Today, May 4th, is the second anniversary of the commencement of this blog. I started it on my return from a writer’s retreat which I credit for kick-starting my career as a published author. So this anniversary is my day for taking stock of how all that is going.

Here is what I wrote in the initial post, and here is what I wrote last year on this day.

In the past year:

• I have had my debut novel, TimeSplash, accepted, edited and published. I only have complete data from the first two weeks of sales at the moment, so I can’t even tell you yet if it is selling well.
• I have been promoting TimeSplash as much as I can online. I built TimeSplash its own website and it even has its own blog. For the past two months I have been running a blog tour which has had eighteen stops on it, Before that, I did a 24-hour, non-stop, round-the-world Twitter tour.
• I have had seven short stories published – two in anthologies
• I’ve won prizes in two short story contests – one being the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest 2009.
• I have continued to earn a trickle of money from short story publishing – but my production of short stories has dropped considerably. I wrote only six last year.
• I finished writing and editing my novel The Credulity Nexus and have begun querying agents for it. (I’ve written to two, so far, the second only about three days ago.)
• I have begun writing a new book, Loner’s Deep, which is a space opera set in the far future (and a sequel to my not-yet-complete Emissaries trilogy. (If fame ever comes knocking, I’ll have two great space opera trilogies ready to hand it.)
• I went to a writer’s festival.
• I have been increasing my presence in the various online social networks. My blogs (this one and the TimeSplash blog have over 1,000 unique visitors a month, and my Twitter following has gone from 0 to 987 in the past year. I’ve become a little more active on Facebook and quite active on Goodreads.
• In an attempt to raise my profile (and my writerly credentials ) I’ve joined the New York Journal of Books as a reviewer. I’ve done them 5 reviews on science and science fiction books so far. Early days. If this is successful, it will also one day become a writing income stream.
• I wrote a children’s story, Hangin’ With the Monkeys. I don’t want my career to go that way, so, rather than just throw it away, I’ve self-published it, and I’m giving it away free on Smashwords.

It all adds up to a very busy year – and a successful one. I’ve finally achieved my goal of having a novel published. I’ve made some great online friends. I’ve done loads of interesting things I didn’t expect I’d be doing. I’ve learned so much about writing and about the industry.

There are two things I didn’t manage to achieve this year – and that makes them my goals between now and next May. The first is to get an agent. It is patently obvious to me, even at this early stage, that TimeSplash would have done so much better if it had been agented. The second – and it may be related – is to start making some real money from my writing, not the dribble that has been coming in so far. And that is probably more a wish than an actual goal, but it’s what I have my sights on, so let’s see what can be done.

May the Fourth be with you too.

The other day, someone in my online writers group wondered if a particular publisher was still in business. They had submitted a manuscript to them four months ago and had heard nothing. So they’d checked the website and found it hadn’t been updated since some time in 2008. Of course, old hands at the submissions game will be shaking their heads and smiling wryly. Four months is no time at all to wait! they’re thinking. Small press publishers are far too busy to worry about updating their websites. This guy is obviously a newbie and will have to learn to control his patience and live with his frustration. Worse still, these old hands will tell you that you mustn’t express your frustration, you mustn’t let your impatience show. It doesn’t matter how the publishing houses treat you, if you kick up a fuss about it, they will put a black mark against you. Commissioning editors, they say, have long memories – as do agents.

Frankly, I don’t understand this attitude. I’ve been in business for three decades. I have managed business units for some of the world’s largest corporations, and I have run my own small consultancy. I know how businesses run. I know how buying works. I know how to manage a supply chain. It’s painfully obvious to me that the world’s publishing houses are making some basic and very stupid mistakes.

At the front end of the publishing business, the companies seem to be doing better than at the back end. Their attitude to book shops – their primary market – seems to be businesslike enough.  It’s a mess, of course, horribly inefficient and the book retailers seem to have beaten the publishers up pretty well over the years, but the publishers are doing as well as they can in a market that has become overly complex and difficult for them. Marketing beyond the book retailers seems to be a rout for the publishers but they are trying hard to redefine the business so that this is considered outside their responsibility.

On the supply side, the picture is patchy. On the one hand you have editing, design, printing and related services, which are going OK. On the other, you have content acquisition and management which appears to be a disaster. Most sizeable publishers only receive submissions from agents these days, having thrown their hands up and given up trying to do it themselves. Despite having been at it for a century or two, the publishers never learned how to do this efficiently. I don’t suppose they think that agents can do it any better, but at least now they have passed a large part of the cost on to someone else.

Since agents and publishers do not know which books will succeed and which will not, they have no way of telling writers what they want (apart from saying “This, this, and this genre – oh, and anything that’s really good.”) This means writers must produce work on spec and hope it fits the requirements/hunches/moods of the moment when they submit it. Agents are not in a much better position, they have to read through heaps of queries and mountains of slush, then take a gamble on their gut feeling, imprecise knowledge of publishers’ tastes and needs, and their (often quite limited) experience. This amounts to a major inefficiency in the system. If you include authors as part of the publishing industry, this process alone pushes the overall productivity of the industry very close to zero.

The gross inefficiencies of the acquisition process, and the lack of effective process management tools, are directly responsible for much of the rough treatment of authors that ensues. If you call your local utility company, a voice recognition or menu system will channel you into appropriate queues. There you may be given an estimate of how  long you will have to wait to have your call dealt with. You may be told how many are ahead of you in the queue and this will count down for you as you wait. At the very least, the musak will be interrupted every couple of minutes so they can apologise for the delay and assure you that they are still working on getting to you.

With an agent or publisher, it is very different. You may (or most likely won’t) get an acknowledgement that your submission has arrived. After that you will hear nothing. Sometimes you will hear nothing for three, four, six, or even twelve months, before you get a one or two line pro forma rejection. Very often these days, you will wait forever. Many agents and publishers say their policy is that if you don’t hear from them, you can take that as a ‘no’!

It’s not because they’re rushed off their feet (although that is often true.) It’s not because they’re rude and selfish people (some are, some aren’t.) It’s because their business processes are ridiculous, designed for another age, and propped up by free labour and outrageous demands on salaried staff. It’s because their acquisitions business model depends on luck, rather than on knowing what they want to acquire, leading to huge amounts of additional, wasted work. It’s because their suppliers – the authors – are so desperate for success, so cowed by the system, so petrified by the old hands and the long memories of faceless decision makers, that they will put up with this shoddy treatment.

Do you think the suppliers of paper and transport and warehousing do their work on spec, hoping that the publisher will approve and pay them? Do you suppose the printers submit a quote for services and wait six months without hearing a word from the publisher, afraid that if they complain they might uspset them? Of course not. So why do writers?

Honestly, we get the publishers and agents we deserve.

Right now, the publishers stand with respect to writers as the big supermarket chains stand with respect to farmers. But, in a time when publishers and agents are teetering on the edge of complete disintermediation, this is not the time to be upsetting potential suppliers. This is the time to be raising your game. Writers have long memories too!

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

I knew it would be good when I saw their promo site, but How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs if You Ever Want to Get Published by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark, exceeded my every expectation.

I thought it would be funny and it was. I laughed out loud all the way through. Thank God I wasn’t reading it on a plane! The level of wit was superb. Every warning of what not to do (and there were lots and lots of them) was accompanied by a brilliantly badly written yet at the same time horribly fascinating ‘extract’ from an imaginary unpublishable book. And many of these lovely cameos were apparently taken from the same set of imaginary unpublishable books. My personal favorite describes the adventures of Jack Bilge. Born into a famous family of hydraulics experts but himself an ergonomist by training, Jack struggles to give the world ergo-hydraulics, despite the dastardly dealings of renegade ergonomics expert, Dr. Nefaro. In fact, the extracts were so good, I hope that one day they will write the whole novel.

Sounds silly, I suppose, but the richness and texture of the wit in this book was a constant delight.

Not only that but in its own inverted way, How Not to Write a Novel is packed full of extremely good advice, presented in a way that really hammers home the message. Oh God, how I cringed as I read the section called… Hmm, well, maybe I’d rather not say. I’ll just go off and re-write that bit and no-one will be any the wiser. But, I assure you, Newman and Mittelmark really nailed me on that one. What’s more, they probably have  a nail or two for you, my friend. (And I can think of many published authors who should go out right now and read this book before they sign one more deal.)

It was funny, it was wise, it was clever. What more can I tell you? Oh yes, order yours today!

Be still my beating heart! I just got a letter today from the JABberwocky Agency in New York in reply to my query letter. It asked to see some pages!

Maybe I’m getting the hang of this query-letter thing after all.

JABberwocky is a great agency, and the agent I approached, Eddie Schneider, looks like a great fit for this book (TimeSplash!) so my fingers and toes are all crossed.

When I’ve calmed down a little, I’ll put the package together to send to him.

Thanks to the ever-giving Marianne de Pierres for the recommendation.

I recently finished writing (yet another) novel and I’m looking for an agent to represent it.

To get an agent (it seems) you have to ‘query’ them. That is, you have to write them a letter asking them if they would be interested in reading your manuscript. Easy enough, you’d think, but writing a query to an agent is actually a form of High Art. The novice must master this exacting artform before the agent will even consider responding to the letter, never mind them actually asking for your manuscript.

Don’t laugh. I’m serious. I never knew until recently how delicately-wrought an agent’s query is. When I look back at queries I’ve sent out in years gone by, I realise now that I never had a cat in Hell’s chance of being asked for my MS. I was doing it all wrong! There was one time – many years ago – I sent out 56 agent queries and got back just six, pro forma rejection letters. That experience was instrumental in me deciding not to bother even trying to get published again: a resolution I kept for nearly fifteen years.

There are whole websites dedicated to critiquing query letters. And many others that deal with the subject among many others on publishing etiquette.  I’m told there are even services where people will write query letters for you for money!

Why is it so hard? Because agents get hundreds of queries each week. Far more than they can read sympathetically and consider with a generous spirit. The query has to be organised so that it is in a structure they expect, is concise enough to scan through in a few seconds, and gives them specific pieces of information.

As someone who has spent a long career designing user interfaces to computer systems, I understand this problem very well. In fact, it would make the agent’s life soooo much easier if they created an online form that could be first checked by computer to weed out the grosser errors. For example, they like to see their names spelled correctly. A computer could easily check that. They like to know that a manuscript (fiction, anyway) is complete. That just needs a checkbox. They need to know it is a genre they represent (selection from a drop-down list), that the word-count is reasonable (peasy), and that the author can spell and construct gramatical sentences (so easily checked these days). This kind of checking would probably mean form rejections are sent out to a huge number of queriers without ever having to bother the agent.

Of course, the agent would still need to read the synopsis and they’d still need to see whether the author had personalised the query appropriately, but the software filter would be saving them so much time that they could spend lots more effort on this than they currently have available.

Sadly, most agents still insist on paper queries and havent even reached the stage where they can deal with email. It looks like there may be an opportunity here for a new agent to leap ahead of the competition. Don’t forget, less time spent reading duff queries is more time spent networking and selling the good ones.