Hello again, fellow castaways on the shores of time.
This week, let me kind of give you some background on my own publishing journey, and it may help you navigate the waters through the scam jobs waiting for you to sail through their minefields.
I started writing Becoming NADIA back in 2003. The story came to me in a nightmare so vivid, I woke up in a cold sweat, not even knowing where I was. That's a pretty intense feeling, as you can imagine.
So, anyway, the rough draft poured out like water in a total of 55 days. And here was I, the beginning writer, all full of myself because: "Look what I did. I wrote a book!" And to be pretty honest, I think I was pretty proud of myself. So should you be, if you write a whole novel of 85,000 words, whether it be in 55 days or 10,000 days. We all know that's a lot of work.
The problem was: I had a book, and had no idea how to get it to market. Kind of like where some of you are. I was hungry, starving to be an honest-to-God "published author."
Fortunately, my place of work had this book exchange, kind of like a Little Free Library, on the second floor in a bookshelf, and in that bookshelf one day I found my first key to unlock that door to publication. It was a book by Scott Edelstein, titled "Manuscript Submission." The tagline was a short line about how to format my baby and get it ready, and how to start the submission process with publishing houses.
Please get that book and read it. It has some outdated information in it, but I guarantee it will open your eyes to some valuable tools for your toolbox.
Now, here was my second hurdle, which I ran smack into and tripped. Here I am telling on myself just a bit. I thought that I could just whip out a story and just like that, the acquisitions editor at Random House would read it and cry, and tell himself, "Where has this been all my life?" Because I believed in that story SO MUCH at that time, I knew it would become an instant best-seller, and I would become financially independent overnight.
Silly me.
After the first ten form rejections, I was ready to tear my hair out. What was wrong with these people, that they can't see how fricking BRILLIANT this story was?
To be completely blunt with you, and with myself, I was a total idiot. I'll get to more of that later.
I started stumbling across organizations like SFWA, the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, at sfwa.org. Go ahead, look it up. These are the big money professionals: The Ben Bovas, the Ray Bradburys, the Olivia Butlers and Andre Nortons. The BIG folks. Their website has a lot of useful information, besides listing their great roster of members. Now, to be a member of SFWA, you have to meet a whole list of criteria. And these are the folks who give out the Nebula Awards.
One of the pages on their website has a sample contract that serves as a template of things to look for. Another page recommends a good critique group.
What is a critique group, you ask? Well, let me tell you. A good critique group is one whose members will be brutally honest, and expect the same from you. One that respects the art of writing enough to make each other better at it. "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." That includes women, too.
I thought that I had to keep my work under a tarp until the Glorious Reveal, when I could unleash it upon the world, and everyone would close that last chapter with a wistful tear. Really, I did think that. Yeah, to be so full of oneself that you are at THAT point, you got a comeuppance coming. And oh, boy, did I ever.
I got a free membership at Critiquecircle.com. I highly recommend it. Now, to post your work for critique, you have to earn credits. You earn credits by giving other writers feedback on their work, and then you can post in return, and they give you feedback on your work. That's how it works. I can't speak to other critique sites, but that's how it works over there, and it works well.
So I finally get to post my first chapter, and a sixteen year old girl calls me out on so many errors in technique: Overuse of adverbs, needless repetition, Point of view: I mean, she was a real technician. It hurt to hear all that, to be honest. But at the same time, I knew she was trying to put me in a higher place, with real skills. It's one thing to be a storyteller; it's another thing to be a WRITER.
I spent the next three years polishing and correcting all my numerous boo-boos, and still tripping over other hurdles in the process.
After I got it punched up, I started running it through the mills again, and got acceptances from companies that wanted to publish my book for the paltry sum of 3,000 dollars. I nearly signed with them until I looked a little deeper and uncovered the scam. Look at my previous posts on publishing to get a little more insight on it all.
To make a long story slightly shorter, I finally got a deal with a small press out of Montreal, and published 5 books through them, until the house closed due to health issues. But I got into self-publishing, and re-released all my work, and here I am: Working hard, writing hard, and trying my damnedest to help you all avoid the pitfalls I fell into.
We'll get more into the details of my journey in future posts.
Till then, keep the light on.
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