Hang with me for a series of seemingly unrelated factoids. 

1. Y’all know who Doc McGhee is, right? He was Mötley Crüe‘s manager way back in the day and pretty much made them rich and famous. (Oh, shut up. You know I’m a Mötley Crüe fangrrrrl. But Mick Mars does look a little, um, ready for a nursing home, doesn’t he?)

 

2. In early November, Amazon “suck[ed] up to literary agents” in a bid to kill its monsterly image. Really? They need literary agents to kill its monsterly image? Who’d’a thunk it?

 

3. Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette all announced they would be holding off releasing ebooks of new (hardcover) titles by six months. The brilliance never ends.

 

4. Stephen Covey just told Simon & Schuster to fuck off.  Well. I’m pretty sure that’s not exactly what he said.

 

5. There is one thing an unknown or midlist self-published author can’t get that s/he needs most.

 

6. There is only one thing a bestselling name-brand author has but doesn’t need at all.

I’m not going to explain any of this stuff. The graphic should make it, well, graphically obvious. Take the above seemingly unrelated items, throw it in with this, and see what you come up with. Assume the writer has not himself arranged for the actual production of his manuscript into print and electronic:

Pop quiz: What word is nowhere to be found in the above flowchart?

I think there’s one agent out there who already knows all this and is slowly, steadily—over weeks, months, years—training his blog readers to start thinking this way.

The difference between how agents work now and how this could work is that a writer would interview agents and hire one (as s/he would an attorney or CPA), as opposed to becoming a supplicant for the agent’s approbation/validation. Agents who now work as if they’re doing writers a favor may not deal with this system well.

On the other hand, even though this is my own plan, I can see that it could land us right back where we are now if writers won’t let go of the thought that they’re powerless and/or only incidental to the book creation process.

Writers, listen up: You’re the creator. There’s power in being the originator of content. Use that power and take control of your own destiny. It’s your work. Take responsibility for its dissemination.

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I am constantly struck by the idea that writers “give up.” What does that mean, exactly? They stop writing? They stop submitting? Or they stop writing because they’re so disheartened by the submitting? My bet’s on that.

Keep on submitting and you will get published.

By “writer,” I mean good, unpublished novelists who don’t, for whatever reason, catch an agent and/or editor’s eye. I’m not talking about the people who don’t hang out on agent and editor blogs, learning every query trick in the book (some of which are flat wrong to some agents and golden to others). These are the writers who assume that the problem is with them, not with the odds.

Write a better book next time.

Oh, fuck that. It’s odds, folks, whether you want to believe it or not—and the odds get worse every week. And that write a better book bullshit? How do you know the one you just wrote is bad?

You don’t.

And then some of you will crack under the discouragement and say, “I write crap.” And you’ll stop submitting. You may even stop writing.

I did that.

I didn’t write crap, per se. I wrote slightly off-tick that didn’t hit the romance formula bullseye exactly right. Yeah, I said it. There’s a formula. I couldn’t hit it, and the misses were near enough that it was sickening.

This is not an anti-traditional-publishing rant. This is about writers, about you and your work and how much faith you have in it.

Why are you basing your goals on decisions someone else has to make? And, by extension, why are you waiting for validation based on odds that aren’t in your favor? And why are you acting like a job applicant?

You’re not powerless.

But somehow the idea of taking control of your work and presenting it to the public/the readers/the (gasp) curators is “giving up.”

Because “money always flows to the author.” Fuck that, too.

Yeah, you’ll have to assume some risk. Deal with it.

It pains me to see good writers on agent blogs talking about “when I’m published someday,” because “it will happen if I submit enough and don’t give up” and “I just have to write a better book next time.”

Stop thinking that way and start believing in your product.

Stop thinking you have no power.

Stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an entrepreneur.

Go make your own damned job.

Update: To clarify, I’m using the term “curators” to describe the self-appointed task of the people who consume the work, like it, and recommend it to others, i.e., the readers/fans, the people who make being The Lone Artist all worth it. I’m not using the term as it has been tossed around the internet for the last year.

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Gawker Unsolicited: Spell my Damn Name Right, and Other Hot Tips for Agents.

Somebody give me a machete.  I can’t get through all the layers of irony here.

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From Publisher’s Weekly:

It’s been clear for months that it will be a not-so-merry holiday season for publishers, but at least one house has gone so far as to halt acquisitions. PW has learned that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books. [...] Another agent who had also heard about the no-acquisitions policy at HMH called the move “very scary” and said it’s indicative of an industry climate worse than any he’s ever seen.

Predictions:

1. Expect this to keep happening for a while at other major publishers.

2. More independent publishers will spring up, particularly in the ebook arena.

3. Major publishers will start mining their backlists for ebooks. Oh, wait, they already have. Credit for innovation coming right up!

4. Revisions in the advance/royalty system. E-presses blazed this trail, but Harper Studios has taken up the cause (and may end up reaping the credit for that, too).

5. This may be the death knell for the consignment system of selling books. One can hope, anyway.

Yeah, it’s depressing, but A) everybody’s having a hard time, so boo hoo at you too, publishing and B) everything is cyclical.

Quite frankly, the economic downturn and the rise of the ebook couldn’t be timed better. You build up the low-cost or free alternative in the downswing (coupled with instant gratification), something people can afford and are open to, then you see it explode once the upswing begins.

Dead tree books will NOT be a thing of the past (knock on wood), but the smart publishers and booksellers will find cheaper alternatives to bring those to market too. If you want to survive after an economic downturn, you must start thinking in the long-term instead of the short-term; you sure as heck aren’t making any money now, so figure out how to make money when everybody has some again.

Pssst, publishers and booksellers:

It’s called the Espresso.

In kiosks.

At Wal-Mart, Target, and smack DAB in the middle of your chain or independent bookstore.

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So I saw this in Publisher’s Weekly online yesterday and bookmarked it to blog about, but then Janet Reid beat me to the punch.

Recently, funny things have been happening in my slush pile. I find myself receiving well-written, correctly formatted, professional-looking query letters from bad writers. Imagine my chagrin: one minute I’m intrigued by a smoothly crafted query letter, the next I’m staring down at a crackpot writing sample.

I wondered how long this would take.

I will always and forever remember a story my dad told about Hardee’s barbecue sauce and a taste-tester he met. The point wasn’t to make a standout barbecue sauce. The point was to make the barbecue sauce as inoffensive as possible to the largest number of people.

So I’ll call it the Hardee’s BBQ Sauce Query.

One comment on Janet Reid’s blog summed up my thoughts quite nicely:

Post Summary: In the 21st Century, people can Google query on how to do something and find carefully composed instructions. Thus, the prior vetting process is no long efficient for the Literary Agent.

My 2 Cents: Awesome. Adjust or die.

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I’ve had a lot on my mind lately that I haven’t been able to untangle, much less unpack on an issue-by-issue basis. What are they?

1. The election

2. Prop 8 in California

3. “Black October” in publishing

4. Independent publishing

5. Agents and editors (the “Gatekeepers”)

6. Mormon writers/Mormon literature

But a couple of posts on Nathan Bransford’s blog yesterday sorted at least one issue out for me, which is my firm belief that whether or not independent publishing becomes as accepted independent filmmaking and independent music making, it was the right choice for me. And I’m going to come back to that Espresso Book Machine thing because it’s tres important.

Which leads me to a post Mike Cane made recently about self-pubbing and an author’s inability to do it all, yet tries because he wants to save money. He’s right overall, but I learned long ago that creative types in one discipline are drawn to other disciplines and have the ability to do those well, too. What they are, though…that I can’t say. So that’s going to be my jumping off point for today’s Jack Handey.

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I’ve had something rolling around in my head for a while since Dear Author asked, “What’s wrong with a C Review?” More recently, a discussion at Racy Romance Reviews involving a book I must get expanded on the conversation at Dear Author (I have a sneaking suspicion RfP and I are on the same wavelength with regard to this).

To clarify: C means neither good nor bad, but average.

To me, an average book = meh = forgettable. In my opinion, if a book is forgettable, it didn’t finish the job it started. What I haven’t figured out yet is if a book is so bad it’s not possible to forget, did it do its job?

I’m trying to distill this out for myself, but I’m reading a lot of books lately that are meh. In fact, they are so meh I forget I was reading them the minute I turn my ebook reader off to tend to other things. As I said on the Dear Author thread, I found a dozen books by bestselling authors that I didn’t remember buying and, worse, that I didn’t remember reading until I scanned the blurbs. Mind you, these are books that got high marks at Dear Author and Smart Bitches (I know, ’cause I went back and looked).

Now we have DocTurtle reading a Harlequin Blaze as a challenge by Smart Bitches to read a “real romance” and see how wonderful it is. Turns out he’s having fun, but not of the type everyone expected. He seems to read in fits and starts, so obviously it’s not keeping his eyeballs glued to the pages, unless that’s the type of reader he is, which I don’t know.

So what is this meh? Where’s it coming from? One of the last non-meh books I read was Ann’s because it was so damned different. What made it different?

I’ll tell you what made it different. She broke all the “rules.” Somewhere, somehow, with the evolution of RWA and its sister organizations and their writing workshops, easier access to agents and editors, more stringent-yet-vague criteria on how to write a query letter, and more propagation of some writing “rules” (the ones that would get you a D in any college creative writing course–ask me how I know), there’s been some weird homogenization. (And I started noticing this really begin to gather steam in the early ’90s.) Yeah, you can have unique plot devices or tried-and-true plot devices done differently, but essentially, the voice has become the same: same meter, same literalness (thanks, RfP) to supposedly make for clarity, and same explanation of things that I (Random Reader with a modicum of intelligence) don’t have to be told and would have rather inferred or been left wondering.

Tired, y’all. I’m tired of reading the same stuff over and over again. Even the stuff I’m getting mad at and simply not finishing–one reason is because the voice is tired on top of other problems. Everybody’s taking voice lessons from the same singing teacher out of the same songbook. The only reason I remember any of these books is to say, “Oh. That.” And off it goes to be archived on CD or in the box to take to the used bookstore–without finishing. One book I’ve been looking forward to reading and bought on its release date (because I had it on my calendar as a reminder) was a real let-down.

This “write from the heart and you’ll get sold if you try hard enough” cheerleading? Bullshit. Don’t write from the heart; write from the rules. Write what the gatekeepers tell you to write and, more importantly, how they tell you to write it. Obviously, lots of people love it, and I am the High Priestess of Capitalism, so I’m not arguing with an established market.

But…if everyone’s following the rules, how do you know the reading public wouldn’t like what you wrote from the heart? I know how you know. The gatekeepers won’t buy it because why mess with the homogeneity of voice? People like it; people buy it. [Insert philosophical plug for doing things independently, but that's not what this post is about.]

Nothing, but nothing, makes me realize how homogenized the romance voice has become until I read something different. Kristan Higgins’s books were different and I enjoyed them muchly (although I heard some whisperings they weren’t romance so much as women’s fiction/chick lit and honestly I don’t know what the hell difference it makes). Ann’s, of course. Laura Kinsale, always.  Eva Gale, who came here as a poster (never heard of her before that), whose voice (albeit short pieces) just pushes all my right buttons (not talking about the erotic aspect, either).

Remember, I’m not talking about archetypes, plots, and themes. I’m talking about rhythm, word choice (e.g., the obsessing over avoiding “be” verbs and adverbs that spawns ridiculously tedious prose), dialog tags, over-explanation, and, yes, punctuation, which is one of the biggest tools in keeping your rhythm and singing in your own voice.

RfP said it best over at Racy Romance Reviews:

My most frequent complaint lately is that genre romance has no voice: it’s overly literal and can over-explain mundane detail to the detriment of style. Some of my favorite novels include more impressionistic passages in which I’m not sure exactly what’s happening, but they’re wonderfully referential and evocative.

I mean, come on. If I’ve noticed it and other people have noticed it enough to remark upon it and complain about it (and we’re only a fraction of a percent of the reading public), maybe there are a lot more people tired of it than the gatekeepers think.

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