Filed under: publishing, Rant, Writers, funny but true, On the Other Hand..., Why Not be a Writer?
08/24/2010 • 8:00 AM 0
(Top 10 Things +1) Writers Love:
1. libraries and bookstores. Look at all those dead trees! Look at all those rotten books! Your book will be so much better. Look at all those shelves for your great books. Your books will one day share shelf space with your literary heroes and you will all enter the pantheon. Libraries and bookstores are harbingers of potential, omens of destiny, and, not incidentally, where you get #2.
2. books. Your shelves creak as you add even more books. Your iPod is full. Your heaven is a place filled with books and time to enjoy them, to savor them, to devour them. You prefer books to people, though people do have their place (i.e. they can give you a good book.) A good book is sex that lasts longer.
3. life. It’s where you get your ideas. Life is the thing you absorb so you can process it, chew and hold your ideas up against it to make your fantasy seem all the more real. Life and the limited world it comes from—that’s what you’re going to change with your writing. (Yes, life is number 3 down the list. That isn’t an error. Why? Because when you write you are god. When you don’t write, you’re…well…you.)
4. good first readers. A good reader will proofread your manuscript and find the errors you didn’t and not make you feel like an idiot about it. Good readers are very hard to find. Not unicorn hard. Good readers are platypus hard.
5. an excellent agent who’s a bitch or a bastard when they’re bargaining for you but never that way in their dealings with you. Search for agents with multiple-personality disorder. Try mental hospitals. (Or decide that in any venture you will encounter individuals who are human. You may even come to like some of them. The rest will make great gossipy stories at your book launch.)
6. an editor who’s careful and considerate. There are many. No, really! They want to help you make your work the best it can be to earn a larger readership.
7. a motivated sales force. The crop is of uneven quality. If you can, give them more motivation by offering a trip to your Florida condo for the highest seller. Failing that, make a great impression at the sales conference, smile and shake every hand. I loved Amy Tan as a person, so I sold more of her books. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just natural when I was selling to bookstore owners. “Yeah, I met her at the conference and wow was she great etc.,…)
8. a great book cover. Publishers may “consult” you, but if you hate it and they love it, they’ll go with the cover as is. If someone else is publishing your work, that’s a factor that is out of your hands. It will gnaw at you. You will curse them. Eventually you will accept it so you might as well start accepting it now. (Also, when your book tanks you’ll have something to blame that wasn’t your story and someone to blame who isn’t you.)
9. fans. Duh. (Yes, some superstars grow to hate their fans. In the social media/TMZ-environment, they are soon called “Uh…that guy. The obnoxious prick…what was his name again? Oh yeah. Has Been.”)
10. time to write. There’s never enough time. If you don’t have an official publisher-set deadline now (read: you’re still a wannabe writing on spec) it’s a blessing not to have that hanging over your head. Just write. Sip the coffee. Recline and give that revision sober and careful thought. You have more time now than you’ll ever have. After you sign some contracts and people are clambering for your next book, you’ll feel like you never have enough time. Ev-er.
BONUS:
11. ourselves. Inside every writer is an insecure, wounded child who started worrying about death and how they don’t matter way too early. Over top of that is a thick layer of pomposity and that is the egotist we love. How else to explain our deep need to share our thoughts with strangers? We love ourselves as we see ourselves. We want to share so others will see, hear and understand our genius, agree with us and love the broken child one layer down. We write to reach out. We write to connect. We write so others will share our visions and forgive us our sins. We write to hear our voices talk and prove we matter. We write to make worlds because they who make worlds must be gods (not spineless schmoes worrying about paying the rent.) We love ourselves so much we betray family secrets and confided stories. We love ourselves beyond reason because the world is beyond reason and we think so highly of ourselves, we have such hubris, we think that through words we can impose order. We love ourselves so much we glorify our self-hatred. We write for love because the love we have for ourselves is large, but it will never be enough to fill our hearts. We write for your love. And most of you won’t give a damn.
Filed under: publishing, Rant, Writers, Love, On Writing, Top Ten Things Writers Love, writers
08/23/2010 • 6:38 PM 0
Seth Godin Quits Traditional Publishing; Readers Respond
08/23/2010 • 5:05 PM 0
Publishing Links
Just added Jane Friedman and The Millions to the blog roll. Read them and you’ll see why.
Filed under: blogs & blogging, book reviews, Books, publishing, web reviews, book publishing blogs, jane friedman, the millions
08/23/2010 • 8:08 AM 0
(Top 10 Things) Writers Fear:
1. the blank page. And yet, ideas for stories are all around us. Look in newspapers, magazines, real life, fantasy, the net, your dreams and in the back of your sock drawer. Everywhere. Augusten Burroughs says if you experience writer’s block, then write about that. That will prime your pump.
2. that someone, somehow, will steal their ideas. You can’t copyright an idea, and that’s a good thing. Ideas are cheap because (see #1) ideas are everywhere. Execution and completion is what counts. Lots of people have book ideas but never type long enough to even get to the starting line. You’re the best one to take your idea through to fruition. Also, come up with an idea and pitch it to 100 people. One hundred different stories will shoot out from pulling that one trigger. (Note: I won’t steal your ideas. I’ve got plenty of ideas! I’ve got more ideas than I have life left to execute them all! …gulp.)
3. failure. Yeah? Who doesn’t? Failure is in not even trying. Nobody likes a whiner. Shut up and type.
4. success. Just kidding. Nobody really fears success. Change, sometimes, but never success. Fear of success is something somebody made up in 80s to sell self-help books. Who still believes that now?
5. criticism. You won’t join a critique group so you won’t learn (or will learn very slowly.) That’s how I learned very slowly. The truth is, not everybody is going to like you or what you write. That won’t change, so accept that and look for people who give you caring yet constructive criticism. Flush all others. As Walt Disney said, “I’m not gay.” No, no. He said, “Always move forward.”
6. rejection. People very rarely get a book deal from the first agent they approach. (See #5) Not everybody is going to like what you write. If it’s any good, eventually someone will. Then you can crow all you want about all the publishers, editors and agents who said no before you found the one genius who agrees with you. Your definition of a genius is anyone who loves your manuscript and is in a position to market it to the world.
CHAZZ DEFINITION OF GENIUS:
Anyone who agrees with Chazz.
7. revision. But your best writing is your rewriting. You know that. So go do it. Yeah, it really is that simple. That’s the same way everybody else who hates revision bulled their way through.
8. that our best friends will achieve astonishing literary success and we won’t. I guess you should start typing faster if you want to even have a horse in that race then, huh?
9. poverty. So make sure you get paid for what you write. Send out more queries. Suffer the day job until you achieve escape velocity. Keep the day job and enjoy both with a little less sleep. Be so adorable someone else will support you while you write (I am!). Launch a successful business you can escape to write. Make writing your successful business. Reality check: if you choose writing over riches, are you really going to end up in the street? Would the people who care for you really let that happen? (If so, you’re a right and proper bastard, aren’t you? You deserve homelessness. Maybe you should work on your social skills and bathe, hm?) Poverty isn’t so bad. Not writing would be worse. (If you don’t understand that equation, you aren’t a writer.)
10. anonymity. This is the worst. You fear anonymity because if no one reads your words, there goes your only shot at immortality. If you don’t achieve some success with your writing, soon it will be as if you never existed. You might as well have never existed if you can’t leave some kind of stamp of your personality, your brain and your thoughts on the careless, fickle future you’ll never see. The abyss is yawning beneath you. We are only a brief crack of light between two black infinities. If you don’t write, you can’t be published and if you aren’t published, you are forgotten. You are a helpless speck disappearing down the raging current of time. There is no return. Death waits for us all.
ANONYMITY = DEATH
Feel that fear? It’s not just real. It’s good.
You need some fear in your life to keep you motivated.
Back to the keyboard, friends!
Filed under: getting it done, Rant, writing tips, 10 Things Writers Fear, anonymity, getting it done, writer's block, writing advice
08/22/2010 • 10:26 PM 0
Ken Levine on Overwriting
Click it! I’ve lauded The Great Levine before. I’m doing it again for good reason.
Filed under: writing tips, Ken Levine, overwriting
08/20/2010 • 8:08 AM 1
Dare to Suck.
She’s got it right. Lots of writers expect to be fantastic as soon as they start. That’s unrealistic. You are not a genius, but with practice, you could be. Also, don’t think about the money you will or won’t get. For now, just write for its own sake. The rest? That’s for later.
Filed under: web reviews, Writers, writing tips, dare to suck at writing, writing advice, writing tips
08/19/2010 • 8:11 AM 0
A Few Things Publishing Has Taught Me (#1 of a series)
1. They’re called deadlines, not livelines. Ignore them and you only make yourself miserable and worse, less productive.
2. Publishing is not a romantic pursuit 99.9% of the time. We think of cocktail parties and rubbing shoulders with the glitterati. Mostly it’s hard slogging, alone at a desk developing hemorrhoids.
3. Authors aren’t entitled to a sense of entitlement, but we need it. We should be humble considering our real place in the grand scheme of things. However, we must have a sense of entitlement. We must not be humble. Otherwise, we wouldn’t dare do this (and expect to be paid for it!)
4. Publishers and agents say they aren’t cynical. Many (most?) are. They say, “If we weren’t cynical, how could we be in this business?” Actually there are several answers to that, #1 being that many of them are english majors who are otherwise unemployable. (Many agents are way too snotty to be baristas.) However, much of the time, heavy skepticism serves them. Why? Because I’ve worked a slush pile and know that most manuscripts are not ready to be considered for publication.
5. It’s not just the bad writers who get rejected. People who consider themselves “real” writers delude themselves. Good writers get rejected, too. Shrinking budgets. Smaller staffs. Corporate giants have swallowed publishers up so there’s a greater emphasis on quick returns. Being a midlist author with a track record can be worse than being a newbie with no sales figures to drag down a publisher’s hopes for your next manuscript.
6. Publishing is always, and has always been, a business first. We talk about art on NPR and CBC Radio. At the sales meetings we do not talk about art. We use another word: “Product.” Yeah, that’s right. I said it.
7. Bookstore owners got into selling books because they loved books. (Past tense.) In practice, they spend more time calculating the GST on their (shrinking) sales than reading. This makes some of these disenchanted survivors—these noble few—stargazers with unreasonable hopes for the future and an enduring love of books. For many, their love of books is bittersweet nostalgia for when they were still freshmen. A whole whack of bookstore owners and staff are also some sad ass, cranky mofos.
8. Publishers often don’t know what they’re doing. The big publishers today won’t necessarily be the big publishers of the future. They aren’t agile enough or willing to change. A friend who worked for one of the largest Canadian book publishers confessed to me once, “I can’t find anyone in this office who can tell me what a book actually costs!” And that publisher went away. What a surprise. No other industry tolerates such a high failure rate as does publishing. Many of the reasons for that (to be explored in future posts) are out of the publishers’ control I don’t blame them for that. I do blame them for not fixing those faults which are under their control.
9. If you want to see innovation, watch the smaller publishers. They change fast because they have fewer people between now and a decision. They also adapt faster because there’s no money cushion. They have to change.
10. Changing publishing is like trying to herd cats. At a recent publishing conference I watched a publisher wring his hands about the ebook future. It’s coming. Instead of worrying about yes or no, the question is, “How are you going to ride the wave? Swim or sink!”
11. Publishers as a community should be organizing and lobbying for one epub format. Multiple formats cost more money for an industry that can’t afford inefficiencies. That change won’t happen soon. (Though, like gay marriage, it will eventually be the universal rule, so why don’t we just get on with doing the right thing from the get go?)
12. Your advance for your first book shall be pitiful. Doesn’t matter. It’s all going to the publicist you will hire.
13. Prioritize. Authors spend too much time thinking about the health of the industry and not enough time on the health of their manuscripts…uh-oh. Gotta go.
Filed under: Uncategorized
08/18/2010 • 8:11 PM 0
Writers with Low Self-esteem? Blame Your Overlords.
I ran across this great post from SlushPile.net. Her delicious rant explains how writers and writing are often devalued. No wonder freelancers need to support each other so much.
I especially like the story about the freelancer who was expected to pay for an airline ticket for the privilege of writing a NY Times clip. Gee-zuzz!
STAY TUNED:
A Few Things I’ve Learned from Publishing (#1 of a series)
hits your screen tomorrow morning.
Filed under: web reviews, Writers, publishing, slushpile.net, writers with low self-esteem
08/18/2010 • 4:00 PM 2
Top 100 Books for Freelance Writers
Wow. I just stumbled upon Inkthinker, a website dedicated to helping freelance writers. What a great resource. Freelancers! Please peruse. The Top 100 Books for freelancers is just the beginning. We have a lot more reading to do now, don’t we?
Filed under: book reviews, Books, publishing, web reviews, help for freelance writers, Inkthinker, top 100 books for freelance writers
C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m 
