Matt Forbeck

A frustrated author wrote me over the weekend to ask me how he might be able to get published when most editors won’t look at unsolicited manuscripts these days. Since I hear this question all the time at conventions and such, I decided to post my answer here too:

As an unpublished author, you’re caught in the publishing industry’s Catch-22. No one will look at your book until you’ve been published, and you can’t get published if no one will look at your book. Fortunately, there are ways around this.

The best way is to get an editor to look at your book. Don’t send a manuscript, though, especially if the publisher’s website states that its editors will not consider unsolicited manuscripts. However, you can often send just a single-page query letter.

In paragraph one, state who you are and list any relevant credits or credentials. In the second, pitch your story. In the third, thank the reader for his or her consideration. Keep it simple and sweet.

Alternatively, you can try to meet editors at conventions, online, or wherever. Ask politely if you can pitch your manuscript to the editor. If they like your short, succinct, and intriguing verbal (or e-mailed, posted, or tweeted) pitch, they may ask you for a few chapters or a full manuscript. Then the manuscript is no longer unsolicited.

There are a number of agents who will consider unsolicited manuscripts, and you can hunt them down too. An excellent place to start is PublishersMarketplace.com, which has a searchable database of publishing professionals you can access for free. Best of all, you can narrow down agents this way by their stated interests. Before you get too far though, be sure to check Preditors & Editors and Writer Beware, both of which can help you avoid the swathe of people who run scams to prey on the hopes of new writers.

Unfortunately, good editors may not have much time for unpublished authors, and you won’t want to work with the bad ones. It’s best if you can get an editor interested in your script first. Then you can wave a nearly done deal under the noses of the good agents, something that usually grabs any professional’s attention. There’s nothing stopping you from attacking the challenge on both flanks however.

Be persistent and methodical about it. Eventually you’ll get through. However, don’t stop writing while you try to sell your book. Start on your next one instead. That way, if anyone says, “I like your style but not this book. Do you have anything else you can show me?” you’ll have the right answer already.

Good luck!

As the death toll from the Haitian earthquake rolls upward and the aftershocks continue to rumble, I’m stunned at how fast people have been able to pull together to offer support for Haiti’s battered people. In just a few days—in some cases barely in a few hours—people and organizations have been able to pull together benefits designed to help charities already on the ground in Haiti and in desperate need of new funds to help pay for the costs of their rescue and relief efforts.

Pop Cap Games, for instance, ran a promotion last Saturday in which the proceeds for their sales went straight to Partners in Health. Under the banner Indie Relief, dozens of independent software developers for the iPhone and Mac gave their proceeds on January 20 to a double fistful of worth charities too. Wired Magazine‘s GeekDad folks just set up their own fundraising drive, featuring prizes from Gunnar Optiks and my pal John Kovalic of Dork Tower fame. The great people at DriveThruRPG coordinated a promotion with their publishers to bring you nearly $1,500 worth of roleplaying game PDFs for anyone making a $20 donation to Doctors Without Borders through their site.

The speed of the response is amazing. I’ve contributed to benefit books in the past. They work well for raising funds for charities going through a normal year, but they’re awful for helping out with emergencies. It just takes too long to get everything coordinated and moving.

I took part in a project to raise money for the victims of the 2004 tsunami. Unfortunately, by the time the people running it had gotten their act together, the emergency had long passed, and the project was scrapped. The Beyond the Storm: Shadows of the Big Easy book—which raised funds for the Red Cross to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina—came out in October, 2005, over a month after the hurricane hit, and that was a print-on-demand project tossed together at lightning speed. It made some money for the cause, but it could have made a lot more if it had been out right away.

With society so attuned to Internet speed these days, instant fund-raisers or projects are far more successful than those that appear run weeks, months, or years after the fact. It’s not just that we have a short attention span about such things. It’s that there’s often already a new emergency to worry about, one that eclipses thoughts about the past ones, at least for a while. Projects that reach the world now, when the spotlight is on them, are bound to do better than those that do not.

The lesson here is that the project doesn’t have to be thematically related to the disaster. You don’t need to come up with a whole anthology of new—or even recycled—material for a book, album, or whatever. You just have to be willing to pledge your profits for a period of time to go to the cause and then publicize it. You get the exposure, the charity gets the funds, and good-hearted people get to sample your wares for free. It’s a win all the way around.

This week is the annual GAMA (Game Manufacturers of America) Trade Show in Las Vegas, and for the first time in memory, I’m sitting here at home instead. I have many reasons for this.

First, of course, is my family. I’ve been off to Hollywood and Sweden already this year, and tossing another trip on top of that would be a bit much. I used to travel a lot more before my wife and I started having kids, but with five little ones tromping around the house, getting away means having to pull many more scheduling contortions and outright acrobatics to pull such ventures off.

Second, I’m busy. Too busy to leave town right now. I was up until 3 AM this morning, beating a comic-book script into submission, and its lucha libre tag-team partners are straining at the ropes for their chance at me next.

Third, I have more offers for work these days than I can properly field. Since I’m a freelancer, I’m always looking for more. I keep a steady eye on that event horizon out there on the edge of the roiling seas. You know the one. It’s labeled “Last scheduled deadline.” Once you go beyond that, well, Here There Be Dragons.

Fourth, these things cost money. As a freelancer, I’m run a small business, a.k.a. my career. I’m happy to invest in attending a convention if there’s a remote chance it may pay out in the future. I’ve built much of my business on good relationships with friends and coworkers, and while it’s always a good idea to keep those fields freshly watered, I need to keep an eye on expenses too.

Fifth, GTS is all about tabletop games, and I’m mostly working on novels, comics, and video games these days. I’ll always go to the Big Daddy of gaming conventions—Gen Con—but everything else comes farther down the list.

So, I’m staying home. If you’re interested in making or selling tabletop games—or anything else in that market, including tie-in gaming fiction—I recommend the show to you, but you won’t see me there.

In general, conventions—literary, gaming, etc.—are wonderful when you’re starting out in any career. You get to meet all sorts of like-minded people and try to figure out how you can all make a living together. You make the kinds of friendships and contacts that will serve you well throughout your career. You live a little and have some fun so you have something to write about later.

Later, though, conventions become a way to catch up with those now-old friends (the friendship is old, not you, right?) and pass on something of what you’ve learned to the next crop of fresh-faced optimists ready to storm the walls. You sit on panels instead of attending them, and you spend as much time at the show’s Bar Con as you do in the exhibit hall.

The value of the show changes. You don’t stop learning, but you don’t learn as much. The curve flattens out as you go, and you wind up treasuring the friends you see more than the event you’re all nominally there for.

Still, I’m always looking for new horizons, new edges of the world that I can sail over—or off. While I may not be at GTS this year, I’m already making plans for events in the newer fields in which I work, like Comic-Con and the Austin Game Developers Conference and the rest.

And hopefully I’ll be back next year. While I always like to make new friends, I miss my old ones too.

Last night, I watched my beloved Green Bay Packers lose the NFC championship game to the New York Giants. I was raised to love sports much in the same way I was raised to love reading: by near-constant exposure to both. You can see how this affected (twisted) me in my series of tie-in novels based on a board game called Blood Bowl.  

For those not in the know, Blood Bowl is a game of fantasy football, but this is the kind of fantasy that readers enjoy, rather than statisticians. It’s crammed full of elves, dwarves, ogres, and undead battling to the death over a spiked pigskin. To top it off, it’s full of parodic humor, covering the gamut from the Bad Bay Hackers to Killer Genuine Draft.  Sad to say, but such a mix is not for everyone.

Anyone who can read can enjoy it, of course, but those who get the most out of it must enjoy football, fantasy literature, and gag after gag. Some writers figure that trying to cover many niches at once increases their chances of lining up readers.  It should be X + Y + Z, right? 

In fact, it’s more like X ÷ Y ÷ Z. A Venn diagram that shows the small section where the readerships overlap would illustrate the point even more accurately. 

Simply put, most people specialize in their passions. They love either football or fantasy, but not both. I’m sure you can probably point out a number of friends who are more omnivorous. Maybe you’re even such a person yourself, but then you are the exception rather than the rule.  

This is one reason why they have different sections for fiction in most bookstores. They categorize novels by genre, which is the easiest way to divide them, if not always the most intelligent. Readers hungry to feed their particular passion for a genre know where they can go to get their next fix, something close (if not identical) to what has already proven to please them.  

Stepping outside a genre or blending them can cause a writer trouble. It makes it hard for the seller to figure out where to shelve the book, and it can irritate fans who are looking for a standard genre novel but end up with something substantially different. Or, worse yet, the blended concept might confuse them enough that they never bother to pick the book up in the first place.  

Still, I can’t complain about geeks liking what they like. We’re all geeks of one sort of another. As I define the word, a geek is someone who shows a true passion for something.  Just as you can have computer geeks, you can have sports geeks, film geeks, political geeks, and so on. Myself, I’m a geek for my kids, among many other things.  

Every summer, I go to Gen Con, the big tabletop gaming convention. For the past five years, Indianapolis has played host to the show, and Gen Con is late enough in the summer that it often shares a weekend with an Indianapolis Colts exhibition game. Those years, the football geeks (dressed in blue and white facepaint and wearing the their team’s uniforms proudly) rub shoulders with the gaming geeks (wearing fantasy costumes and toting bags full of books, dice, and cards). 

The looks the two breeds of geeks trade on the street corners can be hilarious. Each of them figures the other kind is nuts. But under the skin, they’re all geeks, they’re all showing passion for something, and they’re gathering with their respective tribes to celebrate this with every bit of heart they have.  

I could stand on the street between the stadium and the convention center and try to sell them my Blood Bowl books, but it would be a hard sell. Each tribe would roll their eyes at a different part of the pitch, but one good eye roll is all you need to spoil a sale.  

But those who keep their eyes on the covers—who think “That’s just the kind of crazy tale I never knew I’d been looking for”—they’re part of two of my tribes, and I love them twice as much. I don’t know if the math (or the royalties) work out in my favor, but who can be bothered with such things when you find such siblings under the skin? 

[My apologies for being a bit late with this. Due to WordPress's scheduling feature, I'll slip it in behind Richard's post, and no one will be the wiser. Except those of you who read this confession. D'oh!] 

Last month I wrote about how I needed to spend more time on my own work rather than the tie-in novels, toy development, and computer game work that occupy a good chunk of my time. (Well, the kids take up more than that, but that’s not an area in which I’m willing to trim my involvement.) So, when one of my publishers came calling with an offer for a new novel, I really had to think about it. 

To this point, I’ve agented all my own deals. Mostly this is because I work with publishers I’ve know and trust. But it means that when it comes time to put on a hard nose, it’s my face that wears it.  

The advance wasn’t as good as I’d been hoping for, and given my yearnings to do something else, it seemed like the perfect time to cut myself loose. Still, I’m a lifelong freelancer. Turning down work, smart as it may be, pains me. 

For one, I had to work hard to get my first novels lined up. Five years ago, an offer like this would have sent me bouncing off the walls with glee. Now that I have 11 such books under my belt, I wouldn’t say the thrill is gone, but I’m not the same writer I was five years ago, not even the same person.  

So I asked for more money. I write for money, after all, and more money for my efforts is always good. As the saying goes, “We’ve already established what you are. Now we’re haggling over the price.” 

The counteroffer was “Take it or leave it.” It was mixed with pleasantries and topped with niceties, of course, but that’s was the 150-proof distilled essence of it. 

So I left it. 

Then the new counteroffer arrived. It wasn’t much stronger than the previous offer, but it was better, and a better deal than I’d gotten in the past. As importantly, it showed that the publisher really did want to work with me over the long term, even if there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room on this particular book.   

The kicker, for me, was the deadline, which was a year off. This meant (at least I told myself) that I should still have plenty of time to work on those more personal projects I’d been kicking around in my head, and it gave me the reassurance of future work. If I found extra time on my hands (ha!), I could finish the book early. Or I could push it off while I concentrated on other things. 

So I took it.   

I don’t know if it was the right decision. It lacks the drama of a clean break and an unobstructed view of a new frontier. On the other hand, I’m excited about having a contract for my 12th novel in hand, and I know I’ll enjoy writing this book.  

In my life, I seek balance. Tipping too far in any direction leads to one-sided living (and thinking). This deal gives me a bit of the best of both ends, so I think I’ve found that here. Just watch while I dance more circles around the invisible, constantly moving center of gravity and seek more of the same. Wish me luck.  

Until next time, happy holidays to you all, no matter which ones you celebrate or ignore.  

Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway considered his best work to be his shortest, a six-word story that went like this:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Last November, Wired lined up a lot of writers to take a crack at the six-word short. In that vein, here are three such devilish, abbreviated tales for the Halloween season.

————————————-

“Let’s split up.” Later: “Nooo!” “Nooo!”

————————————-

The world ends not with a—.

————————————-

“Brains!”
“Brains!”
“Brains!”
BLAM!
BLAM!
Click.

Like most folks, I’m inherently lazy on some level. When there’s something I should be doing, I’d often rather be playing games, running around with my kids, or catching up with my wife. I’d be great at being independently wealthy.

Of course, I’m not, and I’m a full-time writer/game designer, so I drag myself to the keyboard every day to set my fingers dancing across it to create something new. Most of the time, I don’t have to drag too hard. After all, I get to set in a comfortable chair and make things up. It beats digging ditches any day.

At this point in my career, I occasionally have people ask me to pitch them something, to send them some ideas about projects we might tackle together. Often I want to do these things. The idea of working on them feeds my demons, and I know they could be lots of good-paying fun. But many times I never get around to doing it. There are just too many other things to do, professionally or otherwise.

Am I being lazy? That’s what the sinister voices in the bad of my head whisper. But the boisterous, fun-loving voices do their beer-drinking best to shout them down.

Nothing focuses my mind like a deadline though. It changes the parameters from having something I should do to something I must do.

Without deadlines, my gigs all seem like distant beasts, hazy outlines heaving up out of the horizon as the road rolls in their direction. They won’t become sharp-toothed monsters I must slay until they get closer. Until then, there’s danger I might nod off at the wheel.

I normally deal with this by outfitting my rig with atomic batteries to power and turbines to speed. I race toward those deadlines as fast as I can, then demolish them, all the while hunting for bigger, richer targets on my radar. As a writer, it makes me something of an adrenaline junkie, but that’s the way I like it.

It doesn’t leave me much time for those ephemeral pitches, but it keeps me sharp and active. Otherwise, I just get lazy—truly lazy—and along that slow and easy road lies madness.

I just got back from Gen Con late Sunday night, and I’m still beat. It’s a long-standing tradition (at least for me) to hit any con I hit hard. If I’m going to be there, I go all-out. This year, my fourth in a row as a guest of honor, was no exception.

During any convention day, you can expect to find me in one of three places: on the exhibit show floor, checking out the merchandise and bumping into friends; taking part in a seminar in which I impart what knowledge I’ve earned in my narrow slice of “fun things to do to make a living”; or meeting with friends or clients (often one and the same) to catch up or chat about future projects.

Then, once the exhibit hall is officially closed, I hit the streets. I find people to grab a meal with—again friends, clients, or both—and then hunt down the unofficial watering holes where we can continue the process until the morning’s wee hours. Usually I’m up until 4 AM or later, then grab a precious few hours of sleep before starting all over again.

I do this for fun. Some may call it networking, and it’s been the source of many of my best gigs as both a writer and a game designer, but I don’t do it to network. I do it because I love it.

At Gen Con, I play host for the Diana Jones Award ceremony, a packed party in which I greet every attendee and hand out loads of free drink tickets. We’ve been doing this at Gen Con for seven years. It started out during a birthday party I held for myself in 2001, which was such a great success that we now line up corporate sponsorship for all the fun.

Sure, it’s a great networking mechanism, and it helps me get to know many of the professionals who attend Gen Con, but I don’t do it to gather names for my address book. I’ll never work for or with most of the people who show up, but they’re part of the tribe of people who love games and fiction—and whatever else Gen Con contains—as much as I do. I do all this to get to know them, to see old friends and make new ones.

That’s the real secret behind the best networkers. They don’t have to force themselves to do it to get jobs. They do it because they love to meet people.

If you force yourself to meet folks because they have something you want—like an editor who might have a plum assignment or could publish your magnum opus—you come across like the young man desperate for a prom date. Just like the girls can smell the need on him, the editors can sense it in you.

Nobody likes to feel like they’re being used. Meet people for fun. If you happen to work with them later, all the better, but enjoy the moment for what it is: a moment to enjoy.

Sometimes, as a writer, I read books or columns of writing advice, much like what you can find in many of the essays here on Storytellers Unplugged. Although I have a degree in Creative Writing, I figure there’s always something new to learn, and at the very least I can see how other published writers handle the job and maybe take something from their experiences.

Most times, I find myself nodding my head, agreeing with what I read. It’s rare to unearth an epiphany this way, but often I think, “It’s great that someone codified in writing something similar to what I do.” Knowing that others work like I do can be comforting.

Then there are times I just have to wince then look away. That happens when someone declares something to be so that I just can’t agree with. Writing is an art. We all come at it from different angles, and there are few absolutes, especially when you’re talking about the process. All anyone ever sees is the end product, and that’s what counts, not how you get there, right?

Here’s the one that gets me the most, and I may be cast out as a heretic for disagreeing with it: Write every day.

Hey, it sounds like great advice, and I’m all for getting into the writing habit. I’ve just never managed it myself.

That may sound suspicious from a guy working on his 11th published novel (Blood Bowl: Rumble in the Jungle, due out this December from the Black Library) in the last three years, but it’s true. While I love writing fiction, especially novels, I still make most of my money as a freelance game designer, both for tabletop and computer games. So, writing fiction isn’t something I do every day.

Sure, I write e-mails, rules, examples of play, blog posts, and more, but fiction uses different muscles than those things. Tackling a novel, even, is a far different experience than pounding out a short story.

Instead of writing fiction every day, I prefer to hit it in strong, sustained bursts. That may come from the fact I write tie-in novels, which are generally under tight deadlines. As Max Collins said on the IAMTW mailing list once, “We are not sprinters. We are not long distance runners. We sprint long distances.”

I don’t think I’ve ever taken more than three months to write a novel. I once wrote a 95,000-word novel in 16 days, including a day off for Thanksgiving. The last day, I clocked out after writing 11,000 words.

And I like it that way. I enjoy being able to devote every bit of creative power I have to a single project. I work on many different things in the course of a year, and it’s easy for me to get them confused if I try to juggle them all at once. I’d rather hyperfocus on each in succession.

Of course, I do this full-time, so I have that luxury — if you can call a career built on serial obsessions luxurious. It’s what works for me. Figure out what works for you, then do that. Rinse. Repeat. Relax.