The Writer's Glass - half-empty and leaking...

Today I sat down to continue reading Writing From the Inside Out by Dennis, but as I read his ideas on psychological blocks and strategies, a few things came together in my mind. And one was: any new writer starting out would be entirely forgiven right now for just throwing in the towel and going off to do something else.

Whoa! I’ve been teaching writing for many years and I love helping people to learn the craft and get published. I had to sit back a moment and ask myself why I was being so pessimistic. Well, it’s coming from a variety of things right now, and here are some of the things I have gleaned from industry newsletters, blogs, sources and online chat.

1.      Advances. How low can they go? Some publishers are trying to get writers with debut novels to sign contracts with NO advance. They plead that the market is untried, the budget is strained, the writer is new … Why would you spend several years (at least) working your guts out on a novel and then accept no advance? Because you really want to be published by a “legit” publisher and you figure it’s worth it. The problem is: it’s not. No advance means no real incentive to market your book. You’re on your own with that.

2.      Along with lower and lower advances (citing the state of publishing right now) comes the warning to the less-than-best-selling writer. You’re mid-list and you’re not selling millions so we are forced to reduce your advance. There are murmurings in the UK and Australia that some publishers are starting to “shore up” their argument for lower advances by assuming that PLR and ELR will “make up the difference”.

3.       A lot of children’s and YA writers in particular are feeling jammed between the rock and the hard place – the dollar-making (but often brain-sapping, inspiration-sucking) series treadmill and the stand-alone quality novel that might get shortlisted for an award. If you want to write what’s in your heart and do your absolute best with it, where is there for you to go? Only a few books each year make important shortlists, and then sell more copies. If that’s what you want to write, you can be forgiven for wondering if you have any hope of getting it published. But with every second writer trying to pitch a series, that’s a torturous road, too.

4.      The move to self-publishing, especially in e-books. Yes, 50 Shades of Whatever is making a bomb. So are some others. An awful lot of writers are self-pubbing because they can’t get their books published by traditional publishers, and yes, a lot of those books maybe shouldn’t be published at all. Let’s not get into that. Let’s ask ourselves why writers with really good books (like Hugh Howey with Wool) are self-publishing and then retaining e-rights, or after years of trad publishing, are going it on their own.
Why is this happening?

Because the internet for writers is a combined publishing news service/information update/gossip hub. Savvy writers read and listen and see what is happening, and they don’t like it. They don’t like the low advances and the way they’re expected to do the marketing themselves, so they figure they might as well do it all anyway. If you were an author with a popular blog and a lot of followers on FB and Twitter, wouldn’t you consider it?

You know, I wish I had some answers to all of this. Two years ago, I thought by now that things would have settled down, and to some extent they have. E-book buying has leveled out. Mad-selling books are still with us but we don’t get quite so het up about them. Publishers are still doing great things with great books. But I also wonder (sadly) if trad publishers, in the backs of their minds, are relieved all those writers are self-publishing, and hoping they’ll all just go off and stop submitting unsolicited, and let “real” publishers get on with the job of making money out of “real” books.

Sheesh. I need a glass of wine. While I can still afford it! But I will return - with a post on the glass half-full (metaphorically speaking).

Being accountable for your writing

Everybody knows what a deadline is. Lots of writers I know secretly love a deadline because it is the one thing that stops procrastination and gets you writing. But when you are writing "on spec" - writing without anyone in particular waiting on you to complete, polish and submit by a certain date - it can be hard to stay motivated. Especially with novels. The writing of a novel can go on for years (let's not think about decades!). It can help to be in a writers' group, whether you are workshopping chapters with them or not. The support and encouragement of other writers can be magical sometimes.

Some of you will know from my posts that I am a goal-setter. Years of doing this has proven to me over and over that it works, if you find the right way to approach it that works for you. But it's the day-to-day stuff that gets most of us. It's so easy to spend the whole day on busy-work, doing much and achieving little, least of all writing. If you work in a paying job, it's easy to simply feel too tired to write at night, or even think about writing. Get up half an hour early to write? "I really need my sleep," you say.

So when a billion blog posts (OK, I exaggerate a little) came along at the end of the year about goal setting and procrastination and all of that, I remembered a seminar I went to a few years ago with a hard-talking fitness/motivation guy called Craig Harper. Craig talked about changing or aiming for one thing at a time. For 28 days, and only 28 days. If, at the end of it, it worked for you, give it another 28, and then another. By then, you have a habit. I wrote a lot about this on my ebooks blog.

The key is accountability - checking in with someone. So in January, just through talking to some other writers, I ended up with a couple of accountability partners. Then some other writers wanted to do it as a group. I now check in with both groups. It's not up to me to "police" how they are going at all. I'm only doing this for myself. This is the other key. You also become accountable to yourself.

Right now, I'm up to Day 5. Hardly worth writing about just yet, you might think. But I have 15 pages of a brand new novel already. I have confirmed that yes, writing first is much, much better than trying to do it at the end of the day. Yes, all that other stuff will wait. Yes, my brain does work better in the morning! Best of all, writing for this 30 minutes, no matter what, means I have to push away the dread that the novel is going to be a pile of garbage and just keep going.

As for the first time I tried this after listening to Craig - three years later I am still walking every day for 20 minutes, come rain, hail or shine. Now I'm thinking about my novel while I walk!

The Next Big Thing

1)      What is the working title of your next book?

Runaways – now the official title! Sometimes the working title sticks, sometimes it doesn’t.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

I wanted to write a story about a boy who runs away and how he survives – but not as a street kid in a city. I wanted to take him out to the country somewhere. Then I decided to have two narrators so his sister came into the story. It means I can tell it in two different voices, with different things happening.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

It’s a verse novel – so that’s a novel told in poetry.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

For Jack, I’d pick Hayley Joel Osment as he was in The Sixth Sense. But he’s now grown up, so I have no idea! For Cassie, his sister, same thing. I tried Googling but that didn’t help either. I just have a picture of them in my own head, and that’s what counts for me.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Caught between two parents, neither of whom really want him, Jack runs away and is joined by the one person who truly cares about him, his sister Cassie.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It was represented by my agent and will be published by Penguin Books in 2013.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

About two years. There were many times I nearly gave up, but once I found the place where Jack and Cassie run to in South Australia (turned out to be Hindmarsh Island but I had to go there to realize it), the story finally started to come alive for me.

8)What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Maybe something by Steven Herrick, who also writes verse novels in different voices.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Simply the idea of running away, which I did several times as a kid but I never got very far. I lived in the country and you had to walk a really long way just to get onto the main road!

10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

I tend to write a lot about kids whose lives are made difficult by adults who either don’t care enough or are too selfish or caught up in their own dramas to realize what is happening to their own children. I love the idea of these kids turning the tables and finding ways to become independent and strong, and make their own lives worth living. I guess independence and self-reliance are big factors for me, and I worry about helicopter parents (or their opposite). So if you want to read about kids who find strength and courage together, this is it.

Here’s my list of writers who will be posting next week:

Tracey Rolfe’s writing blog is at <http://tracey-rolfe.blogspot.com>

Lucia Nardo’s blog is at http://www.lucianardosblog.blogspot.com.au/

Demet Divaroren is at demetdivaroren.wordpress.com

Ellen Gregory - http://ellenvgregory.com/

Amra Pajalic has already done her post! http://www.amrapajalic.com/2/post/2012/12/the-next-big-thing-meme.html

A Few Predictions for 2013

Now that the end of the world has passed us by (no doubt somewhere out in space a planet did disappear or implode or disintegrate, but it wasn't ours this time), my mind turns to 2013. At the moment I seem to be reading a lot of blog posts about "the next big thing", whether it be in writing, publishing, marketing or gizmos. So here are some predictions from me (who is NOT Nostradamus or even his second cousin's ex-sister-in-law-twice removed).

E-books - the current trends show the move to e-books and e-readers has slowed. I suspect those who were really interested have taken them up with great enthusiasm and are buying heaps of cheap books. One study said a huge percentage of people who bought or were given e-readers have stopped using them, if they even gave them a try. I think things have slowed down with people over 50. I also think anyone who uses computers all day in their job or at school is going to prefer real books. And anyone who loves picture books (of any age) will resist the move to apps. The big prediction "out there" is a huge move to doing things on mobile phones, but I doubt book reading is going to be one of them. Screens are too small.
 My current status - I have a tablet with quite a few books on it but mostly I am reading non-fiction that way. Fiction doesn't "feel right"!

Copyright - there are going to be a lot more copyright battles in the coming year. Recent reports on things like territory issues show the ground is shifting all the time, driven by e-books on Amazon (many self-published) that are available world-wide. Once upon a time we'd barely notice if a book was published in the US and it took 3 months to get to Australia, unless it was an instant best-seller.

Now, with the internet, we read reviews and hear about interesting books, and then discover we can't buy the book or e-book instantly (as we have become accustomed to!) because of copyright territory issues. E-books have, if nothing else, highlighted this. Big changes globally are coming. If you're not convinced, check out the "rules" for having a book published with one of the new e-book imprints like Momentum.
My current status - there have been a few times this year when a special deal on an e-book was available through a newsletter, but when I went to buy, I was informed it wasn't available to me in my country.  If enough people complain, publishers will soon make every contract for "global rights".

Non-fiction for children and YA - the curriculum changes in Australia and the US mean non-fiction is very much back in the classroom as a resource. But what and how? I've been to plenty of schools where their non-fiction section has either gone or been much-reduced, because they've decided to move non-fiction (i.e. research) to the internet. Any author who uses the net for research (as I do) knows that it's limited and time-consuming. There is so much out there, and so much of it is wrong or conflicting, that I inevitably go back to books.

I use the net as a starting point, and for things like old photos, records, newspapers and sometimes maps. But a good book, especially a large one (which non-fiction often is, in order to reproduce the illustrations and photos well) with a good index, where I can flick back and forth and scan text quickly for what I want, can't be beaten by a screen. So I think a lot of publishers are going to scramble to bring their best non-fiction back into print (updated) and produce new electronic resources. What I really worry about? That in the process they will take history back to the state it was in when I was at school - incredibly boring. I learned all of my history from novels!
My current status - I'm a fiction writer, but I've moved into historical fiction and love it. I'm currently researching for a World War I novel and the books I have found have been invaluable. But I'll be using the net more and more for the newspapers of the era.

Marketing of books - the tide has definitely turned here, towards the writer doing more and more. Not just because publishers have tightened their purse strings either. So many bookstores (including Borders) have gone that relying on traditional things like buying front-of-store space has become almost irrelevant. Readers are finding out about new books in other ways. Reviews in traditional media have shrunk. Bloggers and sites such as Goodreads are all part of the mix now, but the mix is so big, how does an author find their way through it?

We are told to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, our websites - anything we can to get our name and books out there. Yet go to any writers' festival and the biggest complaint is about writers who are only there to plug their books and provide little else of value. Value is the keyword, apparently. I think writers are being expected to do too much now, with little idea of what works and how to manage it all. I suspect publishers will soon have people in their marketing departments who are there specifically to work with writers on all of this, rather than focusing on the traditional media publicity outlets. Somebody has to help writers get a grip on it all! (This is me being logical - maybe publishers will listen?)
My current status - I'll be writing full-time next year and plan to use some of my hours to tackle this stuff in a more organised way. But when I'm working (to pay bills) and can only write part-time, marketing sucks up an awful lot of writing hours. The book has to come first. Without the best book you can write, the marketing is pointless.

There are more predictions I could make but if nothing else, I think 2013 will see further upheaval and change. What are your predictions?

Staying Creative

Over the past four months I've been working on my critical thesis for my MFA in Writing for Children and YA (through Hamline University in Minnesota). In earlier semesters I was writing essays, but also doing a lot of creative work, so it balanced out. This semester, after two months, my adviser said, "When you send the next draft of the thesis, how about sending me some creative work, too?" It wasn't until I sat down and wrote some poems for my new verse novel that I realized what was happening - I felt freed up and joyful about writing again!

Don't get me wrong - researching for the thesis, thinking deeply about what I wanted and needed to say, roughing out ideas, diving even deeper into the topic - all of this has been terrific. Challenging, yes, but it's been immensely satisfying to be able to think about what a verse novel really is, and more importantly, what it can be. Other people's ideas and opinions feed into this, but ultimately it's up to me to work it out. However, actually writing poetry is a whole different thing. Like going from overhauling a car engine to actually driving it down a sunny country road at 100 miles an hour! (And I'm not going to count how many adverbs are in this paragraph.)

I've continued with the verse novel, but now the thesis is done, I'm working hard on revising a historical novel I've been writing for 18 months. It can take me 3 hours to rewrite about 8 pages, so this is a major revision, not tinkering around the edges, and it requires a lot of concentration and focus. On the other hand, at night, while my husband watches TV, I've been reading the last 38 issues of Poetrix, the poetry magazine that my writing group publishes. After 20 years, we are closing it down - it's a lot of work and we've decided it's time. But our last issue will be a double and will include our favorites from Issues 1-38.

What I have found is that reading through so many poems, night after night, is inspiring me to write single poems again. Not verse novel poems, where character and story and voice are also important, but poems that just arise from the ether, sparked by an image or a word or an idea. And I'm back driving down that country road again. It's reminded me that not everything has to be perfect, that to simply write for the joy of it, without expecting anything except fun (and often passion or those exciting sparks) is real freedom in writing, and to be savored and encouraged.

Interview with Kate Banks

Several years ago, I visited Menton, in France, and Kate Banks graciously agreed to meet with me and be interviewed. I had a lovely morning, talking to her and looking at all her beautiful picture books and novels, and went back to my hotel to transcribe and type everything up. Later, at home, I couldn't open the file and then my notebook disappeared! Now, thanks to a new recovery program I discovered, I've finally been able to resurrect the file. Very timely, as it turns out, because Kate's latest picture book, The Bear in the Book, has just been named in Publisher's Weekly's Best Picture Books for 2012. This is a long piece using her answers to my general questions (written into article format).

Kate Banks started her life in books when she spent three years working for Knopf as an assistant editor to Frances Foster, and had three books published by them. She then worked for National Geographic for a year in Washington, and continued writing, then got married and moved to Europe. When Foster moved to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Kate went with her and from then on all of her US books have been published by FSG. In France Kate’s publisher is Gallimard, who do a lot of her books in French (her picture books). Her first book with Gallimard was with Georg Hallenslaben – Baboon. They do most of their books with both publishers, but the French ones come out faster.

Kate writes for older children and teens, too, but feels she relates more to little kids around three to four years old – she loves the visuals of a picture book and it’s more fun to produce them and be part of the process. The challenge is to write spare text – the poetry in the text is important – she pays a lot of attention to choice of words, even in novels. She loves to read picture books aloud to kids, and always reads her own stories out loud to hear how they sound.

For children, their grasp of language comes as much from listening as from seeing words on the page – sound is important for communication. She believes that reading aloud in school is really important, and that it is not being done so much now is a big reason why kids are less literate.

When writing a story – she gets ideas as they occur – “fall from the sky” – she always stays aware of ideas, wherever they come up. Sometimes an idea might be kicked off by an event, or it could be a phrase or something a child does or says – she writes down the idea and then lets it gel for a while (she takes a notebook everywhere so she doesn’t lose those ideas). She always works on several things at once, then there is no fear that the one thing won’t work. She gives herself lots of room to think about the idea, then knows when it is ready to be written. She might do several drafts or more, but usually the first draft is to get the structure and form working, or to see if something is not working in the structure. Then she fills out the story and adds more to it. The first draft is getting it down.

Her novels take at least 4 drafts – again, she writes the bones in the first draft, then subsequent drafts are about filling it out and developing. The last draft is always copyediting and looking at every word and phrase to see if it can be made better.

For The Cat Who Walked Across France: initially she did hear of a story about a cat – not the specific story that she wrote – and since the book has been published she has heard other stories of cats who have walked a long way to get back to their original homes. The illustrator, Georg Hallensleben, was an artist she discovered in Rome. He is German and she asked him if he was interested in doing picture books. When she lived in Rome he would ride his bicycle across the city to her house to work every day, then he bought a van and outfitted it as a studio, so then he would drive to her house and set up downstairs in her garage. As he worked on illustrations, he’d bring them upstairs and they’d talk about them and then he’d go back down and revise or do more. This was how If The Moon Could Talk was created.

For the Cat book, he drove his van across France, following the path the cat takes in the story so that he could paint what the cat saw, in reality.

Kate collaborates a lot with her illustrators. Because she has worked in the industry, her editor trusts her to know the artist’s work and how to collaborate and get the best book. This also sometimes leads to her writing a story specifically for a particular illustrator.

Her themes are about connection – how people stay connected in life and death. She’s interested in writing about the human experience of the soul and the physical body, how to communicate that connection and understand humanity through stories with resolutions. Children today experience the media all the time where disaster and tragedy have no resolution; it’s just presented to them. She is opposed to irresponsible media that projects sensationalism – children don’t have the tools to deal with the constant bombardment. She feels her contribution is to write about these themes. Death is a part of life but in our society we don’t want to see this. She writes about death a lot but thinks this is because she lost both her parents as a child.

Kate speaks three languages – English, French, Italian – and says her spelling has got worse! She does think her vocabulary has changed since she has been living overseas, and she has more ease in working with words – she plays a lot more with words, but is able to do this because she has had a strong foundation in grammar and punctuation. You can’t use poetic licence unless you have that strong foundation.

With marketing, she has never done much but can see now that things have changed a lot and that publishers cannot do much for you. Being in Europe, she can’t do book tours or school visits in the US. She doesn’t like to think of books as products – her books are more literary, not mass market paperbacks, and picture books are expensive to buy. She has an agent now because contracts are getting more difficult – new clauses and things to negotiate.

My thanks to Kate for being so generous with her time, and her answers!

Making a writing space

I don't think I have ever had a real writing space. For years I wrote at the kitchen table, because it looked out on the back yard, the fence, the pond, and often birds would flit in and entertain me. That only worked as long as I had the house to myself, which is no longer the case. So I bought a new desk. But I put it in the only space there was - in the computer room. Waaaaay too close to the internet connection, and the desk slowly filled with papers and books until I couldn't work there either.

In the back yard we have what is laughingly called "the bungalow". It means an odd building that was once used as extra accommodation and now has no insulation, sagging ceilings and enough junk to stock a recycling store. Give me space and I will fill it, being a long-time hoarder. I can tell you that out there are multiple copies of every publication I've ever been involved in, at least four crates chock-full of class materials, all the books I can't throw away but there's no room in the house for them, and sundry items that need to find themselves a rubbish dump to jump into.

I've tried to write out there. It doesn't feel right. What has, surprisingly, felt very right and very workable for the past couple of years are cafes. I've been the Cafe Poet at Melissa's Cafe in Altona for 6 months, and I applied for this because, let's face it, I was writing there at least twice a week anyway! I have a couple of other cafes I like, too. Why? Somehow I can block out all the noise and just write. Well, to be honest, I am unable to block out screaming kids. But chatting coffee drinkers are a cinch.

Now I know it's time to make a real space in my house. Enough of the excuses about how long it would take me to clean out the back room (laughingly called my "office" - we do a lot of laughing about the junk I store everywhere, with gritted teeth). I have made a substantial start. The photo above? I wasn't going to include it, if only because when I started the clean-out, the room actually looked a lot worse! But I figured if I posted the photo here, it committed me to finishing the job.

It's been three days, two huge bags of rubbish, one huge bag of paper for recycling, two boxes of books to donate, and a lot of discoveries of strange, wonderful, long-forgotten items that have surfaced along the way. No, I haven't finished yet. I know I need to get more ruthless, but some of those things I've saved have a lot of meaning for me, and where else do we writers get ideas from, if not from evocative memories?

So by this time next week, I have promised myself the room will be finished. There will be a writing space that I can use, a clear desk, a new keyboard, some of my favorite things around me, and all my research stuff in neat piles, ready to use. Fingers crossed.

Small Press is Exciting!

Last Friday I went along to the SPUNC conference. Now the first thing I need to tell you is that SPUNC is no more - the organisation has renamed itself Small Press Network. Too many years of having to explain the acronym and dodge smirks, someone said. Besides, Small Press Network does say exactly what it is. For now, all is business as usual at the old website but they promise a new updated site very soon.

First of all, membership of the network is now over 100, and members range from larger presses such as Black Inc and Spinifix Press to very small publishers such as Kill Your Darlings and the History Teachers' Association of Victoria. The conference, as you would expect, had a large focus on digital publishing and how this might and does affect small presses, given the variety of platforms currently out there.

I'm not going to go through each session (you had to be there) but there were a number of key points that either informed, interested or astonished me that I'll share:

* consumers still prefer to buy from the aggregators (a new term I learned - it means the "middle man", e.g. Amazon, iBooks, bookshops, online booksellers). People still want someone or something to offer choice, and they will use an aggregator rather than buy direct from a publisher (and I guess that also means an author).

* publishers in Australia have been forced to lower book prices in the past 5 years to compete with online booksellers, but they are still profiting from imported titles due to the strength of the Australian dollar.

* if you are self-publishing or you are a small press, good meta data is absolutely essential to help people find your book/s. It can include subject lists, reviews, excerpts, links and author bios. Make it work for you!

* market analysis has shown that $9.99 is still the top favoured price people will pay for an ebook. Past $14.99 and sales drop drastically.

* discounting big-time is not a good strategy - people will pay for quality (if you are offering quality!) and discounting just takes money out of your pocket.

* when it comes to selling books or ebooks, discoverability is the top essential, and quality comes after that.

* the main reason why the government is struggling with PLR and ELR payments on ebooks is to do with all the different ways libraries are currently buying ebooks - it can be outright purchase, number of borrowing days, limited use copies, etc. Hard to track the physical holdings of ebooks when they can disappear from the library's inventory.

I also learned quite a bit about bookselling, both in the actual shop and online. I had never heard of high and low stock turn before, but the advice to talk to your bookseller before publishing (to get their coalface experience and suggestions) was a good one.And these days, if you are trying to sell on consignment to a bookseller (i.e. just a few copies at a time) you are at the bottom of the food chain!

There were also talks by Nerida Fearnley from Lightning Source (very interesting) and Gary Pengelly from Thorpe-Bowker (where you get ISBNs). Thorpe-Bowker has a new site called My Identifiers which will cover all sorts of tools for book publishers. All food for thought! With more and more books on our backlists going out of print, republishing is a real option, both with short runs on print books and ebooks. I have already republished Farm Kid as a print book and am now looking at it as an ebook. I'm sure other authors are doing the same.

Revising Deeper, Not Wider

Over on my other website, ebooks4writers.com, I have a monthly writers' newsletter and this month I included an article I'd written on revision. Some writers (like me) love the first draft and struggle with meaningful revision. Others dread getting the first draft down and love rewriting over and over. I hate the feeling with revision that all I'm doing is fiddling around the edges and making no real difference to the heart of the story.

So when a book comes along that makes me actually champ at the bit to rewrite my current novel, before I've even finished the first draft (only about 3000 words off, though), that's a book worth recommending! It's Donald Maass's new title, Writing 21st Century Fiction - Maass is a longtime literary agent and you may have heard of his other books - Writing the Breakout Novel and The Fire in Fiction. In this new one, he says the time has come for the best elements of genre (all those things that create a page-turner) and the best of literary writing to combine into the kind of book that will become a best seller now.

Traditional genre and literary fiction still sells, of course, but the books hitting the top of the sales lists these days are the ones that catch on by word of mouth - they are brilliantly written, with story ideas and characters that totally engage the reader. Think Dennis Lehane, who was considered a crime writer for years until Mystic River and Shutter Island. Still crime but taking it to a new level of excellent writing. Then add books like The Help, The Kite Runner, Water For Elephants, The Lovely Bones, The Time Traveller's Wife - I could go on and on, but they are all books that sit between genre and literary and catch readers' imagination.

So I was interested in how Maass thinks you can write a book like this. Of course it comes down to things like standout characters and layered plots, but he tells you how to work with these elements, and gives great examples from published books. What I like best, though, is the huge list of questions at the end of each chapter that you can apply to your work in progress. I bought this as a Kindle book, but I wish now that I hadn't, as I'd really like to photocopy the questions and have them next to me to work through as I revise. I guess I'll have to work off the screen instead. Roll on, revision!