Michael Andre McPherson

Beyond the Slushpile

Tag archive: Editing

by

Kindles Everywhere

Look out Sony e-reader, Nook and Kobo, because Amazon announced this week that Kindles are now on display and available for purchase at 3,200 Walmart stores.  Since they’re already in Best Buy, Staples and Target, that means they’re everywhere, and they’re getting cheaper with the new ad version.

This can only be good news for authors, because once people get their hands on an e-reader, any e-reader, they’re going to want content–inexpensive content.

I know I keep repeating  this, but so many good writers I know out there refuse to publish because they’re waiting for the brass ring and the pat on the head from a literary agent, a publisher and the adoring public in that order.  A two year process at best.

So I’m going to try a little experiment.  By this Friday, I hope to have crunched through all of the editor’s notes on my vampire novel.  I want to publish it to coincide with the launch of the movie Priest, which as I posted before, has some very similar themes–walled cities, vampire armies and warrior priests.

I’ll keep track of how many copies of my e-book novel (and its sequels) that I sell in the next two years.  There’s only one prediction I can make that I’m certain will come true: I’ll make more money and have more sales than my friends who have yet to get a literary agent to start their ball rolling.

by

My Editor has My Other Baby

Fogel and I have been debating how e-books will affect freelance editors.  I’m guessing that people who want to indie e-publish will be swamping freelancers’ in-boxes with edit requests.  Fogel argues that freelance cover artists will get a lot of business, but freelance editors won’t.  She says:

“Most self-published e-books will fall into the same categories paper books do. There’ll be the professional writers who rerelease books that are out of print, and haven’t the rights to the original cover, or hated it. Then there’ll be the rank amateurs who have no business calling themselves writers and self-publish because no legitimate publisher will take them on. The former don’t need editors because the book’s finished; the latter won’t use them because they think they can write, but know they can’t draw.”

I’m sure some indie authors will fall into the Howett category, writers who simply can’t believe they need a substantive editor let alone a copy editor.  But Joe Konrath keeps pointing out that indie writers need two things: a good editor and a good cover artist.  I’m not the only indie author reading his blog.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve gone through the editing process so many times with my short stories, but I can’t imagine publishing without an editor.  So I’ve sent Fogel my other baby, the vampire novel, and I’ve got my fingers crossed that she won’t totally gut my heart out.

The good news is that she’s already read the first two chapters and written back that there are “no show-stoppers.”  From Fogel that’s high praise.

Fogel’s launched a website, but don’t hire her if you’re looking for the sort of praise you’d expect from a mother, cause you won’t be getting it.  You’ll be getting the unvarnished truth.  She doesn’t care about your feelings.  It’s why I chose her for my editor.

by

Priest Forces My Hand

The first hint of trouble came from a friend who had read and liked my vampire novels.  He sent an e-mail with a link to the website of the movie, Priest, and asked me if it sounded familiar.   The tone of the e-mail indicated he already knew the answer.

Three of the main components of that movie trailer are in my novel: walled cities, vampire armies and warrior priests.  Aside from that my novel is very different, but I know people will draw parallels between the two.

I admit vampire armies is not that original an idea.  I mean, if you make two vampires and they make two vampires and so on it’s pretty obvious that eventually humans will have to wall off their cities and fight swarms of vampires.

As for my protagonist belonging to a quasi-religious order–well priests have been fighting demons for centuries, and Hollywood has exploited that idea many times.

So I had to decide: slink away with my Priest-like vampire novel or go for it.  Then it occurred to me that this is a marketing dream.  When people ask what my novel is about, I can say that it’s Priest meets the Battle for Helms Deep from Lord of the Rings.

Okay, some of you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about, but the fans who would buy this type of novel will know exactly what I mean.

I can’t wait to see Priest, because I’m pretty sure that the movie’s high-tech take on vampire fighting is very different from my post-apocalyptic novel, where gunpowder is so scarce that people carry swords and cross bows as supplementary weapons, and gasoline engines are a thing of the distant past.

I’m also betting that I have the better story, but I’m judging the trailer so that may not be fair.

So here’s the plan: run my novel to my editor (God help me) and hire a cover artist.  This novel has already been through several readers, so hopefully Fogel won’t totally gut me.  By the release date of Priest, May 13th, I intend to launch my novel on Amazon.

It’s going to be a tight deadline, especially since the Toronto Marathon is on May 15th and I’m training five evenings a week, but it’s exciting.

by

A Warning for Self-e-published Authors

I prefer not to simply publish links to other people’s content on this blog, but this warning from Amanda Hocking was aimed right at me.

She’s done what I want to do: e-self-published through Amazon and Smashwords, and she’s making thousands a month doing it.  She’s snagged an agent.  She’s making a good living as an author.

But she warns here that she knows another author, J. L. Bryan, who doesn’t sell as well even though he is a good writer and performs the same marketing moves that she does.

The warning is clear.  Even if the writing, promotion and cover are all great, your book might languish simply because you didn’t strike a cord, hit the right topic or simply didn’t appeal to the reading public.

It’s all a big gamble.  Just ask a traditional publisher.  Luckily with e-books, the upfront costs aren’t as huge as print books.

by

Want to Write a Novel With Me?

I like writing because it’s a solitary task.  I’m the complete dictator of an entire world when I sit in front of my keyboard.  I decide who lives and who dies, who get’s laid and who joins the priesthood.

Of course this dictatorship ends when I present my work to others to read, whether an editor, a writers group or friends.  Then I have to listen to opinions, weigh reputations and compromise.

So Fogel, my editor, has serious concerns about my novel, In a Country Burning, and I have some big decisions to make.  Because it’s my first novel, written and rewritten dozens of times over twenty years–yes, you heard me–twenty years, I’ve lost all perspective.

So I thought, why not make it a public effort?  I’ll tell you where I am in the novel and the problems I’m having.  People are welcome to e-mail suggestions.

Just remember: I’m still the dictator in the end.  All opinions are just that: opinions.  If you send me a suggestion, you’re sending it for free and will receive no compensation.  If I use one of your suggestions it doesn’t mean you own part of my novel.  I retained all rights, copyrights  and ownership.  This is my baby.

So: these two guys walk into Afghanistan in 1983…

by

Looking Outside the Box for the Juicy Gossip

I opened that hideous box last Monday, the one containing my perfect manuscript now covered with Fogel’s scrawls.  There’s a lot of work to do on my novel, no doubt, but the comments that concern me the most are the ones I got by e-mail before I received the box.

One of Fogel’s main complaints is that I don’t have a clear picture in my own head of my characters.

What!  I’ve written and re-written this novel more than ten times.  These characters are like very close friends.  I thought I had a clear picture of them in my head, thank you very much.

But when I calmed down and thought about it, I had each character in a specific box of time and place.

So I started thinking about my real friends in real life.  I know where they went to high school.  I know where their parents dragged them to church each Sunday (and which religion) until adulthood.  I know which ones still go to church.  I can recall career successes and failures, drunken nights on the town or weekends camping.

Life’s big and stuff happens.  I think of my dad today because it’s Remembrance Day, a paratrooper at too young an age, scarred for the rest of his life not just by the war but also because he lost his mom to TB near Christmas of 1945–before he even had a chance for that well-earned moment of peace, to feel safe back home.  What if I didn’t know that about him?  Would I describe him just as a old man, recently deceased?  There’s so much more there.

As for my friends, I know what they had hoped to become and how that turned out for them.  I know whom they slept with and whether it was a good idea.  Sure, I don’t know these intimate details for everyone I’ve met.  I’m just talking about close friends, because I’d better know my characters at least that well.

So I began asking questions and had to spend two days answering them, and it took a lot of research.  I not only had to fill out biographies for them, but their parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters.  Who got along in the family and who hated each others’ guts with the intensity that only sibling rivalry can inspire?  Who was a disappointment to their father/mother/son/daughter?  What caused friction in the family?  Who went to war and who dodged the draft? Who refuses to go to mass at Christmas despite his mother’s pleas? Who got a good job and who had the bad habit?

You get the idea.  I need to know what they smell like after a hot day of work.  I need their biographies from birth to death, even beyond the time frame of my novel.

So damn if Fogel isn’t right again, because as I fill in these details, many of which will never appear in the novel, my characters, their motivations, their likes and dislikes become clearer with each new tidbit of juicy gossip.

Many of you writers already knew this.  I thought I did.

But now I’m trying to think outside that box.

by

The Fogel Speaks Again

Guest Post by Melanie Fogel

Here’s the thing:

I’m a great believer in writing from the inside out. What that means is that, although good story is more important than good writing, writing is the only means you have of conveying the story.

So at some point, you stop writing story and take a hard look at the way you’ve used the words. You aim for the lightning rather than the lightning bug (I assume you know Twain’s quote on the subject). But if you haven’t got the story firmly anchored in your head–the character, the setting, the meaning of the climax–then you can’t come up with the lightning words.

In one of the great climactic scenes in Caryl Férey’s Zulu, he uses the word “totem” to talk about the stillness of the protagonist. He could have used “statue,” or “carved figure,” or “rock,” but believe me, “totem” is killer lightning. It took everything that happened in the novel prior to this point to make “totem” so striking (pun intended).  And you gasp, not only at the brilliant writing, but at the significance of the sentence to the story.

Honestly, I could teach an entire writing course based on that novel.

Mike’s Note: This article will find a permanent home under “The Fogel Speaks.”

by

My Editor Guts My Heart Out and Hands It To Me On A Plate

Mike’s second rule of publishing is to hire an editor.  Don’t get me wrong: I’m a genius, but sometimes that doesn’t make it onto the page.  There’s no one like an editor who can tease out of your brain what you were really trying to say, to make you laugh at what you had accidentally said, or cringe because he/she is so harsh.

Now I’m not talking about a copy editor here–that comes later.  I’m talking about a substantive editor, a pro who will critique the whole deal.

But danger lies in wait out there for unsuspecting writers.  The predator editors lurk on websites all over the cyber world.  They have no editing credentials, and they know little about writing and publishing.  I read one resume that shamelessly listed “tug boat captain” as if it had something to do with writing.  They will charge you as much as the pros, and they will do nothing for your work.  They are to be avoided at all costs.

So for my novel I went with the devil I know, an editor who’d driven me out of my mind when critiquing my short stories before she’d buy them.  Despite the damage to my scalp from all the hair pulling, my stories always ended up far better when they went to print.

Melanie Fogel spent fifteen years in the editing trenches at Storyteller Magazine.  She waded through piles of slush seeking short story gems.  She encouraged new authors, ruthlessly critiqued their work and fearlessly rejected even well-published authors if their short stories weren’t up to standard.

But Melanie’s credentials don’t stop there: she teaches creative writing, leads writers groups and is also a published short story writer, so she’s seen both sides of the editing process.

Melanie rejected the first short story I ever sent her, but she did something no editor had ever done before: she told me why.  Yup, she gutted out my heart and handed it to me on a plate.

I didn’t like hearing that the first half of my beloved short story was “irrelevant,” but I knew a golden opportunity when I saw it.  I slashed the first half of the story off, wrote another story keeping her comments in mind, sent them back to Storyteller and BAAM!  I had my first two sales: Burning Moose and Beer Truck.  The former even made it onto the 2002 Great Canadian Story Contest short list.  The neighbors must’ve wondered about all the shouting.

But Melanie won’t rubber stamp your stories even if she’s encouraged you to submit more work.  I sent her over a dozen stories between 2002 and 2007, when Storyteller closed up shop, and she published eight of them, summarily executing the others, even a Bony Pete contest winner.

So three weeks ago I hired Melanie to look at “In a Country Burning,” the novel that we’re going to take to e-publishing success, and she threw the first monster monkey wrench into the works.  Yup, she ripped out my beating heart handed it back on a silver platter.

“The writing, the actual line by line writing,” she states, is not as good as my writing of three years ago.  The misplaced modifiers are driving her crazy when they aren’t making her laugh.

What went wrong?  I’d like blame it on sleep deprivation (I have three very young children) but I believe it’s actually because I committed one of the greatest sins of writing.  I stopped.  After my youngest was born I stopped writing for nearly a year.  It shows.

Is it hopeless?  I received this e-mail from her this week: “I’m near enough the end that I’m starting to see what you were trying to do with this thing.”

That’s about as close to praise as I’ll ever get from Melanie, but that’s okay.  I didn’t hire her to pat me on the head.  The idea is to make the novel better.

If all I wanted was praise I’d go to my mother.  Actually, she can be pretty honest too.