Queries and Colorless Flowers

It's been a little more than a month since the launch of my debut novel, and I've had some time to reflect. Generally, I feel like I don't know what I'm doing, and just trying, every day, to do a little something with the tools I have to promote this book, to get it in front of readers and get them to share it with others, via reviews or social media or recommendation.

And it's a lot, frankly.

But as overwhelming as it's been, I know that I have good people at my publisher, Indigo River Publishing, ready to help as much as they can, and I also know that I'm learning a lot about the industry. One thing I'm learning is not to listen to certain people.

For instance, one saying that really scared me from the very start was "Never pay to get published." I just read a whole Reddit thread on that subject. It was mainly about hybrid publishing, which was my path to getting published, and the reason I was reading the thread. Overall, the responders really seemed to think they had ended the conversation with that old mantra - "Never pay to get published." 

And I know, I'm still a novice in the publishing industry, still learning a lot every day. After publishing Thy Father's Glass (available now!), I decided to try to get an agent for my next novel, aim for the majors.

So I wrote a query letter, a bad one, then hired an editor and former agent to help make it a good one. I hit the query trenches, which I learned is a very apt metaphor for that aspect of the writer's journey. I say that because querying really does feel like a defensive position, like being inundated with wave after wave of rejection, looking for brief opportunities to shoot your shot before hunkering down in the trench again, next to your comrades in arms. 

Another way to describe querying is that it's like a poem titled "La Flor del Aire" by Gabriela Mistral. In the poem, the speaker encounters a mysterious woman of the meadow. The woman tells the speaker to climb the mountain and bring her white flowers, which the speaker does. Upon giving the woman the white flowers, she turns white, just like they are. Unsatisfied, however, the woman sends the speaker after red flowers, then yellow flowers, each time taking them and changing color, and each time remaining unsatisfied, until she makes one final, impossible demand, "cortarás las sin color," cut the ones with no color. And somehow, incredibly, the speaker does it! She cuts flowers from the air, creating them as she collects them, to satisfy this demanding, enigmatic woman of the meadow.

There are two reasons this poem reminds me of querying. The first is that I'm pretty sure I don't fully understand either one. The second is that querying makes me feel like the speaker in the poem, constantly catering to a demanding audience, all the while wondering if they really know what they want, or if what they want is even possible.

So, I followed all the rules and stipulations about query letters and cover letters and ten, twenty, or fifty page samples - also sometimes five, for some reason. I sent out a lot of queries, an even hundred over the course of three months, and now, I'm just watching the rejections, with some smattering of interest, roll in. At the same time, I'm getting an education in different paths to publication. And, while I admit that I'm still green here, all of this experience has taught me at least one thing.

If you want to get published, you are going to have to pay someone.

The old saying, "never pay to get published," is misleading, and downright impossible. There is no question, if you get published, you will be paying someone. The real question is who you'll be paying, how much, what for, and for how long.

For instance, you could self-publish. Some writers have been very successful this way, and some have simply put a bad book in print so they can add that "accomplishment" to their resume. But assuming you really have a great novel you want to self-publish, and I know of many, you will have to pay a lot of people to make that happen. You'll pay editors to polish the manuscript, graphic artists to design the covers and pages, printers to actually bring the book out of the ether into the physical realm. You'll pay for marketing and promotion and everything that a traditionally published author would expect their publisher to cover. Did you know it costs money just to get an ISBN number? It's a lot of work and expense, and I respect anyone who has the patience and the faith in their work to go this route.

At the other end of the publishing spectrum, you have the big five. Or is it four now? Things change so quickly. If you are one of the chosen few who actually leap out of the query trenches, charge the cannons, and get an agent to represent you, that agent will shop your work around to a very small group of editors and aqcuistions departments at a shrinking number of major publishers. If they are good at their jobs, and the market is starving for the genre of novels you write, and your word count isn't too high or too low and your inciting incident is in the first ten pages and the stars align in your favor, then you have a chance at getting an advance from the publisher and a contract. Unlike a self-published author, who would generally get all of the profits from sales, you'll get royalties to the tune of five to ten percent. 

And out of the meager share of the profits from the book you wrote with your own brain, you'll pay your agent ten to fifteen percent for their (genuinely crucial and difficult) job of selling your book to pubishers and possibly managing your career. While that sounds like a scam, consider that while the publisher is taking the lion's share of the profits, they are also paying for all those pesky bills that pop up when a book makes its way to readers - editing, design, marketing, distribution, among others. It's a long shot, but it's generally what we think of when we imagine the life of a career writer. 

But don't be fooled. You are paying to get published. You pay your agent, in perpetuity, for selling your book, and very often, they really don't have to do much else after the publishing contract is signed. Some do, some don't.

Somewhere on the road from self-publishing to traditional publishing with an agent's help is hybrid publishing. This is where the idea of paying for publication gets tricky. Hybrid publishers, and there are good ones and bad ones, like to say that they partner with authors. What that means is that when the publishing contract is signed, the author puts up some money, generally nowhere near enough to actually publish a book, but enough to take some of the initial burden off the publisher. Essentially, you are publishing with a smaller press, definitely not one of the big five, or four, with fewer resources. You shouldn't have to pay for everything, just one negotiable sum at the beginning, and in return, you generally get far more control over your work, and much higher royalties.

As an example of the difference between royalties in hybrid and big five publishing, let's just say that you're concerned that a smaller, possibly hybrid, publisher could never market as effectively as one of the majors. You'd be absolutely right, but here's the thing. That agented author, who gets about five percent royalties, has to sell ten times the number of books that I do to make the same money. 

And I don't have to share mine with an agent.

So, in response to someone who says "never pay to get published," I would say that everyone pays to get published. Every path to publication costs the author money at some level. Not everyone is going to get picked up by one of the majors. There just aren't enough positions in that league, and their algorithm for choosing books may actually exclude some of the best novels people are writing today. I'm still waiting patiently for all of my queries to get rejected or just wither on the vine of no response, but in the meantime, I'm watching the sales of my debut novel through my hybrid publisher.

And I'll admit, I had concerns about getting scammed. But the one thing that put my mind at ease about the legitimacy of my publisher, even when it drove me crazy, was the sheer number of times they had me edit that novel before they set a release date. It was nerve-wracking to get the criticism, but it not only made me a better writer overall, by a factor of about a thousand, it also assured me that they were a serious publisher. Every time my editor said, "It's not quite ready," I knew they were trying to put the best possible book on the shelf. If they hadn't cared about quality, then I would have been suspicious.

And hybrid publishing, done right, is traditional publishing. My novel is distributed by Simon & Schuster. Small press does not automatically mean vanity press. And while perhaps more of the marketing tasks are falling on me, the publisher is still promoting the novel as well. And anyway, I'm hearing a lot of writers - agented and big five/four contracted - complaining that the publisher is pushing a lot of the marketing on them as well.

So if a writer is skittish about hybrid publishing, I get it. There are scammy presses out there, just like there are scammy agents and scammy editors. We writers make vulnerable targets, quivering in our trenches and praying that someone, anyone, would rescue us from the front lines. If I had one piece of advice for anyone looking to follow this path, from an admitted novice, it would be to ask questions about deal-breakers. In other words, ask questions that point towards what you'd have to do to get this publisher to drop you. Ask what would happen if you refused to make edits, or failed to meet a deadline. What is their acceptance rate? Kind of like the dating world (which is a trench I'm so glad to be out of), if there's nothing you can do to get the other person to lose interest, it's a scam.

Just don't ask me how I know this.

Release Day Next Week - Excerpt From Thy Father's Glass

 As hard as it is for me to believe, but my debut novel releases on Tuesday! It's been a long process, with a lot of work, rejection, and imposter's syndrome along the way, but the big day is just around the corner. To celebrate (and maybe entice some readers to buy a copy) here's a scene from the novel.

    Dane had already made three orderly piles of clothes on the bed and had started to pack when Muriel got home from the gym. He told her what Sabine had said and that his father needed him to stay over for a while.

“It happened that way with my grandfather.” Muriel helped Dane pack an overnight bag. “I was almost ten, and that was back in Haiti, but I remember it was just like this.”

    Dane went to the bathroom and scooped his toiletries into a blue drawstring bag with some faded company logo on it.

    “I remember being very sad about it. He lived with us,” she continued. “A lot of people had their grandparents with them back then. It was like he was . . .” She sat down on the bed, rolled a pair of jeans into a tight tube, and shoved them into the bottom of Dane’s backpack, “Like he was disappearing in front of you, a little at a time, until he was gone.”

    Dane cinched the bag with his deodorant and shaving tools in it and sat down next to Muriel, his shoulder up against hers. She stopped folding his T-shirt and rubbed the back of his hand.

    “He’s a completely different man,” Dane said. “I don’t know how this happened so fast.”

    “The doctors did say it was coming. We were all so focused on Mom for so long, I guess . . .”

    “But I can’t even say I really knew him before. Now what?” Dane took the shirt from Muriel’s lap and started rolling it tightly. She took another from the pile on the bed behind her and folded it into fourths.

    “You know, my dad and my grandfather never got along,” Muriel said, smoothing out the folded shirt and handing it to Dane. “Papa only ever had bad things to say about his father—he was stingy, he was rough—but I don’t remember any of that. People change when they get this way—a lot. I know other families who went through it, and it seems like there are always two ways people change: they either get really mean and difficult, or they get really sweet and gentle.

    “My father knew his father all his life as a hard man, strict to the point of being mean. But all I remember of him was him sitting with me on the couch, all hugs and kisses, being so grateful for anything I did for him. He didn’t always know who I was, but I knew he loved me.” She pushed socks into the front pouch of the backpack until she could barely zip it closed.

   “Once a man, twice a child?” Dane smirked.

    Muriel whipped him with a pair of his own underwear. “Did Sabine tell you that?”

    Dane nodded. “Pop was like that too,” he said, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands. “Then he wasn’t much of anything. He worked a lot, I guess, and when he wasn’t working, he wasn’t interested in much of anything I did. You’ve never really met the man.”

    Muriel nodded, put her arms around her husband, and stroked the back of his neck. “You can choose what to keep from your father. You can look at this time you have together as a window of opportunity to create some memories with him that will be full of love and kindness, and you can replace whatever bad memories you have with these good ones.”

    Dane turned his head and kissed her, wishing she could come with him, wondering how he would sleep in the old house, in his old room, without her. Even worse, no matter how hopeful Muriel tried to make it sound, he dreaded the prospect of so much time cooped up with his father. He tried to create a picture in his head of what it would look like to spend that much time with the old man, and nothing but torture came to mind.

    Conversation between them had always been strained and awkward, and now the Alzheimer’s made it nearly impossible. What would they do? Just sit around and stare out the window together? Listen to fifties music on the radio and tap their feet in time? Binge-watch Gunsmoke until they fell asleep? A dispassionate sense of duty compelled him to go through the motions, but he felt no real desire to do it.

    Dane and Muriel had never had kids, never wanted to, but he imagined it would feel a lot like this. Before Sabine had left for the day, she had cooked enough rice and beans and stewed chicken for them all, plus enough for later if the men got hungry. She had also walked Dane around the house and shown him her protocols for getting Branson ready for the night.

    He wasn’t so badly off that he couldn’t bathe himself, thank goodness, but if nobody reminded him, he would go days without taking a shower. Make sure to lock all the doors around the house and hide things you don’t want him to get into.

    Fortunately, Branson was a tall man who couldn’t bother to bend over for anything, so putting dangerous items on lower shelves and the backs of floor-level cabinets kept them out of his reach. Make sure he had everything he might need—water, light, books, remote controls—by his bed in plain sight. Think of his mental acuity like a power grid, Sabine said. Too much stimulus, too many stressors, and the whole thing would overload and short out for a while.

    “He needs his picture of Miss Gwen by his bed, his bottle of water on the nightstand,” she said. “You don’t want him waking up in the night and wandering around the house looking for something.”

    “Check,” Dane said, “Everything in its place.”

    Sabine nodded. She stepped closer and looked up into Dane’s face, touching his arm to command his attention. “It’s more than that,” she said, dropping the pitch of her voice. “The way his disease is progressing so rapidly, there’s a chance he could wake up and not know where, or even when he is. Try to look at it from his point of view, how terrifying that could be.”

    Dane’s shoulders drooped and he searched Sabine’s face. “You think that could happen?”

    Sabine patted his arm and dropped her hand, still holding Dane’s gaze. “It’s going to happen, Dane. The plan is to minimize his stress and confusion in any way possible, keep his grid functioning.”

    The sheer urgency of Sabine’s instructions overwhelmed Dane, but she tried to bring him back into focus. It didn’t seem as if he woke up much in the night. He usually settled down for bed when she left at six and got up to sit in his chair, sometimes still in his pajamas, by the time she arrived at nine in the morning. He would sometimes take a short nap in the day, but Sabine said she kept him up and active as much as possible during the day to make sure he slept through the night since he was on his own.

    “You make it sound like we’re prepping a house for a toddler,” Dane chuckled awkwardly.

    Sabine agreed. “Once a man, twice a child,” she said, solemnly.

    Once he walked through Sabine’s instructions meticulously, and left Branson safely in bed sleeping, soundly, judging by the loud raspy noise coming through the door, Dane felt unsure what to do with himself. It was the same house he had grown up in, his old room, the kitchen he had plundered for the first eighteen years of his life. But now it felt foreign, as if he were some interloper, some shadow creeping up the stairs and stalking the quiet rooms.

    He checked and rechecked the door locks, cracked the door to his father’s bedroom, and peeked through the sliver of space to make sure he was sleeping, which he always was, every time. The loud snoring actually reassured him, and he didn’t know what he would do if the droning sound stopped.

    He didn’t dare turn on the television for fear of waking up or, even worse, alarming his father, but he had brought some books. After deciding to sleep on the couch instead of his old room, he remembered to check the attic window to maintain readiness.

    Dane had a vision that made him shiver as he crept upstairs to the attic. He saw his father laughing and leaning out of the open window, with nobody there to stop him or pull him back in. Checking and rechecking the lock put him more at ease, but he wanted more security than the little turning sash lock could provide.

    There wasn’t much left up there since he had cleared it out—the empty bookcases, a few crates, a broom and dustpan, and some folding chairs—but he placed every object strategically to get in an old man’s way if he should try to get to the window.

    Brooms would crash to the floor if the door opened, crates would topple over and clatter, and metal chairs would have to be relocated just to get in front of the window. As he stood surveying his work, he felt a little pride over what he had done, enough confidence to help him fall asleep tonight.

    Still, he needed to check the window lock again. The feeling of having forgotten something or of having left the stove on after going to work compelled him to take one last look and reassure himself that he could rest for the night. He tiptoed around the crates and chairs so he wouldn’t have to reset the trap and turned the lock as far as it would go.

    The window gave a wide, pleasant view of the neighborhood. He could see why his father liked sitting there, even if he did seem to lose himself in a weird way. He got his face as close to the glass as he could and tried to see how far he could look down both sides of the sleepy suburban street. A sort of dizzy feeling came over him as he leaned into the window, as if the height of his vantage point or the memory of his father’s near accident disturbed his sense of ease. Blinking his eyes rapidly to shake off the queasy feeling, he settled back on his heels and looked through the window again.

    Neatly mown and manicured lawns all the way down to each corner showed how much pride and love the neighbors had for their homes. Some houses still had lights on, mostly upstairs, but a lot had gone completely dark already.

    Many of the houses had the same layout, in three or four different variations, and some were exactly like the Shottmers’, although none of them had the round window like the one he looked through. Not much had changed since he had played in those yards and taken the bus to school from that corner.

    One thing seemed out of place. Someone had parked an old black car in front of the Shottmers’ house. Not just old, but classic, like the cars in black-and-white movies from the forties and fifties. To Dane, it looked like a specific one he remembered from somewhere, a Buick, or maybe a Pontiac, but he didn’t really know much about modern cars, much less ones from over a half-century ago.

    Still, it was one of the most beautiful cars he had seen. The rounded hood looked like a bullet or a torpedo, the smooth curve from the back to the front, ending in the raised headlights like eyes on either side. And whoever owned kept it so well maintained, it looked brand-new. The black paint glowed underneath the streetlight. He could barely spare a thought to wonder why someone would park on his side of the street or whose car it could be when he saw something else that made him feel dizzy all over again.

    His father was walking across the lawn toward the car.

    “No,” Dane muttered under his breath. “Dammit, no, no, no.”

    He tried not to yell or make a ruckus that might startle his father, but he skipped every other step as he ran downstairs. The vision of his father wandering the streets at night plagued him until he burst through the front door and leaped off the porch onto the lawn. Once his feet touched the grass, he stopped so suddenly he almost flopped forward. He stood there in the creeping darkness of late evening and looked around.

    There was nobody there—no car parked on the street, no father in the yard.

    He turned to the left and saw his own car parked at the end of the driveway, all the way over to the side to leave room for Sabine to park in the morning. He turned toward the house and then back to the street again, confused and alarmed.

    Could someone have taken his father? A car that old would have made some noise for sure, but maybe he missed it in his panic. Was his father’s door open as he ran downstairs? He dashed back into the house and closed the front door, more quietly than he had run out of it, half sensing what he would find on the second floor.

    His father’s bedroom door was closed. For at least the fifth time tonight, Dane opened it just enough to peek through, but he didn’t even have to look to know his father was still in there and still sleeping. The unbroken drone of his snoring confirmed it.

    Dane wobbled a little, as if he had stood up too fast, and felt his way back to the attic stairway behind him, eyes still on the cracked doorway with his father sleeping on the other side. He carefully dropped onto the second step, his breath coming heavy now, and tried to slow his heart rate the way he had learned to do during an important basketball game.

    Once he felt steady, he closed the bedroom door and crept back up to the attic. Everything just as he’d left it. He again maneuvered around his traps and looked through the window. The black car was back, and his father leaned into the passenger’s seat, rummaging through the glove box.

    He closed his eyes for a moment or two and then looked again, but nothing had changed. True, the darkness of the late evening made it difficult to see the yard, but there was no mistaking his father’s stature framed in the light from the car’s interior—his sharp shoulders, long neck, and his gray hair cropped close. He opened the window as quietly as he could, as if, for some reason, he thought the car and the man might disappear.

    They didn’t. Through the open window, he could see them even more clearly. He thought about calling down there, but he couldn’t wrap his head around the situation enough to worry whether he would be startling his father, waking him up, or shouting at someone else entirely.

    After a few more moments of staring, he closed and locked the window, and as he backed away, tripping over one of the crates he had set for his father, he could still see the old black car, still see the man now sitting in the passenger’s seat rifling through some papers.

    He couldn’t feel his feet touch the floor as he walked soundlessly down to the second floor and approached his father’s bedroom again. He opened the door all the way this time, slowly, quietly, and entered the room. He crept over to the bed, where his father still lay sleeping and snoring, looked down into his face, and then parted the curtains and looked out the window.

    No car, no man.

    He stood there for some time, watching. Afterward, he had no idea how long the window had held him there, peering into the yard. He couldn’t recall how he had gotten out of the attic and back downstairs. All he remembered after standing silently above his father’s sleeping form was sitting on the couch and staring through the front window at the empty yard until he fell asleep, wondering how to talk to his father about all this tomorrow.

Thanks for reading! If you like what you see, please order Thy Father's Glass, releasing Tuesday, May 9.