Tag: submitting to small presses

After the Debut

Hurricane Baby: Stories has been out for about two months now. So I thought I’d post a few things I’ve noticed going on in my head and my life since the debut, actually after I signed the deal in the first place.

A book deal will not fix you.

If you are looking for something to ease the doubt about your abilities, fill the God-shaped hole in your soul, or validate that you have a role to play in God’s plan for the universe, a book deal is not that thing.

Signing a book contract does feel really good for a while. But it will not quiet the voices in your head that say you’re a poser, a dilettante, a pretender. Someone you know will get a better deal. You may not be able to dive into another work right away. Someone you know will sell more than you do. And all of those things will combine to make you feel like an imposter again and you won’t understand why that is.

If selling the book to a publisher is hard, selling a book to the reading public is way harder.

You can schedule a signing, and it seems like everyone you know will message you telling why they can’t make it. The books may not arrive in time. You may not get invited to all the cool kids’ books conferences, and if you do, you may sell one book at that event. You may go weeks with no sales. And all the grinding, strategizing, networking, and peppy social media posts you do may do nothing to move the needle on sales at all. Selling books is hard, and no one told us or trained us in doing any of it.

Releasing your work out in the world is terrifying.

A few weeks after I got the news about selling the book, I was seized by terror. Surely something bad was about to happen to take the joy this achievement brought into my life. The first time I read aloud from the book at a conference, my voice shook so bad I didn’t know if I could finish.

When I found out it was open for pre-orders. I was giddy for two weeks, then realized–people I know are going to read this book. People I don’t know will read it. What if I get a bad review? What if someone comes up to me someday and says how much they hated it?

Don’t let your mind think about all that. It doesn’t take you anywhere nice.

And remember, other people will not care as much as you do. Surround yourself with writing friends who get it, but large swaths of people you know and consider friends will not remember to pre-order your book, or call you on release day, or leave a review on Amazon. All those people who have been living rent-free in your head all this time that you were going to prove something to? Pfft. They don’t care.

And that’s all right.

Why?

Because to me, letting people inside my head and my heart is a payoff in a league all its own. Watching someone I don’t know come up to me asking that I sign their book, where maybe they read an article or just heard the book mentioned in passing or picked it up because it had a cool cover, is a thrill right up there with the feeling I had when I held each of my daughters when they were first born. I made this. I did it. No other feeling quite like it.

Success?

So last week I told you about my pitch meeting with a publisher at the HOMEGROWN festival. I told you I looked up his email address and sent him a thank-you note for listening to my pitch and taking my materials and being so encouraging. I told you I didn’t know what was going to happen as a result of the meeting, but I felt good about it.

So Monday I got an email back from the gentleman, and he said for when it’s finished for me to send it through the regular submission channel but be sure to specify in my query letter that I had pitched it to him and what event I had pitched at! So that’s a connection I would not have made had I not stepped out and just did the thing. I’d never done an in-person pitch before, but I was calm and confident in my story, and now I feel so much further ahead of the game than I did for Hurricane Baby!

So now I am starting a list of who this book is going to go to first once it’s finished, beta read, edited, and revised. One is my current publishing company, another is the group that published the original novella, another is this company, another is a contest where Hurricane Baby was a semi-finalist, and another is one where I got the very kind personalized rejection. That’s five for the first shot of it. I hope to start sending it out in January 2025.

Just goes to show where you have to put in the work, be persistent, and believe in yourself. I am learning more and more about this process and what all effort goes into a finished book. I don’t have all the answers, certainly. But I am committed to share my journey with you all and be as transparent as possible about how things are working (or not working) for me. Makes me feel less alone in the journey and makes me feel good that i can provide information that I wish I had known when I was starting out.

Happy writing!

COVER REVEAL!

Finally able to get back to my computer after some illness and traveling and able to reveal . . . the cover for Hurricane Baby: Stories, due out in August 2024!

I want to thank Jacqui Davis for her design work here in realizing exactly what I’ve always had in mind for the cover of this work. Appreciate the whole team at Madville Publishing for taking on this project and awaiting the next proof copy with bated breath! Much love to all!

Line-Edits!

I got line-edits last week! So I spent yesterday working on that project. Only 335 punctuation corrections! (Ugh.) I did notice a trend–a lot of em-dashes had been typed incorrectly, and I LOVE using em-dashes, especially in dialogue. And I love writing dialogue. So that was that.

Only content question the editor had was about Leilani, James’ second wife, having such an unusual name. I did not know this–it’s Hawai’ian for “royal child”, which was perfect for the spoiled baby of the family! But that was only a happy accident–I certainly didn’t think that up while I was writing, and it’s doubtful that Leilani’s parents would have either. So I dreamed up a new explanation for why her parents named her that–that you will have to buy the book to see :).

Now it goes for formatting into InDesign, then another read to make sure nothing horrifying mechanical-wise goes through once it’s converted to a PDF. Then I read proof versions, then it goes back into design for final formatting of the text.

I am trying so hard to be calm and professional in my interactions with them, but I can’t help for my joy to come out! It’s really getting real! In eight months, my book will be out on bookstore shelves, Amazon, Barnes & Noble! A big goal for my life since I was a very young thing! I have been writing stories for FOREVER. Treasure stories cribbed from the Bobbsey twins’ adventures when I was a kid, teen romances when I was a teenager, short stories in my first Master’s program–I’ve had stories in my life longer than almost anything except my parents. And I’m so close to having a book!

It boggles my mind how far I’ve come.

Onward!

Finding a Passion Project

Sigh.

I realized I just don’t feel enough of a push to actually work on my memoir, When I Went Crazy, as I thought I did.

I’m not rushing to the computer to work on it like I did Hurricane Baby last year. I was seriously excited to do that project, and when I wasn’t excited, I was fueled with a grim determination. I WAS going to finish it, and I WAS going to revise it, and I WAS going to sell it whether anyone liked it or not. I had a real drive that pushed me through all the hard work.

And I’m not feeling that right now except about one project–selling my novella, Looking For Home, as a standalone project.

Looking For Home grew out of a scene I had written while floundering around with Hurricane Baby the first time. I had written it in the context of Wendy and Judd’s baby growing up and going looking for Judd when she was a teenager. I didn’t go that direction with Hurricane Baby, but I did think I had written a perfectly serviceable scene. So I dreamed up a new idea for a story about a teenaged couple, Carlton Dixon and Merrilyn Beck, giving up a baby for adoption because Merrilyn was only sixteen–and that baby coming to find Carlton once she got to be a teenager.

I had a really good time writing that story just like I had enjoyed doing Hurricane Baby, with a rich backstory, told with multiple narrators. On the advice of an editor I had asked to help me with it, I cut it down to one point of view and created a novella, which I sold to a publishing house in 2018 as part of an anthology. Well, the rights have reverted back to me, and I want to sell it as a standalone book.

So I’ve been researching publishing houses that publish novellas and sending off to them. But the story has really held up through the years since I wrote it. I don’t see anything that really needs to be changed about it. And if it doesn’t sell as a novella, then I may take it and redo it just like I did Hurricane Baby. Only this one I think I would write as a duopoly or trilogy of novellas in one book. I would harvest the original manuscript to write the story of back-when in Carlton’s point of view, write the intervening story in Merrilyn’s point of view, and leave the current novella in Cassie’s (the teenager) point of view.

(Hm. I will think about that some more.)

But back to my point. If there’s no flame to fan in your heart for a project, maybe it’s not time for you to work on that project. I have No real excitement about going back into those thoughts and feelings right now. So I will wait for the right project to come along. (Or I may have just found it. I’ll keep you posted.)

Liminal Space

So now I am in the liminal space between querying my book and publishing my book. I’ve done what I’m supposed to do (get the manuscript in the best shape I can, look over sample covers, get leads on publicity avenues) and now I’m waiting for the edits and the ironing out of final details before we go to print in February 2024. Suddenly February 2024 doesn’t seem that far into the future as it did in September when I signed the deal.

I am working on When I Went Crazy–I’ve finished the first chapter and am looking at the next. I will likely start on it tomorrow night when I write. I’m also researching places to try to publish my novella Looking For Home as a standalone book. So far I think I’ve sent it six places (I don’t have my list in front of me so don’t. hold me to that.) Not many publishers do novellas, so there aren’t many places to send to. But I’m going to give the ones I can find a shot and see what happens.

I love that I’m finally able to think about a future in writing and publishing my work. I had resolved to myself that if Hurricane Baby didn’t publish by 2025 (the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina) that I would just give up on writing fiction altogether and just stick to my bipolar work and labor for a better world for the mentally ill in my little corner of advocacy and education. But now I feel like I have a chance to do more, be more, get more visibility for the issues surrounding mental illness. And that’s a good feeling.

My Final Copy

I turned in my final copy of the manuscript on November 1, early last week. Now it’s time for the editors to get going on it and find what I might have missed. I really worked hard to do all the corrections and typos and continuity errors, and I thought of one this afternoon I probably left uncorrected–in one particuIar spot, I called Tommy Hebert’s truck a diesel truck–and it’s not. So I need to at least correct that as soon as possible once I get the edited manuscript back. I’m hoping that’s the only glaring thing that’s there. I imagine there may be stylistic discussions, etc. as well. Which I do not mind getting into. If something needs changing to make more sense, etc., by all means, fix it.

I don’t know when those are going to come across–I figure after the new year with the way people usually work during the holidays. It needs to go to print February 1 or thereabouts. I just want the editing process to be smooth and not rushed. So I hope I hear back sometime in December while I am off for the holidays. We will see.

I am starting to turn my mind to my next project, and I think it may be my memoir project rather than any more work on Missing and Mentally Ill in Mississippi. I haven’t gotten any replies on it from the batches I sent out in August and September, and I was too sick to send many queries during October. And most of New York publishing shuts down during the holidays until the second week of January. I have the proposal, and it is still solid.

But I think I am going to invest in rewriting the story of those 24 months between when I told Bob I was pregnant with my youngest daughter and when I was actually diagnosed bipolar. And I can have my stats (if any!) from sales of Hurricane Baby to bolster my case for getting another publishing deal. Not sure exactly when I will get started, but maybe soon, maybe after the new year, maybe after i finish edits for Hurricane Baby. I’m going to start by reading that part of my thesis manuscript again and see what (if anything) I can incorporate from that manuscript to the new one.

Wish me well! Happy writing to you all!

Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing

So if you’ve been on social media for the past couple of days, you’ve probably seen the kerfuffle on this topic. A Famous Author spoke disparagingly recently about those who self-publish rather than get an agent and a Big Five deal. She called self-publishing the “easy way”.

Now, I understand this line of thought. Back in the 2000s, self-publishing was synonymous with vanity presses, those you paid to simply print your book for you (often at great expense) and left you to your own devices to sell a few copies and be able to say you wrote a book. Often, they were riddled with grammatical errors and looked very unprofessional to the savvy readers’ eye.

However, that’s no longer the case with the current generation of writers. Many act as their own publisher, hiring editors, book designers, publicists, printers, and other professionals to aid them–or taking the initiative to do all of these jobs themselves and–most importantly–keep all their profits from sales.

I knew I didn’t have the expertise or desire to incorporate and run my own publishing business. So I opted to pursue a small press or university press deal, where I wouldn’t be too busy doing all the technical work to publish a book to be able to write the next one.

Self-publishing is also democratizing and diversifying the publishing trade. The Big Five have a problem common to multinational corporations–appealing to the lowest common denominator to make a quick buck or billion. But very little of that money goes to the author–most is eaten in taxes, agent commissions, and other expenses of the publisher.

I was blessed to find a regional press that published what I was selling–a book of Southern literature, a short story collection, a book set in recent past. They take care of the technical details, and I set my own publicity schedule, going where my book is likely to find an audience. As far as I am concerned, it’s a win-win.

Writing a book is a big accomplishment. Finding an agent and a publisher is darn near impossible for someone just starting out. The main thing for an author to watch out for is someone who wants to draw you into spending a lot of money and have very little to show for it afterwards–agents who charge upfront fees, publishers who hoodwink you into a ironclad contract then take you to the cleaners for expenses, editors who want to turn your book into something other than what you meant to write.

But making the choice to self-publish, with your eyes open to the demands that path entails, is often a case of getting a book out into the world that is everything you wanted it to be. And that’s not as “easy” as some might think.

To God be the Glory!

I. SOLD. HURRICANE. BABY!

Deets: We had come home from church on last Sunday and I was checking my email when I saw Madville Publishing’s message. I had sent the book to them August 15, and they said it would be a few weeks before I heard back from them.

I was bracing for a rejection.

Instead, Kimberly Davis, the publisher, told me their reader had loved the book, and they wanted to make an offer on it and publish it in August 2024 and told me the terms of their standard contract.

I thought. Twenty publishers still had the book, most of whom I had submitted it for contest consideration. But there were still a few where I had simply answered open calls. So I asked for time to contact some other publishers to see if they wanted to counteroffer. I asked if I could wait until Wednesday to decide. I got the okay for that.

Both publishers I contacted said they were not in a position to counteroffer. So I accepted the offer and got a contract to sign. I asked to retain the rights to Hurricane Baby the play. She said that was fine.

I asked a publishing friend to look at the offer to see if it was fair. We discussed it, and he mentioned some of the finer points to look into, and I took his advice. The contract was modified, and I signed it on Thursday afternoon right before dinner.

The first person I told was my husband, Bob, the day they made the offer. I also told my parents after I drove up to see them that same day. My dad just about fell out of his chair. Then I sent the news out to people who had already agreed to blurb it and sent the book when they said they were still willing to do so. Over the week, I shared with other people who were important to me and knew the story of how long I had been involved in this project and supported me through it.

To say I have been stunned at how quickly it has happened is an understatement.

But really, it came right when it was supposed to. I am free to travel on weekends to promote the book. My kids are out of school and more or less on their own. I am in such a better mental headspace than I was when I first started trying to market it.

You all reading have been a part of their journey also. Thanks for reading and for your support. In my intent to demystify the writing process and the journey, I will continue posting here about writing, the craft, the business, and the ups and downs of selling a debut.

And lastly, I welcome God’s intervention in my life to accomplish this. I am going to follow through on my pledge to the church. And I will give him praise whenever possible for this miracle I had just about given up on ever receiving. Thanks for reading!