www.andrewmackay.net:

I’ve spent the last two weeks editing a book. It’s a sub-contract deal, so the details are not mine to share, but it was one of the more challenging tasks I’ve undertaken in a while.

It’s been a good relearning experience too. I can promise you that, regardless the amount of attention you feel like you’ve paid to your manuscript, errors have crept it. Some funny, some that feel as though they should’ve been glaringly obvious, and some that will shock you. On top of that, a fresh set of eyes can help to find awkwardly worded sentences and lines that don’t seem to fit into the paragraphs they’re in.

So, here it is, and I say this not just because you can pay me to do it, if you are writing, you need an editor. You need multiple editors really–one to do line edits, one to keep track of the overall flow of the manuscript, one to proof the line edits, and one to keep everyone coordinated. I’m sure I’m missing a couple more. And of course, you need the editorial assistant to get coffee for the editors. Definite key to the whole shebang.

Seriously though, it was good for me to sharpen up again. I think it’ll help me to see some more errors in my work. But I’ll never catch them all. And that’s why I’ll endeavour to have professionals working with me to make my manuscript the best it possibly can be.

I read this article by way of Brandon Sanderson mentioning it in a Twitter post. It’s all about how royalties and advances work in the publishing industry, put together by an editorial assistant.

The most interesting part for me was the section on returns:

Reserve against returns: This is the reason you won’t have gotten every royalty dollar you were due during a period. Your publisher has a right to retain up to a certain percentage of your royalties–the actual percentage varies on your contract and on the situation–against future returns from booksellers. Returns are pretty complicated; we’ve talked about them before, but they’re always hard to wrap our heads around. These are big, corporate returns, not the kind of customer-by-customer returns (“My Aunt Wanda bought this cookbook for me but I don’t like Russian casseroles” etc). Basically, there are scenarios wherein a publisher may print and sell 10,000 requested copies of a book to book sellers, and, if expectation was wrong, receive all 10,000 copies back, for which they’d have to relinquish the entire dollar amount they originally earned for those books. Alas for returnable industries.

I just can’t understand how you can have a functioning business model where any day a product you thought was sold comes flying back into your warehouse, possibly in terrible condition (if my days in publishing are remembered correctly), and the “buyer” expects all their money back.

I’m with him, alas for returnable industries. One day we’ll have to dialog a little bit about various ways of getting content to readers without going through traditional bookstores — not that I want to cut them out. There just seems to be a multitude of opportunities to think differently about selling books with technology advancing the way it is.

This post is more therapeutic than anything else. I’m struggling in my writing. I feel like my bad guys aren’t all that bad. I don’t know if it’s a mental block or a philosophical one. I feel as though I’ll have a hard time writing them accurately if I make them genuinely bad. Or, genuinely badder.

As a result, I’m mostly making the situation the bad guy. The bad guys are really more nuisances than anything else.

The problem I have with that is the prominence of bad guys in my reading. Ender’s Game, for example, features bad guys that aren’t really bad, good guys that aren’t all good (Graff… although he’s somewhat redeemed), and bad guys that are just plain bad (Peter, although redeemed in the later books, doesn’t smell so good in this book. Also, Stilson and Bonzo. That sentence fragment is for the editors in the crowd. I like to make you think on Monday morning). In the Lord of the Rings, you have Sauron, the Ring Lords, and their armies who exude evil, Saruman who was good but turned evil, and Boromir who has a little personality flaw but recovers.

In the light of all that, making the situation the problem seems bland by comparison. So, I put it to you, readers (all four of you), do you prefer writing with clear, evil-doing, bad guys? Do you like shades of grey/gray? Or would you rather the author just write the good guys?

I feel as though I’ve read more writing advice than I can possibly parse together and make sense of. You want the reader to feel comfortable, like the style is familiar. But it needs to be unique. But if it’s too out there, no one will want to read it.

Then you start to try to figure out how to pitch your book, and it’s more of the same. Your pitch needs to establish that other books like yours are being published. Be careful to express what makes your book unique, though. Again, not off the wall… no one wants to publish off the wall.

All of this because writers are aiming to get their product published via a business model that is challenged by modern technologies and marketing schemes and other forms of media. I think the only position more difficult to be in than the writer’s is the acquisitions editor.

“What are you going to do today, Mr. Editor?”

“Oh, I’m at a conference listening to pitches. Some won’t be in my genre, some will be out there, some I’ll like the sound of but will be terrible on paper. Maybe, just maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll find one that I can acquire. Oh, and everyone I say no to will be upset.” Tough job.

Anyway, this is just me, crystallizing some of my thoughts on this whole process. And, I have a secret weapon. I have figured out exactly how to make readers, editors, and agents all immediately stop and take notice of my manuscript or my pitch. I’m going to start it with the most familiar phrase in all of North America, currently.

“Warning… your automobile’s warranty may have already expired.” And then, when I have their attention, I’ll tell them how great a book I’ve written. Or sell them a warranty. Or something.

James A Owen is the author of Here, There Be Dragons. If you haven’t read the book or its sequels yet, I recommend them. They’re a fun, intriguing read.

He keeps up with his blog pretty consistently. The other day, when I pulled up his blog, I found a short post he wrote about his research method. It was interesting to me for several reasons:

First, there’s a definite method to his system. I feel like I’ve been pretty disorganized as far as the research thing goes. I think it’s a place that I need to develop my abilities.

Second, he’s ever so right when he talks about research as a necessity. One place that I feel like my current effort fails somewhat is in how well fleshed-out the world I’m writing is. Clearly, that’s my fault, probably tracing back to not researching enough.

Finally, I loved one particular sentiment in his post:

yes. Much research will be necessary. Because You have to know the world you write, even if you only show a grain of sand on its beach.

Wow. The man is dedicated. I hope I can show that type of passion for detail. I think I have a tendency to be more interested in characters than detail. Not necessarily the worst trait, but some of that detail (the guys at Writing Excuses would probably call what I mean by detail “world-building”) is essential to selling the reader on the experience.

So, research… just another area that a good writer has probably already mastered. So, another area that I’ll need to work on.

I very recently started on a crusade to complete my first book. It had been essentially left to rot at the 16,000 word mark for about a year. Yep, no progress, a year. It seems like a long time, mostly because it was.

So, all of the sudden, I started writing again. There were several different factors, but a big reason was a podcast my little brother had referred me to last summer. It’s called Writing Excuses.

Writing Excuses is a podcast put together by three writers, Brandon Sanderson (Fantasy author of Elantris, the Mistborn Series, also “the guy who gets to finish the Wheel of Time series”), Howard Tayler (writer and artist responsible for Schlock Mercenary), and Dan Wells (Horror author of I Am Not a Serial Killer). In it, they cover all kinds of topics that pertain to writing. It’s smart, funny, and it’s consistently 15 minutes long.

I’ll point you to Season One, episode 17 : it’s the one that helped me to jump start myself back down the path to finishing my story. Of course, if you dig into their archives, you’ll find episode three, Killing Your Darlings. It has me absolutely convinced that I’ll finish this first story and then have to throw it away.

But, I look at it this way: if it’s accurate, I’ll be prepared for it.

A very worthwhile resource if you’re interested in writing or in thinking more about what exactly you’re reading.

Get it? Habits? Hehe. You can laugh.

So, writing habits. I have a history of being a spotty writer. 5,000 words one week, nothing for three weeks after that. I’m learning that if I can make myself establish a consistent effort in my writing, I’m a lot more likely to make significant progress on my work. This runs contrary to the romantic theory I’d tried. That theory says that you just “wait for inspiration to strike,” and the whole book pours out at once. I mean, I guess it could happen that way for some people, but can you imagine? I’d feel especially bad for the people who write 200k + words per book. Think of how that’d go for Robert Jordan’s later Wheel of Time books!

I made the conservative estimate the other day that if I had waited for inspiration to strike, I might be 8000 words into the book I’m trying to write. A start to the story, perhaps, but roughly 1/4 of what I’ve written using a “write daily” approach.

So, I did some research. I used the king of all resources, Google. I found some interesting (if true) facts. (A lot of these came from this article at authormagazine.org.) Like, Hemingway, apparently, aimed for five hundred words a day.

/begin narcissistic detour/ That’s actually the goal I’ve set for myself as well. There are days where I double and triple that, but I try not to go to bed without getting at least 500 words on paper. /end narcissism/

Jack London, on the other hand, wrote between 1,000 and 1,500 words a day. Here’s my favorite: Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings over 11 years. That’s approximately 245 words a day, if you average it out.

Of course, there’s no way that my 500 words are as creative and well thought out as Tolkien’s 245. I also don’t have the massive amount of research and world creation that he had. But, it’s still neat to think that the raw production of it was accomplished by a sustained effort over a fairly long period of time.

I’m convinced, too, that it will be a sustained effort that actually converts me from a writer into a published author. It may not be my first book or even my fifteenth book, but if I keep at it and learn with each one, I think the rest will come.

So, this is a topic I expect to come back to, but for now, that’s writing habits.