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.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Moaning Writer
I am not Charles Dickens. I wish I were. I want to be a writer of wry humor, social commentary, and have an effect on the soul of the world I live in. The way he was. Heck, Dickens invented Christmas the way we do it now (with considerable help from department stores like Macy’s) by writing A Christmas Carol. But the chances for that are growing ever dimmer.
The small publisher with which I was associated, and who gave me a contract to publish Snow Babies, has died. The business folded while my novel was still in the editorial phase. PDMI Publishing was a worthy group of writers and entrepreneurs who in a different time might’ve gone far. I know by reading some of their works that they had talent. But between the ferocious grip of the mega publishers and the waves upon waves of self-published stuff on Amazon, real writers with talent are drowning in a sea of mediocrity and media indifference. Writers who succeed are the ones with the most luck or the most direct connections to the gate keepers. Profit is far more important than literary merit. You don’t really have to have talent any more. You don’t have to know what a split infinitive is or how to compose a compound sentence properly or how to spell. Shoot, you barely have to know how to write. Just write about sparkly teenage vampires falling in love with high school girls or sexual perverts who are into torture devices, and you can be a millionaire… if you can somehow luck out over the millions of wannabes writing the same exact crap.
There was a time when writing teachers and published authors were telling me that sooner or later good writing gets published. It was supposed to be inevitable. But that was a different time than now. Different rules for the game. I will have two published books with two different publishers. I-Universe published Catch a Falling Star. And Page Publishing will publish Magical Miss Morgan. But I paid both of those publishers to turn my books into published paper books with ISBN numbers and access to customers of Barnes and Noble and other outlets. But I don’t expect to earn the money back that I invested. Not while I’m still alive at least.
My I-Universe publishing experience was worth it. I spent a lot of money to get Catch a Falling Star published, but I got to work with real editors and advisers who had experience working for Knopf and Random House. They gave me a real evaluation of my work and taught me how the business of promoting the book was supposed to work. And the help that they gave me ended there. No advertising budget beyond what I could afford myself. I learned a lot for my money. But I had to come to terms with the fact that marketing was going to take more time and effort than I was physically capable of doing. I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor after all.
Page Publishing was a mistake. They were cheaper than I-Universe, but I am not getting anywhere near the value for my money. Instead of real editors reading and suggesting and modifying my work, I get nit-picky grammar Nazis who don’t even know as much about grammar as I do. They are only copy editing. And the last rewrite was me spending time changing all the incorrect changes they made back to the original text. They did not even tell me the name of the editor making the changes. I talked to the I-Universe editors over the phone and discussed changes in detail. Page gives me email copies to read over and fume about silently. They are no better than the vanity presses of old who were really no more than a re-typing and printing service.
So, from here on, I will only do the self-publishing options available through Amazon. I have no more money or energy to spend on the black hole of literary dreams.
I can’t help but be a writer, though. That part is genetic. I will continue to write and tell stories that I need to tell. I can’t help it. Not to do so will cause me to shrivel and die almost instantly. And I am only exaggerating just a little bit. Well, maybe a lot. But it is still true.
Whatever promises the future holds, I am not depending on them for my feelings of success, closure, and self-worth. The world as I have come to know it will always be a ridiculous stew-pot of ideas and ego and cow poop, and I am not so much giving up as stepping out of the stew. I wish to tell stories for the story’s sake. I have no delusions of becoming as wealthy as Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. I will never be Charles Dickens. And I am okay with that.
3 Comments
Filed under commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, insight, publishing, self pity, the road ahead, work in progress, writing
Tagged as being a writer, Catch a Falling Star, complaints about publishers, I-Universe, Magical Miss Morgan, Page Publishing, PDMI Publishing, publishing