Shannon Phillips

Robin’s super excited about Hallowe’en this year. He saw a pirate costume for sale somewhere and for a few days he talked about being a pirate—an idea I was fully on-board with, because I figured I could make him a pirate costume pretty easily. But then, somehow, he got a new idea into his head. He was going to be a kitty cat. And no amount of pirate talk was going to change his mind.

For the past week or so he’s kept up a constant stream of kitty costume talk. “I’m a scary black kitty for Hallowe’en!” he’ll say, out of the blue. “I have kitty costume!”

I decided not to try to make the cat outfit myself. All the patterns I could find were for pajama-style onesies, and I had more of a “cat from CATS!” kind of thing in mind. (I also had a pang of jealousy when I saw the adorable punk-rock kitty tutu patterns you can buy; there’s nothing that good for boys.) So instead I assembled the costume from bits and pieces of things found from various sellers on Amazon—the hood and mittens from one store, the tail from another, the fuzzy boot covers from a third. The last piece of the costume arrived today so I let him try it on:

He’s thrilled. The challenge will be getting him to wear anything else between now and Hallowe’en!

So I decided to submit my novel to some e-publishers, mostly in a spirit of keeping all my options open while I work out what I want to do with the novel. I chose three e-publishing houses to submit to:

Samhain is probably the biggest name in electronic publishing. They have some star writers in their roster (like Ilona Andrews, whose Magic Bites urban fantasy series is a print best-seller), and they regularly place titles on the New York Times Bestseller list for eBook Fiction. They’re well-established—they’ve been around since 2005—and they have a distribution deal with Ingrams, meaning that they can get the print versions of their books (all Samhain novels get a print run about ten months after the electronic version is released) into Barnes and Noble and other brick-and-mortar stores. They also promote at least some of their titles with ad campaigns, which is a level of marketing support that’s quite rare among e-publishers.

Carina Press is Harlequin’s e-book imprint, but unlike Harlequin they publish in genres other than romance. I submitted to Carina because they have the backing of a major traditional publisher, but after reading more about them I don’t think they offer authors a very good deal. Their royalty terms are substantially worse than the other e-publishers, kind of staggeringly bad actually, and the vast majority of their titles never get a print run.

Lyrical Press is an up-and-coming small e-publisher. They launched in 2008 and have been seeing strong year-over-year growth in sales: most of their titles only sold a few hundred copies in the first year, but now they’re reporting sales of up to ten thousand copies a year on their most popular titles. That’s an excellent sales figure in the e-book world and decent even for print. (The overall e-book market is still much smaller than the overall print market, although that’s rapidly changing: given the rate at which the digital publishing market is growing, and the print market contracting, digital is projected to overtake print within five years and maybe sooner). Lyrical Press also has good buzz in the author community and a way better website than most of their competitors. I dunno, maybe it’s not true, but I feel like for an e-publisher the quality of their website design is probably kinda correlated to the quality of their publications? Lyrical offers slightly better royalty terms than Samhain, and does print runs for “select titles” (presumably the ones that sell well as e-books).

So I sent my novel to these three e-publishing houses two weeks ago. Samhain and Carina quote a turn-around time of twelve to sixteen weeks; Lyrical tells authors to expect a response in four to six weeks.

Well, Lyrical just got back to me with an offer. So, yay! Only now I have to decide whether:

a) I want to jump on this opportunity, putting my chips behind the scrappy small press with the blazing fast response times;
b) I want to ask Lyrical for more time, in order to give Samhain a chance to make an offer;
or
c) I’d prefer to self-publish after all

I sent the editors at Lyrical back an e-mail thanking them for their consideration, and asking if they could give me any more specifics on what the publication schedule would be for my novel, and what sort of sales figures are required in order to get a print run. I think the answers to those questions will largely determine what I decide to do.

Update: Lyrical was very quick to respond to my e-mail. They say that if I’m contracted with them by November 1, my novel would be released in midsummer, and that “there is a minimum of $300.00 net digital sales for any book to be considered for print.” That is totally reasonable, in fact it’s a pretty low threshold. But I’m gathering that at Lyrical “print” doesn’t mean “on the shelves at Barnes and Noble,” but rather, “print-on-demand via Amazon.” Samhain can actually get books onto shelves. So, I’ve gone with option B. I sent back another e-mail saying: “Thank you so much for the very quick response! $300 of sales is a very reasonable threshold for print consideration. Would it be all right if I took two weeks to get in touch with the other publishers considering my manuscript, and make a final decision? I do very much appreciate your responsiveness and quick communication, which seems a big point in Lyrical’s favor.” Hopefully that comes off as nice and friendly and reasonable. (I also sent Carina an e-mail asking them to withdraw my novel from consideration, as I know that I’d go with Lyrical over Carina.)

I also know at this point that I’d accept an offer from Samhain, should they choose to make one. I probably should have simply submitted to them first and waited for them to give me an acceptance or rejection before submitting to any other e-publishers, but the truth is that I wasn’t at all sure of my way forward and just wanted to be making some kind of progress after spinning my wheels with agents for so long. But here I am, and now it’s tricky. I’ll have to send a follow-up message to Samhain, explaining that I have an offer on the table, and asking if they can provide me with an expedited response. If I wanted to maximize my chances with Samhain, I should simply say “thank you very much, but I’ve changed my mind” to Lyrical. The thing is, though, I’m not sure Samhain will take my novel on. While all of the big e-publishers are focused to some degree on the romance genre, because that’s where the money is in the digital market right now, Lyrical is actively seeking urban fantasy. Samhain, by contrast, is willing to consider urban fantasy only so long as it features “strong romance elements.” There is a love story in my book, but it’s really not primarily a romance, and I just don’t know if the “romance elements” are “strong” enough.

If Samhain says no thanks, then I have to decide whether to publish through Lyrical or to go the self-pub route. I’m still really torn on this one. Rationally, if we’re talking about an e-publisher that has no distribution deals with major bookstores, then I just don’t see how the services they offer can possibly be worth 30 percent of royalties. Yet I still feel a strong emotional desire to have “a publisher,” even if it’s a small e-press. I think this probably has to do with the lingering stigma of self-publishing—thinking of it as “indie publishing” definitely helps.

I dunno. I’ll just have to wrestle with it.

Update 2: Wow, Lyrical is super responsive. They say “Of course you can take the time you need. In fact, in our contract it states you have two months from time of issue before the offer expires.” Which, boo on me for skimming the contract, I guess! So yeah, I don’t have to nag Samhain right away—I can wait a bit to see what happens.

Sam took these photos yesterday afternoon—we went out to Treasure Island to take pictures of the city skyline at sunset, and the boys had a great time playing on the rocks. Davy had an awesome fauxhawk going on.

I took this one:

Robin: I need big boy pants! I need clothes! I need go to school!
Me: I am very happy to put you in your big boy pants this morning, my darling, but we are not going to school. It’s Friday, and normally we would go to school today, but it’s a holiday. That means there’s no school.
Robin: But, what about — go to the playground? What about — run with the bikes?
Me: I’m sorry, kiddo, we’re not going back to school until Tuesday.
Robin (whining): Play with the kids!
Me: Nobody’s there! It’s a holiday!
Robin: No! No holiday!

So Davy had a check-in with the doctor today. He’s 31 and a half inches tall and weighs 21 pounds. Apparently he’s in the 70th percentile for height, and the eighth for weight. How? How is this possible? He eats all the time. Seriously. We took him to a party a few months ago, and I parked us beside the snack table, explaining to another gal there that Davy eats constantly. When we left a few hours later, she laughed: “I thought you were joking,” she said, “but he never stopped chewing this whole time.”

It’s a joke with Dave, the boys’ Pappy. He’ll cluck and pretend to shake his head every time he sees Davy reaching for a new source of food. “Don’t you ever feed that baby?” he says. It’s funny, you see, because we feed him constantly.

Anyway, the doctor seemed to think it was perfectly possible, and that Davy probably doesn’t have a tapeworm or anything, but is simply having a growth spurt. It’s true that he’s gotten a lot taller recently. He can wear some of Robins two-year-old clothes, even though he’s not yet eighteen months. Oh, and he walks now—not perfectly (it’s particularly hilarious when he gets a head of steam going and can’t quite figure out how to stop, so he simply wobbles around in circles until he eventually falls down), but well enough that he defaults to walking now rather than crawling. So I guess he’s doing something with all those calories he burns.

Ooh! I should have blogged this before, but I just got the pictures off my camera from when we went down to Sacramento (a couple weeks ago) and met the boys’ Pappy and Nonna—along with lots of extended family—at the Arberesh Club picnic. Here’s Davy getting a snuggle:

In the background, Robin’s getting a ride from his first-cousin-twice-removed, Mary Palermo. Then he rode a pony!

He did the pony ride four times, actually. He loved the ponies. In fact I’m sort of idly thinking about looking into horseback riding lessons for him.

The picnic was a lot of fun and I’m sure we’ll make it a tradition. I’m especially looking forward to the Arberesh cookbook that the club is putting together!

My friend Wendy wrote this awesome post on geocaching and letterboxing:

Letterboxing is similar to geocaching in that you search for boxes, but the approach is pretty different. Again, you look up boxes to find on a website — the two main ones are atlasquest.com and letterboxing.org — but instead of using technology to find the boxes, you follow clues kind of like you’d find on a treasure map or an adventure comic. Stuff like: “Walk to the end of the fence and look in the hollow of the ivy covered tree.”

The other cool thing about letterboxing is the rubber stamps! Each letterbox has its own stamp and each letterboxer or letterboxing team has a signature too. Once you find the box, there is a little booklet inside along with the box’s stamp. You stamp the letterbox stamp in your notebook and write down any notes about your experience. Then you stamp your signature stamp in the booklet in the box. A lot of people use purchased rubber stamps, but a fun part of the hobby is that most of the stamps are hand-carved.

It sounds like…having a pen pal that you can only reach by going on a pirate treasure hunt? It sounds pretty awesome, in other words. I want to try it!

I really feel like anyone named “Wiener” should have more sense than to thrust himself into (expose himself to? begin blindly groping around in?) legislation relating to nudity.

Perhaps it should not be a surprise that San Francisco does not have a law against being naked in public, nor that a small, unselfconscious segment of the city’s residents regularly exercise that right. A proposed law would put some restrictions on public nudity in San Francisco, and a “Nude-In” on Saturday became a tourist attraction. “This is about body acceptance, not politics,” the organizer said.

That tiny minority was joined this weekend in the autumn fog and cold by unclothed sympathizers at a “Nude-In.” One of their objectives was to draw attention to a proposed law — introduced by Scott Wiener, a city supervisor — that would prohibit nudity in restaurants and require unclad people to put a towel or other material down before sitting bare-bottomed on benches or other public seats.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/us/san-francisco-nudity-restrictions-provoke-the-nakedly-ambitious.html

Unless there’s been a marked engorgement in the public nudity rates since we left San Francisco, this isn’t a real problem and it doesn’t require legislation. Wiener should withdraw this bill from the body politic.

Now that Robin’s had a few weeks to settle into preschool, we’re making another big potty-training push. And, thank the angels, this time it’s working. We’re at the point where we can leave him in underwear while we’re at home (though we still diaper him up if we’re making a trip out). He’s not very good about telling me when he needs to pee (though he has done it a couple of times), but if I ask him at regular intervals if he needs to use the bathroom, he’s responsive and co-operative.

Over the past week I think he’s pooped in the potty five times, pooped in a diaper once, and pooped in his pants once. This absolutely represents progress and I’m really very happy. Of his cohorts at preschool, he is the last to be potty trained, but some of the kids not much younger than him are still having “accidents” at school. I don’t think it’ll be much longer before we start sending Robin to school in underpants.

I don’t know what I did wrong. I tried to follow the advice given in the books. I don’t know if we were too inconsistent or tried to start too early or what. All I know is that the things that never worked before (like offering him a jellybean every time he successfully uses the potty) are working now, and I’m just really happy to see it clicking for him.

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.