Q22 So the thing is, I’m very upset about the marketing of my books. I don’t have an agent, I submitted to [ ] directly, and since then I can’t help but feel that they haven’t taken me seriously enough as an author. I mean, I have yet to walk into a single bookstore and find my book there. I’ve only found it in [ ], and that’s about it. As far as marketing goes, there’s nothing that these guys really do, and I’m quite upset about that.

[Anon]

I spent a lot of time in my 20s feeling angry about situations like this, ended some friendships, wrote several stinkery emails and so forth. It was mostly a waste of time and quite embarrassing to remember.

There’s no point feeling upset about this, it’s likely to be counter-productive. There are things you can do to make the situation better.

1. Understand that no one cares about your feelings or, unless you’re lucky, about your work. Publishing, like any other ‘creative’ industry, has no feelings. It’s a business and while it’s a field where many amazing people work, it’s as cold as any other business. When your stock is high, you can do no wrong, when it’s low, you find yourself in situations such as the one in your question. It’s not you. It’s not even them. It’s market conditions plus new-world or old-world feudalism. Actually, sometimes it could be them. Or you. Everyone wants to write, no one wants to read, everyone wants to be a star, no one wants to figure out how. If your publisher or agent or manager or whoever aren’t doing anything for you, it’s because you are not one of their top earners and their top earners are the ones keeping their jobs safe. Also, remember, while creative fields are full of wonderful people, they’re also full of complete assholes. The ratio is no more or less than any other industry, but if it ever feels like people are enjoying not giving you what you feel is your due or you’ve been going on about things and there’s no sign of change, it’s entirely possibly that someone in the equation is being unprofessional. Sometimes everyone is. If no one is being unprofessional, then it’s the market.

2. Remember that top sellers – and this is especially true in unstructured, developing publishing industries – may or may not be good writers by whatever your standards are, but your feelings about the quality of their work is irrelevant, because often what they do have – and you probably don’t – is a business plan. A carefully selected demographic. A strategy beyond ‘Write. Rule the world.’ There’s a lot going on under the surface of the industry that you don’t know about. In today’s world, people come into the field from other fields, knowing that to earn Y, they have to spend X. Many authors around the world spend huge amounts on advertising, promotions, buybacks, retail space, events, brand sponsorships, networks, including very unethical spending on fake reviews on various platforms. Many others simply lie consistently and loudly. But it’s not some kind of Mordor. Many bestselling authors don’t, and have never needed to do any of these things. And there’s no reason to judge those who do – It’s an investment in fame, access and personal branding. We live in a post-truth world, and publishing isn’t killing people, only careers.

In today’s climate the onus of promotion has shifted on to the author, unless the author is a sure-shot high earner, in which case publishers are happy to invest. This leads to many publishers taking it quite easy when it comes to promotion for new work, or for authors they have dumped in the midlist, because their high earners are taking care of their own shit and the effort/output ratio for new work/don’t-know-how-to-sell-it work isn’t favourable. Yes, I know, new work needs nurturing and promotion and all of that. It doesn’t get it. This is not going to change.

3. There are many people out there trying to rip off newcomers – and old-timers – with pay-for-promo schemes. I don’t know about that scene but I’m not good at gaming systems. Unfortunately. I wish I was. I also have no particular interest in that scene. If you’re good at jugaad and spotting jugaad, find them.

4. Sometimes it’s not a business plan, sometimes the other authors are just sexier to the publisher than you are – easier to slot, easier to sell. In one of the earlier posts I’d talked about things that make authors more marketable. Read that. Think about what you can do to make publishers, journalists, other humans more interested in you. Some people achieve this with makeovers and new shoes. Others change names, genres, countries. Try not to commit crimes.

5. Some authors try to be relentlessly abusive and obnoxious and bully everyone else in the system until they get the attention they want. This route is quite effective if you’re okay with everyone hating you and laughing about you behind your back. Many are. The little people you are stomping on now will grow up and end your career when you are old, though, so time your exit wisely.

6. You can leave publishers if it isn’t working out. It’s a business and no one will murder you. If they are not interested in you, and you are not interested in them, then, you know. Everyone’s time would be better spent doing things they are more excited about.

7. It’s a stamina game. If you want to play it the old-fashioned way, remember: hard work, talent, and luck. You need all three. Often – nearly almost always – they do not line up. Sometimes they do. You can either keep at it and hope for the best or just drop it. Either is fine.

8. Also, every now and then, the playing field changes. At least once every seven years. The business is cyclical, trends come and go, and there are permanent cultural shifts, so change is guaranteed. Technology changes, readers change, tastes change, markets change, companies change. The next shift might be exactly the right opportunity for you. But don’t sulk if it isn’t. I’m horrible when I sulk. So are you, probably.

Q23 I’ve been down the road of the self marketing author, and it hasn’t been pleasant. I don’t believe in spamming random content to generate interest, and instead I’ve tried to slowly build an online presence using elements of the book, even a live action book trailer and everything, but it hasn’t really worked. The second book has been even worse; it’s pretty much sitting dead in the water with zero marketing.

[Same Anon]

Marketing is work. Marketing is also skill. But mostly it is work. Some people really enjoy it. Other people genuinely hate it – or claim to hate it, I have my doubts – but do it relentlessly. I admire both these types of people because they have excellent survival skills and come the apocalypse I shall be hiding out in their bunkers because they will make sure everyone knows the location and that it is the Best and Most Exclusive But Also Universally Popular Bunker.

If it is not something you are naturally good at or enjoy, and if these are things you cannot change about yourself, then it will never be pleasant. The important thing then is to make peace with doing the amount of marketing/promo work you are willing and able to do, to the best of your ability, to recognise that no one else is going to do it for you – you might see it as other people’s jobs, but they see it as yours – and to accept the consequences of this.

Good for you for not spamming relentlessly in the absence of a unique plan. I wish more people were like this. The waterline for acceptable behaviour on the internet has been rising steadily – even massively successful authors are now retweeting praise from possibly-bots like failed Bollywood actors. And when they do it, everyone else feels like they HAVE to, I guess. So figure out what you’re comfortable and happy doing in the promotion of your own work, find the smaller subset that’s things you are actually able to do, and do those things, instead of feeling bad about opportunities other people are getting, or spam that spammers are generating.

The thing with books and films and shows and comics and all the other stuff is that when we’re outside the city we only see the really successful people waving to the assembled masses from inside the highest towers. But life in the city is fun too, and it’s easier than ever before to get in. You are probably never going to be JK Rowling or Salman Rushdie. You might be even bigger some day, who knows. But writing is really fun, so don’t waste too much time being angry and resentful. My biggest regret of the last 15 years, writing-career-wise, is time wasted feeling angry and resentful about walls I did not build and cannot break but remain determined to find interesting ways to crack.

Q24 …my publisher is undermining what the book could possibly become.

[I have an option clause, how can I leave?]

…there’s also the matter of splitting up the last book of a trilogy, giving it to a new publisher. I have no clue how viable that is, or how that will affect things.

… Could you help me out here?

[Same anon]

No, can’t help you out here. But while not helping you, I can tell you that your publisher is not undermining anything, it’s just that they’re not seeing good RoI on spending time and resources promoting you and they have other books that are more important to them than yours and other things to do with their time. Ultimately, you have to decide whether you want to carry on – in which case finish the trilogy – or start afresh, which involves taking your rights back from your publisher for the entire series and either finding a new publisher for the whole thing or going indie. Two publishers on the same series will only mean each will only blame the other for the whole thing’s failure while not doing anything to fix things. So do one of the previous two options. People have done both of these things many, many times in publishing, which, again, is a business, and succeeded.

Q25 How do you decide what to write about? Every moment you can have a new idea. And you never know which one is the one. So how do you decide?

Ani Dalal

Make a list. Just pick one after either thinking about it or using arbitrary chance-based methods like tossing coins. If it’s the right one you’ll finish it. If you abandon it then make a new list. If you picked the wrong one and finished it anyway then make a new list. Or start several and do them all simultaneously. Do what you feel like doing. There is no universal answer to this question and anyone who tells you they have one is lying. Or. There is a right answer to this question but I’m deliberately not telling you because it’s my secret. Or I’m lying. Who knows, really.

JUST PICK ONE. But take as long as you need to figure it out. Don’t rush it. Don’t take too long.

I could keep answering this question for days without helping you at all so I’ll stop. Write what you feel like writing when you feel like writing it.

Q26: Do writers need to get their work edited before submitting it to magazines? If so how does one find an editor? What’s the format for a cover letter when submitting a draft?

@anymysha

No, as far as I know. Magazines have their own editors or freelance editors that they work with. But I don’t know too much about how this works because I haven’t worked in the submitting-to-magazines space. Usually the good magazines can figure out if you’re a good writer who just needs an edit, so I wouldn’t really worry about finding an editor pre-submission. Cover letter formats : Google.

Q27: What about writing which is in an unconventional format? I’ve written scripts for a web series. Do not know what to do with it…)

@anymysha

In general, unconventional formats = Unstructured market information/access/payment/strategy problems + Developing market early entry/easier access/faster rise advantages. You need a LOT of hustle because it’s all uncharted and There Be Dragons. See Things Which Make Writers More Attractive – it applies to creators across the board. The usual risk/reward potential advantages apply but if you were risk-averse you wouldn’t be writing scripts for web shows. Or writing at all.

Good luck! If it’s Bombay, none of the real information exists in written form but try read up on news in whatever the field is. Go do do a lot of meetings. Talk to everyone you can find. Don’t believe anything they say. Leave the door open behind you when you get in.

Q28 In case of speculative fiction, is it better to contact literary agents or directly publishers (only those that accept unsolicited submissions)?

Riddhi Mukherjee

Always better to go through agents or anyone who has a financial/emotional stake in your success, doesn’t charge you upfront and can help you avoid rookie mistakes. In developed markets, agents are specialised so spec-fic has its own set of agents, as does every category that books or other media can be artificially divided into. In developing markets everyone does everything all the time and no one knows what’s going on. Remember that developing markets are created in imitation of developed markets, but the arbitrarily transported rules and categories don’t usually apply. So if you look at some of the biggest success stories of Indian publishing – say Chetan Bhagat, Amish Tripathi – they broke the market and built their own after trying the traditional way, failing, and realising they were far smarter than the people they were submitting manuscripts to. Interestingly neither has had much success in developed markets so far, though if they want to figure that out I’m sure they will. Other interesting people who pretty much made up their own rules are Devdutt Pattanaik, who built his own field, and Sarnath Banerjee, who spent years educating traditional publishing about graphic novels and then published his successfully. None of these people fit any kind of traditional publishing type. Neither did I, but here’s living proof that survival is possible. So follow all rules as long as you want to, but if you have the ability to make your own, do that immediately.

Q29 I’ve heard there is no market for short stories or poetry. Why? Should I not write these?

(Anon, a well-known short story writer and poet and friend)

I’m sure someone told Jhumpa Lahiri not to write short stories when she was starting out. Now she’s writing books in Italian because she feels like.

‘There is no market for X’ means a few things. It means that there’s no absolutely 100% multiple-time-successful formula for massive, easy commercial success for X. It means that the person saying this doesn’t know how to sell X or has failed at selling X before. It means that someone else might have told him/her this and he/she believed it because it was easy. It means you need to either talk to someone else or prove this wrong. Or find a different platform. Or a different medium. Or a different market.

If you want to write X, write X.

There’s never a market for anything until suddenly there is. When you create a market for X, suddenly everyone will have always known that X was the next big thing.

Each time my career has moved upwards – in India, in Europe, in the US – it’s because a set of people were willing to try something new. Usually this was after other people had refused to try this because no one had done it before. Just keep asking until you find such people, and then hold on to them for dear life.

Q30 Have a question you haven’t covered: how do you handle rejection from publishers/agents as a young writer? I mean, sure, by not taking it personally etc. but does it feel like a punch to the gut every time or does it, to use a cliché, get easier with time?

Vedashree Khambete-Sharma

Vedashree is very successful and smart and funny and writes books and other things. Go read her here.

Rejection gets much easier to deal with over time because the older you get the more you understand that it’s not you as a human person that’s being rejected, or your talent, or your time, but that the profit-seeking business organisation across the table does not find your product or service suitable to its financial/branding needs and goals and plans at this time. Yes, these are ugly words to describe the process, and entirely the wrong words to describe your art. You know what else is a wrong word? Rejection. Likewise acceptance, selection, whatever emotionally-laden words are used to mess with artist heads during business transactions. Put the emotion into the creation of the art. What happens when things go well is that you have a match, a good fit, a collaboration.

I infinitely prefer rejection to unenthusiastic/uninspired/uninformed acceptance. Rejection tells you you need to try harder, or try something else, or try somewhere else. All these are fine.

My first rejections were from very polite British publishers in 2002 who told me they found the work interesting or straight-up liked it, but didn’t know how to sell it so bye, try again. I didn’t understand what any of that meant, and was really sad because no one loved me and obviously I had failed at everything. I have faced many more rejections over the last 15 years, but the only ones that hurt are the ones where you forget to remind yourself that loving the work and selling the work are different things. It gets easier. Sometimes it doesn’t but mostly it does.

Okay! That’s Part 3. Pretty much all the other questions I have are covered by the 30 so far. When I have 10 new ones I’ll do those in a post, but it might be a while.

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Published on December 13, 2016 04:05

December 9, 2016

Fiction-maker survival in the post-fact world: Part 2

Part 1 includes What The Hell Is This? and is here .

I’ve grouped several questions together because the answers – as in, my answers – are broadly the same. Several questions I’ve received are also variants on the ones I did in P1, so not going back to those – will be discussing things that we haven’t covered yet in this series. Some of you have also sent multiple questions, so you might see them coming up across groups. Okay.

Q11: I have been trying to write for years but have had to abandon many a novel. Now I have a story but am stuck in the first chapter. Do help. I am also holding a job

Anon.

Do you think it’s possible for someone to create something of any substance while engaged in a full-time job? Also, how do you stay the course? One of my biggest problems is writer’s block either with starting a project or with sticking with one past about 2,000 words or so.

Rohan George

Plenty of people finish novels while holding full-time jobs. In fact, very few people nowadays can afford to write for a living. Most people have at least a part time job, and most writers I know spend more work time doing other jobs than writing books.

Some people take sabbaticals and do their books because they can’t multitask. Some people earn enough to retire early and then write. Others figure out ways to multitask and write books while holding down very demanding full-time jobs. Time management, efficiency, and a huge heap of wanting to do it. Mostly they set aside a few hours every day and work really hard at it. Staying the course is difficult but not impossible at all. It’s very tough. But it can be done if you want to do it badly enough for long enough.

I lived off my fiction for around ten years, but my financial needs in my mid-30s are very different from those in my mid-20s and the relentless pressure to chain fiction projects is pointless and takes away from the quality of the work. So I do a range of other things to make sure that my writing time isn’t spent worrying about money. This involves a great deal of multitasking and much less writing time than I want, but when I get to do the writing I want to do it’s infinitely better than any other kind of work.

Re the 2000-word barrier, I can tell you how it works for me. There’s a point of time in any story where it falls into place and the characters become people, after which the book kind of writes itself with you hovering around to pick it up when it falls on its face because it’s a toddler. The struggle is not to write until you’ve written 70,000 words or whatever your final wordcount is – the struggle is to write until you reach the point where the book starts walking on its own. After that it’s just going to be more and more fun to get back into. The more experience you have and the better you get at it, the earlier you can hit that mark. So it’s not always going to be difficult, just for the first 12-15000 words or so.

Q12: I’ve been planning to write a longer piece of work (preferably, a novel or a novella). I already have a couple of ideas and had already begun writing the first chapter, but have yet to finish it… How can I get myself to finish this novel in two months?

Anupam Sarkar fb

Deadlines are good. Some people get scared of deadlines but others find them motivating and work harder to meet them. If you’re in the former category please forget your deadline because why be scared. If not, and deadlines actually motivate you, set yourself whatever deadline you like, and try your utmost to finish by then. While doing so, deliberately forget the following:

1. You have set yourself this deadline, so no one will hit you or fire you if you don’t meet it.

2. What matters is not when you finish but what you write.

3. If it is your first novel then you have no idea how long it is going to take you to finish it. I think you can only set yourself realistic deadlines after three, when you have a rough idea of how much time it takes you to get from starting to final (pre-editor) draft. But even then it depends on the scale and size and nature of your story so it is not always possible to know exactly how long you’ll take – but your ability to guess gets better.

4. If someone else has given you this deadline and you meet it it doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to meet theirs for whatever their part is in this process.

Stop deliberately forgetting these things after your deadline passes. Remember them all at once and adjust accordingly. Set yourself a new deadline and get back into it.

Also do remember:

1. Starting books is great. Going some way into them and then deciding not to finish them is great. But finishing books is infinitely better than either of these things

2. You only get to write your first book once and it defines at least two years of your writing career. So do the best you can, and it’s not the end of the world if you don’t immediately win a lottery and a Nobel after writing The End. Sometimes that doesn’t happen. If it happens give me money.

3. If you meet your deadlines no one will give you a prize but they will remember you are a professional person who meets deadlines which is better than the other type, I think.

4. Whether you finish your book before your internal deadline or not, please reread it after getting some distance from it and please keep editing or rewriting it until you’re sure it’s good. Just because other people publish bad books doesn’t mean you have to.

Q13: I have always found it hard to approach good, reputed publishers. It seems to me that only someone who is well connected can do it. So what is the process? How does one approach publishers?

Rimjhim Roy

How does one find the right person to pitch an idea or send a sample to at a a publishing house?

Abbas Momin

In developed publishing markets, you need an agent. In developing ones, you need to figure out who the right editors to pitch are through web searches, book communities, book events and book acknowledgements. All of these except the last one are unreliable. In India I would have advised you to pitch directly a few years ago but now there is a massive glut of submissions compared to the massive glut of submissions in the Old Days so get an agent.

Getting an agent is nowhere near the end of your problems though. There’s plenty of material on the net about the challenges you’ll face, which are the same whether your publishing ecosystem is developed or not, with the additional threat of scamsters for developing markets. Read up.

Q14: How do you get into the headspace of picking up where you ended your writing the previous night?

And also how do when and where to stop writing for the day?

Anupam Sarkar fb

Second part first, I stop when I’m tired or sleepy or losing focus – unless I’m enjoying myself so much I don’t care about these things. Stop whenever you feel like stopping.

‘Getting into the headspace’ is also known as starting. Starting is tougher than stopping. Starting is the toughest part of writing because it’s the exact point when the perfect book in your head becomes garbage on your screen.

How you do it depends on what kind of writer you are, which is something you’ll find out only after a period of time, and something that might change every few years as you age, so you’ll have to keep track. Oversimplifying, truly disciplined writers tend to make themselves write something every day, and then spend a lot of time editing. Less disciplined writers tend to binge and fast. It sort of depends on the intensity the work needs. One of my children’s books I was able to sit and hit wordcounts every day until it was done. Most of my novels involved binge-writing for one or two days and not writing at all for two or three days while I thought about the next chapter. Thinking about the next chapter means Facebook usually. Or spending days reading articles about how not to waste time.

Q15: I run 10 information blogs, target is 3 blogposts a day, barely manage one per day! – Q – how do I write faster ?

Manoj Nayak

Your speed will improve as you spend more time focussing on speed and efficiency. Also. Look, I don’t want to be that great-uncle, but do try and maximise quality over speed because in a few years a lot of information blogs will be automated. People I know are writing software to do this. If this is something you want to do for a significant period of time you’ll have to become an opinion leader or whatever the right term is if you want to survive.

Also if you are managing one a day instead of three because you are making sure it’s a damn good one then you’re doing the best possible thing you could do so keep doing that.

Q16:

Do you find it easier or harder to write “new” things as you go along? Do you feel more pressured about comparisons with your past work, or do you feel more relaxed and assured as you write more? Do you see yourself in a particular tradition of writing, or do you like to think of yourself as distinct from other literary movements?

-Siddhesh Gooptu FB

Apologies for terrible vagueness but that is what you are going to get for most of this answer. First of all this is different for every writer. Some aspects get easier, some get harder. Also this increased sense of ease/difficulty depends on your perception of your ability in each aspect of your craft, not necessarily in your actual ability – though hopefully your ability to judge your own work increases with time, because if it doesn’t your work is definitely not getting better. Absolutely the same response when it comes to feeling more or less assured as you write more, it’s both, because the nature of your worries change, and it’s difficult to measure or compare worries at different stages of your life because they are composed of different elements in different proportions.

I see myself in a tradition of writers who are happy to write ignoring current definitions of race/region-based categories and genres and media because their work isn’t necessarily wholly defined by any of those. Is that a tradition or a relatively new thing? I’m sure there are many writers like that. I like my People Also Googled list, if that’s of any help.

Q17: What if I want to write as a side hustle. I don’t know what will come out when I start writing, but I do know the questions I want to raise/attempt to answer – does it work to be writing only for 1-2 hrs a day at best and working or whatever the rest of the time ?

Pooja Sardana, FB

If one were to pursue worrying while holding on to a corporate job for survival, how many hours a day do you think should be kept aside? (reading is just as important as writing, so a cumulative number of hours, if you don’t mind)

@NutAshes, Twitter

I like ‘side hustle’. It implies multiple/parallel/composite hustling and that is my life goal. Pooja, it sounds like you’re writing as much as you can find time for and enjoying what you write and that absolutely works. More than works, it’s really the best anyone can hope for. If you’re writing for 1-2 hours a day regularly but doing it well and enjoying the process you’re spending a lot more time writing than many full-time writers who are increasingly finding that their main hustle has become meetings and networking and pushing themselves on the net and not actually writing. And much more importantly, if you’re enjoying writing you will produce the best work you can produce. I’d hold on to this.

Natasha, no correct answer to this. Read and write as much as you feel like. Do it guilt-free. Have fun doing it. If you’re reading and writing while holding on to a corporate job you are well ahead of the game and there are no established parameters to tell you what percentage success you’re achieving, which is a good thing. We measure ourselves obsessively way too much all the time. Or at least I do. Or at least I used to.

Q18: How does one get people to pay writers fairly?

– Meenakshi @reddymadhavan

Meenakshi is one of my oldest friends in the Indian writing world. We met when we were both in our early 20s and she was angry because I had published a book a little before she had. Today she is one of India’s top authors, bloggers, TEDers, articulate celebrity types, cat-jugglers and other such cool Twitter bio type things. Go read her here.

Meenakshi has bestseller-listed many times (possibly many no.1s? probably. I should keep track of such things) and has received high advances and Upper Berth payments for stuff. So if she is asking how one gets people to pay writers fairly, it is possible the End Times are upon us.

(The End Times are upon us)

The short answer is one does not.

People will not pay writers fairly in our lifetimes unless massive genetic modifications and new tech make human lifespans much longer AND this technology gets mass-produced and cheap enough for all of us to afford while surviving on writer incomes AND society fundamentally changes.

You never know.

But there are different degrees of unfair. And in developing publishing systems we have widespread problems that developed publishing systems don’t – as in, problems that developed publishing systems have at least started addressing while we have not. The two key ones that we can actually go about solving are

1. Information. Without correct and up-to-date and publicly available market information – however basic – there is no transparency, no access. Until this is resolved, cliques and inner circles will persist, both old and new elite will create walls around themselves and only more inequality will result. This will always be the case, and I see nothing wrong with rewarding people for their hustle and their post-writing skills and whatever else but I’m not talking about perfect-information scenarios but about basic beginner FAQs. The degree of opacity and who-you-know-ness across creative fields in India is ridiculous. People have been writing in saying they’ve just learned their basics from my last hastily-constructed blogpost. That’s crazy.

2. Community-building. The crabs-in-a-bucket syndrome affects every creative field in India. This is not because of racial or regional characteristics: it is because resources are scarce – money, information, access – and systems are feudal. Creatives across fields need better contracts, better terms, people to help them ward off exploitation, places they can find out they’re being exploited. We can learn a lot by reading things on the internet about how things are supposed to work in developed publishing systems – that’s how I learned whatever I know – but local conditions here are very different, and creative advice, like humour, doesn’t always translate. What I envy most about the writers I know in the US and the UK, the ones I meet on the net or was lucky enough to meet when I was published in these countries, is their sense of community. There’s a sense of the playing field being big enough for everyone. People are generous with time, information, advice. This is because there’s a certain confidence that some sort of system exists, and you don’t have to go Mad Max with your creative survival techniques. You’re not working in a vacuum. Of course their systems have huge problems and inequalities and entry barriers and discrimination and skulduggery too, but they’ve started addressing them a lot more effectively than we have. You have to replace the tradition of get-exploited-until-you-can-exploit to help-because-someone-helped-you. Until this happens, things only get worse. And by things I mean terms under which creatives work, payments, and access to improved conditions.

Communities, not cliques. But we are a long way away from that.

Sorry, I don’t know how to get people to pay writers fairly, and I’ve ranted enough about this I think.

Q19: I’ve always thought I’d like to start a small publishing house that supports experimental work — is that insane? If not quite insane, how do I go about it? Shubhodeep Pal

It’s not insane, and it’s sorely needed. Go for it!

Ask people who run small publishing houses that support experimental work how to go about it. Work in such places? I don’t know how much money and access and experience you bring to the table, sorry. Are you secretly a super-networked billionaire arts patron? We should meet.

Q20: How complete should the draft of the first novel be before you approach publishing houses?

@anymysha

Finish it. That part is fun. Approaching publishing houses and figuring out that whole part of your life is not fun, and takes time and focus and patience. If it’s your first novel, it will also need all your concentration, and you should be the only person setting timelines on its completion. Everything moves slowly in publishing and the amount of time you will save multitasking between these two different aspects of your work is really not worth it for your first novel.

Finish it.

Ok, that’s this set. More later.

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Published on December 09, 2016 07:47

December 4, 2016

Fictionmaker survival in the post-fact world: Part 1

If you’re coming into the site directly, this is what’s happening:

I recently shared this post on FB and Twitter:

If anyone’s interested in writing/publishing/creative survival advice from me, ask me on Twitter/FB/mail. Will do a post for every 10 qns.

Too much of the stuff on the net is self-aggrandising/follower-bait from novices/exploitative. And writers should help out other writers.

I’ve now survived this for 15 years, and while I don’t have any magic answers, I think I can help you avoid some of the absolute nonsense.

Also, I completely understand if you feel embarrassed to be seen asking things – anonymity is assured if that’s what you prefer. Mention it.

The most common question I’ve received privately so far is ‘Why on earth are you doing this?’

I’m doing this because too many talented people I know are petrified, either because of world events or market uncertainty, and are thinking of quitting. I can’t make their lives better or their fears go away, but I want them to know that they are not alone.

Heading straight into the questions, but a couple of things:

Industry professionals who want to add answers are welcome to do so. I will add your answers where relevant as I go. If I’m getting anything horribly wrong, let me know.

This is going to be fairly sporadic as a lot of questions have already come in, but I will do this as often as I can. Do try and read through what’s already been covered before you send in questions.

Q1: How to create when the well is dry?

(also treat this as an answer to writers block related qns which some other people have sent)

This question is from Joyce Chng, aka J. Damask aka @jolantru. Do see her author page here. Joyce is one of my favourite people on Twitter, not just for her books/publishing/diversity tweets but also because she is a complete badass who finds time in between work and life for heavy sword practice. Come the apocalypse, if you’re looking for a writer’s workshop…

I deal with idea shortages and productivity dips in a number of ways.

I do something else and wait for good ideas to come. Sometimes it’s as simple as working on another project, or meeting humans, or taking your mind out of the rut it’s in by doing pretty much anything other than writing. The good news is that if you’ve reached the point where you can see that you’re in a rut, or the well is dry, you’re self-aware enough to be quality conscious.
I read books and comics. I watch shows and films. I play games. I gape in slack-jawed horror at the news. Ideas come. Once you’re a professional creative type everything is research: life, people, facts, fiction. Take notes. Make future-indecipherable scribbles. Have some fun.
Sometimes the well dries up not because of a shortage of ideas but because life is difficult. Maybe you’ve tried every possible way to figure out your industry but you can’t see the solution. Maybe your real life is tough. Maybe you’re stuck professionally or personally, and you’re not a machine. This happens to everyone and it will stop. Maybe it’s just not the right time, market-wise, audience-wise, whatever-else-wise, for the work you’re creating, and you need to take time to figure out the new plan. Sometimes it’s more emotion-related than anything else. Some people use the process of creation to escape real-life woes. Others need to get their house in order to be able to create again. Whatever it is, the good news is that it will get better, and there will come a point where you can create again – and create better because you probably came out of your other experiences with new perspective and wisdom.
I have spent years not writing but doing writing-related/life-related work. Research. Money-making jobs. Meetings. Travel. Failed projects (tons of those). I have always come back to writing. The well will fill itself up eventually. I have also wasted a lot of time stressing about not writing. That’s pretty pointless when you look back.

Q2: pls to tell Dos and donts in agent query mail.

This is from Sukanya Venkatraghavan, @suku06 on Twitter. The spelling and punctuation are an indication of her sense of humour, given the question, and not the quality of her literary output. She’s an Indian fantasy writer (Dark Things) and I am among the many people who have read and enjoyed her work. If you go to her Twitter page you will see a picture of Vidya Balan launching her book. This means she is very busy and important, because Vidya Balan is not available for book launch events to the general public. She is also clearly looking for an agent, so agents who are reading this please find her and save her the trouble of querying you. This will lead to fun and profit for all concerned.

Agent queries. I’m not an expert in this field because I haven’t done this a lot. I’ve done rounds of agent queries twice: one round was unsuccessful when I started out in 2002 because agents in the West didn’t see how they could sell Indian fantasy that wasn’t about India or Indian epics, and one round was successful, which was Turbulence around 7 years ago. The key difference was that in the second round I did my research, I found the right set of agents to approach for the book, and I wrote query letters after looking up how to structure query letters online. All the things I read then will probably be out of date by now given the fast-changing nature of internet trends, so if you are looking to do agent query letters you should do the same things I plan to if/when I start querying agents again.

Research. Find the right set of agents to query. There are many fantastic resources on the web to help you do this. A lot of it is common sense. Find good sources, make good lists. There’s a wealth of knowledge a few clicks away.
Effort. Finding your first agent and making your first book deal are huge career steps. Give it the time, effort and patience it requires. In the world we live in now, writing the actual book is the easiest and most fun part of the job. The parts that don’t come naturally to you are the work. I’ve often heard actors say they act for free, and the astronomical prices they charge are for having to sit around all day. I have to keep reminding myself this because my own tendency is to finish writing one thing and start planning the next thing to write because that’s the part of the job I really love.
Realism. As you climb higher up the pyramid, agents will find you because you’ve suddenly transformed into an earner. But as long as you need to send out query letters, remember to be realistic about your chances. I know a writer who sent out a query to JK Rowling’s agent and no one else and was very upset when it didn’t work out. The most important thing in any creative career is stamina. Make mistakes, learn, make new sets of mistakes. That’s the only way to do it. Also, please read every agency’s submission guidelines very carefully and follow them. You obviously think your work is magic, but if you don’t approach them on their terms they will think of it as spam at best.
Self-preservation. There are any number of random hustlers out there, especially in underdeveloped publishing markets like India. So please try and perform background checks on anyone you deal with. Find lists of red flags, ways to identify scammers and so on. Leave situations if they feel wrong. Finding out what the basic red flags are is very easy. It’s insane, the number of people who don’t do this.

Q3: I really want to finish my novel, started in 2012. Done 5 chapters, 4 more to go. Nothing motivates me, can’t quit day job

(@impastop on Twitter)

Nothing wrong with not finishing a novel. Motivation is tough to come by. I’m glad you have a day job. Day jobs are things to be thankful for.
If you want to finish your novel, that’s great. It is now almost five years, though, so you are probably a different person. If the problem is that you no longer identify with or like what you wrote then, start a new one.
Otherwise, just take it one sentence at a time and it will come together. Each sentence tends to be easier than the one you finished just before it.

Q4: 1) how tough is it to find a publisher for first time authors? 2) do books really pay peanuts?

(@Rohinik on Twitter)

Treating this as a single question, sometimes it is very tough, sometimes it is very easy. This is a starting set of conditions:

The book is good.
There is a market for it that already exists AND you have brought something new and interesting.
You have submitted it to the right agent and the right publisher at the right time.
You as an author are a potential goldmine and magnet.
You know people or you Are people.

If you meet all of these conditions then the problem is not finding a publisher, it is getting them to keep their metaphorical clothes on. If you don’t, then the usual nebulous mix of hard work, talent, luck, patience, timing, market conditions, nuclear apocalypse etc.

Also yes, books pay peanuts. The number of peanuts, though, is fortunately variable. Sometimes it is zero peanuts, sometimes it is enough peanuts to buy small countries. As Shah Rukh Khan would say never underestimate the power of a common peanut.

Q5: You think a novel from the northeastern part of the country can sell? I mean with all the cultural, historic settings.

@mhanthung on Twitter

ABSOLUTELY YES. And it wouldn’t be the first. Janice Pariat, Anjum Hasan, several others among the brightest rising stars in Indian literary fiction have already proved this to be true, and there are many other examples of successful writers and books from the region. But also see previous answer.

And also please do a lot of reading about diversity in publishing, challenges and opportunities and pitfalls, before deciding what your novel from the northeastern part of the country is. Write the best damn back book you can, and it will sell. How much it will sell is not something you can control after a point.

Will it be an easy ride? Absolutely not, and you know this already because you’re asking this question. I don’t know what else to say. Gear yourself up for a fair amount of insensitivity and stupidity in the process of publishing and promoting this book, and when they make a Bollywood movie out of it, don’t be shocked when they cast actors not from the northeastern part of the country in the lead roles.

Good luck.

Q6: how important is an agent? crucial? Or can one have faith in self and approach publishers directly?

(@BookLuster on twitter)

(India specific answer because in any developed publishing market publishers will usually not accept direct submissions)

Yes, important. Yes, crucial. Approach publishers directly only if you know lots of people in publishing and have access to all relevant introduction. Actually, you know what, get an agent.

But spend time finding the right agent for you. A lot of Indian publishers still take direct submissions, but try the agent route first.

I don’t know enough about self-publishing to talk about it extensively. But I do know I don’t have the relentless self-promotion or sales and marketing expertise it requires.

Have faith in self always though.

Q7: do you think the web is a good place to publicly hone writing skills or does it dilute a strong voice?

(@PeterBangs on Twitter)

The first one. If you have a strong voice, the web will not dilute it. I think the only negative thing about the web for writers is the distraction aspect. Also, if you want to write a novel, for instance, then write a novel, don’t field-test it on the web. If you’re writing on the web, write things that work well for the web and hone web writing skills and find your starter audience.

I am genre and medium agnostic so I don’t think there is any such thing as ‘real’ writing that the web takes away from in any sense. I love the web for what it is, but when I tweet I’m tweeting, not writing a book. I spend too much time tweeting.

Q8: As a writer, do you feel your best is behind you and you have had it with all this storytelling thing. Do you feel like moving on and do something easier like say… Spreadsheets and coding?

(Gaurav Parab on Twitter)

No. Also WTF.

As a writer, I feel my best is ahead of me and yes, if I didn’t I should definitely have quit and done something else. Not a spreadsheets and coding person but yes, there are other things I could do for a living, and I am lucky and blessed and privileged to be able to write for a living and to have survived these years and hopefully many more.

The good thing about writing though is that you don’t have to do it continuously, or for a living, or for any benchmark set by anyone except yourself. So even if you spend several years not writing (I have) you can come back to it.

Q9: How do you deal with the “between books” feeling, where you go from all focus on a book immediately preceding/after its release back to the usual state of plodding on? Feels like post-partum depression to me…

This question is from Krishna Udayasankar on FB, who is asking this because she has just finished her fourth very successful book, Immortal, which has Ashwatthama as an (unfair but easy comparison) Indiana Jones-like adventurer. Read this book and her Mahabharata trilogy. She is feeling sad because she is a compulsive overachiever but she will get over it and will probably be a few minutes away from finishing her fifth book by the time I finish writing this post. Also she lifts heavy weights and runs and does other exhausting things.

I stopped having post-book or inter-book depression after the first few books – but I know what it feels like, it’s pretty terrible because suddenly everything seems empty and pointless. I do not have children but both my grandmothers had eight, and I think they stopped counting them and really noticing them after around five. I did not know them at the time but they were quite cheerful when I met them.

Yes, the transition from LASER FOCUS to whatthehelldoIdowithallthistime can be very depressing, because you care so intensely about the book and handing it over to other people and not really being able to control every aspect of its life can be traumatic. But a large part of being a writer for a decade and a half has been about learning to enjoy things that are not writing. Not writing is great fun. Often much more fun than writing. So I try to have a life. Krishna already has a life so I don’t really know what to say to her except I look forward to reading the next book.

Also, it’s good to breathe a bit between large writing projects. It makes the work better. The more distance you can put between yourself and your work, the better equipped you become to judge it, and plan for the next thing.

Q10: hi, do you have any General or Specific Advice on organising shit when you need to do archival research or other intensive research for a work of long fiction? (i mean mostly novels sure but also longer stories.) especially if just looking up stuff on the internet/asking people isn’t cutting it? thanks!

(Ishita Basu Mallik on FB)

I am in the process of doing exactly this at the moment as I begin a long and slow run towards a very complicated novel. I’m using Scrivener to structure note stockpiles that I know I’m using, and I use Evernote and Pocket a lot to gather material. I look up stuff on the internet, ask people things, and also read and watch a lot of relevant material, both fiction and non-fiction, until I reach a point where I’m beginning to start plotting, after which I only read up specific things, and only non-fiction, when there are specific gaps in the story or structure. General advice: you can research endlessly, you have to stop at some point and dive into your own universe. And trust your gut and nothing else when it comes to taking or not taking advice. Specific advice: always save a spare copy of everything both online and offline.

That’s the first ten! There will be more.

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Published on December 04, 2016 11:13

August 19, 2016

Stoob 4 is done

Waiting for Sunaina’s illustrations to come in, but that’s another series written. Finished it a while ago, actually, but gave it the pull-out-of-drawer-and-see-if-it-works run, and it’s my favourite one in the series.

Which means that it’s actually time to start planning book eleven. I loved writing the Stoob series, but it’s time to write a fat book for grownups again.

Actually, two. Sigh.

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Published on August 19, 2016 21:20

March 24, 2015

I love it when the lack of a plan comes together.

I was extremely nervous about putting Turbulence and Resistance up on Indian Kindle in the complete absence of any kind of selling plan beyond hopeful links on social media. But I wanted to thank readers in India for reaffirming faith in everything. Couldn’t have asked for a better welcome.

So, thanks. And if you want to be one of the kind people who helps keep this going, here’s the link to the ebook. Will post once there’s more news on new print edition/any real progress on the film, of course.

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Published on March 24, 2015 23:05

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