Right revising is a most excellent thing. Perpetual revising that eats new work is not.
My best advice to aspiring writers is to write what you are passionate about, rather than trying to write "to the market." After all, if you try to write what you think others will like, and its flops, it will have been an absolute waste of your time; worse, if it succeeds, people will want you to write more of the same, not what your heart is set upon. If you love your work, there is more of a chance that others will too, and you are more likely to produce your best—which will create its own market, the mad gods of luck and publishing willing.
So, this ambles roundaboutly over to the next set of hard tasks, not terribly closely related: marketing one's tale.
I landed my first novel sale to Baen without an agent, but I wouldn't recommend this course of action to a new writer. I did it the hard way—wrote seven published books and won my first Nebula. Then I found my agent. On the bright side, she is a very good one.
Besides checking books on writing and Net-based sources, which have grown far more abundant these days (if varied in utility), if a new writer is looking for an agent it certainly can't hurt to attend the larger science fiction conventions, such as Worldcon or especially World Fantasy Convention, where a high concentration of agents and editors appear, and better still, appear on panels, where you can actually ask them your questions. Beyond that, it's just the usual slog of query letters and partials-and-outlines, as described in the many how-to books. If you have a published friend, you can sometimes get an introduction to their agent, but beware that you're putting your friend's professional reputation on the line when you do this. Your offering had better justify it.
Keep in mind, agents are not, normally, writing instructors. (Some agents do critique their clients' work, some don't. Mine mostly doesn't. It's not her job. Wrestling with French tax forms, or Bulgarian pirates, or publishers' accounting departments, or corporate-speak contracts, that's her job.)
Since the mid-Eighties when I broke in, the slush piles have grown bigger and the number of publishers who will even look at unagented submissions has grown smaller. Baen is one of the few publishers who still read slush (unsolicited novel manuscripts), but even they can only "start" perhaps one or two new writers a year. It's worth it to try every channel, but if you can land an agent who likes your work, so much the better. While no agent can sell a book that wouldn't sell on its own, once you have an offer, you'll want an agent anyway to do things like retain subrights, be sure your contract is reasonable, and market foreign sales.
Most agents do not handle short work even for their established clients, so of course new writers who can work at both lengths should send off their short tales to the magazines themselves. There isn't much to negotiate or change in most magazine contracts (though you should be sure you have a proper reversion clause), and a short story sale looks good in one's cover letter when offering a novel. No, it is not necessary to write or sell short stories before tackling novels; different writers have different natural lengths, and it's not a bad idea to play to one's strengths in the beginning.
Much depends on whether one writes better at short or long lengths. Many (not all) writers have a length that comes most readily to them. Both my friend Pat Wrede and I tend to be natural novelists. Our good ideas come in novel-sizes. Her first five sales were novels, before she ever figured out how to construct a salable short story. A lot of famous writers seem to be natural short-form writers. One is most likely to sell whatever one writes best. (Duh.) The odds are about the same, i.e., ghastly. (The mantras "They have to buy something," "Odds are for other people," and "There's always room at the top" are useful when contemplating this. Also "If s/he can do it, so can I." At least when "it" is properly understood as "the bloody hard work.") The short story market is shrinking at present, and many more people complete, and therefore submit, short work than long, so it's very competitive. On the other hand, the turn-around time for new novel submissions has become unconscionably long, literally years sometimes, and one can't simultaneously submit works of fiction. Any professional sale is a good thing, and will look good in the cover letter—selling either a novel or short work to an editor's respected colleague establishes your professional status, and the editor is likely to give your next submission, of whatever length, a closer glance.
There is a lot of on-line help out there these days that did not exist when I was breaking in. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has a valuable Website—the page at www.sfwa.org/writing is a gold mine. I suggest starting with Patricia Wrede's "Worldbuilding Questions" and Tappan King's "The Saga of Myrtle the Manuscript," and going on till you come to the end. Newsgroups such as rec.arts.sf.composition are on-line hangouts for both new writers and some helpful old pros, and hundreds of on-line critique groups of varying value have sprung up. E-mail has freed writing groups from geography. The SF publishing news magazine Locus is probably the best resource for publishing, bookselling, and convention news, as well as having extensive review columns and excellent interviews with writers. Not to mention photos of both famous and important behind-the-scenes faces—I was able to recognize my new publisher in an elevator crush at the '86 Atlanta Worldcon because I'd seen his photo in Locus.
Which brings us to reviews. Good reviews are always heartening, bad ones depressing. Curiously, a few bad ones manage to be far more excoriating than the ten or twenty good ones are uplifting. There's a psychological study in there somewhere, I'm sure. Ignore the bad, enjoy the good, and don't take either sort too seriously.
The most popular novels have both a good story and a good set of characters, accessible to a broad range of readers, not just to a tiny elite. (Though I will cheerfully maintain that elites deserve their reads, too, "elite" and "bestseller" don't usually occur in the same sentence for an obvious logical reason.) Books with legs usually need to be books that sell themselves, that people will recommend to each other; clever or expensive publicity can boost a book up onto bestseller lists for a moment, but only the story itself can keep it there for any length of time. There is also the question of cracking that critical mass, of getting enough people recommending it to each other (or arguing about it) that other readers become curious just because they've heard about this thing six times in two weeks in several completely different conversations, and start to actually remember it well enough to go look for it.
Some of a writer's necessary work lies midway between art and commerce, as in learning how to deal with editors and agents and contracts and business etiquette (many writers have no business background, and unfortunately it shows). Paranoia is certainly one of the pitfalls that up-and-coming writers need to avoid. No editor is trying to steal your work, really. It is perhaps also wise to avoid buying too blindly into the "whine and cheese" fests some writers indulge in. Dissing one's publisher, agent, or other professional colleague in public is as unappetizing to listen to as someone dissing their ex-spouse, and can lead the uninitiated newbie into mistaking as adversarial, parts of the publication process that are, in fact, best accomplished in a cooperative spirit. It's a good idea for any writer, though, to become aware of what level of sales constitutes success for one's chosen genre, so as to avoid either inflated expectations or selling oneself short. "How far is up?" can be a confusing question to answer.
I've discovered as my career advances that "take the money and run" is not an option for a responsible writer. By the time one's latest book arrives on bookstore shelves, a lot of other folks have bet their own time, money, and reputation on its success, only starting with its purchasing editor and publisher. The book needs to succeed for them, as well. So I've discovered that some degree of financial independence doesn't actually free me from needing to compete, after all, and that I still care.
Which brings me to authoring. Which is another whole job, demanding yet another skill-set.
While in normal speech "author" and "writer" are used interchangeably, I've found it handy to hija
ck the terms in order to make a useful distinction. Using the two synonyms gives me a way to talk about two separate aspects of a writing career: the actual sweat and uncertainty and frustration and joy of writing, which no one sees (and which would be very boring to watch); and the promotion, which is where the author gets out in public, but which has nothing to do with writing and can sometimes, for the shy or low-energy writer, be actively detrimental to creativity. The promotional/"author" side involves things like interviews, book tours, convention or speaking engagements, Net-based promotion, writing about one's writing (as I'm doing here), answering fan mail, and the like.
The people who imagine that writing is a glamorous profession tend to be looking at the "author" side of things; reasonably enough, since that's the most visible, and when a writer is out in public like that, he or she is usually trying to look as attractive as possible, in hopes of luring readers to their prose. At home we are much grubbier.
There are moments when one is "only" an author, books tours for example. I certainly get no writing done on book tours. All my attention is taken up with not missing planes, trying not to get sick from the travel stress, trying to pay close attention to a rapid succession of people, and never, ever losing my cool with a reader, even if it's the thirtieth time I've been asked the same question that week. After about the third stop I can get pretty tired of listening to myself. And I develop nightmares about airports.
It takes me two to four weeks to recover enough from such a tour to pick up my thread of thought and begin writing again. About the same for an international trip. So they are very expensive in terms of lost writing time. But then, book tours can feed the writer part of my brain just through being intense experiences—getting out and glimpsing new places and meeting folks and listening to the stories they tell me, not to mention sometimes staying in fascinating hotels that would normally be quite beyond my budget.
After I'd been on a few book tours, I really began to wonder about their economic utility for my publishers, not just their huge time and energy costs for me. It's exhilarating when a mob of readers turn out for a stop, and booksellers are always cool folks to chat with, but surely anyone who'd come to an author's signing would have bought the book anyway . . . ? Book tours alone can't increase sales that much, though they may cluster them in early weeks in an effort to game the system of best-seller lists. It all harks back, I finally realized, to those middlemen again. I theorize that having a tour signals a book as receiving a major push from its publisher, just as raised gold foil lettering once did, and so the wholesalers presumably order more copies nationwide. Either that, or it's pure cargo-cult thinking, or a trap like the returns system; a few people tried tours, sales went up, everyone got into the act, and now no one dares be the first to stop. As they said in Shakespeare in Love, one of my favorite films about writing: "No one knows. It's a mystery."
I've been asked whether I think high-profile author blurbs are important to the sales of books. In my experience, readers are largely indifferent to blurbs. The place they seem to be important is, again, during the pre-selling phase, just like the gold lettering and book tours. Like sausages and the law, it is perhaps unsettling to know too much about how books are made—or at least, sold.
One less baffling perk of being an "author" is the authorial meal with an editor. These have various subtle social functions that took me a while to figure out. They are not, as I had somehow expected in dithering anticipation of my first official editorial meal—a breakfast at the '86 Atlanta Worldcon with my then-new publisher Jim Baen—to work out the details of book contracts. Those are done by telephone, with lots of long, thoughtful pauses between calls. What these meals are for is to make the next phone call easier. When you've never met face-to-face, the lack of visual cues over the phone, and the presence of unrestrained writerly imagination, can create confusion and misunderstanding. When you can picture the real person, with their actual tics and tones and grimaces and grins, those phone calls somehow go more smoothly ever after. Still, it's a bit startling in the convention green room to witness the fannish cry of "We're hungry—let's go find a restaurant" transmute into the authorial version of, "We're hungry—let's go find an editor!"
The other charm of editorial dining, of course, is the chance to venture into upscale restaurants that neither writer nor editor, in our scruffy at-home personas and income levels, would ever get within whiffing distance of. An editorial dinner was the first time I ever had a waiter come around between courses and rake the tablecloth free of detritus (the area around my plate always seems to have lots) with one of those cute little brass scrapers. At such a dinner with my friend Lillian's editor at a convention hotel restaurant in Dallas, we were all charmed and boggled when we were each brought, between courses to clear our palates between courses, a small scoop of sorbet—sitting on half a lime—sitting in an individual sculptured ice swan about a foot high with a tiny white Christmas light in the base. I swear we hadn't even ordered lighted swans; they just swanned in, as if naturally.
That wasn't quite as surreal, however, as the editorial dinner at Chicon V in Chicago, when Jim and editor Toni Weisskopf took Elizabeth Moon and me out to some tower of power reached only by marble-lined elevators. The vegetable course, a mounded puree of what I dimly remember as featuring mainly turnips, arrived—decorated with a microscopically thin layer of gold foil about five inches square. As a science fiction writer, I take it as my duty to try any food once, a dubious rule that once led me to eat a wichetty grub, but that's another story. Elizabeth, however, was quietly horrified by the gold, and carefully ate around it and under it, cautiously excavating with her spoon. "Elizabeth!" I murmured in maternal reproval. "You're not eating your gold!" We let her have her dessert anyway.
I've been asked what has surprised me most about writing and the writing business. Actually, I live in a state of perpetual surprise. "My God! The Bulgarians paid me after all! I signed that contract three years ago!" "Good heavens! The Dutch sub-agent has disappeared with all the receipts!" "Publishers Weekly gave me a starred review!" "My first quarter's estimated taxes are higher than my first quarter's income!" "The fans put/didn't put that one on the Hugo ballot?!" "They're putting that cover on my book? Eep!" "They're putting that cover on my book? Hallelujah!" "They went to six figures?! Oh! . . . well . . . how much past?" "Somebody e-mailed me from Kazakhstan/Alice Springs/Finland/South Africa/Portugal/Pakistan/Croatia?" "What's 'The New York Times Extended list'?" "A fan who is dying from cancer wants to see my book early?" "The fan I sent the story to last month passed away yesterday." "I've been stuck on this same damned plot point for 2/3/4/5/6 weeks!" "Pirated in Greece? I didn't even know they read SF in Greece!" "My brother/mother/cousin actually read my latest novel!" "How many days ago did you mail it overnight express?" "Korean rights?" "I can't figure out what the devil happens in Chapter 4." "The Russian fans are holding a Bujold convention in Moscow!" "The new minor character, who I hadn't even imagined last week, just hijacked Chapter 4 and is closing in rapidly on 5 and 6. Will my putative hero ever get another sentence in edgewise?" "We got a blurb from her? Wow!" "Perth?" "Spain?" "London? . . . England?" "St. Petersburg? You mean the one in Russia?" "Where is Zagreb?" "New Zealand?"
All real examples. If a week goes by without a surprise, these days, I get pettish. From fried wichetty grubs to gold-plated turnips, when you're a writer you never know what's going to appear on your plate next. It keeps a woman alert, it does.
A Conversation with Toni Weisskopf
John Helfers
Toni Weisskopf has been working closely with Lois almost from the very beginning, when she was establishing the Vorkosigan Saga. As the current Editor-in-Chief at Baen Books, she has been instrumental in bringing out another Miles novel, as well as editing practically all of the books in the series. I asked her to share what it has been like working with Lois, and here is what she had to say.
How did Lois get discovered by Baen?
This was actually before
my time at Baen, but legend has it that the three novel manuscripts The Warrior's Apprentice, Shards of Honor, and Ethan of Athos had made the rounds of all the older, established publishers, and that they had either been rejected or languished unappreciated, before they came to Baen Books, which had just shipped its first books in 1984. Jim took one look at The Warrior's Apprentice and called Lois up to ask her if she had more. She did, two more novels, and Jim bought all three on the spot.
Did anyone see her potential during that early time?
Jim Baen certainly did. They were the first books he told me to read when I was hired at Baen as an editorial assistant. I was so jaded (straight out of college and already jaded!) that I didn't believe new SF authors could bring anything fresh to the table. Jim and Lois proved me wrong, gloriously wrong.
What do you remember best about the first time you read one of Lois's manuscripts?
The first time I spoke to Lois after reading her books, I offered to have her baby. Luckily, she declined. They made a tremendous impact on me. I started with The Warrior's Apprentice and never looked back. I got the same sort of feeling reading her works as I had gotten from classic Heinlein: a renewed faith in humanity and a desire to explore and do good in the universe. Great feeling.
Did Lois have a clear idea of what she wanted to accomplish with the Miles novels at the time, or did the series evolve in scope as the books were written?
The Vorkosigan Companion Page 9