Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

Q&A Day - Because Absence Makes My Heart

I've been gone awhile. BEA, excuse, something else, climbing, etc.

It's question and answer day today! Let's skip the pleasantries and get down to business.

 

EponaReviews ‏@EponaReviews21h

How do I get into publishing? And what qualifications are required? :)

Thank you for the question. My answer is based on my experience and the experiences of those I’ve met along the way. I’ll save you the careerbuilder.com article (mainly because I think it’d probably be a lot of intuitive, oft repeated platitude bullshit) and give you a rambling answer.

You should know that I got into publishing by one day deciding I was going to be a publisher. I didn’t really know shit about shit at that point (I was 23, full of adrenaline, naive, and ready to go!), but I already owned a company with a friend of mine. One of the first things we did was met with some local dude who ran a publishing company that had books featured on the local books section of our local bookstore.

That guy gave us some advice. More importantly, he gave us some of his time. Though our two publishing paths would soon thereafter take off in completely different directions, I am still very grateful for the time he gave us.

I also read a bunch of books (most notably Dan Poynter’s guide) that are now probably all out of date because publishing in 1999 was a way different beast than the one on your doorstep right now.

And then? I just did it. Small print runs of poetry and short story collections. Though it’s probably not all that cool to say right now, they were practice runs for the real thing. That real thing was the novel Red Sky, Red Dragonfly, published in the fall of 2001.

From there, I ran a company for a few years, sold it to a larger company, got in a fight with management, then started a new company, then sold that to a larger company, and that’s where I am today.

In all of those years, I’ve had a bunch of interns who are now scattered throughout the world, including some of them at agencies, larger publishers, still working with me, and related publishing worlds. Some of them are also huffing glue in an alley in Omaha, so it’s not like this is a guaranteed winning proposition.

So what can you do? Find a local publisher. Ask if you can intern. Or, if there aren’t any in your area, find a company you really like that has a web presence and ask them if you can work remotely. The smaller the house, the greater your passion for them—the more likely they’ll find a way to bring you on board.

If none of those things work, you can do like me, and make a bad decision and start your own.

For more on this subject (that’s a little more of the feel good variety), I detailed all of this much more in an earlier post.

 

 

Zack Barnes ‏@zbarnes21h

How does the Editor and authors get paid for an anthology?

 

This can go a couple of ways, Young Zack.

One is the ol’ “Flat Fee” style where the publisher hands over a bunch of cash pays out a one-time fee to each of the contributors and the editor and that’s that.

Two is the “holy shit, this is kind of complicated and I’m going to bang my head into a wall because I have to deal with it, but ultimately it’s the right thing” way. In that situation, an advance is figured out, and that money is divided between the editor and the contributors. It can be broken down in a bunch of complicated ways including story length, but, let’s just say, for the sake of saying something, that the whole project consists of 10 stories, the advance is $5,000, and the royalty rate is 10% and the book costs $25 and nobody, anywhere is getting a discount.

That initial $5k advance might get split this way (there are an infinite amount of ways for this to happen, this is just for illustrative purposes) -- $1000 to the editor. $400 to each of the 10 contributors. Once the book has sold 2,000 copies it will have sold out its advance (royalty rate would make it $2.50 to creators/copy sold). At that point, for each sale after that, the editor would make $1.00 and the contributors would get $1.50 that would then be split 10 ways (aka $.15/sale).

That’s Mansion Money, son! That’s what publishing is all about.

 

bill gordon ‏@UndeRadar2m

Would love the answer to the scandalous book pricing going on by Amazon…why are e-books more expensive than paperbacks!?

 

I’m not going to pretend to understand book pricing right now. There are some general guidelines folks might use when pricing things, but then those “suggested retail prices” are run through meat grinders and algorithms and some robot that was put together with parts from a transistor radio and a remote control car originally purchased from a Radio Shack in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1984. You see what kind of thing you get. Throw in, on top of all that, agreements to not be undersold by other vendors, the ability to generate discounts at will for whatever rate the robot says is best, and shit stops making sense.

That’s the scientific explanation.

There’s also the Wizard of Oz, don’t-mind-the-guy-behind-the-curtain shenanigans. Some people might tell you that there are strategies afoot that intend to stop certain vendors from making ebooks the only way to buy a book in ten years. Those people hang out at the intersection of Conspiracy Blvd. and Collusion Avenue.

Mainly though, it’s because people don’t know what’s going on, and they want to act, and everything they’ve ever known no longer makes sense, and they don’t want to be seen as passive or dinosaurs, so they just do something even when it doesn’t make sense.

Also, that part about robots is kinda true.

 

 

Top Five Things Not to Put in your Query because Kristin Asked

BENJAMIN LEROY

As some of you may know, I infrequently (and quite poorly) do a Google+ hangout where, ostensibly, I’m supposed to talk about publishing, but usually the conversations devolve into discussions about all kinds of current events, bizarre fringe cultures, Choose Your Own Adventure readalongs, and God knows what else. The first guest I ever had on the show was @_TheRussian and she had a question for today’s blog post. She wanted a “humorous list of things not to put in your query.” Cool, it’s the Thursday night before a long weekend, but I think I can handle that question. So let me go ahead and handle it.

(1) Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t tell me your book is a “guaranteed bestseller” because nobody knows that kind of thing and if you’re delusional about that, you’re going to be delusional about a bunch of things and I’m too old to deal with that.

(2) Don’t query an agent/publisher for a project that isn’t right for his/her list. There is an abundance of information on what people are looking for on websites, from other authors, even from the acknowledgement page of your favorite book. Your job is to figure out a good fit when you see it, and query those people.

(3) Don’t try to get yourself over at the expense of others. Don’t tell me that Dan Brown’s new book is terrible and your book is 100 times better. You might be right on both particulars, but I won’t ever know because I’m going to read your query and think you’re a bitter and miserable Angst Cauldron, and I’ve been removing all of those people from my life since a Poetry 101 class I took back in college with a girl who never quit wearing a Smiths t-shirt because she thought she was going to marry Morrissey, and I’ll never read your book.

(4) Don’t try to put on the “I’m a professional writer type and I write like a robot with no sense of personality because I’m afraid of being myself” act. I want to know I’m dealing with a real human being and not some robot wearing a Smiths t-shirt writing poems about having tea with soccer hooligans. Nobody likes a robot. Not emotionally. And if they do, then I won’t read their queries either, because robots are NOT EVEN LIVING CREATURES AND DO NOT DESERVE YOUR EMOTIONS.

(5) Make sure you address it to the right person and that you don’t just accidentally leave the name/address of the person you just queried. Because that is embarrassing.

(6) Don’t send “presents” or “food” in an attempt to stand out. Some dude sent me a raccoon skull once. The thing is, I opened it right when I was sitting down to eat my lunch. I mean, sure, I kept it and mounted it on my computer, but I don’t think I ever looked at the guy’s book. It didn’t help the cause.

(7) Don’t list credits that—while impressive to you and your refrigerator—don’t mean anything to the outside world. I see people sometimes try to add something in at the bottom (“I was previously published in my high school annual, the Middlestone Marxist Quarterly”). It’s ok to not have a track record instead of sounding like you’re desperately grabbing at straws.

Also, “Desperately Grabbing at Straws” sounds like an unrecorded Smiths’ song.

There you go. There’s a list. I legit LOL’d at my own sense of humor. I wrote the whole list in less than ten minutes. If you were expecting more, I guess you’re a little sad right now. Somewhere there’s a girl in the Milwaukee suburbs who used to listen to the Smiths and dream in poetry, but now she probably works for a real estate company and shops at Wal-Mart.

Shoplifters of the World Unite!

More Q&A - May 2nd (strategies, comics, and movies!)

 

BENJAMIN LEROY

Mia ‏@arrhyth_mia I'm curious about book pricing. There seems to be much variance between retailers, digital/print, physical/online store.

I’m a business guy. Actually, that’s bullshit. But I sometimes have to talk the talk and pretend like I am. Here are some observations I’ve made from the shores of Business Lake on the outskirts of Industry Town.

(1) When you assume that a business, because it has a name you recognize, must be on top of things, you’ve only got a 50/50 chance of being right. Some of the most colossally ill-informed, uninterested, and self-deceiving people I’ve ever met, happen to be in positions of power at companies large and small. These folks ride their “gut impulses” right into brick walls. They’ll tell you something is the way it is (the price of a book, for example) because that’s what it’s supposed to be. Even if you point out that it was a keystroke error by a temp worker, ol’ Jack Welch v 2.0 will talk around the issue, assuring you it was by design.

(2) Nobody knows how this is all going to shake out. Questions about book pricing aren’t answered in any real and permanent way. Not today at least. Are you paying for content? Delivery? How does the price compare to a candy bar? Why is gold valuable? We’re living in crazy times and if we’re so inclined, we can sit around the table with a Big Gulp and Doritos and we can talk all night about value and worth and never come to consensus. We are microcosms battling the same battles that happen in macro boardrooms.

(3) Some folks are content to lose/not make much money today if they can, metaphorically speaking, stab the competition in the throat in the long term. If I had a pile of cash on hand/credit extended to me that would allow me to pay my bills for the next five years and I knew my competition was not as flush with capital, I could see a strategy in forcing them to tie up cash with keeping the lights on until it was no longer feasible. I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, but I could understand, on some Machiavellian/Sun Tzu level how it makes sense. So I’d set my prices super low, smile politely, make very little money and say to my opponent, “Your move.” Since they wouldn’t be able to match price, they’d lose business, and with the reduction in business, they wouldn’t be able to pay rent. Then they’d go out of business, leaving me to control the market, at which point I might consider jacking up my prices and capitalizing on all of the patience I showed.

 

Orion Strange ‏@Nerdy_Orion time travel or who would win in a fight... Superman vs The Sentry?

I didn’t even know who Sentry was, but historically speaking, my issue with Superman was that, besides the whole Kryptonite thing, he was a little too perfect. When I saw that The Sentry was basically Superman +1 I was like, “Meh, give me Badger and I’ll be happier” because (a) I’m trying to be contrarian, (b) dude was from my neck of the woods and namedropped places local to me, and (c) if I pull out something kinda obscure from the comics world, I’m hoping it’ll ease any blowback I might receive for dismissing Superman and Superman +1.

 

Thomas Pluck ‏@tommysalami prior to publication, what can a writer do to build a network or foundation to make publicity/promo easier for the publisher?

Be a good citizen. I don’t mean helping old ladies across the street or anything (though, more bonus points to you if you do), but be a part of the conversation. Read books. Talk about books. Publish short stories in anthologies and zines. Don’t be the overaggressive d-bag auto-Tweeting twenty times a day about something nobody cares about. There is no formula, of course. Some folks got it in higher doses than others, and no amount of jumping in front of the camera is going to make people photogenic.

 

Mark DC ‏@FilmCriticOne Okay, here is one: would publishing a book, even if sales were weak, help get a screenplay made into movie?

Man, I gotta be honest, I don’t understand the movie business (barely have any grasp on publishing) and what it takes to get something from book to screenplay to onscreen.  In the last ten years I’ve talked to producers, actors, scouts, and a bunch of other folks who were, ostensibly, connected to the movie industry. Sometimes they’ve asked specifically about things we’ve published, and I’ve allowed myself to get excited about possibilities that have ultimately fizzled out. Getting a screenplay turned into a movie takes some next level wizardry that I don’t understand. At all. 

 

I talk about a lot of things including publishing and writing and charity on my website. www.benjaminleroy.com

Publishing Q&A, April 18

BENJAMIN LEROY

 

It's another Q&A day around these parts. I'm going to update this post throughout the day. So if it's early, and you have more questions, put your question in the comment section or tweet it to me (@TyrusBooks). It's never too early to start, so here we go.

QUESTIONS~!

@graham_powell37s asks -- What do you wish you had known when you started publishing?

I set out to answer this question with a bunch of technical stuff—how hard it would be to get reviewed in trade publications, the challenges of widespread distribution, the problem of remainders, the terrible lag time between shipping books and being paid for them. But then I realized that if I had known those things, I probably would have just given up. Maybe betting the last of my $20 on a horse named Papa Soda Pop, hoping to live the American Dream a day longer.

But I didn’t know those things, so I didn’t quit. I mean, I knew them as concepts. I knew what was said in all of the “So You Want to Start a Publishing Company” books I obsessed over for months. But they weren’t real to me.

Then I was going to answer the question by saying—“I wish I would have known that it would all work out in the end.”

But then I thought, “Why? So you would have been lazy and expected things to materialize and then nothing would have gotten done and you’d be hanging out at the racetrack cheering on ol’ Papa Soda Pop?”

So, I’ll just be glad that I knew what I did. Namely, that books are awesome and have the power to change lives. The written word is the most powerful thing I know. It lets people know they’re less alone in this life. Getting those words out to others—regardless of the challenges I didn’t understand—was totally worth it. 

 

@JarrettRush49m What are the industry's real views on self publishing? Like, what do they say around the water cooler?

Well, the first thing I’d say is that there is no consensus. If somebody in the industry has thought a thought about self-publishing, I’ve heard it across the spectrum. Some folks still give it little mind. Others are deathly afraid it’ll be the end of their career. Some folks who thought one way yesterday think differently today and will come up with something new tomorrow. Which is to say—like everybody else in the world, nobody knows how things are going to shake out in the future. Not exactly. Not at all.

There are, of course, some stereotypes about certain types of self-published authors who think “TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING IS DEAD. SELF PUBLISHING + ??? = $$$$” and occasional eye rolls when they’re confronted, for the billionth time, by the aspirant saying, “You don’t understand my genius! You’re going to regret your stupidity when you see me on the NYT Bestseller list!” and then the publishing person scrambles back to their office thinking, “Damn, maybe I made a mistake. Let me dig that manuscript out of the trash and see.” But then they dig it out of the trash and it’s a third generation knock off of the Davinici Code starring Captain Horatio Manstuff and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, now I remember, the writing in this book is terrible and has no business being in book form” and it goes back in the trash.

In the same way that every person in publishing isn’t a tweed jacket wearing Snidely Whiplash type, we recognize that there are super brilliant people who have figured out how to make a real go of it self-publishing their books. I, personally, high five those people, because all I really care about is that they’ve connected with an audience who loves what they do and people are reading books. Folks like Chuck Wendig, who employ multiple strategies (including self-publishing) are some of the people I turn to when I want to better understand where publishing is headed. The guy gets it and he’s willing to be a part of the bigger discussion.

I’ve long considered myself kinda Socratic in that I don’t pretend to know the answers to anything. When I see absolutists on either side of the argument, I pay very little attention to what is being said. It’s all noise.

Also, I don’t really hang out at the water cooler, I’m usually at the Off Track Betting place down the street from the office putting cash down on Papa Soda Pop, hoping for the big payoff so I can buy 100 acres in the middle of nowhere to set up a compound where I can subsidize the lives of a bunch of writers I love.

 

Anonymous asks...What rules should be in place for social media promotion when current events/breaking news are happening?

This is a tough one.

I’m not going to tell people how to grieve or process tragedy. It’s not my place.

That said—can you please turn off your damn auto-Tweets? I’m not trying to infringe on your First Amendment Capitalism or anything, but when there’s a serious conversation going on in the room and you’re busy letting us know that we can get 15% off your new releases and “Look at this review from some blog nobody has ever heard of!” it’s, how do I phrase this nicely? Well, it’s like, you’re an inconsiderate asshole and you’re kinda ruining things for the rest of us.

 

This question(s) came in from two people. @mcvladie and @tommysalami5h - What do you consider essential legwork for writers prior to approaching an agent or publisher? What should somebody be looking for in a book contract?

Right before I started writing this response, I counted all of the publishing companies currently in operation. I’ll assume four or five are going to start while I’m writing this, and that the count will be somewhere in the low 100,000s.

The range of professionalism and life expectancy of these companies is as varied as the books they will publish/”publish.” Unfortunately, unless you’ve done some studying of the publishing world, understand the language, and have impulse control, it’s difficult to separate wheat from the “what do you mean the cover is upside down and I’ve only sold two copies?” variations.

Here, then, is my handy guide to kicking the tires.

(1) If a publisher’s website is geared towards making you, the author, a bunch of money by letting you express your creativity, probably they aren’t a legit avenue to Publishingville. Publishers make money by selling books to readers, you know, the people you hoped to attract with the book you spent the better part of a year writing. Marketing to authors means that’s how a publisher plans on making cash—selling services (that will ultimately be near worthless) and books to the author. Move along.

(2) If you ask how long a publisher is in business and they say, “Dude, since last month!” And then you say, “Cool, but you’ve got years of experience, right?” And they say, “Experience in what?” And you say, “In publishing.” And they say, “Well, I mean, I’ve been reading books since sixth grade.” And you’re like, “Yeah, but editing and everything, you’ve got experience, right?” And they’re like, “Dude, I self-published my own book and it once got into the 300,000s on Amazon.” You had ought to walk away.

(3) Here are some more nuanced points, but things you should pay attention to because it shows immediately and right away that somebody has no idea what they’re talking about.

            (a) Unless a book is a work for hire, a legitimate publisher NEVER takes an author’s copyright. A book is copyrighted in the author’s name. Open up the books on your shelves and look for yourself.

            (b) What you/your agent is doing is licensing the rights to your intellectual property (the book) to a publisher for exploitation. The location, language, format and other things are clearly spelled out and are part of the negotiation process. North American English print. Film. Spanish and Italian translation rights. These are all things that get negotiated. Publishers will often pay a higher advance or a greater royalty rate in exchange for more of the rights. Agents (and authors) will fight to keep rights with them, especially when they have legitimate opportunities to exploit them elsewhere and get more money for the author.

            (c) How long does the publisher retain the ability to exploit these rights? That’s covered by something called the Reversion of Rights clause. It clearly spells out how/when the rights that have been licensed to the publisher will return in full to the author. Typically, in the contracts I’ve seen, reversion is tied to things like minimum sales in a royalty period or a book’s status as being out of print (none in the warehouse, readers aren’t able to get new copies). Why is it not set up on a timeline, like after 12 months rights return? Because getting the momentum going for a book and keeping it a sustained success requires effort and planning and there’d be little reason to continue pushing a book if a publisher knew it only had a brief window to capitalize on those efforts. If it is going to be tied to a timeline, then it should be a timeline that allows for the book’s life arc to play out in a realistic timeframe.

    (d) Royalty rates are through the roof because “Big Publishing rips off authors and we want authors to get paid a lot more!” It costs money to publish a book. It costs money to run a publishing company. Do I wish authors could make a bajillion dollars for their works? Of course I do. Unfortunately, business being business—overhead and production costs being real things, money has to go to paying the bills, too. Anybody pretending they can run a publishing company AND pay royalties two or three or four times what the standard range in the publishing industry is going to be out of business before long.

 

I talk about a lot of things. Sometimes publishing. Sometimes other stuff. www.benjaminleroy.com

 

Advice Column and Other Things

BENJAMIN LEROY

I hope everybody is doing well wherever you are. I've been taking questions on Twitter this week to fill up the space on this blog right here. So, that's what you'll get below. And if you've got your own question, leave it in the comment section, and if I have time, I'll get to it.

Also of note--I'd like to give one of you $100 towards the registration fee of the writing conference of your choice. A whole bunch of details about that can be found over on my website www.benjaminleroy.com

Ok! On to the questions!

 

@JNEWMANWRITING -- What, in your opinion, is the number 1 mistake authors still looking to get their first book published make?

Being in a hurry.

Without having gone through the process before, it’s not hard to understand why some first time novelists feel like the work is done as soon as “The End” has been typed.

It’s unlikely that a book is ready to go to market after a first draft. In fact, I’ve never seen it happen.

Nonetheless, authors are excited to share the work they’ve been chipping away at for months or years, and are in a hurry to reap the cash money rewards that come to all books ever written by anybody. So, before they break out the revision machine, they bust out the SASE and start firing queries off to any publisher who has ever published any book that kinda/sorta is like the author’s.

This is an unsound strategy.

I’ve been publishing books for a dozen years or so. That breaks down to somewhere around a hundred novels. The debut novels I’ve published have been worked, reworked, and reworked again, before ever ending on my desk. After that, even when we’ve accepted things for publications, there’s still another round of hey, did you ever think about doing something like this instead? or hey, this character’s motivation doesn’t really stay consistent between these scenes, can you address?

The authors I’ve been blessed to work with, have done a lot of hard work before I’ve ever seen the book and then are willing to work on it again even after they maybe think they’re done with it.

Writing a book isn’t hard.

Writing a great book is and that's an important part of planting your literary flag. 

It takes time and perspective. It’s not a race. You only get one shot at a debut novel, it behooves you to make sure that novel is the best it can be. If that means a few months away from the book while beta readers go after it, that's ok. If that means you need to write multiple drafts, you aren't the first person. Be as objective as you can in this subjective world.

@MARRIEDWITHDEBT -- I'd like to hear your take on the novella's place in publishing today.

I’ve long been a proponent of a book needing to be as long as it needs to be to tell the story it’s trying to tell. That means that I’ve published books approaching 500 pages. It also means I’ve published books that barely make 150 pages. It used to be (or so I was told repeatedly) that a book needed to be at least 200 pages to be considered a novel. Like many bits of repeated “conventional wisdom” in the publishing industry, I’m not sure where it came from originally.

But, I do know, from having filled out dozens of profit and loss sheets over the years, that a book needs to have a good ratio of production cost compared to cover price. One of the things a publisher has to consider when deciding whether or not he’s going to publish a book is what are that work’s competitive titles and how are they priced? It might cost $.25 less/book to produce a 150 page book than it does for a 200 page book. That’s a good thing. But, if people are expecting to pay a certain price for a 200 page book and you need to charge the same for a 150 page book to keep acceptable margins, you might run into a raised eyebrow from John Q. Consumer. That’s a bad thing.

Further complicating all of this is the EXPLOSION~! of ebooks.

Actually, I think ebooks allow for all kinds of fun experiments in book length. Sure, there are still layout costs and those are based, at least in small part, on book length, but the actual raw materials of book production are not there. It’s easier to keep to margins.

What does that mean for authors? It means, depending on their market expectations, now is a glorious and transformative age that likely embraces the novella more than at any time in the recent past.

@EVANJGREGORY -- Do you think publishers could do more to court self-published successes, and build on their success in bookstores?

I’ll be the first person to raise his hand and say I don’t have any answers, just theories, about how things are going to evolve as it relates to the self-publishing world and its crossover into traditional publishing (every time I utter that phrase, a little part of me dies).

Part of the challenge facing publishers is establishing the veracity of “success.” Numbers, rankings, likes, favorites, reviews, all of these things seem prone to manipulation, some in greater magnitude than others. Until a concrete way of understanding a self-published book’s successes is devised, there’ll likely be some hesitation in making the leap.

Except, there are some folks in positions of power who are afraid of looking like they aren’t on the cutting edge and they’re afraid of being left behind. Those people are going to be prone to jumping in (cannonball, not jackknife) to the available pool. One of them will, no doubt, bust out the checkbook, throw a bunch of zeroes at a self-published project that is “guaranteed” to be a “best seller” that will inevitably fall flat (because that’s a risk across ALL publishing, nobody knows how to guarantee a hit) and then everybody will be gun shy.

For me, the challenge, historically, has been that once a book has come out (in any form), it’s no longer able to be reviewed in the trade publications, and those are a huge part of our process. Those publications (Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, and Kirkus) may have changed their policies and/or make exceptions for special cases, but I haven’t updated my thinking.

With all of the other day-to-day tasks in front of a publisher (at least one of our smallish stature), I’m not sure who would look around for self-publishing successes. I keep pretty good tabs on what’s going on elsewhere, but I’ve got an inbox full of queries from agents and others that nearly overwhelms me just thinking about it. It’d be one more thing.

Does that mean I’m going to possibly lose out on working with a super awesome self-published author who has a book that I would love to pieces? Certainly a possibility and one that I’m comfortable with at this point.

I believe we’re still in a transitional phase and the future hasn’t settled. I’m doing ok right now doing the things I’ve always done, and I’m not much for jumping just because some dude next to me is jumping. He catches a fish, I’ll give him a high five. He breaks his neck, I’ll send him a card. Either way, I’m just going to hang out on the bridge a little bit longer.

@MCVLADIE -- How do you find a good editor and/or is it standard to submit your work with professional editing? Doesn't publisher do this?

Excellent question.

I’ve got no scientific evidence to back up my first claim, so either trust me or don’t when I tell you that in the last fifteen years there has been a marked increase of freelance editors available to authors. Some of them are qualified. Others, err, not so much.

One problem authors encounter while trying to separate “good editors” from “other options” is that anybody, anywhere, at any time can hang a shingle outside his/her door and say, “I’m an editor now. And I’m available to read your book for money.”

There’s no test to take. No license to acquire. The barrier of entry to the editing market is non-existent.

Things you might ask editors when you’re trying to sort them.

(1) Can I have a list of books/authors you’ve worked with in the past? If you know the names and know something about the particulars, great! If you don’t yet, you might invest in a book or two (if available) and see what you think about how it reads. If no books are available and the names don’t mean anything to you, well, I ain’t saying it’s necessarily a dead end, but I’d definitely turn on my high beams before stepping on the gas pedal.

(2) Do you have any relevant experience in the publishing world? There are plenty of people with real world publishing experience who are available to edit your book. My old colleague, Alison Dasho, before starting her new job at Amazon this week, was doing freelance editing work. Although she couldn’t guarantee anybody a publishing contract anywhere, she does have extensive experience with getting books ready for the market, as she has been doing editing in the publishing industry for more than a decade. There are other Alisons in the world (and I've got a list of some if anybody needs one).

I’ve seen some freelance editors cite their love of reading books as, essentially, their sole qualification for being an editor. This is a super dicey proposition. Theoretically, everybody editing books loves reading. I love playing softball, but I shouldn’t be giving Major League (or Minor League) baseball players tips on how to properly field the shortstop position.

That’s my answer to the first part of your question. Now to the second, and this is one that gets brought up quite a bit at the writing conferences I attend.

Phrased differently—If Publishers aren’t going to do any editing, just what do they even do?

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been a part of the publication of approximately 100 novels. Every single one of them has been through in house editing (editing done at Bleak House or Tyrus). But it should also be noted that when we agreed to publish them (by signing contracts and paying advances), they were already in excellent shape. In most, if not all of those cases, the book was polished and edited by the author (and in some cases, the author’s agent). Books had been through multiple drafts.

Some of those authors worked with writing groups. Some of them used beta readers they’ve learned to trust. Some of them worked closely with his/her agent.

The important thing I want to highlight is that somebody, besides the author, went over the book to provide feedback, make notes, gently tear things to pieces, etc. Not all aspiring authors have connections to helpful critique groups or beta readers, and may seek the advice/opinion of a freelance editor.

Does a publisher expect an author to have necessarily paid for a professional editor to go over the book? No. But a publisher is only going to consider works that already meet a minimum threshold of quality. We don’t care how an author gets there, but it’s necessary they’ve arrived.

And then the publisher will get out a box of red pens and start the process anew...

 

Ok, that's it for this week. Seriously though, if you're even thinking about going to a writing conference, you should stop by my website and leave a comment because I'm giving somebody $100 towards the registration fee of the conference of his/her choice. Why? Because, among other things, I want to dispel myths and fears about the publishing industry and I want you to become friends with other people on similar paths.

www.benjaminleroy.com

 

In theory. In practice.

BENJAMIN LEROY

 

Of all the endlessly debated topics about novel writing, one that pops up more often than most is the “Planner” vs. “Pantser” bit.

A planner, generally speaking, does a big outline for the book. Way ahead of time he/she knows the plot twists, all of the characters, the specifics of chapters, etc. Sometimes, books that are super planned out feel mechanical and assembly lined to me.

A pantser doesn’t know all or any of these things. The author is writing “by the seat of his/her pants.” New characters show up, weird things happen, unexpected roads are explored, and so on. Let’s be clear, for as much as I enjoy literary chaos and the exploration spirit, I’ve definitely come across many books written by pantsers that are incoherent, filled with loose ends and continuity issues, and end, for me as a reader, with great frustration.

But I’m totally a pantser in real life. As a writer and as a dude living in the world.

I don’t set an alarm. I rarely make plans more than a few days out. I trust the universe will make whatever is supposed to happen, happen, and it will all work out in the end.

Here’s an example. It’s a little on the extreme side, but it’s now and that helps with the illustration.

I am set to attend a conference in Mobile, Alabama April 4-7. I am leaving my house tomorrow, by car, to begin the journey to Mobile. For those of you unfamiliar with the Interstate and geography, if I was to drive straight through from Madison to Mobile, it would take me fifteen hours. If I left tomorrow morning early enough, I could conceivably be in Mobile by the end of the day. March 28th.

And this wouldn’t be without historical precedence. One time, a long time ago, I was speaking at a conference in Denver, Colorado and instead of waiting 24 hours for my flight home, I decided instead to rent a car and drive it all in one shot. Fifteen hours. Here’s the real time video diary of that drive and all of its hallucinating goodness.

 

But I am not driving straight through. In fact, I don’t know which of the three most logical routes (some more logical than others) I’ll take. On the first night I might sleep in Iowa or Illinois or Kentucky or Tennessee. I don’t know. It might be in a hotel. Might be in my car. Might be on a friend’s couch. I don’t know. 

And this causes me absolutely zero stress.

I’ve decided that at the end of each day, I’m going to check in on my website and the social medias (@tyrusbooks) to let everybody know where I am and where I kinda sorta hope to be at the end of the next day. And then I’m going to let any interested party pick some of my route, places, and the people I’ll see along the way.

What’s going to happen? Who knows?

In conclusion—something something about “pantser” vs. “planner” and I still remember fondly the Choose Your Own Adventure Books of my youth. 

For those of you playing along at home here are the states that I will hit: WI, IL, KY, TN, NC, SC, GA, FL, AL. Here are the states I might hit: IN, IA, MO, AR, MS, LA. If you've got suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

By the Seat of My Pants,

b.

For more about things, visit www.benjaminleroy.com

Of Bestselling Frustrations and Opening Day

BENJAMIN LEROY

Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have seen a little meltdown I had yesterday afternoon. I’m all better now. Thank you for your concern. For those of you who don’t or who have learned to tune me out, I was tres bent out of shape by the over and unqualified usage of the term “bestseller” and how often it pops up in author bios.  A few deep breaths and everything got better.

Anyway, on an unrelated note, baseball season is almost upon us and I, for one, am eagerly awaiting opening day. I’m a fan of the game, especially its history (the company was even named after one of the great specters of Major League Baseball’s past).

Because last week I talked your ear off about the history of the company and my own history in the publishing world, I figured I’d go brief this week and talk a little baseball. To that end, I’d like to list the three best Hall of Fame outfielders of all-time.

(1) Ty Cobb – I named the company after the guy. He was a fierce competitor, driven by family ghosts, and so singularly focused on winning that he left behind an indelible legacy. When he retired he held all kinds of records. Most important stats .366 lifetime batting average, 897 stolen bases, and 4189 hits.

(2) Ted Williams—another malcontent, another fierce competitor, and another guy that hit everything that got thrown at him. Also, the dude served in WWII and the Korean War during his baseball career, and not as an entertainer playing exhibition baseball games on base far away from conflict, but as a fighter pilot. In addition to being awarded a variety of commendations from the United States Government, he finished with a lifetime batting average of .344, 521 homeruns, and 1839 RBI. Baseball fans will always wonder what the stat line would have looked like if he hadn’t served.

(3) Jeff Taylor—the guy was a three time MVP during the years 2003-2006 and had a .453 career average. Nearly 100 points better than Cobb.

So there you go, Play Ball!, and all of that. I’m really looking forward to baseball season this year (as I always am), even though my beloved Chicago Cubs, on paper, don’t stand much of a chance this year. Oh well, I just love the game...wait...what? You’ve never heard of Jeff Taylor? You don’t remember him being a three time MVP?

Oh.

I think I see the source of your confusion.

You assumed, because I said the three best Hall of Fame outfielders of all-time that I was talking about Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.

But  I wasn’t.

Because Jeff Taylor was a high school baseball player in the Woodhaven, Michigan area. I got his stats from his former school district’s website. And I was like, “Damn! Dude hit .453. Cobb only hit .366. Both guys are Hall of Famers, therefore Jeff Taylor has earned the same distinction as Cobb.”

Rightly, you reject that logic. To be inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame requires that you excel at the highest level of the game known to man. To be inducted into the Gibralter School District Sports Hall of Fame requires...something else.

And now I’m back to this issue of people slapping “Best Selling Author!” on their author bio when the only argument you can make is through very squinted eyes when you’re looking at a sub-category on Kindle’s hyper specific best-selling list, sometimes in categories that have very limited competition.

“Look ma! I’m #4 on the Mysteries and Crime Fiction --> Iowa setting --> Corn based whodunit --> Tractor mysteries!”

Yeah, sorry, that doesn’t count.

It’s deceitful and self-aggrandizing and just as shitty as the bulk of Saturday morning television ads for toys that don’t hold up to scrutiny (damn you, Hotwheels). I understand the marketplace is really tough and some book promotion person has told you to tout yourself as a “best-selling author,” but that term has meant something, either implicitly or explicitly, for years. It has meant that a book has popped up on a publication such as the New York Times or Publishers Weekly or USA Today’s list.

Can that system be rigged? Certainly. But it gives a general sense of a book’s popularity. Can the Kindle list be gamed? You betcha. And a lot easier than the publications above. And since nobody really knows what Amazon sales ranks translate to, knowing a book has made the Kindle best-seller list is vague at best. It certainly, at this point, draws no parallel credibility to that of placement on the other lists does.

The logical way this plays out is that every author trying to jam a foot in the door will figure out how he/she qualifies as a “best seller” and every book will be written by a “best-selling author!” and what is now a non-specific, semi-confusing term will become meaningless altogether.

Jeff Taylor doesn't sit down next to Ozzie Smith and Cal Ripken at autograph signings saying, "For $20 you can get your picture taken with me, Hall of Fame baseball player, Jeff Taylor." If he did, you'd say he was being absurd and you'd point out the whole Gibraltar School District Hall of Fame isn't anywhere near the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.  

It’s this kind of noise and static that will ultimately push potential readers away because they’re going to feel as though authors are trying to manipulate them.  One more self-perpetrated injury in the quest for a bigger audience.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game...

b.

 

For less surly ramblings about the world and publishing, visit my website www.bejaminleroy.com

 

The Persistence of Roots and Vines

BENJAMIN LEROY

I come to you today, a bit conflicted, but generally optimistic. I can’t promise anything meaningful will show up in the following paragraphs—not from a how to standpoint at least—but it’s from the heart, and sometimes that’s the best we can do. Please forgive.

Remember 1999? That’s when this all started.

I got involved in the publishing world during the tail end of my college years, running a company that would, a few years later, be renamed Bleak House Books. The first project that I ever saw from layout to cover design to printer to bookshelf was a collection of short stories I wrote. Pretty much everything except the printing was done on my computer in my room in my house.

And it looked like it.

A few short story and poetry collections from others would follow. Another B. LeRoy work after them. Though we may have been getting the hang of it on some level, the overall quality of things was of a dubious nature.

Somehow I got in touch with a reporter for one of the two daily newspapers in Madison who was in charge of the Books/Literary section.  She mentioned the possibility of doing an article on the company. The two of us had a long conversation and she told me a story would be forthcoming.

Needless to say, we were pretty excited.

However, the article would never materialize, and after a few months of hounding the reporter, I was told, “Listen, no publishing company started in Madison by people with no experience in the publishing world has a chance of lasting long.”

I guess you could say (and I have said repeatedly over the years) those words put something of a chip on my shoulder.

But this is not a story about a chip on my shoulder.

It can’t be. Not anymore. The time for that kind of thing has come and gone, and though it may, on rare occasion flare up, I have to bury it deep in the earth.

I’d much rather hand you a story of what happens when you surround yourself with good people who are capable of great things.

In late 2001 we published our first novel, Red Sky, Red Dragonfly by John Galligan. As expected, it was hard to get noticed. The book got reviewed in the local paper, was stocked on shelves at local bookstores, but was otherwise not covered, except for English speaking newspapers in Japan who raved about the book (the novel is about an American teaching English in Japan).

Around this time I met Jon and Ruth Jordan for the first time. They came to town for an event we had at Booked for Murder, a mystery bookstore run by Terri Bischoff. We were celebrating the release of Marshall Cook’s, Murder Over Easy. I remember talking to Jon about what we were doing and hoped to do, but also remember him telling me about an idea he had for a magazine devoted to crime fiction and the people who love it. Jon, Ruth, and I bonded for life that night. We all knew there was a long road ahead of us, but that it was worth the journey.

Towards the beginning of 2003 Bleak House got our first interns. Two of the earliest interns were a guy named Alex Carr and a young lady named Alison Janssen. Both of them were, at the time, Barnes & Noble employees who I’d run into during events we did at the store.

Alex would work with me for a few months before moving to the Twin Cities to work for Consortium—a book distributor for many really awesome presses including, at that time, Soho and Akashic, two companies that I greatly admired. To know Alex had gone from our fledgling operation to a legitimate piece of the publishing industry was a satisfying thing for a 27 year old who still wasn’t sure he really knew what he was doing.

Alison stuck around.

We spent countless hours reading submissions, editing books, talking to authors, listening to a lot of music, being snarky, going to conferences, etc. In the parlance of marketing people, we “built a brand.” During the years 2003-2005 we published a bunch of crime and literary fiction, including John Galligan’s fly fishing mystery, The Nail Knot. It was the first book we ever had reviewed in one of the Big Four of publishing industry magazines.

Times were good. 

Times were also super lean. There were no paychecks. Questionable health insurance. I worked a lot of 80, 90, 100+ hour weeks because it had to be done. There was always something to do.

At one point I told Alison, “You should quit your job at Barnes & Noble and the nanny job you picked up. Work full-time, for free. If we focus all of our energy on making this happen, it will. I guarantee it.”

I believed it. I guess she did, too. Because she took out a loan and quit the other jobs.

Right when things were at their bleakest, sometime in the middle of 2005 when cash had dried up, and it looked inevitable that we were going to have to close the doors, we sat on the front porch of our office—an old Victorian house my business partner Blake had purchased—and, in desperate need of a “Win one for the Gipper” speech, I looked around for some bit of inspiration.

What I found was a stick. An ordinary, broke off the tree, stick. I said I wasn’t sure exactly how, but that stick was going to be the solution. 

Whether or not that stick wielded magic powers, I can’t be sure, but I do know that a few weeks later a company emerged from out of the blue and asked if we’d be interested in selling Bleak House and getting full time jobs with salaries and insurance as part of the deal.

We took the opportunity, of course, and continued on with what we were doing. We were fortunate to have another stellar intern—Krystal—helping us keep on top of everything.

By then the Jordans had launched Crimespree Magazine.John Galligan’s second fly fishing mystery, The Blood Knot won the magazine’s Readers Choice award for books published in 2005. We were getting regular review coverage in all of the publishing trade magazines by that point.

We also got a string of interns courtesy of the University of Wisconsin, most of whom I gave nicknames that only made sense to me. That list includes people like: Pyro, Spy, Chuter, Stompermonster, Rhombonica, Narco Polo, the Happening, Shuffles, Ez Ray (we don't play, we fight!) and Killleroy. They were bright eyed and curious, not afraid to eat a lot of candy and pizza, determined on varying levels to understand how publishing works, and a great joy to be around.

 

From l-r (top) Spy, Narco Polo, Nathan Singer, me (bottom row) Alison, Pyro, Killleroy, Stompermonster

 

In 2008 we received three Edgar Award nominations, one each in the category of Best Novel (Reed Coleman’s Soul Patch), Best First Novel (Craig McDonald’s Head Games), and Best Short Story (Stuart Kaminsky’s contribution to Chicago Blues). It was the first, and to my knowledge, the only time a small press has landed three nominations like that in one year.

Also, Publishers Weekly, once an intimidating tower in a foreign landscape named me, some dude from Madison, to their “40 Under 40” list of people to watch in the publishing industry.

By 2009 Alison and I decided to leave Bleak House, and strike out on our own with Tyrus Books. We were joined later by crime fiction fan Eric Campbell who had been a longtime supporter of Bleak House.

Time at Tyrus has been exciting. Not without its share of drama and stress. Alison left the company in 2010. F+W Media acquired most of Tyrus in 2011. The publishing industry itself is in a constant and accelerated state of change.

During all of that there were all sorts of highlights. A run of five out of six books Alison edited got starred reviews from the trade publications. Scott O’Connor’s debut novel, Untouchable, won Barnes & Noble’s Discover Award for Fiction. We launched a short story collection at Morgan Freeman’s blues club in Mississippi with Mr. Freeman in attendance. Exciting stuff.

Fast forward.

As of 2013, here’s what I know.

A bunch of interns left Madison and went to work in the publishing world outside of Madison. Some of them went to work at agencies, some got involved in literacy efforts, others are MFA students, Spy is with Random House now, Pyro works with me at Tyrus, Jaime (who never got a nickname) is at Hal Leonard, Krystal is the editor of a publication, and Alex Carr went from Consortium to Amazon where he would ultimately end up on the editorial side of things.

Terri Bischoff who was a one time co-owner of Booked for Murder--a very early supporter of Bleak House Books--eventually left for the Twin Cities where she is now the Acquisitions Editor for Midnight Ink, one of the most popular mystery imprints working today. We continue to see each other on a regular basis at conferences all across the country.

Jon and Ruth, along with all of the wonderful people who make Crimespree Magazine tick just celebrated their 50th issue anniversary. The magazine is a beloved part of the community and a hub for so many author/fan interactions. They now work with Eric Campbell, who has started his own publishing company, Down & Out Books, to make all of the old and current issues of Crimespree Magazine electronically available to readers.

John Galligan, my former creative writing teacher and the author of the first novel I ever had a hand in publishing, is now a great friend and a weekly writing critique partner. On top of that, he just finished working as an editor with Peter Brown Hoffmeister on his forthcoming debut novel, Graphic the Valley (Tyrus, July 2013).

 

On March 13th, Alison and I sat down together for the first time in over two years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Alison, the girl who leapt on faith, just announced she’s leaping again, this time towards Seattle where she has already landed an acquiring editor position for Thomas and Mercer, the crime fiction imprint of Amazon. I’m extremely proud of her and have all the confidence in the world that she’s going to do big things with her time in Seattle and wherever else she lands.

My thirteen years in publishing have allowed me to travel all over the country to meet writers and other publishing professionals, some of the most important people in my life. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet the President, hang out with Morgan Freeman, find myself at Mamie White’s birthday party, even attend a red carpet premier of a movie in Hollywood.

It’s been a trip. Even if I left it all today, it’s good to know the limbs of the family tree will continue to reach and spread. Maybe somewhere, that magic stick I found on the porch of the old Bleak House office has recycled itself into the earth and is now a growing tree. I can't be sure.

It's also impossible to forget how blessed I've been to be surrounded by such a wonderful collection of people. I'm sure it doesn't play out this way for everybody, but the fact that it did for me, should let everybody know it's possible.

The reporter said -- “Listen, no publishing company started in Madison by people with no experience in the publishing world has a chance of lasting long.”

I respectfully disagree.

 

For more insights on the publishing world visit - www.benjaminleroy.com For daily updates, follow me on Twitter @tyrusbooks

Articulating the Big Message and a question about Social Media

BENJAMIN LEROY

So, at some point here, I’m going to write this big manifesto about publishing that will no doubt get whispered about on the internet for the next fifteen years, but for right now, I’m back with another Q&A session. Is it lazy? Sure. Maybe. But maybe there are questions here that you’ve been afraid to ask, so maybe you shouldn’t be too judgmental.

(1) Does an author need to be all up in the social media hive? Twitter, Facebook, etc. (@zbarnes)

  This is definitely a question that I’m going to be addressing in the Big Manifesto, but my short answer here is...no. I want to tell you more. I want to discuss this at great length, but for right now, I’m just going to say, no, an author does not need to be all up in the social media hive.

(2) What makes the Big Message so hard to articulate? (@seanchercover)

When an author—actually, let me expand this—when people have something that is buzzing around their insides that they want to share with the rest of the world, there’s an added stress to make sure you get it right. The mistake is in thinking that proper articulation (finding the right words) is the only necessary component.

It’s not.

There’s also body language, use of exclamation points, ability to be heard, and about a million other things at play. The words are important, yeah, but they are not everything.

I know that probably sounds like something I shouldn’t give voice to on account of me making a living by selling words, but the truth is the truth and I can’t dispute it here and try to peddle it somewhere else as gospel.

Anyway, back to the question about the Big Message. It turns out some people don’t believe in the Big Message. To them, life is a series of 30 minute episodes with no story arc. Things happen. People laugh. People cry. Special guests appear for an episode. Some stick around (Cousin Oliver being the prime example). Other times there are very special episodes and those usually involve a tragedy.

But there is no arc.

Therein lies one of the problems of articulating a Big Message—you have to convince, subtly, and without a hammer, those people who aren’t inclined to believe in Big Messages that there is, in fact, a Big Message without being written off as a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, loud mouth who is madly in love with the sound of his own voice.

Then again, there are others who believe in the Big Message. Those two can be broken down into two categories.

(1) The Know-it-All. Not only does the Know-it-All believe in the Big Message, but he/she knows the Big Message and isn’t afraid to tell you about it and criticize you for not believing or call you stupid for believing something else.

(2) Then there’s the Socrates school (the wisest among us know nothing) of people who are searching for the Big Message. Really looking. Behind rocks. Under the carpet. In the stars. In the laughter of strangers. On the open stretch of highway connecting every goddamn town I’ve ever...they’ve ever driven down. Sometimes the Big Message feels like it’s in your hand, but you don’t dare open your hand because you’re afraid that as soon as you pry your fingers apart it will float away like so much campfire smoke. And sometimes, with that message in hand, you’d like to gather everybody around for show and tell, but you are deathly afraid of opening up that paw of yours and only seeing the lifelines delicately carved into your palm.

Ok, (this has gone on entirely too long, and for that I apologize, sincerely, but also, I persist) now that we’ve narrowed down the three general approaches to the Big Message, you can see why it’s hard to articulate. If you aren’t afraid of being called a pretentious asshole by one group you’re worried about being told you’re wrong by another. And adding to all of that, you aren’t even entirely sure what you’ve got, because you’re afraid to really give it the once over, and in most cases, doubt you can hold onto it long enough to even look.

And that, friend, is the answer to that.

Love,

b.

 

I ramble even more over on my website http://www.benjaminleroy.com

Because Colds Happen

BENJAMIN LEROY

Hey Gang- I hope your Thursday is going well. Since the last time we spoke, I’ve gotten a bit older (from 36 to 37) and I want to publicly thank everybody for the birthday wishes. I appreciate the entire lot of you. I’m dealing with a bit of a cold today, leaving the better part of my brain unavailable for coherent and reasoned pieces. With that said (and trying to keep a little bit on topic) last year I wrote a piece about publishing using a construction metaphor. You can read it here.  

Earlier this week, Slate had a piece from a real life contractor. Unfortunately, he didn't use publishing as a metaphor for construction. You should read it anyway. Here. Compare. Contrast.

More Q&A - Valentine's Day edition

BENJAMIN LEROY

Hey Gang, since last week's Q&A was so much fun (for me, at least) I decided it'd be cool to do another one. Questions are being submitted through Twitter (@tyrusbooks) and Facebook. If you've got something you want to know, ask it at some point today and I'll do my best to answer. I'll be updating this entry multiple times during the day.

Also, this Saturday is my birthday and I've reflected a little about life over on my blog. You can read that here and wonder how the hell anybody takes me seriously. Seriously.

Now! Questions ahead!

(1) “Is romance dead in crime fiction? Does it ever work out or is this genre dedicated heart & soul to heartbroken protagonists?” (oddmonster)

It’d be easy for me to bust out the cynical Romance is Dead Everywhere answer. And with crime fiction being full of really cynical characters (and the authors who create them) it’d also be consistent messaging for a lot of the people with whom I associate.

But because I’m always searching for the truth, I want to explore this a little deeper.

What is romance? Using a very limited understanding of romance fiction, I think I’m supposed to imagine some broad shouldered cowboy showing up in a white hat to pluck some lady off the train tracks before disappearing into the sunset.

Yeah?

Well that’s not dead. But not because it’s alive and throbbing, but because it never existed. Ever. Not in real life. A bunch of heartbroken mopes with inked up quills played the literary what if game and then a bunch of readers were like, “Yeah, that would be Awesome! I hate my life, too! What have I done and how did I get here?”

We are all destined to be heartbroken protagonists of our own scripts.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

 

(2) “Conferences. I've never been to one. They look like fun, but I've wondered about just how beneficial they are. Thoughts?” (@caroylnleeadams)

Conferences can be hugely beneficial depending on your goals.

As far as I’m concerned, hanging out with friends (new and old) in an environment where you can talk about writing, books, shared experiences, etc. is the spice of life. Some of my closest friends are people I’ve met at conferences. I’m so glad to have met them. Though it’s not what I’m looking for when I go, I know a lot of people meet beta readers/critique partners at conferences, and that’s valuable.

Then, of course, are the speakers and the classes that the conference offers. This is—in my experience—a very hit or miss proposition. I don’t spend a lot of time in the workshops I’m not leading (too busy hanging out with others at the bar), but I’ve sat in on a few classes that left me wondering, who the hell is this person and why is he/she pretending to know what the hell he/she is talking about? Cringe inducing bad.

But when I was a young pup, I also attended a few conferences that helped me to understand how the industry works, gave names to writing techniques/devices that I loosely understood, and introduced me to agents and editors (who I was then interested in pitching, but now, in some cases, call friend).

Conferences vary widely. So do experiences.

Dig around before you sign up.  

 

(3) “What are your thoughts on self-publishing allegedly poisoning your marketability to actual publishers later?” (@SSVa_Raven)

That’s conventional wisdom and it has been for as long I’ve been publishing books. The addendum people would throw in would be something like, “But, if you can sell X copies of your book by yourself, a publisher might be interested in picking the book up from you.” X was sometimes understood to be 5,000 copies. Sometimes 10,000. Sometimes...eh, you get the point, people were making shit up like they always do.

The idea was, if you sold it to 1,000 people, you’d probably maxed out all of your friends and family connections and the book didn’t have a life past that. In most cases, knowing what I know now, that was probably true.

But somewhere along the line publishing flipped a little bit, and the dismissive attitude towards self-publishing is changing. Sure, most of it is still suspect, but as recent successes, both critical and commercial, have shown, there are some really worthwhile projects that could be moneyfied if they had the machinery of big publishing behind them.

For us, one of the challenges (and it’s one that may be changing) is that historically, if a book had already been published in any form, it wasn’t eligible to be reviewed by the important publishing industry trade magazines like Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, and Kirkus. Because reviews/coverage in those magazines are an essential building block for a book’s success for a company like ours, we couldn’t really even consider re-releasing self-published books.

But I think the rules on that kind of thing are changing. Basically, at some point, all the Publuminati will gather in some super swank Manhattan office and decide what is officially “ok” and “not ok.” They’ll disseminate that information down the ladder to me, and I’ll whistle the tune.

 

 

 

Q&A Day in the Living Room

BENJAMIN LEROY

Hey Gang-

This post is going to get updated about a million times today (2/7/2013). I'm answering questions from Twitter in realtime. If you have a question you'd like me to answer, even if it's "for a friend," send it to @tyrusbooks and I'll do my best.

Let's get started!

(1) “How much of a book submission do you read before you decide whether it's worth considering or destined for the garbage pile?” (@seanmay)

This is a multiple answer question. I’ll cover all of the possible avenues. Partly because you asked, partly because it might be of interest to others. Partly because I rarely pass on an opportunity to drone on pedantically on the internet.

Situation One – the query letter

The first thing I’m looking for when I open a query letter is whether or not I think the author has actually looked at our submission guidelines/is familiar with our line, or if they’re applying the “shotgun” method of query where they spray it out to every address they can find for anybody who has ever published a book.

As soon as I see evidence of the shotgun (querying for a “high stakes thriller!” or “an innovative chipmunk/sci-fi/steampunk genre bender”) I quit reading. It’s not for us and I know it. Doesn’t matter if the book is attached (it shouldn’t be), I won’t read the first sentence.

Sometimes the title of the book is in bold, 32 pt. font, and if that catches my eye first, I will develop an opinion before reading another word of the query. If I see something like EXTREME FINAL JUSTICE, I know, for sure, I will not be publishing. I’m more of an AMBIGUOUS TRAGEDY GRAY AREA EXPLORATION type dude. Have I unfairly dismissed a book that I might have loved in my ten years of publishing based on the title? I doubt it.

Situation Two – sample pages

After a query letter makes it into my “I should request some of this pile” I anxiously await getting the first thirty pages. Something in the query letter has intrigued me. Usually, you can tell just by the writing in the query letter whether or not the author has a voice right for our line (I assume this same, subjective process, is applied everywhere).

Pages show up, I set aside some time to read them, let’s go!

Oh.

Well, that was unfortunate. Turns out I’ve been duped. The thing I was so excited for wasn’t the thing I thought it was.

I can know this as soon as I’ve read the first sentence in some cases. Other times I might read the whole thirty pages, get to the end, and be all, “meh.” If I’m not super jazzed about those thirty pages, I have to write the, “Hey, it’s not you (but really it is), it’s me...” email.

Here’s a point I want to stress on behalf of all my agent and publisher brethren—there is no “yeah, but wait until chapter six! Then the book really takes off!” It either takes off right away or it doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean it has to start with a big ass car chase and explosions and some dude in a Lucha Libre mask robbing a bank. It simply means I have to care about the people on the page and what’s going on. That’s your job as a writer. At least where I’m from it is.

Situation Three – the whole manuscript

There are few things as frustrating as getting to the homestretch of a really great book only to see the author paint him/herself into a corner, ending the book with an unsatisfactory ending because the literary dexterity wasn’t present. Maybe it was too tricky of a spot to navigate, maybe it was laziness, maybe it was a poor artistic choice. Whatever the case may be, it hurts. It hurts because—all of my smartass posturing aside—I love good books. They kinda give my life meaning. I want to find things that are absolutely brilliant with the power to really move people.

So make sure your book wraps up the right way. That doesn’t mean all loose ends need to be connected. It doesn’t mean it needs to be drawn tight with a pretty bow. Life rarely is. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things and I need you to do the right thing.

 

(2) “Being an indy publisher, do you make 2 book deals? What goes into your thought process for that decision?” (@zbarnes)

I certainly have done multiple book deals. Without thinking too hard about it, I’d say that in all of those cases it was for ongoing work in a series. There are authors who do not work in a series that I would totally trust to turn in multiple non-related novels, knowing they’d be awesome. Here’s what goes into the thought process in some variation.

• Does the author have a demonstrable track record of good sales?
• If the series is new, do I have faith that the protagonist in book one will be able to carry multiple books?
• Am I sure I want to work with this person for years? There are times when I meet an author and I think—you are either awesome or you will be the death of me. If I’m unsure which camp a particular author falls into, I’d be less likely to sign a multiple book deal.
• How much cash is this going to cost me? Paying out advances (even in part) for books that aren’t going to come out until a year or two down the road raises some liquidity of capital issues that I can’t ignore. Is it worth it to know the books are locked up? 

 

(3) “Seems almost impossible to get past Zuul the gatekeeper. Besides tenacity and a lot brandy what else?” (@Mcvladie)

If you write a great book, act like a real human being (instead of a cutout from a “How to” book), query projects that fit the agent/publishers niche, and interact with others (gatekeepers included) in a respectful way, it goes a long way towards getting past the fence. That said, I’m not going to pretend that the system is flawless. I know for a fact that many great books and authors don’t get the attention they deserve. Sometimes that’s the result of bad behaviors from others that end up poisoning the well. I’d like to say following the guidelines above, mixed with tenacity, will get the job done. But I also know that’s at least a little bit bullshit, because we are flawed humans working a flawed industry. Mistakes and oversights happen.

 

(4) “Should a publisher have their own ebook store? Why? Why not?” (@komavary)

Good question. What I say today will probably be irrelevant tomorrow, but I’ll go on the record anyway.

Historically, publishers have not been in the business of selling books directly to consumers. It was one more challenge, and one that was not in the direct line of work that publishers were doing (creating books). So the responsibility of bookselling landed with distributors and bookstores. Along the way, publishers gave up somewhere in the ballpark of 50% off the cover price. Seems like a lot of money.

It seems like a no-brainer that publishers would set up ebook stores. Right?

Here are some of the challenges that go with it.

• readers shop by title and by author, but much more rarely by publisher. There are logos that should be indicative of quality (you’d recognize them when you saw them), but I’m willing to bet they are interchangeable in the mind of most consumers. Some independent publishers (and by that I mean independent publishing houses, not authors who are “indie publishing,” a phrase that had a totally different meaning until about three years ago) might enjoy more support by their brand name, but that is likely because the volume of books is more manageable and specific, plus, everybody likes to support the underdog. Counting on readers to track down the publisher’s website to buy books might not be a good bet...

 

• ...ok, fine, so most people wouldn’t shop at the publisher’s website, why not set up the store anyway? Some people will inevitably show up, won’t they? Maybe. But here’s another issue—online retailers that actually sell the majority of ebooks want special terms when working with the publisher. In many cases that means restricting competition for who can sell the books in exchange for better discount rates. If the predominant online retailers see the publishers as competition as opposed to partner in the bookselling business, the terms extended to publishers could rapidly deteriorate or cease to exist at all. (There are egos involved in these types of business decisions).

It’s not hard for me to imagine a landscape where the middleman is cut out of the equation, but I’ve got a vivid imagination. How fast consumer habits could shift and what happens in the evolutionary period are variables that people hoping to make billions of dollars aren’t willing to gamble on without being the house.

The standoff continues.

 

(5) “How does an advance work? Ie: what’s its purpose? When does it get paid off? If a book doesn’t make enough, do you pay it back? (@hcmarks)

An advance is a good faith payment towards a book’s expected earnings. It’s the publisher’s way of saying, “Hey, we believe in this project. We know you’ve worked hard on it, and we want to totally help you buy some groceries this week.”

To make for some SUPER SIMPLE MATH that is in NO WAY industry standard, here’s the process/math of it all.

If an author was getting a 10% royalty payment on the cover price of a $10 book, he/she would make $1 every time a copy of My Heart Bleeds Angst sells.

Before the book is published, the publisher has to fill out a profit and loss spreadsheet that accounts for all of the costs associated with the production of the book – page count, printing, design, editorial, etc. and then, using a mixture of witchcraft and hope, has to guess how many copies could expect to be sold in a limited time after release (we’ll say a year in this case). The advance will then be based on (pulling a percentage out of a hat) 50% of the sales.

If the publisher thinks the book will sell 2000 copies (netting the author $2000), the publisher might pay a $1000 advance, because shit happens and sometimes you don’t sell 2000 copies and it’s better not to have overpaid an advance that the author doesn’t earn out.

So, in the case above, if the author is given a $1000 advance, as soon as that book sells its 1000th copy, the advance is paid off. The author will make $1 for each copy sold after that. If the book only sells 800 copies, meaning the author has only netted $800 for his/her account, the advance will not have been earned out, but the author is not expected to pay back the $200 short. It’s part of the risk that a publisher takes.

However, when an author doesn’t earn out his/her advance on a book, it makes the likelihood of future books with that same publisher pretty unlikely. Sometimes that’s a less fair than other times.

 

(6) “How much say does an author have in how his book is marketed? Ie: cover design, back cover copy, etc?” (@hcmarks)

This varies from publisher to publisher. I’ve heard stories from authors who don’t know what their cover is going to look like until they’re holding a finished copy in their hands. So, I guess I’d say some people have none.

For me, I try to take a holistic and organic approach to those issues. Typically, I’ll have a conference call with an agent and author to discuss strategy for marketing the book, asking about willingness to travel, social media usage, relationships with bookstores, media connections, etc.

A separate conversation will be about how the author “sees” the book cover. Sometimes that’s a concrete image, sometimes it’s a series of keywords, sometimes it’s a vague concept. I listen to it all, and then incorporate some/most/all of it into my notes that I pass on to the production department.

It’s important to note that although many authors have already whipped up something in MS Paint that they’ve become attached to, most authors aren’t designers and the covers are...not so good. Design—good design—is a real skillset that super talented people spend years developing. You aren’t a designer because you own a bootlegged copy of Photoshop.

As far as back cover copy goes, most of the time we end up using a variation of the agent’s initial pitch materials. That was most likely honed by the author and agent much earlier in the process.

So that’s how much I let authors get involved. Like I said earlier, your mileage may vary elsewhere. At the end of the day, it’s important to me that everybody associated with the book feels happy and excited about the product heading to the marketplace.

(7) “Why does it take so long to go from ms to distributed book, sir?” (@lovingshiva)

Lead time, lead time, lead time. Everybody always needs more lead time.

Firstly, the book has to be edited. Even when a publisher likes something enough to acquire it, there are always modifications, fixes, tweaks, twists, etc. that need to be done. Once notes have been handed to author, author reads notes and has conversation with editor, then author makes changes and editor re-reads, then it gets handed over to the production department who lays it out, then it gets sent to the ARC/galley printer.

All of that needs to happen AT LEAST five months before the release of a book for us. The important trade reviewers like Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist request books 3-4 months in advance of a release date.

During that same window, the sales and marketing folks are hard at work trying to generate buzz with retailers, readers, librarians, etc., all of whom have to order books way in advance to make sure they get copies when the book is released.

You can, and people do, skip these processes or speed them up, but it’s been my experience that it hurts sales for us if that happens. We need every second before release.

 

(8) “How important is the cover letter when you are considering a submission? Do you prefer a synopsis or just a few sample chapters?” (@mszola)

For me, a cover letter isn’t all that important. I don’t want a very detailed synopsis or sample chapters to begin. I want to get a sense of YOU, the author. I can learn a lot from your cover/query letter writing and wish that you’d allow yourself to be yourself and that you’d tell me the slightest bit about your book.

That said, other people are going to have different requests for a synopsis or sample chapters, and you’d be doing yourself a favor to adhere to them. They might also have gone to a different school of cover letter expectations. You should not assume that all cover letters will be read the same way.

Important takeaway from this question—follow the guidelines for each person you send materials to and do not assume the generic, one-size-fits-all letter will do the trick.

It’s at this point—inevitably, all the time—that some dude in the back of the room stands up. Typically, he’s wearing black Chuck Taylor’s and a jean jacket with a patch on the back for some band you’ve never heard of and he says, “If you follow the rules, you’re a chump! I do it my own way, with my own style, and blah blah blah.”

Yes, Angsty Teenage Boy Wearing Adult Sizes, you’re totally right, Maverick. You did it your own way and your Rebel Force is strong and everybody bows down to your quasi-literary anarchist tendencies and all the chicks at the pizza parlor think you’re handsome...but nobody has gotten rejected for following the rules. Plenty of people have for not following the rules. Why make an already tough proposition tougher?

 

(9) Would you recommend selfpublishing or going with a publisher? (@elfhybrid)

It all depends on your goals and skillset.

If you think you want total control—cover, editorial, time it takes to get the book to market, etc. then you’re going to want to self-publish. Because you’ll get that control, and you’d absolutely drive a publisher batshit insane with your level of meddling.

You’re going to want to pay freelancers for editing, cover design, ebook formatting, etc. if you decide to self-publish. You should not make the mistake of thinking that because you have software that is capable of doing something, that you actually know how to do it. All of those skills take time to learn (even on the most perfunctory level) and if you want to be taken seriously in the marketplace, your book is going to need to keep up with industry standards. If it doesn’t, and nobody buys it, that’s on you. That’s your fault. Don’t point the finger and blame others as though we were conspiring against you. We weren’t. I promise. But understand that if you’re counting on people to buy your book because “it’s good enough” or “there are worse” you’re going to be hopelessly disappointed.

Lecture out of the way—if you can make a serious go of it with your self-produced ebooks (and maybe print), your share of the $$$ pie will be so much greater than if you went with a publisher. Rough math on a $5 ebook. Through a publisher, you’re going to make $.63 per sale (25% on net of what publisher receives from vendor, usually about a 50% discount), whereas, if you’re at the right place selling your ebook by yourself, you might be able to get 70% of list price--$3.50 per!

Now it becomes a question of—will the lower royalty rate be made up in more copies sold with a traditional publisher? If the answer is “no,” then you should really look at doing it yourself.

But remember, you have to pay all of those freelancers we talked about above, so you’ll need to make at least that much $$ before you start making the down payment on your BMW. Some folks have the extra scratch sitting around to finance those things and not miss a beat. For others, that’s gas and grocery money. You’ll want to make sure nobody is going to go hungry if things don’t work out the way you want them to.

So what can a publisher provide? Well, assuming it’s a reputable one with the right infrastructure—it will be taking care of editing, cover design, sales and marketing, warehousing, order fulfillment, and all of the publicity efforts that are 100 bajillion times more difficult for a self-published author. Existing publishers with track records can reach out to media, retail buyers, etc. and have their communications returned. They’re a known quantity. That’s a huge part of the equation, and all of those things listed above—especially the publicity and marketing—is how books end up getting sold to readers, how readers even know the books exist.

Cash flow on a per book sale basis will be much less than if you do it yourself, but that’s a limited perspective from which to judge.

As Black Sheep rapped back in ’91—The Choice is Yours.

 

(10) “How many different 'layers' of approval does an accepted project go thru?ie; slush, bumped up to someone, bumped to the next one” (@josiejo127)

This is another one of those questions that has a bunch of different answers depending on the publishing company. If it’s a one or two person operation, likely it can go from slush to published only passing through one person’s inky hands.

At its most layered, I’ve had something go from an intern, to an editor, to me, to a boss above me before I knew for sure something was going to get published. I’ve had some awesome interns over the years, but I’ve also had some that were better suited to selling Orange Julius, so I’m sure a whole gang of totally awesome books never made it to my desk because the initial reader didn’t see the brilliance. Flawed system, but it’s all that we had.

A typical experience at a larger house might involve an initial reader digging something, passing it onto an editor, the editor then takes it to a Pub Board where he/she presents it to a bunch of people, including a marketing department (who may or may not ever read the book) that will assess the book’s viability in the marketplace based on how much it mirrors Harry Potter or 50 Shades of Gray. At this point, things like “literary quality” and “emotional resonance” are quaint relics of a bygone era. If marketing isn’t on board, well, it was a nice try kid.

This makes Publishing Bear sad.

Basically, everybody who aspires to publisher/editor status wants to be able to wield a “This Will be Published” sword that he/she can swing whenever he/she wants. But very few people have pulled that sword from the stone and anyway, even if they did, the marketing people would probably criticize the technique.

 

(11) “Is there any way to efficiently distribute books to indie book stores without major distributors?” (@genesisoflegend)

If there is, I never found it. As a guy who started two independent publishing companies that garnered a little credibility in the publishing world, the biggest challenge was to get bookstores to know that you existed, believed you published a good book, and ordered accordingly. It was easy enough to target individual bookstores and approach them if the author or the story matter had a local connection. But trying to reach a wide section with the ultimate goal of a legitimate business relationship (consistent ordering)? That was a tough cookie to crack. We attended Book Expo America and regional tradeshows, met a few booksellers, developed a few relationships, but not enough to sustain a publishing company.

It was until we started Tyrus in 2009 that we saw the power of good distribution (we were partnered with Consortium) and what could happen if you had a bunch of sales reps who had existing relationships with buyers.

 

(12) "How does one find the right editor out of the myriads there are? How to avoid being scammed?" (@elfhybrid)

Get a client list/references. Because there is absolutely ZERO certification needed to call oneself an “editor,” a whole bunch of people wake up regularly and say, “Yeah, I’m an editor.”

And they’re not.

Not good ones at least.

Editing, like design, like playing shortstop, like playing drums, is a learned skillset. Just because somebody has read a bunch of books or took a creative writing class in college, it doesn’t mean shit as far as how good of an editor he/she will be.

Did the editor used to work for a legit publishing house (as opposed to some hobbyist’s garage publishing company)? Are the books edited by that editor available from real publishing companies? If you get a client list and every book on it has been self-published or came out from some small press that nobody has ever heard of, it’s probably a fair play to raise an eyebrow at the editor’s “credentials.”

 

(13) "How important is it to be previously published in some fashion prior to submitting a novel-length work?" (@mark_a_tucker)

To me, it isn’t very important at all.

It might have meant something thirty years ago when there were only like three or four literary journals and a couple of magazines that published fiction. But now, every website is a front for a ‘zine, and I’m pretty sure that even people who had no intention of being published have a half-dozen credits to their names.

What I’m trying to say is that what was once one way for figuring out how legit somebody was as a writer became meaningless with the proliferation of the web. I get all sorts of bios in query letters that list things like church newsletters, personal blogs, and fancy sounding web ‘zines like “Emerald Cottage Review” that make me say, “Wait, have I ever heard of that? Is that important?” And then it turns out I haven’t (and maybe nobody else has either), so I quit trying to keep up to date with all of that stuff and I deal with the material at hand. Obviously if I see something like “The New Yorker” in a query, I’ll pay a little bit more attention, but I’m definitely not trying to suss out the hierarchal structure of the online ‘zine world.

Also, not really related to anything above, but something else of note—at one point, just about every other submission we got, the author had been a “Pushcart Prize nominee.” That ceased meaning anything to me. Along with all of the made up awards “Bensonville Achievement Award for Written Excellence,” etc.

 

 

 

 

Help with your query

BENJAMIN LEROY

It’s cold.

Here are four things that warm me up to a query—

 

• Author is an author. I can hear you now, “What do you mean, Ben? Every author is an author.” But you are wrong, my friend. When things come in by query, I often run across these, too: (1) author is a get rich quick type who thinks rehashing an episode of The Wire is a way to filling the vault (2) author is a hobbyist who “so, last year after my divorce I decided that I wanted to be a writer,” though he hasn’t read any books since his senior year of high school and hasn’t ever written anything before and is not a creative person thinks he can will his way through a manuscript, because, “how hard can it be to type 75,000 words?” The are a bunch more archetypes, but predictably enough, I’m too lazy to list them all. All you need to know is that it makes me happy when it’s clear the query letter was written by somebody who cares about the written word and has been a disciple of it for a long time.

• Author understands that the publishing business is unpredictable/in flux/non-sensical. Things may be getting better for some authors with the ‘splosion of ebook opportunities. Sales may be tanking for authors/books that used to be guaranteed winners. Creating buzz for a title is a non-scientific process that stumps everybody, everywhere, all the time. When I get a query letter from somebody promising to get on Oprah or to make the NYT best seller list, I roll my eyes like marbles. When somebody mentions that they aren’t writing to get rich, I give the psychic high five.

• The query person shows personality. So many queries come across as robotic and ripped directly from a Mad Libs template. Listen, I know writing a query isn’t really fun, and it’s nerve wracking, but part of that is because authors psych themselves out. Be yourself. I want to know I’m hearing from a one of a kind person and not a workbook tear out.

• Know what we publish. Sometimes I get a query from somebody who wants to let me know how big of a fan he is of our publishing house. There’ll be some namedropping done. A few disparate titles from our line. A random grouping of authors. If it’s the right grouping, I believe he has read them and I’ll take a closer look at the query. If it’s clearly a random grouping, then I think somebody is following the template from #3 and I tune out.

 

Stay warm out there, wherever you are.

I’m currently freezing.

One More Distraction

BENJAMIN LEROY

Firstly, my apologies for the radio silence. Between the end of the holidays and now, I’ve been busy getting situated for 2013, and have been profoundly lacking in the department of worthwhile chatter. I have tackled at least the first part of this problem. We’ll see about the second.

Lately, I’ve been in an “acquiring every story that I can” mode. I’ve always found it important to have a thumb on the pulse of fringe cultures far and wide. I’m particularly fond of getting alternate takes on history. I like to hear conspiracy theories (measuring the steps that I can take along with the explainer until it all unravels). I never know when these things will show up in my fiction, but I trust, at some point, my brain is going to need a prompt, and it will find it cataloged back there somewhere.

If you know me, you know that I’m not much for movies, at least not in the sense of big Hollywood blockbusters. I’m the guy in the theater who, with much incredulity, sighs and says, “Yeah right! That would never happen!” and, in turn, I’m the guy who ruins the experience for everybody around me.

Because I’m not a movie guy, I never saw a need for HBO or a Blockbuster card or Netflix.

But Netflix came with a tv that I bought last year.

And now I’ve got a problem.

I can’t stop watching documentaries. People I’ve never heard of. Events of which I was totally unaware. Sub-cultures. Stories from my youth. Things I didn’t pay attention to in history class. It’s all there.

All of it.

Armed with all of these things, I’m half-tempted to disappear into the desert for forty years and forty months and write some 40,000 page novel that connects all of these people and places and events. The more I think about it, the more overwhelmed I get, because that would be such a significant task and is ripe with so much possibility.

For now, though, I’m content to play traffic cop at one little intersection of the publishing world, doing what I can to wave new stories through. Inevitably, I’ll one day disappear like the Lindbergh baby, but until then, it’s me and Netflix. Speaking of which, I wonder if there’s a documentary about the Lindbergh baby on...

b.

p.s. I've got a plea/request/offer for some of you over on my blog. You can read about it here.

The End of the World and What Comes Next

BENJAMIN LEROY

We aren’t all gonna die tomorrow.

Yes, I’m sure.

Now that I’ve calmed you down, I want to borrow your ear for a second. Because you’ve been given an extraordinary opportunity George Bailey, and I want to make sure you understand it.

The first time I was convinced the world was about to end was a Sunday in 1984. I was eight, on the living room floor, and thumbing through my older brothers’ record collection. Because, seemingly since birth, I’ve been fascinated by darker things in the world, I stopped on the album “Holy Diver” by the band Dio. To give you an idea of what caught the attention of my eight year old brain, here is the cover as I saw it that morning.

Spooky, right? A demon whipping a priest with a length of chain, the priest probably panicking about drowning in the rough water.

I’m not going to pretend to be a child psychologist and tell you that most kids would have slid the record back between the Journey and Christopher Cross albums, but I will tell you that recently I found a collection of short stories and poetry produced by my elementary school in 1984, and my contribution—as a second grader—was about me running through a cemetery, falling into an open grave, and suffocating while dirt rained down on me, so I think I have some license to say that I was earnestly skewing towards whatever I became.

I remember being a little scared when I put the record on the turntable. For one, I wasn’t supposed to touch my brother’s records. For two, there was a DEMON ON THE COVER WHIPPING A PRIEST WITH A CHAIN.

Anyway, I dropped the needle, and in those opening seconds of keyboards and water noises, I was absolutely convinced that I’d opened a portal to Hell and that we were all going to die that Sunday morning. And when I say “we,” I mean you, too. This wasn’t a small-time operation.

In the end, we didn’t die, my parents woke up and we had breakfast, and now 28 years have passed and I’m an old man and other people are worried about all of us dying tomorrow.

But we aren’t.

I’ve been paying attention to the whole December 21st, 2012 thing for the better part of this century. (Yes, I’m being a hipster about the end of the world). Eight years ago I was dating a girl with a late December birthday. My business partner at the time also has a late December birthday. We all joked around that we’d have to throw a really big party on December 21st, 2012 because it was going to be the last. For everybody. For all time.

At that point, I’d been told, “Hey, the Mayan calendar runs out and we’re all going to die.”

Later I’d hear a more nuanced version that says something more like, “It’s the end of an era and December 21st, 2012 will usher in a new period of humanity.”

In the intervening years I’ve also heard a million expert analyses, “expert” analyses, really high people at parties, skeptics, street corner prophets, scientists, hucksters, new ageists, and others giving their takes. Sometimes it’s a debunking. Sometimes it’s dubious embellishments.

At this point, none of that shit—none of it—means anything to me.

It doesn’t matter, George Bailey.

All I know is that we’re living in a crippled version of Pottersville right now.  Not to sound like some moralizing asshole on a soapbox, but we aren’t doing the best we could be doing. There’s a lot of noise in the world. Tension is high. Without recapping the recent spate of horrifying violence, I’d just like to say—we are adrift.

Will tomorrow bring a shift to a new period?

It can.

It doesn’t need to be because an ancient civilization foretold it. It doesn’t have to be the work of larger fates. It can be a matter of choice.

We have the power to silence the static. To choose love over fear. To live up to our potential as creators and builders, as poets and artists, as compassionate lives interconnected by our simultaneous existence on this planet.

It’s easy to get caught up in the negativity. Nobody can blame you for being bummed by the state of affairs in Pottersville. But there’s a goddamned miracle afoot if you’re reading this. You’re alive. And even if you wrestle against the truth of it – that’s a pretty extraordinary gift and opportunity.

Let’s make the most of it.

Tomorrow.

And every day after it.

Love,

b.

 

Ramblings from a Surly Old Bastard – the early Holidays edition

BENJAMIN LEROY

I had a bit of an allergic reaction yesterday.

It wasn’t a bee sting or a spider bite. It did not require an EpiPen. But the response was sudden and inflamed, and, well, I’m only now in a position to talk about it. Thank God.

What was this terrible thing?

A fair question, reader. I thank you for asking (if even only half-heartedly because you’re trying to kill ten minutes before lunch by surfing on the internet, and you’ve already checked your email ten times in the last fifteen minutes), your concern is noted.

I don’t know if you’re going to believe this or not—but somebody said something on the internet, and I don’t think it’s true. I know, I know, “if it’s on the internet, it must be true,” we all know that. But, go with me for a second, what if, just possibly, that was not true? What if—and I’m not saying this is a fact or anything—but what if it turned out that there was no screening process and somebody snuck onto the internet and started spouting opinions as facts?

Terrible, right?

Back to yesterday.

I read something to the effect that authors, both aspiring and published, should not give negative reviews of other books anywhere on the internet, because...you might make the editor/agent mad and then those editors/agents won’t want to work with the author who wrote a negative review.

I find this position flawed on multiple levels. Here is a partial list.

(1) A reader owes nothing to anybody. He or she is not only free to enjoy or not enjoy a book, but is likewise free to express an opinion about the book. For the sake of this argument, I’m EXCLUDING reviews by people with personal axes to grind. There are, scientifically speaking, a million reasons to not like a book including not connecting with the story, bad editing, against personal sensibilities, etc. As long as those points are articulated—rage on, reviewer! Rage on.

(2) Publishing should never be mistaken for the Self Esteem Railroad to Confidenceville. It does not exist to make an author or a publisher or an agent feel better about him/herself. If an agent or editor decides not to work with an author because the author found legitimate things not to like about one of the agent’s or editor’s other projects, that’s...sad? Juvenille? 

I hate to play into narratives that are not absolutes, but in the last few years there’s been an explosion of people accusing publishers and agents of being power hungry jerks. Many of those charges come from writers who, frankly, are not writing at a publishable level. I might venture out on a solid limb to assert all of the first reads from family and friends garnered universal praise and now the author is pissed because the “brilliance” isn’t appreciated by strangers with business interests.

But, my interactions with some agents and publishers at conferences or on the internetting have, in fact, provided evidence of a literary sociopathy—with agents and editors filling the shoes of the monsters they’ve been accused of being. Even publishers and agents that nobody has heard of and who haven’t had any appreciable success in the business like lording over other human beings.

My message to them?

This is not high school. You are no longer the cheerleader. Or, if that wasn’t your reality, now is not your time to take out your frustration on the star quarterback for the wrongdoings of youth. Readers (whether they are writers or not) are not present on your earth to kiss your ass and tell you how great you are. Sorry. They just aren’t. If that’s why you’re in the business, you’re part of the problem.

(3) I am one of those pretentious dudes who thinks that you can’t produce great art without struggle. Your toolbox as a human being needs to be full of experiences, many of which are probably unpleasant when living through them. Extraordinary people rise above the challenges put in front of them. They may fail a bunch, but they get back on the horse. (Christ, just how many clichés can I fit into this?) So you know what won’t help you be a better writer/agent/publisher? Indiscriminate clapping at your every breath. If your echo chamber only gives you the good news, you’re never going to see places for improvement. If you want your author to be the best he/she can be by protecting them from criticism, you should enroll them in a t-ball league where everybody wins a medal for trying. The publishing business isn’t safe for them.

And just so we’re clear—I’ve received bad reviews as a publisher. For whatever reason, some books that I really love and published, weren’t given gold stickers by everybody who read them. I take what I can from those reviews, and then move on. I have no Excel spreadsheet with the reviewers’ names. No Voodoo dolls with pins through the eyes. You could serve all of those bad reviews to me in a cocktail and I wouldn’t get the slightest bit tipsy. It’s part of the territory and I’ve got tolerance.

Anywho, back to the allergic reaction. I’ve figured out that I have at least two options. I can avoid the threat altogether by staying off the internet. Or I can take a little of the poison every now and again, and fight the fight. So here we are.

And here I go.

b.

 

For more about life, America, writing, and other stuff, visit my website over at www.benjaminleroy.com

 

 

Powerball, NaNoWriMo, and Self-Publishing Services

BENJAMIN LEROY

Listen, I’m not going to lie, I’ve had a lot of Red Bull today, and on top of that, for the first 22 hours of the day I was pretty sure I was going to win the $500,000,000 up for grabs in the Powerball, so when I tell you I’m wired, I mean to tell you that this has approximately a 50/50 chance of being coherent. You have been warned.

There are three things I’d like to discuss today.

The first, no longer relevant, is the $500,000,000 that I’ve already started spending. If that kind of check ended up in my bank account, I want you to know that I would have overpaid a lot of authors. Not because it would make business sense, there wouldn’t be any chance of turning a profit, but knowing that folks who bring so much joy to others with their writing got paid enough to buy a house and a Chevy Volt or a Monster Truck (they still driving ‘em in Williamsburg, Brooklyn?), well that would be payment enough. Because let’s be honest, dudes getting paid $2,500,000 to oversee Twinkie production at a failing business is ten times more obscene than an author not earning out an advance for a really brilliant book. I accidentally bought tickets for the next ten drawings, so even though the jackpot will be significantly smaller the next few times out, I’ve got a good chance of winning (if I understand mathematics).

The second thing we should discuss is the end of November. More specifically, the end of November that brings the end of NaNoWriMo. I know others have already covered this elsewhere, but let me join the chorus of, “Hey! Great! The first draft of your 73,000 word epic The Absolute Justice Swindle of Extreme Revenge is done and you are e-x-c-i-t-e-d, but you totally need to edit that thing over the next few months before sending it to an agent or an editor.” I respect you for your commitment this month, I personally gave up on November 2nd. I totally understand your enthusiasm and your desire to share your work with the world. But, you’ve got one chance to get the best book you can muster to the market, don’t blow it by rushing it. Yes, yes, you can have it up on Amazon for Kindle by December 1st, but you shouldn’t. The novel needs to follow a proper life trajectory. Though a four year old can wield a shovel with some grace, we no longer throw them to the side of the road to dig ditches expecting a competent hole to be dug.

The third thing—and this maybe isn’t cool of me—but I want to address the whole “Big Six” publisher getting involved with vanity publishing thing. It doesn’t surprise me to see one of these companies get wrapped up in the shenanigans. I understand that some dude in a business suit was like, “Damn, how can we boost our bottom line with little risk or capital investment?” And then some other dude in another suit who wants the first suit’s job was all, “We can charge obscene amounts of money to unsuspecting aspirants to do questionably helpful things.”

That’s how you get people offering to be your Social Media Sherpa for $5,000, guiding you through websites that are already trending towards obsolete, aren’t actual sales vehicles, and sound really really important, but, you know, aren’t. Don't believe me? I don't blame you. But here's an article from the Wall Street Journal talking about the value of Facebook, Twitter, and others as a sales vehicle.

If I had an employee who put together a similar services offered and pricing grid, I’d immediately demand a piss test not to see if he/she was on drugs, but to establish which  color of paint he/she was huffing in the bathroom during the 10:15 coffee break.

Here are my predictions:

• This isn’t going to be a substantial generator of revenue. These types of businesses have been around for the better part of a decade, writers are savvier than they once were, the whole “indie writer” movement has empowered authors to understand the economic realities of publishing. With so many readily available essays about self-publishing/indie author/guerilla wordsmithing, not many, if any, authors are going to stumble into one of these packages.

 

• The prices will be adjusted to something more...reasonable(?)...but by then it’ll be too late. The internet is already afire with talk about this being one more example of “legacy publishing” being tone deaf and out of touch.  Any backtracking will look like either capitulation OR a confession of poor planning, neither of which would be good for an industry leader.

 

Then again, what the hell do I know? I’m just some guy on the internet, playing the lottery, dispensing half-assed advice to writers.

At least it’s free.

The advice, that is.

The lottery cost me $20.

Of Cliches and Pumpkin Pie

BENJAMIN LEROY

If you're reading this in America and it's Thanksgiving Day/Night, I really wish you'd step away from the computer and make conversation with somebody around you. Stranger. Family. Friend. That in-law you don't really feel like you have anything in common with--just talk.

Because here we all are, alive on this crazy spinning planet. Some days the chips are down and we have to bluff our way back into the game, but there's a game, and we've got a chance, and there isn't really anything more empowering than that. I'm thankful for it. 

I'm thankful that even in this crazy era of publishing--self-publishing, Big 6 mergers, books that aren't well written selling a bajillion copies--people are still reading, stories are still being told, and the connection between humans flourishes.

And that's why I want you to go talk to the people near you.

Because we all want to be heard.

And we all want to feel less alone.

As long as there are people around on, we can do both.

Life and Publishing Stranger Than the Fiction

BENJAMIN LEROY

Earlier today, Sarah Weinman tweeted a link to a fascinating article about an author who lived in invented worlds of his own imagination. I'm not talking merely about getting in touch with characters, I'm talking about creating your own life out of fiction--sporting accomplishments, educational achievements, publishing and film successes--in an effort to sell a book.

When I saw who the subject of the article was, I couldn't help but laugh. I'd actually had my own run in with him half a decade ago. Then, on page three of the article, I saw that my interactions were a part of the story.

Here is that article, as written by Thomas Mullen for Atlanta Magazine.

For the rest of this to make any sense, you'll have to read the article. After the break, I give the other details I remember.

 

**

A few years ago, Richard Garbarini (the attorney) for the victim, called the Big Earth/Bleak House office, and the Big Earth people called me and asked that I talk to him.

As it turned out, he was looking for money that Mitchell said was owed to him for his contribution to THESE GUNS FOR HIRE (Bleak House 2006, edited by J.A. Konrath). I don't remember the exact sum, but it was tens of thousands of dollars that Mitchell said he was owed for his short story. I told Mr. Garbarini that he was barking up the wrong tree, and that Mitchell had been paid from the advance that Bleak House paid to Konrath and that it, along with any subsequent earnings, was significantly less by a magnitude of a couple zeros.

I also told him of my dealings with Mitchell and Majestic Descending (aka "Die Hard 4: On a Cruise Ship). 

Peter Rubie brought the book to us with all of the talk of Cherokee Productions, Bruce Willis, James Garner, and Sandra Locke. Mitchell said the movie would move forward as soon as a book deal was in place, but that he'd need at least a $20,000 advance. When we asked to know more, he offered to introduce us to film producer "Justin Harbin" who, he warned us, had recently had throat surgery and talked in a funny voice.

And, indeed, "Justin Harbin" did speak as though his vocal chords were pulled tight and coated with gravel. He was amiable enough and wanted us to know how big of a fan of Mitchell and Majestic Descending he was. This, he assured us, was going to be box office gold. 

We got pretty excited around the Bleak House office. A few days/weeks (the time gets a little blurry now) later, Mitchell came to Wisconsin and had lunch with us (Alison, me, and some other folks), regaling us with stories of his fencing prowess and how he had once embarrassed a "sword fighter" at a science fiction convention who had made the mistake of asking Mitchell to come out of the audience for a demonstration.

Also of note, and not the least bit coincidental, on his flight to Madison, Mitchell sat next to a woman on the plane who was reading his book (The Fifth Ring). He cleared his throat to get her attention and asked if he looked familiar, then pointed at the back of the book. Of course, the lady freaked out when she realized she was sitting next to (surely) one of her literary heroes.

(In the string of biographical facts we were given, it turned out that Mitchell was also a highly accomplished brain surgeon, one of the only men who could perform a particularly complicated surgery. The exact details are lost to time, but I remember feeling like the guy just couldn’t stop adding to his biography.)

Dave Oskin (now deceased) and I kinda assumed the dude was a bullshit artist, but at the same time, as a small press, the mere fact that it seemed possible was enough to keep pursuing it. I’m not going to lie or pretend to be above the past—the book was absolutely not good. This was a carefree time when we thought all it would take to get us on the map would be one big hit, and we could overlook shitty literary quality if it helped fund much more deserving projects.

But then the phone call.

"Justin Harbin" was supposed to call Dave to discuss particulars about Majestic Descending and Bleak House. Dave's phone rang and sure enough "Justin Harbin" was on the phone in his scratchy voice, but the caller ID said Mitchell Graham. When Dave asked him how that happened, “Justin” quickly said, "Let me call you back, there seems to be some static on the line..." and hung up.

Dave called me and said it was weird. The more Dave and I talked about it and added up all of the missing details, the incomplete IMDB listings, etc. we finally gave up on the idea of it being on the up and up.

I called Peter Rubie and said I thought Mitchell was full of shit and I hoped nobody was trying to con us. There was a slight attempt to explain it off as a misunderstanding, but not with any real conviction. Mitchell and “Justin” both tried calling us a few times, but we never took the calls.

A few months later we saw that Majestic Descending had found a publisher. I figured at this point, any of the con associated with the movie would surely have been put to rest. But Tor’s website had an interview with Mitchell, and he was still namedropping Sandra Locke and a movie deal.

I think I made an attempt to talk to somebody to talk to somebody, but then I gave up and figured it’d all come out eventually. I confess that I did check the Bookscan numbers for a few weeks before losing interest.

Though we often joked about it at Bleak House, and later at Tyrus, it was only an interesting footnote in our history until I got the call from Mr. Garbarini, and realized that it was a significantly bigger case than just a movie and book hustle. As we compared details, it was clear that some parts of the story had to be modified over time to keep certain cons going, but that we’d both heard many of the same tales.

Sometime later I talked to an agent who coincidentally mentioned that he was working with a guy named Mitchell Graham about a golf book. It didn’t take long to figure out we were talking about the same guy. I told him what I knew.

There is no golf book by Mitchell to check out on Bookscan.

According to Mr. Garbarini, Mitchell had more pressing matters to address.

Do You Need a Day Off?

BENJAMIN LEROY

Last weekend I spoke at the Florida Writers Conference in Orlando.

As some of you know, I love Florida. If I were in a financial place where I could make grand claims of owning a winter home, I’d buy one in Wewahitchka, a town in the panhandle of Florida along the banks of the Apalachicola River. It’s a town I’ve fallen in love with over the past decade since first publishing Michael Lister’s, Blood of the Lamb when I was still over at Bleak House Books.

So even though I was scheduled to participate in the conference the 19^th-21^st, I made my travel arrangements such that I got into Florida nearly a week early. I flew into Orlando and drove the six hours north to Wewahitchka. Me being me, I did my best to stick to back roads, the stretches of rural highway that highlight what I love so much about the area—the vibrant sprawl of nature, the minutes long stretches between bouts of oncoming traffic, the lack of cell phone signal…

There’s a certain weight lifted from our shoulders when we get off the grid.

On Tuesday night I played in a darts tournament at Tukedawayz (got second place), met new friends, heard great stories, and felt relaxed for the first time in…hell, I don’t know, a long time.

I had to get back on the grid for the weekend—speaking at the conference about the mystery/crime fiction world, sitting on a panel full of agents and editors, taking pitches—and even though I love that stuff, it requires a certain frame of mind, a shorter quality of breath, and my attention in ways that I am not always prepared to offer. I love the high that comes with being in front of a room of people, but I typically feel a crash when it’s over.

I finished up with conference duties on Sunday and headed back out on the road with only the vaguest notion of a destination. I ended up in the town of Mount Dora. A place that reminded me of a bygone era I didn’t experience the first time. It reminded me of Mayberry. It reminded me of old family vacations. I didn’t do much but walk around, eat, and talk to some locals, but I was the most at peace I’ve been in a long time.

There was no talk about social media. No worrying about book sales or review scandals on Amazon. No attention to the 24 hour news cycle. It was heaven, really. And I wished everybody could be there, or be somewhere like there.

If I was in the position to think about buying a winter home, it would stand to reason that I’d have a bunch of money tucked under my mattress or a Mason jar buried in the back yard. And if that was the case, I’d spend every damn dollar I had to get all of you somewhere off the grid to give you a chance to breathe or read or write or laugh an honest laugh.

But I can’t afford to do that. Not for everybody.

However, I’d still like to make the effort for one person.

I’m going to buy somebody a night or two of lodging off the grid somewhere where he or she can finally crack open the novel they’ve been wanting to read or type out fifty inspired pages for a NaNoWriMo project or have the conversation he/she has been meaning to have with his/herself to get the clarity to make positive life changes.

There are no strings attached. I don’t want your email address. You don’t have to buy anything. I’m not asking you to fill out a survey.

I just want you to get off the grid. I want you to take a deep breath.

Details can be found on my website over here - http://www.benjaminleroy.com/get-off-the-grid-if-only-for-a-night-or-two/

Three More Protocol Tips for Attending a Writing Conference

BENJAMIN LEROY

Hey! I'm in Florida for a writing conference, and I was hanging out with some conference goers discussing etiquette. Then I decided to write a note about it. Below, are three more tips (because I'm sure I've rambled this about in earlier posts) about how to maximize your writing conference experience.

• There is always something to learn—I’ve attended many wonderful writing conferences with valuable panels, great teachers, and excellent handout materials. Of course, I’ve also been to some conferences that don’t fit that bill. Some of those second types were actually more even more beneficial to me on a personal and professional level because of the people I met (non-panelists) and the things we talked about. Keep your eyes and ears open, even when it isn’t in a classroom setting.

 

• Do not be a jerk—this is self-explanatory and a lesson you can take with you to places other than writing conferences (you’re welcome). I know I don’t need to explain this to you, but I’ve seen ugly and pretentious behavior at writing conferences. Nobody is going to steal your idea and other writers are not your competition (not in a there can only be one winner kind of way). Be good to people and the universe will respond in kind.

 

• Keep the sales pitch to a minimum—Do you know who has been trapped in an elevator with an overeager author holding ten copies of the author’s poorly put together book? This guy right here. That kinda bums me out when it happens. But do you know what makes it worse? When the very same author starts trying to sell me a copy of the poorly put together book before he knows me. It’s clear I’ve been reduced to “potential customer” and the webinar the author dude took by the “social media expert” convinced him that it’s best to hit up everybody you see, anywhere you see them, to purchase your book. Rest assured, it is not. The conference isn’t about you peddling copies of your book, it’s about a whole bunch of people who dig writing, talking about writing. If, after you’ve actually built some community, you mention you’ve got spare copies of Harley Ford’s Epic American Dragrace for sale, I won’t begrudge you as hard.

 

Got it? Cool. Thanks.

See you on the road,

 

b.

One More Time About Community

BENJAMIN LEROY

A few weeks back I bitched about authors who were making a practice of creating profiles under fake names on book review sites, giving themselves a bunch of 5 snowflake reviews, and tearing into other authors they perceived as competition.

It offended me then.

And in my own foul-mouthed way, I explained why it offended me. I also knew that my initial rage, though profanely succinct, was only the top of a volcano with more substantial heft somewhere below sea level. (Jesus, can’t I ever express anything in simple, non-mixed metaphor terms?)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking.

I don’t view publishing as a zero sum game. Either wrongly or rightly, I don’t think that a sale of a book published by another press means one less sale towards Tyrus Books’ bottom line. In fact, I’ve got this crazy ass theory that if the book purchased from somebody else is good, somewhere there is a happy reader who will be looking to address his or her book fix in the future. Maybe that’s when the reader selects something from our catalog. Maybe not. The most important thing? The reader is coming back for more books.

Period.

As such, I believe it’s important to promote reading and books. I feel blessed to exist in a community of publishers, readers, and authors that talk about books with genuine enthusiasm, recommending books that mean something to them, most of which have not visited anywhere near the NYT Bestseller list, because they love them.

Chris Holm, a dude I think I met at last year’s Bouchercon, but that I definitely know from Twitter, had a new book (The Wrong Goodbye) come out from Angry Robot— a publisher that some market analyst with a nice tie and stylish glasses would call our “competition.” Lots of folks I respect, like Elizabeth White, Keith Rawson, Steve Weddle, and others were talking about The Wrong Goodbye on the social media. It was real buzz, as opposed to the, “we’re going to show you this ad forty times today, and by the end you’re going to be mildly curious about this movie,” buzz that large marketing departments   hope will generate conversation.

Caught up in the spirit, I offered to buy electronic copies of The Wrong Goodbye for the first two people to respond. I received the two responses in seconds. Then, the totally awesome @lolosletters made the same offer.

Certainly, our market analyst would protest, Ronald McDonald does not stand around Burger King buying people free hamburgers.

I am not Ronald McDonald.

We are not serving mass produced hamburgers. We cannot advertise billions sold.

I am ok with that.

But I am committed to feeding the hunger of others. In this case, it’s a matter of books and story. In this realm Angry Robot, Soho Press, Midnight Ink, and others have proven themselves to be farmers of good taste and good produce. I want to support them, because I am more like them than not like them, and I know that there is room for all of us in a thriving market. And I feel better about them, knowing they aren’t involved with genetic modification of food in a battle of commodity and profit over touchy feely things like taste and not going to make me long-term sick.

Writing fake reviews, bad mouthing others, and whatever other shenanigans “expert book promoters” encourage or fail to speak out against, are the cynical tactics of folks who have taken a short term, kill or be killed approach to books. To…yes, I’ll say it…art.

If you’ll grant me this one more indulgence, I’d tell you that this art, this business of connecting the universe through words and stories, both fiction and non-fiction, letting readers know that they are part of something bigger than any one of us is sacred to me. There. I said it. I mean it with all sincerity.

That, then, is why schoolyard antics on review sites are offensive to me.

It is also why I will give my time, energy, and cash to making sure that wherever there is a reader looking for good books, that reader will be able to find them, whether they be from Tyrus Books or from somebody else who takes the mission as serious as I do.

Preach mode, off.

b.

For more from me, catch me on Twitter @tyrusbooks or at www.benjaminleroy.com

Piling On isn't Right, Either, But I Do It Anyway

BENJAMIN LEROY (@tyrusbooks)

This month’s big distraction from quality books (the thing about publishing we should be celebrating) is the sock puppetry of online reviews, the puppeteers, and ultimately worthless discussions about the ethical implications of the behavior (present company included).

For those of you who have wisely/fortunately avoided all of the drama, here’s a capsule summary.

More than one author has recently been outed/has confessed/bragged about the fact that s/he routinely goes online to places like Amazon or Goodreads to praise his/her book, and in some cases not leaving the bar before spitting on other patrons by writing negative reviews about books written by peers.

A six year old, without use of graphs or complicated words, can explain to you why this is wrong. There isn’t really any debate to be had.

But, wait, Ben! It’s not illegal, and in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, it’s incumbent upon an author to…

Stop. Just stop. It’s beneath your dignity to pony up that kind of bullshit. It’s an insult to my intelligence. And it’s time you’re wasting when you could be working on a more meaningful contribution to the world. Maybe that’s writing. Maybe that’s giving blood. Maybe that’s quality time set aside for reflecting on how just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it isn’t still the domain of assholes, and you likely don’t want to be a part of that gang.

The deck isn’t stacked against you by any sort of cabal. Integrity is more important than a five star review on Amazon. There aren’t excuses. There is no believable feigned ignorance.

Not even to a jury of six year olds in a first grade courtroom.

For more talk about publishing and hypothetical courtrooms, visit www.benjaminleroy.com

The Disruption of Routines

BENJAMIN LEROY

Well, here it is almost midnight on a Wednesday, and I have, as is sometimes my custom, been a bit delinquent in my posting duties.

Lost a computer yesterday (the hard drive is dead) and I've been relegated to using my work computer, a machine that doesn't have the same "feel" to it. When I sat down to write something witty or informative or listy, I came up blank.

Then I started wondering if other people need a particular computer/device to facilitate their best writing. Or are some of you able to write on any machine at anytime? If the computer isn't the limiting factor, is something else? Do you need music? Do you only write at a certain time of day?

Lemme know.

Unofficial Labor Day Opening Challenge

So, you’ve got a long weekend, I’ve got a short attention span, and I’ve got a micro challenge for you.

I often talk about how I know I’m going to love a book based on the strength of some obscenely small sample—usually the first few paragraphs.  I also say that I can’t always articulate what it is that works (in the abstract), but I know it when I see it. From there, when I have a living, breathing example, I can kinda string together a coherent defense of what it is that I love.

Let’s put that in practice.

For those of you on Twitter, put together your best opening in one single tweet. Use the hashtag #hdgc. That leaves you with something like 134 characters. Doesn’t matter if it gets cut off in the middle of the word. I'll know.

Or at least I think I'll know.

If you have questions, ask me here or on Twitter (@tyrusbooks).

3, 2, 1, go!

Brief Dispatches from the Attention Deficit Department

BENJAMIN LEROY

Well hello, dear reader! I’m still on the road and have now been gone from my compound for twenty days and counting. Thankfully, I’ve been sitting still in the same spot for more than a week, so even though it’s not home territory, it’s home, and I’m ramping up productivity by 100%.

In addition to reading a lot of submissions, I’m also reading my first Western novel—Max Brand’s, Silvertip—an experience I’m really treasuring because I’ve somehow managed to tap into a former life of mine that gathered around the old Philco with the rest of the family to listen to the Lone Ranger or Gunsmoke sixty years ago. Is there anything better than getting into the reading groove that reminds you what it was like when you first started picking up books as a kid? If there is, I don’t know what it is, and I’d rather you didn’t remind me.

Anyway, Silvertip is free this week for Kindle and NOOK. If you use either of those devices you should totally pick it up.

Also!  (in case you haven’t figured it out yet, my attention span is razor thin today) I wanted to share something with you. Maybe it’s Controversial~! Maybe it’s not (now I have the itch to make another one of those lists, stay tuned to see if it happens).

Last week when I was speaking at the Cape Cod Writers Conference I sat down with a room full of attendees to talk about the current state of publishing. I was feeling particularly spirited, caught as I was by a rather rambunctious side of myself that likes to talk, when a question was put to me about social media.

It went something like, “What’s the best way to use Facebook and Twitter to build our author platform?”

I’ve probably discussed this before on this very website (but, per my usual stance on things, I’m too lazy to look it up and while I’ve got attention on this subject I should stick it out), but it’s really, really hard for me to do anything other than roll my eyes at questions like the one above.

I think the emphasis on an author’s social media footprint of being any corollary to an author’s sales is specious. I thought the same thing about book trailers. Bookmarks. Posters. Candy with cute handwritten messages on it. Business cards. Balloons. Tote bags. Stress relief balls. Letter openers.

You know what sells books? I mean really, meaningfully sells books? Buzz. Organic buzz.

People read your book, they love it, they tell others about it, and the spider web shoots out in so many directions. All of the penny ante bribery with cheap plastic bric-a-brac (there’s a word I don’t get to use often) didn’t work five years ago, in much the same way that simply standing on your digital pulpit and screaming, “I HAVE A NEW BOOK FOR SALE. YOU CAN BUY IT HERE,” isn’t going to do anything either.

Social media is effective at helping you, Earth Citizen #6,593,503,301 be able to erase the geographical limitations of car travel and long distance phone charges to make friends with strangers all over the world. But just like in for real life, that means working at it a little bit. That means showing up to a party and instead of just whipping out your wallet and showing everybody pictures of your kids, you have to ask others about what it is they do, and you have to remember those details (as opposed to nodding politely while trying to figure out how you’re going to work in the fact about your son’s triple in the Little League championship game that got him in position to be the tying run). And, unless you’re currently waiting for your English 101 class to start in a week—life isn’t all about parties. You take a break. Sometimes—and if you’re a bitter old man like me, it is often—you need time to yourself to do your things.

But, if you checked out the lessons that some others are telling you that you need to be sounding a constant bellow from the lighthouse of your writing career (that has now becoming a selling career with a writing hobby) to let people know that you’re out there and you have a book they can buy right now.

Going back to this whole party analogy. You ever meet somebody at a party, hit it off really well, and know that the person is likely to be a part of your life for a long time? Great feeling, right? Have you ever gone back to that person a day later and said, “Hey, remember me? Yeah, I’m awesome, right? You should get on the phone and tell all your friends how awesome I am so they’ll know.”

Of course you haven’t (and if you have, click here). It might take a few months, but later on you’ll run into one of that other person’s friends and he’ll be all, “So, you’re Steve Doeswellatparties? Heard a lot of great things about you.” And then you’ll shake hands and you can ask that dude if his son plays baseball.

Let your legend grow through the organic actions of others, and not by guilting or compelling others to be your sales guy. You write a good book, if it strikes somebody as something special, they’ll talk about it. I promise. That’s how buzz starts. If it could just be manufactured, all books would be best sellers because the formula would make it easy to guarantee.

Quick math—your part of that equation is writing a special book. Not an ok book. Not an adequate book. A special book. You know what that takes? That takes time having your ass in the seat writing and exploring your characters, not updating your Facebook status every hour to talk about a new five star review you got on Amazon from a dude who gives five star reviews to every book he’s read, but doesn’t ever seem to talk about plot or anything else specific in the book. 

If you believe this journalist type (and I do), it’s all a tech-bubble ready to burst anyway.

(Can you believe I wrote more than 500 words just so I could give you a link to an article that somebody else wrote?)

I just remembered that I mentioned something about making a new list earlier in this post, but I, for the life of me, can’t remember what the hell I was hoping to do with a list or even what the subject matter was going to be, so I’m going to have to let you down in that department.

Maybe next week.

Anyway, that’s it from here. I love you all and hope that you have a great week writing and living in these times.

b.

 

 

Hello. Sit Down. Stay awhile.

BENJAMIN LEROY

I'd like to tell you that I've got exciting news or some wedge of insight (initially, I typed that as "incite" and I thought it was cool, but worth changing) to share with you, but I don't. Not really at least.

I've been on the road for a longtime. Last week I went camping and rock climbing in central Oregon. Had a bunch of first time experiences that will help shape me as a publishing professional, but also as a human being (as an example, here's me crossing a creek/river in a Jeep for the first time). So that's good and important and all of that. I ended up meeting a bunch of wonderful people at the Willamette Writers Conference in Portland last weekend. Really looking forward to reading some of the pitches. Hello to you! I'm glad we had a chance to meet.

From Portland, I flew the red-eye to Boston (first class~!) to hang out with my co-workers in MA, and then down to Cape Cod cause trouble with my author, friend, and mentor Randall Peffer (quick sidenote, here's Peff telling the story of the time he tracked down the King of the Hobos for National Geographic). The two of us taught at the Cape Cod Writers Conference, including a wonderful lunchtime talk about what in the hell is actually going on in the publishing world. I had on my Captain Contrarian outfit today. To all of you who might be reading the blog for the first time because I saw you today--Hello! Trust me, I'm usually 80% more educational than I'm being right now, this is admittedly just a sleight of hand filler.

At some undetermined point in the future, when I'm good and ready, I'll leave the Cape Cod area and head home, but, I'm not going to lie, it's going to take a little bit to pry me away from here. I plan on spending the weekend with my own novel and some solitude.

I'm a lucky, lucky guy, and I'm doubly lucky for having you in my life.

Keep writing.

b.

Tragedy, Introspection and Other Thursday Topics

BENJAMIN LEROY

Last week I said I’d quit with the ridiculous list writing and that I’d move on to some other less entertaining/less informative thing. I am committed to fulfilling the promise of lowered expectations.

There are a few things I thought about covering. Some of them have much bigger real world consequences than the others. But then again, if I squint hard enough, and I extrapolate far enough, and I give in to the never ending demons of media speculation and accepting the worst qualities of humans, I suppose it can be done.

First up is last week’s shooting in Aurora. There is nothing I can add to capture how terrible that scene was and continues to be, especially for those closest to it. Whenever something like that happens, after the initial shock of the event has worn off, I usually start thinking too much and too abstractedly about the role pop culture plays in helping criminally inclined people envision outlets for their violence.

I think I brought up something like this in an earlier installment of this blog (but I’m too whatever to look back right now), but I definitely wonder if, by publishing books that typically focus on interpersonal violence, if I’m not guilty on some level of bringing down the tenor of all conversation.

Someday soon I will likely disappear. Poof. Into the ether to figure out my culpability in the perpetration of guilt in the world. My own evolution is a micro-study of the problem--from middle school outcast with an interest in serial killers to middle aged dude who believes, ultimately, that love is the answer to all of our problems. I believe there is a choice to be made between perpetuating all of the fear and hate and anger in the echo chamber of the public square or raising two middle fingers in the direction of that sound and fury and choosing, instead, to love. Simply. Fully. Without reservation.

Then again, Story Two I was going to bring up was about the recent petulant behavior of a group of authors who didn’t stop at crying and bitching about negative reviews, but instead, started stalking the reviewers—posting the reviewers’ personal information online (including where they lived), in some bullshit attempt to stop people from giving their honest reviews of books. I’m not going to link to anything these people have done, but it won’t take you long on the Google machine to find it.

A message to thin skinned authors--You do not get to bully and harass people because they don’t like your precious baby. You don’t get to make up rules like, “Well, the reviewer is also an author, and authors shouldn’t review other authors.” That’s something you made up, it’s nothing the rest of us signed on to or will abide. Sorry. If you wonder why your life is full of drama, I’d suggest hitting the introspection button and figure out how much of it starts with you.

As a publisher, I’ve definitely had books that have come out from both Bleak House and Tyrus that were reviewed less than favorably by certain reviewers. Sometimes I’ve read the reviews and wondered if the reviewer was even reading the right book. I’ve seen reviewers bitch and moan about things I’d consider inconsequential. But how many times have I emailed them to say, “You’re a jerk and I hate you?”

Zero.

None.

I’ve seen some of the offending authors claim that the bad reviews are messing with their livelihood. I’m going to call bullshit on this, too. A bad review on Amazon or Good Reads or any other blog isn’t going to be the crippling blow to what would have otherwise been a successful book. You know what kills your ability to make a living as a writer? Writing a book that isn’t better than the one next to it on the shelf. And, guess who’s responsibility that is? I’ll give you one hint while you hit the introspection button.

All of this negativity and stalking and screaming adds to the same distorted noise in the public square that leads to drama and tragedy that doesn’t serve us in any helpful way. At least I can’t see it.

Anyway, it’s off to the introspection button for me. Then gone.

 

If you want to keep up with me, even if I'm off the grid, your best bet is at my website.

Five More Things To Consider, Aspiring Author

BENJAMIN LEROY

Unless something new pops into my cerebral cortex, I may be done with the whole list thing because I don’t think there’s anything left for me to cover and if there’s anything I hate doing, it’s sounding like a broken record. And besides that, I've started shooting almost nightly TV shows to discuss writing and publishing (and all kinds of other things). For the more professional version of this, here is the Tyrus Books channel and if you need a less formal, more random life discussion, here is my personal channel. When I broadcast each night I take questions from Facebook, Twitter, and on the Youtube pages themselves. If there's something you want answered or clarified, let me know. Now! On to today's list.

 

 Five More Things For You To Consider, My Author Pal

A few more notes and bits of advice as you go about your writing journey.

 

• The Labor of Love. Planning your life around being a bestselling author is folly. There. I said it. Will somebody make that plan and see it to fruition. Yup. Will countless others embark on that same voyage from the shores of Unpublishedville to Bestsellerlandia and end up on the rocks or at the bottom of the sea? You betcha.  Don’t set your understanding of success at some self-esteem crippling level. There are way too many factors outside of your control. You can build a great boat, but changing tides (there’s a metaphor for you), a poor crew, acts of God—all of these things can be uncontrollable anchors. If your joy is in the boat building, you can be a happy sailor regardless.

 

• Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I’m all about people doing new things, exploring, shining flashlights down dark corridors. Sometimes you get bit by things and learn lessons. I applaud that. Slap a little dirt on the boo boo and keep marching. Then again, don’t make easily avoidable stupid mistakes. Our digital age makes it easier to do great things fast and wide. It also makes it exponentially easier to make a complete ass of yourself in the Public Square. Yes, you can try your own brand of frontier justice on reviewers you don’t like over on your book’s Kindle page. Yes, you can start a website and claim to be “award-winning” or “best-selling” but offer no proof or flimsy evidence. You can. Some morally shaky and straight up audacious folks just say, “to hell with it, I’m going to turn my life to fiction” and list publishing credits that don’t really exist. But why? Why do that? The momentary thrill of I’m a big shot is short lived and easily unraveled. So much more easily than regaining any credibility anywhere that counts.

 

• Beware of Dubious Advice. Getting your advice from lists on the internet isn’t a substitute for living life. Present soapbox preacher included. I touched on this a little last week, but it’s really important to me, so I’m going to be redundant. You’re going to die. I’m going to die. Might be today. Might be a hundred years from now. You may even be reading this in a future where I am already dead. Please trust me on this one—experiencing the thrills of the world vicariously from the comfort of your couch, even on the biggest plasma screen, is a poor substitute for living the actual thing. Not everything will be great. You will come across shitty people and bad experiences, but you will also see the beauty of this world and the overwhelming sheer awesomness of humans being human in the most unexpected ways. If you think I’m lying, and I’m in your neck of the woods, I will personally come pick you up for an adventure because the world is huge and I want to die with a long laundry list of things done, places seen, and people met. As the future tattoo on my arm says—Adventure ‘til Death.

 

• Books are not condos. My sentimentality for the written word is showing here.  I’m also mixing it with the halcyon days of my youth. Way back when I was just a kid, my family headed to Florida for our annual Disney vacation. As rubes from all over have no doubt likewise experienced, we got roped into a high pressure sales pitch for a condo timeshare. The sales associate was boorish. Aggressive. And, because my dad lives by the whole, “If you’re forcing me to make a decision right this minute, the answer is no” philosophy—the man was unsuccessful. For all that is good in the world, do not corner readers in an attempt to browbeat them into purchasing your book. Either they’re going to or they’re not, stop with the high pressure stuff. Also, laying on the guilt trip “this is my livelihood” story is a bullshit excuse and probably means that you thought you’d figured out a get rich quick scheme and you have now learned that writing and publishing (well) is hard. Great. That was a life choice you made, and not one that needs to be subsidized by strangers. Sorry. If you're relying on pressure to sell something, as opposed to, say, quality, you shouldn't be in the writing business. You're just contaminating the reader pool for everybody else.

 

• Your Image is Showing. I know, Killer, you’re a surly old bastard who’d prefer to live without the distraction of human companionship. You’re in constant existential ache. There is no time for love or laughter because those are wasteful uses of time. Actually, you’re full of shit. If you’re writing, it’s because you have something to say…something to say to someone. You’re looking to be heard and understood and maybe remembered. Not acting like a dick in real life goes a long way, not just as a writer, but as a human being. Be a part of the community, and the community will be there for you. In professional wrestling, when a wrestler acts like his character outside of wrestling environs, it’s referred to as “living the gimmick.” I’ve known too many aspiring writers more interested in living the gimmick, than, you know writing. Don't be that guy. He's kinda ridiculous, for serious.

 

Before I go, and while I might still have the inflated audience that comes with list making, I want to quick jump in with something important.

My friend Sabrina Ogden (a gracious human being and huge friend to the crime fiction community) needs jaw surgery, but her insurance won’t pay for it. A bunch of really hip and wonderful authors are putting together an anthology with proceeds going towards the surgery. (This is a beautiful part of community as I discussed in “Your Image is Showing” above). You can read about the anthology over here. You can also read Sabrina’s account of how it is that her jaw got to be the way it is over here.

If, after reading all of the things I linked to in that last paragraph, you decide you want to help, I’m making a special offer. Donate $250 or more to the fund and I will critique the first 50 pages of your novel and have a one hour phone call with you to discuss the work. Maybe I’ll even work up a little list magic and tell you the “Five Things That Make Me Think You’re Brilliant.” But I’ll also probably have to do the “Five Things That Make Me Very Disappointed in You.” (or maybe I won’t.) Anyway, for more info on that offer, you can visit my Benjamin LeRoy website where I’ve outlined some of the particulars.

Love to you all from a late night in a far away hotel room,

b. 

 

For more publishing talk, writing advice, and dubious life commentary, please visit my regular website.

Five Things to Consider, Aspiring Writer

BENJAMIN LEROY

Well Hullo!

Before I get in to today’s over opinionated list—sweetly entitled, “Five Things to Consider, Aspiring Writer”—I want to let you in on an opportunity, dear reader. This past week I got a tutorial in Google+ and how to use Hangouts. Essentially, I can now shoot live tv shows broadcast on the internet with up to four or five guests to carry the conversation.

I’d like to do this every Thursday to discuss my weekly post here, but also to discuss the writing world in general, any controversies~! going on, new books, etc. What I need from you is your presence. If you’re interested in being a part of things, you’ll need the following: a Google account, a computer with camera and mic, preferably you’ll have headphones so we can avoid feedback and echo. And you’ll need a winning personality. Also, you should not be a raging asshole, because even though that might work on some tv shows, I’m not looking for it on my show. We can disagree, but this isn’t Scream-o-Vision.

If you’re interested in participating in this nonsense, send an email to ben.leroyATfwmedia.com and we’ll talk.

Now, on to today’s list!

 

FIVE THINGS TO CONSIDER, ASPIRING WRITER

 

There Isn’t Enough Time Isn’t a Good Excuse. We live busy lives! The world may or may not be collapsing! Forty hour work week turns to fifty hour. I had to go to a wedding last weekend! My son has soccer as soon as I get done with work!

Remember that episode of Saved By the Bell when Jessie Spano was freaking the fuck out with the whole “Time?! There’s never enough time! I’ll never get into Stanford…” diet pill bender?

Well, Jessie Spano was a hysterical high school girl. And if you’re listening to her and saying, “Yes, that’s why I don’t have time to write,” you’re taking your life lessons from a corny character on a corny tv show (that I happen to be able to recite nearly every line of dialogue from).

In the real world, no matter who you are, somebody else has a harder life and manages to find time to write the things in his/her gut. It is a matter of desire. You can always set the alarm clock a little earlier. If this is really what you want to do, you’ll find a way to do it. It’s not always going to be easy, it might hurt like hell on occasion, but it should also give you the most profound sense of being alive (because you’re living for multiple people) and that is payment enough.

 

Don’t chase trends. Remember when the Da Vinci Code was the big thing? It’s likely that even after it kinda slipped from your mind a little bit, it was still fresh in mine. Why? Because I was a huge fan? Because I was obsessed with how much money it made? Nope. Neither of those things. Mainly it’s because approximately one out of three queries I received in the 18 months following the height of the buzz were…you’ll never believe it…complete rip-offs of the Da Vinci Code. Judging by the submissions I read, 0% of them were good books. Some of them because they may have been technically well written (words were in the right places, punctuation was fine, etc.), but the stories themselves were totally derivative and lifeless. But there was also the class of people who had clearly given little to no thought about writing a book before sitting down to write Michaelangelo’s Mixtape. If you’re going to write a book, write it because it means something to you. Write it because the story matters. And for all that is good in the world, write it because your characters have something to say.

 

When it’s Done. It’s Done. I can speak from personal experience when I say, sometimes as authors, we get so sick of looking at our Work in Progress that we simply want to shoot it off our desk and into the world. You must fight that impulse until it is actually done. The difference between a great idea and a great book is a whole lot of editing. You have to be absolutely sure you’ve said it the way it was supposed to be said before it goes to market. You won’t be there to explain yourself. You don’t get to hold the reader’s hand to pull them where you want them to go. They go where the map takes them. It’s on you to layout the bread crumbs correctly. The first time. Even when it means you need to hack through the overgrowth and false starts you created for yourself. Is it hard? Certainly. It’s also what separates real writers from people who have a computer based hobby.

 

Not Everybody is going to like everything, ease off the death threats. If you’ve ever used the internet for anything, you may have noticed that some folks have strong opinions (seemingly about everything) that they aren’t afraid to voice at full volume. It’s quite possible that your book may end up with an arrow in its flank courtesy of Amazon User #529. Do those reviews suck to read? Depending on who you are, they certainly can. I’m not going to lie—even as a publisher—when I see somebody slamming a book that we’ve published I get a little bummed. But then I remember that I liked the book and other people did, and that’s the balance of the world.

The explosion of ebook self-publishing and online reviews has created a sometimes combustible playground filled with personal conflicts where reviews aren’t really about the book and authors, who should recognize that not everybody is going to love their precious baby (especially if it’s poorly written because of the When it’s Done it’s Done above), but who ultimately freak out on a reviewer for having an opinion and try to bully reviewers into saying nice things. Because, y’know, every “I love you” uttered at the end of a knife is sincere.

The stakes just aren’t that high. Do not escalate them Emo Writer, I promise it won’t help your cause and it will distract you with high school theatrics during time you could be using to develop your writing talents. 

 

We’re All Gonna Die. Back when I was an emotionally fragile teenager combing through old literature for moody quotes to write in my well-worn high school notebook, I found this one particularly upbeat gem from Aldous Huxley:

“A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor”

Don’t meditate on that one too long, it’s actually kind of a bummer. But basically I just want to let you know that we’re all going to die. Armed with that knowledge, may I suggest to you that you should live first and if you’re concerned about being forgotten, one way to improve your chances of sticking around in the collective conscience would be to write a really great book.

 

For more stuff about books and life, visit my website here.

Five Plot Devices That Have Overstayed Their Patent

BENJAMIN LEROY

I used to know this guy (he’s dead now) who built all kinds of crazy ass gadgets that you would never think there was a need for, but that he’d build just because he was intrigued by the idea and he was one of those obsessive/brilliant types who would conjure things out of thin air.

Here are examples.

“Oh, Ben! Don’t you think it’d be cool if your remote control—the very remote control that manipulates your television could also raise your garage door?”

“Hey! I had an idea. What if I converted this scooter into a scooter and lawnmower?”

Most of the things were neat parlor tricks, but nothing with meaningful long lasting implications. Once you’ve seen one toothbrush with a floss dispenser, you’ve seen ‘em all. Seen enough.

Speaking of seen enough, I’ve seen enough of these plot devices in books.

• Hey Look! It’s Cousin Oliver and He’s Got a Smart Phone! You know that feeling when you’re reading a book, things are going well, the protagonist is in a bit of a jam and you say, “Don’t you die on me! I care about you! How are you going to survive this?” And then some floppy haired, bespectacled character who hadn’t been mentioned before, or who had only been mentioned in passing shows up with a big neon sign flashing "ANNOYING SIDEKICK" and arrows pointing at him. I’m not expecting your protagonist to know everything and be some super self-sufficient loner machine, but for Lil' Baby Shakespeare's sake, can we at least try to not make it so damn heavy handed when we need help from others? And also, once that dude is on the screen, can we try to tone down the "This is So and So and his gimmick is..." Not everybody has to have a super power and your reader isn't stupid. We get it.

• She sure is pretty and she looks good, too! I’ve met a lot of people in my life, and I can tell you that none of them have only existed in my life to look good. If the first thing your protagonist notes, and then repeats in variation a hundred times in subsequent pages is something about “Look at the drumsticks on that one!” or “her shirt was filled out in all the right places” or “the raven haired temptress in the short skirt” then your protagonist might just be a misogynistic asshole who will, inevitably and monotonously, remind us 53 times that there is a woman in the book and you should pay attention. There are variations on this one—like when the protagonist is having conversations with “black dude” who says things stolen from a mid 70s Blaxploitation flick every time he opens his mouth. Human beings are three dimensional, just because the page is flat doesn’t mean your supporting cast needs to be, too.  Ya dig?

• Let’s Win the Lottery AND Get Hit by Lightning on the Same Day! My father is more apt to believe in straight up coincidence than I am. But I’m more likely to get irrationally pissed off about those same coincidences when I see them in a book. Listen, I know sometimes the universe conspires to do us a solid and that’s cool, but let’s not push our luck with pieces of microfiche that may be of interest to your protagonist buried deep in the library's vault, but that somehow the 22 year old library intern just had to catalog a few days earlier. If your book is glued together by freakish chance, your book will fall apart.

• They Died Yesterday, Today We Get Revenge! I know I harp on this all the time. If you’ve heard me speak at a conference or you’ve read this blog for more than a month, this is one of those dreadful things that I go on and on about. It’s also something that when I say it, there is probably a long line of people, fashionably dour, telling me I need to man up. I don’t really give a shit about them, though, so, I’m willing to go out on a limb and make this confession—when somebody close to me dies, it’s tough. There are a lot of emotions to sift through. A guy like me, if he got dropped into a book where all of his neighbors or co-workers or whoever have been slaughtered, he wouldn’t pick up a gun and say, cooly, “Oh, it’s on now.” I hope you realize when you have a high body count with no time for reflection on the lives lost, it pretty much makes all of those deaths irrelevant. And I further hope, that if you take the time to think about it, if there’s a need for a death in a story, there are vast reservoirs of emotional resonance that you can tap into to make your protagonist breathe and the consequences he faces even more universal.

• Special Investigators Dr. McGilligutty and Sgt. Jack Daniels and the Rest of The Emo Alchoholic Gang—obviously I sift through a lot of crime fiction, some stuff we publish, other stuff that has been published elsewhere. So believe me when I tell you, I’ve seen a whole lot of The Emo Drunk as Detective. Sure, sometimes he’s passed off as cold or unfeeling or just straight up tough guy. But if you dry him out and scratch at him a bit, you know what you find? Just a regular old, run of the mill Emo Drunk dude, not unlike the guy at your local bar who is all mopey and won’t play darts with his friends or pretend to have a good time because he’s trying to impress the girl at the pool table that he’s deep or reflective or “damaged goods” and maybe she’ll get the urge to try and save him. We’re all haunted (or we’re boring), but remember last week’s story about Ty Cobb’s mom shooting his dad and how Cobb played violent baseball with the ghost of his father on his heels? That’s infinitely more compelling than a sloppy drunk trying to find a bad guy.

That's about it from me this week. I'm taking a brief and unplanned vacation in the beautiful Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Fourth of July road trip. I'd be remiss if I did not mention that one of my greatest influences and one of the greatest storytellers I've ever come across--Andy Griffith--died this week and that bums me out.

Andy Griffith and J.D. Salinger are probably my two biggest influences when it comes to storytelling and getting language right. I've long been a fan of both and was really happy when I learned that Salinger used to regularly watch the Andy Griffith Show with the same sort of emotional connection to the characters and the town of Mayberry as I do. What does that do to my noir credibility? How about we don't worry about that, or at least I won't. Your mileage may vary.

For more random stuff from me, feel free to visit the official Benjamin LeRoy website.

Five Things About Bad Guys that Make Me Want to Punch Their Creators in the Face

BENJAMIN LEROY

 Last week’s attempt at a slightly inflammatory title and opening line seemed to go over well enough, so I’m back again this week, desperately clinging to the same formula. Even though this is all about bad guys and violence, I’m certainly not advocating socking somebody in your writers’ group because their writing doesn’t live up to the subjective literary code outlined below.

Quick digression using professional wrestling as a reference point.

In the parlance of the professional wrestling industry the phrase “to get heat” means that a bad guy gets booed. There are two kinds of heat relevant to this discussion. The first is the kind you want—you want the audience to “hate” the bad guy, salivating to see him get his comeuppance. The second kind is when the marketing department has shoved some wrestler down the audience’s collective throat, the wrestler’s personality doesn’t click with the audience, and when the crowd boos, it can be translated to something like, “Get the hell off my tv. You’re annoying and I’m going to turn the channel because you suck.”

We’re going to be talking about how to avoid the “Get the Hell off my TV” kind of heat.

As you’d probably guess, I read a lot of query letters, sample pages, and every now and again, full novels. I also have the good fortune of meeting writers at conferences all across the country. And, because I deal primarily in crime fiction, I see a lot of bad guys. If I were in a different field, the antagonist might be nature or something more abstract, but mine is the domain of black hatted, curly mustachioed, slightly accented villains. Here are some things I see too often that make me hate your villain.

Let’s go!

(1)    Evil Because He's Crazy Because He's Evil – Sometimes I’ll be sitting at a conference rapping with Author X and the conversation will turn to the novel he’s working on tentatively called Extreme Absolute Justice or something like that. Here’s a sample of how the conversation goes:

Author X: My protagonist, Everchance Purity, is an FBI agent trailing notorious serial killer, The Waxahachie Ax Hacker, when…

Me: The who?

Author X: The Waxahachie Ax Hacker.

Me: Why is he a serial killer?

Author X: Because he’s craaaazy!

Me: Why is he crazy?

Author X: Because he’s a serial killer…

This circular logic and the subsequent chase around the tree is much less thrilling to the audience than Author X thinks. I’m going to need a little bit more from the “what’s my motivation?” department. Also, I’ve met a bunch of straight up criminals in my life, but I’ve never met one yet that didn’t have some upside somewhere. Funny. Good storytellers. Artists. Can pluck a guitar some. Obviously these traits don’t excuse crimes, but they also indicate a little more depth. I want to see that in all bad guys.

(2)    All That for This? – Occasionally I’ll really be enjoying the cat/mouse between good guy and bad guy, trusting the author to layout character motivation, I’ll totally understand the protagonist and his struggle for survival. Who will win this battle of wills? But then it turns out the bad guy is going through all of this chase—at great cost to personal treasure and time—because of some totally ridiculous trigger. “You stole my girlfriend in high school, now I’ve spent $300,000 and risked a lifetime of prison to follow you around the world to blow up your ski chalet in Zurich!” Oh, Emo Villain, your broken heart could have done so much more.

(3)    Central Casting Called, They Want Their Cardboard Back – Four day stubble? Yup. Smoking a cigarette in a knit cap while leering from behind the wheel of a dented cargo van? Check. Say things like, “You’re all gonna pay, you meddling kids!” Sure thing, Scooby Doo. I understand that sometimes we use archetypal descriptions to help the reader along, but sometimes we get a smidge lazy. And if you’re going to be lazy with the writing, maybe I’m going to be lazy with the reading. Thankfully, the garbage man has a job to do, and the chain of laziness can be broken. Hooray!

(4)   Actually, I Won't Be Sad if He Stabs Your Protagonist in the Throat – This goes back to last week’s post about why I may or may not like the hero of a book. In this particular case, if Author X’s goal is to establish a dynamic of good v. evil and I find myself rooting for evil (and not just because I want to be a contrarian jerk) because he’s more sympathetic than your protagonist, we’ve got a problem, Houston. Plenty of books, especially the ones I like to read, have a whole lot of grey area when it comes to good and bad. In those cases I might find myself hoping the antagonist triumphs. But the author has more than likely gone into the project with a “nobody is perfect, we’re all varying degrees of flawed. This guy is the protagonist only because I’m writing from his POV” approach. Is your supposed to be bad guy becoming the anti-hero we cheer because he’s legit cooler than your protagonist? Was that your intention?

(5)   Pass Me the Mic, I Need the Last Word – There is a time for talk and a time for action. When your, presumably, greatest foe is at the end of a gun, the yakkety yak business is over. As there is likely little satisfaction in delivering a monologue to an audience that cannot provide a review (because, you know, they’re dead), really what the hell is the point of going on at great length about all of the clever and devious things you’ve done in your quest to vanquish him? Oh, there isn’t one? Right. So leave that scene out even if it turns out that your almost dead hero has risen, zombie Bruce Lee style, to kick out some justice before the soliloquy is finished. This is hubris.

Confession: I’m something of a deviant.

I’ve long been fascinated with historically infamous people. Musicians. Killers. Athletes. In fact, the very publishing company I run is named after one of Major League Baseball’s great boogeymen—Tyrus “Ty” Cobb. By most folks’ accounts, Cobb was a ball of rage prone to violence both on and off the field, including one fateful day when he ran into the crowd to beat the hell out of a heckler, stomping on the armless fellow with his cleats.

If that were the sum total of Cobb’s story, I’d be glad I wasn’t in the stands when he played and I don’t suppose I’d care too much one way or the other about him. But there are other layers to the Cobb story.

Perhaps most notably, Cobb’s mother killed his father, the only man whose respect and acceptance Cobb craved. The killing occurred weeks before Cobb would be called up to the Major Leagues to play professional baseball for the Detroit Tigers, and, as Cobb would later confess, he played his whole career with the ghost of his father on his heels, propelling him. There was never, for Cobb, a chance to gain the acceptance and approval he sought. All of the records set and the legendary feats ultimately didn’t mean enough. There is something hugely fascinating about a story like that to a degenerate like me.

Your bad guy can and should have depth.

Enough for me to love him. Enough for me to hate him. Enough for me to want him to stay on my tv.

 

For more ramblings about publishing and life visit my website Adventure 'til Death.

Five Reasons I Hate Your Protagonist

BENJAMIN LEROY

Ok, before we freak out at each other in a yelling match, I’m using the word “Your” in this case to sound inflammatory. It’s a crass attempt at causing controversy, reinforcing the whole “publishing gatekeepers are jerks” meme, and probably a little bit lazy of me. But really, you, whoever you are, you have created a stunning protagonist that does not fit any of these categories. Or, maybe a little bit of one, but certainly not enough for us to get all worked up into a fight.

 

(1)     Too Perfect Syndrome—you ever read about the dude who was a black belt in like six different martial arts, was a professional sniper, could crack a joke, bed a starlet, probably shoot scratch golf, and made restaurant quality waffles? That dude bores the living hell out of me. If your protagonist seems conveniently shiny and skilled, I don’t like him. I don’t believe him. It’s much easier for me to feel empathetic with flawed characters like me.

 

(2)     Anybody could jump that hurdle!—I recently read a submission that was well written, had me turning the pages at a good clip, excited to see just how bad things could get for our heroine. How hard would she fall before rising triumphantly to overcome the challenge? Well, as it turned out, it was like she mis-stepped off the curb, lost her balance, did that thing where you pretend to jog a few steps because you don’t want to look like a jackass, and then finished her walk to the finish line pretty much unscathed. I need to know your protagonist has been tested for me to cheer her on.

 

(3)     Frat Boy Wins Again—though this may sound similar to #1, it’s actually different. We see that Chaz Dollarstacks, the Ferrari driving, handsome son of business tycoon Wellington Dollarstacks is living up the night life. Maybe a little coke. Maybe a run in with a black hatted frat boy (likely turned backwards) on the golf course. At stake? A five million dollar antique lifted from somebody’s personal art collection. Fuck all of these dudes. I hope an Atomic RazorBomb makes the scene and they’re all cut off the map. This differs from #1, because we see that Chaz is flawed—he isn’t perfect—but because I don’t fetishize hanging out in VIP until 4 a.m. or playing polo in the Hamptons, I don’t really give a shit about the guy. Your mileage (and audience) may vary.

 

(4)     “Oh, this guy?”—Sometimes when a tv show or movie is really popular, you can watch a wave of what essentially amounts to fan fiction come in over the transom a few months later. Back when The Shield  was a weekly thing we got a submission at Bleak House about a rogue cop named something like Nick Slackey (that’s not it exactly, but it was something just as close) who didn’t play by the rules but always got his man (even if during the process he created more problems for himself). I want to believe that your protagonist is a singular character of your invention and not some irregular pulled from the assembly line. I only read about 20 pages of the Nick Slackey book, but I’m pretty sure if I would have finished it, there would have been a love letter to Shawn Ryan at the end that said, “Bro, whaddya think? You wanna adapt this for season six?”

 

(5)     Plywood and 2x4 Man—As I’ve already talked about way too many times on this blog, I like to travel. I love to meet new people in new places all over the country. I’m especially excited to hear new turns of phrases, new dialects, twisted pronunciations, and things like that. I grin like an absolute idiot when I hear particularly good ones. Language is so alive and vibrant. How you say things is sometimes just as important as what you are saying. So when your character sounds like my iPhone reading something back to me in ways that are grammatically correct but are absolutely without spark and are totally unrealistic as far as actual conversations go, I’m tuning out. Without spark, there is no fire. Without fire, I’m cold. When I’m cold I stop reading and look for shelter.

Am I missing any? Am I unfairly including some? Have you ever been guilty of any of these? Have you ever been guilty of anything?

What We Mean When We Say "Special"

I’m nearly sick of my own voice, so I can only imagine your frustration/boredom with the prospect of another word dribbling missive from this corner of the publishing world. For a quick escape, here is a link to Yahoo, a picture of a dog that got in a fight with a porcupine (legit), somebody smarter and more articulate than me.

If you’re still here…

In the course of real world events, sometimes somebody says something witty or profound that applies to the publishing industry even though it is originally directed at an entirely different audience, like, say, the graduating class of 2012 over at Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

For those of you who didn’t see it originally on June 1^st, Wellesley High English teacher, David McCullogh Jr. took a non-traditional approach to the commencement speech. He didn’t quote from Dr. Seuss’ Oh! The Places You’ll Go. He didn’t recite a long list of Succesory maxims.

He straight up told the kids, with all of their assorted kith and kin right there in the audience—

You are not special.  You are not exceptional.

Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.

Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped.  Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again.  You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored.  You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie.  Yes, you have.  And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs.  Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet.  Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman!  And now you’ve conquered high school… and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building…

But do not get the idea you’re anything special.  Because you’re not.

The empirical evidence is everywhere, numbers even an English teacher can’t ignore.  Newton, Natick, Nee… I am allowed to say Needham, yes? …that has to be two thousand high school graduates right there, give or take, and that’s just the neighborhood Ns.  Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating about now from more than 37,000 high schools.  That’s 37,000 valedictorians… 37,000 class presidents… 92,000 harmonizing altos… 340,000 swaggering jocks… 2,185,967 pairs of Uggs.  But why limit ourselves to high school?  After all, you’re leaving it.  So think about this: even if you’re one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you. (full speech here)

Earlier this week it was announced that a civil suit had been filed by disgruntled authors against PublishAmerica. As I am not all that interested in getting thrown frivolously into a lawsuit, I’ll reserve any real comment on what I might consider non-standard business practices as far PublishAmerica—a company that labels itself a traditional publishing house—goes. I will only say that, as I understand their operation, it varies significantly from any operation I’ve ever headed also called traditional publishing houses).

Thankfully, there are places to gather online to discuss different publishing operations, agents, and the assorted ephemera of the industry to get a better handle on how they are viewed in the community. One such website—Absolute Write—has a whole sub-forum devoted to Publish America. A quick review of the general Bewares forum shows there are dozens of other publishers and agents that seem to be challenged passing the bar of what is considered acceptable business practice (thank God for this never ending supply of italics. They make tip-toeing around things a smidge easier).

What I mean to say is that there are enough shady, fly-by-night, dangerously unqualified, well-meaning, but poorly informed operations out there who will publish your book using loose language and promises. Sometimes for a fee. Sometimes for hidden costs down the road. Sometimes with no cost, but also no chance in hell of being discovered by readers (why we’re all here). One thing that has become common with many of these operations is to proudly and boldly declare that they are in business because they believe writers have a right to be heard! They believe writers—but especially you—are special, and if it weren’t for the damn gatekeepers holding you back…

Hi. My name is Ben. And I’m a gatekeeper.

The simple truth is this—I see hundreds of books a year. The overwhelming majority of them are not special. They are not distinguishable from one another in quality or originality. They are a great lot of Cs. A mash-up of SVU, NYPD Blue, and LA Law.

Should they be published?

I can only answer whether or not they should be published with a Tyrus Books logo on the spine. I sometimes run into books that I truly love and adore, but that aren’t an editorial fit for our line. I sometimes find books that I’d be proud to publish, but I’m unable to come to terms with the agent. But mostly I get rehashed concepts and scraps of dialogue that inspire a slight shrug and an uninspired, “oh. Ok.”

Let’s be very clear about something—I believe in writers. When done right, a novel can be life-alteringly powerful. I have and will fight at great length to bring to light books that have moved me. No health insurance? No paycheck? Been there. Done that. The payment was always bigger when I could see the look in people’s eyes or hear in their voice how much a book that I loved moved them, too. If I were to then pretend that all books were that special, you’d know not to listen to me about books.

Is it an accomplishment to finish a novel? Sure. Many people talk about it and never do. But it doesn’t make an author special for having done it. What meaning can special have if every author who finishes a book—regardless of quality—is special?

It isn't easy to write a truly special book. It requires a hybrid of honed talent, natural gift, and a dedication to process. Plenty of people have those elements in varying quantities, but to put them all together, redlined and complete, is the elevating factor.

It's also the goal we should set for ourselves for everything we do.

Always.

 

BEN'S BEA Recap

Eleven years ago I went to my first Book Expo America—that year held in Chicago. Pre-Tyrus, Pre-Bleak House Books, all the way back to the Diversity Incorporated days of poetry and short story collections.

Displaying at Book Expo America was profoundly more difficult than we had anticipated. There was the prohibitive cost, the time spent setting up a booth, putting together a booth with little to no money that didn’t look like a bad home made project, and then the business of standing desperately for two or three days trying to catch the attention of booksellers and librarians who had already been inundated with promotional copies and sales pitches from folks like Random House and Little, Brown.

It was exciting in its way. And I’m glad I paid the dues. But eleven years later I’m very glad I no longer have to set up the booths or hawk wares.

In the early days, we didn’t get invited to parties (because we didn’t know anybody and nobody knew us), but in more recent years, there are usually more invitations than hours to fulfill them. On my first night in the city I went to a party at the Scandinavia House to celebrate the launch of Danish crime writer Sara Blaedel’s new novel Only One Life. Dead Guy’s very own Erin Mitchell sent the invite and I attended the party with book blogger and Twitter friend, @thepickygirl.

Thursday morning I had breakfast with Sean Chercover, then went to the Javits Center for BEA. Had a meeting with my boss and some other folks. Ran into Yishai Seidman, agent for Scott O’Connor’s great novel, Untouchable. Walked around the Javits Center for a long time until I met with the Greenwich Girl.

Hung out a little longer at the show then walked back to my hotel.

Went to a Penguin party with Dana Kaye. Had dinner with Dana Kaye at Do Hwa . During the cab ride back to the hotel, the cabbie randomly asked, “Do you like Journey?”

I told him I did.

He played “Faithfully.” We laughed and sang along. Then there was some Bryan Adams (Dana took over on lead vocals) and we fell out of the cab wondering what the hell had just happened.

Thursday morning I hung out with another Twitter friend, took two more short meetings, and then finished up my time at the Javits Center. Total hours spent on the floor this year? Maybe six or seven. Stress level? Way down. Targeted business accomplished? Plenty.

On Thursday night I attended a party thrown by Soho Press—some of my favorite people in the publishing world—ran into old friends (people I’ve met at Book Expo America over the years), had a few affirming conversations, gave a few high fives, and I was out the door and in bed by 10 pm because I am an old man.

And that was Book Expo America 2012.

 

A Departure to Music

BENJAMIN LEROY

A slight departure this week.

In some alternate universe where I didn’t get into publishing, I’m pretty sure I ended up working in the music industry. Not sure if I was at a label or I was a reviewer or I ran a record shop in Des Moines, but somehow my income would be dependent on the music world. As it stands now, it’s a one way street because I spend a lot of money on music, but in this fictional world where I have fantasy re-booked my life, I'd get paid by music, too.

(Do you ever play the "what if" game with your life? The lives of your characters?)

I assume many of you are also music fans and that a large percentage of folks write while listening to favorite albums or Pandora stations or something like that. I’ve got a list of favorite albums I listen to while I write, my listening choice usually heavily influenced by the mood of whatever I'm writing. I can write to songs with singing, though I’ve met my fair share of people who get tripped up by lyrics and can only listen to instrumental albums (to those people, I often suggest checking out the genre of music called “post-rock” because of its evocative soundscapes and lack of singing). 

(What do you listen to when you write?)

Basically, all of that set up above was just ballast so I could get into a loftier discussion of Rolling Stone's newest heat seeking list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All-Time. I’d like to discuss.

I’d begin that discussion by saying that 6 out of the top 10 albums listed are either The Beatles or Bob Dylan. Reiterated--60% of what Rolling Stone is labeling the top 500 albums OF ALL TIME EVER RECORDED were recorded by ONE of TWO acts.

Credibility is out the window.  

I realize that music is a totally subjective thing, but I'm here to say, scientifically speaking, this list is terrible. Criminally so. Can any of you mount a defense of a top 10 being so skewed to two different acts?  

I'm a huge music fan across a bunch of genres. I'd say I own somewhere around 50-75 albums on the total list. I would also say that many of my personal Top Ten don't make an appearance.

Of the top 10 on Rolling Stone's list, I own 3, none of which are Dylan or The Beatles. (Marvin Gaye, The Clash, Beach Boys). I couldn't really be more in touch and out of touch with this list at the same time.

Here are some of the other albums that make an appearance on their list and my collection that are big influences, especially when writing.

 

# 488 Husker Du—New Day Rising

#402 Nas—Illmatic

#272 Sleater Kinney – Dig Me Out

#226 Bruce Springsteen—Nebraska

#218 The Smiths—The Queen is Dead

#211 Pink Floyd—Wish You Were Here

#200 AC/DC—Highway to Hell

#144 NWA—Straight Outta Compton

#137 The Replacements—Tim

#95 Miles Davis—Bitches Brew

#87 Pink Floyd—The Wall

 

Let's discuss. Where am I wrong? Right? What's missing from your collection that really should be on the list?

Let's Save Our Fictions For Our Novels

BENJAMIN LEROY

This week the online writing/publishing community has been abuzz with the plight of Mandy DeGeit, the writer whose confounding story about her experiences working with Anthony Giangregorio and Undead Press went public.

Briefly outlined, Ms. Degeit submitted a short story, “She Makes Me Smile,” to Undead Press hoping to be included in the company’s anthology, Cavalcade of Terror. As it turned out, according to Ms. Degeit, the story was accepted by Mr. Giangregorio and all appeared to be going well.

When a finished copy of the book showed up at her house, she noted that the title had been changed to “She Make’s Me Smile.” Disappointed with the added apostrophe, but still excited to be included in the anthology, she found more changes had taken place during editing though nobody from Undead Press ever discussed them with her. Those changes included the following:

(From Ms. DeGeit’s blog) “Let’s see: They turned a non-gendered character into a boy, they named the best friend, they created a memory for the main character about animal abuse. They added a suggestion of rape at the end…”

Significant changes by Ms. DeGeit’s account—one would be hard pressed to disagree—and changes that were never run by Ms. DeGeit during the editorial process. She submitted one story and received approval, but the final product didn’t really match.

Confused and disheartened she reached out to Mr. Giangregorio and asked what had happened. The surprisingly vitriolic exchange, included this from the publisher “as for the story. the editor had a hard time with it, it was very rough and he did alot to make it readable. despite what you think, your writing has a long way to go before its worthy of being printed professionally. we did what we had to do to make the story printable. you should be thankful, not complaining. ah, the ungrateful writer, gotta love it.”

And…we’ve got enough red flags at this point to start a parade.

(1)    If a story isn’t very good, I fail to see why a publisher would acquire it.

(2)    Publishers/editors don’t rewrite major parts of a work. They especially don’t do this without consulting the author.

(3)    A little respect goes a long way in our interpersonal dealings. I’ve never had a discussion with any author I’ve worked with that sounded anything like the above exchange.

 

I don’t know Mandy. Neither do I know Anthony Giangregorio, but I’ve found the resulting online discussion fascinating. Like these kinds of dustups do, this brought out a bunch of Internet Lawyers suggesting that Ms. DeGeit sue the publisher. And, even more curiously to me, more than one person stepped up to share a similar story and said the only reason he/she didn’t come forward before was for fear of being blackballed in the publishing industry. Blackballed by the guy running Undead Press?

For serious, Internet?

Let’s be clear about something—Some guy publishing books from his garage doesn’t have the power to blackball anybody in the publishing industry. I know a lot of people in publishing, even the people who are whispered about as the biggest people in the industry, and there isn’t one of them who I believe could or would, in this day and age, blackball an author. If a guy like James Frey can still make cash in this factory even after his troubles with Oprah, what are the odds that somebody who stood up to a guy who runs a publishing company that probably hasn’t ever been mentioned in any of the traditional publishing magazines is going to be permanently barred from the picnic?

Zero.

We don’t gather as a group to compare notes. There is no shared database to cross reference when considering a project. Also, there are no secret handshakes or passwords. I’ll be honest when I tell you that I’m not anybody special at the country club—in fact, most members probably wouldn’t recognize me, what with my junior status and all—but if there was a secret blackball list, I’d know about it before this guy would.

I’m not sure where this controversy~! will all end up. I’m guessing it disappears in a few days. But in case it needs to be heard somewhere tonight—dear author, we love you. Please continue mastering your craft. Please do not chase after fishhooks that look appetizing but will only cause you pain. Research before submitting (there was plenty of discussion about this guy before this most recent incident). And, for the love of all that is good in the world, quit worrying about secret publishing cabals potentially exerting negative influence on you for calling out trouble when you see it.

It won’t happen.

I promise.

Sincerely,

Publuminati Member #66613
AKA (Ben LeRoy)

 

Maybe I'm Just Getting Old

BENJAMIN LEROY

Greetings from this neck of the woods.

If you’ve taken a look at the Tyrus Books website in the last few days you may have noticed two books that look a little out of place mixed in with titles from Reed Farrel Coleman, Craig McDonald, Bill Cameron and other crime writers I’ve worked with since my time at Bleak House Books. It occurs to me an explanation might be in order.

Last year I attended the Houston Writers Guild’s Annual Conference. While there, I took a dozen or two pitches from aspiring crime writers. As is the case with most conferences, I met some really cool people and heard about some intriguing books that I’m confident will find homes with other publishers. In between discussions of shootings, poisonings, and other violence, a young woman stuck her head in the door and said something like –

“Hey Ben. My name is Miah and I don’t write crime fiction, but I like some of the things Tyrus has done. I’ve written a book and though it’s not right for you, I’d like to give it to you anyway just because.”

The details are a little foggy here, but the important takeaway is that the pages for Miah’s book, Sweet Land of Bigamy, were added to the collection of whodunits. And, because I’m blessed with the memory of a goldfish by the time a conference draws to a close, I’d likely forgotten pretty much everything everybody had said about their books.

A few months later I flew to Portland for the Willamette Writers Conference, and I took the pages from Houston with me to read on the plane.

Like I said before, there were some really good crime novels in the mix that weren’t a good fit for Tyrus, but have probably already found homes elsewhere because they were well done. I’ve discussed before that it’s necessary for me to have a visceral reaction to new material if I think Tyrus should publish a book.

I read the first few pages of Sweet Land of Bigamy and was grabbed immediately. By that point, I’d forgotten about Miah’s introduction and was likewise unaware that I wasn’t reading a crime novel. As the title suggests, it’s a story about bigamy, more specifically a woman who is married to one man, but is unable to stop herself from getting married to another man while the first husband is away for months as a contractor in Iraq.

It is beautiful. It is emotionally charged. It is funny. And it is sad.

But it was not crime. Nor would fit into the other, vaguer category I use to describe what it is we do—dark literary fiction. To be sure, it was literary. Absent, however, was a dead body or the existential examination of the effects of violence that have long been a hallmark of the books we publish.

Or is that completely true?

There was the emotional violence that rises as a unavoidable consequence of the protagonist’s dilemma. It even manifests itself in physical violence at one point. But those arguments would be a stretch at best.

Then it occurred to me, I have insisted for years that what I care most about as a publisher is better understanding the human condition, especially as it relates to everyday people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. And Sweet Land of Bigamy is full of that.

So I made a decision, then and there, that I wanted to publish the book. I called the author and discussed it with her. After a bit of a “are you serious?” conversation that likely sounded as though your narrator was medicated, we agreed to move forward. Sweet Land of Bigamy is now scheduled for a summer 2012 release.

I’ve kept the announcement a little off radar. Partly because of my work with other initiatives like Prologue Books, but also because I wanted to figure out how to announce my departure from the one path that had defined the publishing companies I’d been associated with over the years. How does one, organically and naturally, let people know that in addition to walking along the fringes of what a mystery novel is he might also be interested in skirting the edges of romance? And how does one, in this culture of elevator pitches and 30 second explanations, let people know that to him, it all boils down to the perils of being a flawed human being trying to understand our place in the universe without sounding like a pretentious jackass?

Well, we’ll see how it goes.

And to keep this even more meta-Dead Guy blog, I’d like to point out that the second book in that same line is Linda Hull’s The Big Bang. Linda is a client of our very own Josh Getzler. The Big Bang is scheduled for fall 2012.

For anybody worried about me losing my edge or anything like that, you’ll be happy to know that we also have books from Reed Farrel Coleman, Loren D. Estleman, and other straight up face punching tough guys coming out later this year, too.

 

A Flimsy Excuse and a Gift

BENJAMIN LEROY

I'd like to make a confession.

I'm tired. Exhausted in the way that comes with being on the road for a long stretch of time. A week ago this past Monday I started my day in Madison, took the bus to Milwaukee, then flew to NYC for a few days of Edgar Award festivities. I did my best to make it to all of the cocktail parties, talk to friends, meet strangers, and celebrate the books and people that make this community such a fascinating and great place to spend time.

Then, before the sun rose on Friday morning, I jumped on a plane heading from NYC to El Paso Texas. Well, that's not exactly right, there was first the matter of a layover in Atlanta. Then El Paso. Then a three(ish) hour drive east into the heart of West Texas (Ft. Davis) for a writing conference. Also, because I have long been fascinated with one, very random town in West Texas, I drove an additional five hours roundtrip so that I could hang out for thirty minutes in the town of McCamey. I had hoped to find the old McCamey hospital and locals to talk to, but the restaurant it had been suggested I visit was closed (permanently?) and all I got was a trip to a Dollar General where I picked up a hat and a warm bottle of Dr. Pepper.

After a brief detour into New Mexico on Sunday, I flew out of El Paso on Monday to Cincinnati for work meetings. It should be noted that, as best I know, there are no direct flights between the two cities so I ended up flying El Paso to Atlanta to Detroit to Cincinnati, arriving a little before midnight, at which point I picked up a rental car and drove the forty minutes from the airport to my hotel.

The last two days have been day long meetings, team building exercises. And, like I mentioned earlier, I'm exhausted.

To beg your forgivness for this otherwise thin update, I'd like to offer a gift -- Prologue Books (one of the two companies I oversee) is giving away William Campbell Gault's, Don't Cry for Me, the Edgar Award winner in 1953 for Best First Novel.

In a few weeks we will discuss the book with a variety of crime fiction luminaries and would love to have you be a part of that discussion.

Books are available here -  For Kindle   and for NOOK 

Of Literary Expectations and Pretentious Metaphors About Construction

BENJAMIN LEROY

You know what I love? Books. Words. Stories. The pursuit of documenting the human experience—both fiction and non-fiction—by people who are brave enough to lay bare essential parts of who they are for public consumption. It isn’t a hobby of mine or a career path that I picked out of the classified ads. It’s a goddamn mission that I’ve felt compelled to follow since before I knew better. It isn’t about a paycheck or health insurance. It isn’t about “prestige” or “fame” or being a “gatekeeper.” If anything, it’s about kicking down the gate to make sure that the outliers and people on the fringes can not only have their voice heard, but their gospels pushed in the public square.

I am a zealot for words and stories. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they are sacred to me.

And I get my words from a lot of sources. Novels. Speeches. Religious texts. Memoirs. Protest songs. Love letters. I get immutable joy reading the stark poetry of box scores buried deep in the Sports section of the local paper.

My conviction isn’t to a job or an industry. It’s to the spread of words. So it took me by surprise a few months ago when I was at a writing conference and was asked if I was “scared” of the changes in publishing, especially as they relate to the indie author movement.

The answer, unequivocally, is no, I am not scared.

I offer no dismissive hand wave or condescending declaration of “Fools! All of them! What do they know?”

That’s not my bag.

If an author decides to self-publish (or any of the existing or forthcoming names given to the process like “go Indie” or “rebel style publishing” or “literary freedom fighter”), I’m good with it. Do your thing. But if you’re going to do your thing, I want you to promise me that you’ll do it right.

Because it’s only a button push away is not an excuse for disrespecting the legacy of the written word.

I’m not mad at people who opt to go around the old process. I don’t see them as the competition. My sleep is disrupted by plenty of things, but I’ve never woken up with a racing heart because anybody, anywhere has decided to self-publish a book. It isn’t money out of my pocket. And even if it was, even if every existing publishing company dried up tomorrow and I was left unemployed, I wouldn’t begrudge authors who opted to self-publish. There would be plenty of introspection and resulting evolution to follow, but I wouldn’t hold hate.

But I sure get pissed at people who create inferior products, make them available in the marketplace, and then cry when objective consumers find fault with the project. I’m removing the opinions of friends of the author, family of the author, and the ever present wannabe covert Literary Promotional Death Squads that spring up out of nowhere, squeeze off a few rounds from the Praise Gun, and attempt to suppress any negative conversation about a book. And, because I’m only focusing on words right now, I’ll eschew any discussion of cover design and formatting—two hugely important, not to be scrimped on details of what makes a book.

What you choose to write about is up to you. Present tense or past tense? First person or third person? Genre? Novel, novella, short story, flash fiction? All of those decisions are the writer’s. Based on their preferences, different readers will enjoy things differently. But a writer can always, in these matters, say this was my artistic choice, I was compelled to write like this.

Inconsistent head hopping? Typos? Random tense shifts? These things make Reader Bear weep and throw book across room. They are not artistic choices. They are the byproducts of sloppy work from people who know better or the unfortunately likely outcome of people who don’t.

Furthermore, Reader Bear doesn’t care if the writer hasn’t had the formal training of other writers or written ten previous novels, he isn’t reading books based on writer pedigree. He’s reading and judging books based on every other book he has read in his life. A writer’s ignorance of reader expectations isn’t a problem for anybody but the writer. This has nothing to do with LEGACY PUBLISHING STIFLED MY CREATIVITY~!

If you hired an Indie Contractor to build a house for you, and when Indie Contractor lifted the tarp off the thing there were nails and screws sticking out at 45 degree angles and the toilet was connected to the electrical system, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, cool, that’s your interpretation of how a house should be built.” You’d file a complaint. And you’d be right to do it.

Don’t mistake loose wires and uneven joists as a design choice. And don’t think those people who are familiar with how a house works because they have lived in one and visited a million others are going to accept shoddy work. Further, don’t mount the, Well, I was in another house built by ACME Builders and they had a crooked nail defense.

They shouldn’t have. Their negligence is not your opportunity to follow suit. And anyway, a crooked nail here or there, though unsightly and unprofessional is not the same as load bearing walls made solely from 1/8 inch sheet rock.

Writing and publishing—communicating your story to the world—is a practice and learned art. Because you’ve got a computer with a functioning keyboard and a word processing program makes you no more a writer than owning a 16 oz claw hammer and a pair of kneepads makes you a roofer.

If writing and publishing is new to you, I want you to know, I am not afraid of your brilliance. As a reader, I am also uninterested in excuses and unforgiving of sloppy work. Too many people have come before, holy work in hand, to show me the power of what can be done with words. It is what I’ve come to expect.

 

Need tips? There are all kinds of resources on the internet. One of your first steps might be over to Chuck Wendig and his blog Terrible Minds. He’s the kind of guy that asks the questions that will help you ask questions of yourself.

 

The Sometimes Non-Verbal and Often Anecdotal Cues I Notice During Pitch Sessions

BENJAMIN LEROY

Writing conferences are always a good time. I’m fortunate to have conversations with brilliant, creative types all over the country. That’s the kind of thing that sustains me. Recharges my battery.

That isn’t meant to suggest that every conversation is a blue ribbon. As sure as I am that there will be something exciting, I’m almost as sure there will be a pitch or two that kinda bums me out or has me thinking about dinner plans before I’ve heard the title of the book. Are all of those pitches for bad authors or bad books? Not necessarily, many of them just aren’t good fits for Tyrus/me, and because the inside of my brain is a poorly constructed county fair, I am easily distracted by things off the Midway.

So, Mr. Barnum and Bailey, what DOES keep your attention? you might ask. Here are five things that keep my attention—they are, by and large, completely unscientific and subjective, but so are many other parts of this process. I guess it’s par for the course.

(1)    A bright and sometimes crazy glint in your eyes.

Sometimes I’ll be sitting at a table waiting for the next person who is going to pitch me, and in will come some guy or gal, wide eyed and engaged, ready to go, already going (I imagine there is a similar county fair blinking and ringing in their brain). They’ll hit me up with a genuine, “Well hello!” and not in a Dale Carnegie way, but in a full on “Damn, isn’t it amazing that we’re all alive and doing things and people read books, and we can talk about my book?” way. Not infrequently this person will pitch a book to me that sounds batshit crazy, but intriguing if done right. These people seem to be fascinated by the same kind of fringy cultures and oddball characters that I know and love. Most of the time I can tell the difference between “bright and crazy” (good) from “dude who is going to mail you a raccoon skull crazy” (bad).

(2)    I don’t feel like I’m dealing with Al Gorythm

Every now and then I run into people who think it best to test market their protagonists and plotlines before writing a book. “But, Ben!” you may protest, “It’s good to know what the hot trend is!” I’ll address that issue later. In this case, I’m talking about literally test marketing characters and plots with focus groups. During my publishing career, I’ve been told, on more than one occasion something like—“I’ve got a friend over at Cretty Bocker who let me throw in the first ten pages of my novel when they were doing blind taste tests of apple strudel. Strudel makers share 85% of recreational interests with the reader I’m writing for. 73% of the strudel tasters gave my book an 80-89% ranking. 47% said they would buy the book today if given an opportunity. That number increases to 54% if Cretty Bocker throws in a 10% off coupon towards future strudel purchases, and my guy over there said he’d talk to the VP of Special Promotions to see about making that happen! Do you want to buy my book? Do you like strudel?” I get that publishing is a business. I still cling to antiquated notions that writing is not. To that end, I don’t believe in calibrating to the point of market testing.

(3)    “This isn’t my first book written, it’s my first book pitched.”

Everybody has to start somewhere. When it comes to writing, that often means with a crappy first book that ends up in a locked drawer. There is no mark of shame in writing a not-yet-ready-for-prime-time first novel. It’s a rite of passage. It is an invaluable learning experience. And it is something to be celebrated. That said, it isn’t necessarily (or even likely) that it’s something to be published. Having the humility to know the truth about your book, is a big deal. You’ll note the fraternity and sorority of high fives and snickers that come when many successful authors talk about their first (and unseen) books. When I hear that an author is pitching his/her second or third written book to me, but that it’s still eligible to be a debut novel, I get butterflies. When that same author tells me that it’s the third or fourth DRAFT of that second or third BOOK, I’m even happier, because I know the author didn’t simply sprint to the finish line of some cross country trek, but took time to look around, stretch, examine the scenery, and contemplate what exactly is the finish line? Gold medal approach, writer. Gold medal.

(4)    When I ask, “Have your characters ever talked back to you?” You nod.

This is one of those questions that, if posed to the general public, would likely result in a bunch of deer in headlight stares. Sounds all illogical. You, the author, have created this story. You set the protagonist down on paper and you push him from Point A to Point B. You are an omnipotent God of literature. Right? Well, except for the crazy phenomenon when the Rebel Angel turns around and shakes his head and says, “But that’s not what I’d really do,” and then you, as OGL actually listen. Ever have a conversation with a person you’ve created from Make Believe Land? Ever feel like you’re not controlling both sides of the conversation? Good, take a seat. Let’s discuss.

(5)    Write the book in your gut, not the book you just read or the tv show you just watched.

I know I’ve beaten this point to death over the last six months, but I can’t stress it enough. For this guy right here, sitting on the other side of the table, I don’t want to hear about Archeologist Masons looking for a lost Picasso being held captive by teenage vampires in Washington. (I’m sure somebody somewhere just got a plot idea, but feel free not to pitch me). When your cop is an obvious mural of Sipowicz, Crockett, and Officer Poncherello named Lieutentant Jackhammer Strongchin, I am DIALED OUT OF THE CONVERSATION IMMEDIATELY AND MY PHONE LINES HAVE BEEN PERMANENTLY BURNED TO THE GROUND AND MY TELEGRAPH MACHINE GOT LOST IN THE MOVE. Derivatives were bad in the financial crisis. They are likewise as bad in writing fiction. But I’ve always been broke, so maybe that’s why I’ve never understood the need for either.

Anyway, there are five things for you today. Take them. Leave them. See you on the road. I'm probably already there.

 

How Do You Like Your Blue-eyed Boy, Mr. Death?

BENJAMIN LEROY

If you know me even the littlest bit, you know that I have great affinity for a few things. Baseball. Traveling. Writing.

My Major League baseball allegiance is to the Chicago Cubs, a franchise perennially cursed by what one might politely label “underperformance.” Or if you’re more inclined to believe in tales of black cats and billy goats, plain old superstitious jinxes.  Though games give me joy on a day to day basis, it is only because under all of the tough luck and the losing, I’m able to squint in such a way that I have faith in the promise of “next year.” To look at the sum total of the franchise’s existence is to see generations of failures, some more glorious than others—tough jawed pugilists ultimately felled by the barrage dealt by opponents better skilled and/or less prone to catastrophic events.

I spend a lot of time on the road. I fly quite a bit, but I enjoy the inefficiency of driving. I prefer the ability to take unexpected exits, to change course in mid-trip, to stop whenever it calls me to chase after rabbits and to explore gimmicky tourist traps. Those flights drop me off in NYC or Los Angeles or Boston—fine towns, all of them—all of them overly familiar to me from personal experiences and the seemingly limitless portrayals in books, movies, and television.

I am more excited by the prospect of exploration in rural America. Once, when I gave up on the idea of driving across Texas and instead headed north towards home, I came across Picher, an abandoned lead mining town in the southeastern corner of Oklahoma. Had never heard of it, didn't know what it was or, for that matter where I was. I drove by run down restaurants, broken walls, and a sign declaring the town as home of the 1984 Oklahoma Boys Baseball Champs. Only later would I find out the town's tragic history and the story behind what I'd seen. This beaten down town off the beaten path that I ended up in randomly has come to leave a very real and indelible mark on me.

It will come as no great revelation when I tell you that I prefer books set in towns like Picher, inhabited by people that would live in a town like it. The characters I love are not unlike my beloved Cubs in that they come to understand lifetimes of heartache, but still lace up their boots each day, taking joy in the small victories of an otherwise failed war. It is an inglorious, but (and maybe this is me oversentimentalizing it all) an honest life that I can respect.

Nobody lives in Picher anymore, but there are towns I've visited with the same kind of feel. One of my favorite places on Earth—and one where I often dream of settling down without a cellphone or internet access or even a computer—is Wewahitchka, Florida along the banks of the Apalachicola River. It’s beautiful country. Slash pines along the highway. Water dropped all over the map including the Dead Lakes. Beautiful and haunting to see. But there are also dangers lurking on the land and in the water. Alligators. Cottonmouth snakes. I’ve discussed it in other entries on this blog and do not need to retread that ground now.

But it is related to what I want to acknowledge (which, coincidentally is also something I’ve previously discussed here).

Earlier today I found out about the death of author Harry Crews.

I always figured I’d meet Crews at some point. I know people who were close to him, I spend plenty of time in Florida, and I’ve got a lucky streak of running into people I admire. I didn’t feel urgency, even in the face of reports suggesting his poor health, because life works out in the end.

I often point people to the clips of Crews discussing writing on Youtube. I did so on this very blog back on January 5^th. I do it at conferences where I speak. I do it in emails sometimes to the people who submit books to Tyrus. What it means to me to be a writer is wrapped up, succinctly and forcefully, in a ten minute video interview of the author.

Crews’ writing is compelling for its rawness, its honesty, and its exploration of subcultures no less extraordinary than the worlds of superheroes and international badasses. His stories, both fiction and non-fiction are populated with the scarred, the broken and limping, the people who take punches, but find the strength to peel themselves off the canvas. Or at least try to get up. One can only imagine that Crews' style, like Crews himself was birthed and honed in the backwoods of rural Georgia, not all that far from Wewahitchka.

As Crews said (and was later used as the title of a documentary about his life). “Survival is triumph enough.” I believe that. Even use it sometimes when people ask me about the editorial guidelines for Tyrus.

Though I never did meet him and now most certainly won't (at least not this go-around), his impact on many writers that I admire will, for me, ensure his continued presence in the literary world. Proud. Honest. Punching.

Thank you, Mr. Crews.

 

The Inter-connectivity of All Histories | Down & Out

BENJAMIN LEROY

My publishing career started under dubious circumstances. At 18, I started a business with a lifelong friend. We filed for corporate status, printed business cards, and generally made asses of ourselves as we flexed muscles and tested out the grown up language of adults and businessmen. Had no idea what we were going to do. Hadn’t bothered to write down a business plan or, for that matter, chosen a business.

It took a while to develop, but eventually we decided to start a “multimedia conglomerate.” We wanted to bring together authors, filmmakers, musicians, photographers…hell, I feel like I’ve already rattled out this tired story a million times, and for all I know, I’ve done so on this blog a half dozen times. Things happened. Ideas got tested out, dreams were birthed and crashed, a few years passed, and we decided to settle on publishing books.

There were a couple of experiments to go through the process—short story and poetry collections that are rotting into the earth right now. Then, in the fall of 2001 we released John Galligan’s debut novel, Red Sky, Red Dragonfly. The company back then was called DIVERSITY INC., a naming relic from an old high school philosophy club my business partner and I had started back in the early 90s (to add to the pretension and the teeth rattling arrogance, I’ll let you know that it stood for Divine Intellectuals Violating Every Rational System In The Yuniverse, ah! the hubris of youth!)

Anyway, at some point there was a name change to Bleak House Books and we published about 50 books over the course of the next eight years. Like any other endeavor there were good times and bad times, close calls, and near wrecks, but we always persevered in some form or another.

As I am sometimes inclined to do, earlier this week I got caught up in the grip of the past, thinking about the journey from smart assed 18 year old kid to 36 year old whatever the hell I am now.

While at Bleak House, I had approximately thirty interns who worked with me during those eight years. The lastingness and depth of those relationships are greatly varied. But in the years that followed I provided recommendations and helped make introductions for some of them. By my best count, nearly a dozen of them went on to work at larger publishing houses or agencies or magazines.

My life is incalculably richer for having made the journey. The business side of things has, on the whole, been nice, but pales in comparison to the personal relationships forged. In addition to the people I discussed above, there have been authors, publishers, agents, librarians, and readers.

It’s this last category that brings me to the point of this entry.

Back at Bleak House we started a program called The Evidence Collection—signed, fingerprinted, and numbered collector editions of our titles. We had dedicated subscribers to The Evidence Collection that ordered directly from Bleak House (as opposed to buying from a store). Though it is nearly five years since we started the program, and three years since it ended, I can still see many of the names in my head. Most of them were strangers, names I was grateful to see on a spreadsheet, their purchases the validation I needed for what might have been a questionable idea.

One of those people—Eric Campbell—picked up copies of everything we published at Bleak House. He and I talked on the phone a few times back then about the Evidence Collection, about what was scheduled for publication way in the future, about our shared love of books. Solid guy.

As life goes, things started falling apart at Bleak House Books (by then a division of Big Earth Publishing) in late 2008. My co-worker Alison and I decided that it might be better to continue publishing with a new company than with the company we’d spent so much of our time and lives building.

In a dying economy and with a more developed sense of business than the 18 year old version of me possessed, we struck out looking for investors in our new venture.  We scraped together enough cash to open Tyrus Books, but it was lean and ultimately, without further investors, doomed to certain failure.

At Bouchercon in 2009 we ran into Eric Campbell. We talked about what happened with Bleak House and what the plans were for Tyrus. As it turned out, Eric had been interested in investing in another publishing company, but hadn’t had much success in working anything out.

No doubt you know where this story goes—Eric swooped into the picture in true superhero style, gave the company the stability to make it through the extra lean patch, and made it possible for us to continue with the line including new books from established authors like Reed Farrel Coleman and Victor Gischler, but also debut novels like Hello Kitty Must Die and Untouchable. It is not an overstatement to say that without Eric’s timely introduction to the scene none of those books would have been published by Tyrus, and who knows if they’d have been picked up elsewhere.

It’s two and a half years later and now Eric is the Publisher of Down & Out Books. Alison is doing some editing for him, and perhaps the hardest working intern I ever worked with, Krystal, who later moved to NYC to work for a larger publisher and then a distinguished agent, is doing publicity for Down & Out.

I don’t know how much longer I’m going to stay in publishing, but I know that it is in good hands as long as companies like Down & Out are around. I recorded a podcast with Eric yesterday to discuss his new venture, what he's publishing, and to talk about the new book Scoundrels released this week, edited by Gary Phillips and featuring new stories from SJ Rozan, David Corbett, Reed Farrel Coleman, Brendan DuBois, Kelli Stanley, Tyler Dilts, Travis Richardson, Eric Stone, Bob Truluck, Pamela Samuels Young, Darrell James, Lono Waiwaiole, Seth Harwood and Gary Phillips.

Tyrus Podcast - guest Eric Campbell

 

On the Road, Good News, & a Brief Update

Good news, readers!

(1) I'm on the road this week, and not really positioned to do a long post. So, no rambling piece from me this week. I will be short. Concise. And I bring good news.

(2) The good news is this -- I had to go to NYC this week for an award ceremony. The award in question? Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers Award. My vested interest? Scott O'Connor's debut novel, Untouchable, was one of the three finalists in the fiction category. 

Where have you heard about Untouchable on this blog?

Alison talked about it back before it came out in February of 2011 here.

It seemed to have an impact on Dale here.

And I was even heard to make some remarks here.

What I mean to tell you is that things were pretty exciting this week and I got to attend a swank event. Twelve years ago when I started publishing books, this kind of thing seemed totally out of reach, the domain of big New York publishers.

Well, mark one up for the little guy and congratulations Scott!

The news from Publishers Weekly here.

A more detailed review of the judge's view of the book here.

 

Introducing Prologue Books

BENJAMIN LEROY

Today I helped launch Prologue Books, a project I've been thinking about for the last two years. I've talked about it, drawn it on napkins, and dreamed what it would be like to put it all together. And now it's done. Kinda.

A quick summary of Prologue would be that we're trying to trace the genealogy of genre.

The driving question behind Prologue Books is – How have the books and authors of other generations influenced today’s new releases?

To help shed light, we’re converting out-of-print novels into ebooks, in an attempt to better trace the genealogical roots of crime, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, western, and young adult fiction.

Greg Shepard of Stark House Press has been instrumental in helping to curate the Prologue Crime collection. We are also deeply indebted to Ed Gorman whose knowledge of and appreciation for the history of the genre is unmatched.

Here is the press release from today:

F+W MEDIA ANNOUNCES THE LAUNCH OF PROLOGUE BOOKS
Hundreds of Out-of-Print Pulp Novels of 1940’s-1970’s Now Available as E-Books

New York, NY –March1, 2012 – F+W Media announced today the acquisition of more than 250 out-of-print novels, spanning 1940-1970, to be reissued as e-books under the imprint, Prologue Books. These hard-boiled crime novels, written by legends like Peter Rabe and William Campbell Gault, served as inspiration for contemporary crime fiction.  Before, these old paperbacks could only be found at book fairs and used book stores, but now, they will be available to anyone with an e-reader.

“I envision Prologue Books not simply an e-book publisher for out-of-print titles, but as a living record of the crime, science fiction, and fantasy genres,” said Ben LeRoy, publisher of Tyrus Books who is spearheading the project. “There’s a great opportunity to shine the spotlight on authors who may have been significantly influential on the current state of publishing, but who have never really received their due for one reason or another. With the help of luminaries in the genres—authors, readers, reviewers—we are excited to find and share those stories.”

“I love and collect vintage paperbacks, so you’d think the concept of e-books would have no appeal for someone like me,” said pulp novelist, Christa Faust. “But the way I see it, having reading copies of these classic titles available in digital format is not only a great way to attract new readers, it also helps to preserve existing paper editions that are too fragile to be thumbed through. It’s old-school pulp for a new generation. A brilliant idea that’s long overdue.”

 

 

A Reminder

BENJAMIN LEROY

99% of the people working in publishing as editors or agents are in the business because they love books.

They have likely been reading since they were able to sound out words on the living room floor. Many of them loved words and books so much they majored in English during their college years. Will they always love the same books you love, or, perhaps more importantly, the book you wrote? Of course not, we’re all subjective human beings with different interests, fascinations, and tastes. In the same way that it doesn’t offend me that some people like the taste of okra, it shouldn’t offend you if I don’t dig your book the way you and others might.

You’ll also note that the math in my initial assertion is (a) not backed up by scientific evidence, and (b) is rather specific with regards to two job titles, and is not the blanket of “all people working in publishing.” On the first point, it’s a number I arrived at by living in the industry for ten years and meeting a whole bunch of people. I have extracted accordingly. As far as the second point, I raise it because there are many other people who are essential to running a publishing company that could just as easily be working at a music label or a computer manufacturer or a general widget company. Their skillsets are for running a business. The product is sometimes secondary, and is usually hostage to spreadsheets and forecasts. Instead of things like plot, pacing, and theme (the domain of the editor and agent), focus is instead given to things like, profit margin, consumer buying trends, and other jibberjabber that I can’t even properly qualify. Undoubtedly, some business types have come in from different industries hoping to apply widget practices to literary conventions and have ruined the party for all present. That doesn’t change the fact that other skilled business folks have also helped keep afloat a vessel, the S.S. Publishing Industry, through many storms.

These two different sides are usually good together. The business suit guy helps keep the editor/agent from indulging in some crazy whims about things that could be published. And, through some complicated osmosis that I’m still not completely sure I understand, the buttoned up Poindexter behind the calculator learns about things like Love and the Existential Struggle.

Here’s a sample transcript from a made up meeting between the two sides.

 

EDITOR: Oh my God! This book is so great. The protagonist is a man who accidentally ingested speaker wire and he falls in love with a poor country singer who can’t afford an amp, but absolutely has to play the county talent show. So the protagonist stands on stage with her (the singer), mouth wide open, and the music comes out of him, loud and clear, with the best acoustics ever… 

BUSINESSMAN: Who is going to buy that?

EDITOR: Me. And like, at least a dozen of my friends.

BUSINESSMAN: Is the singer a vampire? Vampires are biiiig right now.

EDITOR: Well, no…I mean…it wasn’t ever really discussed or anything. I suppose it’s possible. There wasn’t any evidence to suggest it, but…

BUSINESSMAN: Could you talk to the author, maybe? Vampire it up a little bit? Or, if the author doesn’t like that idea, could we set the county fair in some dystopian wasteland, where, if the singer doesn’t win the contest she is killed on stage in front of a cheering crowd and her body is harvested for organs in front of everybody. There was this show on HBO that…

EDITOR: Yeah, the book is basically a quirky love story. I don’t know how those things would fit with it…

BUSINESSMAN: Do you have any other projects to suggest? Maybe we should move on.

 

Editor has a problem. Huge fan of Speakerman and the Blue Ribbon(*), but the numbers don’t work. So now editor has to go back to the author and say, “Well, I love this, I really do. It’ll be with me for the rest of my life, but I couldn’t get the necessary in-house support. We’re not going to be able to publish it.”

Who is wrong in this situation?

Well, to the author, it’s likely to be whoever the hell “in-house support” is, and because that’s not a name or a single person, it can quickly become the company. And if enough companies reject Speakerman and the Blue Ribbon it can become the publishing industry as a whole.

Well, to Captain Numbercruncher behind the big mahogany desk, it’s the author for not writing what’s hot, and, instead, following the pesky gnawing in the gut to write a book that means something to the author.

To the editor, it might also be “in-house support” but in this case, editor knows the names and faces and knows that the business folks who stress over forecasting and budgets are the same people who have to make sure enough money is coming into the company to pay for editor’s salary and health insurance. So editor goes back to the other 300 unread books in the office and begins the process anew, trying to find a brilliant work that has a definable audience (preferably with disposable income for books) and speaks to the same part of the editor that was built on the living room floor and was fed with Ramen during four years of college.

It’s hard, I know, to be out of step with current trends, to be passionate about something brilliant while the world adjusts its bifocals. But as a writer, it is your mission to listen to that voice in your gut, writing the thing that means something to you. It’s the part of the process you have absolute control over. You have an anxious audience waiting behind the desk—agents and editors both who will do what they can because they believe in books. Are moved by words. See your brilliance.

 

 

* Because a whole bunch of people asked to buy SPEAKERMAN, I thought I'd at least give you a glimpse of the cover so that you can find it on the shelf at your local bookseller.

Thank You for Everything

BENJAMIN LEROY

It’s my birthday today.

At the risk of sounding sappy, I want to thank you for the present. I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you (even those of you who may be discovering this weeks later) for caring about the written word, for loving books, for not having fled the joy of reading. I’m looking at you, readers, authors, librarians, agents, publishers. Bless your hearts reviewers! For keeping the discussion going.

I travel a lot for work.

Sometimes by car. Sometimes by plane. Big cities, little towns, sometimes no town at all in the middle of nowhere. I am most at peace in the throes of movement. All of those miles are grist for the experience mill—everything I hear, see, taste, experience is part of a never ending quest to understand everything about everybody, everywhere. At the heart of that is a desire to understand myself and my place in the universe.

I’ve been blessed to meet many wonderful people along the road. Endlessly generous and warm people who reaffirm my faith in all of us. I have been invited into the homes of strangers to have dinner with families that have become extensions of my own. I have slept on the couches of people with beliefs very much unlike my own in matters of politics, music, sports, and any number of other superficial subjects that sometimes distract us from the greatness we can cause.

My own life is immeasurably richer for having been a part of the publishing industry, for having spent so much time with people who care so severely about what it means to be human and alive and everything that goes with it.

When I started Bleak House Books more than ten years ago, I had big dreams about what the future held. I could never have known just how lucky I’d be. The dreams may have morphed a bit, evolved as I have along the way, but they have never been any less fantastic than they were way back then.

For that and everything else you all have given me, I thank you. It’s the best present ever, every day.

At about this time each year I release a video made up of footage from my life during the previous year. Here is my 2011. My love to everybody in here.

Happy Birthday.

 

It’s about time for me to open up Tyrus Books for submissions. As faithful readers of this blog know, I had to close things down a few months ago because my plate was full of other things—forecasting, promotional planning for titles coming out this spring, a few secret projects, and some web development. All of those things were necessary (and continue to be necessary) to run a for real business (a skill for which I have no proper training other than experience).

But you know what else is necessary? Books. In particular, good books. Great books. Life changing bunches of words gathered on paper or electronically or surgically implanted into your brain cortex box. And that means, like a pig on a truffle hunt, I’ve got to go out and root around in the dirt to find some. That’s my job, yes. It’s also one of the things that matters most in life to me.

We can all sit back and lament the dying of a golden age of publishing and pretend like things were more prestigious fifty years ago, or that there was an inherent current of genius floating around publishing when it was ruled by old dudes in tweed jackets.

The fact is, we’re all connected in new ways, bigger, bolder, faster, sometimes scary, sometimes revelatory ways that Ebenezer Von Bookguy couldn’t have imagined even after his trip to a (then legal) opium den on the upper Westside of Manhattan. Our interests can be piqued by American outposts that aren’t so distant anymore and we can get the real story by the folks living it, as opposed to the imagined story by people who haven’t experienced it. Do you know what this means? Do you realize how it can fix the problem facing all of us?

That’s right, it can raise the level of understanding among the whole of the planet. The 90 year old great grandmother in Des Moines can nod along to the “hey, we’re all human” typings of a Mormon kid in Salt Lake City or a swamp rat along the banks of the Apalachicola River in my spiritual hometown of Wewahitchka, Florida. And this thing doesn’t stop at any border, because it doesn’t have to, it can beam on an arc all around the globe stopping in London or Tehran, Paris or Damascus, Moscow or Beijing or Nairobi.

Novel writing is not singularly the domain of folks who have done six years of college and who received their MFA in Creative Writing. It’s about finding the truth to life, articulating it in an honest and compelling way, and letting the universe take it from there. We can, in the course of hearing another’s story, excuse imperfect grammar and discarded literary conventions, as long as the story means something.

Tips for querying a publisher:

• Don’t announce yourself as the “next BIG NAME AUTHOR” in your query letter. That isn’t a decision you make. The reading public will let you know. Also, to that same point, don’t talk about how BIG NAME AUTHOR can’t write a book to save his life and you don’t understand why anybody buys his books. You don’t need to understand, you just need to know that people do.

 

• Don’t make some ridiculous claim that you’re a “surefire New York Times bestseller” in waiting. The metrics for the NYT’s list are mysterious and driven by a lot of factors. It’s not in your control or even in your publisher’s control whether or not you’ll make the list. Consumers and readers make it happen, and you can’t control them either.

 

• Not all reviews are created equal. Ok, so check this out, some of you might have read that and been like, “Ben, you’re buying into the old hierarchy of dynamic media and its hold on the myth of blah blah…” Here’s the truth—reviews are good for a few things. Primarily, I note, they help feed an author’s self-esteem (sometimes in negative directions) AND they give awareness of a book to the reader of the review. A glowing five snowflake review of a book on a blog nobody reads is great for column A (author self-esteem) but does little for column B (raising public awareness of a book). A review in a publication with wider circulation does much more for column B and ultimately column B sells books. If that publication is geared towards publishing industry professionals (bookstore owners, librarians, etc.), say in a magazine like Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus, or Booklist, all the better.

 

• Don’t do that parlor trick where you pretend to be a big fan of the publishing house and you say, “I consider my works to be like two of your authors JOHNNY STORYTELLER and PEGGY BOOKWRITER” whereas JOHNNY STORYTELLER and PEGGY BOOKWRITER have very little in common with each other. It is a highly transparent move. If you’re a legit fan of one of the house’s authors, great, say what you like about him/her. But don’t just grab two names and say, “Hey, the three of us could be Peter, Paul, and Mary! Because there are three of us!” I know it says to do that in some guides, but don’t listen to those guides.

 

• Realize that the other person on the other end of your query letter is looking to get really excited about projects that move her. Your book might be great, but it might not speak to the editor, and the editor, without question, has a better handle on what is going to get her excited, how a project fits into the editorial niche of the publishing house, and whether or not she wants to acquire the title. If she doesn’t want to acquire it, try to refrain from the “You’re an idiot! I’m the next Stephen Grisham Rowling! You just passed up the opportunity to make $$$!” Because that won’t help your cause. Besides, if that’s the way you’re approaching the intersection of art and business, it will end in a wreck every time. I swear to you.

 

• If you’ve self-published the book you’re now querying about and then decided that self-publishing wasn’t as easy as some people told you it was going to be, be up front about that. Some publishing houses will still look. Others won’t. That’s their call to make. Pretending the self-published version doesn’t exist and being all, “Oh, that? Yeah, uh, I, uh, printed like three copies for my friends to let them see it, but it’s not published published,” is a smidge disingenuous. PRO-TIP, if you publish three copies for your friends, don’t assign an ISBN to the book.

Two Paragraphs and a Hunch

BENJAMIN LEROY

This week we got some good news around the Tyrus Books compound. Our 2011 title, Untouchable by Scott O’Connor was selected as a finalist for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Award (fiction). We were thrilled back in early 2011 when we found out the book was selected for the Discover Great New Writers Program, but to have that book end up being named a finalist out of all the books selected for the program last year? That felt awesome.

(As a sidenote, the ultracool Dead Guy contributor Dale Spindel wrote about Untouchable a few weeks ago. You can re-read that here - http://heydeadguy.typepad.com/heydeadguy/2012/01/what-makes-a-book-a-mystery.html)

Untouchable started out special, and has continued along the path.

As I understand it, the book was originally shopped to larger publishing houses by agent Yishai Seidman of Dunow, Carlson, & Lerner. Though some folks at the big houses were excited by it, ultimately it got passed over for being too dark (and therefore, likely not marketable).

Then it ended up on my desk.

I’d like to tell you that I dug into it immediately, but that would be a lie. I don’t read things as quickly as I would like to (and if you’ve submitted something over the last few months, you’re likely aware of that already). I often require a kick in the ass a few times before I get around to reading something, and even then (this is terrible to confess) I read with an eye towards rejecting the book, just so I can put it behind me and get the agent off my case).

When Yishai called to remind me about Untouchable, I opened the file with my RejectionGun all set to go. But then a funny thing happened. I read the first two paragraphs.

At that point, two paragraphs in, I called Yishai and said—“I haven’t read the whole thing. In fact, I haven’t even read the whole first page. But I know I want this. Let’s get a deal done right away.”

And we did.

Was the book perfect at that point? Nope. The author and Alison worked hard on it to get it into the best shape it could be. But the essence of what makes a book great to me was there in full display even before the two of them fixed any of the particulars.

I had the same reaction the first time I dug into Craig McDonald’s Head Games, a book that would later go on to be nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. When that reaction hits, I trust it. It’s more than words on a page speaking to me at that point. It’s the I Know It When I See It phenomenon, and I can’t explain it any better than that.

Of course, you could buy a book based on the first two paragraphs and later realize you’ve made a terrible mistake. But in this case, the selection by Barnes and Noble for the Discover Great New Writers program happened and then later, The New York Times reviewed the book in the Sunday Books Section. The first novel I’ve ever been involved in publishing that did either.

Guess I got lucky.

Anyway, the winner of the award will be announced in March 7^th, and I’ve got my fingers crossed. If you’re so inclined to cross yours, too, that’s great.

Also, unrelated to Untouchable, but about publishing, I was on WGN's Midday News today. You can watch the clip here.

Down the Rabbit Hole of Trivia

BENJAMIN LEROY

Today I read an article/factoid/holysh#tidbit about the family tree of John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States of America. It turns out that the guy, born in 1790, who took office in 1840, has two LIVING grandchildren. I didn’t say great great grandchildren or great grandchildren. The two men in question, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. and Harrison Ruffin Tyler, are his plain old fashioned grandchildren.

Here are some things about this that blow my mind.

John Tyler was alive when George Washington was President. Between the three generations of the Tyler men in question (including John Tyler Jr., the father of Lyon and Harrison), they have been around for ALL 44 Presidents. By comparison, three generations of my family including me, have been around for a paltry 15.

I’ll admit that I didn’t know much about the Presidency of Tyler before doing some internet research earlier today. Tyler ended up in office after President William Henry Harrison died a month into his term, having succumbed to complications of pneumonia.

Tyler was on the USS Princeton when the tragedy occurred. What tragedy? Yeah, I didn’t know about it either, but it’s fascinating.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

All of these facts and historical footnotes are fertile ground for the imagination. And though they captured my attention today, something else will grab it tomorrow.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but I think it’s important to be curious. As writers, we never know what obscure historical event(s) can be discussed or re-imagined or re-plotted to serve our stories. I can’t get enough of these things, and how often, much later down the road, they give context to something I wouldn’t have otherwise understood.

Do you have any favorite historical footnotes? Obscure, but real characters who fascinate you and that you hope to work into your writing?