Category: Culture

Having done a few posts on different kinds of publishing and which kinds to avoid, let me now start by giving some advice on how to start writing in a way aimed at getting published.

1. Most importantly, START WRITING! Don’t wait until you’ve read a bunch of theory before you start. Just start. If you don’t get in the habit of writing–and writing regularly–you won’t get good at it.

2. Be prepared to write a lot of stuff that never gets published. This is your practice work. Everyone learning any skill has to practice, and writing is no exception. As a result, relax. Don’t worry about whether this stuff is good enough to print. Don’t have that as a goal for your initial writings.

3. Become aware of what you read. As you read stuff–particularly stuff you like–ask yourself questions, like: "Why did he say it that way?" "How could he have said it differently?" "Why didn’t he?" "What is it about this writing that I like?" "What don’t I like?"

4. Get some books about how to write. There are lots of them out there, and they’re specialized by the kind of writing your want to do (e.g., non-fiction, fiction, science fiction, detective, romance, western, etc.). Read them.

5. Get the book Elements of Style by Strunk and White. This is a very short book offering concise writing advice. It is the standard work for beginning writers. Has been for decades. It’s also cheap.

GET THE BOOK.

6. Start getting feedback on your writing. This is very important, because if you don’t do it, you won’t know how others see your writing, and you won’t make progress past a certain point. Unfortunately, this is also a tricky step.

The easiest thing for most folks to do to get feedback is to hit up their friends and relatives. But there’s a problem: Your friends and relatives (at least the ones you’r likely to hit up) will want to be nice to you. That may interfere with their being honest with you. Honesty is what you need, though, to know whether your writing is succeeding or failing. Another problem is that your friends and family likely are not professional writers themselves and thus may not be able to help you make that much progress.

An alternative that many beginning writers try is joining a writers’ group. Just about every town has these (if you know where to look), and if yours doesn’t, you can start your own. Writers in the group meet, share what they’ve written, and critique it. But there’s a problem here, too: Writers’ groups tend to turn into groups of friends, which raises the niceness vs. honesty problem mentioned above. Worse, writers’ groups frequently end up spending most of their time socializing and comparatively little time critiqing writing. Also, while the writers in your group probably know more about writing than your friends and family, they usually aren’t professionals. Most of the writers who attend these groups are amateurs, and so there’s a limit to how much they can help you progress.

I speak from some experience on that one. I myself used to be a member of a sci-fi writers group. None of us (at the time) were published, and we turned into a group of friends and then started socializing and stopped working as a writers group. I still miss those guys. (Sniff.)

Another alternative is to take a writing class or–better–a series of writing classes. These are commonly available at your local community college. There are also some online. DO NOT NEGLECT TAKING COURSES THAT TEACH GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION. THESE ARE VITALLY IMPORTANT FOR GETTING PUBLISHED. Taking courses usually solves the niceness vs. honesty problem, because your teacher typically will be much more honest with your than your family and friends. (In fact, you may be horrified at all the red marks that come back on your homework.) Better, the teacher also probably knows more about writing than your family and friends–and there’s a good chance he’ll know more than the members of your writers’ group, too, at least about writing in general (if not your particular genre of interest).

The ultimate feedback is sending your material off to publishers (for professional publications, not vanity presses). This is the final threshold. If you can successfully get past this one (and it will take some doing), you’ve arrived in the world of professional publishing.

But that’s a whole ‘nother story.

In the meantime . . . START WRITING!

If you read how-to manuals for writing, one of the frustrations you will encounter is that the term voice is thrown about with abandon.  Publishers want "fresh, new voices"; you are implored to "develop your voice"; you will be advised not to "compromise your voice."  You know what a voice is in spoken language, but how do you develop one in your writing?

Basically, your written voice is the unique way you put together words into coherent streams of thought.  A strong written voice is as distinctive as DNA.  A reader can glance at words you’ve thrown together on a page and have a good idea who wrote them without glancing at the byline.  For a demonstration of written voice, cruise the blogs and note the different styles of writing.  Mark Shea, Amy Welborn, Kathy Shaidle, Jeff Miller, and Tom Kreitzberg are all hugely successful Catholic bloggers with instantly recognizable "voices."  I submit that one reason for their success is that they have developed powerful "voices" that set them apart from the rest of the congregation in St. Blog’s Parish.  When you visit their blogs, you’re not just there for the links but for their "take" on the day’s events.  That’s the power of "voice."

So, how do you develop a written voice?  Do you plunge into writing your manuscript, hoping that one will emerge over the next 80,000 words or so?  Sure, if you want to remain unpublished.  As Jimmy has noted in his recent series of posts on How Not To Get Published, the best way to remain unpublished is to try to write a book before you’ve had any experience at writing.

If, for some inexplicable reason, you’d rather eventually be published, here’s another idea for developing a voice:  Start a blog.  Even if you keep it as a more-or-less "private" online journal where you write a post or two a day, you’ll be exercising your voice.  Blogging will do several things:  You’ll be exercising your voice; you’ll be writing on a regular basis; and you’ll be overcoming the "stage fright" that can hinder your writing.  The last is one of the steepest hurdles in voice development because if you are timid about how your thoughts sound to others then you are going to be timid about experimenting with your word choice and with how you construct sentences, paragraphs, articles, chapters, and so on.  Regular public writing, even for a very small audience, is one means to overcome that.

Or you could pour out thousands of words into manuscript form, stuff the pages in a Jiffy bag, and post them to all the New York slush piles.

You decide.      

A few years ago there was an ad on TV (by IBM or Xerox or someone like that) which was about a class being lectured by a sour, old, unlikable, unsympathetic creative writing professor.

The professor was explaining–in his sour, old, unlikable, unsympathetic manner–that it costs publishers thousands of dollars to produce, publish, and warehouse a book and, therefore, the vast majority of his young, hip students were doomed never to be published.

Through the micro-lecture the commercial contained, one of the hip, young students is shown smirking and rolling his eyes, until finally he can’t take it any more when he hears about the money aspect, and so he gets up and says, "That’s not true!"

The then explains to the sour, old, unlikable, unsympathetic–and now shocked–professor, and to the rest of the class, that there’s this new PRINT ON DEMAND (POD) process that uses digital technology to keep a stored record of the book, which can then be printed a few copies at a time, whenever there is an order to be filled. Even if the order is only for a single copy.

"So now," the student concludes, looking at the hip, young students around him, "we can all get published!"

The professor frowns. The class cheers. Go to the IBM (or Xerox, or whoever) logo. End of commercial.

When I saw this ad, I immediately rolled my eyes. It was unlikable for a whole host of reasons (like dissing old people and professors in a classic example of contemporary "cult of youth" prejudice).

But let’s think this through:

Haven’t we had Xerox machines for an awful long time? (At least, longer than any of the hip, young kids in the ad have been alive?) Couldn’t they "get published" by using those? Further, can’t anyone who wants to today go online and start a web page or a blog and get published that way?

Of course, that’s not what they mean. The kids in the commercial want to get published by having their work come out in the format of a book with a square spine and a full-color cover and all.

Okay, haven’t we had vanity presses for longer than any of these students have been alive? Anyone who wants to can "get published" through those with a real square spine book with a four-color cover and everything.

In fact, isn’t there even an appeal to vanity in the student’s joyful declaration that "Now we can all get published"? (It being, of course, understandable that an unpublished author would want this. It’s a very human and very understandable desire.)

What’s new here?

Basically this: Digital technology allows the printing costs to be lower since the book is produced in an on-demand manner. There also aren’t the same warehousing costs.

But the costs will still be substantial, at least if you want a professionally done book (as opposed to something you wrote and edited yourself in Microsoft Word). There are still all the charges for editing, copy editing, proofreading, typesetting, and cover design that the print on demand process doesn’t magically do away with.

Print on demand publishers also are frequently hooked up to the Internet and to online booksellers like Amazon, but vanity presses are starting to do that, too.

What we’re talking about here is just a somewhat cheaper vanity press process.

Done right, that not a problem. It blends into the self-publishing phenomenon, which can be entirely profitable and respectable (or a total disaster). Some folks have had very good experiences self-publishing, including using POD technology to self-publish.

But it is unjust and manipulative to hold out print on demand as a magical way of getting published to the aspiring author as if using this process would mean the same thing as getting published through a professional publisher.

What print on demand will mean for the typical user is that the person will get the satisfaction of knowing that a few dozen or hundred copies of his work have been printed off and sold (possibly to the author himself so he can give them away to relatives and friends) and that if someone stumbles across it on the Internet that that person could order a new copy.

That’s all fine and good, but it does not mean:

1. That there will be more than a small handful of copies in print.
2. That the book is professionally edited.
3. That the book is professionally designed and laid out.
4. That the book is remotely as good as one done by a professional publishing house.

As a result, indiscriminate use of POD technology will create an "amateur" stigma that continues to attach to many POD authors, just as if they had used a traditional vanity press.

Because basically what we’re talking about here is just a new way to get vanity press-quality books done–at least as long as it’s done with a "Now we can all get published" approach.

Getting published through a service that is undiscriminating among authors will not mean as much as getting professionally published, and it is unjust to and manipulative of POD commercials or services to pretend to authors that it will.

If he wants to do professional quality work through a print on demand service, that’s great. He’ll achieve respectability as an author, and he’ll deserve every bit of it.

But technology (thus far) can’t bring writing up to professional standards, and if this technology is used as a means of publishing material that would have been eliminated at the slush pile stage then it will simply result in more bad books being in print and more dissappointed authors out there.

Yesterday I ragged on vanity presses–and for good reason. Many of them are outright scams, and others operate in a very shady zone.

I want to make it clear, though, that I don’t diss self-publishing at all. In fact, I’ve considered it myself.

What happens in self-publishing is that you basically start your own publishing house.

Why would you want to do that, though, when there are lots of publishers out there already?

If the answer is that your manuscript won’t be accepted by a professional publisher then that’s usually a bad reason to self-publish. It usually means that the manuscript isn’t up to professional standards. (It can mean that the manuscript is aimed at a very small market that the big publishers don’t serve, but then there are lots of small market publishers who you could sell it to.)

Here’s the best reason to self-publish: You stand to make more money. By being your own publisher, you get to keep all the money the publisher usually keeps. Hence, you stand to make more.

Only maybe not. Standard publishers already have established publicity and distribution chains set up, and you’d be building one from scratch. Unless you have a really hot product, you likely couldn’t sell as many copies.

On the other hand, if you do have a hot product, you may be willing to push the product in a more aggressive way than an existing publisher and you might sell more copies.

You might even sell enough that the book trips a big publisher’s radar and they get interested in purchasing the rights from you to print an edition of it themselves.

So why wouldn’t you want to self-publish?

Because in exchange for getting to keep the money a publisher usually does, you also have to do all the things a publisher usually does, as well.

This means that you have to (or pay someone to):

• Observe the legal requirements needed in your state to create a new business.
• Edit your manuscript.
• Copyedit your manuscript.
• Proofread your manuscript.
• Typeset your manuscript.
• Design the cover for your book.
• Get blurbs for your book.
• Find a printer.
• Negotiate with the printer.
• Shepherd the book through the production pipeline.

And that’s only the beginning! After your book gets back from the printer, you’ll have to (or pay someone to):

• Write ad copy.
• Design ads.
• Purchase places for ads.
• Contact booksellers.
• Obtain placement with booksellers.
• Try to get the book picked up by major distributors (not the same as booksellers).
• Fulfill orders.
• Do your own book keeping.
• Pay your own taxes.

Aaagh!

And those are the reasons I ultimately chose not to self-publish.

I want to write, not be a publisher.

But I wanted to make it clear that I don’t have anything against self-publishing. It can be very profitable and respectable–or a total disaster.

If you’d like to learn more about self-publishing,

GET THIS BOOK.

Yesterday’s tip for how not to get published dealt with a way to avoid being published altogether. Today’s tip isn’t quite as good, because it will result in you getting published, only in a highly undesirable way.

You may have been flipping through the back of a magazine at some point in the past and seen an ad that said something like "Writers Wanted!" or "Get Your Novel Published!" or "Be A Published Author!"

Today’s tip is this: Answer those ads!

Why? Because professional writers never do, which means you won’t be in competition with the professional writers. In fact, it’ll be easy to get the publishers who place these ads to accept your manuscript. These publishers need amateur authors. Otherwise, they won’t stay in business.

Why don’t the pros answer these ads? Well, there are two reasons. One is that they usually don’t even see these ads, because they aren’t placed in the kind of trade journals that writers read (if they read any such journals). The other reason professional writers don’t answer these ads will become obvious.

Here’s what’ll happen if you do answer one:

1. You’re likely to get a brochure explaining how exciting and prestigious it can be to be a published author.
2. This brochure will hint that you might even write a bestseller (you never know . . . ).
3. Your manuscript will be evaluated for free!
4. If accepted, your the publisher who placed the ad will edit it, typeset it, proof read it, print it, and market it for you!
5. All you have to do is send in your manuscript!
6. Oh, and one other thing: Because of the high cost of doing all the things that the publisher does, you’ll need to reimburse him for a fraction of these costs, to prove you’re serious about the project. Otherwise, he can’t afford to print your bestseller-in-the-making.
7. What are you waiting for???

So you send in your manuscript and get back a note saying that the publisher is very excited about your manuscript, which the publisher feels has great potential, and he is anxious to start working with you. All you need to do is send in your check to help him underwrite his costs. Payment plans are available if you can’t send it all at once.

So you send in the money, and once it’s all in the publisher starts work on your manuscript. A long time goes by, and eventually you get a shipment of books in the mail.

Your book is in print! Yay! Hooray!

It’s not that attractively designed, and the text is hard to read, and the binding will fall apart as soon as the book is opened, but IT’S STILL IN PRINT and, what’s more, YOU  are a PUBLISHED AUTHOR!!! Yippie!!!

It’s at this point that things start to go wrong.

Your "publisher" doesn’t fulfill on the publicity and distribution that he promised for your book. It’s all up to YOU to get the thing sold. But you didn’t want to be a publisher, you wanted to be an author, and so after giving away a few copies of the book to friends and relatives, most of the ones you got end up sitting in your attic or garage. . . . for YEARS. Nothing ever happens with them. They never make the bestseller list. Nada.

Still, it flatters your vanity to say that you are a published author, and that’s why the kind of publishers who place those ads are called VANITY PRESSES.

Real (i.e., non-vanity) publishers don’t place those ads. They don’t need to advertise for authors (especially in magazines that have nothing to do with writing). They get more manuscripts than they can publish. Remember the slush pile?

Real publishers make their money by selling books to large numbers of readers. They then take a portion of this money and pay royalties to the author. The author himself doesn’t pay anything because the publisher doesn’t make his money off the author but off the readers. Authors like working with this kind of publisher since (a) the author doesn’t have to pay anything up front and (b) the publisher has a track record of getting his books sold to enough readers that he can stay in business (which is more readers than the author himself can usually sell to).

Vanity presses, though, make their money on authors. And the money the author pays isn’t just part of the costs of publishing the book. It’s the whole amount. Often it’s inflated above what a real publisher would have to pay to get the same work done.

The vanity publisher, for his part, has little interest in producing a quality book for the readers (if there are any) because that’s not where he makes his money. As a result, he spends as little as possible on publicity, distribution, printing, binding, typesetting, editing, and anything else involved in book production. He doesn’t care if the hypothetical reader would like the book at all because that’s not where he makes his money.

Instead, the vanity press’s publisher wants to please the author by telling him how great his work is, how much potential it has, etc.–anything to get the author to cough up the money (usually in the thousands of dollars).

Vanity presses are the Dark Side, the quick and easy path to getting published and leads to ruinous results. They presses are the bottom-feeders of the publishing world. As a result, professional authors don’t want to have anything to do with them.

In fact, if you are an aspiring author and have had any dealings with a vanity press, you are well advised not to mention this fact in your cover letter to a real publisher, as it will brand you as a sucker and as someone who doesn’t know how the industry works and, further, as someone who probably can’t write.

Now, not all vanity presses operate in the ham-fisted manner I described above. Not all of them are total scams. Some are even semi-legitimate. There’s a kind of grey zone in which vanity presses blend into simple printers who authors that want to self-publish go to. (Self-publishing being a venture that can be profitable and respectable–or a total disaster.)

But if getting unhappily published is your goal then, by all means, answer those ads!

It’s been a while since I did anything in the "About Writing" category in the lefthand margin, but I’m about to do a string of them over the next few days.

Today’s post deals with a really good way not to get published. If you want not to get published, this is definitely a way to accomplish your goal.

Here’s what you do: Start your literary career by writing a book. It can be fiction or non-fiction, but make sure it’s a full-sized book (at least 40,000 words long).

If you do this and you send your literary firstborn off to a normal, professional publisher, I guarantee that you will not get published.

Now what is that?

For the same reason that I shouldn’t begin my musical career by writing a symphony: I don’t know how. I don’t write music, but if I did then a really good way for me not to get my music published would be to start by writing a symphony

On the other hand, if I wanted to get my music published then the thing to do would be to start small, with a simple melody, then try to figure out how to be successful writing longer and longer pieces until I’d worked my way up to symphony-length works.

Same exact dynamic applies to writing and publishing text rather than music. People who want to get published need to start small and build up from there.

Unfortunately, book publishers receive countless manuscripts from people who have never published anything before. These manuscripts go into what is known in the industry as the "slush pile," which is so named because reading these things feels like wading through endless tracks of slush.

Consequently, the job of reading the slush pile is not a highly desirable task in the publishing industry. Therefore, if at all possible it gets inflicted uponassigned to assistant editors and even interns. If (and this is a HUGE "if") the slush pile reader finds something promising then he reports it to someone up the chain of command (such as the commissioning editor), who takes a second look at the manuscript to see if its worth pursuing further.

The vast majority of manuscripts in the slush pile are rejected. Sometimes the reader doesn’t even get as far as the manuscript itself before making the decision to reject. There are signals the amateur author can send off with the cover letter (like not having one) that signal that the author simply doesn’t know what he’s doing.

If the reader does get as far as reading the manuscript (and usually he does), he normally discerns–within the first two pages, often the first paragraph, and sometimes even the first sentence–the following things:

1. This author is an amateur who has never published anything before.
2. It would require a huge amount of editorial work for the publishing house to get this manuscript up to professional standards.
3. Our limited resources would be better spent on other manuscripts that require less work.
4. My boss would never approve this.
5. I would injure my career here by advancing this manuscript to the next level and thus calling my own judgment into question.

At this point the reader stops reading. He may flip around a little in the manuscript to double-check his judgment, but soon a rejection slip is winging its way toward the author, along with the returned (and mostly unread) copy of the manuscript–IF the author included a self-addressed, adequately-stamped envelope with the original submission. (Otherwise the manuscript goes into the round file.)

The way to avoid the slush pile or at least maximize your chance of getting your manuscript accepted is to start small and hone your skills on shorter published works–articles if you want to write a non-fiction book, short stories if you want to write a novel. Find a periodical that publishes stuff as much as possible like what the book you want to write and publish there. Publish in a sci-fi mag if you want to write sci-fi novels. Publish in a detective mag if you want to write detective novels. Publish in a popular science mag if you want to write popular science books. Publish in an apologetics mag if you want to publish apologetics books.

If the right kind of genre magazine doesn’t exist for the kind of book you want to write, at least start publishing somewhere so that you can start getting a sense of the rules that apply in the publishing industry.

Once you can consistently get your articles or stories published (i.e., you get very few rejection notices any more), you’re ready to try your hand at a book-length work. You also have a track record of prior publications that you can mention (briefly)  in your cover letter. Your short pieces may even attract the attention of a commissioning editor who thinks, "Hey, this kid’s pretty good. Wonder if he’s got a book in him? I’ll have to send him a query."

On the other hand, if your goal is not to get published then don’t do any of that. Go for the book first time out.

You’ll thank me.

Yesterday I posted a query asking why we should fill up our imaginations with fiction: visions of ways God didn’t make the world.

Earlier today I posted a note that Jesus himself used fictions, therefore they must (in at least some circumstances) be okay to use.

Having established that, I’d like to go into the speculative basis of why they are okay to use.

Because fiction is such a part of our lives, many folks might pass quickly over the question of why we should do fiction at all and not register the full force of the question. For that reason, I tried to phrase the question as strongly as I could, even using prejudicial language and talking about "filling up our imaginations" with how "God didn’t make the world."

The first of these phrases makes it sound as if we’re cramming our minds full of fiction so that there’s no room left for anything else. In some cases, that may be true. Some people live in fantasy worlds, either in the sense of spending an unhealthy amount of time on fiction (like the Star Trek fans satirized in William Shatner’s famous "Get A Life!" sketch on SNL) or in the sense of being literally unable to distinguish fantasy from reality (in which case the person is clinically psychotic).

Those conditions represent the abuse of the imagination (in the case of obsessive fandom) or an outright mental illness (as in the case of psychotics). But just because a faculty can be disordered doesn’t mean that the faculty itself should not be part of human life.

In point of fact, it seems that coming up with fiction is something that is part of human nature. If it wasn’t for Jesus’ use of fiction, one could always say "Well, that’s just because of the Fall," but the phenomenon of storytelling is a true human universal. Every society has fiction, and that’s a pretty good clue that it’s something built into human nature.

The ostensible opposition between our imaginations and how God didn’t make the world is also prejudicial language.

After all: What does one suppose our imaginations are for, anyway? The whole point of an imagination is being able to envision how the world might be but isn’t–at least at present.

It’s true that we can use our imaginations to try to reconstruct the way that the world was or the way it might be right now in areas out of our sight, but one of its principal functions–and very likely its main function–is to enable us to model how the future might go. This allows us to plan, to envision how we’d like the world to be and then determine what’s the best way to move the world in that direction.

What will happen if I ask my boss for a raise? What arguments will be most effective in getting me one? Will this girl agree to marry me? How can I increase my chances of getting her to say yes? How can I get the baby to stop screaming at the top of his lungs? How can I get Fr. to end this liturgical abuse? Etc., etc., etc.

All of these are questions that involve envisioning the world a way it isn’t now. We may be using our imaginations in these cases to figure out how to change the world, but the point is that our imagination is still bound up, part and parcel, with the idea of fiction. Trying out fictions of how the world might be is what the imagination is for.

A person without the ability to engage the faculty of fiction has a broken imagination, and that’s all there is to it.

That’s only one reason why fiction is important, though.

More to come.

Let me give you what I consider to be a knock-down blow for the hypothesis we considered earlier that we shouldn’t be filling up our imaginations with fiction–imaginings of the way the world ain’t. I’ll offer additional arguments tomorrow (and I’m sure others will or by the time you read this already have offered them in the comboxes), but this one I consider a clincher:

Jesus used fiction.

If you think about it, that’s what his parables are: They’re short fictions.

When he starts talking about a man who went away on a journey and entrusted his property to his servants, it would be a mistake for someone in his audience to yell out "What was his name?!"

Someone actually does do that in Monty Python’s The Life Of Brian when Brian tries to tell a parable, but it’s missing the point. It’s a mistake.

It would be even more of a mistake to try to find out when and where the guy lived in history. When Jesus says things like this, he doesn’t have particular historical individuals in mind (so far as we know).

As a result, his parables are fictions. They may teach truths about the world, but the contain elements that aren’t the way the world is (or was or will be).

And if Jesus can use fiction . . . then so can we.