There Is No Mad Dash To Publishing

     When I finished my book, I thought, "Okay!  The hard part is over!"  I spent a lot of time writing, refining, editing, rewriting, adding, subtracting, organizing plot structure, characterizing, throwing bits of exposition and dialogue around...the list goes on and on.  Believe it or not, and maybe it's akin to self-inflicted pain, a little masochism, but that's not the hard part.  That's actually the fun part.  Really!  That sounds fun right?  People that write books NEED to find that fun.  If they don't, they won't continue to write.

     The point is, I thought I had reached the Mother Land!  Everything is downhill now, right?  The book has been written, now it's off to the printing press and the amazing word of mouth the book will receive will create sales from the ether!  My part in this is done.  Let the publishers market it and manage the rest while I get back to the fun part, the creation phase.  I guess, subconsciously, I knew there was at least a little more 'post production' work I would have to do, but I did consider, in my wide eyed and child-like innocence, that most of the work was done.  Wrong!  So here's my experience of the post work that comes after the super fun creation work.

     The novel is finished.  Well, as much as it can be, because let's face it, we, as novelists, could carry on forever revising and editing, making it just a little better.  But we have committed to letting it go, to letting our need for perpetual revising to just end.  I submitted my work to many different publishing companies.  What a short sentence that was to describe the angst involved it that!  It wasn't dealing with rejections that authors seemed to be plagued with.  I kept the attitude that submitting my work was half the battle.  I even planned on framing my first rejection letter as proof of the effort.    The hard part about submitting my work to different publishing houses was the formatting requirements.  Each publishing house wants specific guidelines followed for your submitted work and it is vastly varied.

     From margins to headers, to page numbers to title pages, here's what I ran into:  publishing company "A" wants a header with your last name and email address at the top of each page of your manuscript.  Publishing company "B" wants no page numbers and only wants the title of your manuscript at the top of each page.  You phone number and email address must be on the title page.  Publishing company "C" only accepts manuscripts with one inch margins and your last name should appear on the top of the page, left justified, but only at the beginning of each chapter, etc...the specification went on and on.  Because of it, I found myself spending massive amounts of time before each submission reading though the requirements of each house and formatting my manuscript to their specs.  After all, I didn't want my book slush piled(can I use those words as verbs?) just because I didn't follow the requisite formatting guidelines for that particular publishing house, right?  So I trudged through it, reading the guidelines, formatting, submitting, reading the guidelines, formatting, submitting...oh! And not to mention the time spent before all that finding a publishing house that accepts the genre I write in.  No sense in sending a publisher of romance novels a sci-fi, right?  The process was grueling, and not fun, especially when all I wanted to do was to get back to that fun creation stage.

     Eventually, two publishers wanted to publish my work.  I guess they saw my magnificently formatted content and thought, "Hey, if nothing else, this guy can follow formatting guidelines!"  Never mind about content!  No, I'm sure(telling this to myself, now...) that the content was the driving factor for acceptance.  So I was emailed a contract to peruse.

     Upon reading the contract, I was simply not impressed.  I would make less than a dollar a book sale.  I would be required to purchase a minimum of forty books, and I would have to market it on my own.  Is this what publishing houses are doing nowadays?  So I took a step back for a moment.  Here it was, the coveted book contract, the pinnacle of what I was after, and now the feeling was simply flat.  It took the air out of my sails, that's for sure!  I weighed the options and decided that I would explore the idea of self publishing.  

     The main thing I was after when I decided to sell my book wasn't money or fame or really any of that.  It was a simple thing really.  It was simply the confirmation that I was a good enough writer to have my book published one day, at some point, to call myself an author.  So after the mad formatting and submittal dash, after I received the contract to simply sign and send back, I realized that the contract itself was confirmation enough.  A publisher saw my work and decided that I was good enough to publish.  I understand and acknowledge that publishers are taking a huge risk on a new author and spend little of their budget on marketing for first time novelists.  I wasn't offended at all, just surprised that that's how it worked.

     I decided, after some research, that if I were going to self publish, I would still be responsible for marketing and trying to sell my book.  No advantage to having a publisher there.  I would make more money on each sale.  No advantage to having a publisher there.  The only advantage I saw was the professional name behind my book, and the professional formatting service they would provide to make my book look as professional as possible.  Unfortunately for them, the process of submitting my work made me an expert at book formatting!  I decided to self publish and see how it went.

     So four months after I finished my book, I had still not published, and decided to self publish.  I mistakenly thought the majority of time to publish a book was the writing!  Not true at all!  That's the fun part.  The next part in the process is what everyone in the self publishing world calls 'discoverability.'  The journey was just beginning.  I will expound on this process and what I experienced in my next blog.  Hopefully, this blog will serve to demystify the publishing and querying process.  I hope it will help anyone on a publishing mission to understand the process as I have come to understand it.  Subscribe to the blog so you don't miss the process of discoverability.  In many blogs of this type, people never tell you the hard sales numbers.  As I work through the process, I will be transparent with this.

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Airport Shenanigans (part one)

People are amazing.  Recently, I flew to Atlanta on a work related expedition for product training.  

JIA is a humble airport, with a spattering of terminals, resting serenely, almost with an air of nonchalance, as a nearly insignificant blip on an otherwise uneventful swath of land inside the rim of Jacksonville's northern extremity.  I suppose what I'm trying to convey here, is that Jacksonville has a wishful airport, big boy pants for a waist that's just too small...it's trying, though, and one day, maybe soon, the waistline will fit the pants.

With ticket in hand and bags checked, I confidently made my way toward my designated terminal.  I wouldn't, by any remote stretch of the imagination, call myself a frequent flyer, but over the last four or five years, I've flown to Atlanta twice, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, and Richmond, Virginia.  While I I'm not a Lord of the Rings level traveler, I would at least consider myself comfortable with and accustomed to the act of flying--in a plane, in case you thought I had acquired the next level of human evolution or come up with an aviatory solution not otherwise already considered.  Because of my past experiences with this sort of thing, I elected to bring a Tom Robbins novel with me in an attempt to quell the boredom of the inevitable wait.  I already knew that waiting in a security checkpoint line, on the plane before takeoff and after landing, and then on the tram to the hotel, was imminent.  Plus, the book is wildly entertaining.

Everything was textbook as I boarded the plane; everything was standard airport monotony.  I can find entertainment almost anywhere and people-watching at an airport could be the Super Bowl of a lifetime of people-watching training.  There's much to digest, if observing people is your bag.  

A little off-topic, and as a simple example (I like supporting evidence), I hadn't been inside of JIA for ten minutes before I witnessed the first of many soon to come novelties a simple airport has to offer.  I was standing on an escalator, heading down.  The escalator to my left was on the upward rotation, creating a technological letter "X" in the form of metal steps.  I mind my own business for the most part, I don't seek out strangers to talk to, don't give them a reason to talk to me.  In fact, in public places, where there is an abundance of people, my goal is to be invisible.  I slither through the crowd, not making eye contact, not making a scene in any sense of anything.  I'm not sure if my ninja skills were honed just so precisely on this occasion, or if the woman on the up escalator just didn't care that I was there, because she suddenly turned to two men about twenty feet back on the escalator behind her and asked loudly, affronted, if they were talking about her, and that she could hear everything they had said.  I, as previously stated, was on the opposite escalator, moving in the opposite direction and so was not privy what the two men had said.  One of them looked at her square in the eyes and told her, yes, they were talking about her.  Then she released the Kracken on them and began to unleash some words in the English language that I had only heard tales about.  

The voice trailed off the deeper I rode the escalator down, as my thoughts moved from how homeland security could possibly have executed her right then and there for causing such a stir in the airport.  They would have been within the limits of proportionate reactions because the woman had lost a grip on her sanity and quite literally had become a threat.  I never got to hear the end of that argument, but it would end up being just a simple skirmish in the war of my day.  

So, my thoughts moved back to finding my terminal, which I did, and fast forwarding, I ended up on an aisle seat, sitting there, invisibility cloak wrapped tightly around me, Tom Robbins book in hand.  The book had been a gift, and I had just started reading it after I had situated myself in my seat.  I was on page one.

The seats were five across, with an aisle in the middle.  I was on the two seat side, close to the aisle.  I only describe this arrangement to facilitate the understanding that the window seat was currently open, the plane not fully boarded, but really it illustrates that when my aisle-mate would arrive, we'd be in intimate quarters, just the two of us with no third wheel buffer.  A third wheel buffer always keeps the invisibility cloak in tact.  Head down in a book keeps it in tact too, mostly, because most people just don't feel comfortable interrupting a person reading.  My aisle-mate arrived and I stood up to let him get to his window seat.  A break in my reading, and a break in keeping my head down not to have to converse with anyone occurred because of this movement.  Obviously, I had not properly planned this out.

We were forced to exchange cordialities.  He was in his mid to late fifties, a little overweight, gray hair, but still held on to a youthful vigor only discovered after he began talking.  

"What are you reading there?"  Dammit.  Here we go.

"Oh," I muster a deceptively fake air of outgoing charm.  "It's a book by Tom Robbins."

"Not very far into it, are ya?"  Dick. 

I rally.  "I just got it.  Brought it to read on the flight."  There.  Short, to the point.  Stated my intentions. Leave me alone.  He gets it.  And he really did seem to.  I continue reading.

The plane begins to take off in the late afternoon, early evening.  The sunlight is waning, but there's still enough that I can comfortable see the words on the pages.  The airline had taken measures to ensure a convenient experience.  I like to believe that the meeting went like this:

"Look, we can give them more leg space, bigger seats for comfort, or we can give them overhead lighting.  We can't give them both.  Cut backs causing strategic use of our funds dictates this.  We have some tough decisions to make, boys."  He probably slammed his fist down on the table for emphasis.  The members sitting at the boardroom table probably jumped a little at the unexpected punctuation.

"Lights."  They all agreed.  Except Smith, who always went against the grain.

"Fuck you, Smith, it's gonna be lights."

So there I am, legs curled up to my chin, thinking about how Smith needs to grow some balls and stand up for his convictions.  I reach up to turn on my overhead book light, since my side of the plane is angled away from the sun.  I push the button....and nothing happens.  Wow.  I lose.  I accept it quickly, and go back to reading in the dying light.  There's still enough to easily make out the words on the page.

"Ya have to hold the button in for a few seconds to turn it on."  My best friend next to me suddenly exclaims.  Apparently, my dilemma has not gone unnoticed.  I graciously say thank you and hold the button in.  I hold it in a little longer than what I deem necessary, but it's just so my helpful buddy sees and knows that I gave it a shot according to his directions.  No light.

"The flight is only 53 minutes.  How long are ya gonna hold it in?"  Holy shit man.  This guy just directed me to hold the button in and now he's ridiculing me for doing as instructed.  This guy!  I don't respond directly.

"Oh well." I say.  "No big deal."  Still using as little words as possible, no longer so I don't have to interact anymore, but because I've already decided that I don't like him.

He turns his light on and directs it toward me.  "Thanks," I manage.  Maybe he's okay after all.  I would never find out.  The plane touches down in Atlanta and I'm off the hook with him.  "Good luck in your travels," I tell him, and he, none the wiser that homeland security could very well have wrestled me to the ground if they had but known my thoughts as I exited the plane.  

There's more to the story, but my time to write is winding down.  Perhaps soon I'll revisit it and explain the rest.  Maybe, when its rainy outside, or the kids are at school and I'm alone in the house and with no idea what to write about, I'll create the second part.  Enjoy!