From Polished to Published: the editor's side

I was originally going to write an emotionally meaningful post tonight, but I did my ecology volunteering this morning, so I've been up since 4:45 a.m. And my family is in town. So emotional post next time, polishing post tonight.

I haven't had a ton of story publications, but I have been reading slush for a professional fiction market for... um... six years now. As such, I'm bringing all my tips from that angle.

(Since the category is polished, I'm going to assume you've proofread. Don't be that writer with the otherwise awesome story with a typo in their very first paragraph. This actually happened this month, and almost every slush reader mentioned that in their comment. It's not the kind of thing that really makes a difference between publishing and not... but it looks bad.)

1. Read the guidelines, and follow them. It seems like I shouldn't have to say this. And yet, there are a startling number of people who don't do it. I know some of it is accidental, such as uploading the wrong file. And sometimes you're uploading the story at 10 pm at night when the baby has been screaming all day long because she's teething, and you can't remember your own name, let alone how many words your story is. Unfortunately, that situation is impossible to see from my end, and we see so many blatant disregards of our rules. I think it feels to me like a lack of respect. If you don't respect us enough to follow your guidelines, why should we give you the respect of paying you professional rates for your story?


2. Be professional in your demeanor. Writing is art. Publishing is art with a side of business. It ends up sometimes as this messy collision between insecure artists (aren't we all?) and people trying to make enough money to keep their publication afloat so they can keep publishing good stories. It astonishes me the number of people who put down their work, or who try to make jokes in their cover letters, or who say "this is something I wrote in an hour last weekend." I don't even know what that last one means; does it mean you haven't proofread it yet? Is the worth of a story really determined by the amount of time it took you to write? Just pretend your story is going out on a job interview. You wouldn't make jokes or insult yourself in a job interview, so don't do it in a cover letter for your story.



Those two will get you consideration without being kicked out. But actually getting published? That's much tougher to pin down. Some of the biggest mistakes I see, especially for us, is stories that are the wrong size for their current word count, either too large or two small. And every story needs a beginning, middle, and end. It makes a difference.

There is one thing that seems to matter more than the others, so I'll quote a previous post by an authority on the subject*:

3. Don't worry about trends. Write what matters to you. It's hard to set hard and firm rules about what stories or trends I hate. Because every time I do so, someone comes along with an exception to the rule, and I have to shut my mouth all over again. Sheer originality is a good thing too, but an old idea well-told can be a glorious thing.
The real kicker is a good tale combined with good emotion. One of my slushers has been complaining lately about the number of stories featuring difficult situations faced by wide-eyed children. It's something we see often – where the writer has gone for the biggest emotional punch possible. Sort of like, "It'd be sad if the main character had cancer, but it would be EVEN SADDER if he got the cancer while rescuing puppies from communists!" (You see this type of thing in anime all the time too – all the characters have to have a horrifically tragic backstory). The instinct is understandable. Emotion is what attaches us to the stories we read. However, I'm beginning to think that it's not the amount of the emotion that matters. Rather, it's the truth of that emotion, and how well the writer projects it.


Hopefully those thoughts are of use to at least some of you! Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sleep for hours and hours and hours.





*Me, from a few months back ;)

From Polished to Published - Karen

There is still a lot of mystery in the writing field about how we writers go from a finished work (when is it finished??!) to something tangible in the world, a piece of writing that others can read, maybe even others beyond just our family and friends who we force into reading our work.

Let's talk about a few aspects of that process.

My self-published novel, Convergence, available online everywhere!

First, the finished work. When is a project finished? This one is funny. As a writer who is constantly evolving, whose interests change over time, and whose skills are (hopefully!) improving over time, looking at a piece of my writing almost always creates in me a desire to change it. I can tweak until the cows come home, quite literally. Seeing as how I don't live on a farm, this could be forever.

So I have to create an arbitrary deadline for myself to get out of the "constantly editing" cycle of doom. Sometimes it's a pledge to submit to a certain market (the Writer's of the Future contest is helpful for it's quarterly deadlines.) Sometimes it's a plan to complete a piece during a specific time interval - e.g., this week when I have few outside commitments. Sometimes the deadline is completely self-imposed by a desire to get a piece self-published. And sometimes other criteria enter the equation such as waiting on critiques or a cover from a cover designer.

Having a deadline of some sort, though, is essential to me getting anything finished. Without a deadline, my projects lie forever in a 3/4 done state. Literally I have 6 novels in that state, I might have a problem.

For me with my current goals, once a piece is finished, I have to decide if I'm going to pursue a traditional publishing route with it, or if I will indie publish it myself. I am still on the fence about this, there are so many moving parts to the publishing world and I continue to hear stories from friends with crap deals coming out of traditional publishing, I tend to teeter over to the indie side more often than not, but I remain open to the possibility of a traditional publishing deal. Best not to burn bridges.

Since I don't have a current traditional publishing deal, though, let's talk about what indie publishing entails. This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather an overview for those who might be considering this route. I'm sure I'll accidentally omit a few steps (see, even blog posts are never finished!) so please add them in the comments.

1. Finish your piece! See aforementioned need to have an arbitrary deadline as my secret to getting something finished. 
2. Create accounts on the sites that permit self publishing. I have author accounts on amazon.com, bn.com, smashwords.com, and have a need to create ones on kobo.com and apple. To create accounts most require some level of personal information because selling books means income in the US - consider whether you might want a separate business banking account and if you need to get a P.O. box for professional writing correspondence. Now would be a good time to set those things up. 
3. Edit your work with an eye toward final polish. This may mean hiring an editor, or asking several detail-oriented (anal-retentive!) friends to read through with a fine-toothed comb. Reading your work aloud can help you identify last lingering typos, too. While you can upload revised versions of your manuscript later if you find issues, most readers are easily frustrated by simple mistakes particularly early in the book. Don't frustrate your readers, spend time on this step!
4. Choose a cover for your work. There are many great cover designers who create stock covers that are reasonably priced and have quick turnaround. (I recommend The Cover Counts and Mallory Rock. There are also groups of designers like Cover Art Collective.)  If a stock cover isn't for you, get on a cover designer's schedule 4-6 weeks in advance of when you hope to put your book out (popular cover designers may have even longer design schedules, contact them early in your process!) Sometimes a cover may be one of the arbitrary deadlines that helps you move your writing to completion, don't forget this step early in your process. 
5. Format your project for your desired platform. Formatting can seem like an insurmountable task. I recommend a writing program like Scrivener to help simplify the process. Scrivener lets you save your project (compile it) into all the different formats (.mobi for amazon, .epub for everywhere else) that ebook publishers require. The basic process you will need to follow is to compile your project into the proper format, upload it onto your author account on that platform, then preview the work to see if it looks right (all the sites have some sort of viewer for this, or you can load your formatted project onto an e-reader to check yourself.) Other writer friends use In Design, but I find I can do what I need to within Scrivener 99% of the time. 
6. If you are doing a print-on-demand version, work on that formatting via Create Space (I recommend downloading the template for the cut size you plan to print at. I do not have a ton of experience with this yet, so I welcome input for what other tools people use to format POD books.) 
7. Press done! Wait 24-48 hrs for your project to go through final approvals on the publishing sites. Then tell *everyone* about your available work (but don't spam us. Once a day for a few days and then once a week or less after that.)