This looks like a good sign to me:
http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=633864&er=9781439102282
Simon & Schuster just added information about ReVamped (the sequel to Staked) to their website. They list the pub date as March 10, 2009.
J
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Monday, August 20, 2007
YMMV – Part Two – How Long Is Forever?
I never guessed how long things took in the world of publishing, but you’d think I would have.
Before managing to “Go Pro” myself, I regularly interacted with the publishing industry only as a customer or a retailer. I worked for a local comic and game chain Lion & Unicorn (long gone now, unfortunately) for roughly eight years. For several of those years, I was in charge of ordering comics. We’d place orders roughly three or four months in advance and try to equal our invoice amount in sales by the close of business on Wednesday and double our invoice by the end of business on Saturday. By the end of my tenure there, I think the order gap had narrowed to more like two months in advance.
Being on the creative end makes that two month wait seem like a coffee break. Which isn’t a complaint, exactly, but waiting was stressful until I realized a few key facts. Publishing has a few unique rules all its own. If your agent or editor manages to get anything done for you in or around November, December, or the first half of January, they have accomplished something spectacular and rare. You should be very thankful.
Be patient with them. You are not the only iron they have in the proverbial fire.
On the other hand, if they need something from you, get it to them quickly. They are balancing many different projects and when it’s your book's time in the attention queue, you don’t want to slow things down. There is (at least for me) a great deal of “hurry up and wait” in publishing. My suggestion is that you use that time to WRITE. Writing is the one thing that you can mostly control. It also means that if *gasp* your series bombs and they want another book anyway, just not in the same vein as the one they bought first, you can say, “How about this one?” instead of “I’ll get back to you in a few months.”
At any given time, I usually have one novel that I’m seriously working on, one I’m poking around at, and a third in what I call the brain storming phase. I plan to be prolific.
[Authorial Aside: This doesn’t count all the little notes that wind up in various sections of my hard drive detailing enough of an idea so that I can go back to it and start working later. One of these notes is how I arrived at my first publishable novel, STAKED. You see originally, I was going to write about magicians. I wrote two novels about said magicians before I realized that they really weren’t up to snuff. Some of the mages were perilously one-dimensional and in the climactic throw down in book one, the people who showed up to help the main character had literally no motivation for being there at all. *I* knew why they were there, but I hadn’t shown the reader enough to give them any indication other than a) I guess those other mages really like that guy or b) I guess Jeremy wrote himself into a corner. Rather than go back and rewrite the novels from scratch (which still may happen one day) I started paging through my idea documents, examining scraps of texts and found a note I’d left myself: “Maybe the Eric idea would work better in first person… with a I don’t know what to call it… a co-tagonist. Can I include two alternating first person points of view in a narrative? Meh.” It was followed by a secondary note about how to handle Eric’s potty mouth: “Might work best if you just write it how he says it. He can be censored later.”]
But back to the topic at hand, the process of publishing takes a long time. A very long time. I’ve often wished for a sort of guideline giving approximate gestational periods and steps for a book. I've started such a list in one of these blogs, but won't be able to finish it for a while yet.
J
Before managing to “Go Pro” myself, I regularly interacted with the publishing industry only as a customer or a retailer. I worked for a local comic and game chain Lion & Unicorn (long gone now, unfortunately) for roughly eight years. For several of those years, I was in charge of ordering comics. We’d place orders roughly three or four months in advance and try to equal our invoice amount in sales by the close of business on Wednesday and double our invoice by the end of business on Saturday. By the end of my tenure there, I think the order gap had narrowed to more like two months in advance.
Being on the creative end makes that two month wait seem like a coffee break. Which isn’t a complaint, exactly, but waiting was stressful until I realized a few key facts. Publishing has a few unique rules all its own. If your agent or editor manages to get anything done for you in or around November, December, or the first half of January, they have accomplished something spectacular and rare. You should be very thankful.
Be patient with them. You are not the only iron they have in the proverbial fire.
On the other hand, if they need something from you, get it to them quickly. They are balancing many different projects and when it’s your book's time in the attention queue, you don’t want to slow things down. There is (at least for me) a great deal of “hurry up and wait” in publishing. My suggestion is that you use that time to WRITE. Writing is the one thing that you can mostly control. It also means that if *gasp* your series bombs and they want another book anyway, just not in the same vein as the one they bought first, you can say, “How about this one?” instead of “I’ll get back to you in a few months.”
At any given time, I usually have one novel that I’m seriously working on, one I’m poking around at, and a third in what I call the brain storming phase. I plan to be prolific.
[Authorial Aside: This doesn’t count all the little notes that wind up in various sections of my hard drive detailing enough of an idea so that I can go back to it and start working later. One of these notes is how I arrived at my first publishable novel, STAKED. You see originally, I was going to write about magicians. I wrote two novels about said magicians before I realized that they really weren’t up to snuff. Some of the mages were perilously one-dimensional and in the climactic throw down in book one, the people who showed up to help the main character had literally no motivation for being there at all. *I* knew why they were there, but I hadn’t shown the reader enough to give them any indication other than a) I guess those other mages really like that guy or b) I guess Jeremy wrote himself into a corner. Rather than go back and rewrite the novels from scratch (which still may happen one day) I started paging through my idea documents, examining scraps of texts and found a note I’d left myself: “Maybe the Eric idea would work better in first person… with a I don’t know what to call it… a co-tagonist. Can I include two alternating first person points of view in a narrative? Meh.” It was followed by a secondary note about how to handle Eric’s potty mouth: “Might work best if you just write it how he says it. He can be censored later.”]
But back to the topic at hand, the process of publishing takes a long time. A very long time. I’ve often wished for a sort of guideline giving approximate gestational periods and steps for a book. I've started such a list in one of these blogs, but won't be able to finish it for a while yet.
J
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
My Publishing Journey: The Possibly Helpful Tale of How I Got I Published – Part One
Hi, All!
My name is Jeremy F. Lewis and my first novel, a vampire book currently entitled BITE ME, is scheduled for a March 2008 release from Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books. During my writing and editing process, I found tons of authors' blogs; some were extremely useful, some terminally funny, and others utterly terrifying. I want to make mine a healthy mix of all three.
I plan to start out the first few blogs by running through how I got published in the hopes that it might be of some use to you. I’m sure I’ll scatter some unrelated blog in here and there.... my friends say if I had a superhero name it would be Nonsequitur Lad. It's just the way I am. I'm also a very organic writer. As an example, only four or five of the chapters in my most recent draft were written in sequential order. When I write best it is kind of like the non-linear editing that gets done with many modern movies. I write a scene without knowing exactly where it goes- with only a vague idea that it goes somewhere in the middle, beginning, or end. Once I have written ten or eleven chapters, I can often begin to see the shape of the thing coming together. This makes it very hard to complete a preliminary outline.
But that’s not how it all started.
Let’s just say that I spent ten years writing two novels and countless false starts. Roughly six hundred thousand words of practice. For several years, I gave up trying to actually publish anything. Then, Wizards of the Coast announced several open calls and I started writing drafts specifically intended for publication. You may have noticed that WotC is not publishing BITE ME. Which is just fine. If I’d done my market research correctly, I’d have known that and would not have wasted their time with an urban fantasy submission.
In 2003, my wife bought me several writing books for Christmas. Among them was WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL by Donald Maas. I found it very eye-opening. I'd suggest the book to anyone who is serious about a writing career. Six months later, I completed my first draft of BITE ME (then called WELCOME TO THE VOID) and we began the long and tedious editing process. Another four months later, it was ready to send out (or so I thought). I sent it in to the Wizards of the Coast open call and several months later, it was rejected. My loyal friends insisted that it was good stuff... really good stuff... and that I shouldn't give up on having it published. I decided it was time to find an agent…
Next time: Agent Search
My name is Jeremy F. Lewis and my first novel, a vampire book currently entitled BITE ME, is scheduled for a March 2008 release from Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books. During my writing and editing process, I found tons of authors' blogs; some were extremely useful, some terminally funny, and others utterly terrifying. I want to make mine a healthy mix of all three.
I plan to start out the first few blogs by running through how I got published in the hopes that it might be of some use to you. I’m sure I’ll scatter some unrelated blog in here and there.... my friends say if I had a superhero name it would be Nonsequitur Lad. It's just the way I am. I'm also a very organic writer. As an example, only four or five of the chapters in my most recent draft were written in sequential order. When I write best it is kind of like the non-linear editing that gets done with many modern movies. I write a scene without knowing exactly where it goes- with only a vague idea that it goes somewhere in the middle, beginning, or end. Once I have written ten or eleven chapters, I can often begin to see the shape of the thing coming together. This makes it very hard to complete a preliminary outline.
But that’s not how it all started.
Let’s just say that I spent ten years writing two novels and countless false starts. Roughly six hundred thousand words of practice. For several years, I gave up trying to actually publish anything. Then, Wizards of the Coast announced several open calls and I started writing drafts specifically intended for publication. You may have noticed that WotC is not publishing BITE ME. Which is just fine. If I’d done my market research correctly, I’d have known that and would not have wasted their time with an urban fantasy submission.
In 2003, my wife bought me several writing books for Christmas. Among them was WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL by Donald Maas. I found it very eye-opening. I'd suggest the book to anyone who is serious about a writing career. Six months later, I completed my first draft of BITE ME (then called WELCOME TO THE VOID) and we began the long and tedious editing process. Another four months later, it was ready to send out (or so I thought). I sent it in to the Wizards of the Coast open call and several months later, it was rejected. My loyal friends insisted that it was good stuff... really good stuff... and that I shouldn't give up on having it published. I decided it was time to find an agent…
Next time: Agent Search
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)