I don’t remember exactly when I began the story of the Lorrondons. So much of it existed only in my head for so long-as much of it still does. I know that by the late winter of 1979, when I began to write things down, these people were already becoming known to me. So, the beginning must have been the fall of 1978. I was twelve.
I was also perfectly miserable, both in my own mood and to other people. We had moved a year and a half earlier, and I still missed the large trees in the backyard of my former home. I was doing poorly in school, and had no wish to improve (I wouldn’t until the ninth grade). I skipped a lot of school and spent the time listening to records and reading.
Tolkien was my lifeline, as he was for so many unhappy kids. By the end of the school year, my grades had picked up (a smidge) and I had already lost track of how many times I had read The Lord of the Rings. I seldom went away without my copy of The Tolkien Reader. I read a wonderful novel called The Book of the Dun Cow. I read the romances of Barbara Cartland, more for her descriptions of historical setting than for the romances themselves. I discovered Norse mythology and Iceland's bloody, brooding history told in the sagas. I read a lot of things I don’t remember in detail.
And I began a story of my own, like many other kids with a penchant for science-fiction and fantasy. The long tale of this family of mixed Galactic heritage(Terran and Neoran) came to me in pieces. Scraps of the Lorrondon children’s childhoods, how treachery and lust for power tore their lives apart, and how they survived and in some cases, prevailed.
For years I wrote nothing but scraps. Episodes, incidents, family trees, charts, lists of planets. It wasn’t until 1990 that I began anything like a complete manuscript. I still have hundreds of pages of scenes, Many will be in the books, but much changed (and, I hope, improved). Many will not. All of the principal characters were there from the beginning, Rusorin, Rob Lorrondon, Enrik Ratt, Anna Helsak, Walsam (the earliest name still in use). The overall story of galactic war and the efforts to build peace has never changed.
Like the tales that inspired me, this story was never happy, but it wasn’t quite as grim as Njal’s Saga. A few years ago I read through some of those old sketches and was amazed at how many of the things I wrote down had to do with death, or battle, or estrangement.
From the beginning I was interested in the romance of space itself; the distances, the incredible things like nebulae and black holes, and the possibility of other peoples out there. My galaxy was never as crowded as Gene Roddenberry’s or George Lucas’s. Space travel is a lonely and dangerous endeavor.
Even as I wrote more and more things down, and filled in more and more aspects of this world, I knew I was years a way from being able to write this story, or to write it the way I felt it deserved. I served a long apprenticeship, reading everything, fiction and nonfiction alike. Tolkien, Faulkner, Le Guin, Clarke, Poe, Undset, Woolf, Lessing-these were among my teachers. In college I majored in English, and continued to write out scenes. If you want to learn to write, read. That’s no guarantee, of course, but it’s the best training you’ll get.
It wasn’t until the late nineties that I finished the first book, The Bretton Katt Alliance. For one thing, it took years for me to decide what was necessary to the story, and what wasn’t. How many books would I need to tell the story-or rather, how many books could I break this into. I decided on six. I didn’t want to put out eight-hundred-page tomes when three to four hundred could do the job.
The book was self-published almost two years ago now. I’m still foolishly pleased when somebody likes it. We’re never the best critics of our own work, but I think my book is pretty good. Will it Teach People Anything? Is it inspiring, enlightening, life-changing? Darned if I know. Those calls are for other people to make, not me. I’m just telling a story, one that’s important to me, and that I hope will become important to other people.
And after thirty years, I will see this through to the end, sweet or bitter.
Proofreading is arduous. Proofreading is difficult and tedious. Proofreading is nerve-racking and no fun at all. And it’s a necessity.
We all use the spell-check and grammar-check, (at least I hope so), but there are many things that those handy features won’t catch, such as homophones (every writer’s sworn enemy), misspellings that are actual words, and missing words like a and the. This last error can make you sound like Boris Badanov. Only careful rereading will catch any of these.
I’ve been a member of an on-line writer’s workshop for three years, and I’ve noticed something that might sound weird: It’s easier to spot other people’s errors than it is your own. That’s because your eyes start seeing what your fingers intended to type, but didn’t. I’m not harsh to people who don’t catch all the typos, because I know that I’ve probably missed a few in my own stories. If you have the money, spend it on a professional proofreader. This isn’t cheap; most SPAs are on their own.
I read an editor’s site once; she offered a proofreading quiz to anyone who was interested in being an editor. The qualifying score was 100%. If this sounds a bit hard-nosed, think for a second. Let’s say that the allowed score was 98%, or two errors out of a hundred. In a 95,000 word manuscript (the length of my own two completed books) 2% is nineteen-hundred. That’s a lot of mistakes.
So we get to work, reading carefully, concentrating strictly on the words, ignoring their meaning and the story we’re telling with them. Teh for the, form for from, though for thought. It’s numbing. In the end, you hope you’ve caught everything. I thought I had caught everything with The Bretton Katt Alliance; it turns out that I missed a few (a corrected edition will be out in a couple of months). Trust me, nothing makes the stomach roil and the sweat break out like the discovery of post-publication errors. We love our books, and we want to do right by them. It’s only fair to readers, and to ourselves, that we put out the best possible product. (But I can do without reviewers whose snide comments imply that you didn't proofread at all).
That said, I don’t understand why some people are more judgmental of SPAs than they are of more famous, best-selling writers. One post on an Amazon board even said that best-selling authors had ‘earned the right’ to be sloppy. With the money that some of these people get, you’d think readers would hold them to the highest standard. Nobody has the right to be sloppy.
In the past few years I’ve seen errors in books by some major writers (I won’t mention names), mistakes that somebody on the proofreading staff should have caught and fixed. But proofreaders, like self-published authors who must do their own proofing, are only human beings, and human beings aren’t perfect. We must keep some perspective. We’re not surgeons; errors are annoying, even unprofessional, but no one will die because of an error in a novel (at least I hope not).
So once more we open the file, and begin, line by line, until our eyes get tired and we must stop for now. We find another two or three mistakes that we missed the other day. We fix them and close the file. And tomorrow we’ll do it again.
The 1999 Guide to Literary Agents featured a query letter under the heading ‘Queries That Made It Happen!’. It was from an author with a good track record of short stories, and it was addressed to one of the big agents (I won’t mention names. If you have a copy of the Guide around you can check this). The agent went through the entire letter, detailing what the writer had ‘done right’. The final note touted that the book would be published in 2001. It was published, and it's now out of print.
A couple of years ago a book was released, from a Major Publisher. It sounded like a gothic/paranormal Victorian caper, obviously timed to cash in on the success of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. It was reviewed prominently on the front page of the New York TimesBook Review (publishers ask for that slot), the first page of Entertainment Weekly’s book review section, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. None of them panned the book, but they all said that it was about twice as long as it needed to be. Despite the publisher’s best efforts, the book never showed up on any bestseller lists that I saw.
Reviews from readers for both books were mixed.
What are we to make of this? The only thing we can make of it is, nothing is certain. An agent likes your book and sends it to an editor who likes it-or at least, who thinks it will sell. In some cases, they may be the last two people who do. As the examples I note above indicate, publishers can’t manufacture a bestseller, or even a modest success. That rests solely in the hands of the reading public.
Most SPA’s (myself included) would jump at an offer from a big publisher. Rightly or wrongly, a mainstream publisher confers legitimacy, particularly among people who’ve never read a self-published book. I’m always pleased for writers who get picked up, whether they got picked up from scratch or started out by self-publishing. But it’s not the end of the battle; it’s just the beginning. All of us are, in Tolkien’s phrase ‘exposing our hearts to be shot at’. Send out those first review copies, tell readers about your work, and be ready for either triumph or heartache.
How do you tell the difference between a genuine review and a fake one?
Genuine reviews, even brief ones, actually give some details about the book. Incidents, characters, etc. A review that provides only generic comments that could be applied to any book looks suspect at the least; reviews that say nothing more than 'Best Book Ever' or 'It Reeked!" aren't very helpful to a prospective buyer either.
This is a touchy subject for any writer, but I think more so for self-published writers. This past week on the Amazon forums, we’ve seen a couple of trolls blasting SPAs for ‘fake’ five-start reviews. They then proceed to post fake one-star reviews, for books they have obviously never read and never even planned to read. The irony is probably beyond these people.
I’ve never understood why some people are so mean. Because that’s all this is-pure meanness. These people seem to think they're teaching us a lesson about how easy it is to post a fake review; they're not teaching us anything, unless the lesson they want to teach is how full the world is of petty little hobgoblins who are just nasty because no one can stop them from being nasty. We all learned that lesson halfway through our first day of Kindergarten. You can’t teach us anything.
I think these twerps really do believe that any positive review a self-published book gets must be fake. ‘Oh, the author came up with an alias and wrote it’ or ‘the author just got all of their [sic] friends to write these reviews’. That our work is any good doesn’t enter into their muddled little heads; self-financed movies are art; self–produced rock bands have artistic integrity; self-published authors produce nothing but crap. We know that this isn’t true.
These days mainstream publishing is just as corporate and commerce-driven as either Hollywood or the music industry. Their aim is to produce work that moves quickly; hence the cashing in on trends. Music is full of prefabbed teen idols; The studios keep producing one overblown, brainless blockbuster or lame comedy after another. Publishers look for clones of last year’s bestsellers. It’s difficult to get a publisher’s attention if you’ve written anything original. If you write genre fiction, particularly fantasy or science-fiction, it’s well-nigh impossible.
So we must go it alone and do what we can to promote our work. We connect with other writers (who also read), join on-line forums, contact bookstores, and send our books off to reviewers, keeping our fingers crossed that they’ll like it.
Many of these books are first-rate work; their authors don’t need to post fake positive reviews. Plenty of readers will post real ones.
In the past year or so, various parties in the publishing/internet/on-line-retailer industries have tried all of the following:
Google expressed a wish to change copyright law so that ‘out of print’ would be the same as ‘public domain’.
A Major Publisher (whose name I will not utter here) inserted a clause into their contract, stating that as long as they offered an ‘electronic version’ of a book, it wasn’t out of print-even though they were not actually printing copies and shipping them to bookstores, effectively hanging on to the rights forever.
At the end of March, Amazon began calling Print-on-Demand companies, telling them that they would print their books through Book Surge (Amazon’s own company) or else Amazon would turn off the ‘buy’ buttons for that company’s books. Several PODs did cave in, but many others haven’t. Most ‘buy’ buttons are still turned on.
Recently the SWFA ran an article on the difficulties of getting some publishers to pay authors what they’ve earned. Major publishers, not little fly-by-night outfits.
What is an honest writer to do?
STICK TOGETHER.
Every writers’ organization in the country, and some abroad, have jumped all over the Major Publisher and Amazon. (After a ton of protests, the Major Publisher dropped the new clause and apologized for the ‘misunderstanding’.) PEN, The Author’s Guild, SFWA, RWA-all of these groups keep constant watch. They know from long experience, and history, that if writers don’t look out for each other, no one else will.
This is especially important for self-published authors, like me. Although things have improved in the last decade, there’s still a stigma attached to self-published books-mostly by people who haven’t got the faintest idea of how the publishing industry works.
Perhaps at one time, any writer who wrote a good book would get snapped up by a major publisher. This was true, until about twenty years ago. Today, the publishing industry is run more and more like Hollywood; the focus is on brand names and established formulas, whether the work produced is any good or not. That business model (did I just use the phrase ‘business model’?) makes it nearly impossible for new writers to get their work noticed.
If the excellent POD novels I’ve read this year are any indication, the big houses have rejected or overlooked wonderful work. These people self-published because, like me, they believed in their stories and knew that readers would respond. The irony is, If I weren’t self-published myself, I probably would never have read them. But if I want readers to take a chance on my self-published work, I had better put my money where my mouth is. So I have discovered authors like C. S. Marks and D. M. Paul, Seth Kerin and G.L Douglas. I have others I’m going to get to through the year.
Reach out to your fellow writers, whether they’re self-published or not. Never stop believing in your work; if it’s good, people will tell you. The battle is easier if we fight together; alone, nobody gets very far.
