The Day I Met Siskel and Ebert Via Snail Mail

I don't remember who was the first person to tell me this, but there are two words that wanna-be writers need to always remember:  Writer's Market.

If you've never seen this really thick book anywhere, the Writer's Market is a yearly publication that is tremendously helpful if you're looking for a publisher for your work.  It lists literally thousands of publishing houses broken down according to what you've written, whether it be a book, a short story, a play...and each publisher lists such things as addresses, names in the company for you to contact, what they publish, how to submit....

In short, the Writer's Market could probably be a writer's bible for those of us who can't afford to get an agent to sell our work for us.

In my own personal collection, I have two copies of this "bible" - one from 1989, when I was trying to decide whether the Playgirl story was going to be followed up with some other work, and one from 1997, when I began to actively seek out a market for my nearly completed romance novel.  Scraps of paper in the 1997 edition mark a couple of the "big name" publishers who had published books similar to my story.  Somewhere in one of the two filing cabinets in my "home office" where I keep all the things I consider to be important are the rejection letters from those publishers I contacted.  I keep such things as a reminder that, while I've mostly seen complementary reviews on the internet from the first novel, there are the people I think of as "The Siskel and Eberts of the Publishing World" who read my cover letter and nothing else before rejecting my work.  When I start to feel my ego getting the better of me, I go back into my writing file, pull out one of these very critical letters, and bring myself back to the real world.

What can I share from my own experiences with the budding writer?

Simply this:  Writing the novel, play, short story, or what have you is the easy part of the job.  Writing a good cover letter to sell your material is another matter entirely, and something that I suggest you practice - a LOT.  It's a lot like the cover letter you write when sending your resume off for a job.  You have to sell yourself, and if you do a good job of it, you can sell your work to the highest bidder.

I suck at selling myself, whether it be in the job market or the writing market, a truth that became self-evident when the letters I had sent out to try to sell my book slowly returned.  Some of those letters weren't even opened when they arrived at their destination, returning to me with a little hand-written "no thank you" either attached with a taped-on post it note or written directly on the envelope.  Having had the first attempt at selling my work go so well, it didn't take too many of those rejections before I was starting to question whether my mother-in-law was perhaps right about me and that I should take all the work that was sitting in a desk drawer and start a nice bonfire with it.....

But then I got an email from a friend of mine, who had another friend who was just starting up an internet business and might be able to help me get started.

For those who haven't read any of the brief bios I have attached to my book, I was born, raised and still live in Maine, where the traditional jobs that kept our forefathers alive are dying out.  Those who value our way of life and want to remain in Maine have come up with creative ways of making enough money to survive.  Thus it was when, in the summer of 1998, I was introduced to Connie Foster, who was starting an internet company she called "Ebooks on the Net".  She had heard about a new media called "electronic books", in which the publisher basically put a novel up on the internet for sale, gave limited permission to the buyer that would allow the buyer to either read the novel on a computer or to print out a single copy of the work to read the old fashioned way, and cost a lot less to produce - and therefore purchase - than a traditional book.  This was before electronic book readers, such a Kindle or Nook, were available to the public, so instead of continuing to bash my head against the walls of an industry that had antiquated standards for what made good reading material, I could get in on the ground floor of a budding industry that may or may not turn into something good.....

Willing to try anything, I sent off my manuscript via email (in Rich Text Format, which is what Connie requested) and held my breath.  The next thing I knew, I had an acceptance letter in my mailbox that contained a very specific contract, stating that I was only selling the rights for my work to be sold as an electronic book, leaving me open to be able to sell the book elsewhere as a paperback, should I be able to get a buyer, or to self-publish a paperback with a local print shop, should I be able to drum up the money to do so.  Within a couple of months, there was a beautiful thumbnail "cover" and a brief description of my story on Connie's web site, I started seeing small checks at the end of each quarter with the royalties I had earned from the sales, and I could proudly proclaim myself as a "published novelist".

The friend who had connected me with Connie, wanting to be able to have a copy of my book on her bookshelf so she could brag that she was friends with a published writer, loaned me the money to go to a printer in Denmark, Maine to have a limited amount of books printed.  The one problem I encountered was that the beautiful cover that had been designed by Connie's friend, Fannie Glass, couldn't be increased to an 8 x 5 cover without "pixilating" (a new term for me at the time), which made it look much less impressive, so I learned a new trick:  How to make a book cover.  It was a very sad attempt, one I have never been proud of, but it served to allow me to get 200 copies of the book printed for my friends who wanted a signed book.  In order to make back the money I had borrowed, I started out selling these "limited edition books", basically selling them at just enough to make back the cost of producing them and mailing them.  When sales petered off, I put the rest into a closet that isn't used for much else, and thought that was the end of it.

But in the way of today's world, new technology began to make electronic books popular.  Connie's tiny business was bought out by another ebook publisher in Maryland in 2002.  My book was one of the ones that the new company liked enough to offer me a new contract, with a sexy new cover, and a redistribution contract that would allow my ebook to be offered on such web sites as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  The quarterly checks, still not showing massive sales for the book, but showing that it was selling pretty steadily, continued to come in.

When the publisher decided to step into the Print On Demand market in 2008, allowing for books to be printed on truly nice paper instead of printing massive editions of cheap paperbacks that might clog up bookseller's shelves for years before the last copy was sold, I got offered another contract to allow this to happen.  Thrilled, but seemingly still unable to sell myself to bookstores, I learned that advertising takes LOTS of money - and since I don't HAVE lots of money, I've continued to get very modest quarterly royalty checks, which are a nice little surprise whenever they arrive, but not enough to cover a major advertising campaign.

In the meantime, the redistribution clause from my prior contract allowed Amazon to offer my ebook in other countries.  Imagine my surprise when I was demonstrating to a boss that one can Google a name and pull up all kinds of interesting things - and I discovered that my book was available in such places as Germany, England, Canada, Spain.....

(In short, when I first joined the internet community in 1997, my name brought up exactly three search results on Google, two of which were people who shared my name.  Now, as pointed out by a cousin who was just trying to confirm my home address before trying to surprise me with some family heirlooms he wanted me to take charge of recently, I'm "everywhere".)

So, the basic lesson I wanted to share when I sat down and wrote this post, which seemingly has turned into a novella, was this:

1)  Just because you're getting rejection slips from the big publishing companies doesn't mean your work isn't good, sometimes it just means that you have to find the right market.  Keep trying, and don't forget to approach small local companies.

2) Listen to your friends when they suggest something that is a little unorthodox for you to try.  The worst case scenario is that you have someone read your work who will give you critical ways to correct the issues that are causing your work to be rejected.  The best case scenario is that you may find your work getting into a new market before it becomes popular, sliding you in on the ground floor of a new technology.

3) Just because you aren't making the kind of money Stephen King is making doesn't mean that you aren't a successful writer.  While you're busy doing other things, your work may be going places you never expected it to go.

4)  Even if you can't afford a massive advertising budget, you can afford a free web site service where you can start a personal web site that may eventually gain international attention from those places your work has gone, but you never have.  You can afford to spend some time in social media and make new friends who can help you by suggesting other free ways of drawing attention to your work, such as blogging.  You can afford to spend a little time sharing your experiences and making the world a better place for struggling writers and artists who can learn from your mistakes, and thereby make even more friends.

For the next post, I'm going to take a deeper look at some of the boring parts of this job for a new friend I've made through this blog.  Hopefully, by working together, we can defeat the Monster of the Editing Lagoon and discover another new writer......