Becoming a Micro-Publisher

Tomorrow, Sarah and I are going to be talking to the Derby Rotten Scoundrels Chapter of Sisters in Crime about our publishing journey. Preparing for this talk has made me do a lot of thinking about our micro-press and all the work that has gone into learning to create books. It required learning about formatting, new software, what fonts worked well together, what kind of covers were needed, how to get covers, and what budget they needed. Timetables had to be set up for what needed to be done to take a book from manuscript to published. We had to learn about everything from hypertext and metadata to ISBNs and Library of Congress numbers. 

The strangest part of this journey is that neither of us started out with a plan to go into publishing. Frankly, we were and are still writers first, which is why the press will never grow beyond being a micro-press. It is not possible to write and publish a large number of books at the same time. Each is a full-time job. Now that I have retired there is more time I can devote to other projects, but not that much more. I didn't gain those eight to ten hours a day that used to be taken up with my job. Instead, there were new responsibilities that ended up on my plate. 

Publishing is challenging. There are so many other books on the market that it is very difficult to get one book to stand out from the pack. The pack for us isn't the big publishers. It is the other small independent presses and the self-published authors that we vie for shelf space with. Standing out is about finding the right keywords on Amazon, the right blurb for the back cover, the right places to get reviews, and the right price points to get sales. It is all still a work in progress. 

I am grateful for the people who have helped us along the way and awed that I have reached a point where others consult me with their questions. It is quite a journey from writer to publisher, one that I could not have made without Sarah and her editing skills. 

Weekend Writer: Writers Group Participation

I usually post this on Sunday evening, but this weekend I was out of town until Sunday evening and decided to catch up on the chores instead of blogging. Real life does get in the way of writing.

My trip out of town was partly for work. On the second Saturday of the month I participate in a wonderful writer's group that is part of our Sisters in Crime chapter. This past Saturday the group was critiquing a few chapters of my work in progress. I left the meeting with lots of positive comments on the work, but also lots of opinions on how to make my story stronger. The opinions are important. It is equally important to me to remember that they are "opinions." In the end, I must look at each comment and decide if I agree or not.

There are countless ways to tell the same story. In each, the essential elements will be the same, but the way they are presented is very different. For instance, a change in whose point of view is used to tell the story changes what is revealed and when. I could hand my plot to each writer in the group, and their stories would be very different from mine.

This is not to say that I am going to ignore everything my SiC writing friends had to say. I am going to make some significant changes based on their feedback. I have lots of work to do between Saturday and the next time I give them chapters. Not all that work is simple stuff like moving a line or rewriting a sentence for clarity. I have a subplot that wants to take over the story--that's no easy fix. There is also a pesky problem of second bookitis (those places where I know the character so well that I don't explain it clearly enough for the first time reader). I need to go in and reintroduce those characters in a way that doesn't repeat what I did in the first book of my series, but still gives someone who hasn't read Circle of Dishonor a feel for who those characters are. Like I said, I have lots of work to do, but in the end the book will be better. That is what this process is all about. I want every book to be the very best story I can write.

Now for the confession: part of what got in the way of writing this weekend was the need for a break. My spouse and I stayed over in Louisville for a nice dinner, a soak in a hot tub, and a little pampering by the hotel staff. I highly recommend getting away from the computer now and then. It does wonders for my outlook on making those revisions.

Weekend Writer: Fighting the Hard Fight

I joined Sisters in Crime several years before my novel was written because their efforts to promote the work of women mystery writers are important. The tendency of the literary world to look down on genre fiction, and women writers in particular, is not new. Part of that is snobbery. There are many genre books that are better written and more literary than reviewers realize. Part of it is sexism. Blind studies have proven that when the gender of the writer isn't known, women rank much higher than when the readers know they are reading a woman's manuscript. Knowing the thinking behind ignoring excellent books by talented women writers doesn't change the fact that no reviews, and bad reviews, hurt.

It is a difficult, often thankless job, to write. Many of us are struggling to get reviews, to have our work noticed, and to carve out a place for ourselves in the writing world. Most of us are working a day job, and juggling our writing and promoting with hectic lives.

For all my hard working Sisters in Crime, I am posting the following review. I found it comforting to know  that long before Sisters in Crime, there were women working to make mystery fiction one of the best selling forms of fiction on the market. They suffered through the bad reviews and continued to work. Thirteen books into her writing career, mystery writing foremother Anna Katherine Green was still fighting the hard fight.
In February of 1895 the following blistering review of Anna Katherine Green's novel "The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock" appeared in Yale Literary Magazine.  I am including it in my writing blog as a reminder of the need for writers, particularly women writers, to develop a thick skin and keep turning out great books.

The works of Anna Katherine Green are always sought by a large number of readers who care little about how their literary dishes are served up as long as the dishes themselves are good. Anna Katherine Green is perhaps the best story teller in her line--a line which is almost unnecessary to say is neither literary nor intellectual. To make a long railroad journey seem shorter, or to while away a few stray half hours, her books do very well. If one does not get wildly excited over them, one does not at least throw them aside unfinished.

Her latest soar into the realms of literature is called "The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock." The title is decidedly the most interesting portion of the book, and it certainly stimulates curiosity. The story is vastly inferior to "The Leavenworth Case" and is not equal in continuity or interest to the thirteen other books which have come from her pen. Its redeeming quality is its brevity, for, while one can see into the mystery and beyond very early in the story one is tempted to finish it because it is not long.

Anna Katherine Green never draws characters; she merely introduces a host of people in order that her readers may guess who is the murderer. (Of course there is invariably a murder in her stories.) To anyone who has contracted the very bad habit of persistently perusing her works it must be a constant source of wonder that he himself is alive, for murders must seem an every day and perfectly natural occurrence to him. Of the people in "The Doctor, his Wife and the Clock," the clock has more to do with the story than any of the human beings, and is decidedly more entertaining than the majority of them. The doctor is tiresome, his wife is possible still more tiresome, and the detective was evidently born a fool and apparently never got over it.

The denouement of the story is clever and is well related: it is an oasis in a desert. It is not, strictly speaking a denouement, for the rest of the book was without doubt written around this incident. It goes without staying that the story is wildly absurdly improbable, and this is the reason why it fails of its object, which was presumably to be pathetic. The volume is one of the "Autonym Library Series," heretofore so excellent.