I'm Done!!!!!! Now What?

I FINISHED!!!!!! My first novel is complete!!!! I could have this puppy printed if anyone is interested in selling it. If … anyone … is … interested …

Hmmmmmmmmm.

OK, someone is interested. I’m interested. My wife is definitely interested. Quite a few of my friends are interested, at least in a passing sense. I’m sure my editor would like to get paid. My kids would certainly like to eat.

Holy shit! This is a job! This isn’t just a job, though, it’s my job!

Breath … just breath. Ok. Whew. That was close. Thank God—or the deity of your personal choice—that I realized this while I was writing the book. I have been prepared for this moment, I have been anxiously, eagerly awaiting this moment, AND I have been dreading this moment. Why? I’d be happy to explain.

Can a brother get a breakdown?

Let’s start where we should start, being prepared. I have been prepared, (I was a Boy Scout, after all). I went about “The Process” in a manner that I would consider to be professional from Day 1. From page 1, for that matter. I treated this as a business, because if I want to make a living from writing, this is my business. I’ve been a business man, I’ve been an executive, I’ve been a writer, and I’ve been a publisher. I did not come into this blindfolded. I know that printing costs money. I know that shelf space costs money. But, these are not necessarily factors in the modern literary business landscape. For those of us that are writing in this new, electronic literary landscape, Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and iPhones are the business, moving forward. This is an absolute truism. I should be able to take my electronic content, format it for each device, and sell it to a wide variety of the 26 people on my Facebook author page. And while that number is growing, and I am proud of it, selling 26 copies of my novel won’t pay for more than a stop or two at Chucky Cheese’s, and frankly, I don’t believe that’s why my editor added all of his hard work to mine. This is my business. Whether I’m selling hot dogs, or bowling shoes, or software, I need a marketing plan to expose my product to the marketplace that would be interested in purchasing it. Traditionally, that’s why publishers exist, or so we have been led to believe.

For those of you who are new to “The Process” of selling a novel, I’m going to let you in on some research and some experiences from early in this process. Publishers do not, I repeat, DO NOT, search for new writers. Publishers print books and pay to market said books. Only, they kind of don’t. If this is your first novel, the publisher will advance you some scratch to live on, theoretically anyway, will market your book, and pay to have it printed. 10,000 copies is generally considered the minimum break even point in this business for the publisher. After that, they may begrudgingly admit to making some money, depending on how much they ponied up to you in advance. For all of their help, on a $22 hard cover novel, you the writer will receive $2.20 on your first 10,000 sales, and $3.30 on all of your sales thereafter. 

“Well that hardly seems fair,” you think to yourself, “but hey, on 10,000 sales, that’s like $22,000 that I didn’t have when the novel was just hanging out on my computer.”

Ah-ah-aaaah, (finger wave gesture is implied at this point). Not so fast, mi amigo, or amiga, as the case may be. You received a cash advance of—let’s be generous here—say $15,000. So you’re $22,000 is going to be used to pay the publisher back for advance money, leaving you with $7,000. Right?

Ah-ah-aaaah, (2nd finger wave implied). The publisher has paid something for marketing, or you wouldn’t have sold that first 10,000. Let’s say they paid $20,000. So your measly $7000 is gone, a Dios, muchachos. You’ve sold 10,000 books, and you’re still $13,000 in the hole. OK, OK. So I have to sell, um, carry the 0, uh, another 3,939 books to cover that at the whopping increase to 15% of the take on my book. 

“On book number 13,940, I get some scratch, finally. Whew. I thought that’d never happen,” you say to yourself, cautiously.

Ah-ah-aaaah—(different finger used at his point entirely, and no, you can’t wave that one). The publisher, your publisher, the company that believes in you more than the others, has paid for printing, too. You guessed it, if you sell books, they don’t pay for that either. And then, there’s returns. If the publisher ships 20,000 of your books to Barnes and Noble nationwide, and the good folks at B & N decide that they need more shelf space for the 3012th Edition of the Joy of Cooking—so they’re sending 2,000 copies back to the publisher—you guessed it, you are paying for those, too. Even if B & N keeps 2,000 on their shelves nationwide because you’re still selling fairly well.

You’re probably asking yourself, “What the fuck?” right about now. Or, even if your a more positive person, you may be going, “Hey, I sold 20,000 books at $22, and if the retailer gets, say half, that leaves my friendly publisher with $11, minus the $3.30 he’s supposed to be paying me, that’s $7.70 times 20,000, that’s $154,000. No, it’s more, because they got $8.80 for the first 10,000. So that’s more like, uh, $165,000 … and if I’m successful, I’m paying for everything?”

Yes you are. And what’s worse, you are usually paid only semi-annually when they do pay you. And there’s a six-month “accounting period” where they bogart your money. So you will see your first income from sales about a year after you have sold you 20,000th book. 

How encouraging is that?

Not trying to beat this to death, but, there’s another hitch in your get along that has to be dealt with. First. Publishers DO NOT read material that hasn’t been solicited by a literary agent. No, you can’t say your cousin from Alabama is a literary agent, either. Unless that’s true, in which case you’re more than one up on me at this point.

So I need an agent to represent me to publishers. I knew all of this coming in, too. And an agent gets 10% of what I take in. 

“So, how hard can that be? They are working for me, right? So I sign one up that I trust and have a good vibe with.”

Ah-ah—alright, I know that this is annoying by now, but this is the literary business. To get an agent, you must submit a pro-forma query letter, often with a synopsis, and some chapters. 

“Then, for the love of whoever, am I in?”

No, then you submit a manuscript.

The “hunting for an agent process” is where I am now, and it is not pleasant. Everyone is turned down. The successful writers are turned down dozens upon dozens of times. I saw a biography on Stephen King that said he was turned down 134 times on Carrie, and that book went on to sell a bazillion copies. So 133 business experts said he had no chance of selling a book that sold like crazy.

Happens every day.

I’ll do a whole blog on agents as I get into this more.

So that was just part of being prepared for the “business” end of things.

But being prepared also covers the moment I have dreaded. I dread this part of the process. All of what I’ve stated above is more than enough reason for you to understand why, and there’s more where that came from.

But I am approaching this as a business. I have started databases to track my agent contacts and have my query package pretty tight. I’m confident in the quality and content of my novel and the series. And that, leads me to the eagerness of this moment.

Writing something with so many levels, and emotions, and characters, and twists, and thinking up to five novels ahead on this series has been more gratifying than I can put into words. I’m proud of my novel, not so much as something I created, per se, but of its quality, independent of my involvement.

As I put the final touches on the final edit of THE LAST INTERROGATION, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t kidding myself before I finished the final chapter.

I read the final two or three chapters of six different novels a few nights ago. They were from vastly different writers, all of which have sold well, many of which are considered classics. I saw patterns in all … all but one.

Still the best book I ever read.

Does THE LAST INTERROGATION stand up to a comparison with a book of that magnitude? I’m going to be open here, and at the risk of sounding arrogant, personally, I felt it was on par with my favorite book. If it hadn’t been, it would have been another rewrite. I owed myself and those who believe in me that much.

What were the other books I compared? I’m not going to go into those, but I felt it was more compelling than they were. It is my sincere hope that you will feel the same, though if you don’t, I still believe you will find it a great read.

I’m enthused and filled with trepidation at the same time.

I have my product, now my job is to sell it.

It’s all part of the process.

You Want People To Love Your Book … Edit It—But Don't Destroy It

As I bury myself in the final edit of my first novel, I find that I haven’t really dealt with a pertinent question: what do I want from this book? 

You’re probably reading this thinking, “Duh … you want people to love your book,” and you’d be partially right. I didn’t write this book as an exercise in self-gratification, but you could. My point here is that if you’re a person of broad interests and tastes, you could write the same book in an infinite amount of ways. Don’t believe me? Work with an editor you respect and view his or her input as an extension of yours. Are their edits an improvement to yours? Personally, I find it important to focus on when my editor’s changes aren’t better than what I had written, when they may—in fact—be detrimental. If you’re being honest with yourself, you have to admit that this doesn’t happen a lot as a good editor is looking to bring out the best in what you have written. But occasionally, an editor takes the voice out of our work. Discovery lies within that edit. When you know what you’ve written has to remain unchanged, this is the clearest, cleanest evidence of your voice as a writer. That’s when you know it’s right. 

Study these morsels, they’re evidence of what makes you, you. Relish them. Print these sentences/paragraphs/whatever out on paper, cut them up into little pieces, throw these pieces of paper into your bath tub, and get in and roll around naked in them. That’s what you and you alone bring to the table. Nothing is more important than who you are—except the story you’re trying to tell. Hah! Fucked with your head on that one, didn’t I?

This is what smacked me upside my head in writing my novel. When did what I was writing serve the novel and when did it serve my ego? Was I writing this to prove to myself that I could write it, or was I trying to write the best book I could possibly write. After the first edit, I decided I wanted the best book I could write, and that wasn’t the first draft of this book. 

I began with admitting that my editor knew some things that I didn’t, and I could either learn from his experience, or blissfully ignore the “why” behind his damn rules. I think this may be one of the more important decisions a writer will make; it truly helps to define whether this is your career or a just hobby. I knew the answer to that one: this was my career. To be honest, it had to be, (but that’s another blog entirely). I opened my eyes. I studied the details of “why” my editor made the decisions he made. I studied why he did what he did. I needed to understand his rules, his framework, his perspective on structure, including, his literary background. When I understood that, it made my book better. 

I took his edits to heart, so much so that I was editing far more than what he had suggested. My first draft was 330 pages. I edited it down to 220 pages. The naked truth, I had written 110 pages that added nothing to my story. 

So I took my 220 page story and began a complete rewrite. Now I had the essence of the story, its purpose. My characters changed. The feel became clarified. Everything added to the story, and the filler was gone—well, almost gone.

So I’m back to style. Am I’m going to write a funny book, a serious book, an exciting book, a clever book, an intelligent book, a thrilling book, an emotional book, a sympathetic book, a realistic book, a commercially viable book, or a book that makes you think after you’ve closed the book. I went with: yes. All of the above. The question was how to do that legitimately.

What do I mean? In the first versions of the book, it had made people: laugh, cry, be sick to their stomach’s, and think. I was not willing to lose any of those elements. But to maintain a realistic perspective, you could not have too much of any of these elements. So a year 6 months after I had started, and another partial rewrite, I began a serious rewrite using the tools garnered from my editor, along with a healthy dose of personal experience and artistic clarity.

The new version of the book was over 520 pages. That’s 300 additional pages. Then came the BIG question. Again. Were all of these pages adding to the story? Were they necessary.

Surprisingly, the answer to that question for the most part was … yes. I felt weird about that, but it was true.

In retrospect, I still had some things that I wanted to say, and you know what—those were the things that absolutely had to go. There was one chapter in particular that my wife and editor both could not see being included. I wanted to develop an additional character for some very politically correct reasons. Now doesn’t that sound like the absolute wrong reason for including something in your book? I wasn’t telling the character’s stories, I was making a point. Perfectly valid if that’s what your book is about; totally invalid for THE LAST INTERROGATION.

In the end, I lost more than 20 pages. OK, I didn’t lose them, I trashed them. I had to, they weren’t part of this book.

I lost most of the smart-assed passages—people talk like that sometimes, but not all of the time. I wanted realism. My editor would have had me disposed of more humor, but even when the world has a one-way ticket to hell as it does in this novel, I think people do and say funny shit to relieve the tension.

There’s a shitload of swearing, too, but again, a big chunk of the world may be ending, hardly a time to mince words. In times of infinite stress, the lowest common denominators of vulgarity and violence will always get their two cents worth in. Don’t believe me? Take a hammer and smash your thumb, (don’t really do this, by the way). Did you swear? Did you think about swearing, anyway? If you say no, you are lying. Now think of a billion people being hit over their heads—with sledge hammers. They are going to die, for reals. Now, tell me that the people that know this is going to happen don’t swear through that pain. You know I’m right now, don’t you?

So the bottom line of my “Process” here, is: when I realized what the book I wanted to write was, it became an infinitely better book. The details became about the characters, not the author or the author’s opinions.

In many ways, I’m as proud of the editing as I am the writing, and I’m very proud to have had the opportunity to learn from, and participate in, the editing process.