Guest Post Is Live At The Greater Portland Scribists

The great people–including fellow SHUWPF graduate and overall awesome Cynthia Ravinski–over at The Greater Portland Scribists just posted my guest post, “Diagnosis Anthology.” It’s part of their Anthology Celebration series. This is my take on why it is important, but why it is also hard to get people to write, edit, and publish these kinds of books.

Need more enticing? Okay, here’s a little teaser:

As a writer, I find anthologies invaluable. The reader in me finds them essential. But if you were to go to any publisher, you would find they tend to be hesitant with them. I know because I have an idea for an anthology and went around trying to get a feel for who could be interested and what I, as the editor, would need to do on my end. Let me tell you, if you thought being a writer was a tough job, look into being an anthology editor. Writing will seem like a cakewalk.

If you want the rest–and there is quite a bit more–you’ll have to read the rest there.

Guest Blog Post: “A Foot On Each Path” by Barry Napier

A Foot on Each Path

By Barry Napier © 2011 All Rights Reserved

Now that I have sent my self-publishing debut out into the digital ether in the form of my novel The Masks of Our Fathers, I find myself facing an easy question. Surprisingly, this question was perhaps the easiest part of the self-publishing decision. I knew it was one that would have to eventually be asked, but I didn’t concern myself with it in the excitement of joining the growing self-publishing party.

That question is: “What now?”

From what I have seen on various blogs, articles, and on the Kindle Boards, there seem to be numerous writers that have decided to stick with self-publishing via e-readers for the length of their career. I have even seen a handful of examples where a writer has been approached by an agent due to their self-publishing success and the writer turns the offer down. I can safely say that it wouldn’t be such an easy decision for me.

Which is why my decision on the matter of What Next is really a non-answer. Honestly, I’m just going to forge ahead with a business-as-usual attitude. The way, I see it, self-publishing adds a third option to a plan that originally had only two options. No longer are writers limited to shooting for the stars and ulti-book contracts, using the smaller presses as backup options. Now there is the third increasingly popular option of self publishing.

Here you get into the argument that goes something like this: Well if agents and big houses aren’t interested and you can’t get any bites in the small press arena, that likely means your book is no good.

That’s probably true in most cases. But I have a feeling that a lot of writers that are accustomed to smaller presses aren’t using self-publishing as a last resort simply because they couldn’t get published elsewhere. My own writing is a case in point.

Ever since I finished writing The Bleeding Room back in 2008 (to be published by Graveside Tales in August), I made the plan to always have at least two active projects in the works. One of these projects would be slightly commercial and would be written with agents and larger presses in mind; the other project would be aimed at small presses. This was great not only for creativity, but also in upping the number of chances at publication.

When I got down and dirty into the manuscript of The Masks of Our Fathers, I knew that it was going to be a small press book. The pacing and the atmosphere was just too gritty and dark for what I had seen selling well from big houses. It was during the querying process for Masks… that I really began to take the digital self publishing seriously. I submitted Masks to four small presses. One turned it down with very encouraging remarks. I never heard from the others because In December 2010, I pulled my manuscript from the slush piles and went back to work with editing and polishing it up, thinking it would be a great title to test the self publishing waters.

In the meantime, I started working on a much longer novel that I am writing with the intention of starting at the very top of the food chain…the elusive agents and larger houses. Some may call this naïve and overly hopeful, but I see it as a way to cover all of my bases. And honestly, if there are no takers there, I will likely trim it down a bit and send it to small presses. In the background I have a few other ideas kicking around, involving a novel that looks to land in the 80,000 word range that I will almost certainly send straight to the self publishing front. This is not because I think it is an inferior story to my other work, but because it is covering yet another base.

I do think eventually—maybe in as little as 2 years—you will see more and more writers turn away from traditional publishing. The facts are sad: the contracts of small presses simply can’t compete with the earnings potential of self publishing.

But I have always been a small press advocate; I will continue to buy books from them (the actual thing with pages and all) and I will continue submitting to them. But all at the same time, I’ll continue to test the digital waters as well while also resorting back to The Dream of lading that huge contract.

As an aspiring writer that would one day like to make a living from the craft (and hey, the sooner the better), I think it is important that we keep our minds open to industry shifts while also exploring every path along the way.

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Barry Napier has had more than 30 stories and poems published in print and online. He’s had a short fiction collection, a poetry collection, and a chapbook published by small presses. In August, his novel, The Bleeding Room, will be released by Graveside Tales. His novel The Masks of Our Fathers is currently available for Kindle and can also be found on Smashwords. He keeps his online home at www.barrynapierwriting.wordpress.com, where you can find more about his writing.

Guest Blog Post – Louise Bohmer: Writing With Your Ego On The Backburner

Writing with Your Ego on the Backburner

by Louise Bohmer © 2009 All Rights Reserved

If you’re anything like me, you decided to try the writing game because you love a good story, and you want to try telling one. Writing a good story takes time. Much like a sculptor or painter, the first story you produce is likely to be crap. To paraphrase what I once read from a fellow author: “You’ll write a million terrible words before you produce one good story.”

I’ve met writers who are more concerned with ‘making a name for themselves,’ while their stories still require a lot of improvement. Before you make a name for yourself, you need to know how to construct a decent story, at least. Sure, you can ‘just write it,’ but eventually you’ll need to learn how to shape it into an engrossing story that will hold readers.

Stories are the writer’s children in many ways, but we can’t be so precious about those stories we refuse to improve. Constructive criticism is vital to the writer, and it’s in a writer’s best interest to take constructive criticism—whether it come from critique groups or beta readers or editors—and try to learn from it. If eight people read your story and at least five say the same thing, it doesn’t hurt to pull up that section of the story, analyze it, and see if the comments really do justify need for improvement. Chances are they do.

As a writer—particularly if you’re a new writer like me—it pays to listen to the longtime pros. Take advice from those who’ve walked this path twenty or forty years plus. Read Storytellers Unplugged, Robert McKee’s Story, and Mort Castle’s On Writing Horror. Absorb all the knowledge you can. Put your ego on the backburner, if you truly love the feeling you get from a good story—not just reading them, but writing them also.

No matter how fantastical your story, or how mundane, research it. I don’t care how well you think you know your chosen subject, you can always know more about it. Researching elements you want to incorporate into your story broadens your knowledge, insight, and understanding of those elements—gives you new ways to think about your themes and new ways to approach them in your story. Research will make you a more confident storyteller. A confident storyteller tells a confident story, which makes the tale more realistic to the reader, effectively suspends their disbelief, and makes your premise believable for them. Most readers can spot a bullshitter, at least most well read readers can. A poorly researched story will show through whether the writer realizes it or not, because their lack of understanding of the themes, characters, settings chosen / developed will result in vagueness, stereotypical characters, flimsy settings, and a poorly built reality.

Here’s another aspect to remember: millions of books have been written. If you don’t educate yourself somewhat on what’s come before you, how do you know you’re not duplicating someone else’s novel? Granted, nothing is truly original or unique anymore, in a world that’s been saturated with entertainment in one form or another (books, television, film, music, paintings, etc). But do you really want to get charged with plagiarism because your new, thrilling exciting novel (as you’ve dubbed it) uncomfortably mirrors something another writer just had published? It pays to know your genre, and not just your genre, but well beyond it.

Don’t live in a vacuum. Don’t make the writing all about you and your ego, and how your potential bestseller might get you mentioned in the New York Times. Chances are that won’t happen with your debut book. And don’t whine about how the big houses just won’t give you a chance because you’re too controversial or cutting edge. Most controversial or cutting edge writers never called themselves that, nor did they set out to be controversial. They became dubbed so over time because their writing naturally pushed some boundaries, and the reviewers, readers, and media labeled them as such. Nothing is more egotistical than tooting your own horn as the next great cutting edge novelist who is going to blow the industry away.

Step back from yourself, put your ego in a jar, and stop thinking about ‘memememe’ for a moment. Ask yourself why you first picked up the pen, or sat down at the keyboard. Did you do it because when you read your favorite author(s) for the first time, the story blew your mind, and something deep within you said: “I have to write a story that good one day. I want to invoke the same reaction I just had with this book in other readers, through my own carefully crafted words.” Or was it a case of “Oh, I really want to appear on Oprah one day. Having all those cameras on me would be divine!” Regardless of your answer, you still need to learn to craft a good, entertaining story, and to some extent that means forgetting about you and concentrating on learning the elements of crafting a story.

Granted, you should be writing for you. Because you want to write. Because something in you is addicted with every bone in your body to telling a story, for better or worse. But you need readers if you want to develop any sort of successful career. Ultimately, you have to make your audience believe that tale, enjoy that tale, whether it be a sweeping saga of 18th century Russia, or a tale of giant spiders eating people in a subway. You need to learn how to effectively suspend disbelief, how to develop characters so people actually care they might be eaten by a giant spider, and you need to have rising and falling action—some semblance of a plot or anti-plot—so readers aren’t just reading a sequence of events with no real connection at all. Showing—dramatization—rather than telling the story, not to mention what words, scenes, characters to keep and which ones to cut, are all crucial elements that go into writing an enjoyable tale.

Don’t be so concerned with being the next big thing in horror, or whatever genre you write in, that you forget telling a good story takes time and constant learning mixed with constant practice. Don’t get blindsided by the ‘fame’ factor. I’ve been at this, starting out as a hobby writer to trying my hand at the professional ladder, for almost eight years. I know I still have a ton to learn about crafting a good story, and I’ll never stop learning, even if I ever crack the bestseller list. Much like any other art form—painting, composing a song, sculpting, script writing—writing a great story is a never-ending evolution. If you’re too focused on yourself and the name game, you’ll forget the importance of the story, and you’ll lose out on the chance to learn innovative, masterful ways to tell it.

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Louise Bohmer is a freelance editor and writer based in Sussex, New Brunswick. Her debut novel–The Black Act–was recently reissued by Library of Horror. You can read her short fiction in the upcoming Courting Morpheus, Ladies of Horror, and Into the Dreamlands. Her poetry can be read in Death In Common. (from her website)

If you enjoyed this post, check out her other posts at Scott Colbert’s and Jodi Lee’s blogs and watch for posts by Louise at Jude Mason’s and Kody Boye’s blogs

Guest Blog Post By Michele Lee

Digital Rot: How Rot Became an Ebook

By Michele Lee © 2009 All Rights Reserved

If you visit certain infamous internet message boards where horror fans hang out you’ve probably seen threads warmed with outrage on the digital takeover of publishing. It’s hard to miss them, since a new thread pops up almost every month. I try to comment, always the same point, when I can. But it seems some people just want to be angry.

The whole furor over the digital uprising is based on two core misunderstandings (much like most zombie uprising fiction is based on the idea of military experimentation gone wrong, and the failure of the people in charge to protect the little people who aren’t).

First is the idea that ebooks are taking over, that they are replacing print books, and at some vague point in the future paper and ink books (lovingly called “dead tree books” by some) will become extinct. This idea is ridiculous, at least it won’t be happening in our lifetimes because there are simply too many people who prefer print books.

I love print books. The smell, the feel, the look of a full bookshelf, not to mention the ability to take one to the pool or into the bathtub with me for a little R&R. I won’t stop buying print books, and neither will most of the population any time soon. So the market, made to fit the needs of the buyer, isn’t going to stop producing them any time soon.

But I love ebooks too, the neatness of them, the lower price, and the fact that if I don’t like the book I can just delete it and I haven’t saddled an unsuspecting friend or second hand buyer with a real stinker (yes, I am one of those people who don’t keep “bad” books on my shelf lest they infect all the good books I have). Not to mention I don’t have to dust ebooks and they’ll never be stacked so high in my room that they threaten to smother me.

Offering ebooks is not about some forced take over, it’s the same as offering an audiobook. It’s about offering the reader options. Some people find the eco-friendly ebook a huge relief. Some books, like novellas, novelettes and short stories, would never make it to print because of their length versus cost to print, but they make excellent ebooks. And some genres, particularly the more adult ones like erotic romance and horror, are perfect for ebooks because a digital file is easier to hide from underage or disapproving eyes.

Lastly, many borders and boundaries that existed twenty years ago simply don’t exist now. I have friends in Italy and Canada and Mexico that I speak to on a near-daily basis. Sometimes publishers don’t mail to these places. Sometimes it takes weeks or even months to get books from the States there. Sometimes it’s not even an option for a print book to land in one of those readers’ hands.

But ebooks easily cross those borders. Ebooks widen an author’s audience, literally, by being able to reach beyond the limits of print books. This is why I find offering ebook options vital to a publisher’s bottom line.

The second misunderstanding I see in common conversations about ebooks is that you must have a Kindle to read them. Again, this is an extremely limited point of view. First there’s the Sony ereader, which is cheaper and pretty awesome (based on my experience playing with a demo one at Borders). Then there are apps available that will turn any smart phone into an ebook reader.

Always forget your book and end up playing games or Twittering on your iPhone, wasting time? Now you can get an app and buy an ebook and spend that time waiting for a bus, or at the doctor’s office, or even in the bathroom reading that book you wanted to read instead.

There’s the old standby, computers, as well.

“But I don’t want to read books on a computer screen. It hurts my eyes.” Some say. Well fine, fantastic, there are books for you too. And even if the digital market keeps rising in popularity, smart publishers will still be here to cater to your preferences and your needs.

When I sold my zombie novella Rot to Skullvines Press one of the first things I said was “Would you consider releasing it in ebook form as well?” Giving readers that choice is important to me as an author.

The publisher wasn’t so sure. Didn’t ebooks make it easier to pirate? Well, books that never came out in ebook, like the Harry Potter series, are widely available on torrent websites. Being print only sure didn’t help those much.

Well, is the audience for ebooks really that significant? For that answer my publisher went to the owners of Horror-Mall.com which is one of the first horror genre sites to offer exclusive stories available just in ebook form from some of the biggest up-and-comers in the genre. What they learned was that in this down economy the digital books are some of the hottest sellers. The voices of horror might be saying “Woe! Ebooks are the end of us!” but the pocketbooks are saying “We like this!”

The ebook version of Rot is available through Horror-Mall.com for a mere $3.95. The digital version is bare bones, no art, just the story (which I certainly think is enough to entertain readers) but it is a small press, small print run, collectable style story that isn’t $50 for a limited leather bound, or $25 for a high quality hard back. It’s less than $4, less than the price of most magazines and mass market paperbacks.

Books want to be read, after all, and putting Rot out in digital form, in my opinion, helps it find a wider audience. Isn’t that what all authors want?

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“Michele Lee writes horror, science fiction and fantasy from the relative safety of her haunted house in the oldest section of Louisville, Ky. When she isn’t writing she reviews for The Fix, Monster Librarian, Dark Scribe and her own review blog, BookLove (from her website).”

Rot is now available from Skullvines Press in both Limited Trade Paperback and Ebook editions.

If you enjoyed this post, please check out Michele Lee’s other guest posts at Zoe Whitten’s, Jodi Lee’s, and Scott Colbert’s blogs. She has some great views on publishing, writing, and horror. Definitely worth the time to read.