Planetfurry BBS

[Nadan]

I do. Actually, I'm not entirely sure if I should. Let me back up and give you the whole story.

Back when I was 18 I started a furry story which was mostly just teenage no one understands me blah-blah-blah. When I turned 20 I changed it to have more substance. Since then I have been tweaking the storyline. Now, it's more of a commentary on race relations, prejudice, culture clashes, and what it means to be a family (whether blood related or not.) And the main character is 25, not a teenager. I am the kind of person who will take forever to write this story out, but I have outlined more chapters and written more in the past weeks. I'm wondering - should I try and publish my work somewhere other than online.

I have been thinking that perhaps I can get the first half of the book written and available online, perhaps on the Raccoon's Bookshelf, and then publish the book independantly and see if it will sell. Have any of you tried publishing work before? How has it turned out for you? What route did you take? I'd be very interested in knowing.

It is not my desire to have writing be my primary means of income, but I do believe I have something to say and that I can tell a story - and maybe others will agree.

[Rabbit]

For what it's worth...

I've sold a few stories here and there. Generally, once something's been online in a setting like this forum, it loses all monetary value. (This is why I don't post my fiction here, as a rule, or almost anywhere else online that does not at least garner me a publication credit that I can add to my resume. Probably 60% of my work-- the best 60%-- is unavailable on-line.) You _can_ post to an e-mail group like the TSA or TFWF mailing lists, which publishers see as "workshopping" and not "posting". Publishers _like_ workshopping, becasue it's good for story quality. They support it. But as a rule they don't support putting work in places where it is both public and free. That sort of ruins their profit margin.

I should also say that I've been writing for almost ten years. I've got a novel for sale via Raccoon's Bookshelf (Thanks again, Mike!) and a second forthcoming. I've sold to a hardcover collection, am very proud to have been included in "Best In Show", have sold stuff to paying e-zines (multiple stories, to one of them) and have been in more "for the love" (unpaid) markets than I can honestly recall. In toto, over the past ten years, I've made maybe $300 or so in exchange for my thousands and thousands of hours of hard work. And, to be frank, at that I'm doing far better than average.

I'm not telling you not to write your novel; far from it! Hell, I've written five myself, and have loved every minute. Writing these books has made my life worthwhile, even. But, you need to know going in that a) you won't make a dime unless you can acheive pro-level quality, which is _not easy_, especially without support from a serious writer's group, b) that Jerry Pournelle was right when he said that the vast majority of writers must write a million words or more of non-salable material before even beginning to to flower, and c) that even when things _do_ begin to click for you, the financial returns hover between slim and none.

There are fewer professional writers of fiction in America today, a writer-friend tells me, than there are professional players of baseball. The money just isn't there, and hasn't been since the advent of the Internet. I beleive that our world is the poorer for it. But, them's the breaks...

[Cirrel]

For what its worth, I've written over 3/4 of a million words for furry stories (1/2 million in three novels) and I agree with Rabbit. I still got a quarter million to go. Even then, there's no guarentee of writing marketable stuff. My nephew, a philosphy professor at Minnesota University - Rochester, will have a short story published soon in the Isaac Azimov SciFi magazine and he'll get maybe $500 for it? And that's after writing zillions of words on masters and doctorate level theses. Not to mention his recreational writing.

It also depends on who you know. My nephew also had a short story published in an anthology put out by Balentine books - but that was only because he came in second in a writing contest sponsored by someone who knew someone who knew someone at Balantine books.
Writing for a living is not a common occupation. Like many folks say - "Don't give up your day job."

And even if you do get a major publisher to publish your work there is this. I've a friend who does write for a living (she has six books published by Del Ray of New York) - and she would still almost qualify for welfare were it not for her living arrangements. The writers who do make it big are just the same as the musicians who make it big - they are few and far between. For every famous name musician there are probably 10,000 who are just as good, but not paid as well.

Is this any reason to stop writing?

Hell no!

Remeber the million words thing. You gotta get past that in some fashion. As to my novels? I'm putting them online simply because they are a part of that first million words. I doubt any major publisher would go for it. Remember - they are putting in a considerable amount of cash to publish. At minimum, a major publishing house needs to fork over a quarter million dollars just to get a 25,000 copy run into the bookstore. And that's with no guarentee that they'll recoup any of it.

Smaller publishers - like Mike - usually go the publish on demand route, which makes individual copies of the book more expensive, but it lends itself to writers who will have smaller markets.

Lastly, as a word of hope, there ARE those folks out there who prefer to read the 'Dead Tree' version of the story rather than reading it on-line. There will always be a market for good writing. However, how well it pays often has nothing to do with the quality.


Cirrel - Writer - Artist - and all around Poor Guy.

[Nadan]

Gentlemen, thank you for your feedback. I have considered several of these points, but not from all the aspects you have mentioned, so I think you for that. As always, I am going to write. I will even probably finish the novel. As to putting it online, now I'm not so sure. I will most likely revisit this question sometime after the halfway mark (which may be a while if I keep adding chapters between already written chapters).

It's not really my intention to turn a buck on my book. It would be nice -- even great. What I would really like is the experience this brings. I'm planning for the mountains in the distance, even though I have yet to cross the river. It's a long trek, but one must have a goal.

[Osfer]

There is, nowadays, the opiton of self-publishing through a print-on-demand service. This is how FANG is produced, and how I'm helping a select few authors self-publish their longer works under the FANG Presents banner.

The advantage of self-publishing in this fashion is that it costs no money. The authors I assist in this fashion pay me with a percentage of the sales of their books -- or that'll be the case when the books hit the shelves.

The disadvantage is that you don't get any experience with the publishing industry and the cost per unit is fairly high. With a regular printer, even with a small run of, say, 50 and fairly high-quality materials, it'll still only cost about 6 or 7 dollars per copy to print. With a digital print-on-demand service like Lulu, which is what I use, each copy costs about 13 dollars (based on a page count close to 400).

The book is, in principle, only available online, since whenever a copy is ordered through Lulu.com, a copy is printed and shipped, there's no stock maintained. You could elect to boy a few copies for yourself at cost price and sell those at cons, or you could try offering them to Rabbit Valley or the like. Be warned, though; these are usually not interested in novels, and they tend to need to be able to buy the books at about 40-50% of final retail price, which means they'd have to sell it at $35 or $40 to make a profit.

Then again, there's a particular joy to seeng your work in print that makes such things worthwhile...

[ScottyDM]

A Million Words:

If your writing shows steady improvement, you'll need fewer than a million words to start producing saleable stuff. Unfortunately, there seems to be more to it than quality. Randy Ingermanson has an essay about the process of becoming a published writer in which he talks about the different stages of prepublication, and what to do to advance to the next stage.

On the other hand, it is far too easy to write a million words and still remain a freshman. There's a writer whose work I used to admire. He published another chapter recently and I was very disappointed in the quality of his writing. It lacks focus. It wanders about, lead by the characters. It head hops. He seems more interested in pandering to the fan boyz than writing a story (full of "jokes" and obvious cameos). His past chapters contain glaring, large-scale errors, yet he seems to think that because he had some deep emotions felt when he wrote them, he should never change them. He's been writing for years, and he has improved some, but not very much (mostly grammer, spelling, and formatting).

As Randy Ingermanson said about himself: "I think I spent seven years as a sophomore. That's about six years too long." A million words are meaningless if you don't improve.

Self Publishing:

For tiny quantities, LuLu seems like a pretty good deal. Mike, you spent $100? You must have bought an ISBN and bar code for that price. If you don't care that your book will not be in a bookstore or sold through someone like Amazon, you don't need an ISBN. Without the ISBN, your "setup charges" at LuLu are as low as $0. As Osfer pointed out, the per-unit cost through LuLu is a fright.

Going with a "vanity press" is death. If some publisher wants you to give them money, then it's a vanity press. Real publishers don't do "cooperative publishing" or use other sorts of double-speak to try to get you to send them a check. Part of the ISBN identifies the publisher. It doesn't matter what it says on the spine, if the ISBN identifies that your book came from a vanity press, it will be black-balled and the only store that might touch it is your local bookstore--and only then if you beg the manager, promise a signing, and give him or her a sample to read first.

Editors:

Editors are a wonderful thing. They have a slush pile so the readers don't have to wade through mountains of garbage to find a few gems. Someone once said that the Internet will allow us all to become our own publishers. Someone else said that this has turned the Internet into the editor's slush pile. Professional editors get a lot of slush, and I've read somewhere that about 1 or 2% of that is good enough for publication. Less than that gets published because people send their work to the wrong publisher, or the publisher has enough to do for that quarter.

If you go to a place like FictionPress you'll see that 60% of what is there is fetid dreck, 30% is bad, and only about 10% is readable (I've not stumbled across anything that was good). I used to have an account there, but as soon as I realized my work was getting lost in all the "noise" and that the feedback was mostly small chapters of The Self Congratulatory Society, I deleted my work there. FictionPress is a first-rate example of an Internet-based slush pile.

Should You Publish on the Internet?

If it is out where anyone can see it, then it's considered published. Many online critique groups work behind a password, or with a limited mailing list. Because of the restricted readership, it's not considered publishing to put your work into an online critique process. What most publishers want is first publication rights in a particular language or region of the world. Putting your work on a website kills that possibility. Publishers who are doing an anthology of short stories are the exception; they will accept things that have been published before, say in a magazine.

Improve Your Writing:

Join a critique group. Your goal is to find one whose average member is a better writer than you are. Here's an incomplete list of writers' groups. It's not on the list, but I'm a member of Critique Circle, which has an active community, some of whom are professionally published.

Odds and Ends:

Cirrel: Riders of the Mind blew me away. It is very rare to see such a well-constructed story on the 'Net. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It has conflict that is worthy of your characters. It has characters that one can care about. And you do pretty well with the details of grammar, etc. It isn't "furry"; it's sci-fi. A story like this is probably submission quality (if you'd not already published it yourself). I've also read about half of Wilderhorn with the same reaction.

As for my own writing: I'm not going to be self-publishing any more serial stories to my website, complete works only. I'm also not going to be self-publishing anything I hope to submit anywhere. I'm starting to work on novels, and I'll probably spin out a few short stories from the characters and situations in the novels. I do have half a story posted that I'll probably take down--as it could become the first of a series I'd like to see published someday.

I'll keep writing. I'll do more reading. I still need to improve as a writer. And I'll start working on contacts.

Scotty

[Rabbit]

[/quote]If your writing shows steady improvement, you'll need fewer than a million words to start producing saleable stuff. Unfortunately, there seems to be more to it than quality. Randy Ingermanson has an essay about the process of becoming a published writer in which he talks about the different stages of prepublication, and what to do to advance to the next stage. [quote]


Sadly, according to this article moving on the higher stages seems to involve a lot of personal face-to-face and social networking, skills that many furries (including myself) conspicuously lack. This is why I've come to beleive I'll never succeed in any significant way in my lifetime. After my death, I intend to have all the novels I've been trying to sell, all my genuinely quality stuff, net-posted, since the money will no longer do me any good. At that time, I'll develop a major fanbase, when it's too late. =:)

[ScottyDM]

Randy talks about going to writers' conferences as a major way to meet people who can help. Randy also publishes a monthly newsletter, which is mostly about marketing yourself. You can sign up for it on his website. And there are other published authors out there who have tons of helpful information for new writers, on their websites.

As for finding a con (or maybe two or three), you could write to your favorite authors who write in the same genre you do, and ask them if they know of any writers' cons. You could even write to Randy. Because "furry" is probably the most saleable in the sci-fi and fantasy genres, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America might be helpful. Note, to join that org, you need to have sold something into a professional market. There are zillions of conventions out there, I'm sure if you Google around you'll find something.

Scotty

[Rabbit]

I've sold at the pro level of pay two or three times; and am therefore SFWA eligible. I've even got an entry in _Locus_, thanks to having sold to _Best In Show_/_Furry_. But I haven't joined the group, mostly because I don't like elitist groups that won't let new writers join.

I think that's my biggest problem, really. I don't _like_ people who choose which stories get published by who the writer knows instead of how excellent his or her work is. I'm well aware that the problem is rampant in all fields of human endeavor, is deeply rooted in human nature, and will probably always be with us so long as we _remain_ human. Yet, it makes me so angry that I can never socialize with "movers and shakers" worth a damn, either in person or via e-mail. This remains true in every field I've ever been associated with; politics, my working life, whatever. Eventually, my contempt for the "insider mentality" makes itself known, usually in an ugly way.

That's just how it is. I know that Randy is trying to help, and I'm not attacking him. Rather, please understand that I'm whining and moaning about my own shortcomings, and am well aware all the while that said shortcomings are indeed my own.

Maybe I can suck it up and change. Maybe I oughta at least try.

<sigh>

I'll think about it after the holidays. For now, I just wanna try and relax a little. Thanks for taking the time to reply, in any event. It was appreciated.

[ScottyDM]

I hear ya Rabbit:

I don't think it's so much some insider's club, but the practical matter of too little time. Digging through the slush pile is only part of a submissions editor's job. There are hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts in that pile, sometimes more. How much time can he spend on each one, on average? So things get tossed for what seems like dopey reasons, like the author used the wrong sized font. For each manuscript rejected, that means the slush pile is that much smaller.

Contrast that with a personal letter from the editor's star author, saying, "Hey, take a look at Joe Blow's manuscript. I think it has merit." So instead of tossing an unsolicited manuscript after 15 seconds because the editor doesn't like the way the author used a comma in the first paragraph, he's going to read at least three or four pages.

I like what Randy said in his last paragraph of his essay:

[Rabbit]

If you're interested in a decent critique group, you might consider the TFWF:

http://lists.integral.org/listinfo/tfwf

While it's no substitute for an in-person group, I find it pretty useful. The thing to remember is that we're teaching the art of critiquing as much as we're working on improving each other's writing; we have critiquers of all levels of skill. Therefore, it's important to pick and choose who you take advice from. Sometimes, you will get diametrically opposite advice on the same issue. =:)

"TFWF" originally stood for "TransFormation Writer's Forum". However, early on we decided to open it up pretty much to anyone. We've had everything from detective stories to English papers that students needed help with come through, and multiple published pieces as well.

I know that the TFWF has helped me a lot.