... Telling Me Something?

Sometimes, it's hard not to think Janet Reid, with her familiarity with her own community of writers (not clients), is trying to tell us something personal ... Such is both the ego and the insecurity of a fretful writer Woodland Creature.

In this week's week-in-review post, she quoted me ...


DLM said
But there seems really to be no "middle class" in traditional publishing now. You can't be *dependable*: you have to be a breakout, and - never mind the pressure, it's just a matter of numbers, and the numbers dictate, we simply cannot all be The Next Big Thing.

JANET said
We call it mid-list but you're right. It's like the Army; you can't spend five years in the same rank or your career is pretty much over. Get promoted or get out. Like baseball: you can play on the farm teams for a while, but either move up, or hang up your glove.

Publishing is not the only place this up or out pattern applies.  But it only applies to COMMERCIAL publishing.  You can publish and sell your own work forever. That's one of the many great things about the electronic marketplace: it's easy to access and it actually works. I'm not saying it's easy to self-publish (well, it is, but let's assume I mean self-publishing well here) but that the barriers to buyers are much diminished from where they were 20 years ago.


I think she's seen enough of my comments at her own blog contemplating commercial (what I've been calling traditional, which she rightly calls commercial - augh, and now to fix my tags ...) publishing versus self-pub, and certainly she knows my writing, for my interpretation that she's Telling Me Something - or, at least, agreeing with my self-evaluation - not to be completely out of hand.

And even if it is, at the end of the day, she's neither my agent nor my ultimate guide; just a kind reader - and a professional - along the way I am taking.

So whether she meant "anything" or not ... the upshot is the same. I don't know that I want to hold out for the big leagues. I sure know I don't want to be in the military ...

And, really, right now, what I OUGHT to be worrying about is the WIP.

Collection

Today in "this motivates me to learn more about self-pub" - sigh, it's actually Janet Reid. On the ass-kicking that is the publishing industry.

JJ Litke's blog is stealing into my brain. First it was how being in the traffic jam means: you are the traffic, and now DRAGON CAKE! The post is great, but click through even if only to look at the pictures of the coolest birthday cake I've ever seen. Worth exploring well beyond these two links, I promise.

JK Rowling, whose name has for so many pre-published authors, simply become a synonym for blockbuster success, turns out to have a nimble mind and a way of expressing herself I have to admire. “If my offended feelings can justify a travel ban on Donald Trump, I have no moral grounds on which to argue that those offended by feminism, or the fight for transgender rights, or universal suffrage, should not oppress campaigners for those causes.”

Because, sigh.

On the provenance and price of Thomas Jefferson's hair. ("And now, INTRODUCING the new band: The Fourteen Hairs!!!") The History Blog knows how to have fun, y'all.

See also: the fascinating bit about preservation of WWI graffiti by conscientious objectors at Richmond Castle. Huh.

I Am Not Hilary Mantel

I have dreams of midlist glory!

--Me, as recently as six or so years ago 

People say all the time, "I'm no J. K. Rowling" - but the disclaimer has almost no meaning, really. Even in a climate where you *have* to sell, and sell well - in a climate where authors *probably* can't hope for second chances - where providing a moneymaking brand and the product to keep it going is the only hope for an author to gain "publishing success".

I'm not even Hilary Mantel.


Bestsellers, I rarely read. Some of the greatest authors I've ever found were ones who WOULD not emerge, or survive, today - at least in American publishing - at least not the way they did when they came up the Traditional path. Donald Harington. America's Chaucer, I've seen him called. Parke Godwin, who wrote perhaps the best work in my own genre, to whose standard I will always aspire - and who also was able to get away with comedic sci-fi/fantasy farce too. Not happening, that genre-jumping, not such a long jump.

There is no place anymore for the adequate author, for great writing but un-thrilling sales, for second novels from workhorse producers, for first novels from the rarefied genius.

... or is there ... ?

I don't know.

Among the great factors on my mind, as I have begun to contemplate becoming a self-pub/indie author has been the desolation of the middle class, in traditional publishing.


The situation looks, on the one hand, very much like a symptom of an industry upper-class avariciously destroying a wide, bread-and-butter segment of its own livelihood. I don't pretend to know that's the case. Whether it's the corporate imperative of growth above all, infecting a business ... which never has been entirely comprised of uber-moral artistes in any case ... or the creaking imminence of the death of an outdated system: my education is not wide enough to judge.

Even if I knew enough to judge, probably best to make few pronouncements, in this life.


I tend to be skeptical of harbingers of death. In my less than half a century on this planet, so many concepts have died, I no longer take stock. Rock and roll has died - multiple times, I believe - yet seems curiously animate to those of us in ignorance. Disco has died too - or was murdered, indeed by friends of mine - but retains some vitality, no matter how often we tell it it's over. Civility is a perennial hospice patient; it's been dying for centuries now, off and on.

And so I wonder whether the extraordinary shrinkage of the middle-class in publishing ... and I watch the increasing cross-pollination of self-pub and trad-pub - authors increasingly working both ways, at multiple levels of success and experience - and I am forced to wonder:

Are the evil gatekeepers in the traditional infrastructure the virus - or  another patient?

Or are they - is the industry - are we all - metamorphosing?


Transformation is painful, pretty much every time. We've watched for years as newspapers have died (another one for the list), going digital and either suffocating for life's breath without subscription money, or becoming less available ("you have read your limit of free articles this month PLEASE SUBSCRIBE" and you're splatted on a paywall), or even losing relevance just because the vastness of availability means ABC/NBC/CBS aren't the masters of the media universe.

Nobody cried for typewriters.

We kept them on at most companies, without pay, as long as carbon paper took to eke its way out of existence. Sometimes, we used them to cobble together documents already barfed out of a printer but in need of corrections or additions. We used pens, too.

We began to think typewriters were cute.

We forgot they existed.

We began harvesting the truly quaint ones for keys to turn into DIY jewelry.

The typewriter lives on, but primarily in steampunk design now. Rarely used for writing anymore. Even spiral notebooks find more use there. Though those dwindle too, and we recycle more.

And so ...

I both reserve my weeds where death is heralded, and I believe in it at the same time.

And I grew up in Beautiful Downtown White Flight.

I know, sometimes, things just: move.

And again my education is poor.

Did the middle class move to self-pub when it got squeezed out of the ever-decreasing real estate available for non-bestsellers in traditional? Or give up and just ... keep the day jobs, losing the dreams.

The sheer volume of dreams clearly available seems in this world to me to discount the latter, to an appreciable degree.

Have dreams changed?

I wonder about that too. Because, before I ever even began my education as an *author* as opposed to a writer - my education, with the real and quantifiable goal of becoming published ...

I dreamed of not having to deal with those "gatekeepers."

And, no matter how many of you love Janet, and know you're going to do it, and *have* done it, don't you tell me for a second you never thought about that. "I'll just copy the thing and sell it myself." Even before the days when self-pub had gained the traction it has, the legitimacy it has. Even before people DID that, and it was a real Thing.

Before even I dreamed of midlist glory, before I ever encountered James River Writers, when I was a mere stripling of thirty, or in my twenties, or unable to concentrate but somehow aware I was a not-bad-stringer-of-word-thingies ... in fear and before the blank wall of "how the hell do people become authors anyway" and never knew I would, or could - I thought, "why not copy my writing and sell it myself?"

Easier than learning.

("Oh. Wait ...")

And, yeah. It turns out - something to learn, all itself.

I come from the generation that brought the 'zine to its apex. I come from a wordy dang family. I come from all the fear every Woodland Creature (reg US Pat Off, Janet Reid's Phrase and Wordventions Incorporated) ever experienced, not to say wallowed in. I come from curiosity and confidence and ...

Confluence.

I live, in myself, in that moment where the inchoate dreams of a non-author who was nonetheless still a writer has come face to face with the first dream I ever had, and found that a "real" author can do it too. It's not just the throwaway resort of a 'nartist.

It would be sad if it's the *only* way for a non-bestseller to be published, but ... again, I'm decreasingly of the opinion anymore that self-pub/trad-pub is an either/or proposition.

And I have a resolution in my mind, to always learn, to commit to the preservation of my wee and paltry brain by feeding it with knowledge, and challenges.

And ... self-pub was, in its way, the first dream I had, as a writer. Granted, out of fear. But the way I saw it was an instrument of control. The way I saw it was as an escape from rejection, yeah. The way I saw it came from a time before it ever really existed.

And now it does. Because my dream is widespread.

<Image I'm not stealing, but you should click to see>

Programming note for those who've been kind enough to inquire after me lately - the illness I've had is called labyrinthitis, it's something I've dealt with periodically since I was twenty. It STINKS but is nothing dangerous, and I've been so grateful for everyone's well wishes. It's still not quite cleared off, but I am safe to drive and very happy back at the office, and Penny will be especially pleased when I'm sure enough on my feet for her to get her regular walkies once again. (She's a tugger; you have to be *really* sure on your feet to walk her!)

Beginnings ... (?)

It looks like my last post was the 2500th on this blog. Interesting; it was about neverending dying. It was unplanned.

Like so much of life. Unplanned.

One year ago, I allowed myself to contemplate putting The Ax and the Vase away. At the time, I could not face that as a death, but a persistent coma eventually becomes a death for those who are still in the waking life. It hasn't been long since I memorialized that death, not for the first time, but pretty much in that context. I even said, there is a freedom in letting go. I have been seeing the "release" aspect of death a great deal of late.

And so, it is hard. It is hard to contemplate hope instead.

Stripping off the preciousness and poetry: it's hard, and terrifying, to find myself considering self-publishing.

There is an aspect to the idea that feels like death, itself. The dream of traditional publishing, for me, has been a long one - as long as the writing of Ax itself was, and that was ten years or more. In the beginning, there was a powerful challenge and a business to learn, and that appealed to me. In the midst of that education, the idea of learning another way was overwhelming.

I've seen the commitment it takes to be an indie. I've long, too, seen the liberty inherent in being pre-published. For all these years, the technical side of the self-pub path has been aplenty to stymie me and allow me to maintain an almost studied ignorance, focusing on the traditional pub path.

Damn my brain. I find with age, it is more open, not less, to new ideas and new ways of doing things. I'm a Virginian! This is not natural.

But, even my wee and paltry brain is capable of perception. It has not escaped me that the infrastructure and the process of self-pub has been refined and cultivated over the same years indie's reputation has grown, along with its popularity. And my wee and paltry brain occasionally gets the idea it might just be big enough to learn something new.

And my heart and my talent and my uppity-osity kind of think Ax is a good novel. That it should not die.

I'm still very well aware of its disadvantages as a product. But vanity wonders ... could it work in a market unlike traditional publishing? In this, my wee and paltry brain may admittedly be prone to arrogance.

I am by no stretch committed. Too much to learn even to begin. And this time has been a hard time; it is possibly the worst time in the world to take on such an enterprise. But this is perhaps part of the reason I contemplate it.

As for the rest: I blame my wee and paltry brain. And reading. Reading. Reading. Reading. And a friend who is willing to give me the benefit of her experience and expertise, at least as a starting point. I am grateful for Leila Gaskin. As who wouldn't be?

Sigh.

The comments are open. I would love to see others' thoughts.

Collection

From The Atlantic, on the persistent trend in Hollywood to deny diversity in casting ... "(C)olorblind casting isn’t a form of acceptance or progress: It can just as easily be erasure wrapped up as benevolence."

A guy named Robert Wayne, scholars getting into fusses, “just another Preppy American”, dates of domestication, and the DNA of dogs. Giving dogfighting a new name – a great article nonetheless about a whole lot more than any particular study.

“I keep hoping these guys, who are supposedly Christian, would do the Christian thing and return these objects that they are holding illegally” ... at the intersection of finance, religion, and culture - or, why repatriation becomes complicated ...

From the Boston Globe, on the feminization of book cover design: "(H)ow does a publisher signal to a manly reader that a woman-authored book he has in his hands won’t offend him with talk of motherhood, makeup, and menstruation?"

The earliest prison memoir in the United States, from Austin Reed. Here is an excerpt from early in the book. Here is the History Blog's post on the publication.

Collection

I'm torn between a "who needs garden *gnomes*" joke and a take on the "How does your garden grow? With cockle shells and silver bells, and MEDIEVAL BEASTIES! ROWRRR!!" here. Either way, Jeff Sypeck's garden may (astoundingly) have a cooler guardian than Mojourner Truth's.

But then, Mojourner's got directional hopping. And I've seen at least one living guardian doing a bit of a satan's caper around a fire in *his* garden, so that's pretty monstrous.

Elizabeth Chadwick hosts a guest post from Katrin Kania, on hip huggers, mass production, and medieval clothes making the man. When "one of a kind" was likelier than not! (I would pick only one thread here; historical and quasi-historical clothing is very MUCH mass-produced these days. It may not be accurate, but it's definitely a "thing". Otherwise, American Duchess's beautiful - and, to be sure, customizable - shoes would never sell.)

Carolynn with 2 Ns (one of those reef-ers or Reiders I go on about from time to time, though I've been horribly neglectful of the community and its blogs of late) has some thoughts on ages that are called "certain" (heh - love that phrase!), publishing's slow pace, and prioritization. Those of us beyond the prodigy years can wear ourselves ragged worrying about being too old ...

Finally, Jeff Sypeck again - on how very much more engaging it is to actually read and recite poetry, as opposed to analyzing it. I will refrain from ANY profundities about Michelle Pfeiffer and Black students.

But I have to admit, I never could resist Coolio (and MP's would-be badassery pooch problem in this clip is as hilarious as ever).

Collection

A study in treatment - Archaeology News' take on the Viking Sword of Langeid ("Magic"!) and The History Blog's. Both are good articles, actually. Just interesting to note the popular-press somewhat pandering headline on AN's piece.

How owl vomit helps us study an ecosystem. Also from AN. "Studies such as these provide a window into natural baselines prior to the onset of human impacts in the last century. The effects of human land use on ecosystems can then be separated from the forces of climate change today." Fascinatingly, this study is apparently the first of its kind.

As an author who's joked for years that I only aspire to midlist glory (i.e., I don't want to be Rowling, nor even hope to be Mantel), Jessica's post at BookEnds on the subject is sobering.

Gotta love a good gruesome story (as if bone-inclusive owl barf wasn't gross enough ...), and the HB does come through. Nosferatu's H. W. Murnau's head has been stolen. And here I am, imagining the black market in horror director's heads ... Errrrm. and now I want to watch Nosferatu (but NOT Shadow of the Vampire - even Eddie Izzard's being in that does not create such a temptation).

Jessica Faust again at BE, on non-renewal of a contract, and opportunity. This should illustrate pretty clearly why I follow agent blogs for agents I'll never have. (For one, nothing's at stake. For two: LEARNINGNESS. It's good stuff.)

The insanely absorbing community, resource, and religious implications of ancient Celtic animal sacrifice - in which the animals were then rebuilt into cow-horses in unexpected hybrid corpses. Were the cobbling together the image of a god? Were these to be spiritual servants to the human remains also present in some cases (and also sacrificed - don't let anybody tell you the Celts' hands were clean of human sacrifice)? Were they avatars of living humans' experience in some way? Again via Archaeology News.

Textiles dating back two millennia are, predictably, pretty hard to come by. Textiles relating to the most famous Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy Auletes the Flute Player, are ... well, right here. Thanks again to the HB.

And, in closing: still more proof that The Stupid, Stupid Past - wasn't. The orthopedic screw dating back at least 3,000 years. Because, you know - antique medical practice wasn't all leeches and arcane religious ritual.  BOO-yah, Whig history.

Dirty, Dirty Bidniss

I’ve been reading Janet Reid’s archives – less for education at this point than for sheer entertainment, to be honest. But this post got me thinking. (It is very short, and yes, you have to read it for the post you’re now looking at to make worthwhile sense.)

I’ve encountered agents and editors online and IRL who struck me as … let us say, not self aware. It is not the world’s deepest challenge to find publishing professionals saying things with all the facile and vacuous brightness (and, indeed, the very words) of a stock character in a Hollywood movie about Hollywood. Discussing art and creativity as business translates, and agents have become a trope, be they authors’ or actors’ pit-bull/chihuahua advocates.

More often than evil, the implications tend to go for comedy. Nakedly driven by business concerns, or sometimes almost (… almost …) adorably by dreams, real life Tweets and interviews and so on make clear the expectations and motivations behind “I’m looking for THE NEXT SUCH-AND-SUCH BESTSELLER” or (cringe) the old “this-meets-that” uber-shallow Hollywood pitchery. Expectations and motivations that other stock character, the long-suffering writer, endures to their emotional travail.

It is to sigh.

The point relating to Janet’s post is: I can comprehend the idea of someone who has long worked in publishing getting sneery about the industry and the people in it. Exposed, more than I ever have been, to these dynamics, sooner or later those enamored of their own integrity may feel themselves in need of feeling “better than that.”

Authors, by the way, do this too. Some of them out loud, or in print. Some of them do it in query letters; why else would so many agents have to explain on blogs and in interviews, “When you say ‘all the books being published now are trash’, THAT IS INSULTING” … ? We think my genre is better than your genre – or, more tellingly, my genre is more IMPORTANT than yours is – or reader categories – or other particular writers. And I don’t pretend I haven’t don this, though I have tried to be nonspecific when moaning about querying or reading or what have you.

But most of us learn to keep certain thoughts to ourselves, or at least not to name names – and we all move along.



Which is where Janet’s old post above comes in.

The thing about moving along is, in publishing and in life and in Hollywood and at any job in the world, what it usually means is, dealing with the people we find annoying or inferior, getting it over with, and then dealing with OTHER people.

Because: there are other people in publishing. There are always other people than the annoying ones. Always.

It is no more reasonable to consider “all agents” as possessing any one property than it is to paint every member of any particular gender, race, political party, or age group as a single, monolithic whole – homogeneous, and uniformly good or bad, or rich with nougaty goodness, or perhaps a little too salty with my high blood pressure, so I’d better hold off.

When I was actively querying (and I am still toying with research here and there, though nothing’s been sent of late), I queried GOOD agents. People for whom I have respect.

If I want to participate in this industry, I *need* to respect it.

The idea of considering it a dirty thing on the face of it, but “a necessary evil” is not merely bewildering to me, it’s confounding. To consider my work as product in no way demeans it, to me – if selling art was good enough for Michelangelo, it's good enough for me. As hellaciously painful as it’s been to watch my first borne (I’ll spell it that way rather than literally indicating labor and delivery in the biological sense) possibly fail, it doesn’t tell me I’ve written a bad novel nor that those who recognize they can’t sell it are the bottom-feeding minions of Be’elzebub. It tells me they’re being realistic about business.

It also tells me about the importance of how I populate my stories, and a whole raft of other privilege- and diversity-centric stuff I’ve blogged about already, but those are other posts.

Not one single agent in the world has done one thing to stand in my way. None could nor would stop me if I chose to get The Ax and the Vase out into the world; self-publishing is a perfectly cromulent piece of this business. I feel that *I* do not make a good prospective self-publisher, because the kind of sweat equity I long to invest in this work is different, and I frankly fear my competence to serve my novels without the partnership and network of traditional publishing.

But that doesn’t make traditional publishing my obstacle.

Only I can be that, for myself, and … I kind of prefer not to do that.

My faith in magic ain’t what it used to be (if it ever was), and my expectations have never been that Hilary Mantel oughtta WORRY when I hit the market. But nothing in the years I’ve been learning, and writing, and continually working on all the fronts necessary to my goals …

… nothing has ever persuaded me I don’t deserve this, nor that I won’t get it. It could have happened already, if my resources were greater than they are.

Just not if I had more Magical Literary Beans to get my creative beanstalk to the stratosphere.

Right now, I’m all I’ve got. I joke a lot about my wee and paltry little brain, but we all know I think plenty highly of myself.

I also know, perhaps the one magic I do have in my life, is the great good fortune to find people I respect and am grateful for to work with. Just yesterday, I was struck (hardly for the first time) by the realization that I have a job which is the envy of others doing similar work. Someone said to me, basically, I work with the best people because I am the best myself.

Not something I came by easily, nor early.


Even if I sign with someone unexpected, when it does come, or an agent I thought of as a long-shot/”eh, why not ping ‘em” prospect when I first researched them: when I do have one, my agent will be The Best.

Just as my Penelope is The Best Dog.

And just as there’s nothing OSUM-er than Gossamer.



If I have faith in myself, and in my work – how could I not have faith in the person who chooses (and whom I choose) to advocate it? The agent, the editor who snaps at it, and those who share acquisition decisions, and acquire it?

Yes, yes. It’s all business, and there is a part of the publishing business that concerns itself less with Literary Exquisiteness (or my personal, precious darlings) than with profit.

Hell, it ain’t insurance. And I worked in that industry for YEARS.



So tell me again how PUBLISHING is a bunch of awful little beasts … ?

DABDA

There may be five stages of grief - but many of us linger on one stage or another. Denial is popular, Anger is overwhelming, Bargaining is a cruel temptation ... Depression may be more powerful, even, than anger. Acceptance is the elusive one.

I'm considering it right now.



The Ax and the Vase is a great novel.

It's been my teacher and my child, something that ushered me into the world of an author, as opposed to a writer. I'm proud of it, and it's a hell of a read.

But. It doesn't seem to be a a viable product.

It's been a couple of months now since any agent even requested a read, and - good as it is - frankly, I just believe it's got an uphill battle in store in publishing, and ... if my plan is to be published, I have to provide the best possible material.

Ax is ITS best possible self, but it is not a market mover right now.

I haven't entirely decided to retire it; the fact that there are more agents to query is either a problem or a tempation.

But work on the WIP has become compelling, and though my faith in what Ax IS is unshakeable, if I'm not realistic about the industry, I'm not its best steward. And that's what I want to be. So I'm thinking it may be best to concentrate elsewhere. I'm opening myself to that possibility.


Anyone who's read me much knows I'm not very precious about my darling, special work, but they also know how much it means to me to have this consideration on my mind. My commitment to Ax is not minimal, nor is my confidence. But the odds are speaking to me, and I can't pretend not to hear. That would not serve Ax and would also hobble the WIP and the rest of my works.


This way of thinking has come on me a little suddenly - but, thank heavens, it's also coming at a time when my excitement about the WIP is building. I can't say there's no intentional connection there, either. If I have the WIP to sustain my hope, letting go of Ax would be ... not less difficult. But possible.

And so - I am considering possibilities. Feedback welcome, but most of my readers here at the blog have not been beta readers of the novel itself, so I understand if the comments stay quiet or theoretical. :)



Sigh.

Collection

I wanted to start off with the clip above, because it's not just interesting, but if I could get my mom (and, perhaps, about 58% of the people I know) to watch this, it would make my writing life so much easier.  But they're unlikely to savor eight and a half minutes of an agent being interviewed, explaining some of the most important information about publishing an author (most especially unpublished/first timers) can use.  (Courtesy of the BookEnds blog.  I'm terrified to hit her link to other interviews, and end up down a rabbit hole!)

Again coming from Jessica Faust (who else is inspired to sell their soul for an agent!?), the words I've wished I could shout loud enough to be heard - on agents who need to define their brand!

I asked Janet Reid a question, and here's what she said.  Once again referring to Jessica Faust in a way, we consider agents' perspectives on querying during this festive season ...  (No Gossamer included, but click through if you're into kittens winking AND sticking out and curling their tongues!  Beyond cute, all the way to precious.)



Looking for a link unrelated to authors, agents and the quest for publication?  The History Girls has a wonderfully detailed post about sainted dogs.  Read about Guinefort, not quite canonized by the Church, but revered in any case for centuries.  The post ends on a sad note, but it's most interesting.

Prefer your furbabies of the feline persuasion?  The History Girls didn't forget you: on naming a cat.  All my friends, Janet, and online pals who swoon for his name would be surprised what a hell of a time I had naming Gossamer.  I'm a little glad Grimalkin never occurred to me, though it's a great little name, and it's sweet to know I share a cat-warmer writing companion in common with Francis Hodgson Burnett.




Fashion more your bag?  Here's a refreshing post not sneering about the eighties, at Two Nerdy History Girls.

Collection

Does Janet Reid have the recipe for The Secret Sauce of Acceptance in publishing?  Tune in to find out!  (Side note:  "the glacial embrace of rejection" is the best phrase any of us can expect to read today.  She's a good writer herself, this agent.)

Pour La Victoire has another wonderfully detailed (with photos!) post about her latest preservation effort.  This time, a pair of very shiny silver evening shoes from the 1920s.  This will bring me shortly to my next fashion/style post, on metallics.

Missed Collection!

While I took vacation between jobs (started the new one today! yayy!), I took a vacation from reading those many other sites and blogs from which I cull the Collection posts which have become a feature here.  Those blogs and sites, however, have not taken a break - and, predictably, I missed out on some excellent pieces.  Hoping it's not too late, I hereby now share some of the backlog with you all ...

The History Blog, which originates several of our links today, shares the eye-popping digital color restoration of a 2800-year-old Japanese statue.  The photos here are truly worth the click!  HB's commentary, as always, is worth the read.

HB specializes, too, in historic forensics - and here we have the digitization of medieval bones.  I'll need to follow this project on Twitter, this is the sort of thing that makes Twitter so compelling for me.  I've already seen Tweets which look pretty fascinating ...

For those who find history's mysteries endlessly fascinating, take a look at the new light shone on the long-lost Roanoke Colony, also at the HB.

Take a look at a baby bottle shaped like a pig and tell me whether you wish you'd had one of these when your tots were small ...  I'll make you click through, to find out what kind of toy the bottles also served as, once baby drank enough to drain their use in feeding ...  (As to the theory of the absence of a baby in the burial, I hope the preserve the soil in case it is or may become possible to test whether an infant once lay in situ but is no longer corporeal.)

Stay tuned for a link on repatriation - but here is an expatriation of sorts.  The Dying Gaul visits Washington, DC.  Another innocent abroad ... ?  Sounds like perhaps not.

And the final History Blog link to share today - another repatriation from Britain, this time to Cambodia.  The statue is truly striking.  The blow against the crime of looting is striking in another way.

***

Okay, and now to Janet Reid, always an excellent resource for those of us aspiring to publication - and always a good (and even encouraging) read!

Here, she discusses the hard, even difficult, numbers on the road from self-pubbing to traditional success.

Making me feel better and better that my book is not as short as "everyone" says a first novel "needs" to be.  Ahh, thank you Janet - we histfic authors do need room for the furniture and the art.

On the question of whether you have even ordered, paid for, and received the stove before you start trying to turn it on ...  "Cart, Meet Horse."  Yup.

And, at last - did I query before revising TWO more times?  Yes.  Yes, I did.  And, to me, two seemed to be the obvious answer.  Why would you NOT???  *Finishing final polishes before requerying one, and initial querying two, agents met at the 2013 Conference*

Why Query?

In the world, in JRW, and in our own little group, the Sarcastic Broads, there are writers of different stripes and taking different roads.  Leila and Kristy are most interested in self-pubbing (see Leila’s work here), but I’m lazily/stubbornly/traditionalistically on the old-fashioned query-agent-hopefully-sell-to-a-traditional-publisher path.  At the Conference this year, I let myself ask why I don’t consider the e-route, why I don’t learn from Leila and get Ax out there.

I won’t pretend the tinge of fear has nothing to do with my methods.  There is a certain liberty in being unpublished.  Everything is potential, even when you’re fielding rejections – because there’s still that magical agent out there, somewhere, just waiting (who’ll get the Big Sale too).  But I want Ax to make it into the world.  It deserves it.  Clovis deserves that.

I do.  I have worked my ass off on that book.

The choice of method probably owes a good deal to my own sense of inadequacy in the face of innovation.  Tech doesn’t scare me outright, but I’m not a forefront surfer, and what Leila has done impresses me to death, and though she’s done it with as much on her plate as I have on mine, the added vertigo of being on the hunt for a job on top of everything means I’m weak in the face of committing to more learning.  There’s going to be a lot of adapting and learning to do if I make a change at work; that’ll be enough, thank you.

The real crux of it, though, is that I’m a traditionalist.  The red clay of Virginia is in my blood and bones, and we’re a people who don’t love change.

How many Virginians does it take to change a light bulb?
Five:  One to do the actual job.  Two more to stand off to one side discussing how much better the old light bulb was.  And two more to write the history of the original bulb, with maps and civil war citations.

Perhaps no point of pride, to admit as an author that I’m this kind of a wuss.  But, ask any Virginian, and they’ll swear there’s an integrity to being a reactionary.  I’m not up to snuff in that area in any number of my social ideas, but at the bottom of my being I resist the world’s obsession with eternal growth, with planned obsolescence, with new ways to do old things.  Anyone who’s read more than a post or two here knows – one of my great fascinations is with the depth into the past that human ingenuity really reaches.  The ancient methods and structures which remain with us through centuries, even millennia.  Just yesterday I was reading about the Indus Valley civilization, and how in some areas the basic architectural plans of home building remain the same.

As much innovation and gee-whiz as there is in the world, some things we do, and have done for a long time – we’re not doing WRONG.  It’s no more wrong to go the old-fashioned querying route than it is to self-publish (though I know people who STILL act apologetic and shamefaced about that option, which is long since an obsolete attitude in itself).  And ...

I like a gatekeeper.

I like the sense of breaking through something, getting by someone, to gain admittance.  It’s not about an Old Boys’ Club, and it’s not about exclusivity, but about the INclusive end, the fraternity of old school publishing.  It appeals to me, and – this post notwithstanding – it really doesn’t matter why.  Leila has the strength and the motivation to put Hot Flashes out into the world ON HER OWN and I find that breathtaking.  But I’ll find it perfectly gleeful (even though the process has been, admittedly, a pretty slow one) when I’m agented ... and sold.

One of the more remarkable agents I’ve had the privilege of communicating with commented to me once that the guys like Conn Iggulden and so on are dinosaurs (and he is in traditional publishing himself).  I’ve got about three years on that particular dinosaur ... and, as with being a secretary, I stopped apologizing for not being a wunderkind author quite a long time ago.  The book is the point – the books to come.  And, so far, I’ve got good stuff to get in the world.


The final polish is still going well, though as always not as fast as I would like.  Reading it does always remind me how much I love the work – it’s good, and only getting better fine point by fine point.

Just you wait ...

I sure do ...

Janet Reid, Query Shark

Janet Reid also gets her own post today, because what she's been doing with her Question Emporium posts recently deserves expansion.  I posted her comment recently about what her job is(n't), but that too begs further discussion.

So, read this post for her elucidation on what doesn't sell and the crucial point that what SHE can't sell isn't necessarily un-sellable.  It's important to keep these things in mind.  Though you don't have to go the Special Snowflake (... or is it Highlander ... ?) route in seeking an agent, it is not the case that *any* agent is okay, nor that all agents provide the same opportunities for success.  Agents know this.  We need to remember it too.

And read this post for a quick look at the realities of profit and return in publishing.  What ho!

Janet Reid, Query Shark

My job is not to find good books.

Forget that, and forget ever getting an agent at all.

How to Write a Great Query Letter ... What They're Not Saying

There are likely thousands of articles and blog posts out there offering advice on how to get an agent's attention.  There's also no shortage of agents at conferences, explaining what to do/not to do quite passionately.  I've read and listened to my share, and after a while you start to shake your head because either people are stupider, en masse, than you can comfortably contemplate, or it is just far too easy.  Some of the commonest advice boils down thus:

• Address queries to a particular agent - this means, don't send out a blast email query to every agent whose email you could find, without personalizing nor, perhaps, even researching to whom you are sending.  Choose to whom to submit by researching, and know your audience - and create each submission for its recipient.
• Corollary to addressing a particular agent - spell his or her name correctly.  Seriously, getting a name wrong is a pretty basic insult to avoid in an attempt to get someone's professional attention.
• Follow the agency's submissions guidelines - if an agency as a whole or a particular agent prohibits attachments, or specifically says they like to see word count, or requires the use of an electronic form, counting yourself as the Special Snowflake who doesn't have to conform to simple guidelines is a dealbreaker.  Just do it.  It's the low-low price of admission.
• Content - keep it to a page or less.  Don't yammer about the money you're going to make an agent.  Don't cast the movie.  Don't be a braggart, and don't be an apologetic milquetoast either.  Get the synopsis done, introduce yourself as a prospect, include what is required/allowed, and get out.  With THANKS for time, attention, etc.  (Yes:  this kind of thing actually needs to be said.  Sad, isn't it?)
• Mechanics - anything you send represents your writing.  If it's not free of typos, misspellings, outright construction errors, and precious formatting, it will speak very very VERY poorly indeed of your skill in the field of writing.  If it lacks energy and momentum, the assumption will be:  so does your manuscript.  Your main character, setting, and major dramatic question should be clear in your query. (Again, yes:  this kind of thing actually needs to be explained.  Ad naseum, yet.)

A lot of it is professionalism and common sense, and of course - unfortunately - it's all too necessary to advise professionalism and simple common sense, particularly in a field so dominated by dreams.  People as a whole aren't super with the self-awareness thing, and self-awareness is unfortunately very necessary when it comes to successfully presenting that self to others in patent bids for attention.  Know your assets, know your work, be confident without being a tool, go forth, and conquer.

The thing is ...

I have heard, personally, and read countless times:  "If you can get these things right, you WILL GET ATTENTION."  I've heard agents say, if you get these things right, you're ahead of 95% of the queries they see.  It is a song oft-sung, and it has a pleasing melody.

It gives a fat whack of us confidence that that's all there is to the magic.

Then we send out several dozen queries, all conforming to these general standards, and - not at all astonishingly - do not receive 100% requests for full manuscripts.  Incomprehensible!

No.

The unspoken fact is this:  the advice above constitutes only the minimum, and only the beginning.  Regardless of how many times I've heard that properly created queries are an extreme minority - and the "if you get this right you are better than ninety-some percent of the queries we see" figure is an often-heard quote, I can tell you - the full scope of a slush pile still leaves that magical ten, or five, or one percent of acceptable queries at a prodigious figure.  If an agent receives one to two hundred queries every week, you're still up against ten or twenty other competent queries in that week.  And you would be beyond fortunate to find an agent who took on even as many as five new authors in a year.  And not all of those new authors' properties even SELL.

So what they're not telling you is that there is still a lot more than just getting it mechanically, professionally correct.  There's actually making a connection with the agent - sparking their imagination with your story, your character(s).  There's the imperative of how good a story is, how artful your words are, how important it is to tell what you have to tell.  There's the chemistry, simply, of getting the right work in front of the RIGHT agent.

The little-known fact is:  any given agent might be the right one at one time and the wrong one at another.  I've had personal experience with this - an agent I'd love to work with was intrigued with my subject in 2011 - and, indeed, was a guiding force in my revisions.  I got priceless feedback, and significant correspondence with this query.  A year later, revisions done, this same agent was very frank in saying this wasn't his current area of interest, and it may take a very long time for him to read it again - if he ever does.  Even with my work in a better place, the agent himself wasn't in the sweet spot where my work would hit the target for him professionally.  Because it's not about "what I like" with agents, and most of them will tell you that very candidly.  The market can exert its demands, and any human being may be subject to fatigue with repetition.  "I loved Work X so much, but I knew I could not sell it" is hardly an uncommon phrase in agents' blogs.  This business - is a business, it's not always about "liking".

You can't make lightning strike, all you can do is set up a lightning rod and prepare, prepare, prepare.

And, keep the faith.  The work is the thing.  Give it a good vehicle, but it has to speak for itself.

Award Winning Novels and Popular Centuries

Day Al Mohamed has posted a striking infographic and some thoughts about what it takes to win the literary day these days.

... and Sarah Johnson at HNS (Hisorical Novel Society, y'all) tells us the most popular centuries in histfic right now.  This is very interesting to me - though my period doesn't seem to be burning it up these days.

The Ax and the Vase will change all that, of course.

Schroedinger's Query

Last night on Twitter, an agent I've recently queried said she was reading something she found so hard to put down that she might have to break her two year stretch without signing a new author.

Now, I know she's received hundreds of queries just in the week and a half since I threw my submission in the pile.  I also know that the one she's reading might not be that recent - slush piles being what they are, it can take some agents months to read what they even decide to read at all.  There's no reason for me to think that I'm responsible for her excitement.

Even so, until I know for sure ... I'm in a state of perfect potential - the cat can simultaneously be dead and alive, as far as my experience is concerned.  Quantum state query.  It's also simultaneously exciting and sobering!


***


In truth, I have been a particularly slow author about my work during this past six months.  I completed the revisions before last October's JRW Conference, but the rate of my submissions is significantly less than it was when I first (thought I had) finished the MSS.  This isn't because I have lost confidence, by any means - and I can't honestly complain that it is because I'm "just too busy" - I'm as busy as I was before, but I may be being more dismissive, in terms of the process of elimination.  I may fear I'm too old.  I may just have become slightly inured to the role of Unpublished Author.

But Ax is a great novel.  Not Great Novel - but a great read, a ripping yarn.  It deserves, perhaps, a better steward than I have been, at least of late, with my lazy advocacy.  It will "get out there" ... but not without my getting it there.


***


So ...  I have to edit this post to point out that I realized some obvious facts after writing it - and the cat, unfortunately, is dead indeed.

At least, this particular cat.  It's possible there's another box lying around in the world SOMEwhere (though if Carole Blake has gone two years without a new client, I'm thinking at least this query might be short on Possible-Cats).

But the thing is ... she was saying she had something she could not put down (clue #1) AND was talking about signing someone (clue #2).  The thing is, yes - I've queried her recently.  However, I have NOT sent her a partial nor a full.  She has exactly what Blake Friedmann's submissions process requests:  query, synopsis, three chapters.  Boom.

The likelihood of an agent getting that far ahead of a preliminary like that is vanishingly slim, if not outright imaginary, of course.  An agent with the experience of Carole Blake?  I'd suspect none-at-all fits the bill more precisely.

Even so.  One more query.  One more rejection in waiting, I would think - and she's already been so very kind as it is, particularly with me kissing up publicly.  One more step on a path I'm not ready to quit.

Even if I am rather slow strolling along it.

Even As It Edges Toward Obsolescence ...

... it still never, ever gets old - nor even ends up quite *wrong* ...

Progress, Then Off to Bed

An update for those who (astoundingly!) claim to find this sort of thing interesting (hi, Cute Shoes!) ... querying still going well.  After nothing but eliminations last night, found a good one tonight, and got that off a little while ago.  One query in a night may not be much - perhaps other authors do more at a time - but I start with a pretty large list as a rule, research carefully, and eliminate based on a fairly well-educated-at-this-point set of criteria.

I don't query in hard copy.  This made me feel guilty for a bit - what if I am missing out? - but in this day and age, it's the rarer agency who won't accept electronic than who will, and I look at this as a business consideration.  If even a Luddite such as myself finds email etc. a convenience, the refusal of the practical advance using it represents (not to mention the affront to trees; what a wasteful practice, even with recycling) and the excesses of time it requires are, valid or not, a deal-breaker for me.  We're coming to a time when refusal to go electronic almost looks like pointless posturing - whether to intimidate or just look snobbishly elite - and I don't need that noise.  (Yes, it has occurred to me that sticking with hard copy reduces the slush pile flow.  But I have to draw my personal lines somewhere.  Your lines may vary!)

If an agent's idea of historical fiction is undefined, and their website is predominantly pink and precious, I won't query.  It's my guess you're looking for romance-in-a-corset, and that's great stuff, but I'm writing ahead of the (European) invention of that bodice-heaving accessory, and my work is passionate, not romantic.  It also involves an awful lot of blood and blades ...

... but, muscular as my work may be, I'm also not quite Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden, nor even (and I love this guy!) Ben Kane.  If I think the cover designs for your histfic would work as well for genre video games, I might not query there either.  Or I will be pretty careful about it.

I'm even getting so I want to eliminate agents who don't clearly state their taste profile on their website, or at Agent Query, QueryTracker, or another such clearinghouse listing site.  Yes:  the need to research agents and read interviews is understood; but, if I have to open three or more pages to get to the meat of the matter, you're fatiguing me unnecessarily.  It's almost as wasteful of my time as snail-mail querying.  And wears authors out.  Have a page on your agency website with a blurb for each agent, and IN THAT BLURB please tell me what you want to see - genre, taste preference, authors on your list - I don't care which way you do it, but give me some sort of an indication.  With everything we have to do to appeal to you guys, coyness is just a cruel return on our quest to attract literary (publishing industry) attention.

So only one query out tonight.  For me, given the grumpy exclusions above - that's not a bad night at all.

It doesn't stop me querying extensively.  I just don't blanket-spam every member of the AAR without any consideration.