manuscript (I had learned by then they were referred to as “ms” in written communications) after another.

The quasi-literate (they were the ones who loved "big" words and used them incorrectly), sub-literate and illiterate were sandwiched at random between the religious visionaries, the sexually shall-we-say peculiar, and the politically febrile.

There were the demented, the deranged and the delusional, submissions from jails and penitentiaries.

Most of all there were would-be writers who had never met a comma or, sometimes, even a paragraph, who had no idea how to shape a scene or introduce a character much less write a line of dialogue that any human being might actually have uttered. To those wannabes (that word didn’t exist then), quote marks also often seemed a galactic mystery as did sentences containing both a subject and a verb.

I was no literary snob and my reading choices embraced the entire range from Willa Cather to Mickey Spillane—but the slush pile did me in.

No matter how fast I plowed through the mss (that’s the plural of ms), attaching Bantam’s form rejection letter to the top and placing them in the required SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope), the pile never diminished.

Every morning and every afternoon (two mail deliveries a day back then) the mail room guy dumped another stack of mss on my desk.

They were typewritten, smeary, sometimes single-spaced, sometimes sans margins, punctuation or paragraphing; some were hand written, scrawled in old-fashioned school notebooks, the kind with the marbelized black-and-white cardboard covers. They were held together by rubber bands, string, yarn and, once in a while, ribbon.

The pages were occasionally pristine but more predictably smudged, dog eared, defaced by icky, unidentifiable substances, or dotted with coffee stains and cookie crumbs left by previous editors who had read—or made a valiant effort to read—the submission in question and, as they say in the trade, “passed.” 

I quickly learned to read the first one or two pages, maybe scan a few more, then flip to somewhere around the middle to see if anything had improved and, if any shred of hope remained, look at the last page or two to see if a more careful reading might be called for. (Dream on.)

The only further communiqué from these would-be authors was an occasional complaint that they’d left a piece of white thread on page 125 and, when the ms came bouncing back, the piece of white thread remained in place.

Why, they wanted to know, hadn’t the entire ms been read? How could we (the nameless editors because no one ever signed a name to a form rejection) reject their masterpiece without reading it in its entirety?

Let me count the ways.

I moved on and so did the slush pile: to agents who weren’t about to pay a young assistant to get the slush sorted—by now, it was their unpaid interns who slogged through the mess. (As opposed to the mss.) There was to be a double benefit: publishers no longer had to pay salaried employees to sift through the slush pile and, in the bargain, submissions had now been vetted before appearing on an editor’s desk.

As time passed, we arrived somewhere in first decade of the twenty-first century and reading the slush pile had gone from paid labor to unpaid labor.

A sort of progress, I guess, but one last glimmer of progress beckoned:

The Internet.

The quick and easy upload that earned Amazon a 70% cut every time a 99c book was purchased. Amazon had managed what once had seemed the impossible: it turned a huge time and money sink into a profit center.

Or, as my Mom would say: Someone had finally figured out how to turn shit into Shinola.

And guess what? The same problems that beset me years ago at my piled-to-the-rafters desk persist today in cyber-ville.

• Mangled grammar? Check.

• Run on sentences and run on paragraphs? Check.

• Typo infestations? Check.

• Terrible formatting,

• No discernable plot,

• “Characters” unrecognizable as human beings,

• Blobs, clunks and chunks of back story bulldozed in,

• Hopeless attempts at description,

• Even more hopeless efforts at narrative,

• Character names that change from one chapter to the next.

• And so on. And on.

About the only thing that’s different is that today’s digitized slush pile comes sans icky unidentifiable splotches and the coffee stains and cookie crumbs left by previous readers.

...and the little piece of white thread on page 125.

PS: Lest you think me excessively bitter and cynical, I will add that the SP is not absolutely, totally 1000% hopeless.

There are writers who have made it out. Stephanie Meyers (Twilight) was rescued from an agent’s SP. Philip Roth back in 1958 from a Paris Review SP (you can look it up on Google). And, IIRC, Kathleen Woodiwiss, one of the queens of the Bodice Rippers, was originally pulled out of the SP as was Rosemary Rogers. At Avon. By a talented editor who knew what Freud didn't: she knew what women wanted.

*******

Please Note: We are very much aware there are lots of thoroughly professional indies, who are producing work as good or better than what was vetted by those slushpile readers of yesteryear. (Ruth is self-pubbing these days, and Anne is with two small publishers.)

But because self-pubbers aren’t vetted, it’s up to you the reader to learn to weed out the bad ones—but I’ll bet you won’t have to read as far as that “white thread” page to spot them.

How about you, scriveners? Do you feel competent to do your own vetting, or do you think interns do a better job? Do you want your book to get the stamp of approval of the Big Six before you’ll feel OK about seeing it for sale?

This week, MWiDP is launching its second Saffina DesforgesPresents anthology: Kindle Coffee Break Collection. Anne's story VIVE LA REVOLUTION appears in the anthology (caution: very noir Hollywood humor there. For fans of dark satire only.)

The Gatsby Game is Out!

My life continues to zoom along at warp speed. Mark Williams just told me that THE GATSBY GAME is up at Amazon this morning--a week ahead of schedule.

It's a book I had to write--one that's been sitting in my head  for decades. It's based on the mysterious death of David Whiting during the filming of the Burt Reynolds film, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. I knew David personally, and I've always wanted to tell my theory of how he might have died, based on what I knew of his quirky personality. (It was ruled an accident, but many people call it a suicide, and some think it was murder.)  The characters in THE GATSBY GAME are fictional, but some of the scenes really happened--and David was as obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald as my character Alistair Milbourne. A couple of letters that serve as clues in the novel are real--and I still have them.

This has been called one of Hollywood's Most Notorious Scandals of all time,  Here is what writer Phil Nugent said about it in his article in Nerve.com. Note he says David Whiting committed suicide, which was probably not the case.


#7: The STARS: Sarah Miles and Burt Reynolds

THE SCANDAL: In 1972, Miles and Reynolds, both of whose careers were just taking off, co-starred in the Western romance The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. In the movie, the rough outlaw played by Reynolds abducts and eventually wins the heart of the flinty English beauty played by Miles, in the course of a story that requires her to suffer at the hands of crueler, less photogenic men. Midway through filming, Miles herself was physically attacked by her business manager, David Whiting, and sought sanctuary by fleeing to Reynolds' quarters; the next morning, Whiting was found to have committed suicide.

THE FALLOUT: At first, the creepy synchronicity between the movie's plot and what happened on the set inspired a certain amount of interest and rumor-mongering, and Esquire ran a purplish article by Ron Rosenbaum titled "The Corpse as Big as he Ritz."...[Miles'] failure to become a star probably had little to do with the unhappy fate of David Whiting. As for Burt Reynolds, Cat Dancing was a blip in his career, sandwiched between his first big hits Deliverance and White Lightning, and was almost instantaneously forgotten."

In spite of what Nugent says above, the scandal did have a terrible impact on Sarah Miles. It destroyed her marriage (although she and Sir Robert Bolt did eventually re-marry) and her career came to a screeching halt. She's detailed these events in her fascinating memoirs, Serves Me Right and Bolt from the Blue. 

I've never met Miss Miles, but I have great sympathy for her. I think she was only guilty of too much compassion for David, who was a brilliant, tragic, and sometimes comically self-deluded man/child.

I have made the nanny the protagonist of the novel, giving her the name Nicky Conway, echoing the detached narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway. Although there was a real nanny suspected in David's case, I know nothing about her, and Nicky is not meant to represent her in any way. 

I changed the setting of the story from the small town of Gila Bend, Arizona to the small California oil town of Taft, for no particular reason except I've always wanted to set a story in Taft, which has a tragi-comic history of its own (it was originally named Moron) and it's closer to me than Gila Bend.

THE GATSBY GAME (with a forward by Saffina Desforges) is available as an ebook at at amazon.com and at amazon.co.uk, and will soon be up at B&N and iTunes, and will be available in paper in 4-6 weeks. 

This book would never have been published if it weren't for my blog, so I'll be talking a little about the rumored "death of the blog" in my Sunday post, and I'd love to have readers weigh in on whether they think blogging (or not blogging) has impacted their writing careers.

The $79 Kindle and the Most Interesting Publisher in the World

OK, I can finally say it: I have three brand new novels coming out this fall!

Within a couple of weeks, THE GATSBY GAME will debut as an e-book. It’s a stand-alone mystery set in the Mad Men era that proposes a fictional solution to one of Hollywood's most scandalous mysteries. (It's #7 on the top 10 list, if you follow that link.) 

The e-book will be published by a cutting-edge new e-publisher: Mark Williams International Digital Publishing.

Two comic mysteries will follow with MWiDP: GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY and SHERWOOD, LTD. They are the first two in a series featuring a perennially penniless socialite and her gay best friend.

Yeah but…sez you—what about Popcorn Press? Haven’t you already signed with them? Aren’t they re-launching your two UK books, FOOD OF LOVE and THE BEST REVENGE? Haven’t they been very, very good to you?

Yup. But because both of these presses belong to a whole new “united we stand” type of small publisher, Popcorn will partner with MWiDP and publish paper versions of the three ebooks. Paper copies will be available at the Popcorn Press site (and amazon.com) about one month after the debut of the ebooks. And yes! Paper copies of FOOD OF LOVE are available for pre-order at the Popcorn Press site right now for only $9.99. 

So who/what is Mark Williams International?

Because MWiDP only officially launched this week, I haven’t been able to talk about it before, but if you follow this blog, you’ve seen Mark Williams’ comments to many of our posts. He’s the “quiet half” of the UK’s phenomenally successful writing duo known as Saffina Desforges. He’s also mentored a number of other UK writers to bestselling superstardom.

After zooming up to the top of the UK’s Kindle lists—and staying there for months—Mark and Saffi have been courted by some of the biggest agencies in New York and Hollywood. But they turned them all down. They realized there’s a lot more money (as well as freedom) in the indie publishing world.

But Mark, who has been a teacher and editor for many years, knew a lot of writers (like me) who don’t have the time or entrepreneurial skills to self-publish. He also ran into many successful US indies who didn’t have a clue how to break into the European markets.

So he came up with the idea for a company which is a mix of small e-publisher, self-publishing facilitator, and marketer. They will provide professional vetting, editing, cover design, coding and uploading--and also use the networking and collective marketing developed by indie Kindle authors. MWiDP will also take on successful indie authors who want to expand their markets on other continents.

It sounded so good, I jumped in, even though it meant turning down three offers from the traditional publishing world: three offers I would have killed for a few months ago.

Here’s what happened to me at the beginning of September—just as I was madly preparing my three presentations for the Central Coast Writers Conference. In the space of less than 48 hours, I had a request for a read from one of my dream agents, an offer of representation from a top agency, and an offer of a read of my full manuscript from an editor at a prestigious mid-sized publisher. I also had requested full manuscripts awaiting reads at two other agencies.

But each offer had strings.

• #1 was an initial request for a partial—the beginning of a road that usually takes over a year and so far has had about a 95% failure rate for me.
• #2 was a maybe-offer conditional on a draconian rewrite that involved cutting most of the mystery elements, removing the gay characters and subplots and turning the book into something I wouldn't feel good about promoting.
• #3 was from a company I’d recently discovered has a seriously author-unfriendly contract.
• The two fulls had been sitting at the agencies for over 6 months with no word from the agents, in spite of several inquiries, so I had no idea if they were still being considered. (More and more agencies no longer bother to send rejections for requested manuscripts--even fulls.) 

I mentioned my dilemma in an email to Mark--and he let me in on his as-yet-to-be announced publishing company plans.

Twenty-four hours later, I’d joined Mark and Saffi’s new venture. Here’s my page at their new website. 

What am I—nuts? Isn't this just drinking the Kool-Aid that Janet Reid warned us about?

Maybe. And I absolutely do not recommend this for everybody. Especially for newbies. I think most first-time authors should try the traditional route first. Even if it's only to build up some soul-calluses. Publishing a just-finished first novel usually ends in disappointment and often discourages good writers from staying in the game.

But for me, it’s already looking like a smart move. One of the major factors that swayed me was that Mark could get my ebooks out quickly. He'd already read two of the three manuscripts and knew they were almost ready to go.

He also told me this will be the “Christmas of the Kindle.” He predicted Kindles would get very cheap for the holidays—under $99—and said they'll be THE gift. He expects this holiday season to be the hottest e-book buying moment in history.

And guess what happened on Wednesday this week? Amazon announced its lowest price Kindle will now sell for…$79. And the new Kindle Fire--an ereader/tablet that competes with the iPad, will cost only $199 (a loss to Amazon they expect will pay off in other sales.)

So I think Mark has a pretty clear crystal ball.

He pointed out that in the three or more years it would take to grind even one of my books through the traditional publishing machine, the whole publishing world will have changed. There may not be any more big brick and mortar bookstores. That window in Barnes and Noble where I’ve fantasized seeing my work will probably display only Nooks and Snookibooks. E-books will reign.

So I realized that for me--after fifteen years of bloodying my knuckles on New York doors--it made sense to get all my books out right now. (This isn't all the books I've written, BTW--I've got some practice ones in the files that will never see Kindle-light.)

Mark certainly doesn’t recommend that everybody take out their rejected manuscripts and throw them on Amazon (or submit them to MWiDP.) But I had three finished, multi-critiqued, edited new mysteries. (And yes, Mark did ask for more edits and I’m in the process of killing some darlings, but his suggestions improved the books instead of gutting them.) 

Do I recommend this for everybody? Again I repeat: no. Going the indie or semi-indie route is likely to lead to disappointment if you don't have a body of work and you’ve only been at this game a little while. Writing narrative is a craft that takes years to perfect. You don't open a restaurant after your first cooking lesson.

The reason this move is best for me is: not only will MWiDP make my ebooks available immediately, but my chances of acceptance by the Big Six are abysmal. I only recently figured out why I've been getting so many "I absolutely loved this, but..." rejections.

1) I’ve been previously published, without stupendous sales numbers.

2) My work doesn’t fit into a neat genre category.

3)  I write funny. Humor is subjective and can’t please all of the people all of the time.

4) Funny books by women are often lumped together as chick lit—the most hated genre in New York.

If you’re just starting your writing journey, please don't let me keep you from pursuing your personal publishing dreams. By the time you have two or three books ready to go, the industry will have settled a bit from the e-revolution and you’ll have many more options than we have now. The Big Six may not be as big and Amazon and maybe Apple might be the most desirable publishers. There will also be lots of collectives and small e-publishers like MWiDP to choose from.

If you’re in the process of looking for an agent, please keep at it. Agents will have very different job descriptions in a few years, but having a savvy agent in your corner will always help your career. I’d love to have one myself.

But right now, with all these books ready to go, it makes sense for me to join Mark's new venture and be ready for “the Christmas of the Kindle.”

So who is this Mark Williams dude?

He’s not a guy to toot his own horn. He doesn’t even post a picture of himself on his blog. What I’ve been able glean from his emails and posts is:

• He’s a very good writer and editor.
• And a phenomenally smart guy.
• He’s based in London.
• He spends a lot of time traveling the world, teaching third-world children and building schools.
• He first became interested in electronic publishing because of the opportunity it provides to get books to children in remote parts of the world.  
• He’s traveled and taught in lots of dangerous places, like Soviet Russia and Saddam’s Iraq. He has braved revolutions and lost dear friends in horrific civil wars.
• Right now, he’s helping get solar power to a primitive village in West Africa so they can use computers and electronic readers—an effort partly funded by money from his book sales. (He asks that when you get your new Kindles, you consider donating the used ones to his project.)
• He is apparently living in a mud hut. I don’t know if that’s a metaphorical hut, but it doesn’t sound like the Hilton.
• I’ve got to admit I’ve done a little searching the old Interwebz for a picture—but a name like Mark Williams is as generic as, well, Anne Allen, so I haven’t got a clue how to find him. Unless maybe he’s this guy:

So here I go on another publishing adventure….whee!

So how do you feel about all this, scriveners? Are you ready to take the self-pub or indie-collective plunge? Holding out for the traditional publishing dream? Willing to go indie, but want an agent to guide you? Or are you a successful US indie who’d like help getting into the European and Asian markets?

*********

I'm starting little blog tour in my own slow way this week. I reveal a few personal secrets in a guest post at Karen Jones Gowan's blog, Coming Down the Mountain due to post next Friday, Oct. 7th, and I spilled more beans at Prue Batten’s ‘Mesmered” blog: (with a great comment from Mark Williams hisownself.) Plus I've got some very nice cyber ink from Danielle Smith over at Chick Lit Reviews. Anybody who'd like an interview or blog visit, do let me know (and anybody willing to do a review, I'll be forever in your debt.)