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Today’s blog post is here.

It’s all about how I got published in the first place, and why my first book was published in the UK, not Australia.

And to answer a question that keeps on cropping up: my next book (after the Stormlord trilogy is done with) will be a return to the Havenstar world – but no, it won’t be a sequel. It will have different characters.

All of this has been said before, often. Yet if this Harlequin Horizons affair has showed anything, it is that myths are alive and well. Evidently, we can’t say this kind of thing often enough.

In no particular order the first five myths (5 more tomorrow):

1. Writers make stacks of money.
I wish. This is like saying that “all singers make fortunes”. It’s not true. Most singers eke out a living, singing far too infrequently to small audiences. Looked at as a whole, published writers more often than not hold down a second job to make ends meet. Few writers can write more than one book a year, and few will get more than USD 10,000 a year for their effort, especially for the first few years. Sure, there are the superstars out there, but they are the ones skewing the statistics.

2. You can’t get published unless you know somebody in the business first.
Ok, so then how did I do it?
I had never:
(a) met another fiction writer
(b) met a publisher
(c) met an agent
(d) been to a sff convention.
I had:
(e) no money to bribe anyone
(f) no access to the internet
(g) knew no one to ask about getting published
I was:
(g) living in a country that had no sff fiction-publishing industry

No one recommended me anywhere. No one had ever heard of me. And I still got published.

3. The best way to get published is to pay money to have your book published.
Yep, there are people out there who think authors pay to get their books into book shops. No, authors don’t do this. Publishers pay authors to write books and publishers pay distributors (or have their own distribution system) to place the books in bookshops and other outlets.

4. Publishing and printing a book are the same thing.
No, they aren’t. My publisher pays me an advance, edits my book, copy-edits my book (2 different things, btw), proofs my book – all with my input; they design the cover and pay the cover artist, pay for printing and binding the book, inform booksellers about the book, distribute the book to outlets for sale, market the book (to varying degrees); they arrange for the book to be reviewed, pay me royalties if it sells well, reprint it if it’s sold out…etc, etc.

Printers print and bind the book. If you are arranging this for yourself, they use the files you give them, and do some minimal formatting. You pay them. Pay a little more, and they will help you with the design. That’s all. They give you the number of copies that you asked for – and that’s it. Their job is finished.

5. Self-publishing and vanity publishing are the same thing and they are both great ways to get published.
Self-publishing and e-publishing have many advantages for certain kinds of books, especially non-fiction, niche market books.
–Grannie wants to a family history to give to members of her family, the local school and the local library? Ideal! It will cost her a bit, but the pleasure she’ll get out of it will be worth every penny.
–You have a hobby of growing pansies for perfume making and you want to tell other people how to do it? Self-publish, set up your own website and sell the book through the website. People will come because they will google pansies/perfume or whatever. Better still, sell the book in digital form through the internet for a lot less hassle.
–Self-publishing fiction is possible and has on rare occasions led to a more conventional publishing career, but only by people who read widely about how to do it first. If you do it well, it involves paying for editing, copyediting, proofing, printing, design, cover art, marketing and distribution.

Vanity publishing on the other hand is a rip off that will print (not publish) your book for you and charge you a whole lot of money for the privilege. Beware.

More myths tomorrow.

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Jo asked a couple of questions on the comments section of the last post, and here’s the answer to one of them:

Why do some books come out in hardback and others in paperback?

And with paperbacks, why is the size different? Why sometimes in “trade” paperback, that’s the larger sized paperback; or A format – the smallest size?

The first thing you have to understand is that this is never the choice of the author. We take what we can get. The publishers make this decision and it’s based on economics – commercial reasons, i.e. what is going to make them the most money.

It would be rare these days for a first-time fantasy author to come out with their first book in hardback. It can happen – but rarely. The publisher wants to be sure they have a success on their hands before they produce a more expensive edition. Yes, they can sell a hardback for more money, but the profit is going to come from numbers, and they can lose more too if they don’t reach the magical break-even number of sales. Trade paperbacks are inbetween – yes, they will cost more, but once again the profits are better as long as you get the right number of sales.

So they want an author with a proven track record for sales before they will opt for trade pb or hardback. This is why you sometimes see a trilogy start as a paperback with book 1, it sells like hot cakes, and book two is out as a trade paperback or even a hardback – and you have to wait and wait for that mass market paperback which will match your copy of book 1.

Got that?

Of course, there are exceptions. A publisher might want to throw a lot of money at a new author they think is going to be a hit, and in a way this can be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Put the book in hardback, buy space at the front of the bookstore, advertise a lot – and you up the chances of having a best seller.

Every author wants to be in trade or hardback because they get more per book too. And they get a second round because the book will be re-issued in a mass paperback, at least if it was a hardback first.

And why are people prepared to pay more and buy that hardback? Because they guess it will be a “keeper”(a book you will re-read and/or pass on the the kids) and hardbacks keep better (they usually have better paper as well as better binding). And maybe because they can’t wait for the paperback to come out – they want that particular story from that particular author now!

Topical books that are going to be quickly out of date are usually paperbacks; textbooks that will keep going for years are usually hardbacks.

Children’s books are often hardbacks because kids are hard on books… I suspect YA are more often paperbacks because they are easily stuffed in a bag and read anywhere. (Just guessing with that last one though.)

So when a fantasy author comes out in hardback, you can be pretty sure they are popular and sell well. And same with trade paperbacks – the author is probably doing better than the one who never sees a trade. The USA is fonder of the really small size pb than UK or Oz. No idea why.

We authors also believe that when your name is bigger than the title, then you are becoming a “brand” – i.e., your name is a big factor in the selling books, not just what the book is about.

Note: compare The Last Stormlord, Oz cover v. UK cover, over in the sidebar. I am better known in Oz – and the name is larger than the title. It never used to be!
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Interesting article on the publishing industry in US here, by Daniel Menaker, who was Senior Vice President and the Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House. In other words, he wore two hats and saw the business from two different angles. If you are a writer, or thinking of a career as an agent or in the publishing business, best to read and think about it. I imagine it’s not so very different in other parts of the world.

Some random snippets to whet your appetite (in bold):

About 60 percent of all publishing employers “experienced layoffs,” …

…electronic-book-text digitization begins in earnest. That will happen in a financially and organizationally seismic way very quickly, I think…

Most trade books do not succeed, financially. Three out of four fail to earn back their advances. Or four out of five or six out of seven, depending on what source you consult.

I’ve always suspected that salespeople’s and (the bookshop/retail) buyer’s biases and preferences play a greater part in a book’s fortunes than most editorial people want to allow themselves to understand.

Genuine literary discernment is often a liability in editors.

Financial success in front-list publishing is very often random, but the media conglomerates that run most publishing houses act as if it were not.

…most of the really profitable books for most publishers still come from the mid-list — and the above media conglomerates have failed to see this because of the blockbuster factor

Review coverage means far less than it used to —

The shrift given to actual close and considered editing almost has to be short and is growing shorter,

Many of the most important decisions made in publishing are made outside the author’s and agent’s specific knowledge.

…the books for which the company has paid the highest advances will be the lead titles, regardless of their quality (because most readers don’t want quality)

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When a wannabe-published writer reads the stats (only between 1-5 of every 5,000 completed MSS gets published by a respectable publisher), they start to despair.

But then you realise that most of the submitted MSS deserve to get turned down, or their authors deserve to get turned down – and you can feel a bit more cheerful. Or at least you can if you are a sensible writer who is professional about your submissions and your writing.

How do I know most deserve what they get? Read here (via) or here (via) for a start.

The truth is that most wannabes, having spent hours, days, years, on an MS, can’t be bothered to take a few minutes to read the submission guidelines for an agent or publisher. Instant fail, deservedly so.

Same if they don’t know how a MS should look when you submit it. No excuse for this, not nowadays. Even I, in pre-internet days in a small developing nation, could find out this much.

Says Malaysian editor, Eric Forbes, “Most of the typescripts I receive are not only badly written but lack content or substance.”

In the first link above, Colleen Lindsay, literary agent, lists the reasons she rejected 20 MSS, which boils down to:
About half of them had not read the submission guidelines, or had ignored them, and therefore did not meet her requirements. You don’t attach something to an email if the recipient asks you not to, for a start. Oh, and don’t forget to spell the name of the agent correctly, ok?
Of the other 10:
5 didn’t actually write a query. They waffled on about other things.
1 was rejected on the lousy writing of the sample pages.
1 sent mutiple submissions to other agents (a no-no).
1 wrote a YA novel which is even longer than my current fantasy for adults. Nothing says “clueless” better than that.

….and two were good enough but not what she was looking for. One of those was referred elsewhere, the other was asked to submit other work if she has any.

And what is my advice for those of you who do all the right things and still get rejected? Well, if you are sure your writing is up to par because plenty of critical, non-family members (preferably people who do a lot of writing and/or reading of the genre you are writing in themselves) have told you so:

1. Keep sending out.
2. Start writing something else.
3. If you receive any kind of feedback, then rewrite and try with a new version.

My own feeling is that lots of writers get too hung up on perfecting their very first finished novel. Well, you know what? Not too many first novels actually get published. I’ll make a complete stab in the dark and say that half or more successful established writers have early novels (quite possibly more than one) stashed away on top of their wardrobes. I have eight. (Ok, my first finished book was written aged 12, so I started early.)

Writing is a process. You get better as you go along.

Over at the Locus Blog, from Gary K. Wolfe, are some interesting figures.

In 1954, when I was nine years old, there were approximately 74 science fiction titles published. Locus reports 1,669 titles (including fantasy, horror, etc.) for 2008 – there were 254 SF novels and 436 fantasy novels alone (690 books). The rest would presumably be horror, anthologies, novellas, collections, things that don’t really fit into either category.

Gary says lots of other interesting stuff, so take a look. I just want to think about those figures…he doesn’t say if they are all totally new titles, rather than some reissued from some past time as well, but let’s assume they are.
I am also assuming that he is looking at all English-speaking countries – USA, Australia, UK, NZ, Canada, South Africa, etc etc.
(I am also assuming that they are all “first time in the English language” so there will stacks of other SF/F books written in other languages as well, which we will disregard.)

Hmm.

• 436 fantasy to 254 science fiction. That’s a ratio of 17:10, not quite 2 fantasies for every SF. It means that fantasy writers have a better chance last year of being published than SF writers…
• It means that if you had a particular SF/F book out in 2008 published for the first time* that book was 1 in 690. Not a bad ratio.
• Some authors would have had more than one book out for the first time in 2008, so it means you would be one author in considerably less than 690 authors getting a particular book newly published in SF/F in 2008.
• If you were a brand new fantasy author getting published for the first time, then you were one in considerably less than 436 authors world wide who finally made it. Congratulations. I mean it. (I have no idea how many brand new fantasy authors there were first published last year but I suspect quite a few less than 50. And even more impressively low if you write SF). Think about those figures for a moment. The odds against you succeeding are staggering…and you did it. Wow.
• And here’s another figure that is bandied about from time to time – the ratio of MSS handed in to a publisher versus actually published is said to be somewhere about 5000 to 1. (Sorry, can’t remember where I got that figure from now.)
• If you haven’t made it yet, just make sure you enjoy the journey. It may not be worth it otherwise. If you do enjoy the journey, then of course it’s worth it! We don’t all play tennis because we want to get to Wimbleton, or golf because we have our eye on the Masters…do it because you love writing. That way you have fun no matter what happens.

*(I didn’t have any out in 2008 for the first time – books that came out in UK for the first time had been published in Australia the year before…)

…until Book 1 of Random Rain is published. Sounds like a baby’s gestation. Would you believe, discussion is still ongoing what to call it? Things get a bit complicated too, when there is more than one parent publisher involved in different countries.

Today, though, I felt as if another milestone was reached. There was some discussion about the cover and I know who is the artist for one of the publishers involved, and the name has blown my mind… wow.

I am officially getting excited – but birth publication day is still so far off! How can I keep my cool that long? I feel like a kid finding out on Boxing Day that Christmas only comes once a year.

Or a woman realising she’s got to be pregnant for nine whole months…

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This clause is in my new book contract:
“The Works shall not contain any recipe, formula, suggestion or advice which if followed has the potential to cause harm…”

Oh dear. I immediately cut out the “charm of powerful trouble recipe”, you know, the one on page 234, the bit about boiling and baking the “Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing…” After all, even if readers aren’t crazy enough to drink it, we all know how badly things went wrong when someone dabbled with that mixture, right? And nowadays we have to worry about bird flu, SARS, salmonella and rabies as well. OK, toss that bit.

But what on earth am I going to do with that description of teaching the lad how to fight with a sword on p.93? Or the battle description on p.450. Loads of advice with the potential to cause harm there. You know, stuff along the lines of: “Lop off the dastardly knave’s head, you fool!”

I do so love lawyer lingo.

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[This is actually an idea by author Josh Palmatier. What happens is this: a number of authors are putting up an example of a successful query letter, i.e. one that either got them an agent or an editor. In other words, they post a query that succeeded. In addition, the writer might also post a discussion about how they write queries or whatever they feel might help other aspiring writers with writing their own queries.
At the end of this post there is a link to all the other blog posts on queries posted by all of the other writers.]

My advice on writing a query letter:
If you ignore instructions, you are doomed from the start.

The first thing to do before writing a query letter is to see what a particular publisher or agent wants. And nowadays that’s usually easy – you look at their website. Can you send them an email? Do they want the first three chapters with the query letter or do they want the query first?

Don’t send a two page query letter if they ask for one page. Don’t send it as an email attachment if they ask you not to. Or maybe they are a publisher who doesn’t want a query from anyone but an agent? Then don’t waste your time sending one. Different countries have different ways of doing things too; don’t expect to use the same letter to appeal to an American agent and a British agent…

Back in the days when I started querying, in the late 1980s, finding the prerequisite information was harder. There was no internet. I used the UK Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, ran a finger down the columns of agents to the first one that said they were looking at fantasy, and sent off a query letter.

The letter below was more or less it (and you are going to tear your hair out in frustration knowing that anyone could get anywhere with something like this – but back in those days quite frankly there wasn’t as much competition. You know what? – When you had to type an MS, fewer people actually ever finished a book…) :

Dear (agent’s name)

Please find enclosed the first three chapters of a completed a fantasy novel of 90,000 words, entitled* Blaze Halfbreed. I hope you will consider reading the whole novel with a view to representation.

I am an Australian teacher presently living in Vienna, Austria. My only previously published work has been non-fiction articles for nature and travel magazines.

Thank you for your consideration.

Yours sincerely,

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* Some purists insist that you can’t use entitled in this context. They are wrong. Entitled not only means what is due to you, but also the designation, or title.

Yep, that was it. I suspect this kind of query letter will not get you far today. The book, btw, became somewhat longer after agent and editorial advice, and was changed from a standalone to the first book of a trilogy. It was eventually published as The Aware, Book One of The Isles of Glory. My agent was the first person to ever read it, other than myself.

Nowadays it pays to add some kind of a hook to get the agent or editor interested in reading those three chapters – but I would still keep the rest of the letter short and pithy. At this point in your relationship, an agent or editor is not interested in the fact that you work as a trapeze artist or an ambulance driver (unless of course you’ve written a book about a cowardly trapeze artist or a traumatised ambulance driver). I included the bit about the non-fiction publications merely to show that I can write professionally enough to be published. No details, because I doubt the agent would have been familiar with the magazines involved. If I’d written for a well-known international magazine, then I would have added “including Playboy” or whatever.

If you want to know how to write a query letter with a hook, then look at the archives of Pub Rants or Miss Snark. In the end, though, it will be your book that gets you an agent or a publisher, not your query letter. And it is better to expend your energies in writing that irresistible first chapter than agonising too much over a letter. One good sentence or a short paragraph that tells the reader enough about the book to intrigue should be sufficient. Don’t try to summarise the story!

Something like this might have done the trick for “Blaze Halfbreed”: When you can’t legally stay in one place for more than three days because you lack citizenship, you have to be special to earn a living – or indeed to stay alive. Fortunately Blaze is special. She not only wields a large sword, she can physically see what few people can: magic.

And here is the list of other authors who will be posting their own query letters sometime today – and theirs will probably be much more up-to-date and relevant to today’s situation than mine.

Paul Crilley
Chris Dolley
Diana Pharaoh Francis
Gregory Frost
Simon Haynes
Jacqueline Kessler
John Levitt
Joshua Palmatier
Janni Lee Simner
Maria V. Snyder
Jennifer Stevenson
Edward Willett
David J. Williams