It was my high school friend Peter who told me to get rid of my “but.”
He was impatient with the way I kept saying “Yes, I finally finished writing my book, but I ended up self-publishing it.”
“No need to keep saying ‘but’ as if it’s something to apologize for,” he told me. “You’re in fine company. Virginia Woolf, e.e. cummings, D.H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau were all self-published authors as well.”
Though some of those claims may be apocryphal, Peter’s comment opened my eyes to the need for me to stop apologizing for my failure to garner a contract with a big-name publisher for my recently completed running/parenting memoir, The Mother-Son Running Streak Club. The important thing, as he pointed out, was that I’d gone to the effort to write a book.
I’ll be up front about this: self-publishing is hardly any author’s first choice. What writer doesn’t dream of publication through a grand commercial press, or even a small but highly respected literary press? When I signed with a literary agent 18 months ago, she filled my head with visions of the publishers she was accustomed to working with: Random House, Putnam, Algonquin, Hyperion.
But things didn’t pan out. After a year, although my agent and I had received reams of encouraging feedback from editors, we still hadn’t found a match. As I came to realize, a publisher isn’t just someone who thinks you’ve written a worthwhile book with literary merit; it’s someone believes there are at least 20,000 members of the reading public who would willingly part with $24.95 to read your book. That’s a tall order, no matter how hard you’ve worked on it.
And there was no question in my mind that I’d worked hard. It was August of 2007 when I suggested to my then 9-year-old son that we set a challenge for ourselves of running a mile or more together every day for a year. Only a few weeks into the project, I began to think about writing up the experience as more than just an essay or two but into a book-length memoir. First I’ll see if we actually manage to run every day for a year; then I’ll concentrate on the book, I told myself.
Tim and I did run together every day for a year, and writing the book took me another whole year. So when it was done, I felt like I’d completed two huge challenges: the running and the book. It wasn’t so important to me to have 20,000 people read it; any readers at all would be an increase over the number who would see it if it remained stashed inside a desk drawer (or, more accurately, stored on a memory drive).
And that was ultimately what led me down the path of self-publishing, an arena that has changed significantly in the past decade. In the 1980’s, my mother self-published the first of her two cookbooks, and I knew well what this had entailed: making a ballpark estimate of number of books to print; storing cartons of books until they were sold; packaging books as orders arrive by mail; countless trips to the post office to fulfill customer orders.
Today, the new print-on-demand companies have eliminated all of these steps. Using companies such as CreateSpace, writers simply submit an electronic file that can be generated in high-quality paperback format whenever an order is submitted online. Readers who want a copy of my book order it directly through Amazon.com, CreateSpace.com, or my own website and it gets mailed to them by the printer just as any other online order would. I don’t have to wrap, bundle, warehouse, or make trips to the post office; nor do I even know who is doing the buying, unless they opt to ask me directly for a copy, since I also keep a small supply on hand.
Once I’d decided to call off my search for a commercial publisher and take the plunge with self-publishing, I had no regrets. Ultimately, I just didn’t want to wait any longer to get my book into print. The year depicted in the book ended as Tim was turning ten, and he’s twelve now. If I was going to be enthusiastically promoting the work, I felt like this needed to happen while Tim was still at least a minor, if not exactly a child.
So I went back to the manuscript and did some more revising. I sent a draft to about ten colleagues for review and feedback, and then did yet another round of revisions. I solved the problem of how to create an eye-catching cover by asking a friend who is a talented professional photographer to take some action shots of Tim and me running; for payment I made her a chicken pot pie, and after a little graphic design help from my husband, the manuscript was off to press.
And now, the book is out. I like hearing from friends and acquaintances that they’re reading it, and I appreciate the critique it’s attracted so far. If some of my friends recommend it to some of their friends, I’ll reach that target of selling a few hundred copies. That hardly makes me a great success from a publishing standpoint, but it means that I’ve met my goal of writing and publishing an account of the parenting experiment I undertook, and for now, that’s enough of an accomplishment for me. Someday perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to work with a “real” publisher, whether on this same project or a different one. But as my friend Peter suggested, for now it’s time to get rid of the “buts” and just take satisfaction in a project finally executed.
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
A work in progress
Holly’s light had been off for fifteen minutes when I went into her room to tuck her in one night earlier this week, but she was still awake. “Mommy!” she exclaimed in a breathless whisper as I leaned over to kiss her goodnight. “I just came up with the best idea for my next book!”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Well, this is how the back cover will read,” she said, and rattled off a couple of paragraphs of nearly camera-ready blurb text to summarize her imminent work-in-progress.
I was simultaneously empathetic and envious. How well I know the feeling of inspiration striking, that electric buzz when you hit on the perfect idea for your next essay or article or book. But I also know how different it is at my age than hers. After two decades in the profession, my moments of brilliant inspiration are inevitably tempered by the reality of what experience has taught me. “That’s going to be really hard to research,” my conscience tells me. Or “You’ll never be able to find sources to talk to you about that.” Or “Okay, but what happens after the first three chapters?” Or “That could work if you actually had six months to spend in Southeast Asia. Which you don’t.”
But for Holly, there’s no tempering of reality. For her, there’s just that white-hot spark of inspiration. And falling asleep after it hit didn’t dull the impact at all for her; the next morning after breakfast she used the twenty minutes between breakfast and bus to start jotting notes about her characters, and she worked on it further after school. Now she’s two chapters in.
She may or may not continue with equal enthusiasm. A year ago she completed her first so-called novel, a 67-page, 17-chapter middle grade story about a ten-year-old girl and her adventures with home, school and friends. She composed that book in a fairly unusual way: lying on her back on the rug in my office, gazing up at me through the transparent surface of my glass desk while I sat at my computer taking dictation from her.
Since then, a couple of subsequent projects haven’t gone as smoothly. She’s had that problematic experience with which so many novelists are familiar: an idea that seems great at the starting gate turns out to just not have legs. She’s done four or five chapters only to realize the plot just isn’t going anywhere.
But she’s new to the practice of writing, and her enthusiasm remains unadulterated. So when she whispered through the darkness that an idea was hatching, I could sense her excitement. I remember being eight years old and staying up long after bedtime to work on a story that at the time seemed absolutely world-changing to me.
And in truth, I still do that sometimes. I still hit on an essay idea that I’m convinced will justify the late hour I’m staying up to working on it. “It won’t bother me in the morning if I’ve had only four hours of sleep; I’ll be so excited about what I wrote that I’ll feel fine,” I tell myself.
Not true when morning comes, of course. But nonetheless, I understand exactly how Holly feels. For someone who loves writing – whether it’s Holly, or me, or millions of other writers of every age and every walk of life – there’s nothing quite to electrifying as a great idea. I wish that I too had come up with an idea for my next book this week, but I didn’t; I’m still in the recovery phase from the last one.
Still, witnessing Holly’s excitement reminded me of what a great feeling it is. And it will come again, I know. For me as well as for Holly. Both of us still have a lifetime of writing to get to.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Well, this is how the back cover will read,” she said, and rattled off a couple of paragraphs of nearly camera-ready blurb text to summarize her imminent work-in-progress.
I was simultaneously empathetic and envious. How well I know the feeling of inspiration striking, that electric buzz when you hit on the perfect idea for your next essay or article or book. But I also know how different it is at my age than hers. After two decades in the profession, my moments of brilliant inspiration are inevitably tempered by the reality of what experience has taught me. “That’s going to be really hard to research,” my conscience tells me. Or “You’ll never be able to find sources to talk to you about that.” Or “Okay, but what happens after the first three chapters?” Or “That could work if you actually had six months to spend in Southeast Asia. Which you don’t.”
But for Holly, there’s no tempering of reality. For her, there’s just that white-hot spark of inspiration. And falling asleep after it hit didn’t dull the impact at all for her; the next morning after breakfast she used the twenty minutes between breakfast and bus to start jotting notes about her characters, and she worked on it further after school. Now she’s two chapters in.
She may or may not continue with equal enthusiasm. A year ago she completed her first so-called novel, a 67-page, 17-chapter middle grade story about a ten-year-old girl and her adventures with home, school and friends. She composed that book in a fairly unusual way: lying on her back on the rug in my office, gazing up at me through the transparent surface of my glass desk while I sat at my computer taking dictation from her.
Since then, a couple of subsequent projects haven’t gone as smoothly. She’s had that problematic experience with which so many novelists are familiar: an idea that seems great at the starting gate turns out to just not have legs. She’s done four or five chapters only to realize the plot just isn’t going anywhere.
But she’s new to the practice of writing, and her enthusiasm remains unadulterated. So when she whispered through the darkness that an idea was hatching, I could sense her excitement. I remember being eight years old and staying up long after bedtime to work on a story that at the time seemed absolutely world-changing to me.
And in truth, I still do that sometimes. I still hit on an essay idea that I’m convinced will justify the late hour I’m staying up to working on it. “It won’t bother me in the morning if I’ve had only four hours of sleep; I’ll be so excited about what I wrote that I’ll feel fine,” I tell myself.
Not true when morning comes, of course. But nonetheless, I understand exactly how Holly feels. For someone who loves writing – whether it’s Holly, or me, or millions of other writers of every age and every walk of life – there’s nothing quite to electrifying as a great idea. I wish that I too had come up with an idea for my next book this week, but I didn’t; I’m still in the recovery phase from the last one.
Still, witnessing Holly’s excitement reminded me of what a great feeling it is. And it will come again, I know. For me as well as for Holly. Both of us still have a lifetime of writing to get to.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The honeymoon period: I've written the book, but no one has read it yet
I keep reminding myself that these few short days are the honeymoon period for my book.
The book is in print, the publicity effort has been launched, the order button on various websites has been enabled. The book exists.
And yet, and yet, no one yet has the book in hand. The earliest the printer could promise it, via the fastest shipping available – which I have no reason to think anyone but me opted to pay for – was later this week. No electronic version of my book exists publicly. Both draft copies are in my possession.
So what that means is that my book is completed but there’s no one in the world with a copy of it in hand right now. No one is actually reading it at this moment. Most likely no one will read it tomorrow either. Not until the end of the week…and that’s only if someone were to read it the moment it arrived in the mail, which not only modesty but reality forces me to admit is highly unlikely.
Hence, the honeymoon period. Right now, I get to float along on the victorious sense that my book is done – after more than three years of work, it’s done – and everyone who knows me seems happy for my success. My success in completing my book, that is. No one is congratulating me on my success in having written a good or readable or worthwhile book, because no one has read it yet.
So I’m fully immersing myself in this lull, this brief time before I have to get down to the serious anxiety about what people think of it. Soon enough – within a matter of days – there will be people actually reading my book. Even if they don’t rip it open the minute the mail carrier drops it on their doorstep or in their mailbox, within a few days they’ll be scanning the opening pages, flipping through, checking out the back cover or the acknowledgments. Right now is the only time I get to bask in the pride of having finally finished this long-struggling project, without having to confront any actual criticism.
Because the fact is, there will be criticism. It’s a provocative book on a controversial topic: how I challenged my 9-year-old to run a mile or more with me every day for a year. On the most basic level, that plan was controversial from the outset, as I explain in the book: when I went to an online discussion group for runners, expecting to find other parent/child combinations attempting to maintain a long running streak, I found no endorsements at all, only anonymous posters saying they thought my idea was an awful one.
But that’s the easy part of the controversy, the part about whether or not it’s okay to encourage a nine-year-old to run a daily mile. What’s harder is that the thoughts about parenting I’ve so candidly shared in the book are themselves divisive in some ways. I had about eight friends and family members read the manuscript during the revision process; most liked it, but one or two warned me that it was simply too harsh; that by being so judgmental in some ways and downright negative in others, I was creating in myself an unsympathetic character, a mother who was far too critical of her own child.
So the revision process, for me, was mostly an effort of toning it all down, stage after stage. I removed one adjective after another, finding ways to be ever less caustic in my parental observations. Too much, some of the readers had warned. Too much negativity, too much anxiety, too many questions about what constitutes good parenting.
In other words, I’ve already had a taste of the mixed reactions my book provokes. And that was among just eight readers. In another few days, ten times that many people might be reading it and judging me.
But after three years of work to get this book completed, I honestly believe I’m ready. I understand that some people will be taken aback by the raw honesty with which I depict the less joyful aspects of parenting and family life. Just as people asked us how a mother could submit her son to the physical rigors of a daily mile while we were doing the streak, people have asked me how I can be so candid about both the positive and negative aspects of my life.
My children have seen this book. They know what I write about and how I write. My parents and my husband do too. They accept it for what it is: my best attempts to give literary expression to my most authentic feelings. I know that some readers of my book won’t really like it all that much. Others, I hope, will like it a lot. But of course, I don’t know. And in the end, all I can really hope for is that everyone who reads it respects the fact that I took the time to write it.
Time will tell. But right now, I’m just enjoying the lull between publication and availability. I’ll never have these few days again, when the congrats-on-publishing are pouring in but there aren’t any how-could-you-say-all-of-this to balance it out. The time will come, but for right now, I’m happy to be in this buffer zone, this post-publication, pre-printing cone of serenity.
The book is in print, the publicity effort has been launched, the order button on various websites has been enabled. The book exists.
And yet, and yet, no one yet has the book in hand. The earliest the printer could promise it, via the fastest shipping available – which I have no reason to think anyone but me opted to pay for – was later this week. No electronic version of my book exists publicly. Both draft copies are in my possession.
So what that means is that my book is completed but there’s no one in the world with a copy of it in hand right now. No one is actually reading it at this moment. Most likely no one will read it tomorrow either. Not until the end of the week…and that’s only if someone were to read it the moment it arrived in the mail, which not only modesty but reality forces me to admit is highly unlikely.
Hence, the honeymoon period. Right now, I get to float along on the victorious sense that my book is done – after more than three years of work, it’s done – and everyone who knows me seems happy for my success. My success in completing my book, that is. No one is congratulating me on my success in having written a good or readable or worthwhile book, because no one has read it yet.
So I’m fully immersing myself in this lull, this brief time before I have to get down to the serious anxiety about what people think of it. Soon enough – within a matter of days – there will be people actually reading my book. Even if they don’t rip it open the minute the mail carrier drops it on their doorstep or in their mailbox, within a few days they’ll be scanning the opening pages, flipping through, checking out the back cover or the acknowledgments. Right now is the only time I get to bask in the pride of having finally finished this long-struggling project, without having to confront any actual criticism.
Because the fact is, there will be criticism. It’s a provocative book on a controversial topic: how I challenged my 9-year-old to run a mile or more with me every day for a year. On the most basic level, that plan was controversial from the outset, as I explain in the book: when I went to an online discussion group for runners, expecting to find other parent/child combinations attempting to maintain a long running streak, I found no endorsements at all, only anonymous posters saying they thought my idea was an awful one.
But that’s the easy part of the controversy, the part about whether or not it’s okay to encourage a nine-year-old to run a daily mile. What’s harder is that the thoughts about parenting I’ve so candidly shared in the book are themselves divisive in some ways. I had about eight friends and family members read the manuscript during the revision process; most liked it, but one or two warned me that it was simply too harsh; that by being so judgmental in some ways and downright negative in others, I was creating in myself an unsympathetic character, a mother who was far too critical of her own child.
So the revision process, for me, was mostly an effort of toning it all down, stage after stage. I removed one adjective after another, finding ways to be ever less caustic in my parental observations. Too much, some of the readers had warned. Too much negativity, too much anxiety, too many questions about what constitutes good parenting.
In other words, I’ve already had a taste of the mixed reactions my book provokes. And that was among just eight readers. In another few days, ten times that many people might be reading it and judging me.
But after three years of work to get this book completed, I honestly believe I’m ready. I understand that some people will be taken aback by the raw honesty with which I depict the less joyful aspects of parenting and family life. Just as people asked us how a mother could submit her son to the physical rigors of a daily mile while we were doing the streak, people have asked me how I can be so candid about both the positive and negative aspects of my life.
My children have seen this book. They know what I write about and how I write. My parents and my husband do too. They accept it for what it is: my best attempts to give literary expression to my most authentic feelings. I know that some readers of my book won’t really like it all that much. Others, I hope, will like it a lot. But of course, I don’t know. And in the end, all I can really hope for is that everyone who reads it respects the fact that I took the time to write it.
Time will tell. But right now, I’m just enjoying the lull between publication and availability. I’ll never have these few days again, when the congrats-on-publishing are pouring in but there aren’t any how-could-you-say-all-of-this to balance it out. The time will come, but for right now, I’m happy to be in this buffer zone, this post-publication, pre-printing cone of serenity.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Files off to the self-publishing house
It was three years and three months ago – August of 2007 – that I started thinking about a book I wanted to write. I’d written a Boston Globe story the year before about people who run every single day without ever taking a day off – “streak runners,” not to be confused with streakers – and I thought the topic merited far more than an 800-word newspaper feature. Plus my 8-year-old son and I had started our own running competition, challenging each other to see how many consecutive days we could do together. Tracking our “streak” might make a good appendix to my book about these men and women who run thirty or forty years daily without a day off, I thought.
Three years, three months. Yesterday morning I made my last edit (catching yet another critical typo; they seem to be never-ending when I don’t have the Boston Globe’s copy desk watching my back), converted the 250-page word file to a PDF, and sent it off to a self-publishing house. Final production stages are now under way.
Self-publishing was not my initial hope. I wanted my first finished full-length book to get into print the traditional way, through a commercial publisher. And I did come close. I did my due diligence, identifying literary agents who might be interested in this project, sending off proposals and sample chapters. And plenty of them responded positively, asking to take a closer look at the manuscript. It wasn’t long before I found one who seemed like the perfect match for this project: she liked the concept, she liked my writing, and she definitely had the professional acumen to give my book its best shot at publication.
Still, it didn’t quite work out. Signing a contract with an agent was a thrill, but once I’d done that, I realized that the many unpublished writers who see getting an agent as the Holy Grail are missing the bigger picture. She tried really hard, but we just couldn’t quite get there with a commercial publishing house. By this time, what I thought would be a book about runners had evolved into a memoir about parenting, and how I tried to strengthen my relationship with my growing son through undertaking a running streak. What I thought would be an appendix had turned into the crux of the piece; now the other runners were mere footnotes. “I’m just not sure there’s a big enough market to carry this book” was what most editors told my agent.
And the thing is, I couldn’t disagree with them. A commercial publisher wants to feel assured that a book will sell well into the five figures. Twenty thousand copies. Fifty thousand copies. It depends who you ask. And it’s one thing to say “Yes, I believe in this project of mine; I wrote it to the best of my abilities and I firmly believe it has a market,” but I know enough about the reading public to not be certain at all that there are twenty thousand individuals out there who would part with $24.95 for the privilege of reading my memoir. I’m sure there are inspirational speakers who would say “If you don’t believe in your project one thousand percent, you’ll never succeed with it,” and maybe they’re right. I believed in the value and strength of my project; I just didn’t believe it had twenty thousand potential readers.
On the other hand, if it never saw the light of day, it would have accrued all of five readers, the five friends I specifically asked to give feedback on my work in progress. And that didn’t seem like the right way for this project to end either.
Hence, the decision to self-publish. I’m not out to make money off of this; I’m out to validate a creative endeavor on which I spent three years by finding people who consider it worth reading. Not twenty thousand people. Two hundred. Maybe even five hundred. Five hundred sounds great to me.
I worked on this for three years, and in another couple of weeks it will be in print. Not everyone who reads it will like it; confessional memoirs about parenting, whether or not they take place against the backdrop of recreational running, are not everyone’s cup of tea. But maybe two-thirds of my readers will consider it a really worthwhile read. In my opinion, that would validate my efforts. It’s not the glory of a traditionally published work, but it’s the joy of having something I labored over be read. And at least this time around, I’ve decided that’s good enough.
Three years, three months. Yesterday morning I made my last edit (catching yet another critical typo; they seem to be never-ending when I don’t have the Boston Globe’s copy desk watching my back), converted the 250-page word file to a PDF, and sent it off to a self-publishing house. Final production stages are now under way.
Self-publishing was not my initial hope. I wanted my first finished full-length book to get into print the traditional way, through a commercial publisher. And I did come close. I did my due diligence, identifying literary agents who might be interested in this project, sending off proposals and sample chapters. And plenty of them responded positively, asking to take a closer look at the manuscript. It wasn’t long before I found one who seemed like the perfect match for this project: she liked the concept, she liked my writing, and she definitely had the professional acumen to give my book its best shot at publication.
Still, it didn’t quite work out. Signing a contract with an agent was a thrill, but once I’d done that, I realized that the many unpublished writers who see getting an agent as the Holy Grail are missing the bigger picture. She tried really hard, but we just couldn’t quite get there with a commercial publishing house. By this time, what I thought would be a book about runners had evolved into a memoir about parenting, and how I tried to strengthen my relationship with my growing son through undertaking a running streak. What I thought would be an appendix had turned into the crux of the piece; now the other runners were mere footnotes. “I’m just not sure there’s a big enough market to carry this book” was what most editors told my agent.
And the thing is, I couldn’t disagree with them. A commercial publisher wants to feel assured that a book will sell well into the five figures. Twenty thousand copies. Fifty thousand copies. It depends who you ask. And it’s one thing to say “Yes, I believe in this project of mine; I wrote it to the best of my abilities and I firmly believe it has a market,” but I know enough about the reading public to not be certain at all that there are twenty thousand individuals out there who would part with $24.95 for the privilege of reading my memoir. I’m sure there are inspirational speakers who would say “If you don’t believe in your project one thousand percent, you’ll never succeed with it,” and maybe they’re right. I believed in the value and strength of my project; I just didn’t believe it had twenty thousand potential readers.
On the other hand, if it never saw the light of day, it would have accrued all of five readers, the five friends I specifically asked to give feedback on my work in progress. And that didn’t seem like the right way for this project to end either.
Hence, the decision to self-publish. I’m not out to make money off of this; I’m out to validate a creative endeavor on which I spent three years by finding people who consider it worth reading. Not twenty thousand people. Two hundred. Maybe even five hundred. Five hundred sounds great to me.
I worked on this for three years, and in another couple of weeks it will be in print. Not everyone who reads it will like it; confessional memoirs about parenting, whether or not they take place against the backdrop of recreational running, are not everyone’s cup of tea. But maybe two-thirds of my readers will consider it a really worthwhile read. In my opinion, that would validate my efforts. It’s not the glory of a traditionally published work, but it’s the joy of having something I labored over be read. And at least this time around, I’ve decided that’s good enough.
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