Audrey Kalman's Blog, page 21

The new tradition of publishing

I feel in good company as a writer, again. This morning I heard that thriller writer Barry Eisler "turned his back on traditional publishing," as a story on NPR's Morning Edition put it.

He did with his new book "The Detachment" what I did with "Dance of Souls" — released it as an e-book on Amazon, followed with a print version. Okay, it was a little different for him. He's an established author and Amazon approached him with the idea of skipping the traditional publishing route.

It's not that I wanted to give up on traditional publishing. Why would I want to forgo months — nay, years — of shopping my manuscript around to agents in the hope of getting someone, someday, to take it on… so they could then shop it around to publishing companies and take a 15 percent cut for their troubles? Why on earth would I not want to wait months and months as my book wound its way through the production process? Why would I not want, as a first-time author, to be granted a print run in the low thousands and relegated to the greenest of marketing teams, thus pretty much guaranteeing that my book would never go anywhere?

Okay, venting over. I know that there are advantages to traditional publishing, not the least of which is that the filtering process that makes it so difficult to get published in the first place can actually help you get noticed. That green marketing person, it turns out, has way more connections to reviewers, for example, than an most individual authors have. It's a heck of a lot of work to market yourself, and sometimes it's more effective to pay someone else to do it. And pay you must; I recently learned that my local independent bookstore is happy to carry local author's books on consignment… for a fee. (I am currently figuring out how this figures into my marketing plan.)

But for me and for thousands of other writers, the non-traditional way of publishing offers what may be the only chance of ever having our work read. And on this, I'm with Eisler, who said, "What I care about is readers."

It remains to be seen whether new publishing venues like Amazon and its on-demand arm, CreateSpace, eventually be come the new establishment. In the meantime, I'm happy to be out there, getting read, one book order at a time.

Wrestling

There's a point I always reach in writing a novel that feels like running headlong into a brick wall, and I've reached it with my novel-in-progress.

It usually comes about 50 or 75 pages in, when the initial idea has begun to have some "legs." Many scenes have been written, characters begin to emerge. Sometimes the wall comes in the form of a plot stumper, an inability to construct the book's events. Sometimes it comes, as it has now, in the form of a stylistic question so palpable I feel like I'm physically wrestling with it.

I have a pretty good idea of the novel's form and characters, as well as the overall plot arc. The problem is that I can't decide on the voice: first person or third person? Given the form, first person makes the most sense. But I know what a challenge first person can be. The novel before "Dance of Souls" was written in alternating first-person accounts. It was a bear.

What I should do is try writing the chapters I have already completed both ways before going on. This goes against everything my fingers are itching to do, which is to keep writing, keep exploring, keep unfolding, accumulating new pages. How can I possibly "waste" precious writing time going over stuff I've already written, changing pronouns?

What I know now that I didn't know ten years ago when I last encountered this problem is that if I go on without testing my assumptions I may end up with a flawed product requiring so much time and effort to fix that I never do it. (This concept has a parallel in the business world, as I learned from my work with PDC, Inc., which counsels companies on creating products based on customer needs. When one of their clients protests that the prescribed research will take too much time up front, they sagely point out that it will take far more time–and money–to do everything over again when you realize toward the end of the development process that you have been working all along on the wrong product.)

So now I know what I'll be doing for my next writing sessions: searching and replacing "she" for "I" and "her" for "mine" and then trying, as best I can, to read it all over with a keen eye.

I sure wish there were another way.