How To Drive Yourself Absolutely Mad

by Janis Patterson

Okay, the title of this is a little misleading... if you’re a writer you’re already at least partially mad. Even though we don’t have to keep proving it, that’s just what I have done. 

So what have I done? Well, it’s not totally my fault. People have always been telling me that I should be more businesslike about my writing, that there’s more to it than just sitting at my desk (or on the patio, or...) and making up stories. And there is.

Back during the years of the covid crazies I got very lazy. I was aware that reverted rights from some of my trad-pubbed books were showing up in my email, but having better things to do (namely hot tub and ice cream) I blithely tucked them away on my hard drive. In January of this year one of my resolutions (being a hopeful fool I still make them...) was to be more businesslike about my writing, so I started digging through the computer to find and do something about the reversions.

Imagine my shock when I found there were twenty six of the little beasties. TWENTY SIX! A quick glance through them decided me that four were going under the bed forever - either not to my current standards or requiring too much time/work to make them acceptable. Which still left twenty two. (To say nothing of the two new works for which I am currently contracted...)

I was raised in advertising, where deadlines are sacrosanct, so I decided that to get all these stories out and about again in a timely manner I needed a plan with firm deadlines. So... every one of those novels will be freshly edited and freshly formatted (ebooks only at the moment, though some of the will eventually go into hard copy) and if I don’t own the rights to the cover I will have to make a new one so I can rerelease a book every other Wednesday. 

Every other Wednesday.

This experiment began the last week of January. If I can hold to it, and so far I have, the last one of this batch will be released mid-October. 

This doesn’t really make me crazy, does it? Just ambitious.

What probably does push me over the line into crazy is that in the middle of this an absolutely splendid opportunity arose to enter the audio book market. As I have done audio narrations in the past for other authors and was a voice actress for a while I cherished the idea of doing my narrations myself, but there were two things in the way of that happy eventuality. First of all, I barely have time to do laundry let alone narrate even one book, and second of all, I don’t have the money to rent a half-way decent studio. (Yes, I know some people do their recording in their homes, but I have an extremely vocal little dog, and my next door neighbor - while a wonderful and upstanding man - owns every piece of gasoline powered lawn equipment ever manufactured and seemingly uses every single one of them every day. His showpiece of a lawn proves it. It is especially noticeable next to our scraggly property, where we cherish our weeds because at least they are green.) No, home recording was most definitely out.

However, due to a happy confluence of the universe and the intervention of a dear friend, I came into contact with a marvelous narrator - whose voice you might recognize if you heard it - who agreed to go into partnership with me. We hope to have at least fifteen books out in audio by the end of summer. Admittedly I have much less to do with the process - edit the books to make sure they’re ready to record and then do an editorial check on the final tape or whatever it’s called.

And sometime in the few interstices of time, I do frivolous things like cook dinner, do laundry and sleep. Oh, and write. Remember, I have those two new books contracted. Sigh.

Maybe there’s a reason writers are regarded as crazy?

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

by Janis Patterson/Janis Susan May

But it shouldn’t be.

Like so many other writers I am in the process of trying to get my rights back. Why is it such a hassle?

Most new contracts are written where it seems the publisher controls all the rights forever, with little or no hope of reversion to the writer. Apparently many publishers feel that they own the book instead of just having the license to publish it, and that’s just wrong, especially if they do little or nothing to sell the book. Instead they just sit on it.

A friend of mine has had several books with a major publisher for years now and try though she will, she cannot get the rights back. There is a catch in her contract that she can expect her rights to be reverted only after her book has been on sale for a certain length of time. As her sales had been okay but not spectacular she wanted to try for the gold ring in self-publishing. Every time the magic reversion date comes close, though, the publisher brings out a new, cheapie edition in Rumania or Patagonia or somewhere. It’s a new edition, however potentially unprofitable, and that resets the reversion clock. I guess they don’t want the author to make any money that they don’t control or the ability to put the book on the market where it might be bought instead of one of theirs. Either way it’s a dishonorable practice, whether or not it’s contractually legal.

Even worse is the publisher who has a distinct reversion of rights protocol in their contract, but who simply refuses to acknowledge it. Certified letters are refused, takedown requests are ignored, sometimes even royalties are withheld, but like a dog in a manger they keep the books – usually without doing anything for them. The books are simply held hostage and the author is forced into getting a lawyer to regain her property. I believe that I am facing this prospect now.

To add insult to injury, there are publishers who do not pay the proper amount of royalties earned and, as there is no law that sales figures (from their website or from third party retailers) have to be shown to the writer, the author must just take on good faith that the publisher is telling the truth. The author receives only dribs and drabs as royalties without having a way to check if this is right while the publisher keeps the money. In any other business this would be called theft; in publishing it is sometimes unfortunately business as usual. Sites like Writer Beware and Preditors and Editors are full of warnings about such publishers. And, sadly, it seems that these ‘publishers’ are the worst about reverting rights. Doubtless they feel they shouldn’t have to let loose of a cash cow, no matter what the law says.

Some publishers act as if a writer requesting reversion is a personal attack and respond in kind with rants, threats and tirades over the phone and through email. Sometimes they even go to the extremes of harassment through bad reviews on all the author’s books no matter where they are published or by whom. Such vicious attacks are designed not only to increase the publisher’s sense of power and personal vindictiveness, but to browbeat and punish the author for daring to want to recover her books.

Of course even the legitimate publishers are scared. After decades of being the omnipotent Grand High Pooh-Ba who must be placated and courted by the writer in order to be published, of doing as little as possible for the author while keeping as much as possible of the money (6% royalty, which some houses still offer? Of net and not even of cover? Really?) the specter of the independence of self-publishing must be terrifying. Books go directly from the author to the reader and the publisher is totally cut out of the equation. One of the downsides is the potential for a really big number of really bad books to flood the market, but there are no more gatekeepers. On the other hand, one of the upsides is that there is so much more variety and servicing of niche markets (markets too small to really interest a big publisher) because there are no more gatekeepers.

Publishing is changing, but that does not give the publishers the right to violate contracts and refuse to return authors their legitimate property – their books. The authors write the books and the publisher is only licensed to handle them for a proscribed amount of time. It’s time that all publishers – good and bad, honest and dishonest – realize that without authors there would be no publishing industry and they should be treated with honesty and respect. The author-genie is out of the bottle of traditional publishing and it will never go back to the old ways again. 

Time, Money and Choices

by Janis Patterson

I grew up in a do-it-yourself family. Okay, I grew up poor, where if you didn’t do it yourself, it probably didn’t get done. Money was to be used only if you couldn’t cobble whatever it was together at all. My mother made both hers and my clothes and even my father’s dress shirts for a while. Going out to eat was silly, since we could cook better food cheaper at home. It was almost a dictum in our house that just about anything could be fixed with duct tape, bailing wire and determination.

Our fortunes changed, of course, and money became more plentiful. We went out to eat occasionally and my dad bought store-made shirts. As an adult I am fortunate enough to be able to live comfortably and even buy all my clothes. (Which is a blessing, because though Mother was a gifted seamstress, I am a total klutz. No one in their right mind would wear what I can sew!) Still, however, the we-can-do-it-ourselves mentality was so deeply ingrained that to this day I call a repairman only when I know I cannot fix it myself. (This is written as I wait for the refrigerator serviceman.)

So what does this have to do with writing?

I am in the process of bringing out a few more books of my backlist to which I have just had the rights reverted. Since they were professionally edited at major houses back when major houses really edited, there’s little I have to do about that. I am tweaking somewhat, as I hope I am a better writer now than I was then, but nothing major enough to justify paying for the services of an editor.

But then there is the process of converting my newly-vetted document into a book. Now there are simplified processes for ebooks, one that even a complete techno-naif such as I can do, but when I began there were sheets and sheets of instructions written in a techno-speak only slightly less incomprehensible than Urdu. While now I can click a few buttons and some kind electronic server somewhere does the work for me, there is the terra incognita of print awaiting me.

Sigh.

So – where this long and convoluted post is going is that I am going to – gasp – hire the conversions done, as I did when first dipping my toe into the epublishing pond. Yes, there are those technologically gifted who sail through formatting et al and who look askance when I announce I am hiring it done, all the while telling me how simple the process is. I can only say ‘joy go with them.’ If it could be done with duct tape and bailing wire I might fare better.

I also send my apologies to the self-sufficient, do-it-yourself stalwarts of my ancestry, even as their shades look down with disapproval. “There are instructions right there!” they shout. “All you have to do is read them and follow them!”

Yeah. Right.

Both my parents (the greatest do-it-yourselfers ever born) passed away before the computer-in-every-room era, so their ghosts have no idea of what is necessary, or how much time it would take to learn what all those odd words and acronyms mean, to say nothing of what to do with them.

Yes, I could learn everything in those instructions and do it myself. For that matter, I could learn how to repair my ailing refrigerator, and, given enough time, probably learn how to build a more efficient jet engine or CAT machine. There is nothing wrong with my brain-box and I am considered to be reasonably intelligent. On the other hand, I have come to believe in the law of diminishing returns. While I could learn these things, doing so would take time, time that would be better spent writing and caring for my family.

All of life is a trade-off, so I trade money for formatting skills that I have neither time nor desire to learn and spend that time gained doing what is better for me, my career and my family. It works – even if I doubt my parents would have approved. 

Publishing and Other Perils - A Rant

             In the greatly lamented and only partially mythic ‘Golden Era’ of publishing printing books was a gentlemen’s game. The publishing houses were primarily large and privately owned by individual gentlemen rather than omnivorous multi-national corporations. These companies were actually interested in books and belles lettres. They read things submitted by writers as well as by agents and when they found a writer they liked, they worked to build his career, finding them editors who understood their voice, dealing with bookstores for good placement and arranging publicity. They took care of all the mechanical necessities and even sometimes – if they really liked the writer’s work – gave him a second chance if the current release didn’t reach their projected sales. Paying an advance was standard practice. In those warmly-thought-of days, a writer’s job was writing.

     Fast forward to today. Ah, how the business has changed. There are still a lot of different publishing line names on the spines of books, but most are controlled by the Big Five publishing houses, which just a short time ago was the Big Six. During the corporate feeding frenzy of the 80s nearly all the mid-sized independent publishing houses were absorbed – willingly or not – into the current monolithic, corporation-controlled houses, most of which go about selling books with the same techniques and artistic sensitivity as they use to sell widgets or shoes or hand tools.

     It is difficult if not impossible to approach any of the large paper publishing houses without an agent. As they are now the ‘first readers’ and arguably the arbiters for what will be seen, too many agents have begun to regard themselves as the center of the industry… and placing their bottom line over the needs of the writer, the publisher and the reading public. In a devil’s bargain with agents, publishers have been making their contracts more and more friendly to their own bottom line and to further this end making them less and less comprehensible. The writer, without whom there would not be an industry at all, always seems to come at the bottom of the pile.

     There are small and electronic publishers who do read unsolicited/unagented manuscripts, but in an alarming twist many of them are refusing even to look at a manuscript unless it is formatted to their own exacting specifications. Presumably this is so if they do contract the book, they can put it straight into production without having to bother with any typesetters or formatters. Since when did formatting become a writer’s responsibility? And most especially as a prerequisite for submission?

     Also many publishing companies ask in their submission requirements “What platform do you have for publicity? What kind of a marketing plan do you intend to implement?” Apparently it’s not enough for the writer to have written the book, and formatted it, now they are expected to handle nearly all the publicity for it. This is a plan that benefits only the publisher, who does not have to spend money for publicity. Let the writer do it! 

     The logic for this is particularly flawed; not only does publicity take precious time that should be spent in writing the next book, but as most writers are not publicists, it also forces the writer to re-invent the wheel. How much more logical it would be for publishers – who take the lion’s share of the money anyway – to have a well-oiled publicity machine with contacts made and slots ready and waiting instead of having each writer individually either contact every outlet or pay big bucks for a publicist of their own.

      There is a truism in publishing that ‘money flows to the author’ but in this current world it is becoming commonplace for an author to pay to have his manuscript edited before submission, where it will then be re-edited by the publishing house (or not!) upon acceptance. I must admit this leaves me speechless. Do writers think that sending in a pre-edited manuscript guarantees acceptance? Or are they such bad writers that they know without a pre-submission professional edit they would have no chance at all? Neither prospect is particularly alluring.

     And all these responsibilities and all these expenses paid by the writer come at a time where advances are shrinking or are non-existent.

     Some houses ask for a writer’s standardized input on the cover artwork, and with that it ends there for most. No matter if the cover is ugly, inaccurate or stupid, it stays that way because the marketing department says so. This, however, is a fading practice, especially with good small and electronic publishers.

     To make things even worse, after the book is sold and the writer has waited out whatever time the publisher decrees proper, he receives a royalty statement of books sold. Most are near indecipherable, and short of an audit (for which the writer pays, of course) the writer must trust the publisher that the figures shown are accurate. May I amend that? If the writer is lucky he receives a royalty statement; there are several publishers who have to be badgered and kept after (which again steals away time which should be spent writing) to send a statement, a process which is not guaranteed to have any success.

     Kind of makes one wonder why anyone would ever want to be part of a profession that depends on one kind of skilled artist to exist at all but treats those artists so badly. Of course, no one house does all of these things, but so many do enough of them that it does give one pause.

     I would sincerely like to hear a publishing house representative give a cogent and logical explanation of why the writer, who creates the product and without whom there would be no publishing industry, is treated like a red-haired stepchild and always comes at the end of the line. And the money trail.

     Perhaps the most astonishing thing is that publishing houses – especially the Big Five – profess amazement that so many writers are now beginning to self publish. If writers had received the kind of treatment – and the share of royalties – that they deserve, I wonder if self-publishing would ever have taken off.

Janis Patterson

Interviewing Bernadine Fagan

Today I interview my friend and fellow mystery writer, Bernadine Fagan, who recently published her new book, Murder in the Maine Woods. 

1.  Very briefly, tell us where you grew up and the kind of work you did before writing novels.                                                                                                               I grew up on Long Island. I was a  science teacher for several years, but also taught English.

2.  What do you enjoy doing when you’re not writing?                                        
 Favorite pastime: reading. I used to like indoor “gardening,” but I got tired of killing perfectly good plants so I gave that up and am now into plastic/fabric plants in a big way.

3.  What made you decide to write mysteries?                                                          

I was a failure as a romance writer, so I decided to write the way I think, which is mysterious. I also tend to see the humor in many situations so that pops out in my writing.

4.   How did that turn out?                                                                          
 I got fed up with the “usual” route to publication. It takes so long, too long.

5.  Why do you set your mysteries in Maine when you live on Long Island?        
 I’ve been to Maine. I love it. I have family there.
             
6.  Tell us about the role that humor plays in your mysteries.                          
Humor plays a big part in my work. Before I wrote Murder by the Old Maine Stream, before I came up with much of a plot, I was thinking about funny scenes. They are the MOST fun to write.

7.   Give us a brief summary of your new book.                                              
Detective work is rarely easy, but if you’re a New York City woman who loves fancy clothes, who fears most members of the animal kingdom, whose field of expertise is computers, and who is in the woods of Maine on the trail of a murderer, rarely easy doesn’t begin to cover it. As Nora Lassiter faces mishaps and misadventures, a trio of lovable aunts provides moral support, and one rugged and handsome sheriff, Nick Renzo, sets the air crackling between Nora and himself.

8.  What advice would you give new writers?                                                          
(1)  Read a lot (2)  don’t force your characters to do something illogical just to  get the plot to go the way you want it to. (3) Easy on the adjectives.

9.  What do you plan to write next?                                                                          
A sequel to Murder in the Maine Woods.

10. Who are some of your favorite mystery writers?                                          
Harlan Coben, Lee Childs.

11. These days writers are expected to market and handle PR for their books. What do you find is the best way to get out the word about your books?                    
I do not know the answer to this one. I’m not a Tweeter or a Facebook person. I tried both for a few months and decided they was not for me. I have not tried any other forms of social media.

12.  In what other genre would you consider writing?                                                
 I’d consider writing for children.

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How Will You Publish? by Morgan Mandel

Now that you have more freedom, how will you publish? Will you go for Kindle, as David Morell is doing?

Are you self-publishing in other e-book formats, or maybe in print on demand?

Will you submit to a traditional publisher, or maybe you already have and your book will be out soon? If so, will it also be in ebook forms, including Kindle?

Are you going print on demand with a small publisher with or without Kindle/ebook?

So many choices. What's yours?