Edging towards self-publishing
21/04/13 10:34 Filed in: Aeropolis | Self-publishing
So the rejections from agents continue to pile up. When I started writing the first Aeropolis novel, I was aware of the self-publishing renaissance that had been enabled by Amazon’s Kindle project, but I also knew that people like Amanda Hocking were likely to be the exception rather than the rule. I read the polemics of Konrath, but again, felt he was a special case. I was fairly sure that the best way for an unknown author to achieve publication was via the traditional method: find an agent, who finds you a book deal with a publisher.
I nearly achieved a shortcut on this process, quite by chance. I got the opportunity to send my manuscript directly to the editor of a publisher, which is very unusual. Of course I didn’t rely on that working out, and started submitting to agents as well more than a year ago. But when I found out last December that the publisher was not able to take the work, that meant relying on an agent, and so far I haven’t found one.
I’ve submitted to around twenty agents, including three that have yet to respond. The Children’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2012 lists some fifty agencies, so I’ve not by any means exhausted my options. But I do feel as if I’m close to exhausting my patience. It’s a slow process, and the temptation to simply get the book out there is strong.
Of course there is more to it than just uploading a file to Amazon. Creating the file itself is not that simple. But I do have strong technical knowledge, and have already made a few Kindle files for proofreading purposes. Also required is a good cover. Again, I have some graphic design skills. It’s hard to see the downsides to just getting it out there and seeing what happens. The feedback I’m getting from agents is that the writing is good, but it’s just something that doesn’t “click” with them, which means it may be a fairly niche work. In that case it’ll do better as an e-book anyway, if it doesn’t have to jostle for space with more broadly appealing titles. Or it may be one of those works whose appeal is not immediately obvious, but which does find a following.
I have designed a cover, which I do like a lot, although it’s based on a photograph which has forced certain design decisions on to me. I may have a go at creating one completely from scratch using a Blender render. In the meantime, feast your eyes!
I nearly achieved a shortcut on this process, quite by chance. I got the opportunity to send my manuscript directly to the editor of a publisher, which is very unusual. Of course I didn’t rely on that working out, and started submitting to agents as well more than a year ago. But when I found out last December that the publisher was not able to take the work, that meant relying on an agent, and so far I haven’t found one.
I’ve submitted to around twenty agents, including three that have yet to respond. The Children’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2012 lists some fifty agencies, so I’ve not by any means exhausted my options. But I do feel as if I’m close to exhausting my patience. It’s a slow process, and the temptation to simply get the book out there is strong.
Of course there is more to it than just uploading a file to Amazon. Creating the file itself is not that simple. But I do have strong technical knowledge, and have already made a few Kindle files for proofreading purposes. Also required is a good cover. Again, I have some graphic design skills. It’s hard to see the downsides to just getting it out there and seeing what happens. The feedback I’m getting from agents is that the writing is good, but it’s just something that doesn’t “click” with them, which means it may be a fairly niche work. In that case it’ll do better as an e-book anyway, if it doesn’t have to jostle for space with more broadly appealing titles. Or it may be one of those works whose appeal is not immediately obvious, but which does find a following.
I have designed a cover, which I do like a lot, although it’s based on a photograph which has forced certain design decisions on to me. I may have a go at creating one completely from scratch using a Blender render. In the meantime, feast your eyes!
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The stories behind Apple and Amazon
If you’re not into Apple or investing, you may not have known this, but Apple shares fell in price recently, from an all-time high of over $700, to under $450, following the company’s quarterly earnings report. Another well-known company, Amazon, saw the opposite happen, when its shares rose following its earnings report.
So far, so boring, you say. Companies produce a bad earnings report, their shares go down. Or they do well, and their shares go up. This is news? Next you’ll be telling me the Pope is Catholic.
Here’s the thing, though. Apple’s earnings report wasn’t bad. Yet its shares went down. And Amazon’s earnings report wasn’t very good. But the shares went up. Read More...
So far, so boring, you say. Companies produce a bad earnings report, their shares go down. Or they do well, and their shares go up. This is news? Next you’ll be telling me the Pope is Catholic.
Here’s the thing, though. Apple’s earnings report wasn’t bad. Yet its shares went down. And Amazon’s earnings report wasn’t very good. But the shares went up. Read More...
Aeropolis in physical form
14/02/13 10:10 Filed in: Aeropolis
I had some requests for the book in physical form - obviously not everyone has a Kindle! So I had a look at print-on-demand (POD) possibilities, and the one that made the most sense was Lulu. I managed to upload a file from Scrivener with minimal problems, designed a quick-and-dirty cover, and had a few copies printed at a very reasonable price. It’s quite a thrill to finally see my work in the flesh, as it were, even if I’ve already spotted a few typos- I’m going to have to do a detailed proof read.
Changes
There have been some pretty big changes in the last six months of my life: I moved house and started a new job, both of which have impacted on my writing. Moving house is an incredibly time-consuming exercise, not only in terms of the move itself, but also because of all the work that needs to be done on the new house to make it the way you want it. I think I’ve spent so much time assembling Ikea furniture that I could now do it blindfolded.
The new job has had an arguably greater impact though, as I did a lot of my writing while commuting on the train in my last role. The new job necessitated driving to work, so no free writing time, and it’s been quite a consuming six months which have simply flown by.
Nevertheless I have started writing my next book, working title Heart of Clay, and I’ve managed to get Aeropolis (known as Airship City in its second incarnation) in front of a number of agents, most of whom have been complimentary, although none felt it quite right for them. An agent in New York wants to see my second book, which I think means she felt Aeropolis was almost, but not quite, there, and that I might get there on the next one! So that’s encouraging. Unfortunately the editor who had requested the rewrite got back to me in December to say the book was much better, but that in the meantime she had bought a couple of similar titles (it seems I’ve written a steampunk novel) and so she had no room for Aeropolis. Frustrating. Although she encouraged me to submit to agents and even gave me two recommendations, so that was also encouraging.
I had already submitted to one of the agents, who subsequently came back with the dreaded “it’s good but I didn’t love it”, and I really should get it submitted to the other agent. It’s a tough thing, rejection. I remember reading all the advice about not taking rejection personally and about keeping your head down and your confidence up, but the thing is that it’s one thing to know what you should be doing and another to actually experience the emotions, and I do find the self-doubt starting to creep in. There’s a stronger resistance to making the next submission after every rejection, an unconscious attempt to protect oneself from the pain. But it’s a resistance that needs to be overcome. You only need one “yes” at the end of that very long chain of “no’s”. If you don’t get past them all, you won’t get to the “yes”. So it’s time to plough on!
The new job has had an arguably greater impact though, as I did a lot of my writing while commuting on the train in my last role. The new job necessitated driving to work, so no free writing time, and it’s been quite a consuming six months which have simply flown by.
Nevertheless I have started writing my next book, working title Heart of Clay, and I’ve managed to get Aeropolis (known as Airship City in its second incarnation) in front of a number of agents, most of whom have been complimentary, although none felt it quite right for them. An agent in New York wants to see my second book, which I think means she felt Aeropolis was almost, but not quite, there, and that I might get there on the next one! So that’s encouraging. Unfortunately the editor who had requested the rewrite got back to me in December to say the book was much better, but that in the meantime she had bought a couple of similar titles (it seems I’ve written a steampunk novel) and so she had no room for Aeropolis. Frustrating. Although she encouraged me to submit to agents and even gave me two recommendations, so that was also encouraging.
I had already submitted to one of the agents, who subsequently came back with the dreaded “it’s good but I didn’t love it”, and I really should get it submitted to the other agent. It’s a tough thing, rejection. I remember reading all the advice about not taking rejection personally and about keeping your head down and your confidence up, but the thing is that it’s one thing to know what you should be doing and another to actually experience the emotions, and I do find the self-doubt starting to creep in. There’s a stronger resistance to making the next submission after every rejection, an unconscious attempt to protect oneself from the pain. But it’s a resistance that needs to be overcome. You only need one “yes” at the end of that very long chain of “no’s”. If you don’t get past them all, you won’t get to the “yes”. So it’s time to plough on!
Discovering the story
20/06/12 11:03 Filed in: Writing
So this writing thing is a pretty steep learning curve. I used to think that I planned my stories out in great detail before writing them, because an early experiment in just letting things unfold naturally led to me having to abandon a large chunk of my novel. I decided then that I needed to sort out plot before writing anything in future, so that when it came to the actual writing, I could just concentrate on character and description and dialogue without worrying about where things were headed…
And to be fair, I think that I partially achieved my goal. But the thing is that as you actually write out your carefully planned plot, things start to change. You realise that character has an impact on plot, because your hero suddenly refuses to do something that you had planned for her. And you also realise that perhaps you didn’t think the plot through as carefully as you might have, because you were anxious to get going with the writing, and here you are with a gaping big plot hole. And then, worst of all, you suddenly get a new idea, see something that just makes so much sense, that feels so right and lifts your story up a whole level.
What’s so awful about that, you ask? Because it messes up your carefully planned outline, makes you rewrite before you’ve even finished the first draft, throws out your fantasy about writing being an orderly and planned process of thinking things up and then writing them down in an efficient fashion.
I suppose it must be possible to spend so much time planning, and to do so in sufficient detail, that you do see everything before writing a word, and so all of your planning is the process of discovering the story, at the stage when changes are simple and easy to make. But it’s more likely that for most people, there must remain some element of discovery during the actual writing process, and so where you end up on the planning/discovery continuum probably depends on your patience for rewrites. M Night Shyamalan reportedly did not discover the key to his script for The Sixth Sense - the main character himself being a ghost - until the fifth draft. If you can’t handle doing a rewrite for the nth time, you’ll put more effort into the planning stage next time.
And of course with experience the writer becomes, like a chess grandmaster, able to spot problems and dead ends and to unconsciously close them off before they even arise, whether at the planning or the writing stage. It’s the old thing about writing being a journey. When you start out on a journey you take wrong turnings, you fall down a lot, but all those mistakes teach you to spot the right turning, avoid the pitfalls, and so your progress becomes much faster. This is why most first novels are never published. To think of them as a waste of time and effort, however, is a mistake. The failed first novel paved the way for the second and third and all the rest, in fact was the training ground, the boot camp, that made the writer. And it’s never about just one book, just as the journey is never completed at the first mile marker. To be a writer you have to be able to use your talent to tell many different stories. You are not your work, even though it’s sometimes hard to see that when all you’ve written is the work in progress of your first novel. If it works, fantastic. If it has too many flaws to overcome, leave it, move on to the next story. If the story is compelling enough you can return to it in time and re-tell it with the benefit of your new skills and experience. But you’ll probably find a hundred new stories that you’re itching to tell, and that’s what being a writer is: having more ideas than you’ll ever have the time to tell.
And to be fair, I think that I partially achieved my goal. But the thing is that as you actually write out your carefully planned plot, things start to change. You realise that character has an impact on plot, because your hero suddenly refuses to do something that you had planned for her. And you also realise that perhaps you didn’t think the plot through as carefully as you might have, because you were anxious to get going with the writing, and here you are with a gaping big plot hole. And then, worst of all, you suddenly get a new idea, see something that just makes so much sense, that feels so right and lifts your story up a whole level.
What’s so awful about that, you ask? Because it messes up your carefully planned outline, makes you rewrite before you’ve even finished the first draft, throws out your fantasy about writing being an orderly and planned process of thinking things up and then writing them down in an efficient fashion.
I suppose it must be possible to spend so much time planning, and to do so in sufficient detail, that you do see everything before writing a word, and so all of your planning is the process of discovering the story, at the stage when changes are simple and easy to make. But it’s more likely that for most people, there must remain some element of discovery during the actual writing process, and so where you end up on the planning/discovery continuum probably depends on your patience for rewrites. M Night Shyamalan reportedly did not discover the key to his script for The Sixth Sense - the main character himself being a ghost - until the fifth draft. If you can’t handle doing a rewrite for the nth time, you’ll put more effort into the planning stage next time.
And of course with experience the writer becomes, like a chess grandmaster, able to spot problems and dead ends and to unconsciously close them off before they even arise, whether at the planning or the writing stage. It’s the old thing about writing being a journey. When you start out on a journey you take wrong turnings, you fall down a lot, but all those mistakes teach you to spot the right turning, avoid the pitfalls, and so your progress becomes much faster. This is why most first novels are never published. To think of them as a waste of time and effort, however, is a mistake. The failed first novel paved the way for the second and third and all the rest, in fact was the training ground, the boot camp, that made the writer. And it’s never about just one book, just as the journey is never completed at the first mile marker. To be a writer you have to be able to use your talent to tell many different stories. You are not your work, even though it’s sometimes hard to see that when all you’ve written is the work in progress of your first novel. If it works, fantastic. If it has too many flaws to overcome, leave it, move on to the next story. If the story is compelling enough you can return to it in time and re-tell it with the benefit of your new skills and experience. But you’ll probably find a hundred new stories that you’re itching to tell, and that’s what being a writer is: having more ideas than you’ll ever have the time to tell.