some good news

Here at last is some good news. I should have posted earlier that Dorothy and I found an editor who gave us some work. This person edits the successful Grosset & Dunlap "Big Head" series. It got its nickname from the cover art. Each book is a biography, and the artist portrays them with "big heads" that make them easy to spot. The books are paperbacks, aimed at a younger-grade audience, and most importantly sell like crazy. Anyway, they're branching out from biographies into places and events, and we were assigned a very desirable subject: the Great Pyramids.
    We recalled years ago reading that the two most popular subjects for young readers were Ancient Egypt and Dinosaurs, and we told an editor (jokingly) that the obvious title would be "When Dinosaurs Roamed Ancient Egypt."
     Anyway, the editor liked what we did, and "Where Are the Great Pyramids?" is scheduled for publication this fall. We were assigned two more titles, and are hard at work on them.

Even better news is that I found somebody who liked my YA novel "Come Sit By Me." Since this book has a school shooting as its back story, publishers and editors and agents ran from it like vampires from garlic. The great fear is, I assume, that there will one day be a school shooting and the shooter's locker will be opened to find that he (they're always male) had been reading "Come Sit By Me."
The fact that this is a topic that is probably discussed in every high school, and most grade schools, in the country means nothing to the publishers.
Having given up finding a publisher or agent, I began to look into businesses that have what I call a new paradigm for the publishing business. I wasn't going to pay for having my book published--that's a very old paradigm called vanity publishing.
No, this company brings together authors, editors, designers, and "book managers" on projects. Everybody is given a share of the profits (providing there are profits). That gives everyone on the project an incentive to do well--a piece of the action, you might say. What's in it for the author? Well, first of all, my share of the profits is 30%--much better than any publisher ever gave me. And secondly, I am finally assured that the sales people involved will actually try to sell the book. I will keep you all posted on how it goes.

There's a site for writers called Absolute Write Water Cooler. Lots of cool features, including people reporting on their experiences with agents. There's one called "How Real Publishing Works," and I posted the following. I recently heard from somebody who had read it, and I wrote back to him. It's too long to read in just one post, so let's start with my original post:

Somebody asked what's changed since this thread first began. Well, I didn't read the entire thread, but I saw a lot of things in the beginning that are different now. First, let me tell you that I've published 100 books for children, YAs, and adults, both fiction and nonfiction. My publishers have included Knopf, Putnam, Oxford University Press (when they had a children's division), Scholastic, Philomel, Wiley, Little, Brown and many more, so I am experienced. I also won an Edgar and other awards and received many starred reviews, so I think I'm a good writer.
But one of the big things in publishing now is Nielsen BookScan, which tells anybody who pays for it how many copies your books have sold. And believe me, if your most recent books didn't sell well, you've just become a non-person in the publishing world. Might as well change your name and start over. (There was an article in the NY Times about an agent who actually did that for a client, because that was the only way the agent could sell the client's next book.)
And let me tell you, extremely few publishers (and none of the big ones) will consider your book unless it is submitted by an agent. And now many of the agents won't look at your book unless you've already published, or unless you come recommended by someone they know (like one of their established clients.)
So let me tell you how I became a non-person. My wife and I (we usually collaborate) had written a nonfiction adult book for Little, Brown that did well enough that they brought it out in paperback after the hardcover edition. We were lucky enough (Ha! so we thought) to have the editor-in-chief for our editor, so we came to him with a proposal for a book about the theft of the Mona Lisa. He considered it, and then came back to us with a counter-proposal: do a book about that crime and several other crimes that had occurred in Paris around that time (early 1900s). He even did his own outline.
Unfortunately, we couldn't resist because we thought that if we wrote the book according to his outline, he'd make sure it was promoted. Little did we know.
We slaved away, turned the book in, and then waited. He sent the manuscript back with some line edits which we then took care of, and said the book would be out by such-and-such a time. The next we saw, there was the cover of the book on Amazon. It was the worst cover we had ever had in all the books we've written. Well, we had a clause in our contract that said the publisher had to "consult" with us about the cover, so we took it to our agent, who agreed that the cover was unprofessionally bad. But after conferring with the editor, he told us it was too late to change it. (Did I mention that the editor no longer took our phone calls? In case you don't know, that's a very bad sign.)
Then, one day, we got a message from the publisher's rights department that Vanity Fair was going to publish an excerpt from our book! Hooray! That surely meant it was going to be big and that the publisher would push the book.
Nope. In fact, while we worked with the editor at Vanity Fair to stitch together the parts of the book they wanted (all the parts about the theft of the Mona Lisa, BTW), he let us know that the rights person at Little, Brown had actually tried to talk him out of buying the excerpt. Well, since the editor was still not accepting our calls, we called the rights person, who kind of laughed sheepishly and admitted that was true, saying only that there was another book about the theft of the Mona Lisa coming out, and she wanted to make sure Vanity Fair had the right one.
Actually, our agent told us later, the sales department had looked at our book well before the pub date and decided not to devote any energy to it, partially because they didn't understand the concept and partially because of the other book about the theft of the Mona Lisa. Young writers don't understand that to publishers, not all books are equal. They have limited promotional resources, and don't divide them up equally. It's no longer a world in which wise editors like Bennett Cerf and Max Perkins promote their authors. You have to appeal to the sales people, who would rather sell a nice, easy-concept self-help book than your literary efforts.
So time went by, the issue of Vanity Fair came out, with our excerpt mentioned on the cover, but still we didn't see our book in bookstores. Then, a month after the original pub date, the rights person called us to announce gaily that she had sold the paperback rights! Hooray! Who bought them? Well, some academic publisher in the Midwest who paid--wait for it--the lavish sum of $1000 for the rights! Then we knew that the publisher was truly giving up on our book before it ever got a chance. (Later, a British movie company optioned our book three times, so somebody besides the editors at Vanity Fair must have thought it was good.)
Well, as you may guess, Nielsen BookScan didn't report high sales figures for the book...and because of that, our agent would no longer send our proposals out to publishers. He didn't have the guts to tell us that outright because as it happened, the contract he had "negotiated" for us with Little, Brown let the publisher have the ENTIRE $10,000 that Vanity Fair had paid, as well as the $1000 that the academic publisher had paid. (In truth, they were applied against our advance, which the book will never earn back.)
The agent, of course, claimed that our proposals weren't good enough for him to send out. In reality, at least two of those proposals were eventually published--by other authors with harder-working agents. So I told my wife that an agent who doesn't send out your work, isn't an agent, and we left him.
Our next agent was a young woman who seemed energetic and ambitious. In reality, she wanted to turn some of our earlier books, which were out of print, into e-books. She too failed to get us any new work, and one day we got an email from her saying she had had a baby and wanted to work on raising children instead of pursuing her career in publishing.
Leaving us without an agent, and a bad sales record on BookScan. Which means we've been trying without success to pitch new book ideas to new agents. The majority of them, BTW, never bother to respond at all. One of them suggested that she could try to place one of our books with an academic publisher. She thought she could get $5000 for it. Of course, that is before her 15% cut, taxes we'd have to pay, and the rights for illustrations (which usually run around $1000). So given that it takes well over a year (or two) to write the book, that doesn't explain how we can eat and pay rent.
Right now, I'm sending around to agents a couple of YA novels I've written, since that's a popular genre that we've been successful at before. One agent asked for the full manuscript of one in May. I wrote her in September asking if she'd gotten around to it, and I got a curt note saying she was busy. Another agent, with a second book, asked for a full in July. I wrote her in September and she told me she was reading it and would have an answer in two weeks. That was five weeks ago.
We have decided to self-publish. Can anybody blame us? Check out the first of our blogs at Seikeiworld.blogspot.com.
And that's REALLY "How Real Publishing Works" in 2014. And BTW, you can guess when I read about the trouble Little, Brown is having with Amazon...you can guess who I'm rooting for, can't you? Go, Amazon!

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How a Literary Agent Views Editors

This isn't what I planned for the next post, but it was just so good, I had to post it.

I've been scanning the web pages of literary agents, looking for one that might want to represent us, since our last agent had a baby and said she would rather raise the baby than be an agent.

This is from the section of one agent's website that tells prospective authors how to write a book proposal. Says a lot about what's wrong with publishing, and why you should consider publishing your own book:

In most cases, editors and publishers ...are often very young, often in their 20s or 30s. So you need to try to make the proposal as accessible as possible. This means you should consider using charts, sidebars, graphics, tests, and so forth to make the proposal as interactive as possible, as well as to make it look interesting on the page; remember, you’re giving this to somebody who was raised on TV, so s/he may have a very short attention span....

          Although the proposal is not supposed to be complete, you should also keep in mind that some editors are not that great at “connecting the dots.”

Searching for an Agent

The search for an agent was harder than we thought. Previously, the fact that we had successfully published many books and were good writers was enough to interest an agent. Since we had found our last agent, we had been nominated twice for an Edgar, won the Edgar once, and written a book that was excerpted in Vanity Fair. Our books had numerous starred reviews, and one of them had been optioned by a British movie company.

But agents were looking for more than good writers. (Actually, they weren't looking for good writers at all; they were seeking would-be writers whose books would come pre-sold.) Agents--and, I presume, publishers--first of all wanted to know if you had a "platform." That means something that had already made you famous. If you were a celebrity, and you decided you wanted to write a book, that was easy. Even if you couldn't write, the publisher could find someone to write it for you. You could also make yourself famous by writing a blog that thousands (preferably millions) of people read regularly. And of course, you might have self-published one or more books that sold well. Amazingly, even though this would seem to have demonstrated that you didn't NEED a conventional publisher, there were self-published authors who jumped at the chance to have an agent take 15% of their earnings, and to have a "real" publisher who would screw them in ways they never dreamed of.

Another new feature of the publishing business was that when you submitted a proposal for a book, agents--and publishers--now wanted you to list all (or most) of the books like yours that had already been published. When I first ran into this requirement, I thought that they wanted to make sure your book WASN'T like any others. Quite the opposite. Publishers wanted to know if there were books JUST LIKE YOURS that had already sold well. Thus, they could feel safe about publishing yet another one. We had seen an earlier version of this phenomenon in the me-too attitude of publishers who tried to imitate the success of another publisher's book by coming out with one like it. Case in point: After Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series became a major best-seller, every YA publisher had to have a vampire book (or series) too. Of course, none of the imitation vampire books were ever as successful as the original. Dare I suggest that the reason was that the writers of the imitation books were not as skilled AT WRITING as Stephenie Meyer? But since editors and agents no longer know good writing from bad (or care), they didn't figure that out. Same thing happened with the Hunger Games series. Publishers then wanted "dystopia" books, preferably with a girl heroine who was skilled at killing.

Well, we discovered that if you were merely good writers who were writing original books, there was another way of attracting an agent: find a friend of yours who was also friends with an agent. We did so, had a brief lunch with the agent, and she convinced us that she was talented, energetic, enthsiastic, and--most importantly--would take us on as clients. I'll tell you about our experience with her in the next post.

Agents: Can't Live With 'em, Can't Live Without 'em

When we first started writing books, a long time ago, you could sell your work without having an agent. Or at least publishers would look at your work, even if it was "unagented." But as the publishers got bought up by big conglomerates, some accountant figured out it was a waste of money to go through all the manuscripts in what they called "the slush pile." Very seldom did anybody find a gem in this pile of slush--or so the argument went. So the publishers decided to accept only manuscripts or proposals that were sent by an agent. This gave the agents enormous power, as you might guess, and they raised their rates from 10% to 15% at around this same time. (That was also the '80s, a decade of serious inflation. My theory always was that agents couldn't get higher advances for their clients to keep up with inflation, so they compensated by taking a bigger chunk of their clients' incomes.)

This meant that not only were authors compelled to find an agent, but once they had an agent, then they had to write something that would appeal, first of all, to that person and no other. In the "old days" if a publisher didn't want your manuscript, you could go to another publisher, and so on till you found one who liked what you were writing. This new way, if your agent didn't like your work, you had to adjust it or abandon it.

Such was the case with us about three years ago, when our agent of about ten years decided, basically, that we were unpublishable. Or at least our work was. He refused even to send it out to a publisher. Waste of his time. His argument, of course, was that our work had suddenly become not good enough to publish. (There was a reason for this, which I'll take up in a later post.)  He rejected our ideas; he rejected elaborate proposals that we wrote to support the ideas. Even when he told us how to improve the proposals, he rejected what we produced. In one case, he told us to put a sample chapter in chronological order; however, it was already in chronological order. He told us to make a chapter outline of the proposed book; when we did so, he rejected it anyway.

The most irritating thing about this sudden storm of rejections, is that we saw that other authors started to publish books that were the same as ones we had proposed. For instance, we wanted to write a book about the "mad bomber" who terrorized NYC during the 1950s. Sounds topical and interesting, right? Not to our agent. Then somebody else stumbled onto the topic and did the book. Got a writeup in the NY Times about the book. Then we wanted to write a book about Oscar Wilde's year-long lecture tour of the U.S. in the 19th century, before he was a world-renowned figure. Our agent told us he found Oscar Wilde "boring." And he was always bragging about his background in the theater! Yale Drama and all that. Well, of course, somebody else eventually did that book too. And believe me, it wasn't boring.

My wife was reluctant to leave the agent, despite all this. I told her, When you have an agent who won't send out your work, you don't HAVE an agent. So we started looking for a new agent. I'll tell you more about that in my next post.

You want inspiration? Here's one way.

This print, made by the Japanese artist Kuniyoshi around 1840, was posted on our blog about the Samurai Detective series. It shows a famous Japanese poet, Dainagon Tsunenobu, who lived about a thousand years ago. He has just finished writing this poem:

When the evening comes

From the rice leaves at my gate

Gentle knocks are heard;

And, into my round rush-hut,

Autumn's roaring breeze makes way.

Just then a ghost appeared outside his window and recited another poem, this one by a well-known Chinese poet. (It's on the scroll you see coming out of the ghost's mouth.) I just thought it would be wonderful if a writer's inspiration came so easily.

After a Long Absence...

I really have neglected this blog, but now that my wife and I are starting another one (to present stories and history about Japan that aren't in our books), people have been checking into this one too. Let me say that my intention was to present a series of blogs describing my efforts to write another novel in the Samurai Detective series. I stopped because of some health problems (broken leg, prostate problem that required surgery), and because of various professional setbacks that resulted in our dropping one agent and losing the one that we signed on with after that. Maybe I'll write about those problems at some point, but I don't want this to become a soap opera.

Anyway, all these problems cut into my work ethnic and work time. I remember reading about a well-known author years ago (I think it was Irving Wallace) who said that you shouldn't let anything interrupt your work--illness, hangover, divorce, whatever. I always tried to live up to that, but this combination threw me for a loop. So yes, you can say there is such a thing as writer's block--if you give in to it.

Anyway, I finally got started with that novel again, and posted it online because my old publisher didn't want any more of these books. It is called THE RED-HEADED DEMON and is the seventh in the series my wife and I have been working on for over a dozen years. You can get a paper-and-ink version on the Amazon-sponsored site CreateSpace.com, or at amazon.com itself. You can also download an e-book version at smashwords.com. It has all the e-book formats available, as far as I know. Our daughter, Dr. Hoobler of the art history department of Cornell College (Mt. Vernon, Iowa) was kind enough to create new covers for all seven books. Unlike the original publisher, we NUMBERED the books in the series, and Dr. Hoobler used manga for the artwork.

Our only regret is that we weren't able to get the paper-and-ink rights for the first book, THE GHOST IN THE TOKAIDO INN, away from the original publisher. It's selling too well. That isn't due to any efforts on the part of the publisher to actually promote and sell the book. It's just that luckily, it was adopted by a widely used homeschool curriculum guide.

I think I'll continue this blog with accounts of how Dorothy and I are changing our approach to promoting and selling books now. Our use of various publicity media, and so forth. I'll try to write more often. Stay tuned.