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This was a question to me from a writer just starting out. And I am going to answer it in bits, because I am too busy to sit down and write a long post this week.

So here’s Part One: THE PROBLEM

She has an unusual name (I’ve never come across it before) that is easily mispelled and mispronounced, and she doesn’t like it anyway. Let’s, for the sake of this post, call her Sally Sullimunder (and I hope there isn’t a real person out there with that name!). And let’s say she is thinking of calling herself Sally Tye.

Sounds like an easy call, doesn’t it? Become Sally Tye for your professional writing life!

But there’s a couple of catches that don’t make it so simple:

• She knows that a name change would be hurtful to her father, Mr Sullimunder, who’s proud of being a Sullimunder.
• And all those people who know her as Sally Sullimunder from kindy onwards are never going to know that the author Sally Tye is the person they grew up with/are now working with. And that’s a lost selling opportunity. (Most of us will buy a book by someone we know!)

So what should she do? She asked me because she knows I changed my name. Tomorrow I’ll talk about that.

In the meantime, what do all you readers of this blog think about the issue?
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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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Interesting discussions going on in the blogosphere.
Publishers Weekly, which is not uninfluential in the business, have named a list of 2009’s best adult books. Not a woman writer in sight. Wow.

Here are some excellent comments about that.
Look here from Lizzie Skurnick and here (Mumpsimus) and here (Tansy Raynor Roberts) and here (Tammie Pierce with a summary of other links). Thanks, Tansy, for the heads up on this one via twitter.)

Honestly, I think they say it all without me commenting as well.

And to young women writers starting out? If you are interested only in praise and money, and aren’t interested in showing the turkeys what you – a woman- can do, use a male pseudonym. Sigh.
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John Scalzi had a blog post on this subject two days back. Basically he was saying in answer: nothing much. Give up an hour’s TV (or internet surfing or gaming or similar), 5 days a week, and you can write a book in a year.

In a way he is right. Many people do just that. Plus they write while commuting in trains or waiting in queues or other odd moments. And in a year or so, you have your book written.

However, I don’t think Scalzi tells the whole truth, at least not as far as most people are concerned. It’s one thing to write the prerequisite number of words, it can be a much more prolonged affair to hone them to something that a publisher will buy.

Then, just when you think you have solved all problems and you have a contract…that’s when you get introduced to something called the deadline. You have a contract that specifies a date by which you have to hand in your next book. And suddenly, that one hour a day begins to look like an over-optimistic time frame.

Typically, this is what happens. You have written the first book of three you have planned. You have just got a 3 book proposal accepted, with a proviso. The editor has said, we want book 1 submitted by 1st September, but we want you to cut out the dwarf character and change the setting from fairyland to 19th century Armenia. And book 2 is due 1st June next year, book 3 1st March the year after.

And you, in the first flush of success, agree to everything…

That’s when those dates begin to loom large, and one hour a day begins to look sick indeed. What if, when you are halfway through book 2, you realise it’s not working and you have to start again? And that is when you start searching for more time (in between keeping the boss at work happy – plus the spouse and kids at home happy, not to mention the dog walked, the garden weeded and the bath cleaned or whatever your chores are…).

And then you discover that the publisher sends you the copy edit of book 1 to correct. Two weeks work. Then later the proofs. Four days. And asks you to do some publicity. And oh, they aren’t happy with book 2, could you possible insert 6 dwarves and skip the 19th century Armenian scenes entirely?

You dream of giving up the day job – but everyone tells you not to be crazy. Statistically, it is doubtful you will EVER be able to earn enough to match your day job, although if you write genre you probably have a better chance than mainstream “literary” novels.

And in the end, something has got to give. The housework. Or time with the family. That holiday at the beach (or you go and spend all the time working.) In the end most of us make sacrifices beyond an hour’s TV a day. (I actually watch no TV. We don’t own one.)

Is it worth it? Of course!

And my best advice to budding writers? Learn to write in small bytes. Ten minutes in the doctor’s waiting room. Five minutes in a queue. In the car waiting to pick up the kids. Early in the morning before anyone else is up. Carry a netbook with you if you can. Use it. Or settle for the back of an envelope and a pencil stub if you must. Every minute means a few more lines towards meeting that deadline.

Do we give up something to write? Yes, I think so. But we gain satisfaction.

I have not exactly been keeping up with the blogging very well. I am not at my computer as much lately. I intend to start writing book 3 of The Watergivers trilogy (i.e. the Stormlord cycle) on July 1st and maintain a steady 11,000 words a week for 4 months, which should bring me to the end of the first draft in time for revisions and a January 1st delivery. Maybe. Unless, of course, I do other unscheduled stuff like fall sick…

I guess losing one’s other job has an up side: more time for writing!

Right now, I am not writing at all – I am socialising to make up for being unsociable for so long, and I am house-cleaning, to make up for…you don’t want to know.

You know what? House-cleaning is a remarkably solitary occupation. I wonder why.

Pix from here.

If you couldn’t get to Denvention back in August, but want to read the excellent Guest of Honour speech, it is up on the internet and you can read it here. (The GoH was the wonderfully talented and lovely lady, Lois McMaster Bujold, btw).

There were a number of things she said that resonated with me.
Here is my comments on one of them:

LMB: “...the notion of the writer as the heroic lone creator, a picture held and advanced by many non-writers, which is an outright lie, and evil insofar as it is taught to children. I know of no writer or other artist anywhere who hasn’t come out of some context of other artists and a supporting community, with its own conversation — or argument — even though those contexts are usually edited out of the historical picture for simplicity.”

I think I must be the exception, then.

• No one supported me in an artistic sense, until after I had an agent. (My husband was supportive, in that he encouraged me, but he never read my work.)
• I never met other writers, or editors, or fans.
  
• I knew four people who read sf/f for pleasure, and they were all members of my immediate family. They did not read my work until after I had an agent. Two of them lived in another country.
• No one else read my work at all (except to reject it, sometimes with a comment).
• No one offered input until my agent read the book “The Aware” and took me on as an author.
• I never told anyone I was writing anything, except my immediate family, until I was published.
• Back in those days, there was no internet.
• I had no access to writing classes, courses, or even libraries full of books on how to write.

Yeah, I was the lone creator, making mistakes and learning all by myself. Dunno about “heroic” though; I think “bloody stupid” is probably more accurate. There must have been a better way to do it, even in Malaysia in the 1970s and 80s.

But I did it. I just took longer than I should have… This post is really the quintessential essay on how not to become a writer.

…sort of like those proverbial ships.

One of the really, really great things about being a writer is the great people you meet who are also in the business. Next week I have one such person coming to stay – but more about that at a later date.

Several years ago I met another struggling writer at a convention in Melbourne. We made a connection – and parted to our distant parts of the world almost immediately afterwards with no expectations that we could ever get together easily. Which was sad, because we had so much to talk about and there were so many points of connection and contrast that could have kept us in conversation for weeks.

In the intervening time, I read about her successes with delight; she has received considerable critical acclaim for her work internationally and has gone from strength to strength. Another Australian sf/f author makes good on the world stage! There must be something in the water downunder (other than a suffeit of salt and yukky tasting minerals).

Yesterday, I received a package from her, completely out of the blue, containing some books – which have gone to the top of my to-be-read pile. She’s a special person.

Thank you, Anna Tambour. [And if you haven’t got my email by now, write to me giving me the correct address…]

Several times I have been intrigued by someone approaching me who wanted to be writer, but who – as became apparent during the course of the conversation – read very little, even in the genre they wanted to be published in. This strikes me as curious in several ways:

• firstly, why wouldn’t you support the industry that you want to be a part of;
• secondly, how do you expect to learn about stories/books and how they are written (put together) without reading them – many of them;
• and thirdly, shouldn’t you know what’s out there (to study the market) before you write your contribution to the genre?

Maybe it is all part of a trend – the physical process of writing anything is now so easy, and publication/communication is so easy through the net, that everyone now wants to be a writer. I started by pounding out things on a typewriter back in the days when even correction fluid didn’t exist, so believe me, I know it has got easier.

At the same time, there are so many forms of other entertainment at our fingertips, in our homes, following us around through iPods and other portable devises, that our reading time is cut – unless we make a conscious decision not to let other forms of entertainment take over. It is not a coincidence that I have not had a working TV in the house for well over two years now.

Still, it does seem weird that everyone and their cat apparently wants to write – but not everyone wants to read…

This (written by Rachel Donadio) from the New York Times, Sunday Book Review of 27^th April, via Bibliobibuli (a great site if you want to keep track of what is happening out there in the literary world).

“… Americans are reading fewer books than they used to. A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year…”

But:
“In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles (…)the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly ‘for personal fulfillment’.”

“And the numbers suggest the books will keep on coming. IUniverse, a self-publishing company founded in 1999, has grown 30 percent a year in recent years; it now produces 500 titles a month and has 36,000 titles in print…”

Do they get read? Not much, apparently. “Most writers using iUniverse sell fewer than 200 books.” Even though there is loads of help out there:

“…there are hundreds of creative writing programs offering M.F.A.’s and other credentialing. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs represented 13 programs when it was founded in 1967. Now it includes 465 full-fledged courses of study, and creative writing classes are offered at most of the 2,400 college English departments in North America.”

So…who is going to read all those books?

Here in the KL, there is an independent bookstore called Silverfish. It has a great site and newsletter you can subscribe to. Here, the owner Raman – renowned for his blunt speaking – talks about a parent wanting to turn his offspring into another JK Rowling.

Part of the conversation he had with said parent went like this:
Then he said, “Unless you are deaf, dumb and blind, everyone knows how much money JK Rowling makes.”
Oh God! Not another one!
“How many JK Rowlings are there?”
“One.” He looked puzzled.
“What is the population of the world?”
“I don’t know … several billions.”
“So, the chances of your daughter becoming another JK Rowling is one in several billions. Now, if you go downstairs and buy a lottery, the chances of you winning the first prize is one in three million. Wouldn’t that be much better? Anyway your daughter has not even started writing.”

Raman, I sympathise. I also have come across people who think they want to be writers, yet hardly ever read, and hardly ever write. It’s weird.

And if any of those people are reading this blog (which I doubt) – take a look at the sidebar on the left, down at the bottom. There is a list of the books I have read since January 1st. And bear in mind that I have a “real” job, plus I write at least one book a year.

There are 10 books on that list, many of them with over 400 pages. That’s more than one book a week. And I am no speed reader, either, alas.