How to rite Killer Fiction (26 page)

But then a strange thing happened. Writers who started soft sold an amazing number of books (
vide
John D. MacDonald) and the houses that published them decided to put them in hardcover and keep the paperback rights. The hard-soft deal was born. And the start-soft-and-work-your-way-up-to-hard career path became a well-worn trail.

So one question you'll have to answer for yourself: Do I put any paperback original houses on my A list?

The answer may depend upon what you're writing. Lightweight category mysteries (such as cozies that depend upon a gimmick) may do very well in paper and then work their way to hard by the old-fashioned method of upping the sales figures with each successive book. What this means for you the author is intensive self-promotion for the first few titles (and winning awards wouldn't hurt). Your goal is to increase sales of the paperbacks every time you come out with a new title and then lobby hard for your publisher to bring you out in hardcover.

The alternative is to go for hardcover first (or better: a hard-soft deal that guarantees you a paperback appearance.) Hardcovers are bought mainly by libraries and collectors, at least when you're not well known, but the up side is that they get reviews, and good reviews can help you reach your audience.

Your final A list will probably be the big, prestigious houses based in New York. Your B list may be a mix of hard and soft; your C will probably be the independent small presses whose books are trade paperbacks and whose advances are minuscule. This is not to say that you won't enjoy seeing your work in print or that your book won't be appreciated by a loyal audience, reviewed by the mystery publications, and eligible for awards. It is to say you won't get rich unless a major house likes what it sees and makes you an offer.

D list: the e-publishers, and the self-publishing print-on-demand options. Which is not to say that people who self-publish or who use nontraditional means aren't really published, just that these are avenues to explore after you've exhausted the more traditional means.

There is a body of opinion that "it isn't worth it anymore for a new author to go through the process of trying to get published by big traditional houses." So says romantic suspense writer Penny Sansevieri, who published her first book,
The Cliffhanger,
through Xlibris, which offers a print-on-demand option. Writers pay from $500 to $1700 to get their books in print, far less than the old-fashioned vanity presses, and Amazon.com will list an e-book for a small fee, so that the book essentially becomes available worldwide. Print-on-demand books have made it to regional best-seller's lists, and as Sansevieri also says, "the beauty of print on demand is that I can build a track record, then go to the bigger houses and say, 'Look what I can do on my own.'"

Finding Editor Right
Assuming that you prefer to explore traditional options first, you're getting a good handle on which publishers you'd like to work with. But you also realize that a letter sent To Whom It May Concern won't cut it. You need a specific editor whose taste you can predict, someone whose track record says, "I like the kind of books you write."

More research. But look on the bright side: this is what you do when you hit the inevitable I Hate This Book stage. Go to your local big-box bookstore, grab a double mocha, and glide among the shelves taking notes. Which publishers publish the writers who are most like you? Which ones have a hole in their lineup because they just lost their dog/ horse/quilt/cooking/Roman/cat/gardening/Victorian mystery writer?

Now pick a book from the shelves and open it up. Check the Acknowledgments section, then peruse the dedication. What you're looking for is the "To Susie Creamcheese, Editor Extraordinaire" kind of thing, because what it tells you is that Ms. Creamcheese is a big fan of psychic mysteries and that's what you write, so why not send her the manuscript of
Seances Are Murder?

Unless the book is in the New Books section of the store, you'd better check to see if Susie is still with MegaPublishing Group or if she's gone over to Colossal Books. You can find this information in the Writer's Digest
Writer's Market
yearbooks or in
Literary Marketplace.
Both are available in libraries, so save your money and plan to spend several afternoons looking up names you've collected from the bookstore.

Wait a minute—doesn't my agent do all this? Why am I haunting the mystery section of my bookstore in Iowa City when the New York agent who's going to represent me knows every editor within a twenty-block radius of her Madison Avenue office?

Because a writer who hands her entire career over to an agent and takes no active part in choosing her editor is a writer who isn't thinking clearly. By the time you're ready for an agent, you should be able to discuss your future publishing options with confidence. Talk to writers at conferences, meet as many agents and editors as you can, learn about the business you're about to enter, and never forget that once you've finished putting words on the page it is a business. Mind your own business.

Back to the Zone

Then get back to work. Start a Great Agent Hunt file, an ABC List file, keep adding more data as you acquire more information, but put the pre-publishing research on the back burner and get back into your writing routine.

E.M. Forster says a writer either allocates a certain number of hours per day to the job or chooses a number of pages to complete by the end of a writing session. I find that the "hours per day" option works when I'm in the outlining phase, but once I start the actual writing, setting a page number works better for me.

I'm also a spurt writer, so there are times I just glue myself to the chair and write till my fingers are ready to fall off. The dangers there are twofold: thinking you're going to write like that every day and feeling let down when you can't, or deciding you've done so much work you might as well take a week off. If I succumb to that temptation, I'll soon find that my spurt actually cost me precious time because I've used more than the equivalent in recovering from it.

Revision time has special rhythms. It takes large chunks of time, not to mention space, to get the big-picture revision out of the way. It can't be done solely on the computer screen, and it can't be done in twenty-minute increments.

When Is It Finished?_

You've ripped it to shreds at least three times. You've laid it out in piles on the floor and shifted papers frantically from one pile to another. You've cut and pasted, made notes for revision in at least four different colors of ink, you've shown it to all your friends and incorporated their better suggestions into your rewrite. You've worked the arcs and tinkered with your chaptering and firmed up that sagging middle. You've beefed up the ending and slashed the beginning. You've given all
your
characters jobs and you've linked your subplots so that nothing's hanging out there all by itself.

You've line-edited to the point where you could recite all of chapter one in your sleep. You've cut the adverbs, strengthened the verbs, and specified the nouns. You've consciously created metaphors and crafted dialogue that jumps off the page. There isn't an ounce of flab in your taut, spare prose and your title is a work of art in itself.

You've checked for errors, using your computer's spell-checker and then eyeballing the book for grammar and punctuation mistakes. You've given the book to someone else for proofreading and corrected all mistakes in the computer before printing out.

Before you, on a table or in your lap sits a pristine, clean, fresh copy that, as far as your human ability can make it, is absolutely, totally perfect.

You start to read.

You tell yourself you're reading it over one more time just to make sure there's nothing more to fix, but that isn't true.

You're reading it over one more time
because it's so damn good.

That, my friends, is "finished."

Enjoy "finished" for a little bit. Let the pride wash over you and bask in the glow of your achievement. There is a great gulf fixed, not between the published and the not-yet-published, but between the finished and the not-yet-finished. Once you've completed an entire manuscript—and by "completed" I mean fully revised and ready to send out into the world to be seen by people not related to you—you've taken a giant step toward your goal of becoming a real writer. You can never go back to your earlier innocence. You can never whine and say, "Oh, I could never write a whole novel all by myself. It would be too hard."

You've done it. And it
was
hard. But now you know exactly how hard it is and
you know that it wasn't too hard for you to actually accomplish.
You know that any time you're truly ready to make the commitment of time, energy, and perfectionism, you can do it again.

So enjoy it.

Then start the next one.

Buckle up your seat belt and start the climb up the roller coaster, anticipating the plunge that will have you screaming in ecstatic terror (or terrified ecstasy, your choice). Enter the big clown head and turn left at the skeleton, making your way toward the Hall of Mirrors. Come back to the playground and never forget the most important thing of all when it comes to writing.

Have fun.