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Reply Subj: I'm either really stubborn or really stupid. Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2014 at 12:05:16 pm EDT (Viewed 831 times) | |||||||
Quote: I kind of figured there would be a lag. There's always bureaucracy to get through in publishing companies. It's not so much the bureaucracy as the low resources. Most of these guys have half a dozen staff tops. Some are one-man bands. Half a dozen books a year out there is a big deal to some of them. The publisher that's put out the most of my work so far celebrated because they got 14 titles out in 2013, an all-time record. With that kind of limit in personnel and advertising budget (if any) there's quite a queue of stuff heading to print. The delays tend to be around editing, artwork, and compositing. The other feature of these small-print runs is that maybe 50% of sales come from trade stands at conventions etc. Lots of the small publishers have a deal where any creator can get at-cost copies for resale like that, but then there's no other royalty on those sales. And since the creator list includes the editor and cover artist as well, there's a chance that large numbers of your work get sold without you seeing any reward other than a healthy circulation. Some authors I know have a nice sideline in taking copies of their books to such places - especially the ones where they can double as a guest and get a free table. Shifting say 100 books with a profit of $3.50 a unit over a weekend isn't too shabby. Quote: My biggest enemy with writing anything that long is the more I go back and read earlier stuff the more glaring problems bother me. Right now I solve that by never going back. But if it's a full publication, I'm going to have to, so I'm going to need to learn to draw a line where I can say this is good enough, and leave it alone before I make things worse.There's an art to longer-form stories. The techiniques vary from writer to writer. I generally power all the way through to the end then crawl over it again at least a couple of times, with a few weeks break in between. Quote: Another enemy I have to fight is that I hate filler. It's really difficult to write 60,000 words without at least one section where nothing is really happening, but it'll probably be necessary. This is actually the number one thing that causes my writing to come to a halt completely for a while - I realize the entire section I'm writing is filler, and I toss it out. I probably throw out 1/4 of what I write and no one sees it because of that.Avoid filler at all costs. If a 60,000 word story seems too much for the story you're telling, look to four 15,000 word stories that link together. For World Class, story 1 is Keiko and Sean meeting and their first case together. Story 2 has some link to Keiko's past. Story 3 gives some emphasis on Sean's circumstances. Story 4 features the fight against the bad guy who's been behind it all from the start. Or similar. That was the book has sections, each of which is a novella in its own right, all of which lock together into a complete narrative. | |||||||
