Tag: writing

The Numbers

I’m going to sound vague on exact numbers in this post. But I do want to talk about was and was not in my first royalty statement for 2024.

First off, my publisher believes that the wholesaler, Ingram, has not paid for any books sold in October, November, and December. By my publisher’s calculations, the figures for late August and September account for half the units shipped so far, and the other half of the units should be recorded as completed sales after the fourth quarter payments come in.

Number two, even with the wonky sales numbers, I sold enough to earn out my publishing costs–the publisher paying for editorial, design, shipping, and other fees. So that was great news that the publisher has broken even on me.

Next, the statement shows only two books being returned to the publisher. Returns come from either a consumer who returned the book for a refund or from bookstores with stock they did not sell. So for me it looks like the gamble of having bookstores order my books for events is not backfiring on me. That’s a great feeling!

And finally, the publisher has only five books on hand, which means I’m coming close to having another print run if people continue buying the book. Not printing too few but not printing too many is a delicate balance for a publisher, and I’m looking good on that front.

Now–the money for the publishing costs comes out of net sales. I barely crossed that boundary with books sold listed in my royalty statement. Then I’m entitled to a portion of the sales left over, which rendered my payout nearly invisible to the human eye–low enough that the publisher can’t cut a check for it so it will carry over into the next year.

But you know what? That’s up to God. That’s his money, and he knows best how it can be used and when he needs it. All I know is that I am a debut author whose publisher is not in the hole for having taken a chance on me. That makes me feel GOOD!

Trying to Give Back

I recently called the principal of my hometown high school before Christmas. I told him who I was and that I was a former student, and that I would like to give a talk to the students about finding their dreams. I said I had succeeded somewhat in my field, mentioned the book, but told him I wouldn’t be selling anything with the talk. Just said I wanted to tell them I’m from where you are, I went out with this vision, and this is how I put in the work to make it happen. He told me to call back after Christmas and we would plan something.

So I did. Mid-January. I think he was surprised to hear back from me. He looked at the school calendar, and he found me a Friday morning where he could arrange for me to speak to the graduating seniors and tell my story.

Why am I bothering? I’m not even going to hand out my bookmarks unless someone asks me directly how to buy the book. I’m not going to make any money. So why?

The only inspirational speakers I ever remember coming to my school when I was there were trusties from the state penitentiary. They told us how they wound up in jail and to not do what they did or we would, too. (The 80s were a very strange time in lots of ways) We all pretty well got that message.

But what if someone had ever come and said, “It’s okay to have big dreams! It’s okay to want more for yourself that what you see around you! You can do it!” That would have lifted my heart immensely. Especially someone I could identify with, like me.

So that’s what I want to do for these kids. I have no illusions that they’ll be excited or if they’ll even listen. But maybe I can plant that spark in somebody. I’m going to try.

Revision Finished!

So last night I finished the last few issues I had discovered in Looking for Home at the first of January! I managed most of the revisions and took two sections out of the book–they were short scenes, and while I knew what I had meant to do when I first wrote them, when I came back around to them, the story was cleaner for me having taken those sections out. All done!

So now it’s the waiting game. I sent it out to six beta readers, which sounds like a lot. But I had many, many more people read Hurricane Baby through the years than that. And each person had expressed a desire to read it when I got finished. So there you go!

So what’s next?

Some papers for conferences are next in the writing queue. I’m thinking about trying to write a few craft articles, which I’ve never done, and shop them around a bit. I want to read more. Maybe think about the next book? Too soon? 🙂

I feel very satisfied with this draft as a draft–there are areas that need work, especially in the first section. So we will see what suggestions come across the transom! Have a great week!

MORE GOOD NEWS!

I found out this week that Hurricane Baby: Stories has been nominated for a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 2025 Fiction Award! I had heard of this award but didn’t know much about it; you can look up more information about it here.

I asked who the other nominees in my category were, and I was blown away. Only a few small press books were on the list–the rest were all with the big New York presses. Almost all of them I had heard of except two that were debut authors like me. To be included in such company with my first fiction work was astounding to me. It’s still blowing my mind.

So that was that.

In other news, I have podcasts, interviews, talks, and conferences to get going on in the rest of the month and in February. I need to write out my talks to present them, and that’s going to be interesting. One is a talk on how to go after your goals and dreams, and the other is how I figured out why I write and what I write. I have the basics of that one already typed out–it will just need a good bit of tweaking.

Aaaand I finished revising the first section of my work-in-progress, aaaand I realized I had too many fight scenes in it. Four one right after the other and one in the next to the last chapter. %$#@#$%. I don’t want the character in that many fights. So I’m definitely going to cut one scene and rearrange the others so it’s not one right after the other. I still can’t believe I did that.

So a really really high high, a middling low, and the rest business as usual. Except a year ago I could not imagine such a life for myself. Praise be!

Happy Surprise

We get together and exchange gifts with my husband’s mother, his sister, her husband, and their sons every Christmas Day. This year I was opening a small present from my sister-in-law’s family and saw that it looked like a Christmas ornament, a porcelain star. I pulled it out of the package and turned it over.

This was the inscription:

“The year I was published. Julie Whitehead 2024.”

I was so stunned. I never knew there was even such a thing in the world as a personalized commemorative ornament like that. I went and gave my sister-in-law a hug and told her I loved it.

And they are not bookish people. But they understood what Hurricane Baby meant to me and that was enough. (Picture above courtesy of Bob Whitehead.)

Hidden Costs for Authors

Some recent conversations have got me thinking. Most people do not understand the economics of a literary career. I’m going to talk about that for a bit.

First, let’s talk about the costs of shopping a book. Many debut authors get an in into the book world by being selected as the winner of a manuscript contest. Many presses hold these once or twice a year, where you send in a submission and your work is judged anonymously. But often there’s a catch–an entry fee. I entered many contests with Hurricane Baby and racked up a considerable amount of money since fees were typically $20 a pop. The press that bought Hurricane Baby was free to send to, as were many others.I could have made a principled decision to not participate in paid contests, but I knew that it could limit my options.

I got a traditionally published contract through a royalty-paying publisher. I did not get an advance against royalties and this house offered generous royalties. What I am having to keep in mind with my contract is that I don’t get any royalties until the cost to produce my books has been made. It’s not uncommon for that to be the case with a small press. University presses and larger publishers rarely make that stipulation. So I could sell a good many books without seeing any royalties (my percentage of the book’s price) at all.

Once the book came out in August, I started promoting it. I did not do paid promotions, like ads, etc. None of my media appearances cost me anything. Likewise, I never had to pay a fee to appear anywhere, although I have heard of authors being charged booth fees or table fees to appear at a festival. But I resolved not to do that. But with traveling, expenses can pile up–gas, lodging, food. My husband has said he’s not sure we can afford for me to get another book published. 🙂 But it is a consideration I have to keep in mind, as do many authors in the tier I’m publishing in.

Another fee I have decided to forgo is buying my own books at the wholesale price and selling them myself at library and other events. That route brings with it tax implications that I’m not prepared to handle. So I always ask if there’s going to be a bookseller at the event, If there isn’t, I just have to hope people there will remember me long enough to buy the book afterwards. I’ve also held a library event where guests came book-equipped and I signed them.

One expense I did go for was setting up an account with Vistaprint and buying promotional mailings for my events. My publisher had a social media person who designed the graphics for me, and I just downloaded it and printed postcards that I then mailed out for different events. Vistaprint helped design a bookmark that I’ve been able to hand out all over town, and Canva is another free resource to design your own graphics.

As you can see, I am currently operating a non-profitable outfit. But each sale brings with it a chance to improve my track record, which I can then use for the next deal. Hope springs eternal.

Fallow Time

The old folks used to talk about letting a field lie fallow for a certain period of time–sometimes one or two growing seasons, sometimes longer. It would mean that the land wasn’t cultivated for that period of time; they didn’t grow crops on it. They might let cattle use it for pastureland, or they might leave it alone completely. The idea was to let the soil rest and replenish itself with the necessary elements, compounds, water, etc. so that after the fallow period, it might would bring a bumper crop when it was planted and cultivated again.

After I finished this draft of Looking for Home, I decided to just let it sit for a bit.

I did this because I know myself.

If I read it again too quickly after finishing it, I would still be in the glow of creating and finishing the work and would not be able to see the holes in it. I always, always think the writing’s great as it runs through my fingers to the page. What other way is there to say this? So I need to get some perspective on the document itself.

While I was writing each section, I bracketed some words like “redo”, “fill out”, “develop more”. Those are scattered throughout each section. I would put them in when I didn’t exactly know how to work out a narrative problem. My brain needs some time to work subconsciously on those problem areas.

The fallow period for a manuscript can last a short or a long time. I decided to rest mine over Christmas and take it up in January, the time of new beginnings, right after the solstice as the sun begins to stay longer in the sky here in the southeastern United States. I am really itching to get back to it when December is over. Whenever I have the urge to go ahead and start, I give my brain a narrative problem in it to chew on for a while. I’ve already done some preliminary planning for them from this practice, so that’s good.

Are you in a fallow time? Let me know in the comments!

ANNOUNCEMENT!

Last week, I was nominated for my first-ever literary prize!

The Pushcart Prize is one of the older literary prizes in America, and it’s reserved for small presses, publishers, magazines, and journals. Nominations can be short stories, essays, creative nonfiction, or poetry. Each nominating entity can make up to six nominations.

And Madville Publishing decided to nominate “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” from Hurricane Baby: Stories as one of their nominations. This particular short story follows Tommy Hebert of Metairie, Louisiana throughout the day after Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coasts. Tommy had spent the day before and part of the night out on his airboat rescuing people and moving them to higher and drier ground as a volunteer–his trade was fixing cars. He gets up the next day and gets an alert for someone who needs help in Mandeville. So he texts his buddy, who drives an ambulance for a Metairie hospital, and they go and meet up on their boats at Fountainebleu State Park. Then they’re taken with some other men with their saws to the rescue site.

Under the broken-down house are a young woman and her baby boy buried under the rubble of roof. They uncover them and take the baby Avery to the hospital, but Amy Thompson, the young woman, has had her legs crushed under a beam the men can’t move. The EMT gives her a shot to settle her down, then says that there’s nothing else to be done. Afterwards, Tommy and his buddy go eat, but something inside Tommy wants more. He winds up picking up a sixpack of beer for his buddy as a gift for after he helps clean Tommy’s place but alone in his house waiting on him to show back up, he starts drinking them himself to drown out the girl’s screams in his ears.

So I am just pleased s punch that my publisher saw fit to enter me into this contest, along with fellow Madville poets and authors. No idea when prizes are awarded, but it an honor to be nominated, and I don’t take that lightly.

Madville’s 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominations

MILESTONE UNLOCKED!

I finished this draft of my current fiction project Looking for Home on Thursday night!

I fought so hard to get to that last page. I realized halfway through the chapter that I was writing that I needed to scrap a planned final chapter on this section because where I was happened to be a perfectly serviceable ending in and of itself and heaping even more bad fortune on the character might seem excessive.

So I wrote over 2,100 words Thanksgiving night. So far the manuscript is just under 300 pages with 78,697 words total. And getting to the last page really was a fight–I knew exactly what image I wanted to leave the reader with; I just had to wade through some setup to get there. The characters were in no hurry to finish talking. I kept thinking, “Really? Another page? Do you really need another page?” and the answer was “Yes.” Until it finally wasn’t any more, and I was done.

I looked it up–I started on this project almost right at a year ago. I queried and shopped it at the HOMEGROWN conference on the Coast in February of this year and already have a press that may be interested based on that pitch alone. So that’s exciting to think about.

But I’m trying not to think too far ahead. I’m going to take out some time to rest through Christmas, then I’ll review it in the New Year and rewrite, then let some readers take a look at it.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to do a little reading, keep up with this blog, and keep hustling to get events set up where I might get more sales here and there. And keeping you folks up to date on all of that.

Off to relax until I start back to work tomorrow. Happy reading!

Writing Differently

I have been doing something very interesting. I am writing differently than usual.

I started off writing Looking for Home in the same style I did Hurricane Baby. A lot of immediate action, twists, and turns. And it was working for me because I was writing the end of the story, and it needed a rush to the climactic moment, and it was told by an impetuous sixteen-year-old girl, Cassie Beck.

When I began writing the beginning of the book, incidents that had happened eighteen years earlier, I still avoided much narrative–Carlton Dixon was also sixteen years old, learning how to grow into being a man in Tennessee in the late 1960s. A lot of his story was pretty action-packed as well because he rarely had room to think before he had to handle a situation. But towards the end, it turned somewhat more contemplative–more narration, more time in Carlton’s head with his thoughts about what was happening to him.

Then to bridge the two stories together, I worked on telling Merrilyn Beck’s story. Right away I encountered trouble==she was a well-brought-up girl, trained to make some up-and-coming young businessman, lawyer, or planter a fine wife. Instead she had fallen for Carlton Dixon, was pregnant with his child, and Carlton had been drafted into the Army. Merrilyn had also been molested at the hands of her father–an open secret in the family.

Merrilyn turned my tendency towards action on its head; she was a planner and a thinker. She considered her words and chose them carefully before she said them, even as young as she was at sixteen. The abuse had made it where she didn’t live in her body but in her mind, so that’s where most of the action was in her story.

I fought this. I wanted the story to be the same as the others. But once I finally figured all this out about Merrilyn, writing her story became much easier. So today’s lesson is to listen to your characters when they tell you who they are. Sometimes there are surprises.

Next Saturday I will be in Hattiesburg, MS at the Author Shoppe in the downtown area from 2:00-3:30 pm. Wish me well!