Scams, shams, and hams: Welcome to 2019

By Steve Weddle

What a year we've had in publishing this week.

We had the Dan Mallory lunacy, on which I already did a funny.

And Jill Abramson.

Jason Heller, whose publication credits include NPR, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, suggested this week that you should probably quit your job and follow your dream of being a writer.

Perhaps he knows you and thinks that this is a good idea. I don't know you, and it isn't.

Some folks, such as Gretchen McNeil, manage to write while also making that sweet, sweet bill-paying money. Maybe you like being able to go to the hospital for your annual exam, a task I dreaded much less prior to the recent onset of the "bend over" years. Perhaps you like being able to clothe your children before sending them to school. Perhaps you enjoy food. Or your spouse does.

Heller received 2,428,934 (estimated) replies to his suggestion. The majority of replies echoed McNeil's above RT w/ comment & were of the "Uh, that's a negative, Ghost rider" variety. To wit:

It's Twitter and it's terrible advice, of course, but this is Chinatown, Jake. 

At least Heller (no relation) seems to be enjoying his fifteen minutes:

In looking at the week, I thought today I'd look at Mallory and we'd do more funny takes. 

And, perhaps once the funny takes are over, we can look at the more serious aspects of what the Mallory story touches on:

Perhaps you and I can keep our eyes open for more of those stories and share them and engage with and, maybe, do some digging and helping of our own soon.

Today, though, I wanted to look a little at some other unbelievable nonsense -- the idea of going into debt to get your novel edited.

Keidi Keating, who runs an editing business, suggested this week on Twitter that author should pay an editing business, even if the author can't afford it.

Maybe you've taken Heller's advice and quit your job. Now you can't afford Keating's editing services. Keating is the author or The Light: A Book of Knowing: How to Shine Your Light Brighter, which is published by the Light Network.

For whatever reason, I was not familiar with Keating's work with Light and Knowing and Shining. According to her author bio, she is a "spiritual mentor" who was visited by a ball in her bedroom one night:

I haven't much interest in making light of her bio here. I, myself, likely would have passed something like this off as indigestion, more "gravy than grave" as Mr. Dickens might have put it. Keating, however, has turned this into books and business.

As for her business, she suggests the following for writers who might have a manuscript lying about:

I'm not terribly interested in picking apart the ethics of this. I don't know you, but it seems getting a loan to have your manuscript edited is a terrible, terrible idea. Editing can cost thousands of dollars. Do you expect your book to bring you that back soon? When you're paying off the loan (a $5,000 loan with reasonable interest paid back over two years) at $250 per month or so, are you expecting your advance to cover that? Royalties? Maybe you think you're just one copy edit away from a movie deal. (You aren't.) Please, please be realistic. This idea of taking out loans to follow your dream is bad, bad, bad.

Can you get up early to write before the job? After? Can you knock out a hundred words at lunch? Can you carve out an hour each day to write? Don't quit your job.

Can you find a writers' group to join? Swap beta reads with other writers? Find sites online where you can join critique groups? Can you do that for your draft instead of going into debt for an edit?

Sometimes, doing a swap with an editor might work. It worked for editor Jim Thomsen:

(An "armoire," as it turns out, is some sort of cabinet thing found in France.)

So, you know, maybe that works for you. At least that way, you're not going into debt. Asking someone for money -- whether from a bank, credit card, or "someone wealthy who believes in you" -- seems to me to be a terrible, bad, no good, horrible idea. 

Consider: Do you need to have your manuscript edited before you 1) query an agent? 2) before you self-publish?  My thoughts are 1) probably maybe not and 2) yes, yes, yes, please.

Later in his Tweetday, Thomsen said he's had authors with Big Six/Five publishing contracts who have asked for his editing services, because the editing services offered in-house were rather rubbish, according to the authors. Maybe you need outside editing then.

Editing -- professional editing -- is very, very important and should be priced accordingly. Pay an editor $500 for your 150,000-word novel, as Thomsen suggests some authors want? Hahahaha. That ain't going to be good editing. How long did it take you to write that? How long do you think it will take a professional, talented editor to help you work through the problems and strengthen it? Yeah. What's that worth?

Do you need a professional editor for your book? As Jason Pinter points out, it isn't on some sort of check-list you're required to complete before publishing.

Will it help? If you hire the right editor, sure. Is it worth it? That's a thing you'll have to consider, isn't it? To clarify, as Ben LeRoy says:

Again, editing is important and, if you want professional work done, you should consider whether you want to hire a professional.

Neliza Drew wrote one of my favorite books of 2016, All the Bridges Burning. Drew worked with professional editor Elizabeth A. White on that book, so I asked about the process.

I asked Drew how she came to the decision to hire a professional editor.

Neliza Drew: It was more an emotional decision than a financial one. Financially, it was stupid. I rationalized it by doing the cover art myself with cheap stock images, formatting the inside myself, and doing the coding for the e-ARCs myself.
Me: How did you decide on White?

ND: I hired Elizabeth White because Josh Stallings liked her work. I was told if I was going to hire a pro I should query it again. I'd already queried it several times. I probably should have stuck it in a drawer and just written something about dystopian vampires at boarding school, but I didn't.

Me: Did you consider or use beta readers?

ND: All this talk about "beta" readers means you have to talk other busy people into working for free and that might mean you're either taking writing time away from people who tell stories you want to read or your're relying on people whose opinions you might not trust. If you're like Josh Stallings or Chris Holm and you have a reader you trust who lives with you and is wiling to devote their time and expertise to improving your work, that's great.

Me: Did you consider writing groups with locals?

ND: I live in an area without good writers' groups. I've tried several and sat through critiquing rambling poems about "shafts of power" and stories about happy fairies finding hope in a tree nook. A lot of the established mystery writers down here either are former journalists or retirees with the money to buy editors (or have their own clique).

The end result from Drew's writing and White's editing work, All the Bridges Burning, was amazing and you should check it out.

Should you do what Heller says and quit your day job to "follow your dream"? Please don't.

Should you sell a kidney to hire an editor? Probably not.

Should you hire an editor at all? You should darn sure consider it.

Should you remove Dan Mallory from your Christmas card list? You know, I don't have all the answers. I'm still just trying to figure out what questions to ask.

Should we follow our dreams? My dudes, my dream last night was about the dishwasher's relocating itself to the other side of the kitchen, which wasn't exactly our kitchen, but more like the police station from Adam-12, even though the dishwasher repairman was Hawkeye Pierce and, as it turns out, it wasn't really a dishwasher, but a sink, which I knew I shouldn't urinate into, but I really had to go, despite my lack of pants. I mean, my dreams are weird and not something I'd want to follow. Of course, I've never had a dream about a ball of light in my bedroom, so maybe there's still time.

A Shocking Series

By Dave White

Series characters are tricky.

When Dennis Lehane finished Prayers for Rain, he said that Patrick Kenzie’s voice went away from him.  He didn’t hear Kenzie and because of that he moved on to other ideas—Mystic River, Shutter Island, and so on.  Eventually he came back to Kenzie—or, rather, Kenzie came back to him, and Lehane wrote Moonlight Mile.

Back in 2007, I was working on the Jackson Donne series.  Jackson Donne started out as the typical private eye, someone mourning the death of his fiancée Jeanne.  She drives the series, motivates Donne and some other characters. 

The first Donne novel, When One Man Dies, was about to be published and I was working on the sequel The Evil that Men Do—which would be published in 2008.  I was deep into Donne by then, his voice throwing ideas at me left and right.  And then, just weeks after Evil came out, my publisher dropped me.

I needed to reboot, try something new.  I wrote Witness to Death, a book set in the same universe as the Donne series, but with nary a mention of Mr. Donne.  I moved on to other things, and even briefly considered leaving writing—focusing on my teaching career.  I got married, had a kid,  and went back to grad school for a while.

Jackson Donne didn’t stop talking to me, I stopped talking to him. 

Somewhere in there, I self-published Witness to Death and it did quite well.  And for while, I thought about what I would do next.  I’d start a short story and stop it.  I’d scribble some novel ideas down.  Things weren’t going anywhere.  Occasionally, I’d think about Jackson Donne, and wonder if the series was over.  I had no ideas from him.  I was different now, much different than when I wrote about him.

Series characters are tricky, and it’d hard to surprise readers form book to book.

One afternoon, I sat down to watch Doctor Who.  It was during Matt Smith’s second season.  I remember this very, very clearly—mostly because Steven Moffat, the writer of the series, surprised the hell out of me.  He took a character that had been around for 50 years and managed to do something that I didn’t expect.

Steven Moffat killed the Doctor. 

An astronaut came out of a lake and shot him dead, on screen.  Now, we all knew that the Doctor wasn’t really dead.  That somehow, Eleven would find his way back to life somewhere over the course of the season.  But that particular moment came out of the blue. 

And that’s when I really started to think about Jackson Donne again.  About series characters, and about how to surprise readers.  Suddenly, I had it.  The moment that would turn the series on its ear. 

Jeanne wasn’t dead.

I sat down and wrote a chapter.  Then another.  Then another.  I mentioned the idea to Jason Pinter—my original editor at Random House, and now the founder of Polis Books.  He loved Jackson and he loved the idea.

And, as I wrote the book, Donne himself started to surprise me.  He was no longer the typical private eye—actually wasn’t even typical in When One Man Dies.  He’d grown, changed, and evolved in the years since I’d wrote about him last.  He was talking to me, and I was talking to him.

Now, after a 7-year absence, he’s back in Not Even Past, trying to find out why and how Jeanne is still alive.  I’m talking to Donne again.

Yes, series characters are hard—because each book has to be the same, but different.  However, if you’re willing to dig deep and try something different, you can mine new angles and still be shocking.

And, just like Doctor Who surprised me, I hope Not Even Past will surprise new and old readers alike.

Spreading Rumors

I love rumors.

Really, I do. My favorite part of baseball season--after the playoffs--is hot stove rumors. I love hearing who the Yankees might acquire and how the Red Sox might counteract that. I'm a huge college basketball fan, and I follow recruiting pretty closely. There are a lot of rumors that travel through that world too. Who might commit, what team is cheating (no, not Rutgers), what player is leaning a certain way?

I love movie rumors too. I check out sites like Ain't It Cool and Dark Horizons, looking for new movie trailers and photos taken by spies with silly fake names. But these rumors get me excited. I want to see the movie. I want to watch my teams play. I dig to find out more.

I think authors need to do the same things. Rumors need to be let out for the fans to see, especially if you're established. Think of the uproar and excitement that was let out when we all heard Dennis Lehane might be writing a new Kenzie/Gennaro novel. Or the rumor that never panned out: he was writing something called MISSING DELORES. That book never panned out, but it got my imagination going.

Writers now have so many tools at their finger tips. There is Twitter, Facebook, and who knows what other things to get your message across. And too often all we get are word counts or something really mundane like "writing about killing today." Or even my awful status update that I "need to write today."

Who cares?

If you're going to talk about your writing, shouldn't you make it pique someone's interest? How much cooler would it be if Russel McLean tweeted that he'd was "writing today about melting the dome in the Capitol Building." Let me tell you something, I'd probably spend the rest of the afternoon combing the internet for more information. He'd probably also get an harassing email from me too. Or if Jason Pinter tweeted he was writing a scene about the beheading of a Canadian figure skater? That'd get me looking around the 'net too.

Boy would they have my interest. Let something go. Make it cool, and vague, and mysterious.

I understand things get cut in revision. Things change. Books don't pan out. But Missing Delores never happened, and I still wanted to know more about Shutter Island. Fans understand.


But it can only help to get the reader's attention long before the book comes out.

********

Check out my e-book More Sinned Against and find out if two thugs can make it out of an Atlantic City hotel room alive. Or will their blood be splattered all over a couch?

CHALLENGGGEEEEE

It's a challenge.

Deep down writing is a challenge. To have the discipline to sit down every day and write is a challenge to begin with.

But what good writers do is challenge themselves everyday. Tonight I attended a signing for Jason Pinter's newest The Fury and Reed Farrel Coleman's (with Ken Bruen) Tower. At the signing both talked about challenge themselves as they sat down to write these novels. To do something different.

As a writer, I respect that. One of the things that's always been important to me is doing something different each time out. To find at least one thing to focus on that was something I hadn't done before. With When One Man Dies I just wanted to complete and publish a novel. With The Evil that Men Do the challenge was to tell a story that had two linear narratives and amp up the speed and action.

Now I'm working on two novels. And each time out, I'm challenging myself more. The novel I've almost completed is a standalone. All the characters in it are brand new. I had to think differently about how to tell a story, who's eyes I'm telling it through. I had to make everything up from scratch. It was a pain in the butt, but I think I'm getting there.

Next I'm challenging myself by making the setting smaller, new characters, smaller stakes, but just as compelling. It's difficult to think about, and even harder to get down on paper. And you know something, that's just the way I like it.

I don't want to tell the same story twice. Each time I sit down to write I want to do something new. I want to come up with ideas and characters no one has seen before. It may not always work, but that's fine. I'd rather fall from the highest heights, that stand on the ground not even looking up.

Try Dennis Lehane. He challenged himself by telling new and different series novels for a while. Then he BLEW IT UP and wrote huge, gut wrenching standalones. And now the rumor is he's going back to the series. That's got to be a challenge, going back to characters nearly ten years later. I'm interested to see what he comes up with.

But what do you as the reader want to see? More of the same or something brandy dandy new?