Another Door Closed

Very often I think that “disappointment” might as well be my middle name.

Okay, here’s the thing. Last time I talked about a story I’d started writing after finding a publisher that looked promising. It had some guidelines for the kinds of stories they were looking for and a couple of them sounded like fun. As mentioned in the previous post, I started working on one and it eventually fizzled out, but I had some ideas for another and started working on it.

Made pretty good progress over the past few weeks, despite various interruptions and more hours being added to my work schedule and other delays. As of the latest scene I finished today, the word count is at a little over 16,400 of the publisher’s minimum required word count of 40,000.

Every now and then I’ve gone to the publisher’s website to check the submissions page and be sure they’re still open to subs and haven’t changed the types of stories they’re looking for and haven’t closed down. After finishing the scene mentioned above, I took another look at their subs page and noticed something that should’ve jumped out at me immediately but didn’t. I suppose being homeless, and all the worries and stresses that go along with it, had me too distracted to pick up on something so obvious, but I finally did.

There’s no pay rate listed on the publisher’s website. You’d expect to find something like “8 cents per word” or “5 cents per word” or whatever, or a percentage of royalties, or a mention of an advance being offered even if the amount isn’t listed. Something about what the authors are paid and how they’re paid. But there’s nothing.

So I searched for info on this publisher’s pay rates and found a thread at Absolute Write where authors were able to ask questions to this specific publisher and a rep of the publisher answered them. A couple of red flags went up within seconds of starting to peruse the thread. One, the publisher’s rep refused to disclose pay rates, royalties, advances, and so on, and posted vague and contradictory comments, for instance saying in one reply that they pay industry standard rates and in another reply saying they pay double the industry standard. Two, the rep was frequently hostile and hurled insults at people who’d politely asked completely reasonable questions and asked for clarification on seeming contradictions and their refusal to offer specific numbers. And after reading the whole thread …

Granted, it’s an old thread, but it’s the closest I was able to get to any info on pay rates. Other links I found led to the publisher’s website or to lists-of-publishers sites that simply copied and pasted the info from the publisher’s own subs page, including the absence of pay rates and types. The rep’s behavior and the persistent lack of solid answers regarding pay made me reluctant to send that publisher any of my work. It’s possible that, in the years since the final post in this thread, the publisher has changed its behavior … but the total absence of pay rates on its own website is still a concern.

And, well, I’ve been burned before, so I’m not willing to put myself in that position again.

I’ve had two bad experiences with previous publishing efforts. And what’s really sad is that those were the only times I’ve ever succeeded at getting anything officially published. Everything else I’ve done, I’ve tried for years to get published until it got rejected too many times and I gave up and stuck it on a website like Tapas, where it got a bit of attention but for the most part just gathered dust. I have yet to see any actual money from those ventures.

The first of these bad publishing experiences wasn’t the worst screwjob I’ve ever seen, but it was bad enough to make me extremely wary of small publishers. The second time, I didn’t get screwed at all, it was simply a total failure. But I’ll get to that one later.

The first was over ten years ago. I’d already been trying to get a foot in the door since around 1991 and every submission was rejected. A few of the more recent ones, less than five years ago, were rejected within hours, even when the guidelines said the response time was a couple of weeks or several months. I sent it in through their online form and received a rejection email less than six hours later. So. That’s what I’ve been up against for over thirty years.

The only reason this one publisher accepted the novel I’d just finished is because I knew someone who knew someone. I knew an author who had several books under this publisher and they suggested I sub this novel to it. So I did, and it was accepted … probably, I suspect, because of the connection I had with the other auther.

So. After twenty-plus years, the only way to get in the door was … nepotism.

I won’t bother naming the publisher because it already shut down several years ago. But here’s quick rundown of what happened.

The novel was accepted in early 2013 and I was invited into the publisher’s Facebook group (where other authors working with this publisher were able to talk with one another, but only members could use or even view the forum) while the editing process was going on. An artist friend of mine had done some sketches of an earlier version of the book’s protagonist that I’d used in some unrelated stories, and I posted a few of them in the group just because I thought they were cool.

When the book’s cover was being designed, the person running the publishing company emailed me some works-in-progress and I saw that their “art director” had taken one of those sketches and simply traced over it to get a picture of the main character to put on a cover. I remember just staring in disbelief at the images. I mean, what the hell kind of art director would do that? I immediately emailed back and basically said, “Oh, hell no! You’re not using my friend’s art without her permission!”

The reply was the next thing that left me dumbfounded. They agreed not to use my friend’s work but kind of brushed it off, as if they didn’t understand why I was so pissed off. A publisher should know that the stunt they tried to pull could get them and me sued by my friend, and most likely would’ve destroyed our friendship. They seemed completely oblivious to that.

They made another attempt at a cover using a shitty stock image of a gothic-looking city for the background and a human inserted amateurishly into the foreground with her skin amateurishly colored purple. The main character had purple skin and wasn’t human. She was genetically engineered and had the physique of a bodybuilder and the stock image used for the cover was a slim, supermodel-looking woman. The character also had dragon-like wings, claws, digitigrade legs, and a number of other nonhuman features that weren’t in the stock image. The book’s setting was also a high-tech, futuristic city. Think “Las Vegas cranked up to eleven” or Night City in Cyberpunk 2077. There was nothing gothic about the place.

They got frustrated because I’d nixed the plagiarism attempt and objected to the second attempt as well. I made my own cover using a royalty-free stock image I’d gotten and a font that was free for commercial use, and it looked leaps-and-bounds better than the publisher’s half-assed attempt, if I do say so myself. And they turned it down, claiming font and image couldn’t be used for commercial purposes, which simply wasn’t true. They then ended up using a bland-as-hell background consisting of mostly the dark side of a planet that might’ve been Earth (which was where the above-mentioned city was located) with only a narrow sliver of the light side visible, on a completely blank background with no stars aside from the distant sun, and the title and my name in a bland font.

When I commented on how uninteresting the image was, the reply was basically, “Well, you wouldn’t let us use the two previous covers, so …”

At that point I just gave up and let it go. I knew at that point that this was going to be a bad ride.

During editing, their editor made a number of suggestions that I didn’t like, but I went along with them because I’d already kind of checked out and because I just wanted to get the damn thing out the door and start getting paid. But they made one suggestion on which I simply wouldn’t budge. I remember bringing this one up before but don’t recall which post it’s in, but … they suggested that I rewrite several chapters of the book in order to kill off a pair of supporting characters because it would be a “gut punch” for the readers.

No other reason. Just a “gut punch.” Just for shock value. Those characters played significant roles in the rest of the book, and I would’ve had to give their dialog and actions to other characters or just chop them out entirely, and add a bunch of dialog and narration from other characters mourning their deaths. In addition to the completely unnecessary work this would’ve caused, it would’ve cast an unnecessary pall over the rest of the novel.

But more than anything else, too many stories kill off characters seemingly just for the hell of it. In some cases, yes, it raises the stakes or shows that no one is safe, but when it happens too frequently …

This was my main point in the other post where I talked about this, so I won’t rehash it here. I’ll just say that being so eager to kill characters off takes away its effectiveness after a while, and could turn readers/viewers off and make them give up and move on to something else when they get sick of it.

Killing a character here and there can be effective, can show the readers how high the stakes are, and can move the story forward in a huge way, but it should be done sparingly. And it should be done for the right reasons. It should not be done just for shock value or a “gut punch.” It’s got to mean something.

But I guess that’s why the guy was an editor, not a writer.

Ugh. That was kinda bitchy. But I’m still pissed off even though it happened a decade ago.

Anyway. I refused to go along with that one, and eventually the editing phase ended and the book was finally published.

And then the publisher did absolutely nothing to market the book. They left that entirely to me. I had no money to spend on advertisements that would reach thousands of potential readers, since I was barely paying the rent and other expenses at the time. All I could do was post links to the book on Facebook and Twitter and talk about it on a blog I used to have way back then. I was able to put the link on a couple of other websites I hung around back then, where I had a tiny audience of a few dozen readers, but that was it. I had no other way to promote my own work.

Publishers do. But this one did nothing at all. And my novel absolutely tanked. I sold a few dozen copies and then it just completely fizzled out.

I found out later, from the author that suggested this publisher, that it had claimed several of their other books just because they were loosely connected, having determined that they were “direct sequels” and therefore belonged to the publisher. My novel was a spin-off of a series of books I’d been working on since 2002, and now I was worried that I’d get into legal hot water if I tried to publish them elsewhere. But after my experiences with this publisher, I sure as hell wasn’t going to submit any of them there.

Since this publisher closed permanently a few years ago, those other books are free and clear … and I eventually put them up on Tapas because I couldn’t get them in the door anywhere else. I no longer have a copy of the manuscript of this novel, so if I continue the series someday, I’ll have to start it over from scratch or slip bits of the story into the main series as flashbacks. But that version of the book is, effectively, dead.

The other bad experience I mentioned was mercifully short — and, again, it wasn’t another case of me getting shafted. It simply turned into a failure.

A few of the authors in the Facegroup mentioned up above had gotten together and published an anthology every now and then, and one of them invited me into their next one. This was a sci-fi/fantasy romance anthology, which I think I may have mentioned in other posts here. So, once again … nepotism.

Romance isn’t really my cup of tea. When it happens in one of my stories or novels, it’s a small thing that happens between characters while they’re involved in the actual plot. It’s rarely the main point or the whole reason the story exists. But I figured, what the hell, I’ll give it a try. What came out of it was a short story that I decided later on to expand into a full novel, Uncharted Territory. Which is still a work in progress that I need to get off my ass and finish.

Previous anthologies had been bestsellers. This one, though? The one they asked me to submit a story for? It sold so poorly that they gave up and pulled it from Amazon after only three months. So … I don’t know. Maybe I’m just the kiss of fuckin’ death.

At least the story I wrote for it was something I found compelling enough to expand into a novel, and events in the back half of the book gave me ideas to use in more sequels. So there’s that. But I started posting it on Tapas because, deep down, I knew I’d never get an actual publisher to consider it for even a fraction of a second. Failure is my thing, apparently. I just don’t succeed at anything. Even if it looks like I’ve gotten a win, it either falls apart immediately or turns into an utter disaster later on like the first publishing experience discussed at length here.

Anyway. That brings us back to the warning signs I saw on the Absolute Write forum. After what happened a decade ago, I’m just not willing to take that kind of risk with my work. All the time and effort I put into my one and only officially-published novel was for nothing and the book itself is long gone. I’m not going to risk getting burned again and losing a story I’ve put this much time into writing.

So … what do I do with the over sixteen thousand words of the story I can’t even use that I’ve written so far? Well, it was kind of a spin-off of Uncharted Territory, so I’ll expand it into a full novel and use it as a sequel. I’ve put too much work into it to just throw it away, and I’m having too much fun with the characters and the trouble they’ve gotten into. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can finally finish Uncharted Territory. I still feel driven to keep working on another story I’ve talked about before, one that I feel like it’s trying to tear its way out of me … but the subject matter pisses me off and depresses me so much that it’s really difficult to keep working on. So maybe finishing UT will serve as a palate-cleanser.

Maybe sometime soon I’ll post a few snippets from the spin-off story here, too. Not right now because this post is already way too long, and my laptop battery is almost dead. Also because I’m at the library and they keep the air conditioning cranked up too goddamn high. It’s ninety-six degrees outside, but in here it’s so cold that I’m actually shivering. I bet my nipples could cut glass right now, so it’s time to go charge up the laptop with the power inverter in my car and exchange shivering for sweating …