Publishing a book in 2017 is a real art form. And there are rules for doing it. Unfortunately, no one can explain those rules to you. No one can even explain it logically to themselves. It is a form of voodoo and bingle-bungle flim-flammery that only the anointed like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling can use to cast publishing spells with.
So I will not try to tell you how to get published in 2017, even though it seems I have done it myself three times this year. I will only tell you how NOT to do it. I am an expert on that. I have the brain bruises to prove it.
First off, here’s my proudest achievement that came as a side effect of doing things in the worst possible way.
- “”The first mistake you need to make in publishing novels in the worst possible way is to turn to an overpriced print-on-demand service called Publish America. For more information about just how shyster-iffic and icky this publishing scam in sheep-dip clothing is, just click here. They published my first book in print, Aeroquest.
Publishing this novel was a mistake in itself. I had only worked on it for a year and a half. Compared to Catch a Falling Star which I worked on for seventeen years and had in my head since 1977, it was thoroughly underdone and only half cooked. Good novels are either baked at 450 degrees for a decade or more, or composed of prime ingredients that you have been keeping in your mental cupboard since childhood. The greedy, no good, evil publishers of this overpriced and under-cooked novel actually paid me a dollar up front and sixteen dollars in royalties total. I didn’t pay them anything. But they made one intentional formatting error in the climactic chapters of the story and wanted huge sums of money to fix and reprint it. They never lifted a finger to sell it to anybody but relatives and people I named as friends. It was a learning experience that thoroughly humbled me and taught me the primary lesson that “Mickey knows nothing about publishing a book.”
2. The second mistake you need to make to have a truly horrible experience in the publishing world is to make up your mind that you will pay for the process yourself, no matter how much it may take to do it, of both money and carefully carved out pieces of your soul.
Here’s the I-Universe propaganda.
I turned to I-Universe as a publication choice for the first of my babies that have gestated for more than a decade before being born. They have a submission process where they will evaluate your manuscript and tell you flat out if it is worth publishing or not. If they tell you it is basically crap and worthless, they will give you a vanity press treatment and let you publish as-is your piece of crap story with no editorial or marketing support. If they think your book is marketable, as mine was, they begin charging you additional publishing fees to work with editors, proof-readers, and marketers to make it all happen. The bills keep piling up, but you get to work with editors who have worked in the major publishing houses for years (I-Universe was bought by Penguin Random House so they have many seasoned employees to call upon). These editors will actually read your manuscript, offer real editorial input, and help you hone your work. They will also grouse about how the publishing business is disintegrating and offer betting odds on whether your book will make money or not that actually are rather distant from the shores of flattering praise. The marketers will help you set up a blog and recommend promotional programs for more money than you can possibly sustain over time. I only got a stock cover that didn’t look at all like the suggestion I gave them.
I have to admit at this point that this particular topic makes me windier than usual, and though I am only about half way done, the rest of this rant will have to be saved for Part 2. I am already at 700 words and only just getting warmed up. The full blaze is yet to come.
An Unexpected Gift
This post is a movie review for Thor : Ragnarok , though I don’t really plan on talking about the movie very much. It was an excellent comic book movie in the same tongue-in-cheek comedy tradition as Guardians of the Galaxy. It made me laugh and made me cheer. It was the best of that kind of movie. But it wasn’t the most important thing that happened that night.
You see, I spent the weekend in the hospital thinking I had suffered a heart attack during the Thanksgiving holiday. I thought I was facing surgery at the very least. I knew I might have had an appointment to play chess with the Grim Reaper. It is a lot to worry about and drain all the fun out of life.
Well, one of the things that happened that day, Tuesday, my first full day out of the hospital and, hopefully, out of the woods over heart attacks, was that I received my new replacement bank card because my old one had a worn out, malfunctioning chip in it. So, I took my three kids to the movie at the cheapest place we could find. I tried to run my bank card for the payment, and it was summarily declined. I had activated it previously during the day, and there was plenty of money in the account compared to the price, but it just wouldn’t take. So I had to call Wells Fargo to find out whatever the new reason was for them to hate me. It turned out that it had already been activated, but a glitch had caused it to decline the charge. While I was talking to the girl from the Wells Fargo help desk, the lady who had gotten her and her husband’s tickets right before us put four tickets to the movie in my hand.
The middle-aged black couple had lingered by the ticket stand before going in to their movie just long enough to see a sad-looking old man with raggedy author’s beard and long Gandalf hair get turned down by the cheap-cinema ticket-taking teenager because the old coot’s one and only bank card was declined. They were moved to take matters into their own hands and paid for our tickets themselves.
That, you see, was the gift from my title. Not so much that we got our movie tickets for free, but that the world still works that way. There are still good people with empathetic and golden hearts willing to step in and do things to make the world a little bit better place. The gift they gave me was the reassurance that, as bad and black as the world full of fascists that we have come to live in has become, it still has goodness and fellow feeling in it. People are still moved to pay things forward and make good on the promise to “love one another”. I did not have a chance to thank them properly. I was on the phone with Wells Fargo girl when it happened. The only thing that couple got out of their good deed was thank-yous from my children and the knowledge that they had done something wonderful. I plan to pay it forward as soon as I have the opportunity. Not out of guilt or obligation, but because I need to be able to feel that feeling too at some point.
I do have one further gift to offer the world.
After we got home from the movie, I opened an email that contained the cover proof for my novel, Magical Miss Morgan. Soon I will have that in print also if I can keep Page Publishing from messing it up at the last moments before printing. It is a novel about what a good teacher is and does. It is the second best thing I have ever written.
Sometimes the gifts that you most desperately need come in unexpected fashion.
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Filed under commentary, compassion, happiness, healing, humor, illness, movie review, NOVEL WRITING, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as gifts of love, goodness in people, paying it forward, Thor Ragnarok