Negotiating and learning about the publishing contract

I came back from my New Year's writing retreat to the next phase of the traditional publishing adventure: negotiating the contract.

There's a complicated scale for royalties for hardcover and paperback and ebooks, depending on how many you sell (higher royalty the more you sell) but it isn't great under any circumstances. Publishers only really make money with volume sales. They sell the books to bookstores at a 40% or greater discount off the list price and incur all costs of insurance and shipping and buying the books back if they don't sell. A book like mine, by an unknown, unproven author, is a big gamble and they're only willing to invest so much. Maybe it will take off, maybe it will flop. Of course, they want it to be a big seller and so do I, but that depends on so many of the stars aligning just right, so many unpredictable factors.

In the short run, I could probably make as much money by self-publishing as I will initially get from the publisher so it's a gamble for me too. My hope, and theirs, is that their possibilities for exposing it to a wider public in ways that self-publishing can't do will garner us more readers.

At the end of the week's conversations with my agent, I told her I wanted to pursue this with the publisher for the experience of it. To have a traditional publisher and go through all the steps and see what happens. To be honest, this is already farther than I ever thought I'd get. So it's thrilling no matter what!

Story magic

Today is the last day of the 8-day writing retreat. With no big project to work on, I floundered the first few days, not knowing how to structure my time or direct my energies. But I fell into a comfortable rhythm of drafting 2-3 poems a day and writing a fictional prompt. Some of the poems have real potential and that pleases me and I have liked being back in the kind of thinking that poetry gets me into. I become more observant of what's going on around me as I am always looking for poem ideas: a snippet of conversation, light on a tree trunk, a face seen in a store.

The prompts have been less successful though fun to write. My good friend Bridget gave me a Storymatic box of prompts for Christmas. It has two kinds of cards, characters and situation, and they've been fun to fool with. Then yesterday, as I was writing a prompt that needed to incorporate a parade and a smoker, story magic happened. About the fifth sentence, something in my creative self began to tingle and a character showed up, one with great possibility for something more, something larger, maybe the next novel. I don't know yet but my excitement while writing a few more sentences and then taking a few notes of possibility was palpable. Even better, I woke up thinking about the prompt this morning and what different things could happen next.

And this morning I wrote a different prompt and had the same tingling, the same excitement. I don't know if the two prompts are connected or are two separate stories or are even really stories, but something has opened up and it's way cool!

Resting in the pause

I am on day 2 of an 8-day retreat at Aldermarsh, a retreat center on Whidbey Island north of Seattle. Large parts of each of my books have been written here and I usually come in mid-project with clear direction for what to do each day. This time is different. I completed a draft of my current novel last August and it is with beta-readers. I completed a small how-to book earlier this month and it is with a proofreader. So I am in the pause.

I am not someone who is usually comfortable in the pause. Rest and relaxation are not easy for me, and even though I say I want them and sometimes even yearn for them, I don't know how to be in them. I'm more about getting things done, about being engaged in some mental or physical activity.

So I'm letting myself do whatever occurs to me next. Yesterday I worked on a proofing project for my novel, The Color of Longing, that will come out next month. Then I read through a notebook of old prompts. I am hoping that my next novel idea will find me while I am here. My three drafted novels all came out of ideas in that notebook, but this time no such luck. I think I have used those up.

So today I wrote a new prompt and wrote a poem and began to revise some poems that I wrote two years ago. I also spent some time starting a list of creative project ideas for next year, both in painting and writing. It has been a good day, although I still miss being in the middle of a book.

Making my way into traditional publishing

For the last 15 months, my agent (it still gives me a thrill to say that) has been shopping my mystery novel to potential publishing houses. We had both just about given up (she was down to the last 6 of the many acquisition editors she knows) when we got a nibble, an editor loving the book and wanting to know if it was still available. Why, yes! we said. And so she finished it and asked permission to send it with her proposal on up the chain of decision-markers at her company.

Two more weeks went by and I stopped being excited and anxious about it, which was a good thing. I had a sleepless night the first night and expected to hear an answer right away, but of course things don't move that quickly. When the offer did come on Tuesday morning this week, I was excited all over again.

It's a satisfying recognition of my book and my writing to have someone believe in it enough to bet money on it, which is what the publishing business does with books. Some authors and books are sure bets. Stephen King can writer a stinker and millions of people will buy it. (Don't get me wrong. I like Stephen King, some of the time.) Other people can write heartbreakingly good books and no one is interested. So it's a crap shoot in a way.

I think that's particularly true in these volatile times when hundreds of thousands of people are publishing books, mostly online, and just as many people are buying books online instead of in bookstores. Publishing is in the midst of a revolution, and so I feel particularly pleased that a traditional publishing house is willing to take a chance on my book selling enough to be worth their while. And the fact that they are building their literary fiction line makes me very proud indeed.

How much editing and rewriting is enough?

I'm coming into the final stages of work on my novel, The Color of Longing. I've read it multiple times, I let it rest for over a year, worked on it again. I had several beta readers and my agent give me feedback , and I worked on it some more. And then last summer, I declared it complete. Years ago, I read that we finish a piece of writing or artwork when we run out of time (if we're on a deadline) or we run out of juice for the project. I'm running out of juice on this one.

However, that doesn't mean I was done at that point, just done with rewriting. The next step was to send the book to a professional proofreader. She found a good number of small things and a few larger items to signal to me and I made all those changes. Then I sent it off to the designer.

Now, I'm proofreading the laid-out version. I'm restraining from making changes, just cleaning up errors, but it is amazing how many things I see each time I look at it. But after this round, I'm just going to let it go. There's a perfectionist part of me that wants it to be just so, and I also know that imperfection is part of the creative process.

Judging a book by its cover

My friend Jan is in the research process of figuring out how and with whom to publish a novel. She is a thoughtful and methodical person and I am benefiting from all her reading, as I don't have the patience to do that. "You've got to have a professional-looking cover," she says at our Friday writing day. "It makes all the difference."

I know she's right. CreateSpace, where I'm about to publish my first novel, lets you design your own cover. And it's a great option, especially if money is tight. You get to pick from a lot of images and a lot of fonts and do something that pleases you. And most of these covers look fine. But they don't all look great. Most people don't know about the legibility of fonts, or the emotional impact of colors, or the way that shifting everything a quarter-inch to the right will make all the difference in eye appeal.

Graphic designers are trained in eye appeal, as most of them make their money from marketing and advertising work. They've learned all the subtleties that encourage people to pick something up and examine it more closely. It's a combination of art and science that most of us don't have.

I'm blessed to have a designer who's a friend and a colleague. She has a great eye for color and shape and organization, and she's a pleasure to work with because it's a collaborative effort. I've been working with her to design the cover for the novel. I've asked for color changes, different fonts, moving things around a little. And she's been gracious and come up with great solutions. She has also designed an interior that carries the cover design so my book will be gorgeous inside and out.

I think many people do judge a book by its cover. Maybe not judge, but definitely pick up and buy. Something to consider when you get ready to self-publish.

Collaborating on a book

I'm in the later stages of completing a brief book called Sober Play: Using Creativity for More Joy and Meaning in Recovery. This is my fifth book and the first one I've done in collaboration. My friend Bridget Benton and I started talking about this book a couple of years ago when we were on a writing retreat. I was talking about it as a project I'd like to do and she expressed interest in working on it with me. At the time she was just finishing up her fabulous Creative Conversations: Art-Making as Playful Prayer. This had been a long process for her carved out of a busy life and I was reluctant to ask her to commit to yet another book right away. And I was working on a novel that I didn't want to drop, even for a while. So we let it sit.

Then last August I finished the draft of the novel and knew that I wanted to take on Sober Play as my next effort. But Bridget was still hard at work on other major projects, so we agreed that I would move forward on my own. I wrote a first and second draft that could stand alone or that could fold in some chapters of Bridget's experience and expertise. And once I saw the value of another voice of experience in the book, I also asked some other friends to share their experience, strength, and hope about using creativity in recovery in mini-essays.

It has been important and interesting for me to relinquish full control of the outcome of these contributions, to wait on someone else's schedule, to figure out how to mesh voices and formatting into a whole. Fortunately, Bridget and I both have a solid foundation in the 12 Steps so our negotiations have been easy and simplified by the use of those tools and our mutual commitment to generosity. And I can already see that the book is going to be richer and stronger for all these collaborations.