Today I put up a corrected version of my short story “Hole in the Wall,” which was originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in May 1991, edited by Gardner Dozois.

As I've been republishing these works of short fiction that appeared in science fiction magazines some years back, I've been writing afterwords that tell something of how I came to write the story. When I was ready to republish this one, I realized the afterword was far too short and contained far too little. So I started over and told more of the story behind the story.

In keeping with my recent habit of providing the afterword to each new publication here, in addition to inside the very-reasonably-priced book itself, what follows this paragraph is the afterword to “Hole in the Wall,” which you can read even if you’re not going to  shell out 99c, though of course I would never try to stop you from doing that too.

Writing Hole in the Wall
When I first got the idea for “Hole in the Wall,” I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I knew the story took place in a diner, and in the diner was a wall with a portal that went somewhere. So I had a setting, but not yet a story. Later I decided the man who ran the diner was called Tomacheski, who was a recent immigrant. Now I had a setting with a character. And there it languished. In those days, or so it seemed to me at the time, some of my ideas became fully-realized stories, and others did not; I had no clue as to why. I was still a bit new to this writing lark, and although I'd made a couple of fiction sales, the whole process seemed more like luck to me than craft.

Eventually, luck took me far enough that I could absorb the craft I needed. I met Algis Budrys, who was then the editorial director for the Writers of the Future contest. On the night we met, at a party attended by quite a few starry-eyed wannabe science fiction and fantasy writers, he shared with us the seven-point plot skeleton that he claimed was the inner structure of every story. You would not find it in vignettes or stream-of-consciousness pieces, he said, but whether the author knew it was there or not, it served as the bones of every story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and knowing how to apply it was an important key to stories that worked.

I didn't yet know whether that was true, and I didn’t yet know how basic the structure of narrative is to human consciousness, but I took it on faith. I consciously applied the model to the next story I wrote, and the next, and the next. I sent these stories off to Writers of the Future, in three successive quarters. I received honorable mentions for the first two, which was wonderful encouragement, especially as some of the most amazing writers of the time were judging: Anne McCaffrey, Roger Zelazny, Larry Niven, and Gene Wolfe were among the judges that year. I felt there was a distinct possibility I might be doing something right.

I've since found the seven plot structure elements Algis revealed to me that night in every story I've ever examined, no matter how commercial or how high-flown and literary, though many writers will still tell you the structure doesn't exist, and others confuse plot with formula. Algis used to say "Formula is putting Coke™ in a Coke bottle for Coke drinkers. Plot is the structure of the events in your story. Storyline is what happens to your character as a result of those events." Years later, a writer who's won every award I ever lost and a few more rapped my knuckles thoroughly when I wrote an article about seven-point plot structure for a writers' magazine, and warned anyone reading his commentary that I was peddling claptrap. You can see that opinions differ sharply on this subject.

So back to the evening in December 1985, when I got a phone call at the bookstore I managed in Redding, California. It was from the WotF contest director, who informed me I had won first prize for the fourth quarter of that year for my story "The Old Organ Trail." We talked for a few minutes while my feet tried in vain to find the floor; he seemed as pleased to be giving the news as I was to be receiving it. After he'd hung up I remember thinking “I must have mis-heard him. He probably said third place.” Fortunately, that was just my insecurity trying to keep me from getting my hopes up. It was first place, and I got a really nice check for the win, and another when Algis bought the story for the annual anthology at an unheard-of word rate for an unknown writer.

A few months later, I was invited to a week-long workshop in Taos, New Mexico. This was the first Writers of the Future workshop—a test case to see if the idea would work. The workshop was held in May, 1986. There, four of the greats of science fiction—Frederik Pohl, Gene Wolfe, Jack Williamson, and Algis Budrys himself—did their best to teach eleven new writers (including Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, whose blogs you should be reading if you don’t already) how to turn an idea into a story, and how to make the story shine once you’ve written it. “First you write it, then you make it good!” was a piece of memorable advice from Fred Pohl that should probably be tattooed on every new writer.

As the workshop progressed, and I learned more about the structure of stories, I began to think of the ones I’d begun, then abandoned in old notebooks because I had no idea how to complete them. I had loosely plotted two of them by the time I got home and went looking for those notebooks. "Hole in the Wall" was one of the stories I dug up that year, and eventually finished.

Early on in outlining the story (yes, I do outline—no, I don’t always stick to the outline), I was having difficulty bringing the narrative alive. I realized I needed to make a change in the my choice of viewpoint characters. Ladislaw Tomacheski was the hero of my story, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt I needed to tell it from Morton Grimes’ viewpoint. 

As Tomacheski’s story, it would tell of the triumph of the little guy over a corrupt system which Grimes would personify; potentially interesting and fun, but I felt like I was missing something. 

Morton Grimes’ story is about a man who's so tied up in his own narrow ideology that he can't recognize good people when he meets them, and never seems to be on the side of the angels in any situation. In the end, he loses his last and best chance to change. As Grimes’ story, “Hole in the Wall” could relate the same basic events with the same humor, but Grimes’ overpowering sense of justification and lack of human understanding would be clearer, and the underlying tragedy would make itself felt. The story felt stronger and more meaningful to me this way. Having made that decision, the writing became much easier; the story had found its voice.

Shortly before I sent this story to Gardner Dozois at Asimov’s, I sent him a novelette-length time travel story. He said he thought it was a good story, but was going to turn it down. In general, he said, time travel stories didn’t make a lot of sense to him. 

I put that one aside, and sent him the very next thing down on my stack, which was…yep…another time travel story. I didn’t realize this until after I’d mailed it, and so resigned myself to getting it back shortly. Fortunately, Gardner liked this one enough to write a check. “Hole in the Wall” appeared in Asimov’s in May 1991, and again in Timegates, (Ace Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann), in 1997. Thanks Gardner, and thanks Jack, and thanks to all you readers out there. 

A message from Occupy Publisher's founder...me. For more news, information, community, and awareness, visit Occupy Publishing. You can also Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and add us on Google +. We won't mind.

"Nothing in the world of publishing is what it was just a few years ago. Many, many writers at all different stages of their careers are still either unaware of this, or are banking on everything getting back to normal any day now. 

It won't.

My wish for writers everywhere is that they will write with love and dedication, educate themselves about the realities of publishing, and be aware of how the rapidly-changing environment of their profession affects their career paths. 

With Occupy Publishing, we hope to be raising awareness, communicating news, and informing anyone who'll listen about the opportunities and realities of publishing in the 21st century.

Watch this space for more news, links, opinions, guest blogs, and anything else we can think to include.

What would YOU like to see?"

There was once a golden age (by comparison) of publishing, and no, even I am not old enough to have experienced it, but everything I’m about to say is true. In that golden age, there were lots and lots of New York publishers who were not all subsidiaries of even larger publishers who were subsidiaries...well anyway, there were lots of publishers at which toiled lots of acquisitions editors, each with their own tastes and preferences that were expressed in the books they bought. And after an editor bought a book, the sales staff figured out how best to sell it. Yes, the horse actually pulled the cart in those days. Trust me; although it's no longer true, this is the way it happened in that golden age. 

Editors who Edited, and Books Without Buzz
In that golden age, editors at publishing houses (who had worked their way up to that position while learning their craft reading and evaluating slush pile manuscripts) actually got to edit, while administrative tasks and editorial scut-work were handled by people lower down the company totem pole, as they had once been themselves. 

Publishers weren’t subsidiaries of publically-owned multinational megacorporations and so, lacking stockholders to keep them focused on the bottom line for this quarter, they often thought far, far ahead in terms of developing authors and their careers, and developing sales for an individual book. Years ahead. In those days, strategy trumped panicked reaction to every market fluctuation, and instinct was more a factor than microvariations in book-buying statistics. Books did not spoil on bookstore shelves as quickly as they do now, so a long view could be seen as the best view for many novels, and they were often left to develop word of mouth; “buzz” hadn’t been invented yet, except as it pertained to bees.

In those halcyon days, editors and writers often felt connected by a common stake in the success of a project and of a writer’s career. It was editors who nurtured reasonably-good writers into good ones, and good ones into great ones. If Nicole Polizzi had showed up at Simon & Schuster with a great idea for a book, she'd have been shown the door, politely but firmly. If some S&S editor had come up with the idea of hiring a ghostwriter to create a Nicole  Polizzi masterpiece, he would have joined her on the pavement.

In those distant decades of another century, an editor could find a promising book that was not quite ready for prime time, and dedicate himself to working with the author to make it better. Editors were mostly men in the golden age, but in time salaries would fail to keep up with the world outside publishing, and women would come to dominate the field.

Every book went onto the market with expectation and trepidation. Would this one make it? Did they have a bestseller on their hands? That's right, kiddies—there were no manufactured bestsellers, no automatic midlist titles. To be fair, there was also precious little in the way of book-length genre fiction, except for historical novels, but science fiction, romance, and westerns, among other genres, were well-represented in magazines.

Yes, Magazines!
There were dozens of magazines in those days that published several pieces of short fiction each month (I am NOT making this up!), so that many if not most writers learned their craft and earned their reputations learning to plot and polish for the more demanding short form, then moved on to novels. Others made a living writing nothing but short fiction, writing a western one day, a jungle adventure the next, a spy mystery the day after that. Quite a few magazines were devoted entirely to short fiction, but almost every magazine published some fiction in every issue. America, not yet habituated to television with its endlessly-continuing stories, had a big appetite for short fiction.

Editors Editing, Agents Agenting...
So while editors were editing books, often taking on authors who were not yet ready for prime time because they believed in their promise for the future, agents were agenting. They did not, at that time, function as the pubishers' first readers. They showed promising books to editors, and represented their clients in contract negotiations. There were many, many fewer of them, and virtually none of them thought of themselves as editors, because there were plenty of those just over town at the publishing companies. Publishing companies had not yet laid off so much of their editorial staff that they could no longer fulfill the function of vetting incoming manuscripts.

The conventional wisdom regarding agents was that a writer didn’t need one until he or she was selling books and making "real" money, so writers could submit their work directly to editors, "over the transom." When an editor wanted to buy a book, and was ready to negotiate a contract, he suggested the author retain the services of an agent. Well, the honest ones did, anyway. An unpublished writer with an agent was pretty much unheard of.

Instead of stranglehold agency agreements of the type we have now, the agent and author were bound only by the agency clause in the publisher’s contract, and a handshake. When the rights to the book reverted (and they usually did so without tears or threat of lawsuit), the agent’s legal interest in that book was at an end, and until he sold another, he had no legal interest in anything that author might write in the future. Nor did the publisher.

Back to the Future
So this all happened a long time ago. By the time I was ready to sell a novel, which was a shorter long time ago, it was virtually the stuff of fairy tales. By that time, most editors wouldn’t look at an unagented manuscript, and a new crop of agents who had only lately been employed as lower-echelon editors were the publishers’ new first readers—the gatekeepers’ gatekeepers. They were doing more work, handling more clients, and to no-one’s surprise, starting to charge more money. Many insisted on contracts that went beyond the publishers’ agency clauses in sewing up the author’s freedom of movement. Despite the fact that the agents were not able to put their interests first, most authors would not have dreamed of going against their agents’ wishes for their careers.

But we’re writing a new story now about a new golden age, one that came on us so fast that many writers don’t believe it’s actually happening, while others fear it might be, and that might mean the sky is falling. Those writers are still living in the fairy tale that stopped being true before they ever sat down to a keyboard.

A New True Story
In our new story, writers have a wide range of choices about their careers, and publishers, while sometimes desirable for particular projects, no longer control the only means of distributing books. Agents no longer control access to subsidiary rights such as film and TV deals, foreign language publication, or audiobooks. Writers build their own platforms and publicity campaigns, hire other professionals to do whatever they can’t do themselves to get their books ready to publish, choose their own publication dates and price points.

Smart writers weigh their options, make their own career decisions, and walk away from bad contracts. When they deal with publishers, they insist on being treated with the respect they deserve as creators of the content that drives the business. When they publish their own works, they enter into it as entrepreneurs who learn from the past, live in the present, and keep a flexible future in front of them.

Tempted to be nostalgic for that golden past of publishing? Don’t bother. Any age takes on its coloration from the lenses we use to view it, and our future as writers is more golden than ever before if we want it to be. I like this new story best of all, and as we go into a new and promising year, I’d like to invite anyone who fancies it to make it your story, too.

Today "Kidnapped by Aliens!" went live on Amazon.com. 

The story behind the story begins with two writers working at a large computer game company in the early 1990s, in a cubicle of a nice size for one writer. One small writer who doesn't move around much.

But as luck would have it, it holds two—a mother-daughter team whose duties include writing ads, magazine articles, sales copy, box copy, and documentation, and editing game designers' in-game text. Two desks and two writers pushed up against one another 8 hours a day (when we were lucky) five days a week, for more than a year. That's why we made the big bucks. 

Oh, wait...the pay was crap.

Well anyway, that's why we collaborated at work, and we also wrote together on our own time. And this particular collaboration has recently been dusted off and re-imagined as what we think is a better story with more interesting characters than when it was originally published in Tomorrow SF, in 1995, edited by Algis Budrys.

Kidnapped by Aliens!, the Making-Of Special

What follows is the afterword included in the back of the book that is now live on amazon.com.  You can read it here even if you don't shell out 99c. But of course you're welcome to do that, too. So without further ado...

BMcK: I remember how we started writing this. We were working at Sierra On-Line around 1991. We shared a cubicle sized for one, so we wrote in one another’s pockets for well over a year.

This was about the same time we were working on “Remarkable Things,” another story set in the universe of tabloid stories, though I don’t remember which one came first. Anyhow, you mentioned someone you’d like to see “disappeared,” and quickly amended that you didn’t want any harm to come to them, but maybe they could just be kidnapped by aliens.

As so often happened in those days, one of us said “I feel a story coming on,” then we said in unison, “Kidnapped by Aliens!” And so the title was born, exclamation point and all.

I’ve lost some brain cells were this story’s concerned. We both left Sierra in 1991, but if it appeared in Tomorrow SF in 1995, we couldn’t have sold it any earlier than 1994. Did we send it to a lot of other editors first?

MMcK: Yeah, it made the rounds before Algis Budrys decided it was just the thing for his magazine. And I remember that moment. Re-reading the original draft of the story, it hit me that we were more cynical in those days. Our main character wasn’t very likable from where I’m standing now. It made me happy to give him a workover for this release—he’s a better man for it.

BMcK: Yeah, I wouldn’t like that guy (er, Guy) much now. He was a lot shallower. I think we were playing the humor angle a little harder back then, and painting with broader strokes. It’s been a real education in how we operate as writers to go back over this story.

MMcK: Yeah, it was satisfying to bring it up to a new standard. We’re publishing a better story than we did back then.

So, we should talk about how we collaborate. Over the years we’ve encountered so many writing-team permutations, and I think they’ve all had a different way of working together.

BMcK: Right. Some partnerships have one person do a rough, the other polish it. Some divide characters between them. And I remember that one well known science fiction writing team we were on a panel with said that no-one should ever collaborate unless there was no other way to get the story written. I’m glad we didn’t hear that before we started, because in our experience, collaboration was tremendous fun.

Our particular method of collaboration was usually to sit down and throw ideas around and get an overview of the story and events, which was open to change as we went along, of course. Then somebody would start. In this case, it was you who wrote the opening scene. Then we’d trade back and forth until we got to the end. Then we’d fiddle with it.

MMcK: Re-reading it, I can honestly say I don’t know who wrote what 99% of the time. But back then, we’d each write a scene, hand it off, edit the other person’s work and then write the next scene. And we always knew who was responsible for what…except for that one time.

BMcK: Ah, yes. That one time. We were collaborating on “Remarkable Things,” which was about two very different families who lived next door to one another. The children get acquainted as the story opens, and at some point we realized that the mothers would have to get together for coffee and get to know one another. The problem was, neither of us really wanted to write the scene. “I think you should write it.” “No, I think you should.” Lather, rinse, repeat.

So one day the scene appears in the latest draft, and one of us says, “Hey, good job on the Moms scene,” and the other one says, “What’re you talkin’ about? You wrote it.” “No, you did.” “I totally didn’t.” We finally decided our “third writer” must have written it. None of the stories we collaborated on ended up much like what either of us did on our own. In fact, fellow writers trying to guess who’d written which scene were almost always wrong. Between us we made a third writer.

MMcK: It was so bizarre. We were both so certain we hadn’t written it! Maybe it was a ghost writer…

Anyway, I think that’s one thing a lot of writing teams have in common. Collaboration is a different way of creating—I think we were able to egg each other on and validate each other’s ideas in a way that the solitary writer can’t. Writing is generally a lonely business and writers spend a lot of time doubting themselves, so these partnerships can be sort of freeing in a way.

BMcK: Exactly. Half the story is someone else’s responsibility; somehow it’s easier to just have fun with it.

So all these years later we come back to this story. We still like the fun of the idea, but Guy and Carol-Ann needed some major tweaking to make them more likable. And there were anachronisms we needed to zap, too. In the original story, Guy wears a tie to go to work at a software company. Back then there were still a few companies—especially in productivity software, which is what Guy writes for—where people still dressed up to go to work. But not these days. Zap! Guy goes to watch a video, but wait—it’s a VHS tape! Zap!

MMcK: Yes, in order for the story to work in this century, we had to lose anything that would thrown the reader out of the story. In a few years, DVDs might seem ridiculous, but for now the story flows more naturally with these updates in place. And as I said, I think overall we’re publishing a better story this century than we did in the last one.

BMcK: I agree. I think we ought to do it again.

Over on The Passive Voice  a few days ago, Passive Guy re-posted a blog from earlier this year: “Your Agent Isn’t Your Mommy,” in which he quoted some of “...the extreme reactions of some authors to any criticisms of the business practices of agents.” My head is still spinning after reading a quote from one author: “I would trust him/her with all my future endeavors. All. Even if they seemed, excuse the turn of phrase, sketchy as hell.” I can’t even begin to say how foolish that sounds. But that’s just me...and lots of other writers I know who are paying attention to what's been going on in publishing the past couple of years.

There are also some remarkable comments from very savvy writers on both the original post and the re-post linked above.

Why an Agent?
So why are so many writers so enamored of the very notion of having an agent that they are willing to trust their writing careers and incomes to people they’ve never met? Why are they renouncing advice from people who've been there and done that, and told us about it over and over, like Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith? Because not to put too fine a point on it, blindly turning your writing income and prospects over to someone else seems to me, especially in today’s rapidly changing publishing environment, like a really dumb idea.

But it wasn't always a really dumb idea. In fact, when I wrote my first three novels, it was a terrific idea, so climb into the Wayback Machine™, and let's go on a trip into the not-so-distant past.

What's Past is Prologue 
Back in 1991, I'd been selling short fiction for a few years, and now I had a novel to shop around. I wanted an agent like a six-year-old wants a pony under her Christmas tree.  In the publishing environment of the time, a writer with a book to sell needed an agent. We needed agents because we needed publishers to get our physical books distributed to physical bookstores (remember those?), and you couldn’t deal with a publisher without an agent. If you could get an unagented book to an editor—and that was and still is possible if you're ballsy—you'd still need an agent to negotiate the contract. Agents, or so we thought, knew everything about IP law, and pretty much everything about publishing, too. Oh, and they also knew all the editors in New York, and what they wanted to buy. That was a lot to put on anyone, but it was the prevailing conventional wisdom among writers.

Within a few months of finishing my first novel, I had an agent. This was due less to my dazzling talent (far, far less, actually) than to the fact that an author of my acquaintance messaged me online (Prodigy, in case your memory goes back that far) and said she’d told her agent to expect a call from me, and not to embarrass her.  The agent and I had a conversation in which he asked a lot of intelligent questions about my career. I sent the ms; he liked it a lot. We shook hands, as it were, from a distance of 3000 miles. And I gained the privilege of using that heady phrase "My agent..." I hope I didn't overdo it, but you know....

A couple of months after that, I had a deal for my first novel and two unwritten sequels.

How Do You Spell Success?
I ask you, what could make a late-20th-century writer’s heart gladder than that? What could make a new novelist any surer that her future was laid out before her like the Yellow Brick Road, with the Emerald City of literary success clearly in view? Now I had an agent AND a multi-book contract! Did I break out the champagne? Oh, hell yes! My education in publishing, contracts, and yes, agents, was yet to come. 

At the time I joined up with my first agent, the commission on domestic sales was 10%. Soon after, he gave himself a 50% pay raise to the now-standard 15%, at least for small-potatoes clients like myself. The deal you get is not always the deal best-sellers get, but that's just business, and never forget agents are in business. At any rate, I was never in a position to make either of us rich at either percentage.

To this day I believe that particular agent is one of the good guys, and he's yet to prove me wrong, but our present business relationship is connected only with the books he sold for me back then, and only because the publisher in question is hanging on to my rights like a dog with a bone (or perhaps a penguin with a fish). If a traditional publisher were to offer me a deal tomorrow (admittedly, getting a pony is more likely), I'd hire an IP lawyer to negotiate the contract, and keep the 15%.

Doofus for Hire
And let me make this perfectly clear: not all agents are created equal. I've known some real doofuses who went around passing out business cards with "agent" on them, and some unfortunate writers who hired them. A friend of mine who's now a successful author with half a dozen novels in print went through four or five absolutely terrible agents before finding a competent one.

And there have always been crooked agents. My first agent, like many of his generation, graduated from "the high school of literary agencies," Scott Meredith, who was famously unethical. An agent once told me that most people of a certain age in his profession had worked for Scott when first starting out, but those with any ethics left as soon as they could to start their own agencies.

The Agent as Superhero
In those days before The Disruptive Innovation that Came to New York, most authors depended on their agent to know a) everything the publisher knew, and b) everything the publisher didn’t. We believed our agents were in the business of looking out for us and our career needs, and we believed ourselves somehow protected. Cared for. Watched over. All we had to do was write. Our agents would make everything else happen.

That wasn't exactly true even then; it was part of the lovely, if broken, illusion of being a 20th century writer. But now it's 2011, publishing has been turned on its head in the space of two years, and many agents have morphed into that horrifying chimera known as the "agent/publisher." And yet the guardian angel illusion is still very nearly as prevalent among inexperienced writers—and not a few experienced ones—as it was then. Those of us who go it alone for some or all of our writing projects are still quite the minority, despite our volume level.

Author Augers In
As it happens, my career did crash and burn, but I've never thought that was any more my agent's fault than the publisher's or my own. He even kept me afloat with some lucrative work-for-hire projects I'd never have gotten without him. He did nix a couple of outlines I sent him as not having enough commercial viability, and eventually I went my own way, which included not writing much of anything outside the day job for years.

Commercial viability is a much bigger concern with agents than with writers. I mean, we may write a novel because it's a story we just have to tell, but why would an agent waste his time flogging a novel he didn't think likely to sell quickly? He's got dozens of clients, only so many hours in the day, editors he doesn't want to spam, and bills to pay. If you're off-genre, you're kinda hosed. And genres are getting narrower and fiddlier as we speak. It's much easier to say "Nobody's buying that sort of thing right now," and steer the writer toward something more profitable.

My Other Agent
When I did write another novel, I hired another agent to represent it—a UK agent. To this day I think he's one of the smartest and most capable people in publishing. The book was off at least two genres, maybe three, and he didn't end up selling it. I'm pretty sure he was disappointed that I turned down one American agent who was enthusiastic about the book, but then wanted me to make substantive changes I didn't see as an improvement. But perhaps they would have made it more commercially viable—who knows?

I had no more success shopping it around on my own; no-one could decide how the hell it was supposed to fit into the existing subgenres. Odd as it may seem, when I wrote it, I hadn't thinking about fitting into anything—I was telling a story I very much wanted to tell in the best way I knew how. I'll be publishing that book myself next year, after a rewrite and a thorough going-over by my editor.

Since both these agents favored the old-school ways, which say that the agent’s contract with the author is the agency clause of each individual publisher contract, I had no agency agreements to haunt me when I wanted to move on. That kind of handshake deal is hard to find today in the world of increasingly restrictive agency contracts. It's another reason I like and respect both these men, even though I'm increasingly wary of what's happening in their profession.

So listen up!
Up until a couple of years ago, writers needed agents to go the traditional route through a publisher to physical bookstore sales. And so we overlooked some basic facts about the agent-author-publisher relationship, because we could not rock the boat we depended on to get us to that golden shore. But here are a few facts you might want to mull over, now that being agented is entirely optional:

• There are only a few major publishers, and only a few editors with whom your agent has a relationship.
• Your agent depends for her living a great deal more on the good graces of the publisher than she does on yours.
• If you're a midlist author, you're not contributing enough to your agent's financial success to make you a player in his game. He must and will sacrifice your best interests from time to time in favor of authors who make him more money.
• An author who's doing well can really help line an agent’s bank account, but every agent knows that if she pisses off a publisher, she's finished.
  

So writers, whatever you choose to do with your careers, at least know a few facts going in. Do your homework. Read the blogs. Some of the best (in my opinion) are listed in the sidebar right over there. Listen to people who have been where you want to go. Don't let what was important or glamorous or sexy in publishing a few years ago blind you to what's happening now, because trust me: everything is different, and getting more different by the day.

Don't expect publishing to be what it was in the last century, and don't expect an agent to be your guardian angel.

Victoria Strauss, blogging for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America on Writer Beware, asked the other day: “Why the Hate?” from the independent publishing community about Penguin’s Book Country.

I think “hate” might be far too strong a word to describe the reactions of the bloggers I’ve read on the subject of Penguin’s recently launched vanity press endeavor. But I think it would be fair to say that among the reactions is a fair bit of outrage. 

As Jim Kukral points out on No Publisher Required, vanity publishers are nothing new, but when the second-largest publishing conglomerate in the world jumps into the vanity business: “We’re angry at legacy publishers for letting us blaze the trail they said was idiotic to follow...” 

So first they say we’re making a biiiiiig mistake, then they invite inexperienced writers to pay them money to do the same. Yeah, I get why that might piss a few people off.

No Worse Than the Worst? Worse.
Ms. Strauss thinks the “(shudder) "indie," ” community is missing the point, that Penguin’s “self-publishing” scheme is no worse than any of the others. Perhaps it’s not worse than some, but even she agrees that doesn’t make it a good thing for writers. 

In one way it certainly is worse than the others: David Shanks, Penguin Group USA’s CEO, has publicly stated that they consider Book Country their “farm team.” “The lifeblood of any publisher is finding new talent,” he says in an interview with Rich Fahle at this year’s Digital Book World. “...we’ll start to look seriously at those people and say ‘Aha! here’s our new crop of potential best-selling authors.’”

Don't Be The Fish!
This is going to be an irresistible lure for a lot of writers. But “lure” is the word to keep in mind. Writers, you’re the fish here. They're taking your money AND a fat royalty to do what you could quickly learn to do yourself, or hire done for a reasonable flat fee. 

Listen up! Publishers have always had a system in place for finding new talent. It's called submissions. True, they pick a very few of the many submissions they receive for the privilege of publication, they offer really terrible terms and crap royalties, and the author abandons considerable control for very little of the take, which is why there's an independent publishing community in the first place. 

Penguin Plans to Be the Penguin
But what if a publisher could bypass agents, who are getting a lot of bad press lately, and get people to submit directly to them and actually pay for the privelege of bucking roughly the same odds—roughly .02% according to one editor's recent estimate—of being picked up for publication. Now they've turned what was formerly a free service into a paying proposition. That's a smart publisher being the penguin to your hapless fish.

Yes, the reactions from the independent publishing community to Penguin’s vanity publishing scheme have been overwhelmingly negative. I believe that’s because as a group independent authors are passionate about educating other authors. Penguin only seems passionate about separating them from their money.

The Indiepub Community on Penguins and Fish
Joe Konrath lays out a clear explanation of what writers get—and don't get—for their money.

Lee Goldberg takes you on a tour of “Sucker Country”

David Gaughran reports: Penguin Launches Rip-Off Self-Publishing “Service”   

J W Manus tells you How Penguin Book Country is Running the Con Game 

Jim Kukral, on No Publisher Required, is Thinking Longer About Penguin

David Burton at Random Musings shows how you can Forget Penguin’s Book Country – Do It Yourself

Kevin O. McLaughlin at Swords & Starflight asks Dear Penguin and Book Country: How stupid do you think writers are? 

And as always, lots and lots of good analysis and opinions on the subject on The Passive Voice here (Penguin Launches a Self-Publishing Service) and here (Something Else Penguin Book Country Should be Ashamed Of)

Today I'd like to give a shout out to a few of my favorite blogs for the author/publisher. These selected bloggers are overwhelmingly in favor of independent publishing as an author strategy. It's cool if you don't agree, but if you read what these very savvy people have to say, you can disagree from an increasingly informed position.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch - How Traditional Publishers Are Making Money
“Is it becoming clear why profits are up at the traditional publishers? The profit they’re making is coming out of the pocket of the writers.”
Read the rest at The Business Rusch.

Joe Konrath - Book Country Fail
“If you want to self-publish, read and learn all you can about the process. Hire smart people with references to do the heavy lifiting (proofing, formatting, cover art). Then keep your rights and keep all the money. But don’t take my word for it. Arm yourself with information and figure it out for yourself.”
Read the rest at The Newbie's Guide to Publishing.

Dean Wesley Smith - The New World of Publishing: 95% of All Authors Will Never Indie Publish 
At World Fantasy I had a long talk with a publisher about digital publishing and midway through, he looked at me and asked, “Do you know how I’m still in business in ten years?”
“Nope,” I said.
He smiled, “I’m still in business because 97% of authors are not as aggressive about digital as you are.” 
Read the rest at deanwesleysmith.com

The Passive Voice - What Not to Overlook When Reviewing Your Book Contract
Passive Guy, that most excellent curator of news relating to “Writers, Writing, Publishing, Disruptive Innovation and the Universe” passes on contract wisdom from Lloyd J. Jassin at CopyLaw.com.

“It gets in the way of the fun stuff.” “Attorneys cost money.” “Most books don’t earn back their advance.” These are three common (and potentially devastating) justifications that owners of publishing companies give for not paying attention to their boilerplate contacts. Similarly, many authors lack the courage that Oliver Twist exhibited when he rose from the table and said, “Please sir, I want some more.”
Read the rest at CopyLaw.com. 
Keep up with the latest in the world of disruptive publishing innovation at The Passive Voice.

Joel Friedlander (The Book Designer) - Looking Forward, Peering Back
“Now it’s really happening. Authors are walking away from $500,000 publishing contracts. Authors are selling so many self-published books they’ve become media celebrities. Self-published authors have sold millions of e-books in the Kindle store.
“Agents are now publishers. Publishers have discovered readers. Retailers are publishers, even though publishers seem to be in danger of obsolescence. Yet everyone wants to be a publisher. Their own publisher."
Read the rest at The Book Designer

I wasn't at the World Fantasy Convention this year, but from what I hear there was considerable debate about Michael A. Stackpole's use of the term "house slave" in blog posts to describe a type of mentality he observes in some writers who decry the trend towards author-centered publishing. Stackpole's first post to use this term, House Slaves Versus Spartacus, published in the spring of this year, likened  traditionally-published authors who defend the author-unfriendly environment of traditional publishing to the Roman house slaves whose interests lay closer to their masters' than to their fellow-slaves involved in the rebellion of 73-71 b.c.e. 

An Apt Analogy, or Trivializing?
There's been a lot of talk since then about Mr. Stackpole's use of the term "house slaves" trivializing the horrors of American slavery. In fact, there's been a  lot more talk about that than about the actual points Mr. Stackpole makes in that post, and in subsequent ones (Swimming Lessons for House Slaves, and Degrees of Slavery), about the economic and contractual inequalities that have always been part of the publishing industry, and the notion that with the predominance of digital delivery and the move towards independent publishing, the balance of power has shifted to the authors. 

In addition to Mr. Stackpole's writings, blog posts and comments by Dean Wesley Smith, Kris Rusch, Joe Konrath, and Barry Eisler, to name a few really smart people with their fingers on the pulse of publishing, have been trying to explain the inadvisability of throwing all your eggs into what they believe is a sinking basket. And they've been attracting no small amount of hostility from writers who are doing just that, and from others who insist on attacking Mr. Stackpole's choice of analogies, for instance, or Mr. Konrath's tone of voice, because they can't or won't debate the actual points they're making.

On Not Being a Raging Fuck-Wad
Today, Tobias Buckell posted a journal entry taking Mike Stackpole to task for his choice of words. He titled it "Self publishing doesn't mean you have to be a raging fuck wad." He's quite angry about the "house slave" language, and he does make an attempt to debate Mr. Stackpole's points, but he gets his facts wrong. He claims neither Konrath nor Eisler are independent authors: "They’ve both exchanged one corporate relationship for another. So anyone who champions them as self publishing masters immediately demonstrates a lack of perception."...and..."...neither of them sell direct via websites with their own turnkey credit card systems like anyone actually *serious* about disintermediation..."

I'm not sure who died and put Mr. Buckell in charge of defining "*serious* about disintermediation," but a quick fact-check would have shown that both authors have traditional publishing deals for some of their books, other books they publish independently, and of course their famous contracts with Amazon, and that between them they sell dozens of books from their websites. "Want to read about changes in the field, want to read about the business?" Mr. Buckell asks. "Start finding people who are utilizing all the options available." Well, Mr. Buckell may not like these three authors, but they are pretty well known to utilize all the options available, and I'm amazed he's not aware of that, since it's a key point of his criticism. 

“I’m tired of hearing their vile denunciations of everyone and everything," he continues. "...I hear these types on the radio...they’re no different than Rush Limbaugh or anyone else.” These don't strike me as useful or reasonable arguments in a post warning of the dangers of fuckwaddery. Vile denunciations? Everyone and everything? Rush Limbaugh or anyone else? I'd be saying this in the comments on his blog, but he doesn't allow comments.

In the Midst of Rage, Some Sage Advice
Mr. Buckell is, of course, within his rights to dislike the term "house slave," and to dislike Mssrs. Eisler, Konrath, and Stackpole and their opinions on anything whatsoever to whatever degree he desires. I'd never say otherwise. And he did offer me one piece of advice I intend to follow, so thanks, Mr. Buckell, for this: "Listen to people who don’t have to denigrate, shout, and insult others to make their point." 

Amen.

One of my favorite blogs, The Passive Voice, put up a quote today about the notion that a writer's apprenticeship usually consists of writing and discarding a million words "...before he's almost ready to begin." Passive Guy sometimes likes to get his readers talking. This should do it, I think.

This past weekend I put my first two backlist short stories— The Bard Effect and Hole in the Wall—up on the Amazon Kindle store. I've put descriptions of each story on the Home page. Both were originally published in major science fiction magazines some years back, and I'm happy to be able to present them to a new audience.

I had set a project deadline of 21 October, but due to the intricacies of ebook formatting and conversion, about which more below, I frequently despaired of making it. As it happens, the first book was for sale on that date, the second didn't pop up until sometime after midnight. I wasn't awake to see it.

Congratulations! It's a Book!
In the days when my publishing fate was tied in with traditional publishing, I have gazed lovingly at cover flats from my publisher, and held those first precious advance copies of my novels, savoring the the solidity—the sheer physicality—of the finished product. I won't lie: it was pretty glorious. But it was not, I think, more glorious than seeing a book I'd created from words to formatting to cover to sales copy populate its own Amazon page. I'd gone from contemplating becoming an independent publisher about seven months before, to seeing my first two projects available for sale.

Excuse Me, I Really Have to Scream Now
Somewhere between those two points there were months of re-keying published stories from old magazine copies, converting to hand-built XHTML, and figuring out what Kindle's Mobi format really wanted from me, and how I could induce it to create a good-looking ebook. Having some experience with HTML and CSS helped considerably, but I could have picked up what little I needed fairly quickly, if I had not. 

I often joke about the beginning of my writing career: age nine, avid reader and cinema-goer (when your big sister works at a local movie house, you can see Them! and It Came From Outer Space for free, over and over and over), and budding author of books handwritten in pencil in a black and white composition book of the style I still carry to meetings. I’m pretty chuffed that anyone still makes these—they make me feel so writerly!

The books I wrote at age nine were nothing more or less than plagiarism, though of course I didn't know that word. If I loved a movie or a book enough, I’d write my own version of it in my notebook, complete with illustrations. I still enjoy the odd chuckle at that earnest little girl who wrote so awfully, but what set her apart from most kids her age was that she wrote anything at all. My schools did not, that I recall, put particular emphasis on storytelling as a skill. I don’t recall ever being tasked with writing a story; I did it because I had to, and because I loved the feeling of the pencil on the pulp paper, and words emerging from the end of it. Later I switched to a pen, but the magic was undiminished. 

A number of experts on this and that—Daniel Levitin (This is Your Brain on Music) and Malcom Gladwell (Outliers) being only two—have written that something around ten thousand hours of practicing one’s craft are necessary for mastery.  This presupposes mastery as a destination, but my objections to that are for another day.

Certainly the Beatles’ hundreds of eight-hour sets in Hamburg made them one of the tightest bands around, and picking up tennis rackets at age three was as good a way to produce a Venus and Serena Williams as any I can imagine.

So there I was, at the beginning of a long and amazing road with a pencil and a comp book.  It wasn’t long before people started noticing that I wrote, and somewhat more competently than many of my childhood peers. At the tender age of 13 I was encouraged by a school counselor to plan for obtaining a journalism scholarship that had recently been established at a nearby university.  I replied politely that I would, but inside I was digging in my heels at teachers and counselors planning my future for me. Who were they to be telling me what I was going to be?
 
The heel-dragging continued until I was about thirty. One day I heard myself writing narrative inside my head, and decided that must mean I was a writer. In later years I discovered that humans have a species-wide affinity for narrative, and in fact everyone tells themselves stories, though many may not have conscious awareness of it. I’m glad I had no inkling of this on that brilliant afternoon when, having identified myself as a writer, I drove to the nearest library and borrowed some books on the subject, ready to begin a new adventure.

Before a year was out I had made my first two fiction sales and shredded reams of utter crap along the way. One particularly malodorous story was back in my mailbox with rejection note attached before it could plausibly have arrived on the editor’s desk, two thousand miles away. My theory about this is that really, really bad stories can travel in time. Other lost works from that time were perhaps not quite time-travel bad, but never found a home. Eventually, I was able to sell most of what I wrote.

My point is, I suppose, that anything worth doing is worth doing over and over again, and getting better at.

The self-publishing option wasn’t a viable one in those days, so I wrote and sent out and received back and sent out again. The virtue in this, if there is one, is that I got better. That doesn’t mean that today’s new writers who may choose to publish works that have never received a rejection will not also get better; if they care about their craft, and work at it, they almost certainly will. Some of them will put me to shame with the quality of their writing and storytelling. They may not do so with their first attempts, but writing will eventually make a writer, not necessarily in ten thousand hours, but not in ten or a hundred, either.

If you’re new at the game--whatever that game may be, keep at it. If you’re  an old hand with a long string of successes, KEEP AT IT.

Keep at it.

I’d like to give a shout-out to my friend and colleague R. K. MacPherson, whose first novel, Antigone’s Fall, was just released today. The writing team started drinking champagne about 10:30 this morning.

Here’s the description from the page for the Kindle edition of Antigone’s Fall:

“A bond forged in battle...
Home from the deserts of Iraq, Nicholas Cross wants nothing more than to start over as a civilian. Together with his best friend, Thomas Abelard, a former US Army Ranger, Nicholas enjoys the quiet life—until a young actress's suicide is called into question. Nicholas and Thomas peel back the layers of her life and discover a woman in over her head.
A relentless enemy...
For Nicholas, however, the stakes turn personal as the mystery deepens and his past comes back to haunt him. The death toll rises as the two veterans encounter a ruthless foe who'll stop at nothing to protect a dark secret. Nicholas is forced to dodge hostile operatives, the police, and dangerous questions about his identity—and his past—as he tries to piece together the evidence and protect the last witness.
A secret worth killing for...
Nicholas and Thomas find themselves in a desperate race against time as they struggle to uncover the explosive truth behind...
Antigone’s Fall.”


Stop by and visit his blog, Raven's Nest.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the level of bad feelings between people who embrace independent publishing and those who do not. Where there might be a middle ground of the "to publish my own stuff or not" discussion, there seem to be people saying they have nothing against it for you, but a) they wouldn't stoop so low, b) they really like signing away their rights for a tiny percentage of cover price, or c) they might do it after they've paid their dues and become a "real" writer.

Bare-knuckle Boys
Over on Terrible Minds not long ago, Chuck Wendig and Joe Konrath (of A Newbie's Guide to Publishing fame) got into a fine old punch-up over whether or not writers should be pursuing traditional publishing contracts. Chuck likes 'em (even says he likes doing work-for-hire) Joe doesn't. And Chuck didn't care for Joe's attitude. Yeah, Joe's famous for his attitude. To tell the truth, I kind of admire it. He can be blunt, but that's Joe, and I take it into account. I actually thought that for Joe he was on his best behavior over at Chuck's place, but he came out swinging, as he does, and many took exception to it.

I think both these guys are brilliant in their own ways, but I come down on Joe's side about the doom that came to legacy publishing. The publishing industry will continue, but I believe smart writers will avoid it until it removes its head from the exit orifice of its digestive system, and that goes triple for agents.

In fact, Joe Konrath is not a wild-eyed, foam-spitting propagandist for self-publishing, but rather for doing what works to get readers and make a living from one's craft. He and Barry Eisler have had some very clear-headed things to say about authors making choices that work for them. It's just that when you run the numbers, traditional publishing doesn't come out on top in the works for me department. Not for Joe and Barry, and not for a whole lot of other writers, from best sellers to has-been midlist nobodies like me.

But Why Would You...
Dean Wesley Smith, one of the leading proponents of author-centered publishing and the strongest voice I know calling out for staying away from agents until the pub industry dust (and ash) settles, is writing a new blog series asking "But why would you..." In the latest as of this post, he asks "But why would you not spend the time to learn indie publishing?" If you're on the fence, read it. I burdened some poor guy with a reply longer than the original post about not putting his eggs in the trad pub basket, but I won't repeat it here, cos...long. If you don't mind long, feel free to go find it.

As for me, I'm hiking the learning curve to formatting books for e-book and paperback, and plan to offer a free short story here and on the 'net next week. Watch this space for "The Bard Effect," originally published in Amazing Stories, back in the 90s when that publication existed.