Publishing

Posts about publishing.

Going live!

/ Scott Nagele / 3 Comments

Book release day, or as Amazon calls it, “Going Live.” It’s exciting for sure, but it’s also leaves one with a feeling of vulnerability. How do I get this book in front of people? How do I persuade them to give it chance? For those who do give it a chance, how do I encourage them to give feedback? What will the tone of the feedback be?

Writing is hard work, but it’s safe work. It happens in your own world, the one you control, mostly. Everything that comes after writing has to happen in a much broader world. This world you can only hope to influence. It’s a wide world filled with questions you can’t answer on your own. You need help, you need to hone your beyond-writing skills, and perhaps most of all, you need to rely on the faith that you wrote a good book.

Here’s a skill I’m trying to hone: creating a sell sheet for my new novel. I welcome comments on its look and appeal.

For those interested, here are the purchase links:

Paperback

Kindle

I appreciate every single look this book gets. There are a lot of good books out there, and most people have a limited supply of money. It’s a wonderfully humbling thing when someone spends their money on your art, but I am also grateful for the people willing to share a post, or tell a friend, or just leave an encouraging word. Every little bit helps.

Writing is difficult work. For many writers, promotion, marketing, publicity (everything that falls under the heading of reaching out) is the most difficult work of all. That said, thank you for reading this post.

The first review

/ Scott Nagele / Leave a comment

Last week I introduced my new novel (out later this month). Today I am sharing a pre-publication review from BookLife. BookLife is the Indie books arm of Publisher’s Weekly.

Every author would love a review filled with phrases like, “Best book I ever read,” “Life-changing,” or “Most influential book of its time.” This review includes none of those phrases. That’s probably a good thing, because if it did contain those phrases, you’d likely wonder which of my aunts writes reviews for BookLife.

Nonetheless, I think it’s a fairly positive review. It has a couple of minor factual errors in the first paragraph, which my aunt would never have made (e.g. substitute “early twentieth century” for “late nineteenth century”), but I don’t think those types of gaffes are rare for the first paragraphs of reviews. Anyhow, I believe the assessment piece is more valuable to readers than the plot summary in any review.

Enough reviewing the review. Here it is.

This fascinating supernatural tale from Nagele (A Housefly in Autumn), told in an offhanded style that keeps readers off balance, opens with five-year-old Emma’s asking, at a family dinner, about “The Other Place.” She has recurring dreams of a mysterious being, The Gatekeeper, who takes her from present-day Pennsylvania to a late nineteenth century farm where she sees an older girl, Mary Ellen, who looks very much like Emma. For mysterious reasons, the Gatekeeper repeatedly forces Emma to get the other girl in trouble by setting fires—and he threatens to harm Emma’s parents, Rob and Marcia, if she disobeys. Rob and MarcFrontia alternate between dismissing Emma’s dreams to fearing that she might be losing her grip on reality, echoing the thinking of Alex and Janet, Mary Ellen’s parents. That couple frequently beats Mary Ellen, as punishment for the fires, and The Gatekeeper urges her to take murderous revenge.

Quick paced and unsettling, The Other Place offers readers teasing mysteries to work through along with Emma’s parents. One surprising thread: what is the connection between The Gatekeeper and the song version of William Hughes Mearns’s poem “Antigonish”? As Emma’s dreams increasingly seem like they might be real, she finds herself inside Mary Ellen’s mind, fighting to keep Mary Ellen from being driven to murder, while Rob and Marcia eventually accept that their daughter is not delusional, they struggle to save both girls from The Gatekeeper.

Nagele weaves an intriguing story about families, childhood, the supernatural, self-sacrifice, and innocence both lost and saved, though the pace and pared-down language come at the expense of fleshing out the characters, especially Emma and her family. Scenes of abuse and terrorized children will put off some readers, but Emma’s fight to save Mary Ellen from evil is admirable, her determination and kindness shining through. The Other Place is rich in detail of the places past and present, and readers of horror-tinged historical mysteries will be intrigued to learn more about Glenn Miller and William Hughes Mearns.

A book in the hand is worth four waiting for edits

/ Scott Nagele / 4 Comments

The last time I wrote a post here about my writing projects, and I’m ashamed to say how long ago that was, I wrote about a four-book series in which I was knee-deep at the time. The good news is that I finished writing that series. The bad news is all the post-writing difficulties. Professional editing alone represents a prohibitive cost to the production of the set. And that’s just one of the things that needs to happen to the adolescent manuscripts before they can grow up to be big, strong books.

While considering how to embark upon that transition (i.e. banging my head against a wall), I have not been completely idle in other areas, except for blogging, in which pursuit I have been near completely idle. While I have not been blogging, or producing a marketable series, I have been working on this:

Granted, it’s not a series. It’s just a solitary novel. But on the plus side, it has been professionally edited. More to its credit, it has a cover, front and back. It’s even formatted in an easily-readable fashion. It may be a little thing (compared to a multi-book saga), but it’s very nearly done. That is to say, it’s almost an actual book, the kind people could buy and read if the fancy so struck them. And as Hans Christian Andersen was wont to say, “That is certainly something.” (Disclaimer: I don’t really know what Hans said in Danish; but the English translations usually amount to the quote above.)

If I click all the right buttons on the right web pages, this book will be released in May, 2023. If I don’t, it’s off to remedial button-clicking class for me. Anyway, enough about my technology issues, here’s the marketing blurb.

Emma and her parents share recurring dreams, in which they are a different family, living 100 years ago in an unfamiliar place, and heading toward tragedy. When Emma’s parents discover their dream family actually existed, it becomes clear that these visits to the past are more than mere dreams—they are playing an unseen role in this historical family’s lives. As the century-old history of this troubled family materializes, it reveals the truth that the impending tragedy spells doom for both families. Only five-year-old Emma has the power to avert disaster, but it will require extraordinary courage against overwhelming evil for Emma to save both families from destruction in The Other Place.

I will post more updates about this book through its publication. In theory, this will serve the dual purposes of building awareness about the book and making me back into the sort of active blogger I used to be. It may also give me something better to do than bang my head against the wall trying to discover a way to manage the production of four hefty novels in succession. That would be the icing on the cake, but a good cake without any icing would be enough for me right now.

Why you shouldn’t write a novel series backward

/ Scott Nagele / 2 Comments

For starters, you probably shouldn’t write a single novel backward. Novels are kind of long for that sort of jiggery-pokery. Short stories are fine. I’m all for writing them backward. They are small enough to see from all angles in your mind. A novel series is like a train of trailers hitched behind a truck – tricky to drive backward.

I’ve documented how I got in the awkward spot of writing a series backward, or at least from the inside out, in previous posts. Here’s the back story for those who missed them.

I had a novel that was too long, so I decided to divide it into two books. This seemed like a good idea for a while, until it became clear that my two books would have to be three.  The third book would need to consist of a bulk of new storytelling in between the other two. At the time of my last update, I had finished drafts of the two outside books and was staring at the daunting prospect of building a bridge book that would fit together with the books on either end.

The whole story:    Update1    Update2    Update3

Now that I’ve got the support beams in place, to the tune of about 130 pages of new middle, I’m staring at the prospect (and you may have guessed this if you read the previous updates) of splitting the middle book in two, giving me a total of four books.

This is not what I wanted, and it’s possible that I may be able to hold it to three, but with each passing chapter, four becomes more likely. After 130 pages, I still have lots of ground to cover. If I could do it in another 130, that would wrap things up in three books. I begin to doubt I can.

Make sure the bridge is finished before you drive your series backward over it.

Why is four books bad? In a perfect world, it’s not. But in a perfect world, I would be writing these books in order. In a perfect world, I might even have the resources of a publishing company behind me.

From the writing standpoint, four books is no problem. As I progress, my confidence in my ability to tie four books together into a viable series grows. I can tell the story.

The headache comes after the writing. Taking a single novel from manuscript to book is a difficult task for an independent author. By the time I am done with all my patchwork writing, I could have four books to shepherd through that journey. Because I am not writing them chronologically, they must all be written before any one of them is finished.

Arranging for editing, covers, layout, etc. of four books in quick succession is crazy daunting. True, I would have to eventually do all that, even if I wrote them in order, but in that case the production pieces would be more staggered, with writing time in between.

I know it amounts to the same thing in the end, but it looks like a huge wall to get beyond, rather than four separate, manageable walls.

Nevertheless, I’m the one who put this train into reverse gear, so I ‘m the one who has to bear down and figure out how to keep it on the tracks.