– by Bev Vincent

The acquiring editor is the person most writers—and, perhaps, readers—are familiar with, at least in general. We submit stories to them, they accept (or reject) our work, and changes to the overall flow, structure, and content of the material originates with them. I think of them as conceptual or big-picture editors. A while back I wrote about what a good editor can do for a writer.

This month I would like to introduce you to copy editors, the unsung heroes of the publishing process. After the editor and the author have ironed out the major issues with a project, the manuscript then goes before the sharp eyes of the copy editor.

The first thing she does is to build a style sheet for the project to guarantee continuity from the first page to the last. The publishing house probably has a style manual that it uses as its Bible, but there will inevitably be things that aren’t addressed by the style manual, so the copy editor makes a decision about how such things will be handled, adds rules to the style sheet, and sweeps through the manuscript to make sure the rules are obeyed. How will times be represented: a.m. or AM? What numbers will use digits and which ones will be spelled out? Will essay titles in the text be italicized or put in quotes. Will certain words be hyphenated or represented as compound words? Will the serial comma be used? These are just some of the decisions the copy editor makes and enforces.

The copy editor also flags grammatical errors and catches errors in fact. She looks for overused terms or duplication of words in close proximity. In a work of fiction, a good copy editor will make sure that Jane, who has blue eyes on page 17, doesn’t turn into Jean with green eyes on page 317. In a non-fiction work, she will notice that an author has referred to a publisher as Everett House throughout when, in fact, the company is Everest House. The copy editor makes sure that trademarked names are correctly spelled. She catches vague references and ambiguities.

When I was working on The Road to the Dark Tower with Penguin several years ago, once the hardcopy manuscript went to the copy editor, it was “locked.” All subsequent changes were made on that printed version of the manuscript. The copy editor sent the manuscript back to the author with her notes in the margins and the author addressed the comments and suggestions in the margins using a different color of ink. For complicated or lengthy changes, the author could insert pages into the manuscript, but that version was sacrosanct. I often wondered what would happen if it were lost in transit. To be honest, I was surprised that a major publisher still did all that work in pen on paper—it meant that someone had to sort out the stets from the deles, interpret the handwritten insertions, and key them into the electronic master. It all worked out in the long run, but it seemed like an unnecessary step in the electronic era.

For my current project, the copyediting phase was done electronically. I received a version of my Word manuscript by e-mail with changes tracked and notes inserted where clarification was required. The style sheet came as a separate attachment. I went through the manuscript, again with changes tracked, and responded to comments and questions with my own comments and responses, accepted certain changes, rejected others—providing my reasons for doing so—and reworded passages that required clarification.

Copyeditors, in my experience, seem to be deferential people. They know that it isn’t their job to rewrite what the author has created, only to improve it. Often, alterations that were made to my manuscript were accompanied by queries that asked, “Change okay?”

After the author addresses the changes,the first pass of the book’s layout can be created. This is the point where proofreaders come into play—and the author is to be counted among this group. That’s the point I’m at with my current project. The first pass is on its way to me as I write, and I will have a week to go through it. In general, all I would need to do is proofread, but since this is a profusely illustrated book, I’ll also be seeing proposed design elements for the first time, and I’ll have to write captions. It’s been a fascinating project to work on, let me tell you.

I have the utmost respect and undying gratitude for the copy editor who caught all my silly mistakes and will make the finished product (and me) look better.

– Bev Vincent

Recently, a representative of a book packager contacted me with a proposal for a project they wanted me to consider. 

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. That’s the sound of my brakes squealing across the pavement. Book packagers? What’s that? Sounds kind of dodgy. Some sort of scam, mayhaps? 

Before committing to anything—or indeed, even responding to the unsolicited e-mail—I had to educate myself on what this book-packaging thing was all about. Book packagers are exactly like publishers. They produce books. They have researchers and editors and marketers and foreign rights departments, and all the other things that you might expect a publisher to have. They have artists and illustrators, book designers, the whole nine yards. They even have their own organization: The American Book Producers Association. 

What they do is bring together all these creative people to assemble a “package,” which is just another word for a book. This book idea either originates with another publisher—perhaps even one of the big, famous, New York publishers—or the proposal is shopped around. That’s right—the book packager also acts as a literary agent for the project. 

Why do they exist? Because publishers don’t always have all the resources necessary to produce labor-intensive books—ones that have a lot of photographs or illustrations, require a lot of research or involve the acquisition of rights and licensing. That’s the stock-in-trade for a book packager. The volumes they produce would look right at home on your coffee table. Big, lavish volumes with photographs. Every page illustrated and intricately designed. Book packagers (also known as independent book producers) make complicated books easy for a publisher to publish. 

As was the case with the project I was offered, another publisher often comes up with a concept, perhaps prepares an outline or some guidelines, and then hires the book packager to produce the finished volume. 

So, what’s the deal? As with any other publishing relationship, the sky is the limit. It’s difficult to generalize. The conventional wisdom is that the writer’s end of the deal with a book packager is much like “work for hire.” That means, you get a flat fee for your words—which, after all, are just part of the package—no royalties. And, sometimes, not even name credit on the book or a transfer of copyright to the book packager. It’s like being a ghostwriter. Those terms may be deal breakers for some people. 

However, everything is negotiable, and not all deals are the same. The book packager in this instance offered both royalties and name credit. Though the boilerplate contract stipulated a transfer of copyright, my agent successfully negotiated copyright in my name. During negotiations, he told me he enjoyed working on this deal because it was a different type of contract from the usual ones he was used to seeing. Different kinds of clauses and concerns. 

There was something else to consider—though I will get a royalty on every copy sold, the royalty is based on the sale price to the publisher who initiated the project, not on the cover price. That’s not the way things normally work—it’s more like the terms of a normal contract for “deeply discounted” copies, except in this case, every copy is deeply discounted. 

On the other side of the equation, though, the books are sold to the publisher on a no-return basis. I will get a royalty for every copy printed. None of that nasty “reserve against returns” that appears on typical royalty statements—money held back by the publisher in anticipation of a certain percentage of returned books from stores. 

There’s another dimension to this project: I’m essentially a servant to two masters. I have an editor I’m working with at the book packagers, and another editor downstream with the publisher who solicited the project whose name I don’t even know. It is possible that I will “finalize” the manuscript with one editor only to find out that more work will be required at the behest of the second editor. So far, the second editor has been agreeable with everything we’ve done, but it’s something to keep in mind should you find yourself considering a deal with a book packager. 

Things tend to move very fast in the world of packaging. The editor first contacted me at the end of November 2008. After a few rounds of discussion, both by e-mail and phone, I was intrigued enough to get my agent involved. He went off and did his thing with them while I prepared a detailed outline for the project, which I submitted in early January. 

After the outline was approved, I got straight to work. Because of the accelerated timeframe, I had 1/3 and 2/3 point deliverable deadlines—both to keep me on track and to provide the photo researchers with material to work from. 

The editor has been a delight to work with, as enthusiastic about the project as I am and very supportive of the work I’ve done to date. Exactly the kind of environment every writer hopes to have while working on a book. 

Now, less than three months after the initial contact, I have an executed contract and a completed manuscript. Because these books are so lavishly illustrated, the word count tends to be fairly low. In this case, 20-30,000 words was the contracted text. 

In parallel, the photo researcher and documents experts have been gathering material for the book. I don’t have any involvement in that, though I have been able to facilitate access to certain materials. The book will be published this fall—about a year after initial contact. It’s hard to match that in “mainstream” publishing. 

So, that’s what I’ve been up to during 2009 to date. I had the first draft finished at the end of January and I spent the first couple of weeks of February revising and polishing the manuscript and I turned it in last week—two weeks early. 

The advance is probably more than I would get for a first novel from a paperback house and for much less work—and there’s the possibility of further revenue if the book is popular, or if side deals are executed for subsidiary rights. All in all, a very pleasant process. Especially in this economic climate, and with the fairly dire state of affairs in publishing, it was a welcome surprise to have something like this drop into my lap.

And, at the end of the year, I’m going to have copies of this beautiful book in stores across the country. Guess what all my friends and family are getting for Christmas this year?

– Bev Vincent

There’s a scene in Amadeus where Mozart has just finished playing one of his new compositions for Emperor Joseph II. After a few generalities (“ingenious,” “quality work”), the Emperor concludes (at the prompting of Mozart’s nemesis Salieri), “There are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.”

The movie version of Mozart, who has the benefit of a good script to feed him a comeback, retorts, “Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?”

Several years ago I wrote a short story for a themed anthology. Although the editor expressed an early inclination toward accepting my story, the anthology (it may surprise you to hear) failed to materialize. I submitted the story to a few markets in the aftermath of that implosion, but never reread it or paid much attention to it. One editor, bless his soul, took the time to write a lengthy critique, almost two full pages. He saw a lot of good in the story, but felt that it needed major work. I filed the story and the critique away without taking further action.

A few weeks ago, I received an invitation to a broadly themed anthology. For some reason, that story came to mind. However, when I perused the invitation and brought up the story document, I saw a problem. The guidelines specified “no more than 4000 words” and the story’s word count was 6200. Ah, well, I thought. I’ll just have to write something new.

A day or so later, I was struck out of the blue by a question. Why was the story so long? That’s a pretty beefy tale and the plot, as I remembered it, wasn’t all that complex or involved. The entire story takes place over the span of an hour or so. I brought up the document again, wondering if I might be able to trim it back a little. That seemed a tad optimistic—after all, 2200 words represented 35% of the story’s total length. If I could just get it back to 5000 words or so, I rationalized, maybe the editor would consider it despite its length. (We all know that guidelines are meant for everyone else, never for us!)

I didn’t get very far into the text before realizing that there was a lot of extraneous material. The tale barely got started before I was sidetracked by a lengthy “essay” about the nature of the protagonist. All very valuable insight for me as the writer, but overkill in terms of the story. It was so bad that at the end of that diversion I had a space break to remind me it was time to get back to the plot.

Instead of a scalpel, I wielded a machete. The floor around my computer became littered with excised text. Adjectives, sentences, paragraphs, huge swaths of pages all went. Some of the writing was very precious. I remember writing those gleaming passages, but with several years of distance I found I was able to trim them with only slight twinges of regret.

By the end of my first pass, I was down to 4600 words. Well, then, I thought. Close, but no cigar. I told myself, “Self, it’s going to be very difficult to trim much more than that.”

Two days later, I took another whack at it, after rereading the critique from the helpful editor who had had enough faith in the core concept of the story to send me such detailed notes. As of this writing, I’m only halfway through the second revision, and the word count is at 3600. I’m sure that more will be cut before I tackle the next phase, which will be a procedure akin to plastic surgery to repair the grievous wounds I’ve inflicted on the prose. My machete left gashes and gaping holes. Coarse sutures are holding paragraphs together. My scalpel will come into play to trim, shape and mold, to remove the scars and join the text back together seamlessly, I hope.

Okay, I think I’ve stretched the medical metaphor as far as it will go. When I’m finished with the story, it will probably have crept back up a little, perhaps verging on 4000 words again, but whatever I add (post-op, so to speak) will be subtleties and nuance that give the story depth and—I hope—impact. No more blather.

Is there a take-home message? So often I’m not sure when I start writing one of these essays. It’s a vignette from my writing life. Take from it what you will. I had this lumbering story occupying my hard drive that was so bloated (too many words) that I couldn’t find many places to send it. With a little distance, I saw the skinnier, zippier, edgier story hiding inside and I hope that I’m managing to tease it out.

– Bev Vincent

(With apologies to Lawrence Block for co-opting and modifying the title of his most excellent book about writing fiction)

Much of what we write about at Storytellers Unplugged has to do with the world of fiction: short stories, novels, screenplays, video games, etc. Today I’d like to spend a little time discussing how everything you know about marketing fiction is the exact opposite of the way things are usually done in the non-fiction world.

Can you imagine the response you’d get if you sent a query letter to an editor that said, in effect: I have a great idea for a short story that I’d like to sell to you. Here  is what the story will be about. Would you buy this idea so I can start writing the story?

If you received any response at all to this query, it probably wouldn’t be very encouraging—and perhaps not printable in this blog. With fiction you write, then you sell. For non-fiction, you sell, then you write.

Non-fiction projects are typically sold via a proposal. Before I started shopping around my idea for The Road to the Dark Tower, I researched the process. At the back of Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, & Literary Agents, I found a valuable resource:  a section titled “The Knockout Non-fiction Book Proposal.”

Armed with his advice and the template from his book, I created my own 50-page proposal, which consisted of the following. Except where noted, each item was approximately one to three pages long, double spaced.

• Title page. There was every chance that the proposed title wouldn’t survive the editorial/marketing process, but I gave the title a lot of thought just the same.
• Project overview. The overall concept, with snippets of the rest of the proposal distilled into a punchy pitch letter.
• Author bio. This wasn’t simply a CV or a list of previous publications. It was where I explained (in third person) why I was the ideal person to write this book, as opposed to someone else. What relevant resources and connections I had, along with other work that pertained to the subject matter at hand. Though I listed fiction publications at the end, the focus was on my non-fiction experience. (In response to this section, I was susequently asked to submit recent copies of my Cemetery Dance column.)
• Market analysis. Why did the book need to exist? Who was the target audience and how could I tap into it? I used the demographics and sales figures for King books to bolster my argument, for example. In general, this is also a place to list other books that covered the topic and why the proposed book was different or better, but in my case my book was going to be the first on the subject, so I emphasized that fact.
• Promotion: This section allowed me to outline any connections I had to the target audience that could be used to help promote the book. This was also where I demonstrated my enthusiasm for the project by stating clearly that I would be available for interviews, appearances or any other duty the publisher might request. In addition, I named people who had already told me they would be willing to consider providing a blurb for the book, along with other likely candidates.
• Approach: My plan for the book – for example, writing style, source of material, the use of direct quotes, interviews, sidebars, etc.
• Table of contents: Even though I hadn’t written the book yet, I provided my outline of what I thought the book would look like, including chapter titles and appendices.
• Chapter by chapter expanded outline: My outline ran fifteen pages, with approximately a page devoted to each chapter. It didn’t summarize the chapters—it couldn’t, as I hadn’t written them yet—but it detailed the purpose of each chapter.
• Sample chapter: I included the full text of the first chapter of the book, which was the only part of the project I had written at this point. Approximately 25 pages.

I started with a query, as I might for a novel, and then followed up with the proposal. Once a publisher expressed interest, I was able to acquire representation from an agent and the negotiation went on from there.

Once we had a deal in place, all that remained was to write the darned thing.

Though the above pertains to a book-length work, the same concept is relevant to shorter works such as essays, book reviews and interviews. Pitch and sell the idea, then do the work. Otherwise you could spend a lot of time working on spec projectst that never get sold. The same is true, of course, in fiction–though some writers achieve enough success to be able to sell future works on proposals–but that’s just not the way the system works at present.

–by Bev Vincent

Whenever the subject of writer’s block comes up, I usually say that I don’t believe there’s any such thing. The answer to writer’s block is, quite simply, to write. Write something. Book reviews, essays, blog entries, anything.

However, I do believe there is such a thing as Writer’s Doldrums. The original Doldrums are regions in the oceans near the equator where the prevailing winds are calm. Sailors who ended up in the Doldrums could find themselves becalmed for days or weeks. They were also known as the “horse latitudes,” because mariners often ditched any livestock that might compete for dwindling food supplies aboard the stranded ships.

I’ve been in the doldrums for the better part of two months now. It’s not that I haven’t been able to write—I’ve completed an essay or two, several book reviews, and at least one short story. However, my output has dwindled compared to my norm.

Hurricane Ike was where it all began, ironically, since hurricanes originate in the Doldrums. For the better part of a week, our world was upended. We had no electricity or telephones for days. The place where I work was closed. We cooked meals outdoors on our gas stove and waited in long lines to get gasoline. Communicating with anyone proved difficult. We found creative ways to fill our waking hours, and retired when the sun went down rather than mess around with candles or gas lanterns. We listened to the news on the radio and marveled at the destruction.

Once the power returned, we gradually returned to our normal routines, except everything had been knocked off kilter. The wounds from that storm are still visible in the region. The root system of a massive tree that was unearthed in a neighbor’s yard remains visible. Office buildings downtown still have boarded up windows.

The election and the economic cataclysm have contributed to my listlessness. A medical situation involving a family member also turned things upside down for a while. It’s hard to concentrate on fiction amidst such turmoil.

Except for the days during the Ike aftermath when we had no power, I’ve dutifully gotten up each morning at the usual time when I do most of my writing, gone to the computer, and found numerous other things to do to occupy the time besides writing. I let two anthology deadlines slip past without getting anything together to submit to them, metaphorical horses tossed overboard. I didn’t miss any real deadlines—anything I was supposed to do, I did—but I wasted a lot of hours, too. Since my window for writing each day is comparatively small, it doesn’t take much of a distraction to have it whittled away to nothing.

I’ve been working on a new novel but, since it’s predecessor has been in limbo for a while because of my agent’s schedule, I couldn’t get myself motivated to tackle it with much enthusiasm. I’ve managed to write the first three chapters, but I’ve spent more time pushing those words around than in adding anything new to them. The plus side is that those three chapters are in pretty good shape but, given the amount of time I’ve spent on the manuscript, there should be more.

Last Saturday, I went to the Mystery Writers of America Southwest Chapter monthly luncheon, where the guest speaker was David Morrell. I’ve met him on a few occasions in the past, including sharing a table with him at the Stoker banquet a few years ago, and at NECON. His writing seminar at the Stoker weekend in L.A. was both inspirational and motivational, and his writing book—reissued with new material recently as The Successful Novelist—is also worthwhile reading for any practicing writer. I figured that if anything could put a little wind in my sails, it would be a pep talk from David Morrell.

I was right. Don’t get me wrong—I didn’t come home from that luncheon and add more to the novel manuscript, or write a new short story, or outline the great novel. But I feel reinvigorated and ready to get to work on a number of projects. I have a short story under consideration for an anthology where an editor asked me to reconsider the ending. He didn’t give me any specific guidance, just an option to give it another shot. Given the theme of David’s talk this weekend—writing the books and stories we were meant to write based on the dominant emotions governing our lives that we need to come to terms with—I have a new appreciation for what that story is really about, and a new way to tackle the ending. After a suppertime discussion with my wife about another short story I’ve been ruminating over for several days now, the big picture concept fell into place, and I’m champing at the bit to start on it. And I’m looking forward to retackling my most recent novel, once I hear back from my agent with his report, hopefully in the next week or so.

I’m not completely out of the Doldrums, but I feel the winds stirring and they’re pushing me in the right direction. I don’t think I’m going to have to toss any more horses overboard. I’m going to do my best to take advantage of the trade winds while they’re being supportive.

by Bev Vincent

In his endnotes for the short story “N.” in Just After Sunset, Stephen King postulates that “everyone suffers OCD to one degree or another.” What does that have to do with submission tracking? I’ll get to that shortly.

I concur with King’s theory, though I would add that most people’s version of the disorder can be written off as mere quirks. I, for example, have a mild obsession with numbers. Even before the recent roller coaster ride on Wall Street, I monitored the Dow Jones values each day, and I keep tabs on the exchange rate between the US and Canadian dollars. When I’m at the gym, I watch the calorie counter and the heart rate monitor as much as I watch the TVs hanging in front of me.

Back in the 1990s, when I was cycling seriously, I kept a log that recorded my daily distance, time and calculated average speed. While I was riding, I focused on my rpm, changing gears to keep it in the 90-100 range.

Here’s one I picked up from my father: I keep a logbook in the car where I record the mileage and amount of gas at every fill-up. At one time, I used to enter that data into a spreadsheet and monitor mpg trends. It told me when I needed a tune-up clearer than anything else. My wife has given up asking me why I still keep track of that information. I can use the “tune-up” excuse, but that’s probably not the complete truth. I simply have a mild fixation with numbers. It doesn’t interfere with my life.

So, this is where it gets a little odd—if it isn’t weird already. I track my short story submissions four different ways.

The first thing I see when I enter my office is an erasable white board. It lists the short stories I currently have seeking homes, and the market they are with. I can tell at a glance when a story is fallow. When there are too many gaps in the right-hand column of that table, I make myself go on a submission spree. I usually try to get a story right back out again, as soon as I receive a rejection note, but sometimes other business makes me fall behind.

On the computer, I use a free download called Sonar 2. It allows you to enter markets, along with contact information, editor names, URLs, full guidelines, etc. and even has a feature that will print mailing labels for you, though I haven’t used that yet. I have my own special formula for preparing a postal submission, and haven’t found reason to deviate from it. The second part of the database lets you enter short stories. You can specify word count, genre, a synopsis, etc. These two lists meet when you match a story with a market. The front panel of the program displays a list of stories (sortable by different criteria) that shows how many days a story has been out or if it has been accepted/rejected, based on your latest update. If you make a sale, you can enter the amount and keep a running tally of income that way.

On the left-hand pullout tray on my writing desk, I keep a small spiral notebook. On each page I list a short story, its word count, and each new submission by date. When I get a response, I note the date. On the left-hand pages, I list possible markets for future submissions for that particular story. When I get a rejection, I can tell at a glance exactly where the story has been already so I don’t make the stupid mistake of sending a story to a market that has already rejected it.

Finally, I use Duotrope’s online submission tracker—but not for myself. I contribute to the database of response times to help build up that resource, which I use quite often to research new potential markets for stories. I never refer back to anything I enter.

Each of these tracking methods serves a different purpose, but it seems like overkill, doesn’t it? Perhaps a tad obsessive?

All I can say in my defense is that it works for me, and I never mind that I have to update information in four places each time I hear back from a submission. I wipe the market off the white board (or, in the happy case of acceptance, erase both the story and the market). In my spiral, I put a check or an X after the submission date and write in the current date. On my computer, I click the title of the story, click on the submission record, and check a box saying I’ve had a response. And, finally, I go online to Duotrope and add the submission and all pertinent information.

Many people develop their own homegrown ways of keeping track of submissions. If you’re looking for your own solution, maybe one of these methods will suit your purposes.

Or two.

Or three . . .

– Bev Vincent

I received a surprising e-mail a few weeks ago from a grade eleven student at a magnet school in Nashville. As part of an English class on critical thinking, their teacher had assigned them my short story “One of Those Weeks” from the anthology From the Borderlands (originally Borderlands 5).

This isn’t the first time one of my stories has been read in an English class, but it’s the first time where I have absolutely no association with the teacher, the students, or the school. A couple of years ago, I was invited to speak to the Creative Writing class at the local high school. My daughter graduated from that school, so I knew the teacher. There was a connection that led to that speaking gig. In that case, the class read “Harming Obsession,” and I enjoyed the opportunity to speak with them about the story and answer their questions. In this recent situation, however, I have no idea whatsoever what led the teacher to pick my story.

Here’s the part of the essay where I digress from my message and harp on something we repeat over and over, often without feeling like we’ve conveyed the message. From the Borderlands was a Time Warner paperback. I don’t know its sales figures, but it spent one glorious week on the USA Today Top 150 Books list, coming in at #82. I used to see the book in airports all the time, and even found it on the shelf at our local grocery store. In brief, it got serious distribution. I’d be willing to bet that more people saw this story than saw all of my other stories at that point combined. Though none of us got rich off that project, this was an instance of real exposure. An editor called me up to ask whether I had a novel.

And a class several states away studied my story in their class. The students were asked to come up with theories about the meaning of its ending. They presented numerous interpretations of the story, some of them intriguing to me because they certainly weren’t in my conscious mind when I wrote it—but whose to say that I wasn’t thinking that way at some level?

The student who volunteered to contact me believed it was possible that I had written the story primarily to create the type of discussion and thinking they were undertaking. That gave me a lot more credit than I was due—though I didn’t tell them that.

I was more than happy to take some time to respond to the e-mail and subsequent letter to discuss the story with the class. However, in formulating my answer, I discovered that the story meant something different to me now than it did at the time I wrote it. I identified a subtext that seemed obvious, but one that I’d never considered before.

My daughter is an English/Creative Writing major at university so, over the past few years, I’ve had the chance to read her essays on the subject of interpretation, and on the various intents of works. There is the author’s intent, and the interpretation that each reader assigns to the text, all equally valid, and finally there is the abstract notion of the story’s intent, as if it had a consciousness of its own. Until recently, I dismissed that concept as effete intellectualism, the realm of lit. crit. researchers looking for high-minded concepts to make themselves seem important.

By revisiting “One of Those Weeks” several years after it was written, edited, revised and published, I discovered that the story might indeed have its own intent as an entity separate from me, the author. One of the best encapsulations of the story I read came from a reviewer, who was able to summarize its essence in a cleverly crafted and insightful sentence. I liked that analysis so much that I’ve often used it when discussing the story.

However, in 2008, five years after the story first appeared, I see in it something completely different. Things that I’ve experienced in the interim opened my eyes to new interpretations of something I wrote before having those experiences. It still all sounds a little artsy-fartsy to me, but I’m more of a believer in the story as an abstract entity than before.

Try rereading some of your older works, even if you think you’re completely familiar with them. You might discover that your past self can send a message through time to your present self. It’s surprising and delightful when that happens.

– Bev Vincent

I have published something on the order of fifty short stories since I began writing seriously at the beginning of the millennium. Some of the early stories appeared in what are disparagingly referred to as “for the love” (or “4theLuv”) markets. A few were published in “royalty only” anthologies (which are but a smidgen better than 4theLuv markets in that in rare cases some of them have delivered a pittance in revenue—my current record is about $18). Most of the recent ones have appeared in professional markets, some with distribution to tens or hundreds of thousands of readers.

Every now and then, someone asks me when I’m going to release a collection. Choosing from among those fifty stories (plus the twenty or so that are currently seeking homes), I could probably put together a decent volume of my short fiction. Over the past few years, I’ve been approached by reputable small press publishers to do just that.

A couple of years ago, when I was in New York on vacation with my family, I had lunch with my literary agent. Among the topics on our agenda to discuss was a then-recent proposal to do a collection. When I broached the subject, he asked me what I thought it would do to grow my readership. In other words, who would buy this collection beyond people who already knew of my work, either by direct exposure or by reputation?

As much as I would love to see a handsome volume, artfully designed by a specialty press, with an eye-catching cover illustration and a signature page for my John Hancock, I got his point. He was looking at the big picture of a career in publishing, versus the quick and easy gratification of a limited edition.

Single-author collections are a hard sell, especially for an unknown author like me. No mainstream publisher is going to release a collection of my stories, and few people are going to splurge on a $30-$50 small press edition from someone they’ve never read before—assuming they hear about the book in the first place. The total print run would logically be something on the order of 250 copies, enough to satisfy the people already familiar with my writing and maybe a handful of others. As my agent asked, how would that expand my readership? The book might satisfy readers looking for more of my work, but what would it do for me?

Instead of rushing into faster but lower-reaching deals to get a novel or a story collection in print, I’ve decided to be patient. I’m not young—but I’m not exactly old, either, so I have time to improve my skills and come up with something that New York wants to publish. Maybe it will be the novel my agent is currently reviewing, or maybe it won’t be until three or four more manuscripts down the line. Maybe ten—who knows?

Perhaps I have delusions of grandeur, or think more highly of my writing than reality might suggest, but I have decided, for better or for worse, to aim as high as possible for my books. Perhaps I have the luxury of doing this because I’ve already had my ego fulfilled by publishing one book through a mainstream publisher. If I never succeed at that level with my fiction, at least there’s that.

If I were to achieve some success with novels, then it might be time to think about a story collection, when it could actually appeal to a wider group of people who’ve heard my name, perhaps read things about my work, and want to test out my writing in smaller doses than committing to a novel. That could actually benefit my career. All in a best-case universe, of course. There are many hurdles to leap before that joyous day. I accept the possibility that some of these hurdles may be insurmountable.

This essay was inspired in part by a recent discussion about authors who may have published too early—writers who appear content to only publish in the small press, or who seem too impatient to try to break out at a higher level. I’ve given the subject a lot of thought over the past few years. Robert McCammon ultimately withdrew his first four books because he felt he had been published too soon, when he was still learning his craft. I’m not sure I agree with his assessment of his early novels, but I respect the high standards he has decided to set for himself.

As I said, maybe I’m deluding myself about the potential for my writing. My agent doesn’t think so, which is encouraging. Everyone in this business has different goals, different reasons for doing what they do. Different needs they want to have met. I already have a shelf full of anthologies that prove to my ego that I can be published. My goal at this point (subject to change without notice) is to continue to be published well.

– Bev Vincent

(Podcast version of this post available here)

Let’s talk about god for a minute.

No, wait! Come back! This has nothing to do with religion.

The god I’m talking about is the one in the machine. Deus ex machina. In early Greek drama, it wasn’t unusual for a god to step onto the stage at a critical moment and set things aright—or amok. The gods were often shown sitting on their lofty perches on Mount Olympus observing, commenting on and meddling in the lives of the human characters.

Thousands of years later, there is little room for that kind of god in fiction.

Imagine this scenario. A man, recently turned into a vampire, hunts down his first victim late one night on the back streets of Manhattan. He selects a target at random, a man who made the ill-advised decision to take a shortcut through an alley on the way to his hotel. The vampire pounces, knocking the man to the ground. As he pulls back his lips to bare his fangs, he discovers that his victim is the very same person who, decades earlier, bullied him on the playground of their Nebraska schoolyard. Sweet vengeance.

Which part of this story is harder to swallow? The fact that man has become a vampire, or that his randomly selected victim from a pool of a million possible candidates is someone he knew long ago and far away? The answer to that question demonstrates the limitations of coincidence in fiction.

On a recent episode of CSI, the team investigated two independent cases. A bull-rider was found dead in the rodeo ring, and a prostitute was the victim of a hit-and-run accident in another part of town. The investigators discover that the prostitute was last seen in the cowboy’s hotel room and the vehicle that struck her was stolen from him after he died. The cases are obviously connected. Except, in the final analysis, they aren’t. The men who killed the cowboy and stole his truck hit the prostitute by random chance. They had no idea who she was until they were arrested.

That scenario didn’t work for me at all. There are surely situations in real life where coincidences like this happen, but not only is truth stranger than fiction, fiction usually has to be far less strange than truth. Even if the CSI storyline was drawn from a real event, “that’s the way it really happened” is no explanation for the fictionalized coincidental convergence of events. Coincidence is a delicate matter to handle in fiction—too much and you strain or shatter credibility.

In another CSI episode, two women are murdered on the same night. They’re identical twins separated at birth, and neither knew of the existence of the other, though they only lived a few miles apart. Hoo-boy, that sounds like a stinker. However, as it turns out, the killer wanted something one of the women possessed. He happened upon the wrong twin and killed her, then went back to “her house” only to discover his murder victim alive and well, so he killed her too and took what he was looking for. This was a somewhat more palatable use of coincidence. The writers put the seemingly unlikely occurrence to good use and created an interesting and intriguing mystery. It’s a fine line, though.

Early novels often made use of deus ex machina. Clues or witnesses were deliberately withheld from a detective in a mystery novel until just the right moment. A spy discovers he possessed the perfect gadget to get him out of a sticky situation, though it was never mentioned before. The cavalry showed up when the situation was lost to save the day.

There’s a certain charm to these stories, but they wouldn’t fly in modern fiction. We’ve become more sophisticated, both as readers and writers, and we expect more. Things must happen for discernable reasons and lucky finds are seen as cheating the audience. Even the Greeks knew this. Aristotle, in his Poetics, argued that the resolution of a plot must arise internally, following from previous action of the play.

If you’re assembling your plot and you get to a point where you think “they’ll never believe what happens next” then perhaps you should rethink what happens next. The last thing you want is for a reader to slam down the book in disgust, thinking—I can’t believe he did that.

A few weeks ago, I read the submission guidelines for a small press anthology. I’d never heard of the publisher, but a superficial search told me they’d been in business for a couple of years and had published some books, including one by an author whose name I vaguely recognized.

It wasn’t a pro-paying gig, but they offered moderate compensation in advance, and the premise intrigued me enough that I started adapting an old, uncirculated story to suit their guidelines.

Then I did a little more research. I visited the publisher’s website and was dismayed at what I saw. The introductory sentence was a disaster, both structurally and grammatically. The pages were riddled with poor grammar, misspelled words and amateurish writing.

Worse, the layout of some pages was horrendous. In one place, there was a narrow column of fully justified text down the middle of a page, leaving abnormal gaps between words.

If their web content was this poorly edited, what type of editorial oversight would stories in their anthology receive—let alone simple proofreading? And what would one of their books look like if this was someone’s idea of an attractive design? Not having seen any of their books, I can’t say. Maybe the web site was an anomaly. However, I wasn’t encouraged.

I dug deeper to see what others were saying about the press. I stumbled across some unflattering information that made me decide I didn’t want to be associated with that publisher. Was I being overly judgmental? Perhaps. I just knew that I had this queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, and when that happens I pay attention. It’s like the situation I found myself in several years ago when I received an acceptance letter from one of those agents we all learn through experience or lore to avoid. Tempting as the offer was, my instincts told me something was rotten in Denmark.

A few months ago, I learned that the publisher of an anthology containing one of my stories had agreed to publish works that I considered of dubious merit and questionable taste. I was displeased at the thought that our anthology might be lumped together with this other work simply because they came from the same publisher. Guilt by association. In that situation, there wasn’t much we could do to distance ourselves from the publisher. We were already part of the stable. We could only commiserate, and request that the publisher not use our names to promote his business.

A character in a novel I read recently had four rules for success. The final one was: “Never go into business with someone you wouldn’t want to wrestle naked in bed.” That’s a little extreme—and easy for him to say since he was working with his wife—but pithy sayings like this often reveal an underlying truth. Though a short story sale is essentially a financial transaction between two people who know absolutely nothing about each other, does or should personality or character enter into it? Should an editor refuse a story from an author who says atrocious things on a message board, for example? Are there publishers you wouldn’t want to be associated with because an employee has a questionable past or because they’ve purchased stories from someone with a dubious reputation?

I have a reputation. We all do—and we probably each have different reputations with different groups of people. We don’t always actively seek to create these reputations—they’re a consequence of our actions and statements—though some people do go out of the way to generate a certain reputation, especially people who like to be thought of as edgy or controversial.

As a writer, I try to always meet deadlines, respond to editorial requests promptly, return galleys corrections on time and be generally easy to work with. I never want to be the reason something falls behind schedule. I want to cultivate a reputation as someone easy to work with so that editors will be favorably inclined to work with me again in the future.

Online, I try to avoid getting involved in messy fights and flame wars. I have opinions about a lot of things—I just don’t feel compelled to share them very often. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve been tempted to respond to something, have actually gone so far as to compose a response, and then canceled out of the editor.

That probably makes me a little invisible and unmemorable on message boards, but that suits me just fine. Better that than to stand out because of something lame, annoying, thoughtless or volatile I’ve said. That might turn me into the kind of person other writers would feel uncomfortable appearing with in a table of contents.