Why I Self-Publish

I'm not what you would call a one-trick pony.  I do many things.  I've written stories and one-and-one-quarter novels.  I've written plays and teleplays and radio plays and sketches and songs and light verse and hundreds (most of them now archived) blog posts.  I also act and have acted on stage and in videos and for audio, as well.  I've also had the chance to direct on a couple of occasions and have edited video and audio pieces.  I've done foley work, I've been a stage manager and prop master on many occasions.  And I've done all of this, I can safely say, with more than a dollop of competence.  In fact, in all these matters, I would say that I have done well--sometimes extremely well--with far more success than failure.

There's no way around it; I am a talented man.

And yet there is one area where any smidgeon of talent has always eluded me.  I stink at marketing and sales.

The standard in the publishing biz these days is for agents to act as a go-between for authors and publishers, especially when it comes to books.  (Although more-and-more magazines won't seriously look at anything that isn't agent-submitted.)  So the first task for any author who wants to grasp at the chance to earn at least part of his or her living from writing is often to sell oneself and one's work to an agent or a friendly magazine, and my achievements in this area are pitiful at best.

I have tried over the years, especially with the book I have just self-published, Michael Drayton, Detective Guy (available in hardcover, paperback, for Kindle, and for Nook).  I submitted the manuscript to a couple of dozen agents and even one or two publishers without getting the merest nibble.  Nothing.  Zilch.  Bupkiss.

Now, there are some reasons for that.  Agents get a lot of submissions (almost everyone thinks they have a book in them and bullshit like NaNoWriMo just encourages more witless dingdongs [who greatly outnumber the genuine writers] to muddy up the channels with more useless shit), and they tend to use certain criteria as what they delude themselves into thinking is an objective system that they can use to weed out the manuscripts that are "marketable" from those that aren't.  One of these is assigning arbitrary length requirements for novels in different genres.  For example, Drayton, even though it's not really a detective novel, is a detective novel and is supposed to come in at about 70,000 words.  It really comes in at about 50,000, and I'm sure its length gets it immediately rejected more often than not.  Also, agents, just like the producers of big-budget action movies, prefer formulaic and heavy-handed plotting over subtler kinds of storytelling, and they commonly convince themselves that the by-the-numbers plotline they're looking at is "original" if the main character has a raccoon for a pet or wears an eyepatch and a Tattersall vest.  (I actually had an agent, who rejected Drayton when I was peddling it as a much sillier teleplay, tell me that the project he was actually interested in was about a man who solves mysteries with his young grandchildren.  How do they think up this stuff?!)

There was one agent whose form rejection said something about the prose being lacking, and if she actually thought the prose in Drayton was subpar, then she is a knothead who knows nothing about writing.  She should retire and let her place be taken by a more discerning reader, say a hat rack or a credenza.  The prose in Drayton is strong and supple and poetic.  It took years to burnish it, and I won't let that many years of determined effort be tossed aside that way.  If there is a hell, let her fry in it.

Also, I am an autodidact and have taught myself how to do dozens of things.  I taught myself how to swim and ride a bike, how to play guitar and piano and ukelele, and how to manipulate various computer programs to do my evil bidding.  My longest and most successful such project was teaching myself how to write.  I started when I was 14 and continue to learn and grow at 53.  But I never got a degree that signifies that I was societally approved to work as a the sort of tradesman known as a writer.  As a writer of serious intent, this functions as yet another disadvantage to me.

I could have gotten an MFA, I suppose, but I am philosophically opposed to them.  Writing--and this goes for the other arts, too--is not a mere profession, but a calling, and the acquisition of a certificate should be as meaningless to a true artist as a Masters in Baptism would have been to a certain prophet who plied his trade on the banks of the River Jordan.  Degrees are meant for dentists and actuaries, not writers.

But a collection of letters on a resume would have helped.  They help others, many of whom write not half as well as I do.  But that is not who I am.

After years and years of such disappointments, I had to admit to myself that the standard way cannot be my way.  "But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid," Raymond Chandler said, and if that be my lot, I can accept that.  And the only way I can find to get my work in front of even a tiny public in an even mildly professional way is to self-publish.  And so, I do.

I self-publish not because I really want to, but because I must.

Not Novel, Novella

Thanks to an essay on newyorker.com by Ian McEwan (a gifted writer whose name, along that of the actor Ewan McGregor, has inspired a character name I hope to use some day, "Ewan Meehan"), I have decided to admit something to myself.  Michael Drayton, Detective Guy (a title I had abandoned in favor of Dead in His Tracks--more dishonesty) is not a novel, but a novella.

There.  I've said it.  It's a novella.  A long novella, but a novella nonetheless.

Despite being able to trick out the word count due to publishing conventions to 62,000 words, it's actual word count is actually just over 50,000.  There's some controversy (isn't there always) about where the novel begins and the novella leaves off, but there can be no doubt that Drayton at best straddles that line.  In fact, while preparing it to possibly self-publish sometime in the new year, I found out that it only made for a 157-page trade paperback edition, which, while longer than my current collection of short stories, Looking for Christmas (available from Lulu.com,  Amazon.com, and BN.com), is still not a particularly lengthy tome.

Of course, in terms of the publishing establishment, this is just another strike against it.  Drayton is a hard-boiled mystery that isn't really a hard-boiled mystery, but a kind of metaprepostmodern take on the hard-boiled form and particularly on the fiction of Raymond Chandler.  It's short.  (They like mysteries to be at least 70,000 words in the concrete canyons of New York.)  The hero is nonviolent, although there is violence in the book.  There's only one corpse, and he shows up a couple of chapters in rather than at the top of page two.  I have a funny name that they can't easily pigeonhole.  It's unique and quirky and--I can say this from having read parts of it recently after more than a year away from it--utterly brilliant.

The language sparkles, the characters pop.  It takes on life in the world as it is lived rather than the fantasy world of the mystery genre.  It has themes that it considers seriously, even when it is being funny, and it is often funny.  It even reconsiders the themes of both Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and thinks about such concepts as honor and duty and what it means for a man to have a personal code that he adheres to strictly.

And, on top of all that, it's a damn fine read.

And it is a novella.  There's no way of getting 'round it.  And, as Ian McEwan points out, that's something to be proud of.

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Final Revision Complete

I finished going through the entire manuscript a couple of days ago and now have a PDF version available to well-wishers. There were problems with the e-pub version that will require different software to fix. We'll see what happens with that.

In the meantime, the true manuscript, which has been cleansed of typos and unnecessary sitcom-type jokes, is being marketed. The waiting is no fun, but what dlse is there to do?

It Never Ends

I've been busy over the last couple of weeks in converting the Dead in His Tracks manuscript into a form that would be readable on e-readers and using the opportunity to correct errors as I came across them. I had actually just copied and pasted the first several chapters in an effort to make time, but then started reading through each one mostly to catch typos. It finally occurred to me last night that I should go back to the beginning and proof it from page 1.

Chapter 1 was in better shape than I had feared, and most of the corrections I made were just that: corrections. This was good. This was heartening. And then I got to Chapter 2.

Chapter 2, it turned out, was still weighed down with too much jokiness and cleverness and asides. I've started fixing it. Submissions will continue to roll off the assembly line while I do.

I can hardly wait for Chapter 3.

Plugging Along

Dead in His Tracks has now been rejected by one agent and is awaiting the verdict of a second--one who seems to simply not reply if she doesn't like it, per the following stats:



But, those are the risks. She's on vacation, so the clock on her four-week evaluation period will start running on Monday.

I have to say that I don't quite get it. When you only take queries via email, why is it so difficult to send a form rejection once you decide you don't like something? Just as a courtesy. Just as I give her the courtesy of only querying one agent at a time (multiple submissions are done, but are frowned upon) and in following the limitations she sets out on her webpage. I know that she gets a lot of blind queries like mine, and that she will have a mountain to wade through come next week, but are those any reason not to have some standard text that you can copy and paste into a reply email? Maybe there's something that I don't understand here, and you can bet that I would gladly send her the entire manuscript if she requests it. It's obviously not a deal-breaker or an approach that makes me unwilling to submit. I just wonder why.

Why?

Now that it is done, now that Dead in His Tracks is having to fight its way in the marketplace, I have begun to question the wisdom of having written it at all. As I have progressed as a writer, as I have gone from thinking of myself as being a comic writer to thinking of myself as being a serious one, I have also come to question whether this project, conceived in humor and dedicated to the proposition that all things are created absurd, was the best jumping off point for my new incarnation.

Conceived, originally, in a spirit of parody, there are elements of the plot that strike me as being too constructed, too manufactured. It seems too mannered to me. It also occurred to me earlier today that it is harder to go from genre novel, in terms of sales, to general fiction than it is the other way around. The people who represent genre authors and the firms that publish their work want different things from a mystery than what I can give them. They cherish and defend the cliches that I wish to subvert.

Given all my feelings about this, Dead in His Tracks will probably become a #1 international bestseller and then a movie--most likely in 3-D--starring some pretty boy who can't act. Or....

And So, To Market

I finished the latest revision of DEAD IN HIS TRACKS this past Monday. I'm now working on the cover letter and that most dreaded of all marketing items, the synopsis.

I had an interesting run at the end of the rewrite of the novel. I went, very suddenly, from slaving over a single chapter for about a month to knocking out two or three chapters a day. Apparently they had gotten less lousy the further on I had gone.

Which is not to say that there were no changes or corrections. I actually added to the final paragraph, so I can quite truthfully claim to have rewritten it from one end to the other.

And now on to trying to sell it in some realistic manner. Wish me luck.

Chapter 7 Continues

Since my previous post, I have been creating, from whole cloth, a new Chapter 7. The events leading up to this momentous event are as follows: When I started this revision way back in the distant past, I found that I needed to combine what had been Chapters 1 & 2. This meant that Chapter 3 became Chapter 2 and so forth along the line.

That is until I reached Chapter 7.

The new Chapter 6 (which was the old Chapter 7) included the mention of a character that I had not been aware of before then. It seemed reasonable that Drayton would speak with her. In order to do that, a new Chapter 7 would be necessary.

I've been working on this new chapter over the last month or so with some success. It's growing like a weed. Now, I might find that it will need to be taken apart and put back together again once the dust settles, but things are going along nicely thus far.

In a related turn of events, I've decided that it's time for me to maintain this blog a bit more steadily. The progress of this manuscript matters--to me, if not to anyone else--and the record should be noted.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

As I've worked at revising my book, it has taken an increasingly serious turn. What started out as a comic mystery has turned into a literary mystery, and the title Michael Drayton, Detective Guy has become increasingly anachronistic. I'm at a point where I'm starting to sense that the difficult, smash-it-to-pieces-and-put-it-together-again portion of this current revision is coming to its end, and so the imperative to find a new and better title has made itself known.

The new title of the book will be Dead in His Tracks, which I am putting my thumbprint on as of the date of this post. I have a brand new chapter to write and then one more that is going to need a lot of attention. After that, the quality of the work improves dramatically, and the task of revising should get exponentially easier.

I am very excited at the possibility of having a manuscript that I can submit places in the not-too-distant future.

From the Beginning

I've started work on revising Chapter 1 in order to bring it into line, stylistically with the later chapters. Most of the first third of the book will end up undergoing such a revision. To give you an idea of how much it is changing, take a look at this screen shot of the work done so far:




In other words, the work is significant. And necessary. When the manuscript was most recently rejected, I had to face the nagging concern that had been eating at me for quite some time. I was afraid, and now think it was true, that there was too much of the parody left in the early chapters, too many self-consciously bright lines. I had gone through and taken out a load of jokes a couple of years ago, but I hadn't done what really needed to be done, which was thoroughly rewriting that part.

The end result of this process should be a much stronger manuscript.

The Latest but Not Greatest

I heard back from the independent publisher last evening, and Michael Drayton, Detective Guy was rejected yet again. that's life, although they could have chosen another day besides my anniversary to tell me.

Anyway, I am considering at this point the self-publishing option. ("The self-publishing option." Doesn't that sound important and almost dangerous? "mr. President, what shall we do?" "We have no choice. This time it's the self-publishing option.") I've never been very good at playing the game or being a cog in the machine, and maybe now is no time to start. It's worth some investigation, anyway.

If there are any better ideas, I'm open to them.

The Next One

Ever since I finished Michael Drayton, Detective Guy, I've been thinking about what sort of follow-up that book should have. It's not that I lack for ideas for stories--I have several of those--it's that Drayton doesn't seem to lend himself easily to the longer form of the novel. And his adventures are too complicated for short stories. He's a novella kind of guy. And I hate the idea of padding something out just to make it a more publishable length.

So, this morning, I had the thought that I might try pitching a follow-up that was a collection of three novellas rather than one novel. That way, I can just tell the three stories I have in mind and let them each spin out as they will without having to worry about reaching somebody else's idea of a publishable length. Had I had this idea a couple of years ago, I probably would have just written a Drayton omnibus that would tell all the stories I have to relay for him in one fat volume. Maybe some day I will.

No word yet from the independent publisher. Ten months today. That's fine. I'd rather that they took their time and accepted it than rushed and rejected it. I'm just fine with being patient.

For Their Consideration

Well, I went and done it. I have submitted the entire manuscript of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy to an independent publisher. Since they wisely give no guidelines on how long it takes them to get through the slush pile, I have no true idea how long I'll have to wait to hear back. And that's fine.

Now I can put it aside in my mind and let the Fates take up the load.

In the meantime, I will be concentrating on my non-Drayton novel, Such Is Life. And I've started seriously thinking about the second Drayton tome. As pertinent thoughts occur to me about that, I'll post them here.

And now we wait.

Retrenching

I wrote yesterday's post in the midst of many strains, including work on a chapter of Drayton that, while working well in some regards, didn't have the right feel. What bothered me about the revised Chapter One wasn't that the work was bad as much as that it wasn't fitting in with the existing book as well as I had hoped. It was becoming apparent that, in order to make this one chapter work, the whole book would have to be revised extensively, and I was not yet comfortable with that notion.

It's not that the book as a whole doesn't needed revision. I'm sure it does. It's just that, whatever its value, whatever its weaknesses and strengths, it does not, I think, need to become an entirely different book. Any revisions should further explore the thing that it is, should iron out as many of the bumps and creases as my talent will allow, should shine light in the corners that are now dark.

And so, mostly on instinct, I have put that revision on hold.

However, I do have a new plan in place. I will continue to market the manuscript as it is, only I will stop sending it to agents and start sending it to independent publishers. The aspects of Drayton that turn off agents--the mixture of literary with genre fiction, the length, the humor--might actually turn out to be strengths when being read by an editor. The only way to find out for sure is to try.

And it is not the end of the fragment recently written. It strikes me that, with a few amendations, it would work as part of the second Drayton novel. That story will intertwine investigations that Drayton performs for a wealthy, reclusive eccentric, a certain C.F. Dudley, with work he performs for a local TV news vixen who is concerned about a stalker.

I think these are the right moves to make, although I have been wrong many times in the past, may be now, and most certainly will be again in the future. All you can do is stumble forward as best you can.

Blocked

I've gotten stuck in the rewriting of Drayton, and I find myself lost. I have no idea what I'm doing or why. I suspect that I should hold off again, step back, and reconsider. Put it aside for a year or more and let it fester. See how it comes out once I've forgotten it.

I think I should almost certainly start over and rethink and refine every aspect of the book, every page, every paragraph, every sentence, every word.

But we'll see. Currently, I'm feeling pretty low and frustrated generally. that's not the proper time to make these sorts of decisions. However, I think I will put the project on hold while I sort myself out. That's only fair to the work. It's better to do nothing than to do it an injury.

The Beginning Is Begun

For the first four days, the new version dragged. I had a couple of hundred words that I was fiddling with, but little real progress. And then, yesterday, the sluice opened. words started coming out in groups. You never know how long a good period like this will last, but I don't feel dry this morning. In fact, I've already added a couple of more word groups.

My current goal is to get through about 50 pages, which is the sample length most often requested by agents. I don't have a deadline in mind, other than getting it done as quickly as I can while doing a decent job of it. Once I have a big enough chunk to market the manuscript with, I can resume my sales effort. But we'll see what happens between now and when I get there.

A New Beginning

There has been something nagging at me ever since I finished the current draft of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy. As the previous rewrite proceeded, I abandoned any pretense of trying to write a funny novel and started just writing a regular novel. And as I crept along, I discovered that the book I was writing was developing in literary terms, and while still readable as simply a story, it had also become a serious novel.

Which is all well and fine, except that this evolution of the book took place gradually. And that means that the first part of the book is written completely differently than the rest of it. The opening four or five chapters were still rooted in parody and comedy while the succeeding chapters, while occasionally amusing, were far more straight forward and real.

Therefore, I've started work on Drayton 4.0. the first paragraph of the first chapter came off the assembly line yesterday. I'm uncertain as to whether I'll continue marketing it while I rewrite or whether I'll just advise any agents I contact that it is receiving further revisions. I think I read somewhere that you can do that.

Anyway, this is a complete reimagining of the beginning. So much will be changed that it might not even seem to be the beginning of the same book. However, these new chapters will lead up to and link with the existing more serious chapters of the book, which also get a brush up over time. I am not expecting them to change this radically, though.

Some day I hope to be finished writing this book, but you never know until you get there.

High Notes

So far, Drayton has been rejected by a handful of agents. That's not a big deal. All you can do is to keep shopping it until you find the agent or publisher who's on the right wave length, something which, I suspect, involves some level of luck. The right person has to come across it on the right day. And the more that you send your proposal out, the better the chances are that you'll come across the right person.

There's something to that "making your own luck" stuff.

Now, not all rejections are equal. Sometimes you get a form, if you mailed your submission, or some copy-and-pasted standard text, if you submitted electronically. And that's fine. That sort of rejection is not especially meaningful in any direction. You wrote something and they didn't want it. Fair enough.

On occasion--and it's an occasion that's becoming more and more frequent in my case--the rejection comes in the form of a personal note. This is a step up, first of all because you know that your stuff got some serious level of consideration. There had to be at least one glittering moment when the person evaluating the work thought "This might have possibilities." And, if you can get somebody to go that far, you just might be able to get the next person to go further.

At the least, it is encouraging.

I received just such a rejection from an agent this past weekend, and I took a chance and emailed him to thank him for his consideration and to ask him a couple of questions so that I could properly approach the rewrite I had started to realize was in order. In his response to that--and I really have to thank this guy some day--he noted "that the tone wasn't really hitting the high notes" in his opinion. Now, I had only sent him the first five chapters, and the high notes don't really start cropping up until Chapter Six.

I've thought it over, and three things occur to me. First, the opening chapters need a major rewrite in order to bring the tone in line with the rest of the manuscript. Second, while I'm at it, I might as well brush up the whole thing. And third, I have to approach this as being more than just a mystery. I need to turn Michael Drayton, Detective Guy into a great book.

Louis Armstrong used to get into challenges with other trumpeters at jam sessions, and he would rip off 200 high Cs in a row. I can do the same thing and need to.

What's holding this book back are the remnants of parody left from the early versions of the story. It's time to bury those for good. Right now, I'm ruminating. I'm hoping to start writing by the end of the week.

It's Out

Well, yesterday, I put my new and improved proposal into the mail to an agent who specializes in crime fiction. I am cautiously optimistic.

It's a strange thing, sending manuscripts out. It's this endless, elongated version of qualifying for a loan. You make your presentation, try to beef up your qualifications as best you can, and wait for some stranger to pass judgment on your worth to society. If the answer is rejection, you try again elsewhere. Eventually, you just go to a relative to see if they have an extra twenty.

Not this time, though. I've been quietly accumulating more credits. The manuscript--the collateral, if you will--is in the best shape its been. My cover letter and synopsis are light years better than they were. And this is all you can do: hone. Small credits are better than no credits. They build into medium sized ones that become humongo ones if you have talent and luck.

I've also learned something about myself in recent months, recognized a flaw in my character. It is an old one, deeply embedded, and it has hindered me in many areas of my life over the years. My problem is this: I have a tendency to try too hard. It used to hold me back when I tried to woo women, and I only was able to lasso my dear sweet wife because I had pretty much given up on finding someone and because we got to know each other over a period of a few months without the pressure of possible romance impinging itself on us.

Well, getting ahead in a career such as writing is a lot like starting a romance, and I think that I was always the guy who tried too hard, who made too many grand gestures, who forgot how to relax and be himself. I was always trying to write The Greatest Cover Letter of All Time, riddled with jokes that I had tried too hard to think up. In fact, the desire to insert jokes by force when necessary held back the quality of my work as well. I wasn't writing to my true potential because I would spend entire days trying to come up with a single funny line. And the work always showed, I'm afraid.

Now, this is not to say that I'm not a funny writer. Funny things occur to me spontaneously all the time. And the spontaneous ones are usually better, funnier, and more original than the ones I spend days thinking up. And the non-joke that I put in place of the day-long effort works more fluently and smoothly and allows me to do little tricks with language and with character development and dialog. And by hiding these goodies amidst the humor, I can be literary without highlighting it with neon signs and a bright orange sticker on my forehead.

At least that's the hope.

In the end, I'd be happy just entertaining people. It matters not whether readers find any deeper depths or not. It only matters to me that I work. And that I not try too hard.