Kindle...again.

As a sort of birthday gift for my wife and anniversary present for both of us, I bought the latest Kindle last June. This is the 8x11 page sucker. It looks like a full sized notebook, compared to the original Kindle which looks like a PDA on steroids.

As I say, I bought it in late June. My wife has downloaded a lot of novel excerpts and one novel. I downloaded the memoirs of U.S. Grant because it was public domain (99 cents) and I'd read it was one of the more readable presidential memoirs. I can say that Grant did not load up the narrative with dense vocabulary, and if I only had the Kindle next to me in the room where I park at night and watch TV, I might have finished the memoir. I also ordered the New Yorker via Kindle. It does an adequate job with the cover (it's a WSJ type display, no colors) and okay with the cartoons. I admit the learning curve on navigating the TOC is steeper than I'd expected (again, if I were using it more frequently this would probably be a nonissue), but the bottom line with the Kindle is that I don't pick it up as often as I'd thought.

It's not too heavy, and the display isn't bad. It's certainly portable enough - yes, I've read it on the hopper. It's not at all hard to back up a page on the Kindle, the response time is probably faster than the time it takes me to flip through print pages... why is it so hard to say this? I like books.

In part my slow adoption of the Kindle is that many of the books I want to read are not yet available electronically. I most often purchase used books by authors I've discovered (whose titles may be ten or more years old) and these titles have not been set up for Kindles. I spend more on shipping than on the books.

So in ten years, if titles are retrospectively set up for the Kindle, I may be carrying a battered electronic reader around...maybe. By comparison I was hopelessly addicted to my first Ipod within three months... and I now watch more flicks via Netflix download than DVD, so I'm not the slowest of adopters.

I wonder which is the greatest burden on the environment, print books or the energy required to run a Kindle? I haven't seen any statistics I trust either way...

Friends of the editors - 1 year anniversary

You may have noticed in earlier postings I announce the web site friend Denise and I have to publish people (including ourselves); friends of the editors has been limping along for about a year now.

We haven't been deluged in submissions, and that's largely because we've been hesitant to promote it. We did get a shout-out from Grub Street, and got a few excellent submissions from that.

We do things a little differently on FOTE. We do decline material, but usually we give detailed reasons, and in one case, I reverted back to my days as a comp instructor and did a line-by-line edit. I presume others do this as well, but I've never had a rejection that wasn't a form.

So...I've finished a draft of 'Mud Season', the zombie novel, but now I'm rewriting it, going from a third person POV to first person. Periodically I remind myself that I have more fun writing than publishing. Less rejection, more creative....

So consider sending a short piece to www.friendsoftheeditors.com. We do fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

Janet Reid... I'm sorry

Confessions of a Query Shark follower. I've twice submitted a query to Janet Reid's skewerous Query Shark for 'Where the gold is buried', and the first time I got bounced because I was too ordinary a screwup - I had failed to absorb the wisdom to be found in the wreckage postings.
Second time I thought I had a better handle on what an agent might want, but I kept overlooking a key issue - my novel in its original length ran 150K words. See, I got spoiled because Stone House Diaries, published by a hobby publisher, was wonderfully indifferent to length. (They did say I didn't need to add any more). Back on my butt on the sidewalk, I think in terms of those craft workshops who preach 'write the story, don't worry about the length' but now I know size matters.

So I still follow Query Shark, reading others' queries and I think I'm learning to query - and the new draft is just 78K words (easy to cut, once you shoot off the first limb), but I still don't make the acknowledgement cut. Sigh.

Blood Meridian

About a year ago I started reading Cormac MacCarthy, and starting with Blood Meridian is not unlike experimenting with drugs by starting with a mix of crack and oxycontin. The Road, All The Pretty Horses, I suspect would have been gentler introductions to MacCarthy. When I finished BM the first time I felt like I'd just run through a thrill ride, been blinded by the show and emerged into light, wondering where the hell I'd been, not unlike my first viewing of Apocalypse Now in sensurround in a Toronto theatre in 1979... (three hour version ending with the bombing of Kurtz's camp, without the interminable visit to the French plantation, they handed out pamphlets listing the screen credits. Phew.)

I have a list of books I swear I'm going to reread, but this one I did. I'm about halfway through it and it's like I only skimmed it the first time. And here's the reason I'm writing about it: I already know I'm not the best writer around, but other stories usually inspire me to work harder, or perhaps they just make me jealous because I feel I'm as good as they are but they caught the right ears, had the right contacts, etc.. Grapes of Wrath inspired me, that is it suggested a path I thought I could emulate - I'm not Steinbeck, but I thought someday I could write like him. Mind you, I've read more than a few writers who don't inspire me in the least (Dan Brown?).

Perhaps it's because this is a historical novel, which is my chosen milieu. All the Pretty Horses was less compelling, The Road was just a tour de force of sorts, but with Blood Meridian I'll never approach this level of detail and intensity, and I feel no shame admitting that.

Now, back to jealousy and loathing and all the other good writing motivations...

Hobby publishers

What is a hobby publisher? I've found a few references to the term, defining it as self-publishing, which is not how I define it. Hobby publishers are folks who become publishers as a hobby. Sometimes they are retirees, or late-in-their career types, but they are small operations who are or who have earned their way doing something besides publishing. Publishing becomes their hobby, and it's becoming more common with the growing availability of POD equipment and the web's bookstores and the evolution in online book buying.

I coined this phrase because of my experiences in publishing. Stone House Diaries was published by the Local History Company of Pittsburgh, and TLHC is a prime example. They are a retired couple with some help. They specialize in publishing books for the Pittsburgh area. They are good people and I'm pleased to see their web site shows new titles.

(Slight digression)
Earlier this year I finished a historical novel with the working title 'Where the Gold is Buried'. The story is built around a map to buried treasure at Fort Niagara. I stumbled on this legend of buried treasure years ago, and felt connected with it because the luckless soul who tried to find the treasure was my ancestor. So over the past several years I've been searching through known history and making up the rest, and finished with about 550 pages trying to flesh out the legend.

The rule of thumb these days for getting published is for story length to be between 70,000 and 90,000 words, which is in the neighborhood of 350 pages (doublespaced, etc). At 550 pages I was a little long. So... I edited. I cut and cut and rewrote (usually a good idea anyway). Got it down to (imagine a calculator clattering away) 109,000 words Damn! Still 19K over.

The story line begins in 1649 and finishes present day, and years ago a writing advisor suggested stopping the story in the 18th century. So... last summer I said a sad goodbye to a couple of my favorite characters - both Tuscaroras - and stopped the story in 1789. (Warning: this is really traumatic)

What does this have to do with hobby publishers, you may be asking? (Go ahead, ask, someone's got to keep me on track). Well, for my latest opus I decided to try, again, for an agent. I labored over my summary and query and have heard contradictory advice on how many agents to email (1. email only the handful you have exhaustively researched and believe would truly love your work, 2. email agents until your fingertips bleed). Whatever. I got no interest.

Before the Severe Truncation, I sent part of the novel to an online outfit, a hobby publisher that does Canadian history (most of the novel is set in Canada). If they publish it they might get it reviewed, but they use POD equipment and the book will essentially join the long lists on Amazon and BN.com and will only appear in my local bookstore if I take a pile in and try my charm.

It has led me back to hobby publishing. I did some research and the cheapest POD printer I could find was $15K used. Also available for lease. Am I doing the world a disservice by bypassing the vetting process of agents, intended to save the world from bad novels, and cranking mine out anyway? Well, I don't think mine is so bad - not while Dan Brown is still getting published... I'll stop here.

SASE

I suppose I'm among friends here, so I'll admit I've been writing for over twenty years, and I stank until about ten years ago. I knew early on that an agent made publishing easier. Before the web (henceforth to be known as BTW) there was, of course, no email option in querying agents, so I went to the library (quaint, I know) and filled a couple pages of a legal pad with agents addresses from LMP. Then I typed up cover letters - knowing little about what to put in a query, I don't remember now how sucky that query must have been, but what the hell - and tucked in the SASE.

Around 2001, when I was trying to find a publisher for Weathermen, I vowed no more SASE crap. Postage was starting to be a less trivial cost, and I was certain that no traditional agent wanted me, and the newer agents would have email. I was partly correct in both, at least I assume so, as no traditional agent has EVER expressed an interest in my work and some agents had email. So began a epoch of emailing. I've had modest success in publishing, none in agents.

At the Muse/Marketplace workshop Grub Street holds, one recently published writer gleefully explained she broke a couple of the 'rules', mailed her novel over the transom to an agent, found publishing success. So, I vowed to myself, at some point I had to break that old vow.

Well, two weeks ago I used the web to find agents who were a) looking for new meat, er, clients and b) would not take email queries. I used web resources to cook up a query letter and bought stamps, and sent out a total of six snail mail queries. I know that one must blast out queries much as LLBean junk mails their catalogs. Junk mail is considered successful if it gets a 3% response, so how do you calculate a 3% success rate on six mailed queries? Agent took a little longer to throw it in the trash? I mailed them on a Tuesday(?) Got the first rejection on Friday, and two more since then.

Moral of the story? I suspect the writer who bagged an agent by being quaint and ignoring the rules also had a leg up because she was a marketing pro. Trying to find an agent by using an old road seldom used does not necessarily work. Yes, common sense should have told me that, but at the end of the day don't you want to be able to say, I tried everything? Even SASE?

Agents... it would help if I wore a dress

I have had exactly one literary agent in my writing life. Ralph from Cambridge Literary, at the time in Newburyport, accepted my first novel in 1999. From his website I could readily see the agent hadn't sold any fiction. After a year of absolutely no contact, I terminated the agreement. I eventually self-published that manuscript, Weathermen.
In retrospect I wish he'd offered to edit the story, as I now see it needed.

Lately I've been doing the agent hunt, and it's been as futile as ever. I have been published 'traditionally', and I thought that would help my agent hunt. What I've noticed from the online agent databases, and the individual entries I assume the agents create, that most agents are women and most of them dearly want 1) chick lit, 2) romance 3) women's fiction. The agent will then include most other categories - mystery, commercial fiction, 'literary fiction', but their priorities are plain. My wife, who tears through women's fiction like Sherman through Georgia, reminds me that women buy most of the books, so it's a simple supply-demand situation.

I should note that, besides women's fiction, fiction for teens is a close second. Now, is that because teens are reading books (in this age?) or because the schools need fresh material for required reading? I'm sounding soooo cynical.

So, if one cannot get an agent, then one chases a publisher, and not the big publishers, most of whom won't look at non-agented work. That leaves the amateur publishers, the small timers who may not last more than a few years. I used an amateur publisher for my historical novel 'Stone House Diaries'. They printed nice copies, blundered painfully getting reviews, blundered painfully getting the book into the stores... oh well.