I've been watching The Voice this season. I tweet my live reactions @EileenWiedbrauk BTW, if you're interested in following those joys, disappointments, and uneducated immediate reactions as I have zero knowledge of the music business beyond that of avid radio station listener.
Here's the big question I've recently been pondering: why was Amy Winehouse such a huge success in such a short life? She had a fascinating voice and a hot body, yes. But so do so many of the young people who try to make it in the music business each year. So do so many of those who make it as contestants but don't win national shows such as The Voice.
Now I admittedly don't know much about the music business. But if I'm to believe what all of The Voice coaches repeatedly say, it's all about finding an emotional connection to the lyrics/song, and finding a way to connect that emotion to the audience that isn't show-tune-emoting. As the coaches say, it's about being vulnerable.
There's been a lot of internet chatter about Amanda Hocking and her self-publishing escapades this week. USA Today, The Huffington Post, Business Inisder, and her local NBC news affiliate gave her some air time (see video, though the first 30 seconds is just the anchors talking about wtf a Nook is).
"Rejected by countless book publishers" seems like a subjective phrase which *might* have just been blown out of proportion. Ms. Hocking got fed up with the system at age twenty-five. She submitted each subsequent novel she wrote to fewer and fewer agents (as per admission of her own blog).
Most agents will tell you that it's often not the first book you write that's the first book you sell. In Ms. Hocking's defense, she claims to have written 19 novels, many as a teenager. Now, no offense, but I remember what I wrote as a teenager and I teach teenagers writing and that teenage writing has about as much chance of making it with a publisher as I do of winning the lottery on any given day. Eragon = lotto winner.
Also agents (and successful traditionally published authors) point out that most writers do rounds and rounds of queries--sending out ten queries a week for months--before they find the right fit for a successful agent-novel-author experience. It's about finding an agent who is passionate enough about your book to want to sell it as much as you do, not finding someone to schlep paper for you.
Anyway, I bring this all up because I have my doubts about how the news media is portraying her "perseverance." But that's just me.
But it turns out she didn't need to persevere or gain a sound understanding of the publishing industry. She'd already done "market research" by browsing the Wal-Mart book rack (Ididn't make that up), she wrote YA paranormal because she it was what she saw the most of. She knew it was hot, so she stuck it up on Amazon, B&N, and several other epub platforms and made it available POD through Amazon's Lulu. Less than a year later she's self-published eight novels and one novella out and, according to her blog, sold over 900,000 units. Priced at $0.99 or $2.99, Ms. Hocking makes 30% or 70% of that as profit, respectively. According to her local news station, she's made enough to buy a house in cash.
Ms. Hocking is twenty-six and impatient. IMHO.
I don't mean to misrepresent her. It appears that she already feels enough of the internet is doing that. So I won't take some of the pot shots that I could. But I'm the kind of person who believes in the strength of patience, perseverance, and education. Formal education is helpful, but education is out there in thousands of different forms, you only have to ask for and accept it. Reading agent blogs daily is a form of education. Researching publishing is a form of education, learning grammar and style is a form of education. Knowing you need a good copyeditor is a form of education. Learning about things like book bloggers before you jump into the world of epublishing is a form of education. Reading books on craft, being part of a workshop, finding a critique partner, subscribing to publishers marketplace, reading in your genre, reading out of your genre -- these are all forms of education, patience, and (if you keep writing with all you're learning) perseverance. A classroom with a teacher in it isn't necessary to learn.
I'm twenty-seven, only one year older than Ms. Hocking, and I think that if there had been an easy way for me to throw my work into the sales arena when I was twenty-two, I might have done it. But I'm not that impatient now. And I shudder to think of my work when I was twenty-two given all I've learned in the interim.
Ms. Hocking also writes on a recent blog (to clear up things "the internet is saying ... about me"), that she feels a "tremendous sense of urgency, like if I don't get everything out now and do everything now, while the iron is hot, everything I've worked for will just fall away." This also leads to the feeling I get from looking at all of the facts (those presented by her in interviews and those presented on her blog) that her ebook sale boom is the result of impatience.
The SF/F/H writer list serve I'm on is in a tizzy contemplating the viability of the e-publishing-- the phrase "future of publishing" has been bandied about so much that it's ceased to hold meaning for me. Those who seem the most interested are people who are writing "between genres" or in not easily defined areas of the market who don't feel the traditional publishing market is open to them. Meanwhile the listserve's many voices are not really paying mind to the fact that Hocking is writing in a market that's not just hot, it's hott: YA paranormal romance.
Ms. Hocking's first novel has a good concept, but its market niche is one that is begging for content. My local Barns & Nobel has devoted an entire shelving section to "Teen Paranormal" -- more space than "Christian Fiction" gets . . . and on the conservative west side of Michigan, that means something. This is the one genre where publishers can't put out enough material to meet the demand.
Believing that you can epublish in a different genre and take off the same way is a mistake. IMHO. What sells and what doesn't is always hit or miss. No one knows what the next big seller is going to be. But let me present a case to back up my opinion.
Consider this: as much as I am a part of the cult of Firefly, I knew the moment I saw the first episode why it had only lasted one season (obvi, I was watching on Netflix). A space western could have been one of those things that exploited the interstices of genre and boomed, but it exploited the interstices of two declining genres -- dying genres, if we're going to be morose. The space opera and the western haven't been doing well in print or on screen. Speculative fiction has been there, but all you need to do is look at the declining number of episodes each new cast/crew of Star Trek made to see the writing on the wall.
So just because the internet is a way to publish in a declining genre without the editors fearing the decline, doesn't mean success will come your way. There's a guy out there trying to raise $3,000,000 to get Firefly back on the air (or air on the internet). Will his internet grass roots movement catch fire? Grass fire? Prairie fire? He wants people to pledge $40 per season to see the show online. Maybe he'll make his goal. Maybe he won't. But he's got one giant plus on his side: people have already seen the show. It's been on air, on TV, on Netflix, and in traditional theaters (Serenity). This "unproducible" TV show was produced -- your "unpublishable" novel hasn't been published.
The point I'm making: could this Amanda-Hocking-success-story happen for a writer not working in Teen Paranormal? Yes. Would I bet on it? No, I'd bet against it. And I'd make a big wager.
What I do see as worthwhile, competent epublishing ventures or --go forth and epublish now:
Authors publishing their out of print backlist (or like JA Konrath, publishing the backlist and then writing more books in the same series and epubbing them)
Authors publishing short story collections of work previously published by magazines or anthologies (Chuck Wendig).
It's very, very, very hard to convince a publisher to lose money on your short story collection -- because "short story collection" to a publisher is a bit like taking a lighter to money just to watch it burn. The publishers who do pub short story collections do so because they are dedicated to art -- and usually have dedicated grant money. But if you can say look at my short stories published in magazines X, Y, and Z, now collected in one place for a low low price then hey, maybe I'll buy that. Literally.
I'll post Monday on the how to be a professional and a self-epublished author information a publicist recently gave me after a discussion of the above news articles and blog posts. It was all good information that I was going to put here, but this post has gone on far too long.
I've been hanging onto this one for a while. Jason S. Ridler's guest post for SWFA "Work like Hell: Lessons from the Pulp Jungle" talks about what it took to make it in the world of early 20th century pulp fiction and what lessons we can take from that.
Times were tough. We can all agree on that.
I'm often left raising an eyebrow when writers bemoan how the bottom has fallen out of the publishing world. They say things like you can't make a living writing anymore.
My eyebrow goes up. Could you ever make a living as a writer? I want to ask. At least, make the "easy living" you seem to imply?
Maybe I too often take my sense of context from stories of Edgar Allen Poe barely scraping by, or the pulp writers who had to write a story a day to get enough material sold to pay the rent. I've recently been enlightened to the fact that for a while in the 90s (and maybe other decades, but this example came from the 90s) a writer could put out a book of literary fiction, get a six figure advance that would never earn out, and still be able to publish another book with the same publisher.
That's the bottom falling out? Writers not getting inflated advances that never earn out?
I call it publishers coming to their senses.
Now, it sucks if your book doesn't make money and sell lots of copies because you, the writer, won't have a way to make money. But a business is a business. Write more. Write faster. Get an Underwood and battle the pulp jungle.
Happy New Year! Seriously, is it already 2009? My blog celebrates 14 months of regular entries this January. It’s been alive since spring of 2006 but it was so sporadic that I think I checked my junk email account more than I posted to my blog. After my first trip to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in 2007 I vowed to post fiction once a week and did so through October of that year. That November I left law school in order to pursue an MFA and a life writing, teaching and hopefully publishing.
For many of you, these facts are old hat; you’ve actually been around since that November. I owe many of my original readers to Jud who took the time to read and recommend this blog to other bloggers. Quite a few of my “lurkers” are people who have met me in real life. Friends from college and high school, family members – my twin cousins stalk the blog for pictures of my kittens, here’s your prize:
and the last group would be people I met through writing related stuff: Kenyon, commenting on the MFAblog, almost going to UNH with you, or other reasons.
[BTW, we totally need to meet at the AWP Conference. Do you think we can get on the schedule as “Bloggers Cocktail Hour” – You’re followed their blogs for months, now meet and greet with your contemporaries and counterparts to discuss the experience further in person (and coordinate your blog posts for the weekend), cash bar.]
Regardless of who you are or how this blog came to your attention, I’m grateful that you’re reading my rants, recommendations, epiphanies and in general being a sucker for kitten pictures and B&W photography of snow.
All this retrospection came about after the ‘duh’ moment that gave the title to this post.
My well intentioned father, completely confused by such titles as nonfiction, memoir and essay as applied to bound books today, bought me two collections of essays for Christmas, Naked, David Sedaris and I Was Told There’d Be Cake, Sloane Crosley. The reason he did this was because I told him about my last workshop experience where two people called my short story “essayistic.” He then spent the next few weeks pressing me to answer his question if a novel could be written as a memoir.
I was completely confused.
Like Frey? I relayed the Million Little Pieces scandal to my father, but that didn’t answer his question.
Finally (after I became super frustrated and pissy) we came around to the real issue: the only difference between a memoir and a literary novel with a first person narrator is that the novel depicts fictional events. Ideally, the memoir is completely real – or at least completely the memoires of the author.
Tomorrow I’ll get into how I explained what I’m doing to my father which is worth writing out just to share his reaction. But for the time being just know that he bought these two collections of essays to help and inspire me.
The second collection, I I Was Told There’d Be Cake, certainly did inspire me. The writer is a young woman with a hillarious voice who rants on certain topics personal to her and yet sympathetic for everyone. That’s it. It is, of course, in the form of an essay.
I got one page into the fourth essay in the book and suddenly ohmigdImsoooostupid! I’ve been doing this exact same thing for the past ten years! Of course, with varying degrees of readability and knowledge of grammar, but basically with a little tweaking to fit form, any of the pieces I dubbed “comedic rants” is an essay. This is frequently what my blog is (thus the reflection earlier).
I’m going to spend some time working very hard on writing, researching and submitting essays to the appropriate markets.
Ash was a doll the entire weekend. Everyone's in love with her and she's single-handedly (pawedly?) generating new cat owners across the country.
On the way to my father's house she cried a little in the car. I had her in a harness and leashed to the back door handle of the car so that she couldn't get under foot. But once the crying finished she was fine. Just hunkered down and waited it out.
While I drove four hours north to visit family, the kitten went to stay with my father's fiance who was only an hour away. Both there and back, Ash just curled up in my lap and sat/slept the entire ride. On the way home Saturday she hardly moved from my lap she was so calm.
It was great! Only once she got back to the apartment she curled up on "her" chair and slept for four hours straight. Not catnap sleep but deep sleep. The kind where cats twist into funny positions and their whiskers twitch as they chase mice in their dreams.
I'm behind on everything.
Don't be like me kids; don't procrastinate. Just don't.
I'm keeping afloat just barely, but I'm not feeling well at all. Hopefully this will pass.
I'm sure many of you have seen this news at PW and other outlets last week: "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books."
Yikes.
I guess this is the first time the "good news" has been that I'm not ready to publish a novel length work. However, while I might not believe that trickle down tax cuts ever get to the "average joe" -- and no, Joe the Plumber never saw a dime of trickle down economics -- I do know that the big boys' cuts frequently affect smaller and smaller presses. Blah. These guys are 1.) making me glad I'm in school and 2.) making me want to stay in school through the Ph.D.
Thanksgiving was a time of friends/family asking about the Ph.D. My friend from high school wanted to know if that was still my plan, my father still thinks it's the best plan, and unless the economy rebounds in the next 20 months during which time I sign with an editor for publication of a novel, I think I'll be applying for that Ph.D. Meanwhile I need to talk with the advising-people in my program and see what the deal around here is for switching over from an MFA to a Ph.D. without earning the MFA. There are only about 20 (maybe 24) Ph.D in creative writing programs in the nation. They are, essentially, lit Ph.Ds with a creative thesis ... and there are mixed emotions about hiring Ph.Ds in writing over MFAs in writing. Some schools claim that in 15 years they'll hire only Ph.Ds for the spots they're now considering both; some schools are doing searches for faculty and viewing Ph.Ds with suspicion. These inconsistencies are to be expected in a subjective field but they make me want to scream get your shit together for crying out loud!
