Shannon Phillips

So I’ve been reading a lot about e-publishing in the past few days, and it’s fascinating. The indie DIY hipster in me is just utterly charmed. There’s this whole new culture springing up (although in a lot of ways it isn’t new, it’s an extension of fandom and fan writing) where writers and readers are connecting with each other without any mediation. No gatekeepers, no arbiters of taste, no curators of art. This is back to some seriously old-school bardic/skald/traveling minstrel shit, yo. You tell your story right directly to the unwashed masses, and if the unwashed masses like it, they throw you their pennies. Otherwise they fling tomatoes and manure.

This is where publishing is going. This is how it’s going to work. I’m convinced of it. Literary agents are going the way of travel agents: in a few years most of them will not be employed in the same way. Don’t get me wrong, there will still be a few agent specialists who serve really big clients, but the vast majority of authors (like the vast majority of travelers) are not going to work through agents. Similarly, big publishers aren’t going to employ people to read through slush piles. Instead, stories will just be thrown out directly to the audience, and the ones that become popular will be picked up by publishing houses to get editing, distribution, and wider promotion. This is going to be great for publishers because instead of having to make expensive guesses about which books might become best-sellers, they’ll be able to simply monitor the swirling Internet slush-pool and skim the cream right off the top. It will be great for readers too: the voracious readers will have as many books available to them, in every possible genre, as they care to read, and all of it will be extremely cheap. Meanwhile, pickier readers will still be able to rely on having higher-quality material packaged for them by publishers.

Despite the doom-saying coming from some quarters, I’m convinced it will also be great for most writers. A certain class of writers—the MFA-bred, New York-refined, “literary” writer—will suffer. That self-sustaining and self-reinforcing world, where only writers of a very narrow stripe are printed in the prestigious magazines, given the prestigious literary awards, or reviewed in the prestigious journals, will survive, but its hegemony will shatter. In its place will be a million sub-communities of writers and reader-reviewers, each with their own ways of promoting work from within, and each of which will have their own particular standards of quality. The advantage for writers is that they’ll be able to access these audiences directly.

What’s happening right now in e-publishing is that an army of amateurs are becoming professionals. Writers who simply couldn’t get their work through the door of a New York publishing house—who in the old days would’ve been locked out of publishing forever because they couldn’t get past the first hurdle—now are learning their craft by doing: by writing books, publishing them, getting feedback, and improving. And they are making a living. I loved this post: “‘I like the feel of a book in my hands.’ Bullshit. I like the look of a royalty check in my bank account.”

Of course, as always, the money-making leader on the Internet is…porn. Most of the money in e-publishing right now is heavily tilted toward romance and erotica. But I think the other genres are going to follow. Romance is the commercial leader in e-publishing because that market was already online. I do suspect that it has a lot to do with fandom, where for many years now a lot of women have become very much accustomed to writing reams of shameless smut and sharing it with each other. Over the past decade I’ve watched these fan communities nurture and train new writers—I can name authors who started off churning out undisciplined purple prose and are now writing at a level of craft that easily surpasses what you would find by picking a random book off the shelf at your local bookstore. (If you have a local bookstore anymore.) And just as inspiring to me is the way fan communities have nurtured and trained their editors—they’re called “betas,” as in “beta testers,” a term borrowed from the software industry, but what they are is editors and they’re acknowledged to be invaluable.

Now that existing dynamic is being translated into the wider community of writers and readers. The key breakthrough, to me, is that a writer doesn’t have to learn her craft by toiling alone in a candle-lit garret, producing manuscript after manuscript that will never be read by anyone but her mom, until finally the Muses descend and in a feverish burst of creativity she writes Ulysses (only to be crestfallen when she learns that somebody else already wrote Ulysses). Instead, she can learn her craft by joining a community of readers who will give her feedback and encouragement and even money—not much at first, but if her stories are entertaining and her prose is competent, her audience will grow. This is a great thing for young writers.

Since I left the publishing world (I was in magazine publishing, but we were rocked by the same basic forces that are capsizing book publishers now) I’ve been vaguely aware of the e-publishing phenomenon, but I hadn’t bothered to investigate it in any depth. Now I’m looking into it from the viewpoint of someone trying to sell a product, and it’s really, really exciting. A lot of people are very upset and anxious about what’s happening to print publishing; I was upset too, hearing about editors being axed, well-established imprints folding, bookstores closing up shop, cherished magazines and newspapers dying. This transition is painful. But I think what’s on the other side is going to be kind of awesome.

Well, my ex-agent was quite snotty about getting fired. In truth, part of the reason I wasn’t very excited about working with him is that he has a reputation for being kind of a jerk. In pretty much all the advice for authors out there, it’s repeated over and over that having the wrong agent is worse than having no agent at all. So I feel really happy about ending that relationship. Getting detailed feedback from his reader-assistants was great, but ultimately he wanted to take the manuscript in a direction I didn’t want to go, and the incredibly long turnaround times made it pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to be a priority for him.

What I’m second-guessing now is whether I’m right to jump immediately to e-publishing. After all, while most big traditional publishers don’t accept unagented submissions, there are a handful that do—big names like Baen and Tor/Forge. It’s just that the odds of getting plucked out of the slush pile are so long, and the wait times involved are, again, huge (Baen quotes a turnaround time of 12 to 18 months). And meanwhile acquisition budgets at these places are contracting; editors are being laid off; entire imprints slashed.

By contrast, e-publishing is exciting right now. That market is growing at a phenomenal rate. So while it feels sort of wrong to leave mainstream avenues unexplored, every time I weigh the calculation in my head I still end up deciding in favor of e-publishing.

But the decision-making doesn’t end there, because there’s now such a thing as e-publishers—like Lyrical Press or Double Dragon—that are fairly well-established and can offer a certain amount of institutional support for the authors they take on. The thing is, I can’t decide whether it’s actually worth it for an author to go with an e-publisher. If you self-publish an e-book, you have to do the formatting yourself, and contract with an artist for a cover image, but you get 70 percent of the profits from every sale. E-publishers will take care of the formatting for you, and they have in-house artists to do the covers. They’ll also provide some editing, maybe even comparable to what’s going on at the traditional publishing houses these days. But they take 30 percent of the profits, leaving the author with only 40 percent royalties. This is still excellent compared to the 15 percent that a traditionally-published author might expect, but that print author is getting services (like the physical printing, and getting the book placed in stores) that are very difficult for an individual to provide themselves. Formatting an e-book and getting it on Amazon and the other e-marketplaces is just not that hard.

What e-publishers don’t do a lot of is marketing. And frankly traditional publishers don’t do a lot of marketing, either, not for their midlist books. Authors have been expected to do their own promotion for quite some time now. In the e-book world, “promotion” doesn’t mean advertising, it means networking: getting the bloggers to review your book, getting readers to post reviews to Amazon, that kind of thing. So going with an e-publisher doesn’t necessarily provide much of a sales boost.

On the other hand, if an e-book sells well, some of these publishing houses are prepared to do a small print run. That’s kind of nice.

So, I don’t know. I’m still mulling it over.

I just sent an e-mail to “my agent” suggesting that we dissolve our nascent partnership.

I haven’t heard a peep in response to the revisions I sent him, but the disquiet I felt about them has only grown. The small changes were fine and helpful. The big ones, though I tried my best to implement them, I think did harm to the overall story. I regret making them.

Meanwhile, as bookstores and publishers continue to bleed red ink, the odds of success in traditional publishing get longer and longer—and e-publishing is looking better and better. The market for e-books is exploding. Sure, there’s your Amanda Hocking (who couldn’t get published through traditional means, and has become a multi-millionaire selling e-books for a buck or two a pop)…but more importantly, there’s a growing “mid-list” of e-published authors who are earning a steady living with their work. E-books published through Amazon offer writers 70 percent of the profits, which is huge compared to traditional royalties, while giving them the chance to retain near-perfect control of their work.

I first started querying agents for this manuscript in early 2010. Here it is coming up on the end of 2011, with no real progress—and that’s basically just how the industry works. As I wrote in my e-mail: “I’ll always be grateful for your willingness to work with me; I’ve simply become extremely discouraged by the very slow progress. And since I know you have many other projects pressing for your time, I’m hoping we can part ways with a friendly wave on both sides.” (The contract I signed specifies that it “may be terminated at any time by mutual consent, or by either party upon thirty days’ written notice to the other.”)

I really think I’m going to do the e-book thing. It won’t be anywhere near as prestigious, or as satisfying, as seeing my name on the title of a real book in a real bookstore. But how many more years do I want to invest in the “traditional publishing” route, when traditional publishing is in such terrible straits? And e-books are selling like hotcakes? I dunno, but I’d rather take a chance on something fast-paced and exciting than have my novel hang around in publishing limbo for the forseeable future.

It’s a nice Saturday morning here; we’ve got Pappy and Nonna visiting for the weekend, which the kids are thrilled about. They also brought us a piano! It’s been talked about for a while as “Sam’s piano,” as in, “So when are you guys going to take Sam’s piano?” So last night I asked him, hey, how did you get that piano, anyway? “Mom gave it to me,” he said.

“Well, where did she get it?”

“I dunno. She just asked me one day if I wanted a piano.”

Then we did an impromptu dramatic re-enactment of the scene. “Hey,” he said, “want a piano?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“It’s yours.” So now it’s my piano; I guess that’s how it’s done. Anyway, I’m quite delighted to have a piano in the house, as I understand that if either of my children happen to be musical geniuses it will be important to start their lessons early. I am emphatically not a musical genius, so I’m going to look around for someone in the neighborhood who does piano lessons for kids. Also, after its journey across the Sierrras, we’ll need to get it tuned.

We’ve also been getting some projects done around the house. We have a fence for the backyard now, and completed a bunch of interior repairs that we weren’t able to get done when we first moved in; we repainted several rooms in the house, and the wallpaper hanger is coming by on Tuesday. I’ll put up some before-and-after pictures once the wallpaper is in place!

Also, I…have an agent? I guess? Andrew Zack of the Zack Company, the agent I’ve been communicating with, actually sent me a contract to sign. But at the same time I still need to revise the novel to his satisfaction before he’d be willing to shop it around to publishers. So it’s more like I provisionally have an agent, I think. I ought to be really excited but I can’t shake this bleak sense of doom about it—I think I’m just at the point where I’ve been working on this manuscript so long that I’ve come to loathe and despise it, and I’m now having trouble imagining that it could ever really be publishable. This is making it hard to sit down and work on the revisions, actually. I need to just make myself do it.

Update: The piano has changed hands again. “Hey Robin,” I said, as the guys were unloading it from its trailer, “want a piano?”

“Yes!” he cried.

“Okay,” I said, “here you go.” So now it’s Robin’s piano. I can see this being an endlessly amusing family joke, trading ownership of the piano amongst ourselves for years to come…

OMG AN AGENT JUST CALLED

AND THEN THE BABY STARTED SCREAMING SO LOUDLY I COULDN’T HEAR A SINGLE WORD

THE AGENT SAYS HE WILL E-MAIL

I COULD PUNCH THINGS. SO FRUSTRATING!

Not good news for me:

“Two years after her mother has disappeared, and two foster homes later, 15-year-old Ariane moves in with her Aunt Phyllis in small-town Regina, but any hope of normalcy is soon dashed. Mean girl Felicia and her ‘coven’ of followers target Ariane, and she experiences troubling visions and then hears mysterious chanting from the water. She discovers that she is a descendant of the Lady of the Lake and learns that she has no choice but to try to find the scattered shards of the sword Excalibur…”

This was published last October, meaning it would have been in the works for a couple years before that. It’s not exactly the same as my novel, but it shares enough of the basic concept—a girl inherits Excalibur and becomes the modern-day Lady of the Lake—that I now know agents and editors will have “seen it before,” and seen it recently. It’s really a stroke of bad luck, or bad timing, on my part.

I’m working on the novel revisions that the agent requested, but I need someone to help me read through it and identify words that might be so unusual as to be jarring to the reader. I don’t trust myself to do a good job—I changed “ululating” because that was specifically pointed out by the agent, but looking through the rest of the chapter I skimmed right over “atavistic.” Sam caught that one for me, but he’s having trouble carving out the time to read through the rest of the manuscript. Is there anyone reading this blog who would be willing to help me with this? It has to be a reader who would break stride at “ululating,” “atavistic” and similar words—that is, someone who reads like a normal person, rather than an English major. This is a deficiency of mine and I need a careful reader to help me correct for it.

Let’s see, what else has been going on over the past week. Robin had the second of the two playdates I mentioned: Elena is a very charming little girl, and the two of them played together quite sweetly. Amy sent me a message after they left: Fresh out of the babe’s mouth after asking if she had fun today: “Robin is very nice.” Awww. Awww!

Careful observation has shown that Davy is not crawling, but he can travel quite some distance by rolling. He’s also sitting up now.

The sleep issue: still a problem. Yesterday we ran out of coffee and I was basically non-functional by 3:30 in the afternoon. I crawled into bed as soon as Sam got home at 5:45 and I slept through (except when I had to get up to nurse Davy) until the baby woke up a little after 5 am. I was still tired. At least there’s coffee in the house now, because Sam went and got some last night. Yay Sam!

I got a pretty exciting letter today, from one of the agents I’ve queried about my novel—and the only one so far who’s requested the full manuscript. He wants to see a rewrite. He has three main concerns: firstly, that I use too many big words (“Occasionally, you introduce a word that might be beyond the average reader’s vocabulary. This can cause the sentence to drop in momentum as the reader stumbles over the word or hunts for a dictionary. For example, your first sentence contains the word ‘ululating’. While this is a dynamic opening, this word might actually work against you by alienating or confusing your reader”). Secondly, that a couple of the choices my heroine makes seem out of character or insufficiently motivated. And thirdly, that the ending is anti-climactic.

You can tell I’m a hardcore optimist, because instead of feeling daunted by any of this I’m actually delighted. For one thing, none of these criticisms concern the pacing, which suggests that I’ve actually, finally, after long struggle, managed to fix that problem. By contrast, most of these revisions are going to be easy. Swapping out any of the more outré vocabularly choices (note to self: probably don’t use the word “outré” in the novel) will be downright trivial, and clarifying motivation for the key plot elements won’t take more than a couple of extra lines inserted in the right places. The only part I’m not quite sure how to approach right now is the ending, but here’s the thing: I’ve been so focused on the opening chapters, I’ve made hardly any edits to the final part of the manuscript. I spent all my time combing through the first fifty pages, making painful cuts and tightening the action as much as I could. I’m downright relieved to hear that the beginning now works fine and I should turn my attention to the end.

And the agent had a lot of nice things to say. Listen to this: “I found your writing style to be engaging and your characters to be believable and compelling, and your manuscript is infused with levity as well as drama, and I found the work to be a solid combination of fantasy and contemporary life…You have shown yourself to be a talented writer…If these issues are addressed and revised, I would encourage you to resubmit what was otherwise an entertaining and engaging novel.”

I mean! How about that! Yes, on balance I think I’m pretty thrilled.

So I’m starting to work on writing a second novel, even as I’m continuing to send out the first to agents. I had an idea that I would do a story revolving around an urban archaeologist in San Francisco who uncovers Something Magic during a dig, so I’ve been reading Gold Rush Port and Barbary Coast to learn more about the archaeology and history of San Francisco.

Last night I sat down to write, and something very different ended up on the page:

They sent the princess to the dragons with her handmaiden, her dog, and the least of her household gods. Of these the dog was undoubtedly the most valuable. Certainly it is hard to put a price on gods: but this one was, as noted, very small, and the dog was a true-bred Samarran warbeast. In fact the dog was so valuable that it would never have been sacrificed, were it not for the regrettable fact that, once imprinted, a warbeast will mind no second master.

The god would not be much missed. The Imperial Palace was stuffed with gods, some of them native and some of them taken as tribute from barbarian lands. A god could live in anything, after all, from a sculpted rock to a fine tapestry to a lightning-struck branch, and only the priests could tell for certain which extraordinary things might actually harbor a divine spirit. Once found, though—and so long as the women of the household took care to honor the god with the proper rites and offerings—the gods lived forever, and so they did tend to accumulate, especially in a wealthy or noble family. The god they had given the princess was so small that he did not even have a name. He lived in a carving made from some very dark, hard wood, about the length of a large man’s hand, with no arms or legs but only the suggestive outlines of a face. Once the carving had been painted, but now only a few flecks of ochre remained, not enough to determine what symbols he once might have borne. Still, it was a dowry worthy of a princess, especially when one also considered the dog.

The handmaiden was not particularly valuable, except to the princess, and of course to herself.

I kept going for a while, to the end of the second page. It looks like another dragon novel, although I’m afraid the dog is cribbed from that computer game I was playing. I tried to write a dragon novel before the manuscript I eventually finished, but it crashed and burned about halfway through when I realized I was going to be unable to keep my romantic protagonists from killing each other. Anyway, I’m pleased with the opening for this one, and I’ll probably keep working on it for a bit.

This morning for breakfast we had granola, yogurt, and blackberries from our back yard: doesn’t it look pretty?

I’m proud of how well I’m holding things together now that Sam is back at work. For the past couple days I’ve managed to do potty/story time with Robin; basic housekeeping tasks (laundry, dishes, making the beds, picking things up off the floor); and trips to the park, in and around soothing a restless baby who never wants to be set down ever ever ever. The Ergo baby sling has been my friend and boon companion, but I’ve also gratefully accepted Pops and Mo’s offer to buy us an electronic swing, so that I don’t always have to be trying to do things with a baby strapped in front of me.

I’m also excited because yesterday I got my first request for a “full” from an agent, meaning that he’s read the opening chapters of my novel and now wants to see the rest. I think this is a really good sign that the edits I made to the first chapters are working.