Joseph Nassise

Tax day and deadline week all at the same time, means I’m quite literally swamped, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have something for our readers today.  As I was adding up the fees paid to my literary agent for his work this year, I thought it might be interesting to talk about just why I’m willing to give up this money and what I think an agent does for my career.

This will be a two part essay, so today we’ll look at the first five reasons to use an agent.   While having a literary agent is not a necessity, my personal experience has shown it to be a very beneficial relationship and I would recommend it wherever possible.

Reason #1 – An agent knows the marketplace better than you do

Given that it is an agent’s job to be aware of who is buying what from whom for how much, the vast majority of literary agents know the inner workings of the market better than most authors and it is their job to use that knowledge to your benefit.

Reason #2 – An agent has a personal relationship with multiple editors

An agent is, to some extent, a professional networker and has built up personal relationships with many editors over time. They know what certain editors like and don’t like when it comes to literary properties and they know what those editors have recently purchased, so they can help target your proposal to the individuals most likely to receive it in a positive manner.

Reason #3 – An agent understands contracts

The typical publishing contract is fifteen to twenty legal size pages of the most convoluted legalese I’ve ever seen and it is ripe with clauses that benefit the publisher rather than the writer. It is an agent’s job to understand what these clauses mean and to fight to remove or alter those that do not help your career. While you could educate yourself on the basics, an agent sees several of these a day and you would be hard pressed to meet their level of knowledge on your own without considerable time and effort.

Reason #4 – An agent is an experience negotiator

In the end it the agent’s job to get you’re the best offer and contract terms possible. This is what they do, day after day for client after client. They know just how much they can push a particular editor or publishing house, they know what is an acceptable counter offer and what is not, and they can advise you on what tact to take when the publisher offers terms that just aren’t acceptable.

Reason #5 – An agent protects your relationship with the editor

For one reason or another there often comes a time when the publisher had done something that you are unhappy with and that you would like to work to change. At the same time, you don’t want to alienate your editor or allow your anger/frustration over the issue to strain your working relationship. In times like these you agent can step in and play the “bad cop” for you, allowing you to work toward the result you want without damage to your editorial partnership.

Next time around we’ll cover the final five reasons to use a literary agent and I’ll answer any questions that might have come up out of part one.

Well, as you can see, Storytellersunplugged has a new look and feel. This is our fourth calendar year in existence (hard to imagine we started back in June of 2005, isn’t it?) and we’re still going strong with a marvelous cast of contributors and terrific content. We’ve grown exponentially each year and I hope we continue to do the same in 2009.

You may have noticed we have some advertising space available now. If you have a website or product that you think our readership would be interested in, check out the new Advertising page to see what we’ve made available. Our readers comes from more than 80 countries across the globe and are a widely-read and highly intelligent crowd.

Which brings me to the purpose of this post, actually.

We want to hear from you, our readers.

We want to know what you’d like us to talk about in 2009. What topics would you like to see covered? What questions do you have to ask? What other types of posts would you like to see? Maybe book reviews? Author interviews? Product write-ups? Publishing house reviews? Guest bloggers? Come on, don’t be shy! Use the comment section and let us know what you’d like to read about this year and we’ll do our level best to bring it to you.

Finally, we want to say thank you. Thank you to each and every one of you who come back here day after day, week after week. You’ve helped make this place what it is and I know every single one of our contributors appreciates your patronage.

Here’s to another great year at SU!

– Joe Nassise and Dave Wilson

Last month I began a short series on Beginnings. We identified the six key things a good novel beginning should accomplish and covered the first, hooking the reader, in a bit more depth. This month I want to tackle two more of the six – establishing a bond between the lead and the reader and presenting the story world.

Establishing a bond between the Lead and the Reader

The second thing a beginning should do is establish a bond between the Lead character and the reader. This can be done in a variety of ways, the most common being identification, sympathy, likeability, and inner conflict.

Identification, or empathy, is when we can relate to the character because of who they are or the experience they find themselves in. The more the reader can identify with the lead, the more real the experience feels and the greater the intensity of the story. A story about a man who has lost his job would generate identification and empathy in anyone who has ever been in the same position.

Sympathy goes beyond empathy and focuses on the emotional bond the reader has with the character. Awful things have happened and the reader genuinely feels sorry for the character. You can establish sympathy by putting the character in jeopardy, by having them face some grand hardship, by making them the underdog, or by giving them some sense of vulnerability. Take Rocky, for instance. We cheer for him and want him to win the big fight against Apollo Creed because we see him as the underdog, the guy who can’t possibly win. I use the issue of facing some grand hardship to introduce my character Knight Commander Cade Williams in HERETIC, book one of the Templar Chronicles. Cade has lost his wife to a supernatural event and has to deal with his loss and his burning need for revenge daily.

Likeable characters are those that we might like to be around, whose company we might enjoy. A witty character. An amusing character. A character who cares for others. Frodo in the Lord of the Rings. John Maclean from the Die Hard films. Even the serial killer Dexter, from Jeff Lindsay’s excellent series, might fall into this category.

Characters who are absolutely sure about themselves, who plunge ahead without any doubts or fears are boring. No one goes through life that way. Give a character a sense of inner conflict, of doubts and emotions, and you’re almost sure to engage the reader.

Presenting the Story World

This aspect of a good beginning goes beyond just establishing the time and place of the novel. Yes, it should tell the reader those things, but it should also focus on showing the reader what life is like for the lead character.

Showing the reality of the character’s situation not only helps present the story world, but also provides support for the establishing that bond we just talked about, as well as presenting certain elements that might assist in hooking the reader.

John Ridley’s excellent pair of novels, THOSE WHO WALK IN DARKNESS and WHAT FIRE CANNOT BURN feature a future LA where super powered humans are listed as illegals and hunted by special tactical squads from the LAPD. In the very first chapter, Ridley has the hero, Soledad “Bullet” O’Roark, face off with her team against a pyrokinetic who can toss fire around like a beach ball. The action immediately sets the stage and lets the reader know just what kind of world O’Roark is forced to deal with day by day. We see that reality for the lead character is harsh, unforgiving, and very deadly.

I do something similar with the opening of HERETIC, letting the reader know very quickly that the Templar Order still exists operating in secret as a combat arm of the Vatican, charged with defending mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. Without establishing that right up front, the reader would be lost by the events that quickly follow.

Next month we’ll continue our look at beginnings by examining how to introduce the opposition and some common mistakes writers make with their beginnings.

I wanted to talk this month about Middles and offer some advice on how to keep yours from sagging.

No, I’m not talking about belly fat. That’s a different blog. I’m talking about the middle of your book, the place where you have the greatest chance of screwing up and losing your reader.

Nine times out of ten, if you are going to lose a reader, it will be in the middle of the book, in that long, seemingly endless stretch that ties your terrific beginning to your fabulous ending. Think about it – how often do you put down a book in the first ten pages? How about with only ten pages to go? Not often, I’d wager. But think about all those books that you got a third, or even halfway, through, only to lose interest. You put it down and move on to something else. Why is that? And how do you keep it from happening with one of your own works?

The middle of the book is essentially a series of scenes that ties the set-up you created in the beginning with the result you’ve devised for the ending. It must be designed specifically to keep the reader moving forward inexorably toward that ending. If it bogs down, loses cohesiveness, or otherwise fails to achieve its objective, you run the risk of losing the reader. And that’s a cardinal sin.

What keeps a reader reading, what keeps them invested in your story, is their desire to see the Lead outwit/outfight/outthink the opposition and reach their goal What gives them the emotional experience they crave is the conflict between the opposition and the lead in pursuit of that goal.

The Opposition

The opposition does not have to be a person. It can be an organization, a group, a force of nature, whatever. Nor does it have to be evil. It simply needs a compelling reason to stop the Lead. The more compelling the reason, the harder the opposition will work. The harder the opposition works, the more difficult it gets for the Lead to succeed, which in turn produces more drama.

The Glue

Along with the opposition, the other crucial ingredient is the reason the Lead sticks around, the glue so to speak. If the Lead can simply walk away from the conflict, the reader will wonder why he doesn’t do so. And at that point you’ve already lost the battle. You have to figure out why the Lead (and the opposition for that matter) can’t simply withdraw from the conflict. And you have to make that reason believable.

Writing the middle of your novel will then simply be an exercise in writing various scenes of confrontation, most of which will end up with some kind of setback for the Lead, forcing them to analyze the situation anew and try something else.

But Joe, I hear you ask, how do I keep that from getting boring?

That’s easy. You can stretch the tension, raise the stakes, or do both at the same time.

Stretching the Tension

Simply put, this means to never let a thrilling moment escape with just a whisper. Play it for all its worth. This is one skill Alfred Hitchcock had in spades and is what makes him a master of suspense even now, so many years after this death.

When it comes to stretching the tension, I first ask myself one question – What problem has the potential to lay some serious hurt on my Lead? That forms the raw material of the scene as it gives us something to be tense about. Once I’ve determined that, I can go about stretching it.

James Bell suggests two ways to stretch the tension in his book Plot & Structure – stretch the physical or stretch the emotional.

Physical peril or uncertainty is always a sure fire way to hold a reader’s interest and you can make that bond even stronger by slowing down. Go through the scene beat by beat in your head, as if you are watching a movie. Then write it down, alternating between action, thoughts, dialogue, and description. Milk it for all its worth.

Bell suggests three key questions to ask yourself as you do this:

1. What is the worst thing from the outside that can happen to my character?
2. What is the worst trouble my character can get into in this scene?
3. Have I sufficiently set up the danger for the reader before the scene?

Of course trouble doesn’t always have to be physical. It can be emotional as well. When your character is in the throws of some emotional turmoil, don’t let them down easy! Ratchet things up as much as possible.

To stretch inner tension, ask yourself these questions:

1. What is the worst thing from the inside that can happen to my character?

2. What is the worst information my character can receive?

3. Have I sufficiently set up the depth of emotion for the reader before the scene?

Raising the Stakes

One question any good novelist should constantly be asking themselves is Who cares? In other words – Is this scene I’m writing going to make the reader care about what happens? Is there enough going on to capture the reader’s interest? What does the lead stand to lose if they don’t solve the central problem of the novel? Is that enough? If not, what can I do to change it?

There are three common ways to raise the stakes in your novel. You can raise the physical stakes, raise the inner stakes, or raise the societal stakes.

Raising the physical stakes is probably the easiest. What physical harm can come to my lead? What new threat can be raised against him? What other character can I introduce to make things more difficult? How will this person operate? What will they do to make things difficult for my lead?

Raising the character stakes involves looking at the inner conflict of the lead. This has the added effect of adding more dimension to your novel as well, deepening the story while at the same time raising the intensity. Ask yourself how things can get more emotionally wrenching for my lead? Is there someone the lead cares about that can be brought in and tied into the trouble? What dark secrets from the lead’s past can be revealed here?

The third way of raising the stakes is to examine the social aspects at play. Is there some major issue my lead is involved in? How can I bring that to the forefront? What complications does that issue add to the mix?

Easy Fixes

If you find that your middle is lagging, here are some suggested ways to help you re-energize it:

1. Analyze the stakes – what can I do to ratchet up the tension?

2. Strengthen the glue – what can make the conflict more compelling?

3. Add another layer of complication – how do I make things more difficult?

4. Add another character – who else might have a role to play here?

5. Add another subplot – what other plot thread might shore things up?

6. Push through it – is it the writing or just me?

While suggestions 1-5 are self-explanatory, I did want to say something about #6. There is often a point in writing the novel when you think everything you’ve done to date is just utter crap. For me, that usually happens around page 200 (or 2/3 of the way through the work.) Suddenly the characters suck, the writing sucks, everything sucks. At that point it is time to step away from things and get some perspective – before changing anything!

I’ll usually take 24 to 48 hours off from writing. I won’t work on the book. I won’t look at the book. I’ll even try not to think about the book. I’ll go do something I really enjoy, doing all I can to relax and take it easy. Then, and only then, will I come back and give it another look. Usually by then I’ve gained some perspective. If I still think it sucks, I’ll try to find ways to fix it and at that point my subconscious usually has had enough time to figure out just what needs to be done.

So there you have it, some tips and techniques for helping you deal with a sagging middle.

Good luck and keep writing!

A few months ago I was chatting with friend and fellow writer, Jon Merz, about ideas for a book to work on together. It just so happens that we are both martial artists and follow the sport pretty avidly. Mixed martial arts, or MMA as it is known, is the fastest growing contact sport in the US, with a fan base that makes Nascar fanatics seem tame in comparison. Knowing this, we brainstormed different ways we might combine our passion for mixed martial arts with our passion for writing and came up with the idea to do a non-fiction expose on one of the major MMA organizations.

Jon had just finished writing The Complete Idiots Guide to Ultimate Fighting and by chance happened to know one of the senior executives at the International Fight League, a major MMA organization and the only one who approached the sport as with a team, rather than individual, concept. The IFL is a truly innovative organization when it comes to MMA promotions and we believed they would be an excellent partner to work with, so we arranged a meeting and pitched our idea to their top execs.

The folks at the IFL loved what we came up with and enthusiastically endorsed our concept. They gave us unparalleled access to the organization, from the day-to-day operations to the coaches and fighters themselves. Whatever we needed, they said, just ask. With their complete backing, Jon and I took our proposal to our agent.

Like the guys at the IFL, our agent was excited to take the project out to publishers. A sure hit, he called it, a blockbuster if he ever saw one. And he wasn’t just blowing smoke up our asses – he loved the idea as much as we did and after working in publishing for more than thirty years we were confident that he knew what he was talking about.

We turned the proposal into an event, sending it to a dozen publishers with a specific deadline attached, and sat back waiting for the offers to come in. This was it, our ticket to the big leagues, we thought.

Trouble was, we forgot that getting a deal isn’t as easy as just convincing an editor that the book is a good one.

For those who have never been through the process, here’s how it works. A writer puts together a proposal and send it off to the editors he’s carefully selected (or, as in our case, let’s his agent do so). The editor decides if he likes the proposal and, if he does, agrees to take it to the editorial board meeting. At the meeting, the editor pitches the book to the representatives from the various departments – editorial, marketing, sales, art, etc – and tries to convince them that one of the precious slots they have open on their publishing schedule should go to this project.

We heard from several editors who agreed that the project looked excellent. They informed us that they would be pitching at the next editorial meeting and would get back to us as soon as they knew something more. Convinced that we would have a deal in place, Jon and I travelled to the Open Tryouts that the IFL was hosting to build up their roster for the 2008 season, figuring it would make a terrific chapter in the book. We interviewed prospective fighters and some of the IFL top coaches, we took a few hundred photographs, and generally had a great time.

Meanwhile our enthusiastic editors were being shot down by, of all people, the sales departments.

See, there are only a handful of books out right now on mixed martial arts. Of the five I can think of off the top of my head, three of them are personality books, meaning they focus on select individuals in the sport rather than the sport overall. The other two happen to be instruction manuals. Which meant there wasn’t anything our there for the sales departments to compare our book to, to help them figure out what to expect with regard to sales, returns, and the like. In addition, there wasn’t any statistics that they could point to in order to show that the millions of fans who tuned into the weekly television shows and pay-per-view specials would pick up a book about the sport.

It didn’t matter what ammunition we provided to the editors – and trust me, we had it all, from network ratings data to growth projections for 2008 and beyond – each and every time the book was presented the sales departments shot it down, claiming that they weren’t sure that they could sell it.

And just like that, our brilliant idea died a quiet little death through no fault of our own.

We’d written a terrific proposal. We had the complete backing of a major MMA organization who was offering us unbelievable access to every aspect of the 2008 season. We had hand-picked editors who routinely bought sports-oriented books and publishers with an excellent track record of promoting such works with enthusiasm. In short, we’d done everything possible to make the project a success.

And it still wasn’t enough.

Sometimes, timing is everything. If one little cog of the publishing machine jams up, the whole thing can swiftly go out of whack and that’s exactly what happened to us. The idea was new and original, the sport was relatively new, there hadn’t been more than a handful of books on the sport with which to compare it – all the things that got the editors excited about the project were exactly the things that made the sales departments nervous. If there had been a track record of best-selling mixed martial arts books, we would have struck gold, as every other department was as excited about is as we were. But since there wasn’t, all it took was that one No to send us packing.

What’s the moral of the story? Remember that convincing the editor that your project is a good one is only the start of the battle. There’s an entire team involved in publishing and you need each and every one of them on your side in order to be successful.

Welcome to the new look and feel for Storytellersunplugged!

After 2 and 1/4 years of that old plain vanilla, we decided it was time to bring a new face to your favorite writing blog. Some of the changes we’ve made include:

• New style and layout
• Improved search functions
• Better tagging and indexing
• Bookshelves with the latest works by our contributors, linked to Amazon.com and other virtual bookstores, all accessed through their Contributor pages (please note these are rolling out all week – only a few are presently active, so keep checking back)
• Alphabetized contributor pages
• A new blogroll (which we be greatly expanded over the next day or two

Still to come are an improved RSS process, which will not only allow you to create feeds for the site overall (both posts and comments) but also allow the creation of feeds for individual authors or post subjects. (This should be live by the end of the week – the framework is in place, as you can see from the icons, but the mechanics still need some work)

Please let us know of any difficulties you might be having and what you think of our new look!

Best,

The Admins – Joe Nassise and Dave Wilson

In 2004, there were roughly 1.2 million books in print.

80% of those books sold fewer than 100 copies.

98% sold fewer than 5000 copies.

Only a few hundred books sold more than 100,000 copies.

About 10 books sold over a million copies.

Still with me?

Haven’t had a heart attack or gone off to commit suicide at the sudden realization that the chances of hitting the big time after selling your book are just slightly above the chances you’ll find a living, breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex living in the bushes of Central Park?

Let’s unpack those numbers a little bit more.

First, I’m using 2004 because, quite frankly, that’s the latest date that I have reliable, reasonably complete numbers to work from. The publishing industry is highly computerized, but getting actual, hardcore numbers from publishers is slightly harder than the seven tasks of Hercules. I do have some data from 2005 and 2006, such as the fact that US book publishing rose roughly 3% between 2005 and 2006 or that the number of juvenile titles dropped more than 10%, but I’m looking at overall English language publishing data and 2004 is the best I’ve got.

Second, a lot of those titles were self-published titles by authors who couldn’t find a traditional advance and royalties paying publisher, so they paid some outfit to print up a bunch of copies for them and had an ISBN slapped on the back. I think it is safe to say that self-published books account for a good chunk of those books that sell less than 100 copies.

Third, it is also important to remember that not all books in print were published in 2004 obviously. In the last few years, the number of books actually published per year is in the neighborhood of 175,000. A book stays in print for a number of years and the sales numbers for a title decline over time. The rest of those titles selling less than 100 copies a year probably fall into this category.

Still, even with those considerations, it is clear that only about 10% of books published in any given year will sell over 5000 copies.

For someone wanting to make their living at writing, that’s a scary number.

It’s also the reason that the vast numbers of writers out there do NOT make a living from their craft. The actual number of writers who support themselves and their families from writing in the US falls at roughly 1 to 2%.

Remember, that’s 1 to 2% of those writers who are being published by traditional advance and royalty paying publishers, not of writers in general. That means it’s a very small number indeed.

But if you’re like me, writing is in the blood and you’d do it even if they didn’t pay you to do so.

So what do those numbers mean to me?

They mean I have to treat writing like a business. Not just in the sense of income and expense, which I don’t always have a lot of control over, but in the things that I can significantly impact day after day.

In the way I plan my time.

In the work habits that I cultivate.

In the projects that I select.

In the people I chose to work with.

In the way I control my rights.

In the hundred other little things I can do to ensure that my career is as successful as I hope to make it.

Five years ago I’d never published a thing. Now I’m in that group of writers who routinely sell more than 5000 copies but less than 100,000 copies of each individual work.

But that’s not good enough for me.

I want to reach that next step. I want to break that 100,000 copy barrier. And the only way to do that is to be as diligent as possible in the way I treat my career.

100,000 copies.

That’s my goal.

I’ll worry about that million copy mark next year.

This past weekend I said goodbye to four friends that I’ve known for some time. We’ve gone through a lot together; the deaths of loved ones, work-related problems, outside influences that tried to hurt us, that didn’t have our best interests at heart. Sometimes I loved them like brothers. At other times, I wanted to kill them and I spent many an evening developing the most deliciously cruel and bizarre ways to do so.

The thing is, we’d just grown apart. Distant. Our lives no longer intersected at some many points on the dial. Dare I say that maybe we’d even grown a bit bored with each other? We parted as friends, and will probably visit each other now and again, but I think it was plain for all of us that a phase of our lives had come to an end.

And that was okay.

Really.

I can hear you all now. Leave the Dr. Phil stuff to the co-called professionals and get back to talking about writing, right?

But you see, I am talking about writing. This weekend I finally completed A TEAR IN THE SKY, the third and final book in my Templar Chronicles trilogy.

I came up with the idea of a series about modern Templar knights defending mankind from the supernatural on behalf of the Vatican a few years ago. Book one, HERETIC, was published by Pocket Books in October of 2005. The plan to write four books was scaled back to a trilogy at my foreign publisher’s request in late 2006. Book two, A SCREAM OF ANGELS, was written between September 2006 and January 2007. I dove into book three immediately thereafter (namely because I had been late turning in SCREAM and I needed to meet my deadline for TEAR.)

So for the last nine months straight, and off and on for some time before that, my focus has been almost entirely on the exploits of this group of warriors.

It can be comforting writing about the same characters. You know who they are. You know what they want. You know their motivations and their fears and their idiosyncrasies. But it can also be creatively stifling, for when you sit down to write you realize that you are going to be writing about them again. Your very familiarity with them can become problematic, as it no longer seems to stretch you creatively. It no longer holds the same challenges or the same feeling of discovery that working on a new project with new characters often can.

I’ve greatly enjoyed telling the story of Knight Commander Cade Williams and his rough-and-tumble group of warriors known as the Echo Team. But I’m not going to complain as I put them away on the back shelf of my mind for awhile and move onto to something new.

It’s time to tell the story of Special Agent Mitchell Sloane and the serial killer known as the Inquisitor.

Time to journey alongside Joshua Gideon as he struggles to stop the apocalypse he started by reading the forbidden Book of Coming Sorrows.

Time to walk in the shoes of Jeremiah Hunt, the man who gave up his eyes in order to see more clearly, as he searches for his missing daughter, Elizabeth.

These are the stories that interest me now, the tales that are clamoring to be told. And they deserve my time and attention. (And I sure as heck don’t want to piss off my muse!)

I’m sure I’ll come back and visit Cade at some point. But for now, it’s time to say goodbye.

Whoever it was that said “parting is such sweet sorrow” only got it half right.

Several years ago, when I first got into this business, someone told me that it is better to be published well than to simply be published. I thought I knew what that meant. But I’ve come to understand that sometimes, you think you are being published well, when in reality, you are not.

Case in point.

In 2005, Pocket Books published my second mass market novel, HERETIC. It was the first book in a series known as the Templar Chronicles, a series that was intended to run for at least three books. It had great cover blurbs by Clive Barker and Peter Straub. The cover art itself was pretty good. It quickly sold foreign rights in several countries and was an Alternate Selection for the Mystery Guild, Military, and Doubleday Book Clubs, who did their own hardcover editions. My podcast of the novel over 56 weeks gained 37,000 listeners in 83 different countries. Most recently, the story was adapted into a six issue comic series that completely sold out its first printing.

From my perspective, that’s a fairly successful book.

Before HERETIC ever hit the shelves, however, Pocket had made the decision internally that they wouldn’t be working with me any further on the series. This was because sales of my first novel (unrelated to HERETIC) hadn’t done as well as they had expected.

Pay particular attention to the timing there – Pocket decided BEFORE publishing HERETIC that they wouldn’t be doing a third book with me. Not based on the performance of HERETIC, but based on the performance of the book before that.

I’m sure you can guess what they meant for HERETIC. Sure, they went through the motions. They published the book. They made it available through the normal distribution channels. Their sales team went out and marketed it. Most of the usual chains like B&N and Borders had a copy or two on their shelves. But since Pocket was writing it off, it became very easy for the bookstores to write it off. No one was pushing them to reorder once those first few copies disappeared from the shelves and it soon dropped out of the public’s awareness.

Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, HERETIC was on track to disappear into that great remainder stack in the sky.

Skip forward to April 2007. The first of those foreign editions hits the shelves in Germany. The title is now DER KETZER, but it is the same book – same story, same words, just a different language.

And more importantly, a different publisher.

My German publisher, Droemer Knaur, is a large paperback house. My editor takes great pride in his work and from the very start told me that he intended to make me a household name in Germany. I have to admit that I was skeptical – at the time I was dealing with the recent news from Pocket and I wasn’t quite comfortable believing anything that I was told by a publisher.

But then Droemer’s well-oiled machine went to work. The editor talked up the book at the publishing house, getting everyone else excited about it. The art team produced a dynamic and interesting cover. The sales team went out and did such a bang-up job that the initial print run had to be doubled to handle the demand. The publicity team followed suit.

In short, they decided that, in Germany, the name “Joseph Nassise” would be synonymous with great supernatural thrillers and they set out to make sure it happened.

DER KETZER hit the shelves two weeks ago. It has spent those first two weeks in the number #51 slot on the paperback bestseller list. It’s current Amazon.de sales ranking is #76 and it has stayed in that range for the last couple of weeks. It has done so well that preorders for the next book in the series, DER ENGEL, are flooding in and the decision has been made to promote it as one of Droemer’s lead books at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October.

Remember, this is the exact same book, writing wise, that was released in this country and then seemingly disappeared without a trace a few months later.

Suddenly I understood what that person had been trying to tell me five years before.

Publishing is a joint business. Sure, the writer has to produce a decent book in the first place. But the hard part comes next, when the editor, the art department, the sales team, the publicity team, the local bookstore manager, and the reading public all have to work together to make a book a success. And the team that you have behind your creation makes an INCREDIBLE difference to the success or failure of that work.

It’s true. It’s not enough just to be published. If I had settled for that I wouldn’t have my first bestseller and I wouldn’t currently be negotiating a new three book contract.

Being published well – now that’s something worth striving for.

(A quick note for those wondering what’s happening with books two and three in the series. Overseas, all three books have been acquired and will be released with about four to six months between volumes. Here in the States, my agent and I are actively involved in looking for a new publisher to complete the trilogy. Hopefully, we’ll have some more news soon.)

A few weeks ago I took time out of my busy schedule to disappear for a weekend to a small town just outside of Baltimore, Maryland. No, I wasn’t having a mid-life crisis of any kind (and I certainly wouldn’t pick Maryland as the place to have one if I was!) nor was I trying to escape from a wave of raging fans.

I was one of sixteen participants at this year’s Borderlands Press Writers Bootcamp.

Bootcamp is a three day intensive workshop where sixteen “grunts’ get their writing worked over not only by their colleagues but also by the four “drill-instructors.” This year, those instructors consisted of three bestselling writers and one editor-in-chief of a major New York publishing house:

–F. Paul Wilson, bestselling author of the Repairman Jack series (as well as a host of medical thrillers and even some early SF novels)

– Doug Winter, bestselling author of Run (as well as two books I consider the definitive biographies of both Clive Barker and Stephen King)

– Tom Monteleone, bestselling author and editor of the Borderlands anthology series (as well as one of the founders of the superb Borderlands Press)

– Ginjer Buchanan, editor in chief at Berkley/Ace and one of the top editors working in genre fiction today

Bootcamp comes in two flavors – Short Story and Novel. I’d been one of the lucky sixteen participants at the very first Short Story bootcamp back in 2005, learned a lot, and was very pleased to be selected for the Novel bootcamp this year.

Now I can already hear you asking – how does the bootcamp work?

Participants are required to send in a writing sample from one of their novels, not to exceed thirty pages. That sample is then sent to the four instructors, as well as each of the other participants. Those writing samples are critiqued by all involved on the basis of several key areas:

– Plot and Setting

– Dialogue and Narrative Voice

– Character and Point of View

– Grammar, Style, Pacing, Transition and Structure

Attendees are broken into groups of four and we rotate through the process, working with each instructor for several hours on their assigned topic (for instance, Tom Monteleone was our Plot and Setting instructor.) By the time the weekend is over, you have discussed, dissected and pulled apart your writing sample on so many levels that it has to be better, it just HAS to be.

And it is.

Because the instructors are world-class in their approach and in their ability to pass on their knowledge to you.

Now some of you are probably wondering what’s a guy like me – sold five novels to date, has had his work translated into four different languages, optioned his first novel off for feature film production, blah blah blah – what’s he expect to learn from a writing workshop?

In this case — a lot. The opportunity to have four professional writers take your writing sample apart WORD BY WORD is invaluable. This goes way beyond the type of writing group John mentioned in his essay here yesterday. This is four professionals doing everything they can to show you how to make your piece a better one. That kind of attention to your work, and that level of feedback, just isn’t available on a regular basis. It’s like those commercials on tv - Flight to Baltimore – $250. Bootcamp fee – $700. Word by word critique of your latest writing project by four people who have forgotten more about writing than you have learned to date – Priceless.

A word should also be said about my fellow grunts. We all had very different levels of accomplishment and skill when it came to writing. But all of us were readers. All of us knew what we liked and what we didn’t. And I think that is part of the value of a program like this. Just because someone hasn’t sold their first (or their twenty-fifth!) novel doesn’t mean they don’t have something worth saying. I learned a lot from all my fellow colleagues, from the guy who currently works for DC Comics all the way to the woman whose writing sample was the first novel she’d ever attempted. As readers we all look at a piece of writing differently and those different perceptions can be used to better shape and form our own level of talent. Every suggestion we receive certainly shouldn’t be taken to heart (note the various examples my colleagues have given in the comments thread to John’s excellent article from yesterday – there is definitely a time to ignore comments and suggestions from others) but we also should not be afraid to listen to suggestions from others with less experience than we have simply because they have less experience. Listen to it, weigh it, and keep or discard it as necessary – that’s my general philosophy. You never know where that crucial piece of advice is going to come from.

So what’s my point?

Simply this. Writing is a craft. And like any good craft it needs to be worked at in order to improve it. From the bestselling author to the person just starting out, we all have something to learn and it’s never too late to do so.

I take every opportunity I can to learn something knew about my writing and my technique. Some of that comes from simply reading sites like this one. And some of it comes from getting down in the mud and muck, sloshing through an obstacle course with my fellow grunts while our drill instructors break us down and build us up again until we are better, stronger, faster than we were when we arrived.

What have you done to improve your craftsmanship this month?

(Note – With respect to full disclosure, our very own Elizabeth Massie was one of the instructors at a previous bootcamp and you can catch the view from her perspective in an essay she did last year right here.)