GENREALITY

I was moved by one of the quotes in Carrie Vaughn’s post earlier this week:

“How physical the sense of triumph and relief is!  Whether good or bad, it’s done.”

–Virginia Woolf

A few days ago, I turned in the final proofs for my June book, FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS. It’s the only full-length new release I have out this year, and my first since 2010. I’ve been working on this novel since January of 2010. I worked on it before I had a baby, before I was even pregnant. It was a huge relief to know that it’s finished at last.

And then I think about how long a wait I have left until the book hits the stands. Six more months. Kill me now.

The lead time — the period of production between when an author turns in the final, edited version of their manuscript and when it appears on the bookshelves — can vary enormously depending on the genre, the publisher’s schedule, and any number of other factors. This is the time during which the book is copyedited, typeset, proofed, put into galleys, marketed to booksellers and sent out for professional reviews and blurbs.

Factors that lead to a longer lead times might be the format your book is in (hardcover novels tend to have longer lead times than mass market paperback originals, because of the emphasis on reviews and blurbs), or the genre (children’s fiction has notoriously longer lead times than adult fiction — it’s rumored this is due to the emphasis on sell-in to library markets). A shorter lead time might be because the book isn’t getting a pre-publication marketing buzz (like ARCs) — either because it’s a small book, or because it’s so big it has a built-in audience. (For instance, when readers are dying for the next book in a big series or by a big bestseller, publishers are likely to rush it through production and into readers’ hands.)

Longer lead times might be a factor of a publisher who is looking to thin out their schedule or take advantage of a bookseller promotion (I’ve had book release dates pushed back well after delivery for both these reasons), and a short lead time (called “crashing”) might be so the publisher can take advantage of a trend (“we want more dystopia NOW!”) or a timely season (“we need this Christmas book on the shelves by October!”)

The shortest time I ever dealt with was five months. That was in adult fiction. The longest has been fifteen. That one nearly did kill me. With For Darkness Shows the Stars, my usual lead time jitters are compounded by the fact that I spent 18 months writing the darn thing. This book now represents two and a half years of my life. Sure, I did other things with that time. I wrote another book, and a healthy handful of short stories. Oh, and there’s that baby, too.

But come on. Come out, already!

Long leads are painful to me. I have a book that I spent months (or years) living and breathing, and all I want to do is talk about it, but it’s kind of silly, as no one can get their hands on it yet. And by the time the book comes out, I’m already working two books down the line, so the nuances of the new release are not in the forefront of my mind. When the last book in my Secret Society Girl series came out in the summer of 2009, I had already written two over-100k fantasy novels about killer unicorns — the topic of Amy and her college graduation were far from my mind. (They’ll be even farther this summer, when the book is released in Brazil.) Few things are as embarrassing as talking to a reader at a signing who wants to discuss or rave about a scene while you’re consulting the text itself to jog your memory.

During this down time, when I’m waitingwaitingwaiting for the book to come out, I envy my more prolific friends who have release dates every three months, or the self-published who set their own release dates, unlimited by publisher schedules. I try to fill the time with other releases, like short story anthologies or my own self-publishing.

And I do giveaways. Like the one I’m doing right now.

That’s right. To celebrate my first ever post here at Genreality, I’m giving away a bright, shiny ARC of For Darkness Shows the Stars. This is the ONLY place I’m giving away a copy. This may, in fact, be the only chance you have to read it before June.

And June is so very, very far away…

Leave a comment here to enter. Contest is open until next Thursday, 11:59 PM eastern.

Weekend before last, I was at Bubonicon, Albuquerque’s regional science fiction convention, where I was on a great panel discussion about pen names and the various reasons authors take them on.  I was the token person on the panel who hasn’t written under a pen name.

Interestingly, “to start a new career when the first career flops horribly” never really came up as a reason to write under a pen name.  I’ve seen writers at the bar joking about what their next name is going to be when their current writing name becomes poison to the numbers-obsessed publishing business.  We can all name examples of authors who’ve done this — and authors who haven’t and still manage to maintain fine careers.  But it turns out writers have lots of other, perhaps less mercenary reasons for donning pen names.

Reasons for taking pen names:

• To protect your identity if your day job is, say, physician or public schoolteacher
• To write in multiple, very different genres, like fantasy and mystery
• To create a single author identity for a book written by two or more authors
• To write in areas that you don’t consider your primary focus

Another interesting facet of pen names in this internet age is that pseudonyms are rarely secret, and most authors are up front about other names they write under.  So what’s the point?  That brought up the issue of branding.  The name you see on the book isn’t necessarily an identity — it’s a brand name.  You buy a Stephen King book because you know what experience you’ll get when you read a Stephen King book.  Will J.K. Rowling ever be able to successfully publish anything other than Harry Potter stories?  Some would argue that Rowling means Harry Potter.

“Branding” of author names essentially divorces the identity of the author from the name you see on the cover.  J.D. Robb means mystery while Nora Roberts means romance, and neither one can said to actually represent the “person” who writes both sets of books.  Is this important?  Should this bother us?  Probably not.  As I said on the panel, the person I am sitting behind the microphone and talking to the audience isn’t the “real” me, either — I’m putting on a public persona.  Pen names are like that, too.

We also touched on the issue of gender, and altering the name printed on the cover of your books to disguise the gender of the person writing it.  For example, I know several male authors of urban fantasy who write female protagonists and publish under their initials.  Their readers often think they’re women because of that, and that’s usually the point.  The same is true for some women writing science fiction or high fantasy, whose readers sometimes think they’re men.  Authors do this on purpose, and once again it’s for marketing reasons, to make sure their books appeal to the right audience.  That readers won’t pass them by because they’ve made assumptions about the author’s identity.  (This really happens, trust me.)

When I branched out from my Kitty series into YA and contemporary fantasy, I chose not to use a pen name.  First, I felt that I wasn’t moving that far from my established genre — I’m still writing contemporary fantasy with young women protagonists.  I wanted to develop the readership I had rather than start over with a new name.  Second, it turns out that being able to put “New York Times Bestselling Author” above the name on the cover is worth more advance money.  So there it is, a mercenary reason for not using a pen name.

I can see very good reasons for wanting to take on a pen name.  I can also see very good reasons for not taking one on.  I think it depends on an author’s situation, attitude, and what she wants her career to look like.

Now to open it up to you all:  Do you write under a pen name?  Have you considered it?  How do you feel when you discover that a favorite author has been writing other books under a different name?

Tomorrow, my first short story collection is out!  I’ve been publishing short stories for over ten years now, so this has been a long time coming.  I want to talk a little bit about what went into putting this one together.

First question:  How do you whittle my list of over fifty published stories into the dozen that show up in the collection?  In this case, I started with a theme:  Kitty stories, or stories that might be considered part of Kitty’s world.  So the initial pick of stories was easy.  I had some technical considerations.  A couple of the stories that came out over the last year are still under contract — the anthologies they had originally appeared in asked for exclusivity for a period of time that overlapped with the collection’s release date, so I couldn’t include them.

I thought it was important to include new material.  I’m asking people to buy a whole book here, I don’t want it to be all stories they’ve possibly read before.  I wrote two new stories for the collection, one of which is a novella about Cormac.  The collection seemed the perfect way to showcase this novella, rather than trying to publish it on its own.  (It runs about 22,000 words, which is an awkward length — far too short for a novel, but too long for most short fiction markets.  Alternatives would have been to publish it as an e-book, or a stand-alone chapbook.  But bundling it with the short stories made a lot more sense.)

One big question:  how much editing/revising to do on stories that had already been published?  I will confess, I gave into the urge to polish older stories.  In a couple of cases, based on editorial suggestion, I made further changes.  I’m still waffling on some of them, but when you write for publication you sometimes just have to make a decision and go with it.

One of the hardest steps was figuring out what order to arrange the stories in.  I had a few options:  strict chronological order based on when the stories were written, chronological order based on when the stories take place, or a more arbitrary order based on what stories will hook readers early.  This is a guideline many anthology editors use — start with a strong story, end with a strong story.  Draw the readers in, and leave them with a good impression.  Chronological order based on when they were written would make sense for a retrospective collection, but not this one.  Chronological order based on when the stories take place made a lot more sense.  I discussed this quite a bit with my editor, who preferred the “anthology” guideline rather than a chronological arrangement.  The end result was a little of both.  I could have shuffled the table of contents around for ages, so again, I just had to make some decisions.

Another choice I had to make:  whether or not to include author notes about the stories.  I decided to include them.  Because the Kitty books are a series, readers have a lot of questions about how the stories and books all fit together, and this was a chance to answer those questions and talk about the evolution of the series as a whole.  I put all the notes in the back of the book, so readers who don’t care about them could skip them easily.

In my own mind, I’d been calling the collection Tales from the Midnight Hour.  Then Kelley Armstrong’s collection, Tales of the Otherworld, came out.  Too similar, I thought, so I nixed that idea.  On the other hand, that gave me a chance to come up with a much better title more suited to Kitty and her world:  Kitty’s Greatest Hits.

I’m very happy to finally have the collection done and out in the wild.  This was one of the sticking points I had with my old publisher, who refused to do a collection at all, Kitty stories or no.  When I shopped the series to a new publisher, I made a collection part of the deal.  Tor was happy to take the collection along with new novels.  So here we are!

I’m gearing up to get back to work as my maternity leave comes to an end. No, I’m not an actual employee, I’m self-employed. I still planned to not work for six weeks after the baby arrived. And as that time ends, going back to work for myself is every bit as critical as it would be if I had a boss to answer to. Even more so, in fact, because my responsibilities and obligations just increased. So how am I going back to work when my six weeks are up but I still have a newborn to care for? Preparation, and here are some strategies.

1. Prioritize to make the best use of time. Tasks fall into two loose categories: things I can do while the baby is awake, and things I can only do while the baby is asleep. If I can do it with her awake, I don’t waste sleeping time on it. And I start with the most important or urgent task on my to do list, in case that is the only thing I get done.
2. Make work mobile. If I can do it on the go, I can take it with me and work wherever I happen to be when I find myself with a few free minutes.
3. Keep the current project open. I can read and make notes even if I’m not free to write, keeping the project at work in my head. That way, when I have time to sit down and write for five minutes or an hour, I don’t waste that time figuring out where I left off and where to start.
4. Know your work style and work with it. I am most productive working on multiple projects at the same time. By not forcing myself to only do one thing, I can maximize my productivity instead of frustrating it.
5. Focus on the goal. It’s easy to get distracted by everything from self-doubt to Shiny Thing Syndrome, but that leads to lost time and mental energy that needs to go into work. If my goal is to keep writing and publishing and earning an income, I need to work. All I have to do is ask myself if worrying about whether I’m working on the wrong project or writing badly or if I should spend my day reading about the latest publishing news is going to help me achieve my goal of write/publish/earn to stay on track.

Some handy tips from others on preparation for productivity:
April Kihlstrom on Book in a Week

Michael Moorcock on writing a book in 3-10 days

And of course Candace Haven’s Fast Draft workshop is full of information, inspiration, and support for writing a book in two weeks.

Bookends Literary Agency has announced that they’re built an ePublisher-sort of. In an effort to keep up with the fast changes of the publishing landscape they’ve built Beyond The Page Publishing to help their authors who wish to self-publish electronically.

Jessica Faust on the BookEnds Blog
“One of the things I’ve always said is that there is no universal way to be a great agent. Each client is an individual and each career needs to be approached differently. I feel the same about self-epublishing. In looking at what we could offer our clients, there wasn’t one universal path that would fit every client and every need. So after much talk and consideration, BookEnds is taking a variety of approaches to self-epublishing in the hope that we can continue to provide the best opportunities for our clients.”

Dystel & Goderich have announced that they’re going to expand their reach and that of their authors by keeping up with the times…in other words, they’re going to help those of their authors who choose to self-publish with the work that goes into it.

From the D&G blog
“what we are going to do is to facilitate e-publishing for those of our clients who decide that they want to go this route, after consultation and strategizing about whether they should try traditional publishing first or perhaps simply set aside the current book and move on to the next. We will charge a 15% commission for our services in helping them project manage everything from choosing a cover artist to working with a copyeditor to uploading their work. We will continue to negotiate all agreements that may ensue as a result of e-publishing, try to place subsidiary rights where applicable, collect monies and review statements to make sure the author is being paid. In short, we will continue to be agents and do the myriad things that agents do.

Our intention is to keep on trying to find books we think we can sell to traditional publishing houses, to negotiate the best deal (always), and to give our authors as many options as we can. Because we will continue to be commission-based, we will not be automatically pushing authors into e-publishing. Again, we want to give our authors options and empower them to do what they set out to do all along: have their work read by the largest possible audience.”

Personally, I think it’s great to see agents finding ways to continue to help build their authors. What do you think?

EDITED TO ADD:
Maybe because my experience with an agent has taught me to never completely trust that agent is fighting to get me the best deal they could without some pushing and stubbornness on my own part. I just read a long open letter to agents on Courtney Milan’s blog that I think explains the whole conflict of interest angle to me. Which I admit I didn;t really get before, because in my mind I never completely trust anyone to get me the best deal or look out for me the way *I* should be looking out for myself. It’s a post worth reading on this subject.