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Elsewhere on LJ a question came up. It's one that I've thought about a lot over the past years (unlike, say, http protocol, but I digress). How fast can one write? How fast should one write? The answer to this question is about as varied as the answer to the question "How do you write a novel?" as applied to novelists.

And, as LJ seems intent on not actually letting me post anything like a reply to any of the comments, I thought I'd answer with a couple of versions, which are all, oddly enough, mine.

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Which is actually a cheap attempt to distract people from the fact that I don't actually pay enough attention to web protocols <g>.

For anyone who is interested, my Worldcon Schedule follows:

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I don't have a running battle with Spam. For the most part, aside from the gender specific pieces, which are mildly amusing or irritating depending on the phase of the moon, I toss it and ignore it. But every so often, like, say, Right This Minute, it irritates me for specific reasons.
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Quality means many things at many ages. When I was thirteen, I could read romances. It was the last time I could. I found them for ten cents a piece at a used bookstore near my grandparents house, which was cheaper than comics. I bought them by the handfuls because they were cheap. Did I notice that they were poorly written? No. There are books I adored as a child that I simply cannot read now, and it pains me. It's a loss. I don't bother to waste time thinking I was stupid; those were things that saved time and sanity in a confusing world, and I've lost the way into them. I can still read the first John Carter of Mars book, though.
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There are stages of writing.

Some people start with short stories, and some, bless them, have success with those. It's common wisdom that writing short stories -- and selling them -- will give you some credibility when you try to sell a novel, although there are authors who make their reputations writing nothing but short fiction. Obviously, I'm not one of those. I started writing short stories, or rather, attempting to, and my third attempt was a novel. Then again, I start out writing a short single paragraph response to anything, and the final result is four pages. I'm not really good with length.

The reason you get to hear this is because I was so relieved when Katherine Kerr told me that her first four Deverry books started out as a short story. It was similar to the feeling I get when I read poetry that strikes an experiential chord: I'm not alone. It's not just me.( Read more... )

I've scooped this from the previous thread's comments because I want to clarify my rant's stance for a variety of reasons.

Ran smack into that very attitude you describe here:

http://maisonneuve.org/blog/index.php?itemid=363

(It's not his assessment of PDK that annoys me, but his general attitude towards SF.)

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This is not really about business, or about the business, so if that's what you're reading for, this is your great big warning signpost: Stop Here. It is indirectly about writing, and, I think, professional attitude.
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Current Mood: aggravated

Elsewhere on LJ, someone I've met in person has just finished a novel that they feels is hard to define. Names left off, because I actually want to say a few things about this that I feel are of interest in general, and didn't ask if I could be specific.

First, I've read some of the author's published short fiction, and I consider it quite good and tonally consistent, which is sometimes hard to achieve when starting out. Novels are a different beast than short stories, but it's for novels that agents are usually found; short fiction is almost never (but not never) represented unless it's a collection.
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The purpose of all these rambling comments has been to share my take on various things I've seen. It is, of course, subjective; it is filtered through a narrow sensibility. It is not meant to imply expertise on my part, because there's still a lot I don't know, and things change constantly, so knowing anything is an ongoing process.

A couple of trailing comments that I couldn't jam in elsewhere, and then back to the question of my current ignorance.

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When I first started working in a bookstore, we ordered from the frontlist, and we kept a chunk of what didn't sell for the backlist, because as a specialty store, backlist was important. This was before the rise of the big box stores, and our entire inventory was on cards; we had one card per book, and the sales history of each book was written on that card; they were filed in the order in which they were shelved.
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In Print, and other less happy categories Part 1

Since

sartorias and

yhlee continue to talk about the intricacies of process and questions that arise from struggling with it day to day, I'll go back to rambling a bit about things that are less fun, but not, in the continuum that sees writing merge with business, less relevant, I hope <wry g>.

Every shipment of books that arrives in the store will, in theory, come with an invoice. Unless it's the new Simon & Schuster Canadian distribution, in which case it will come with a packing list, no discount listed, and some of the prices wrong. But I'm not bitter. No wait, I'm digressing.

The invoice will list the books in a variety of ways, usually by title. The books that come in, we price and shelve. The books that don't come in usually have a code associated with them to tell us why they're not there. ( Read more... )

My husband isn't a writer, but he's lived with me for long enough that he's had to develop an interest in all aspects of the profession. It was actually his idea that I start these ramblings because he thought they'd be of interest to people; I've worked in bookstores for more than half my life now, and he thought what's invisible to me because it's so ingrained wouldn't necessarily be invisible to everyone else. It's been interesting because I'm certain I still make assumptions while trying to break things down into component parts.

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A couple more questions fielded, from comment threads. I should probably try to keep the answers in the threads, but I find it easier this way; I think the moveable type model is probably a better one for an ongoing discussion, because it lacks the threading, and it's easier to see what's new. But it also requires scads of bandwidth, because you can easily end up reloading a megabyte or more everytime you look at a post. That was tonight's digression.

Onward.

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Catch all, tonight.

Well, okay, a buch of excuses, and then catch-all.

I actually do this for fun. No, honestly, I've been enjoying this immensely. I'm thinking out loud, and my thought processes are over-focused, repetitive, and digressive (if that's a word). I'm happy to do this until the cows come home (which is one of those phrases that makes no sense, considering that I don't own cows. Or maybe it does, in that it implies that I don't shut up). One of the high points of Confluence, for me, was talking to Sally Kobee about -- you guessed it! -- bookselling. I sort of wish I could drag Alice Bentley into this as well, because she certainly saw things about the industry that I did -- but also has her own take, and she does LJ. Or Tom Whitmore. Then again, they may not like to go on at length.

I've been using these posts as a spur to get real writing done; wordage first, LJ post later. I answer quick comments as I can during the day. But having done my writing for the evening, I'm about to launch into answers for a bunch of disparate questions.

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rowyn supplies the question for tonight's ramble.

Subject: Is the writer blamed for bad sell-through?

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Is there any chance you could link me back to your discussion of vanity
presses? I've been having a dreadful time trying to convince a first-time
author I've been editing not to go with a vanity press. She took a class
and believes that publishing houses are the work of the devil (?!). Any
info much appreciated!

Everything I say here is about fiction. In fact, it's about genre fiction in large part. Non-fiction is different. If you have a non-fiction book, you can read this, but it doesn't apply to you.

I mentioned in one or another of these rambling posts that the reason I started all of them in the first place was the mention of Vanity Presses.

valancy made the above comment in one of the topic threads, but I wanted to break it out to address it at length. Which is, yes, how I do anything <wry g>. It's not one that's overly dear to my heart in the same way that bookstore neep is, because it's not a large part of my life.

But the relevant comment was that an editee of

valancy believes that publishers are evil, which is her reason for wanting to go the vanity press route.

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sartorias has a wonderful post about etiquette guidelines for Worldcons here:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/sartorias/31706.html

The guidelines are, in many ways, for new writers, or for new writers who hope to treat the Worldcon as an entry into the professional world. They're very helpful, excellent pieces of advice, to which I would like to add:

2a. You can learn a lot by attending program items featuring agents.

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High advances are not the whole game. Promotion is not the whole game. And by now you've seen that promotion is a slippery word -- there are many elements of promotion that are invisible from the outside. Like, for instance, being Lead or Lead SF title. Placement dollars for position in bookstores is now no longer invisible -- to you. To most book buyers, it still is. In order to get the money and the positioning, there has to be a reasonable chance -- in the eyes of the editor or publisher -- that your book is enough like a bestseller that it has a damn good chance of being one. Money alone won't buy you that. And brilliant writing doesn't either.

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andpuff or

haniaw, can you tell me what the name of the LJ theme you're using is? I like the one I'm using as far as it goes, but I can't figure out how to get it to keep more than 10 friends entries on a page at a time, and it's driving me nuts. Granted, it's not a great distance to that destination, but still. Yours seems to keep 20. I keep losing people off the bottom of my list by the time I get to check it :/.

I want something clean that will compress the most text, and your themes seem to be it. So. (I'm using S2, if that's of any help).

The problem with rambling is that it exposes the unwary to the clutter of my version of mental organization. But it's free, right?

So I'm going to go back to sales reps, and to buying from reps, as it relates to something

sleigh said. The way it relates is circuitous, so bear with me. Okay, very circuitous, so please bear with me <wry g>.

The reps sell what's called frontlist. I know that many authors/writers are familiar with the term "mid-list" or midlist as it relates to an author's status, but midlist isn't a term that's used as frequently in the bookstore. Well, in ours, at any rate. Midlist in general is, as far as I can tell, a term that's used in a way that varies widely -- that can mean anything from "I earned 2,000 on a novel last year" to "I earned 50,000 on a novel last year". I think there was a Salon article in which the author earned a lot more than that, and was unhappy, which goes to show something.

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Michelle Sagara

Recent Entries

Publication: How often?

Worldcon schedule

Now for something annoying and completely different

Musing on quality reading, sort of

Musing on stages of writerly life

To clarify my rant somewhat

Warning: This is a rant

Agent rambling

Sundries

Reorders, and how things have changed

In Print and other categories

Ethical editors

Catch all, Part 2

Catch all, Part 1

Fallout

Publishers, Vanity Presses and evil, a digression

Worldcons, addenda to some much more coherent advice

Marginal books (no, not the distributor)

LJ question

Frontlist stuff. I've given up on part numbers.