Train3 I have a few different fingers in the publishing pie. I wouldn’t be writing for the Fictorians if I wasn’t a writer, but that’s not the aspect of publishing that dominates my time. I’m also a professional editor, something I don’t often talk about in my Fictorian blog posts. In addition, I am a typesetter. Occasionally I’ve even served as a slush pile reader, though that torturous (and tortuous) experience hasn’t always been a high point.

Recently, while on an afternoon walk through my neighbourhood, I realized that I’m kind of unemployable in the “real world.” I’ve been a full-time, self-employed contract worker since the age of twenty-four, and all of my skills are in publishing. Sure, I could wait tables and wash dishes, but I am pointedly leaving those items off my resume. To say the least, I’m firmly enmeshed in the business of publishing.

This is a pretty surprising career development, at least from the perspective of ten-years-ago me, who didn’t set out a specific goal to get to where I am today.

However, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it accidental. Rather, I started making choices that allowed me to follow my publishing dream, and those choices led to opportunities, and those opportunities, when seized, led to my current reality. In short, I got on the train.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The watershed moment happened in Pasadena, California in the winter of 2010—the first annual Superstars Writing Seminar, which we’ve devoted a lot of digital ink to on this blog. Over the course of the next couple of years, I went from trying really hard to be a writer in a hostile world to being surrounded by writers all the time. The world doesn’t seem so hostile now. The proportion of my Facebook friends who are writers is truly out of control. I used to read my newsfeed for updates from old high school buddies. I can hardly do that anymore, because the newsfeed has gradually been swallowed up by publishing business.

I call it business, because that’s what it is. Every day, my friends are asking for advice, providing advice (because some of my friends are seasoned pros), posting articles from trade magazines and blogs, providing sneak peeks of cover art, hunting for beta readers, and on and on and on. This level of immersion, I think, is crucial in a writer’s life because it marks the point when education becomes continuous—and almost automatic. I live and breathe this stuff.

The first conventions and seminars I went to were all about learning new things. Attending Superstars in Pasadena was an overwhelming experience, because ninety-five percent of what I heard there was totally brand-new information. I came home with over forty pages of notes. The notes were important, but the forty friends I picked up were actually much more helpful, because they got the ball rolling. Instead of cramming years’ worth of learning into one weekend in a convention centre meeting room, I started getting it piecemeal every day of my life.

This last spring, I went back to Superstars for the first time in four years. In 2010, attending Superstars was like attending a computer programmer’s convention without any computing knowledge beyond how to boot up Windows. I could barely follow along half the time; I hung out at the fringes of conversations, snatching up scraps like a hungry dog beneath the family dinner table. I was hopelessly lost. This time, I was the guy talking contract terms, market trends, and business practices. It’s impossible to pinpoint where and when it happened, but I came to speak the language.

The information at Superstars 2013 had changed probably sixty percent from the first year—because that’s how quickly this industry is shifting under our very feet—but I went from forty pages of notes to four. Maybe fewer. It’s not that the information wasn’t timely and valuable, and yet I absorbed very little that I didn’t already know—well, that’s not true; there was plenty that I didn’t know, but I was so well primed for it this time around. The benefit was not all of the advice and new-fangled information. It was having so many of my business friends and contacts in the same place at the same time.

That’s what will happen once you start down this track. You don’t need to have a step-by-step plan for how you’re going to succeed. The industry changes too fast for step-by-step plans to be practical, anyway.

Think of the publishing industry as a train. One day, it motors past your station, so you hop aboard. At first, you don’t know any of your fellow passengers and you don’t have the context to understand their insider conversations. But there are only so many people on this moving train, so unless you hide in your cabin all day and refuse to talk to anyone, it’s only a matter of time before you’re caught up in the hustle and bustle of daily train life.

So just get on the train.

For the Love of Words

November 4, 2013

fictorians

Craft & Skills Editing First Drafts Guest Posts Motivation Publishing The Writing Life 1 Comment

A guest post by Lisa Mangum.

I love words. I love how they work and how they sound and how they look on the page. I’ve been reading since I was three, so perhaps it’s not much of a surprise that I chose a profession that is all about words.

I actually chose two professions: I am both a writer and an editor. I’ve been in the publishing business since 1997, when I was hired by Bookcraft as their Editorial Assistant. Bookcraft merged with Deseret Book in 1999, and I’ve been there ever since. After several years as an Assistant Editor, I recently switched responsibilities to work more in acquisitions and developmental editing. It’s the part of the job I love the most: finding that diamond in the rough and polishing it until it shines. Every time I see a manuscript turn into a book I think it is magic.

And nothing was more magical than seeing my own manuscript turn into a book. I wrote The Hourglass Door in 2007, and it was published by Shadow Mountain in 2009. I finished out the trilogy with The Golden Spiral and The Forgotten Locket. My most recent book is After Hello.

So, having been on both sides of the writing desk for so long, what is the best advice I’ve been given about writing?

Three things:

My first piece of advice comes from my friend Rick Walton who tells this to his students who aspire to be writers:

1. “Quit. But if you can’t—do the work.”

Writing is hard. It’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time, but it is hard. So, before you get too far down that road of “being a writer,” you should think seriously about just quitting. Because if your heart isn’t in it, then there’s nothing wrong with not being a writer and being something else—with following your true passion.

But if there is something inside of you that won’t let you quit, that says, “No! I am a writer; I do have a story to tell,” then your only choice is to do the work.

Which leads me to Advice #2:

2. “Dream bigger.”

Recently, I was on a panel at SLC Comic-Con about Disneyland and one of the other panelist said that what she wished she’d known earlier in her career was that it was okay to dream bigger.

I love that! I think we as writers work hard to figure out what works for us and how to write a story and how to get published. And then we think, “Whew, I made it.” Well . . . maybe we need to dream bigger. If there is always a bigger dream out there beckoning to us, we’ll never stop reaching for it. And if we never stop reaching, we’ll simply get better and better until we reach that new dream.

So whatever it is you’re dreaming about—dream bigger.

3. “Don’t hurry. Don’t worry. Don’t stop.”

I saw this years ago written on a wall in the Innovations building at Disneyland, and I instantly resonated to it. Writing is a process; don’t hurry. Take time to learn your craft. Take time to enjoy the journey. Publishing is a process. Take time to learn the business. But don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time. Don’t worry if you make mistakes, or if other people don’t understand your vision. Just—don’t stop.

I believe that there is a story inside each of us that only we can tell. Each of us has a valuable and unique voice. Don’t be afraid to use your voice. Don’t be afraid to tell your story.

So dream bigger. Do the work, and don’t hurry, don’t worry, and don’t quit.

Guest Writer Bio:

Lisa Mangum has worked in the publishing department of Deseret Book since 1997. She specializes in editing fiction for the Shadow Mountain imprint and has worked with several New York Times best-selling authors, including Ally Condie, James Dashner, and Jason F. Wright. While fiction is her first love, she also has experience working with nonfiction projects (memoir, educational, cookbooks, etc.) and some children’s picture books. She loves finding that “diamond in the rough” in the slush pile, and she is particularly skilled in the developmental editing part of the process. Lisa is also the author of four national best-selling YA novels (The Hourglass Door trilogy and After Hello). She graduated with honors from the University of Utah, and currently lives in Taylorsville, Utah, with her husband, Tracy.

November is The Business of Writing Month

November 1, 2013

Kristin Luna

Kristin Luna Marketing Publishing Reviews Rewriting Submissions The Writing Life Writing Tools No Comments

Hello, faithful readers and new readers alike!

Ah, November. For most people, it’s just… November. For writers, it can be one of the busiest months of the year. It’s got Thanksgiving in there, it’s the month before some big holidays in December, and it’s National Novel Writing Month. November is a great month for writing, but it’s also good for going a little insane trying to juggle all of these commitments as a writer and still trying to be real live person.

Bear with us, dear readers, as we try to not go insane this November. In fact, we’re keeping our left-brains in check this month by diving into the business side of writing. You’ll read posts about some of the more logical and analytical aspects of being a writer, such as:

Working with an editor
Beta-readers
Hiring a cover artist
Marketing vs. advertising
Networking
And more!

As a special treat, we also have guest posts from the likes of Lisa Mangum, Stephan McLeroy, Nick Ruva, Heidi Wilde, and Sam Sykes.

Help keep us sane by commenting on our posts and sharing them with your friends!

Happy reading!

Kristin

Horror Comes Creeping…

October 31, 2013

mary

Craft & Skills Marketing Mary Pletsch Publishing The Writing Life No Comments

Happy Hallowe’en and Blessed Samhain!

Like many other people, I’ve read a few Stephen King novels, and watched a few scary movies, particularly around this time of year. And yes, perhaps I have a greater appreciation for zombies than most of my co-workers. And okay, I don’t flinch away from putting the darkness in dark fantasy, and I feel that no honest war story can fail to convey the horrors of warfare.

But I never considered myself a horror writer.

I knew, however, that even as a newly published author, I didn’t want to fall into a rut: the same themes, the same settings, the same sorts of characters. I decided that this year – the year after my first publication – I would challenge myself. So in addition to the military science fiction that I love, I spread my wings and wrote some stories to submit to a few anthologies outside of that genre.

The first of those anthologies was Dark Bits by Apokrupha. Dark Bits is an anthology of “52 + 1” flash fiction horror stories. I thought that a word limit of less than 500 words was a good way to try a, er, “little” something new.

It turns out it took all weekend to craft those 500 words (from someone who can routinely crank out 2000 words/day), because flash fiction comes with its own inherit challenges: you need to develop your character(s) and convey the story arc, beginning to end, in a very limited space. My first draft was almost twice as long as it needed to be; my major editing challenge was to tighten the work into the word limit, making every word count. The end result is a tiny taste of terror called The Long Haul.

The Long Haul is a story best described as “Emily Dickenson is a long-haul trucker.” Hop into the cab of a cross-country delivery gone wrong, brush up on your poetry, and hold on tight. The first few miles will be okay. Just be aware, there’s a long…a very long…way to go.

You can order your own copy of Dark Bits here: http://apokrupha.com/dark-bits/ Books are available in ebook, Kindle, paperback and hardcover formats. There’s also a 2014 weekly planner which includes a flash fiction story for every week of the year!

Bolstered by the success of “The Long Haul,” when I found out an editor I know was accepting submissions to an anthology of horror stories, I tried my hand at a longer-length tale. I’m pleased to announce that next year, you can find Mishipishu: The Ghost Story of Penny Jaye Prufrock in Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant, coming next year from Daverana Enterprises. More gruesome details will be given closer to publication date…

If once is chance, and twice is coincidence, I’m not far away from “third is a pattern.”

I suppose that makes me a horror writer. Among other things.