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.

Flashback: Who I am and How I Came To Be

Russel D McLean is away for the next week. A blog post tying into the Million for a Morgue/Shortbread competition will appear here next Friday. In the meantime, here's a piece that originally appeared at Elizabeth A White's blog on the origins of Russel's need to write:

What made me a writer?

Because, seriously folks, you have to have your brain examined if you want to try doing this for a living. It’s a tough life. Your work has no intrinsic value. This thing that you for a living rises and falls on people’s opinions and moods. Technical skill counts for little if you don’t engage readers on some emotional level.

On top of all of this you have to combat the idea that what you do is easy. Anyone, they say, can string words together in a logical order. But what you’re doing is much more than that. You are trying to give those words life. You are trying to evoke a reaction in the reader, a belief in the lies that you are telling them.

To do that takes a lot of work. Sometimes more than any other job would consider necessary. As much as I joke about how the writing life appealed because it was indoor work with no heavy lifting, it comes with its own worries, especially for the occasionally insecure.

But I wouldn’t swap it for the world.

I was one of those kids who lived in his head. At primary school, my teacher would ask us to write diaries every week about what we did over the weekend. I’d lie compulsively in these. Make up stories about animals that talked or high adventure in space ships like those I saw on the TV. When my school teacher came to see me at a recent event, she expressed surprise at what I wound up writing, but none whatsoever that I was making a living from my humble scribbles.

As I grew older, the stories became more complex. I have a jotter with a half finished attempt at a Doctor Who novel* and a lot of efforts at creating comic books** that chronicle my attempts to create more fleshed out and involved stories like those I was reading.

But it wasn’t until I was maybe ten or eleven that I started to realise that writing and creating stories was more than just fun and games, that the people who wrote the books I loved were getting paid for what they did.

You see my dad also wrote. Somewhere around that time he had his work was accepted by BBC Radio 4. On multiple occasions. That was when I realised that art could equal profession. You see, it was a revelation to me that he was paid for these stories. Actual money.

My ten year old brain started working. Even then, I didn’t like the idea of a job in the real world. I started to wonder if maybe he got paid a small amount for a few stories, maybe I could make a larger amount by selling a lot of them.

But where do you begin?

It was a couple years later when I started reading dad’s copies of WRITER’S DIGEST. The magazine changed a lot down the years but back then the advice in its pages was golden. J Michael Stracynski’s screenwriting column (he was chronicling the development of a show he’d created called “Babylon 5” – whatever happened to that show?) was invaluable to me, full of genuinely practical advice about structure and story that I think could apply equally to any storytelling format. In fact I still apply a variation of the five act TV outline to most things that I write. This often doesn’t happen until redrafts, but I find it helps to search for and identify the story’s natural breaks and rhythms to create a stronger second draft.

Nancy Kress’s fiction column taught me a lot about novel writing and prose techniques that I still use to this day.

Reading the magazine – occasionally before my dad (I’d often be home from school before he came in from work and could grab the post) – I started to work on honing my craft. I entered the WD competition yearly – never getting anywhere – and watched the careers of the columnists grow. When Babylon 5 made it to air, I felt a kind of privilege to know what had gone into the writing and creation of a show I came to love.

My first professional submission, as I have already mentioned, was to Virgin Publishing’s range of Doctor Who Tie-In novels. I chose the wrong moment to submit as the minute my manuscript crossed the transom they lost the rights to publish any more Who books. But they sent me back a beautiful rejection that I still have. One that encouraged me while making sure my head didn’t swell, assuring me that I still had a lot of work to do but maybe there was something there.

That, I suppose, was when I became hooked. That was the point of no turning back.

It would take another ten or eleven years, a lot of rejections and a lot of painful mistakes before I’d finally see print. It would take a long time to make that fateful switch in genres that would help me finally discover my voice and uncover the kind of stories that really got my blood flowing. But that letter from the kind folks at Virgin marked the point where I resolved to become what I am today.

A writer.

And one who loves what he gets to do for a living.