American Idol for Book Lovers?
By Guest | May 29, 2016 |
By Flickr’s Steve Schnabel
Our guest today is Deborah Batterman, author of Shoes Hair Nails (short stories) and Because my name is mother (essays). She is a Pushcart nominee and took 3rd place in the Women’s National Book Association 2012 Short Fiction Contest. Her stories and essays have appeared in anthologies as well as various print and online journals, including Akashic Books Terrible Twosdays, Every Mother Has a Story, Vol. 2 (Shebooks/Good Housekeeping), Open to Interpretation: Fading Light (Taylor & O’Neill), and Mom Egg Review, Vol. 14. Her Kindle Scout novel, Just like February, is a coming-of-age story framed by the passions of the 60s and the AIDS crisis of the 80s.
The road from completed manuscript to publication is more often than not a long and winding one. If ever there was a leap of faith that got me thinking outside the box, it was this foray into reader-powered publishing. I may not have gotten the desired result, but unlike those rejections which writers are no stranger to, this one comes with an affirmation of readership: in a word, if I build it, they will come.
Connect with Deborah on Facebook and Twitter.
American Idol for Book Lovers?
Writers are nothing if not gamblers. Hours and hours of hard work, draft after endless draft, characters who live inside our heads until, one day, we say, “Out!” in the hope that someone, maybe lots of people, will take a chance on what we’re offering.
Self-publishing, especially via print on demand and digital books, certainly has opened a world of possibility (not to mention gratification of a more immediate kind) for writers tired of and/or impatient with traditional channels. At the same time, there’s every good reason that legacy publishers, large and small, maintain a certain allure, even if a publishing market in flux has forced them to take adaptive strategies for survival. Then there’s that hybrid mode, otherwise known as vetted self-publishing. And now reader-powered publishing.
Do I dare? I asked myself when I first got wind of Kindle Scout. It had all the feel of a kickstarter campaign—i.e., drum up support for a book before it’s published—with more than one big advantage: you’re not asking for funding and you have the power of Amazon behind you from the get-go. I weighed the pros: my book featured on Amazon for 30 days; a chance to ‘unbox’ myself from the routine of submitting queries and excerpts/waiting for responses from agents/editors, get a direct sense of reader interest. The cons? Even if there was no escaping the “American Idol” for Book Lovers sense of it all, could I bank on literary merit in a contest more designed to rack up votes for genre fiction?
Get Out of your Comfort Zone
More to the point, I reasoned, getting out of one’s comfort zone is always a good thing for a writer. Day-to-day tenacity may be what we rely on to get the job done, but fresh insights so often happen when we step away from routine. Case in point: I thought I had really nailed my pitch. Until Kindle Scout asked me to put those telling details into a 45-character one liner and a synopsis/description of 500 characters or less. No room for even a wasted syllable here, it’s an exercise that forces your hand, demands getting a real handle on what you think your book is ‘about’. Isn’t that question we all hate being asked? If you’re anything like me, you start with an idea/an image/a sentence that pops into your head. You have a sense of characters who, at their best, take on a life of their own. You think about the underlying themes, the story you thought you were telling that took a 45-degree turn somewhere along the way. Now you’re being asked to reduce it all to pithy details, catchy phrases. Can’t help but call up a phrase from a Cold Play song: Nobody said it was easy/ No one ever said it would be so hard.
Then there’s the simple reality of deciding what efforts at getting published/getting attention really are worth your time. Again, what separates Kindle Scout from other kickstarter, reader-powered paradigms is that you don’t need to raise any money to get your book published. If you’re one of the chosen, you get a decent contract/royalty arrangement for e-books. But you will work as hard at getting out the vote. I did my best to time posts on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Group emails only get you so far; follow-up, individualized, is more necessary than you’d like to imagine. Then there are direct messages to friends on Facebook—please vote/share/help me spread the word. Indeed, it takes a village.
In it to Win It
In the end I did not get a contract, even with a novel that would find itself in the hot and trending zone (#1 spot more than once) for the bulk of the 30 days in which an excerpt was posted, and there are several questions I ask myself: knowing there is interest in my book, would I consider self-publishing and/or an independent kickstarter campaign? Or do I simply make note of that interest when I pitch the novel? Maybe the overriding question is: what kind of books really do well in the reader-powered publishing paradigm? And even if the winner is, almost always, on the commercial end of the literary/commercial divide, don’t chance and timing always play their part in the breakout book, the one that defies conventional wisdom?
Gotta be in it to win it, my husband likes to say when I’m having one of those what-am-I-doing-with-my-life moments. Short of winning there’s every good reason to consider the Kindle Scout experience a testing ground for reader interest. In fact, once you find another outlet for publishing your book and make it available on Amazon, Kindle Scout will send an email to everyone who nominated it during the campaign. Not a bad way to jump start a newly published book.
Whether or not the risk you’ve taken pays off in the way you had hoped, there’s always something to be learned. At the very least, you know you’re in this for the long haul. No sooner did a writer/friend get wind of my disappointment than she sent me an email with links to publishers she thought might be receptive to my novel. “Get back on the horse,” she said. To which I responded, “Yes, but can I give myself 24 hours to sulk?”
What’s your American Idol? What leaps of faith have you taken and how have they paid off?
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
Hi, Deborah. Lovely to see you here. Thanks for this expanded description of the pros and cons of your Kindle Scout experience. Congratulations on taking the plunge and doing as well as you did.
That comfort zone! These days I’m looking for ways to challenge myself. I’ve gotten way too comfortable. Thanks for the nudge and for reporting back on this alternative publishing path. Best of luck with finding a home for your novel.
I appreciate your thoughts, Barbara. I am indeed thankful for all the options, even if it sometimes seems overwhelming. And no matter how good what we’re trying to publish may be, I can’t help think that timing and a certain whimsy play their part.
I didn’t know much about self-publishing when I became my own publisher, so it didn’t feel like a leap of faith. It was more of an experiment. I’m not sorry, though. For me, it works.
I quit my day job less than a year later, not because I was making lots of money with my novels, but because it was about time to retire anyway. My novels were meant to supplement my income.
How has it worked out for me? I write a mystery series. It’s the only series I want to write. I’ve known many writers over the years who got contracts with publishers and were dropped after one or two books, but the publishers retain the rights so they had to create a new series. I won’t have that problem.
I like to work on my own time, to my own deadlines. This way I don’t have to rush to get a book out. Ever known a writer whose first couple of books were great, but subsequent books seemed rushed and not as good? Might have something to do with deadlines.
In my fourth year of publishing I published my fourth book and my writing started to pay a lot of bills. I’m hoping the trend continues.
I think every writer dreams of being published by a big publishing house, but what are the odds? Doing your own publishing isn’t for everyone, but if you have already worked hard to learn how to produce a good novel, have the computer skills to format your manuscripts, and the marketing skills to get your book out to the public, it can be an excellent alternative.
Best of luck, whichever path you take.
No matter how you slice it — trying for a big house (despite the low odds), looking at smaller indie presses (and I think there are more and more of them now) along with the evolving hybrid publishing model, or going the self-publishing route — it takes lots of tenacity and belief in oneself. Hard to deny how much it helps to have sites like Writer Unboxed that bring such good information my way and gives me heart with success stories like yours.
A good story, one that clutches at the reader’s emotions, takes the reader on a roller coaster ride. With a plot, and characters who are real people, themes worth spending time on.
In my case, I aim for the exact middle: commercial fiction, mainstream, contemporary, that will appeal to men and women of all ages. Structure solidly underpinning it. A happy ending, eventually; hard fought and hard won. And just this side of impossible.
But on top of that, a literary quality to the prose that is far above the minimum necessary. But is never allowed to interfere with the story.
‘Literary’ as a description of fiction has the unfortunate connotation in many readers’ minds of spending an inordinate amount of time on tiny details that bring the story to a complete halt. Mainstream commercial fiction can’t afford that – but it doesn’t have to be pedestrian in language.
‘Literary quality,’ on the other hand, has a connotation of care (not thesaurus use).
The leap of faith is in publishing a story that assumes readers would rather have that quality, even if it means putting the time in guarantees a lower output from that writer.
I hope so.
I think the literary/commercial divide has become more fluid, and I included the hyperlink above for a good extrapolation of two writers’ thoughts on the issue. Some good insights there.
Deborah-
I admire the way you put yourself out there. In it to win it. That’s commitment.
I’ve had the book contract, many of them, in fact, and I’ve learned that, for me, success has nothing to do with getting published, or even getting noticed. My orientation today is not to put myself out there in terms of marketing, but to put myself out there on the page.
Contracts I may get. Noticed I probably can achieve. But noticed for what? I’m in it, you bet, but not to win recognition, but to write a helluva story. The rest follows that.
Thank you, Benjamin. For me it really is about waking each day to write. Little by little, I like to believe, an audience for my work grows.
Deborah, there’s nothing wrong with sulking. Mix in some ice-cream, cheese cake, many a good bottle of wine, and voila, sulking-supreme. I understand. I self-published my first novel, which lead me to signing with a publisher for my second novel, gained me a publisher for the first book ebook. .. That must sound all so easy, eh? Took me 27 years from writing that first line to having a publisher. Some call it audacity mixed in some stubbornness.
The moral of the story? Keep plodding along with joy and faith in your heart. It won’t take 27 years, that was a fluke on my part.
Loved your last line “It won’t take 27 years, that was a fluke on my part.”
We do have to keep our sense of humor in this wacky business.
After the wine (or the ice cream) comes the reminder of tenacity, our stock in trade, indeed.
I have considered trying the Kindle Scout program with my current WIP, which is a novel of real life, but I have been waylaid with Ramsay Hunt Syndrome for the past 5 months, which severely limits my writing and computer time. (And I have sulked about that a lot.)
Another consideration I’ve had is how well that type of book will fare compared to the other genre fiction that seems to get the contracts. Also, the decision by Amazon to take your book is not just based on the nominations. Another writer friend who did the program said that the decision is also based on your previous sales numbers at Amazon. Not much different than the way the traditional publishers looked at your sales when deciding to contract your next book with them.
In the end, it is all about the bottom line, not the words on the page.