Self publishing Thursday--post the third

So. You have edited your book to the best of your ability. Sure, you can go publish it right now. It probably won't go over too well. "The best of your ability" right now? That's not going to be "the best of your ability" once you're done with this next part.

And if you're following the plan? The next part is submitting it to the pros. Agents, ladies and gents. It is time for us to find an agent. Or possibly a publisher, if you're in the mood for that too. But how do you FIND one of these strange creatures? And how do you make sure you're submitting to a good one?

1. Find a list. There are several.

The most famous, of course, is probably Writer's Market. It is a listing of publishers, agents, magazines. It also comes with the bare minimum of advice. Stephen King started out fishing magazine names out of the back of a three year old version back in the seventies.

I'm a little meh about Writer's Market. Anybody can get listed. ANYBODY. And Writer's Market doesn't give you any indications of how good that market actually is beyond how much money they will pay you. You can buy it, but you will wind up using the other lists I'm going to give you anyway, because verifying the legitimacy of a given market is more important IMHO than finding that market in the first place. It's also a static book, and nothing is worse than using outdated information for an agent or publisher. So look forward to buying a new one every year.

Another good list is Publisher's Marketplace, and you can tell it's a good info source because my gut did one of those fun "bad memory drop" things when I opened the site. I used it a LOT in my query days. Yes. It's hard to navigate that site and it REALLY pushes for you to get a paid account. You don't need one. This is what you look for:

 The next page is just as confusing, so just ignore it and go back to the side bar over here:

Click on the applicable link and fill out the things on the search form you actually understand. (I don't know what half of those things mean, and half of them I don't understand why that would apply to my book, so I leave them alone). You'll get a list of results.

You'll also note how a lot of those categories don't apply to people looking for a trade publisher. Yes, folks, we'll be coming back here when it's time to start self publishing our books. 

That said, all that you'll see on those pages are what the agent/publisher/whatever wants you to see. And impressive stats, I am sorry to say, are easy as fuck to fake. This is a better option than Writer's Market because the info is more up to date, and there will be a direct link to the person's website with even more up-to-date info.

The third list is Query Tracker. Again: up to date information, you're still just seeing what the agent/publisher wants you to see, and you'll still have to vet the ever-loving daylights out of the company before you submit. One thing Query Tracker offers that Writer's Market and Publisher's Marketplace don't is query history. How long a publisher or agent takes to actually answer a query, what the ratio of rejections to requests is, whether those requests are for partials (part of the manuscript) or fulls (all of the manuscript) and so on. Useful stuff.

The last two places are, of course, places I've brought up before. Predators and Editors is a database of every publisher, agent, and author service the guy running it has ever heard of, and Dave Kuzminski camps out on Absolute Write more than I do. He's heard of a lot. Most of his listings do not tell you genre, contact info, submission guidelines or even link to the respective agent's pages, but they DO tell you something even more important: If you can actually trust that person with your work. A typical page looks like this:

We have, in order, a LONG accounting of how an offscreen agent got charged with a felony, a breif accounting of how another agent was charged with theft, Agent that is a member of Association of Author's Representatives, which is a good thing, and a dollar sign that indicates this agent has many good, known sales, A random agent, a retired/mia agent, one of the best human beings in the universe and certainly one of the best agents (Seriously: I heart Janet Reid.) Agent with known sales, another random agent, and another agent with known sales and AAR membership.

And last but most importantly, yep kids, you knew this was coming, The Absolute Write Water Cooler's Beware and Background Check's forum. Bookmark it and CAMP there. Any day you start researching and mailing queries? B&BC should be in an open tab. I AM NOT KIDDING. They have a thread on everybody. I found them by googling agents in Writer's Market and finding them in the first or second result EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. They're also useful because agents I hadn't submitted to would float to the forum's surface every once in a while. You can find out everything there except prefered genres and submission guidelines: website links, how trustworthy they are, how long you can expect to wait between query and answer, how polite the agent is.

My query submission research was basically all of the last four sites. Find the agent on either Publisher's Marketplace or Query Tracker, check their website, vet them via P&E and B&BC, and then send away.

Which brings us to the next step:

2. Vet them. Vet them. VET THEM. 

You cannot skip this step. My day of query research, I googled five agencies out of Writer's Market. One of them was Desert Rose. Only two of them turned up good, and that's actually a really, REALLY good result. There were days where everybody in my genre seemed to be either charging fees, inexperianced or a flat out scam artist.

So. First thing you do is find the agency. We're going to use Janet Reid as an example because she is awesome, and she's not my genre so I have no ulterior motive in flattering her. (other than that she's awesome.)

Let's say we find her through publisher's marketplace.

The first thing you look for are language red flags. (For the record, I don't see any in her listing) Look for language that talks about "making dreams come true" or anything that makes your heart pound and your hopes soar, because that usually indicates this person either has no idea what the fuck they're talking about or they're trying to shut your brain off and get you to submit without researching further. That's not a "Fuck no" finding, but that means you need to be VERY careful.

Instead of praising you, Janet just tells you what she's looking for. File that stuff for the next stage and move down to her client listings.

If an agent lists no clients, that's a red flag. You want a good, successful agent with lots of contacts and a good track record. Someone who has all these things will post them everywhere. Stephenie Meyer's agent has Stephenie Meyer's name listed on her webpage, I PROMISE you. Janet has a huge client list. Look for names you recognize because that usually indicates a successful author, and that in turn can indicate that this agent can make YOU a successful author. Janet represents a lot of successful people.

Now go down to her sales list.

Again: An agent shy of listing sales either has no sales to list, or they have sales that they don't want to brag about. An agent with good sales is probably resisting the urge to wallpaper the outside of their office building with the list. However, some agents will make sales to publishers that don't require agents to submit, and will use those sales to build a "fake" list, so you have to put in a little legwork at this point. Google the name of the publisher and check their submission guidelines, their P&E listing and their B&BC thread. Usually if you see "no unsolicited manuscripts" that means you need an agent to make a sale and that means the agent in question is a good one. However, if the press is a big enough deal (IE Baen and Tor) an agent will equal a response in a couple of months rather than two or three years.

Janet has had sales to Harper (Big deal) Soho Press (I'm not familiar with that publisher, but a quick
google says Big Deal, so that gets a pass) and Warner Brothers.

As in the movie studio. As in one of her clients has had a movie deal. That's HUGE.

Now. Check the dates on every sale. A sale two years ago has less weight than a sale last year. A sale last year has less weight than a sale last month. Agents are usually slow to update these listings, so we'll stick with sales within the last two years. Which Janet has (a 2013 publication date usually indicates a 2012 sale)

If an agent's last sale to a big deal publisher was five years ago? PASS.

We can now reasonably assume that Janet Reid can sell your manuscript to a good publisher and make sure you get a good deal in the bargain.

However, we need to be thorough. Does she charge fees? How does she behave towards her authors?  Well, let's go back to her P&E listing. First off, that dollar sign indicates she has sales. That's good. That "recommended" means she passes P&E's vetting criteria. This is also good. Finally, that AAR membership means she can't charge fees for her services beyond her commission for selling your book, because AAR members have a strict set of conduct guidelines they have to follow to qualify for membership. So that's a HUGE point in her favor.

Last but not least: B&BC thread.

Everybody hearts Janet on Absolute Write. And yeah, it's kind of not fair to use Janet as an example because she does amazing things for writers who aren't her clients too. Both her blog and her other blog are must-reads for writers of any sort.

Ah, but we're not done. We know the agent is legit, but is she our agent? Time to check what genres she represents.  Publisher's marketplace says:

General fiction Mystery Suspense/thriller Reference

Biography Business/investing/finance History

I read that back in '10, and I was like "OH FUCK, really?" because my genres are sci-fi and fantasy and neither of those are there, and that meant I had to just worship from afar. NEVER submit to an agent who doesn't have your genre on the list. Not having fantasy on the list means the agent doesn't do fantasy, maybe she doesn't even like fantasy, maybe she just doesn't have connections to the fantasy people in the editing departments. Either way, publishing is REALLY specialized. The team doing Mystery is going to be different from the team doing Fantasy, and the more specialized an agent is, the better they know the genres they represent. If you REALLY want a rejection letter right now? Submit. But if you want to minimize the number of rejections you get, hedge your bet and leave agents out of your genre alone. Do not annoy the agent.

But if your genre is there? Goody. Look at what she's looking for specifically. On Publisher's marketplace, she gives you a couple good examples. She really wants a good biography, or something on current events. She doesn't want any books about assassinating a president. If your book is Dead Zone meets Mean Girls? You're SOL. If your book is a biography of the Texas Seven? YAY! You might be what she's looking for.

A publisher changes things up a little bit, but not much. A good publisher will make finding their submission guidelines hard. Not because they don't want you to submit, but because they are far more interested in you buying their books than they are in looking at your book. That's because selling their books is how they make their money. Again, the "dream" language is a massive red flag because it means their model is focused more on writers than it is on actual customers, and that's bad for you. "We help authors reach their dreams!" turns me off faster than Stilton Cheese breath. Another red flag is a micropress that prints everything. Again, publishing is really specialized, and you want somebody focused on YOUR genre. Check bookstores for their books, and then check their Amazon rankings. Low numbers=high sales. DO NOT SUBMIT TO ANYBODY WHOSE BOOKS HAVE A RANKING GREATER THAN 100,000. That means their books are selling less than a copy a day. Those are self publisher numbers, and it means you'll be better off alone than you would with that press. Check covers. Check their P&E and B&BC threads. Read the last page first. There have been several spectacular meltdowns in the last several years (Dorchester-Leisure being a big one) and when it hits the AW boards the back end of the threads explode. You want to know how a press is doing RIGHT NOW, and not ten years ago.
 
3. Build a list of your own. God made Excel spreadsheets for a reason.

 Now that you've vetted and cleared a number of agents and publishers, it's time to put a list together. Mine is very simple: Name of agent, date of query submission, and date of rejection. Why do we do this?

Because 50 rejections is kind of normal. Most published writers have hundreds of rejections. Stephen King had so many rejections the nail he hung them all on broke. And when you have submitted to fifty agents, it gets kind of hard to remember which ones you've sent off to. Then you have the remote chance that the agent is interested. You can keep track of requests for your manuscript. And sometimes agents will ask you to remind them that you submitted something, so if its been six months since query/full submission AND THE AGENT SPECIFICALLY ASKS THAT YOU DO THIS, your list can remind you to do a follow-up. Again, do only if an agent asks you to follow-up after X number of weeks, because you do not want to annoy the agent.

4. Find and Follow the Submission Guidelines. To the letter.

99.99999% of rejections are due to bad submission packets. Let's head back over to Janet Reid's website and take a look at what hers are.

First thing you see? She prefers e-mail queries. This means don't send her paper anything. Some agents prefer snail-mail queries. (I have never submitted to snail-mail agents because REALLY? REALLY? IT IS 2013 AND YOU WILL BE SENDING ME A PIECE OF PAPER WITH "NO" WRITTEN ON IT ANYWAY WHY CAN WE NOT DO THIS ELECTRONICALLY? THE TREES THINK OF THE TREES) and that's what you should send. The wrong kind of query? It goes in the round file.

Next up, she tells you what to send WITH your query letter: the first three to five pages.

This is generous. Some agents asks for just the first three. Some ask for the first ten, and I heart them completely. Some ask for the query letter only and if they really like that, they'll ask for pages.

And before you start screaming "How can they judge the whole book from three pages" The answer is they can't. But they CAN judge the writing from the first three pages. Often, from the first one. Most queries do not get read past that first page. And even though I said rejections are the result of bad submissions, most of the time you can also blame it on that first page. This is why I recommend you do this even if you intend to self-publish the book. You WILL be revising those opening pages until your eyes bleed and your brain dribbles out of your ears, and that goes double for your query letter. (Which I will talk about next week) If the writing passes, they'll start asking for more of the book.

She tells you how to send those pages (pasted into the e-mail, not as an attachment. I have only seen TWO agents ask for attachments on that first e-mail) and what to title your e-mail (Query for TITLE) so that she doesn't immediately pitch the e-mail into the round file as spam.

Then she tells you what she wants (Thriller, mystery, death penalty stuff) and what she doesn't want (Fantasy or sci-fi. Fuck.)

I also know that she doesn't want scary ghost story thrillers because she said on Query Shark that those plots give her the screaming willies. Which means the more you follow agents, the more information you'll find out about what they're looking for.

Publishing: The only industry that ENCOURAGES e-stalking. 

If there is ONE problematic thing in the whole set of guidelines, it is this: "When in doubt, query me. I'd rather see something that's not right for me than miss something fabulous."

This does not mean: "Send me your 20K story about elves or the 150K query re: Vampires in Space because you hope I'll be interested in it anyway." This means "If I have not already specifically said no to this type of book, submit."

Sometimes she does ask for fantasy or sci-fi stuff if she gets something interesting on Query Shark. If it's really good, she doesn't keep it. She sends it over to Suzie Townsend/whoever is the leading fantasy agent on Fineprint Lit these days.

Your book is probably not that "something fabulous" she's looking for. It's better not to annoy the awesome agent.  


5. Assume it's a rejection. ALWAYS assume it's a rejection. It's easier to handle.

 I really hate rejection letters. Not because it's a rejection, but because rejection letters are usually the biggest piece of overwritten tripe you'll ever encounter in your life. You want two things: YES or NO. And if it is a NO you want to get it over with that much faster so that you can move on to the crying and the whiskey and the chocolate.

Instead, most of them start out with a "thanks for submitting" line, a line explaining why you're getting a form letter and/or a line explaining why the e-mail is coming from the agent's assistant's e-mail account (because the assistant is the one that reads the queries. Because you WANT the assistant to b the one reading the queries) and then a "No" that seems to ignore that Strunk and White rule about not using six words where one will do. "We regret to inform you we are not interested"=NO.

You will see many badly written nos. 

Remind yourself what your ultimate goal is: Make the best book you possibly can. Remember that you never intended to get trade publication even though you'd really like it. Remind yourself that this is practice for when some idiot teenager gives you a badly spelled one star review because Plot Element A didn't meet their expectations.

Get incredibly drunk. Go repeat steps 1-5. 

Self Publishing post 2-Revisions and Editing

I'm going to start this with emphasis on editing. I don't want anybody putting the cart before the horse and starting on the submission process before they have a fully edited book ready to go.

The first rule of Trade Publishing is the same as the first rule of Self-Publishing: NEVER SEND OUT ANYTHING THAT ISN'T FINISHED.

This means before you do ANYTHING with your book, it is fully written, revised, as polished as you can get it, and as near to flawless as it is possible for one person to make your book. Trust me. You don't want rejections because "the premise has promise but it would take too much work to publish it". Which I've gotten. (I'm mostly sure these are form rejections, but that doubt is always there)

But where on earth do you start with editing? What does editing mean? What's the most important thing to focus on?

Of course, there's another side to learning how to edit on your own: You don't get screwed by asking the wrong person for help.

I had no idea what I was doing when the time came to revise my first manuscript. I would say learning how to edit is a little bit like learning how to walk. You don't even have a concept of what you need to do, or what makes a good book good. You're just sitting there wondering what books you can use for reference and knowing somewhere on the bottom of your mind that no book can really help you, it's all on you.

And so I made the biggest mistake an author can make: I let somebody else help me edit the book. There are a few major experiences I've had on this publishing road that make me feel vaguely dirty, and the Editor was one of them. One of the big watchdog sites is Predators and Editors for a damn good reason. I had no clue what I was doing, I had no idea how to vet, or that vetting was needed, or that I should be checking a track record, or that maybe, just maybe, I shouldn't be trusting an "editor" who was living on his fucking boat and bumming his internet off the local boat club. The good news is, this time I wasn't out any money.

The bad news? We'd done awful things to my manuscript without addressing any of its issues. And I got way too many ass-pats in the process. And the worst news is, if we hadn't agreed on an art-for-editing trade I would have been out a lot of money. A. LOT. OF. MONEY. Editors often charge by the page, and The Book at the time was 600 pages long. (190,000 words, I shit you not)

And so after six months of fucking around, I was back to square one: a red pen, a pile of books on editing, and a manuscript that wouldn't fit on one ream of paper.

So this, then, is the advice I wish I'd gotten four years ago.

1. Everything is connected.

There's a question that floats around writing forums about once a month. That is "What is the most important part of a story". This implies that the different bits of a story--character development, plot, rythem, flow, the actual words on the acutual pages--are independent things that can be separated from the story and/or altered without affecting the main story itself. But that's like asking what the most important part of the human body is. The answer is: All of it.

How do you apply this? Are you familiar with the term "Mary Sue?" You probably are, if you hang out in writer's forums the way I do. But just in case you don't, a Mary Sue is an extraordinary character lacking equally extraordinary circumstances to justify her existence. A Mary Sue is an indicator of issues with not just character development, but of issues with every other thing in the book. Things like a lackluster plot, an insufficiently developed supporting cast, and your own insecurities.

Yeah. I went there. And I'll go into that more as things continue.

When you're editing, your first job is to identify problems with the narrative. Frequently these problems ARE NOT THE THING ITSELF. The thing (IE Mary Sue) is usually a symptom of an underlying issue you haven't addressed yet. Your job is to begin educating yourself in what the problematic things are, and how to fix them. When you fix them, the revisions you make in the manuscript and narrative often fix the most blatant surface problems.

Watch good movies, watch bad movies. Read good books, read really, really awful books. Try to figure out what makes a good book good, and a bad one "Kill with fire". Try to see how everything connects.

2. When in doubt, throw it out.

 You have to kill your darlings. Usually, this means characters.

I like writing about people. My favorite scene in Blue Ghosts was when I sat Casey, Marco, and the rest of the gang on the floor of Marco's mod shop and just let them talk. I did not know, for example, that Tim and Abbey would have that love/hate relationship, or that Ero was going to be a fucking psychopath, until after I let them bounce off each other for a couple pages. But that's kind of why I write and it's definiately why I read.

And that's why I usually solve most of my editing issues by killing and/or removing most of the cast. Becasue my cast? It gets big. And I'll find that I've got two or three characters filling in the same "role" in the story, and that they could easily all be one person, and I would stop having to introduce character after character after character rather than getting on with the story.

The same goes with everything else. When you have an issue with something in your story, your first question should not be "How do I fix this?" Your first question should be, "Can the story I want to tell survive without this element?" If the answer is no, start looking at ways to fix things. IF THE ANSWER IS YES THROW THE DAMNED THING OUT.

The best thing you can do as a writer is make a list of your cast, either in your head or on paper (preferably on paper) and make a note about what "role" they fill in the story. If you have two or more characters filling the same "role", you need to pare that down to one. If you have several similar scenes in the same book (IE Narcissus in Chain's revolving door of rescues) dump all but one of the similar scenes and revise. If you have to introduce more than new character per scene? Toss all but that one new character. 

Ask yourself what that scene is doing for the novel. Ask yourself why X is here and not Y. Spend your first edit trying to find things you can throw out. Be ruthless. Your readers will appreciate it, and you'll probably get another novel out of what you've tossed on the cutting room floor.

3. Words are important. Don't use them more than you have to.

You are not Ray Bradbury, or Robin McKinley. You are not Stephen King and (thank God in Heaven for this mercy) you are not Anne Rice.

Do not try to be them. And more importantly, don't try to use their words. Use your own.

My first draft of The Book was my attempt to be Ray Bradbury. I loved his halcyon green glaze, I read his poetry and my brain had tiny orgasms (Not catch and grab/but find and keep/ go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep. That is my favorite poem in the universe) and I wanted to write Just. Like. That. And so I wrote things that were fifty words longer than they should have been, wagging tails of adjectives that would have put a dog-show poodle to shame. And I had to go back through during the editing process and rip all of that back out. But then I was trying to be somebody else, and I'd have to go back in and rip all that out, too.

The Elements of Style is a book you should own multiple copies of RIGHT NOW. They say that if you can say it in three words DON'T USE SIX.  Figure out what you want to say, say it in as few words as you can, and then go back and take two or three more words out.

Your readers will thank you.

 4. Listen to your instincts. They don't lie.

I think my favorite part of editing The Book came early on, not too long after I met The Editor. It was, I think, the first time I excerted my control over The Book, because he got very mad at me for doing this and I didn't care.

There was an unresolved plot thread that I wound up having to tie up after the main character's story arc climaxed. Both the MC's climax and the book's climax were good and pulse pounding IMHO, but after the MC's climax had happened the book was emphatically done. Trying to get the energy and pacing back up to where they needed to be for the next scene was like dragging the bottom of a car across a ditch. I could hear the scraping every time I hit that scene. And I couldn't figure out what to do about it. I needed to tie up that lose thread, but I needed to tie up the main character's plot thread there as well.

And then I got the idea that fixed everything. Which was going to require an awful lot of work, but it did work. It solved the problem and it cut 2,000 words off the end of the manuscript.

This is a heart process, not a head process. When editing your brain will tell you that everything you've got is just spiffy, but your gut will be screaming NO IT IS NOT YOU IDIOT as loud as it possibly can. You'll get a headache, or eye strain, or become aware that your feet are cramping...or you'll groan and mutter "NOT THIS SCENE AGAIN" which is a big red flag that the chapter you are reading NEEDS TO GO AWAY NOW and you're just not willing to admit it. So a big part of editing is training yourself to listen to these red flags. Which is a lot harder than it sounds.

But if you're trucking along at a good pace and suddenly you feel vaguely nausious and have an overwhelming urge to go reorganize your sock drawer? You've just hit a big problem spot and you need to break out the red pen refils.

5. Your job is to fuck with the reader.

Oh, there are many nicer ways to say that, but none of them are quite so true. And let's be honest with ourselves, okay? If you don't have it that concrete going in? The product won't be as good coming out.

This isn't about you. This isn't about how you feel. This isn't about how much you like writing. This is about taking the reader's mind, tying it into little tiny pretzles, and then letting them close the book with a feeling of satisfaction and/or the violent urge to buy the next book NOW. 

Good storytelling is a subconsious art form. You distract the reader with the plot and you shove major elements of the plot and climax into thier subconsious like you're shoving notes under a locked door. You flat out lie to the reader. You learn how to use visual and spoken cues to develop a character AND YOU USE THEM. You show. You don't tell. Your first thought when considering a scene should not be "how good is this scene?" It should be "How is this scene going to affect the reader's perception of X, and is that a good thing when you factor Y into the account? And can I make them cry?" Your first thought, second thought, third thought, last thought, should be how the reader is going to see your book. Because from the first word to the last sentence your book will be manipulating their mind. And if you do not address every. single. little. thing purposefully? They're going to find other things that you didn't mean to put in there.

Stephenie Meyer didn't intend for Bella Swan to be a whiny spoiled brat, but she also didn't watch her character introductions and interactions as much as she could have. She wasn't trying to get HER image of Bella into the reader's head fast enough, and so a spoiled rotten brat is what we got.

The first thing you do with the first word is develop something you want the reader to feel. Introduce characters by packing their positive qualities into the first few moments. Have their first sentence be something that defines their character. The first moments a character spend in a new location should be charged with atmosphere and detail. Because if you don't do this? The reader is going to do it on its own. I say character development should begin with the first word, not because it is an ideal, but because that's when it does start. The reader is taking every word and storing it up to form the picture of your character, and if it's not something you intended as a positive it's probably going to be something negative.

Your goal should be to write so well that when your book ends on a cliffhanger, the reader throws the book across the room screaming "Fuck you author" at the top of their lungs, and then immediately runs out to get the next book, because they have to know what happens next. And the only way to do that is to polish until it is perfect and make sure that you've done every little manipulative thing you can to make your book a good one.

When you've trained your mind to consider every word, including words like "a, and, it, is, said, the" and "then", for its impact on the reader? You've finally started to learn how to edit.

It's down and dirty, but when it's done right the experience can be oh, so very pretty.  

Self Publishing post the first: Try for trade

I'm going to head this by pointing out my credentials.

Or rather, my utter lack of them.

Success is defined in the book world by five digit numbers. Mine are in the threes. I sell just under one book a day, so I probably can't tell you the great secret behind the curtain on how to sell a million ebooks in five months (hint: It involves buying reviews and faking others and being generally dishonest.) or how to replicate Amanda Hocking's amazing success (I'm reading her sirens series and all I'll say is, Stephenie Meyer 2.0 and FUCK was Lullaby unsatisfying)

But I can tell you the steps I took and what I did, and what you need to avoid.

I have published six books that I feel "significant", and a whole bunch of short stories that I don't. I've sold 179 books. Of those, 95 were of one series (two books, 80 and 15 sales respectively) and 49 were of the other (26, 15 and 6 of the three books in the series)

These numbers aren't the greatest. 

And so this post is about why you need to try trade publishing first.

You've written your dream book. This is your perfect project. This is what you want the world to see when they read you. And you want to put it out there and be successful and have your whole world change, just because you're sharing the story in your head. You've heard the horror stories, you know the rejection notice roulette usually results in piles and piles of nos and a handful of yesses that eventually lead up to nos, and you don't understand why you should subject yourself to the ungodly nightmare that is trying to become trade published.

And I'm not trying to use hyperbole in that last sentence. I am sure for other (read as: nurologically normal and sane people with thick skins and talent) trying to become trade published was just...normal. Like any other job hunt. For me, I would have been better off mainlining Effexer for six months and then going cold turkey (for those of you not on the up and up with psycheatric meds, this is known for causing psychotic breaks, including one in my own family) I did it for two years, mostly solid rejections all the way around, and by the end of those two years I was literally hanging on by my fingernails. Most of this had nothing to do with the rejection cycle, but the rejections kept triggering several underlying issues. By the time we got to The Big One last April, I was pretty much done and I damn well knew it.

But I do believe even the limited success I do have? Is something I have because I tried to be trade published first. And here is my list of reasons:

1. You will develop that thick skin: 

Seriously. Why one star? It wasn't even that negative a review!

You're going to get bad feedback. YOU ARE GOING TO GET BAD FEEDBACK. And what sucked a little tiny bit when you were posting on fictionpress and fanfiction.net and AO3 and wherever else it is you go to put your work online is going to hurt ten thousand times more when it's a bad review on a for pay site and that's the only review on the entire book. You KNOW that book doesn't deserve that review. You know it and you're right about it, and there isn't a goddamned thing you can do about it because the review is there. And everybody who looks at it is going to go "That book must be full of formatting mistakes and misspelling errors and it must have no plot, so we're going to avoid it"

And you absolutely, positively, cannot tell this person why they are wrong. You can't respond. You can't tell them OF COURSE IT ISN'T LONGER THE DESCRIPTION SAID "SHORT STORY". You can't explain the reason why their favorite pairing didn't come together. You have to keep it together and ignore it, even though you know that book is now basically DOA.

And it's a lot easier when you've got 50+ rejection letters under your belt. Seriously. After you've gone through this:

Is it sad that they couldn't get my name right and I still think it's a form rejection?

Having to deal with this:

...yeah.

Isn't nearly as hard. Oh, it'll still make you twitch, but you won't be clicking on that comment button. It's better to be the unknown author of a few awful books than to be e-famous for writing "You're interrogating the text from the wrong perspective" because somebody actually TOLD you your books were awful. Your writing can get better. Your reputation? That won't.

2. You WILL start going to publishing resources

Researching agents and publishers is the second hardest part of attempting trade publication (Not hitting the "send" button on your diatribe on their stupidity for rejecting your masterpiece is the hardest. Seriously. When you open your e-mail from your dream agent, disconnect your internet before you read it.) There are a lot of agents out there who are good, wonderful people who already have lots of clients, who really, REALLY don't need you, who will be happy to send you a nice form rejection and be on their way.

And there are many more bad agents who are desperate for clients who will joyfully accept your manuscript (and, more often than not, your money) right out of the gate. And that doesn't even begin to touch on the large number of terrible, terrible publishers out there.

This is public enemy number one in my book

If your book gets accepted by a bad publisher or a bad agent? You're screwed. And you'll be screwed for however long that contract you signed is good for. You'll need to learn how to research agents to make sure that the one you're querying has actual real deals under their belt. You'll need to learn how to research publishers to make sure their books are good quality, are acutally selling and are not actively ripping off their authors. You'll need to learn how to research contracts so that you don't get screwed by that seemingly innocent clause you just happened to breeze on by.

The good news is, there are lots of websites that will help you. I found the Absolute Write Water Cooler by googling Agentname+Scam, and from there I found Writer Beware, Evil Editor, Author! Author!, Janet Reid's Blog, Predators and Editors, and and about fifty other sites that I STILL read every day even though trade publication and I don't exactly go together anymore. (We're at that "christmas cards and discreete nod at the grocery store line" stage of the breakup)

Why is this valuable to a would be self-publisher?

Tate. Archway. Xlibris, iUniverse.  A quick google of "self publishing" brought all of those up on the first page. They are all companies that offer a package deal--editing, cover, typesetting and a press release--for a significant amount of money. Just looking at them, if you didn't know better you'd compare the packages and the products and pick the one you think you like the best. Problem is? Unless you do the research, there's no way to know that all four of those are Author Solutions, a terrible publishing company with a horrible history of customer service, whose editing sucks, whose coverart is lackluster at best, and who will lock you into a year long contract in which you do not receive any direct information on how much you are selling where, and I can promise you their "distribution" is going through places that you can access yourself for much less than what they'll charge you.

Long before I decided to self publish, I learned to stay the fuck away from Author Solutions. I learned to stay away from Publish America, which deserves a post of its very own for how truely shitty they are to would be authors (If you EVER consider sending your book to Publish America? Burn it first. You'll be happier and if you send them the ashes, they'll probably still publish it) I learned not to go with any agent that doesn't have a sale to a publisher that doesn't accept unsolicited manuscripts. I learned to look at what the track records are, and how trustworthy someone might be, and that you absolutely DO have every right to e-mail every author on somebody's list and ask "how are they treating you" before you accept any deal you might be offered.

When you decide to self publish, you're going to have to avoid the obvious scams, like PA (I haven't warned you enough yet. STAY AWAY FROM PUBLISH AMERICA) and the not so obvious ones, like Author Solution's octopus of front companies. And then you're going to have to do things like artwork and editing and typesetting and distribution yourself, which you probably can't because you don't know how. So you're going to have to go to editors who offer you this really great deal to doctor up your book, and you're going to have to ask for a list of clients and books the editor has fixed for those clients, and you're going to have to look at those books and talk to those clients before you decide that you want to hire that editor to do your book. You're going to have to decide if you want to use Lulu.com, Createspace or Lightening Source for your print books and said print books' distribution (I still have not made that decision). You're going to have to do a mountain of research.

Doing it for trade publication will get you into the habit now. There's a lot more valuable support for would-be trade authors than there is for self-publishing authors, and the entire business is a lot more shady. Get into the habit in waters that are only kind of murky before you dive into the quagmire.

3. You will learn how to revise your work.

Oh god. Revision. Revision. Revision. Revision. Revision.

Here is a part of my publishing journey that I am not very proud of. I had an agent still looking at my book when I decided to start self publishing.

I can hear the horrified gasps from here. And it wasn't just the query process, either. They had requested materials. In fact, they had requested materials that they had already rejected once, that they were looking over again because I had asked them if they would, and they said yes.

Agents do not do this. It was a horrible thing for me to move ahead with the self publishing when I had not yet gotten a definite NO from them during that second round. You? Should not do this. I only did it because I hadn't heard anything from them for six months despite four "bland and polite as possible" touch-base e-mails, and I figured they had lost the project somewhere and had also totally lost their interest. They did e-mail me two months AFTER I had begun self publishing new material, which made it eight months total without any contact whatsoever. I told them "Thank you very much, take all the time you need to review my material" and crossed my fingers. That was august of last year. I've heard absolutely nothing since.

(Those materials, BTW, are from the first book of the unreleased trilogy that Exiles is slowly lumbering its way towards. I care enough about this project to try to build an audience for it before I let it go into the wild.)

The Query process is a constant onslaught of revision. Your revise the query letter. You revise the novel. You revise until you begin seeing little lights flash every time you look at a printed word. You revise and revise and revise and then put it away while you send out the next batch of query letters. By the time you get the next batch of rejections, you're ready to start revising again! And you're also working on your next project while all this is going on, so that it will be ready to query when you finally kill that first project dead!

The best way to succeed at self publishing is to have books. Lots of books.  Put out as fast as you possibly can. The best way to do that is get good at typing, get fast at writing, and get even better at revising the sucker in as few passes as possible. And the best way to do that is to spend a solid year doing it for people who are not you. For people who expect your book to be bloody fucking perfect when they get it. For people who will tell you exactly how much your book sucks if, and only if, they actually see potential in it. It's learning to fly by throwing yourself out of the nest. It's the only way to go.

4. You will learn how to sell your book.

You should attempt Trade publication for the query letter. That, all by itself, is worth every single solitary hour of misery you're going to feel slogging up that hill.

The query letter is your attempt to sell your book to an agent. They have very precise expectations. Query Shark, run by the incredible Janet Reid, is the best resource for learning what those expectations are. And you know what they are, basically?

A jacket blurb.

As of right now, I have about ten versions of my query letter. Only one of them (the one I sent to the agent that had and STILL HAS my materials for-effing-ever) has ever netted any results. Each one of them taught me a lesson in what NOT to do to try to sell my book to people. Don't ask retorical questions. Don't be cute. Don't flat out lie (which I did in one variation). Don't go overboard on backstory. Don't mention more than two characters by name, and don't mention more than five characters total in the entire query. Don't suck up to the reader. Ever.

Everything I learned trying to query agents is something I use when I write the blurbs for my books. Yep, they're not the best. But they are much better than they would be if I hadn't spent two years learning why "What if you discovered your fantasy world is real" is the worst opening line ever in a sales pitch. Because that's what your blurb is. It's a sales pitch. That and the cover art are your shots at getting a reader to read your book. It's the most important thing you'll write in the entire project. And the only way to do it is to slam your head against the trade wall until your brain turns into mush and your eyeballs bleed, and it finally sinks in that starting with where the character was born MIGHT not be the brightest idea you ever had.

5. BECAUSE THEY MIGHT ACTUALLY WANT YOUR BOOK

This is the biggest reason. Self publishing sucks. There isn't much difference, IMHO, between getting twenty form rejections and spending a week watching your Amazon ranking sink lower and lower while your sales reports don't even twitch. It's the same game, only there's a lot more work for you and your chances of success are even harder in the self-publishing game.

And a real publisher might just want you.

If I did not know exactly what would happen to me if I tired (namely, a depressive cycle so deep it'd take a forklift and a flashlight for me to even see daylight again) I would still be querying agents for my projects. And I probably wouldn't have any self published things out there, because by all reports the big boys won't want you if you self publish ANYTHING and fail. I chose to self publish, not because I thought I knew better than the big boys, but because I knew I had just reached my limit and I couldn't go any further down that road without making some really unfortunate choices. I gave it one more shot, it ended rather profoundly, and I knew I was done.

But it's worth trying, anyway. It's better to fail at something you put your whole heart into than it is to not try and spend the rest of your life wondering. I tried, I failed, and I have my answer now.

And who knows? You might just be what they're looking for.