~:: Just Asking ::~

This post is not crafty or illustrated or humorous or ironic.  It’s just about me.  Nothing more than a pitifully omphalopsychic rambling mess that I’ve been trying to work up the courage to write out for some three months.  It’s about writing.  Not writing blogs.  Writing books.  The business of it.  And the pitiful people who fall in love with using a public voice.

About me.

I used to be an author.  Author meaning: a person who is published and reviewed and gets royalties.  And letters from people.  And thus, feels connected.  Sort of.  I have friends, like Sharon, who are actually professional.  Successful and consistent.  And maybe for about ten minutes I came close to that.  There was actually a time when every manuscript I had ever written had been published.  Yeah.  That can make you cocky.  And I think I was, for a while – cocky.  Not now, though.  Which is why I am writing this.

I never was in it for the money.  I was just writing stories I wanted to read.  And when I was young and romantical minded, and then when I was young and my days were rife with beloved, chaotic children, I wrote – I don’t know why.  To bring order to the universe?  To make sure stories had an acceptable ending?  As a vacation from teaching and carrying and entertaining and shopping and cooking and running the studio?

I don’t really know.  But the stories came, and they filled my head, and then they filled paper, and then screens.  And I sent them to New York, and they came back books (yeah – like it was that easy).

Some day I will write the story of getting my first NY release published.  If I remember it.  Drama.  Suspense. Betrayal. Triumph.

But here’s where it became frustrating: Scholastic ended up publishing my The Only Alien on the Planet. The book got great reviews.  It didn’t sell quickly, but it did do over 110,000 copies over a couple of years, which in those days was pretty wizard.  Which is a funny choice of words, considering the times.  It used to be that a great YA run was about 8000 books.  A few, the ones that English teachers got all hot and bothered about – like The Outsiders – did better and still manage to stay in print (is that one still in print?).  Like I said, 8000 was once a good number.  But I had done better than that.  And so I sent them a second manuscript.  Which my editor liked.  But the word from the committee was: we’re going to wait to see how the first one sells.

Ummm.  It was already selling.  What was to wait for?  So after about a year, I got my courage back up and took it elsewhere, and found my present favorite editor.  Maybe someday I will write that story too – how the publishing industry is a lot like an ocean of predator fish who are always hunting for small fish and swallowing them, and spitting out the bones – and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out at this point that every dang publishing house was actually owned by a cable network that’s part of a conglomerate that belongs to the one huge company that runs of all media companies on the planet and that the whole thing is owned by China.

And they ARE in it for the money.

For a while, in the eighties and nineties, YA publishing was a lot about edginess.  Every fringy aspect of our social fabric got stuck into YA books.  Like every high school in the world is supposed to be full of socially deviant loners who subscribe to the “If there’s nothing wrong with me, then something must be wrong with the universe” perspective. Oh, wait.  That part’s probably true.

Anyway.  Along came Harry Potter and suddenly, nobody wanted to publish quiet books anymore.  YA became a make-a-hit biz.  And, you know, I did like reading that series.  Except for book five and the end.  (Wait – which one had the kittens in it?)

Then came tech and the internet and Kindles and suddenly, the sidewalks of NY were paved with people who used to be editors, because nobody was buying books anymore – unless they were Harry Potter or concerned Vampires and sexual tension.

Which I am not about.  And I was still writing stuff.  But my beloved editor wasn’t  interested in fantasy or horse – both of which I happen to like.  And I didn’t have an agent, and I still don’t – because shopping for an agent when you don’t really know anybody in NY is worse, almost, than shopping for a publishing house.  I can take being turned down by an editor.  But to have some agent go all snooty and superior on you?  Enough to make you chew furntiture.  So I lost my courage.

And even during the odd surge of confidence, when I sent things to houses I liked – it’s just kind of dead out there.  I have a manuscript at Scholastic that the very wonderful editor just loves – but she’s had it for over two years now.  And it’s like she’s the only editor left in that house and has to read everything and edit everything and the queue is so long, she’ll be dead before she gets to me, which she won’t because there are no vampires in my book.

And I sent one at another editor’s request  – “Get it to me quick so I can have it read before Thanksgiving,” she said.  That was Thanksgiving 2009.  A beloved friend asked her the other day, after I’d awakened to realize I’d been waiting that long – “Did you get a manuscript from Kristen?”  The answer: “Umm.  I could have done.  I’m just really behind.”

In the good old days, you waited six months and you got an answer.  Now – you should live long enough for your turn to come up.

The point is this:  if you paint a painting, you can show it to somebody.  Just show them.  And then your painting is real.  Or you can just hang it on your wall, and there it is.  Or if you write a song – you can sing it to yourself and work out your angst and everything.  I know.  I’ve done that.  And it’s real.  Or you can sit on your front porch and sing it to the neighbors.  You make a quilt, you can give it to somebody, or lie under it or take pictures of it and show your Facebook friends.

But when you write a book, it isn’t real unless somebody reads it.

And to have people in the way of that – agents who have this or that to say about the story and may or may not humiliate you.  Then editors – who may not find fault with the writing at all, but just not be that interested in the type of story.  (Give the same manuscript to ten editors, you will have 10 different opinions from “I LOVE it” to “Is there a dead fish in here, maybe?”).  And then it takes over a year to get the actual physical book printed.  Then the reviews.  Then the publisher has to talk stores into stocking it (and let me tell you, that’s a pain – stores will order 50 of a paperback book – and maybe won’t even ever get the books to the shelf – and after three weeks, they’ll throw the books back into a box and ship them back – battered and unusable – or better yet, rip off the covers and send just them back – charging the publisher for the shipping and expecting full credit –which comes out of the royalties to the author – does this sound like efficient and effective business?).

But the stores are closing.  And the little guys who are hanging on don’t carry that wide a selection.  And the big ones have gone on-line where you can’t see a book and touch it and smell it and get a feel for whether you want it or not.

And this is all very discouraging because I LOVE BOOKS.  I LOVE THEM.  And I love walking down long shelves looking for something that feels right.

And I love writing stories for people to love.

And I feel doom.

So.  I had a long talk with a fellow author – a New York Best Selling author who has seen all this happening and has decided to be his own publisher.  He has a following (I used to – where are my 100,000 buyers?  I want a list.  And I want it now.  Please – if you were one of them, go to my Facebook page and, by thunder, LIKE the dang thing) and he writes these books, and he sells subscriptions to them and puts them up on-line.  Sometimes, he invites the people who love reading him to watch as he writes, and to comment, and discuss the characters and root for certain plot elements – they just have a password to the site, and there’s a discussion board, and he talks to them as the books develop – and I think it’s super cool.

But I don’t know how readers feel about that.

In the end, if he has enough people willing to kick in, he prints a short run – makes beautiful hardback books, signs them, and sells them to the people who subscribed.  It’s not selling 100,000 copies, but it’s connecting with people who love your stories.

I don’t know.

Would you pay a buck a chapter to read a book from an author you enjoy?  Would I?  Maybe I would.

I would really like to know how you guys feel about this.  It seems like the wave of the future.

Right now, I have a novel I wrote a couple of years ago, and I love it.  And I’m tempted to put it up here on a collection of pages and see if you like it.  But I’m scared to.  Maybe I should still be looking for a publisher.  But I don’t want to.  I HATE this whole begging and being judged process.  It’s discouraging and it takes years and it’s NO FUN.

And I wonder if this kind of writing – blogging – writing yourself and talking about real things.  I wonder if that’s the kind of thing I was trying to do all along.  Except you really don’t make any money doing that, and I have to pay for felt and buttons somehow.

So, I don’t know – what do you think?  Would you buy a book from a live author?  Would you think it was fun to have a secret password and watch a book unfold?  Would you send paypal a buck a chapter?

If you’ve gotten this far, please don’t just lurk.  Please tell me what you think, because this is keeping me up at night.

And that’s the end.

Oh, and if you are at all interested in what I decide to do here – please do go to my Facebook author page and like it – because I need to start finding all the folks who have read me and might want to again.  It’s all new media now, my dears – sigh.

http://www.facebook.com/kristendrandle.author

Thank you for your  – attention.  Really.  The end.