Publishing

Posts about publishing.

Blurred lines: Stuck in limbo between Young Adult and General Fiction

/ Scott Nagele / 4 Comments

When you are preparing to release a new novel to the public, it’s easy to become plagued by doubts.

Is the action exciting enough? Is there enough action? Is the dialogue compelling? Are the characters well-developed? Are they relatable? Will anybody care what happens to them?

This list goes on . . .

These transient type worries tend to replace each other day by day until you resign yourself to the fact that there is no ironclad way to dispel them. You will only get your answers once the book is in the hands of readers. Until then, you have to work largely on faith.

If you are extra fortunate, your book will also give you one good underlying concern that haunts the back of your mind throughout the process, even as your transient worries jockey for position at the front of your mind.

With A Housefly in Autumn, my super-duper awesome underlying concern has been hitting the right target audience.

I always envisioned A Housefly in Autumn as a Young Adult novel. It’s themes and tone were tailored to younger readers from the beginning, and from the beginning this categorization had the potential to be problematic.

There is a large cohort of literary-minded people who adhere to a rule about Young Adult fiction, mandating that the main character in such works must be no older than 18 throughout the story. I broke this law half way through the first draft. My main character ages out of this statute at about the 60% mark. Then, he does something even more illegal: he continues to age.

Accidents of youth

My main character, before he joined AARP and applied for a reverse mortgage. (Art by Jessie O’Brien)

I decided early on I would have to take my chances by breaking this popular maxim. I sailed full speed ahead.

Then, something else began to happen. As I started getting feedback on the manuscript, I realized that the things I was attempting with the narrative style and word choices were distracting readers from the story. I needed to adjust the tone.

In making the tone more conventional, I have sacrificed what to me is some of the youthful flavor of the narrative. This change was necessary but it was not done without some regret. The novel reads more like General Fiction than I intended.

Still, I could not see marketing it as General Fiction. The themes are too youth-oriented for that. Hence, my nagging concern: is this novel stuck in limbo between youth and adult fiction?

Maybe. But in this age of crossover and overlap, maybe limbo isn’t a land of the lost anymore. Maybe “youthful flavor” is a relic of a simpler time. Maybe youthful theme, coupled with a not overly youthful tone, is a budding sweet spot.

Pigeon-holing is still a useful concept in marketing, and leaning toward Young Adult is not exactly a clear-cut niche. Yet, it is just the spot where this book rests.

In the end, this dilemma will be resolved in the same way the “Will people like my characters?” question is. Readers will decide.

I’ll live with that.

Addition by subtraction: ditching the unhelpful words

/ Scott Nagele / 4 Comments

I’m working my way through the third proof copy of A Housefly in Autumn and it’s making me remember why it took me four or five proof copies to get my other books ready.

I’m always searching for a tweak to make it a little better.

I haven’t noticed any embarrassing mistakes so far on this copy. I haven’t even come across anything that I feel is definitely an error. In spite of this, I have plenty of red pen marks on this third copy already, and I’m not half way through.

What am I marking up then?

Mostly, I’m striking words that seemed necessary at one time, but now just seem like extra words. They are not extra words of the James Fenimore Cooper magnitude. They don’t lead down dead end paths into inescapable thickets. At least in my opinion, they don’t. But they don’t add anything to the potential reader’s understanding of the story either.

An extra wordsmith

James Fenimore Cooper, a man of abundant imagination and even more abundant verbiage.

It’s amazing how many of these words pop up in a novel. And it’s amazing how many edits it takes to get most of them out.

I added a very short scene to beginning of the story prior to this proof. It didn’t change the themes of the tale, but it did slightly alter the tone in which it is narrated. This is the other major category of cross-outs this time around. There are some residual statements sprinkled throughout the book that reflect the previous tone too much. These need to be changed or removed. They are pretty easy to spot, but not always simple to fix.

At the end of this proof, I hope to have an efficient story with a smooth, consistent narrative tone from start to finish. Then I can move on to the really nit-picky stuff on proof number four. Maybe I’ll even have the luxury of revisiting issues I previously vacillated over before deciding. You have to flip a lot of coins in self-publishing. Sometimes you want to go back and flip them over again, not because that gives you a better decision, but it might make you feel like you put enough thought into it.

Meanwhile, I’m not giving up on finding errors. By now, I am the least qualified person to find any errors that remain. My jaded eyes have skipped them before, and they’ll skip them again. I’m counting on other pairs of eyes to bring me errors. I hope they do better than I could do right now, because the consequences of hard decisions I can live with; glaring mistakes are harder to stomach.

The saga goes on. It pains me that it takes so long. I’m disappointed to have missed a Christmas release. But if it makes the book a cleaner, better reading experience it will have been worth every dragged-out day of it.

Let the suckers write while you get rich

/ Scott Nagele / 1 Comment

I was scrolling through the updates of friends on Facebook. You know, the odd bits that show up occasionally, between all the ads and the updates by people you don’t recall knowing. Posts by people I don’t think I know perplex me, but I don’t usually pay attention to the ads. Months ago, I clicked on one for a chance to win five bottles of premium scotch. It countered my tradition of not clicking ads, but come on, scotch!

This time, my eye was drawn to an ad about Kindle publishing, a topic of interest to me.

It touted a how-to guide for getting rich publishing on Kindle.

I didn’t click the ad, so I can’t say exactly what was being offered. Based on the image of two guys who looked like they could also teach you how to count cards in Vegas, I doubt it was about how to increase Kindle sales for the book you poured your heart and soul into.

For the self-published author, who wants to write, publish, and sell a quality product that he has invested countless hours into making as good as he can make it, ads like this are a problem.

There aren’t gatekeepers on Kindle (Nook, iTunes, etc.). On balance, this is a good thing. It creates a truly free market, with no one standing in the way of anybody else’s success. But it is also a land of opportunity for those who would make a quick buck without regard to how their actions affect the rest of the market.

Just sell it.

“Chief Talking Bull’s miracle elixir will make any trash you publish on Kindle worth its weight in gold.” (Image: Marion Post Wolcott/US Farm Security Administration)

People using Kindle as a get-rich-quick scheme are not pursuing the dream of making a name for themselves in the literary world. They are pursuing easy money. By throwing up on Kindle whatever comes to hand and using marketing tricks to sell it, they cheapen the brand. Customers looking for satisfying reading experiences are likely to become skeptical of the medium and unwilling to trust any author who is unknown to them.

I don’t know how Amazon feels about these make-a-quick-buck publishers. In the short run, Amazon profits from their sales. In the long run, they could turn Kindle publishing into a wasteland. It is Amazon’s right to allow whatever they want on their system. It is everyone’s right to get rich by whatever legal means they choose. I would not abridge either of those rights.

Yet, I’m disappointed when I hear Kindle customers say they will only download content from familiar authors or well-known publishing companies. That cuts out a lot of authors who have worked hard toward their goals. We’re just looking for a shot, and we’re probably not as slick at sales as the hit and run content providers. When their material gets chosen we lose, and when it turns a customer off to independently published material, we lose again.

Maybe the ad I saw really was for authors who take their work seriously. I hope so. Even if it was, there are many that aren’t.

What can we do about it? Not much. Not anything besides working to put out the best quality product we can, in hopes of winning one more customer over to independently published books.

There are only three parts of your story to worry about: the beginning, the middle, and the end

/ Scott Nagele / Leave a comment

I’ve moved on to my second proof copy of A Housefly in Autumn. This incorporates all the changes I made to the first proof. I normally go through four or five proofs before I am satisfied that the book is ready to be presented to the public.

In the first proof copy I made numerous changes, none of them major. A few of them were actual errors, but most involved making sentences more efficient. It’s amazing, the little things you don’t see until the manuscript holds like a real book.

The first proof had me worried about typographical errors and other embarrassing occurrences. I feel better about that stuff now, but the second proof brings its own worries.

These are big picture worries, about the overall execution of the storytelling.

Beating up the proof copy

My wife’s proof copy is already taking a beating, and she’s only just begun.

If you break a story down into beginning, middle, and ending, that leaves only three parts to worry about. This reduces the number of worries and gives you more time to worry over each thing.

I most recently obsessed about the middle. Before the first proof, I rewrote much of the middle, trying to transform parts that retained too much “telling” into more “showing.” Since this novel has a large oral storytelling component, in which a character literally tells a story, there were some limits to how much of this I could do.

I’m not saying I won’t obsess about the middle again, but since I just finished doing that, the middle will have to go to the back of the line.

For now, I’m focused on worrying about the beginning. It is an axiom of modern fiction that you have to grab the reader by the throat at word one and not let him breathe until he is irretrievably engulfed in the story. This concept is so well revered that a fair percentage of books now begin with explosions or with characters burying (or digging up) dead bodies.

Those incidents aren’t appropriate for this book, so I’m toying with adding a flash forward to an action-packed scene at the beginning. I need to do this without it seeming too much like a cheap gimmick. It also needs to fit with the historical setting, when people began a story at the beginning, regardless of where the bridges were set to blow.

If I can’t figure out how to work in some page 1 fireworks, I guess I’ll have to hope that my beginning is interesting enough. Meanwhile, I’ll worry that it’s not.

I have not spent much time obsessing about the ending. I’m pretty comfortable with it, except for maybe the last couple of pages. I haven’t found time to worry about a mere page or two, but I will at some point.

Do the last lines bring home the points I worked hard to make throughout the book? Or are they relics of the book this used to be, before it matured and added meat to its bones? These are the questions that await my future obsession with the ending.

Maybe that will come with proof copy number three.