Another Professional Project Is a DANDY Idea

I'm sure you all recall my recent post (the last one?) about the difficulty of determining which literary agents to submit work to. Well, something similar, though easier in my humble opinion, goes on with seeking out markets for short-form writing. There are hundreds of possibilities to sort through. So much to read and decide which journals/sites would be interested in your work.

During Lent this year, I took on a daily short story reading project that I thought would teach me something about writing short stories. It did not. Soon after starting it, I gave up any hope that it would help me in checking markets. My efforts were totally unfocused and random, and I was just trying to get the job done.

Which I did, but for what?

So, of course, I got really excited yesterday when I came up with a similar plan for researching short-form writing markets.

The Kind-of-Daily Market Research Project

I have this Ranking of 500 Fiction Litmags by Erika Krouse. Oh, my gosh. She's got one for litmags that only publish creative nonfiction, too. Now I'm really excited. 

So, the new project is to just casually check out a magazine from the list, read a few things, look at their submission guidelines, and consider whether or not I have something I can submit there. We're going to be calm about this. Which means:

• No reading for the sake of reading. 
• No reading to meet a daily goal.
• Just familiarize myself with some new publications and be grateful for whatever I get done.

Today's Research Project: Five Points

Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art doesn't make all its material available on-line. And what it does offer isn't a complete story or essay. But it has a pretty incredible blog. Consider:

• "Help Eleanor Come Home": The Queer Horror of Hill House by Eve Clark. If I had all the time in the world, I'd read The Haunting of Hill House again. (I have a copy, so I could!) That would be for the third time, since I read it once as a teenager and once after the Netflix series.
• Pride and Prejudice & The Awakening: What is food if not domestication or temptation? by Karen Sims. This is fantastic! I didn't care for The Awakening when I read it sometime after college. Again, if I had all the time in the world, I'd read it again. (I have a copy, so I could!) Food and eating appear in a lot of my own writing. I'm going to be paying a lot more attention when I read it in other writers' work now. "Domestication or temptation."

I Just Did Some Book Submissions. Thank God That's Over.

Though I am primarily interested in short-form writing these days, I periodically submit one of my book-length manuscripts to an agent or agents. I respect my own work (and the effort that went into it), and every now and then, I feel I should show it.

Earlier this year, I saw an article on boutique literary agencies and decided I'd read it. And I finally did. I collected a few names to research there. And I had a few names I collected elsewhere. 

I spent a lot of my writing time the last couple of weeks researching, as I said above. Researching literary agents is a lot like stalking them. You hunt them up on-line. You read interviews they've given. You look for their Manuscript Wish Lists. You see if they're on BlueSky or Twitter, whichever one you favor. Maybe you see if they're on Facebook, though that may be where they post their more personal stuff, and that really is like stalking them. You sign up for Publisher's Marketplace for a month (it's going up to $30 a month September 1, by the way) so you can see if they've sold the type of book you're planning to submit to them. 

If you're smart, I've learned because I wasn't, you'll go to their agency website first, because that's where they'll announce that they're closed to submissions. Believe me, you don't want to have invested a lot of time and effort in stalking an agent only to find out s/he is closed to submissions.

I started out with a group of ten names this go round. By the time I eliminated the people who were not accepting submissions, who represented only children's authors or nonfiction, who were interested in romance or science fiction, who had never sold a mystery, who hadn't sold anything in several years, I was down to two people.

So this go-round of submissions went out to just two people.

I did do some revising of my submission letter, though, with a new hook/pitch line. That can only be good in the future, right?

Why Are My Submission Numbers So Low? Spoiler: I Don't Know 

Well, that's not accurate. I know why my numbers are so low. I don't know why other writers' numbers are so high.

I have submitted 143 Canterbury Road to 19 agents (maybe an editor is included in that number) now. Over many years I have submitted to a little over 100 agents relating to 5 different manuscripts.  Some of these agents I have submitted multiple projects to, so that raises my submission numbers a bit.

According to things I've read, though, I have not submitted very widely. I've read about writers who submitted to over 200 agents for just one book, got multiple shows of interest, and then ended up with representation. And a book sale. I've seen that type of thing more than once.

Where do they find so many agents to submit to?

Yes, there are hundreds of agents out there. But writers are advised not to carpet bomb them. We're supposed to target agents who are interested in the kind of work we do. The likelihood of me convincing a nonfiction agent that he's been waiting for years for my comedy about two slacker churchgoers saving a mainstream church from Christian Nationalists doesn't seem great enough to waste both our time with a submission to him.

Even if you had 20 or 30 agents who were interested in exactly the kind of thing you write, submitting to them is a lot of work. Every letter needs to be personalized as to why you are submitting to this particular person. Agents require different numbers of pages with a sub. Some want a synopsis. Agents who use submission forms don't all use the same submission form. You may have to come up with different material for different agents. 

To do all that to submit to an agent you know can't possibly be interested in your book seems either foolishly optimistic or inept. 

But are other people doing it, and it's working for them? In which case they're not being foolishly optimistic or inept?

But I obsess.

Next Week

Next week I have an essay and a short story to submit. I want to get back to my short story study and plan my workshop attendance for the year and write a blog post. And, finally, get back to some generative work.

That means, of course, writing.

Man, I Feel Like A Writer

Roland Denes on Unsplash

 Doo, doooo, doo, doo, doo-doo.

On Monday, my most recent humor piece, Sure, You're Going to LOVE Being a Grandmother: But let me give you some advice was published at Frazzled, possibly my favorite publication at Medium.

I also received my hard copy of the Stonecoast Review in which my short story What We Do appears, as well as a copy of The Authors Guild Bulletin. No, I don't have any writing in that, but it is hold-in-your-hand evidence that I'm a member and arriving the same day as Stonecoast Review, as it did, makes me feel very writery.

On top of all that, I got two rejections within a couple of hours on Sunday, just the day before. Rejections are a good thing. Not great, of course, but good, because they indicate you're working. You're in the game.

While none of what I experienced Monday involves the contracts and book reviews and appearances of days-of-old, they are work activity. They are the work activity of a short-form writer.

I Went For A Book Walk Last Weekend Part 2

Truthfully, it's been a couple of weekends now. 

The Struggle To Sell

Events like the book walk organized by Nutmeg Lit Fest last month are all about bringing readers and books together. Which sounds very nice. What they're really about is money, which doesn't sound as nice. We are talking about marketing books. Whether you are a self-published or traditionally published author, marketing is difficult. In large part this is due to the 2 million books that are published each year, which I mentioned last time. There are nowhere near enough readers to read all those books. In fact, as I also mentioned, eighty percent of those books will sell fewer than 100 copies.

Given those facts, being able to sell more than 100 copies of a book becomes a major achievement. But what about some other figures?

A Traditionally Published Author

Hal Johnson sketching in my book

I met Hal Johnson, the author of  Impossible Histories, published by a Macmillan imprint, at the book walk. He was one of two traditionally published authors I talked to, though there may have been more there. In our conversation, Johnson said that he took part in events like this one because traditional publishers don't do much marketing anymore. This is something I hear a lot to the point that I'd almost call it common knowledge now. But I don't really know what it means, because it's been so long since I've had a book published, myself.

Back in my day, boys and girls, marketing from traditional publishers involved:

• Sending arcs of your books to professional review sites
• Including your books in their seasonal catalogs
• Maybe taking your book to teacher and library conferences 
• If your book received a certain number of starred reviews, you'd get an advertisement in a professional publication of some sort
• The Hero of Ticonderoga was included in a one of those box displays in bookstores, but I can't remember why.

Are traditional publishers doing less of the above now? Or does the above have less impact because of the overwhelming number of books out there? 

It doesn't matter, of course. The end result is the same. It's hard to sell traditionally published books.

My husband and I used to think that handselling like we saw at the book walk didn't matter, because the number of books you'd sell would be so small, it couldn't have an impact. But, remember, eighty percent of books published sell fewer than 100 copies. You want to sell more than 100 copies to get into the twenty percent! That seems doable by making the effort to handsell at events like this. Remember, someone told me at this book walk that s/he had sold 200 copies of a book in a few months. 

But what about the income involved, Gail? For a number of years, conventional wisdom claimed that most traditionally published books don't sell enough copies to earn back the author's advance, the advance being an advance against sales that traditional publishers pay authors upfront when they agree to publish a book. Recently (meaning just now) I've read that that isn't necessarily true. At any rate, the advance isn't the only money traditional publishers invest in books. They have to pay for:

• all editing, 
• layout and design, 
• interior artwork, if there is any, 
• cover illustrations, 
• design of the covers, 
• and all the marketing listed above. 

Will selling more than 100 books cover all that, making you look like a desirable risk your publisher might publish again? How many books do you have to sell to do that? Beats me.

The Self-Published Authors

Mike Jakubowski

Mike Jakubowski, author of The Kings of Beacon and Joey and the Ocean of Possiblities, was one of
the first authors I spoke to. I was drawn to his covers and learned that he had a friend who did the illustrations and another friend who did the design work for them. We agreed this was very significant, because the cost of self-publishing can get up there. 

In fact, that's why I always call self-published writers self-published and not independent. They have to bear the burden of finding people to do all the work described above that traditional publishers do for the books they publish, and they have to pay for it. Themselves. There are companies that will do that for writers, and I've seen costs for that going anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000. The companies I've read about didn't include a developmental editor, which is the most important and possibly the most expensive part of publishing.

But what about the income involved, Gail? You often see not having to share income with a publisher as being one of the benefits of self-publishing. But without a publisher, you don't have anyone to take on the financial risk of publishing. Authors have to pay for everything. Themselves. 

How many books do they have to sell to cover their expenses? Again, it beats me.

Gail Is Impressed

Yes, when I go to any of these book events, I am greatly impressed by the effort and ingenuity and expense the authors attending put into their marketing materials. 

I'm talking serious posters, for instance, such as the one that Greg Gilmartin had made of his book covers. In fact, glossy book cover posters are a very common thing. I still have a poster a book fair made of one of my covers, but it was some kind of digital printout glued to a poster board. In two decades things have improved. 

I saw table coverings like the one Hal Johnson had made printed with his book covers.

I try not to pick up bling at festivals, because I dabble in minimalism and environmentalism. So I don't have much of that to show. But we're not talking the Kinko's black and white bookmarks I handed out in schools back in the day or the business cards we made on our printer. We're talking about beautiful things. Lots of them printed on both sides!

Don't I sound as if I just came out of the hills?

What really freaks me out, though, are the canopies.

These writers often market outdoors, and in addition to lugging a fold-up table of some sort and a chair, they also have to carry canopies with them to protect them from the sun and, presumably, some light rain. 

Jordan Lopez has a canopy.

As does Kelly Jarvis.

 

And Sarah P. Blanchard.

 

One of 4 book walk stations.

As did most of the authors at the Wethersfield Book Walk. 

Now, I have a canopy on my deck. It's horrible to work with. The one we have now is only a year old, and we've already punched a hole in it. Dealing with canopies is not a minor task. These writers are putting in a lot of personal, physical work to market their books. 

I'm going to be honest. I don't want to say I'm too lazy to do this kind of thing, but I'm too lazy to do this kind of thing. I have cases of my out-of-print books and thought about trying to join an upcoming event just to sell off what I've got. But then I said, No. No, no, no.

There is at least one other group in Connecticut that organizes events for writers handselling their books. But this kind of thing is happening all over the country. Shopping for books in this way may be becoming as common as shopping in bookstores. Or on Amazon.