WEbook Blog: A Writer's Resource

Pulitzer 2012: Love Is All You Need

The Pulitzer Prize is kind of a big deal. Awarded yearly under the administration of Columbia University’s School of Journalism, it recognizes excellence in twenty-one categories of journalism and the arts, bringing deserved attention to a group of writers who spend much of their careers relatively unsung. (Ever strike you as odd that even the most highly acclaimed authors can go to Starbucks, the gym, their own book event, with no fanfare whatsoever, while the Disney channel person of the week can hardly go to the mailbox without a media frenzy? Think about it…)

So the publishing world was on the edge of its seat Monday afternoon, waiting for the 3:05 pm award announcement. Authors, agents, editors, and publicists all hoping for a career-making moment. The lists went up—and the internet exploded into anxious, wounded fury, because there was no prize awarded in fiction.

That’s right. No prize. The biggest award of the bunch, the one with the power to fuel book clubs for months, keep bookstores in the red, justify an editor’s next big buy…zip, zilch, nada.  Before an hour had passed, links were flying around naming the three judges, who nominate the three finalists, and the list of jury members, who stalemated the fiction prize for the first time since 1977. Tweeters and bloggers ran their fingers ragged expressing their disappointment and analyzing what this means about—and for—publishing, American fiction, and reading itself.

But one good thing is tiptoeing around the edges of the firestorm: everyone is remembering just how important it is to acknowledge writers for their talent and hard work. The first reaction of most outraged interneters was to name books from 2011 that would merit a Pulitzer. Bookstores and book blogs gave out their own faux Pulitzers (follow hashtag #TwitterPulitzer to contribute yours!). Anyone could sit by the internet with a pen and paper and their To-Be-Read list would write itself. Publishers congratulated their winning authors in the other categories, and the three finalists are receiving a waterfall of praise from booksellers and fans; they may well see a little jump in sales and word-of-mouth marketing, even if not as much as the prize itself would have brought.

A prize of national standing is a big deal, and can bring a lot of extra opportunities. But perhaps its most important gift is that of affirmation­­—Hey writer, you’re good at this, and the sacrifices you made to bring your story to the world were worth it. Writing is a long and lonely pursuit. Winning an award says that every time you traded sleep for typing; every tear you shed letting go of favorite scenes in revision; every time you scraped together your ego after a rejection, and sent out the next query; every conversation you had about your book in a nearly empty bookstore; every blog tour you went on till your bum was numb…it was worth it. Your story is alive in the world. Readers love your book. You’re a writer. You’re an author.

And the great thing is, that’s encouragement we can give each other year round, published or aspiring, famous or undiscovered. Writers thrive on encouragement of any kind, no judge or jury needed. (Though the $10,000 prize money sure is nice.)

Let us know in the comments—what did YOU think of the Pulitzer kerfluffle ? What book do you remember most from 2011? What kind of motivation keeps you writing?

And if you want to give some encouragement RIGHT NOW, read and rate a few Page to Fame entries. Or just hug the next writer you see.

Congratulations, Jack Knight!

We are excited to congratulate another WEbooker on finding publishing success! Jack Knight's debut horror novel was recently published by Dopamalovi Books.  

Jack was gracious enough to chat with us from his home in the UK, thanks to the modern marvel of email. For the scoop on his writing routine, his experience with the publication process, his plans for future books, and more, READ ON.

You’ve just published your debut horror thriller, Darkness Whispers, after twenty years of seeking publication. How exciting! Tell us a little more about the book itself—where did your initial inspiration come from?

Well actually, I started writing the book twenty years ago, but nothing came of it, so the manuscript was left to gather dust—until I joined WEbook.  At that time all I had was a paper copy of the novel, which looking back was not very good, so I decided to scrap it and do a complete rewrite. Now I am happy to say that Darkness Whispers has been published, and I hope people enjoy reading the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Darkness Whispers is about a group of friends who ignore the warnings of locals and embark on a wild weekend fuelled by alcohol and a desire to have a good time, but end up being stalked by an unseen assailant. They soon become caught up in a terrifying sequence of bloodshed, murder, and voodoo.

One of the main characters, Doc, is haunted by a nefarious past he cannot remember, and as his inner demon seizes the opportunity to take complete control, the few that are still standing frantically search for weapons to use against the encroaching danger because, as darkness falls, their only hope for survival is to win the final battle on the notorious shores of Beacons Cove.

I got the initial inspiration from working a summer season in a large hotel in South Devon with a friend. We made a lot of acquaintances, and had some good times. On one of our escapades we came across several abandoned prefabricated buildings, it looked pretty much like a ghost town. It was a strange place and one we could not explain, but it was there. Also, when I am on my own, I find nothing more relaxing than being on the coast, and one of the most memorable places for me was standing on top of a cliff, which overlooked a patch of land and the open sea. That is where I would lean on the parapet and reflect. This—along with Jack’s bloodlust—became the setting for Darkness Whispers.

And how did you find your publisher, Dopamalovi Books?

After I chose to do the rewrite of Darkness Whispers on WEbook, I put the chapters on as I wrote them, submitting them for feedback. I wasn’t far into the novel when I received an invite to send my work to an editor at Dopamalovi books.

Tell us about the publication process, once you signed with them, from editorial to cover design!

I was assigned to a lovely lady, Patricia Clemmons, who went through the story with me, chapter-by-chapter, and gave me some good advice on how to make my book saleable. When the rewrite was finished, it was submitted to the boss lady, Donna Jean Lyons, and accepted. Then of course we needed to run an extensive edit, which involved a lot of work, time, and rewriting, we had to proofread the print book, checking the manuscript and double-checking it before it was finally published and released March of this year. The staff at Dopamalovi Books treated me with respect and kindness throughout the whole process—making sure I was happy with the final product, including the very professional blurb—and a brilliant cover designed by a very talented artist and fellow author, Terrence Scott.

You have a very disciplined writing process, according to the profile in the Gainsborough Standard—a friend on Twitter admired the routine of “tea, a power nap, and an hour of writing,” calling it "bucolic"…what’s your biggest challenge as a writer? And how have you battled, or even overcome it?

Yes, I have an extremely disciplined routine. You have to have that in this game. I didn’t actually see that comment on twitter, but I would not have described my writing process as bucolic. However, “tea, a power nap, and an hour or two of writing” works for me. My biggest challenge was finding the time and the energy to write after a day’s work—but my love of writing and determination to succeed overcame that.

Of course, we want to hear about ourselves, too—how and when did you discover WEbook?  What kind of writing projects have you pursued here?

The urge to write has always simmered within me. I wanted to achieve my ambition of becoming a full-time writer—but it had to be done professionally. It had to be something saleable. Otherwise, what’s the point of writing if nobody can read and enjoy my work? The urge to achieve this surfaced from time-to-time and prompted me to keep trying. It was on such an occasion that I was searching the Internet to find a site that offered help.That’s when I found WEbook, and began the rewrite of Darkness Whispers. I also submitted a few short stories, two of which were published on Facebook by Dopamalovi Books for Halloween Free Treats—the third one was unsuitable to be published on that site, due to its rating and not because of its quality, so it’s on the backburner until I decide what to do with it. I’m thinking a short story collection is in order at some point.

 On to the future! Do you have a new book underway? Can you give us any bone-chilling details?

Yes, I have started another book and I have four more planned. Jack Knight intends to carry on killing, my inkwell is full of his victim’s blood…if only I had more time to spill it onto the page.

My next novel, The Voodoo Man, is about a sadistic serial killer, and he’s a pretty evil character, let me tell you. That’s as much information as I can give at the moment—but I’m getting the same buzz with this one as I did with Darkness Whispers. I’m not satisfied with a project until I get excited about it, because I believe if I get excited about it, so does the reader, and, WEbook, I am excited about my latest work.

Thanks, Jack, we are, too—so keep writing!

Do you have questions for Jack? Post them in the comments, or give us a holler on Twitter with hashtag #JackKnight, and we'll do our best to include them in a future blog feature.

For more information visit Dopamalovi Books or like Jack Knight on Facebook.

http://www.webook.com/landing/success-stories

Q & A with James Brogden - Part II

Last week, we posted Part I of James Brogden's Q&A with WEbook. James recently signed a book deal with award winning indie press, Snowbooks. Last week, James gave us a ton of great info about the writing process and development behind The Narrows. This week, James tells about what happened when the book was finished, and it was time to start looking for a publisher. 

Once you completed The Narrows, did you query traditional agents first? How did you choose the agents that you contacted? Did you receive any feedback?

I went through the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook with a highlighter, picked every single UK-based agent who said that they considered fantasy, science fiction, or horror, and started sending out samples. To date the feedback has been universally ‘thanks but no thanks’, but I’m hopeful that with The Narrows being published, agents will look more favourably on my next project.

How did hear about WEbook? What was your experience with PageToFame?

I heard about WEbook purely by accident – I teach Media Studies and I was researching the concept of user-generated content and the different uses of social network sites for my students, and came across a newspaper article about the way writers are using the internet to collaborate and self-publish. I wasn’t interested in self-publishing, but I followed up the reference to webook.com and thought that if my submission was successful then it would be something else I could mention in a letter to agents. If Snowbooks hadn’t picked it up then that’s exactly what I’d be doing right now.

PageToFame’s greatest strength lies in the objectivity of readers’ feedback. There are other sites where writers engage in a lot of favour-trading, promoting work which in some cases is pretty dreadful, but there’s nothing in it for webookers except, I guess, trying to rate like a publishing pro, so that keeps it more honest, I think. It can be a frustratingly slow process at times, though.

How did you first hear about Snowbooks and what drew you to submit The Narrows for their consideration?

Just straightforward, cold research and a methodical approach to submitting samples. They were listed in Writers & Artists as being interested in genre fiction, and when I looked at their website I found that they are one of a very small minority of publishers who will consider unsolicited manuscripts. I was impressed by the amount of explanatory detail they went into about their submissions process, and even though I knew this meant it would take a long time for them to get through the slushpile to my MS I felt that they were the kind of people who would give it a fair read. In my original email I even used WEbook as a selling point, as the Narrows was at 92% in Round 2 at the time. Hopefully that made a difference.

What was the submission process to Snowbooks like? 

It took just over four months to hear back from them, which is not unusual (I just recently got a rejection letter from an agent I approached over a year ago, which was a lovely surprise, especially since I’d forgotten that I’d even written to them by that time), and by a weird coincidence I got their email on exactly the same day as the email from WEbook telling me that The Narrows had made it to the Agents’ Showcase.

Once they made the offer things went very quickly; I had a contract in my hands three days later. They were particularly helpful with this, recommending that I join the Society of Authors to take advantage of their free contract-reading service. They’ve produced a very detailed and helpful author pack explaining the timetable of their publication process and giving clear instructions as to what they need from me at each particular stage, and my editor Anna has been great at answering my questions and keeping my paranoia to a mostly manageable level.

What’s been your favorite part of working with Snowbooks so far?

Oh look, everything. The whole thing. This is all a completely new adventure for me, so even little things like going back through the MS to change all the double quotation marks to single ones is fun because it’s getting me one step closer to having my first novel published. I would say that if anything, their embrace of technology is the thing I value most; I don’t understand why in this day and age there are still publishers who won’t accept submissions by email, for example. Just from reading their blog you can tell that they’ve got a good handle on the directions that modern publishing is moving in.

When will The Narrows be published? We can’t wait to read it!

It’s available for pre-order from Amazon (released January 9^th 2012), so save your Christmas book tokens. And watch out for the Winter Solstice in the meantime; that’s when the monsters come out of the Narrows

That's all from James for now. So keep your eyes peeled for The Narrows in 2012. Congratulations James!

Choosing a Perspective for your Novel

Over the past week or so, I've been reading Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. It's a brilliant and funny novel that details the behavior of a group of advertising executives as their agency undergoes layoffs during the late 90's. 

One particularly noteworthy aspect of Then We Came to the End is it's perspective. The novel is written in first person plural (we, us, etc.) which is extremely rare in fiction, especially long form fiction. There are a few famous short stories that use this perspective—A Rose For Emily being perhaps the most famous—but it's generally avoided by writers. 

Improved User-Testing: A Better Way to Publish Books

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In my previous post about slush piles, I started out with a daunting statistic. And I’m not trying to be a downer here, but I have another one: according to publishing expert Shira Boss and literary agent Kristin Nelson, an estimated 70-80% of trade books don’t earn out their advance.

That means the author never sees a royalty check after getting that initial payment, and the publisher loses money, probably.

This begs the question: how do publishers make a living if the majority of titles aren’t earning their spot on bookshelves? 

Answer: Most major publishing houses rely on a small percentage of bestsellers to “pay for” the rest of the books they produce. For example, six books may have lost a combined $60,000 for HarperCollins in 2005, but Marley & Me sold over 1 million copies and was made into a movie, so HarperCollins still made a profit. 

Why don’t publishers only publish the bestsellers? Because it’s very, very hard to know what’s going to sell and what isn’t—especially with new authors. The Help received almost 60 rejections from literary agents, and slow-rolled its way onto the NYT bestseller list. It’s now picking up the slack for less successful Penguin titles, but I suspect very few people (if any) predicted this result. If publishers only pay attention to established bestsellers like Steven King or James Patterson, they risk missing out on the next big thing. 

Is there a better way to publish books? Some innovative approaches have been tried out—for example, Hachette’s imprint, Twelve, only publishes one book a month. Instead of taking a shotgun approach, they market the daylights out of a single book each month and try to connect with as many readers as possible. Their current record is 37 titles published, 19 NYT bestsellers. That means not only did 50% of their books not fail, but they took home some serious bacon. That’s way above the publishing norm.

With PageToFame, we’re trying another approach: better user-testing for unpublished books. Before getting the “green light,” a book typically gets approval from 2-6 people at a literary agency (assuming most agents confer with at least one intern, assistant, or colleague before offering representation), an editorial team, and a publishing board. So as a rough total, let’s say between 15-20 people are intimately involved in choosing a published book. 

What if it were 200? 300? 500? What if these people were the target audience of book buyers? PageToFame makes this possible—one of the writers who has made it to Round 3 of PageToFame has received 326 ratings! This boost in readers allows agents and publishers to get a more accurate feel for a book’s market potential before they buy. 

Traditionally, publishing has been a business of gut feelings and guess work. But, the creative use of crowd-sourcing is changing that. With services like PageToFame gaining prominence, I think we can turn that percentage of earned out advances on its head.

—Ardy Khazaei, President of WEbook  

Ardy is a veteran of the digital media world—both as an entrepreneur and a corporate executive, including six years at HarperCollins Publishers where he was the SVP of Electronic Media. Learn more about him.

Curious about PageToFame? Want to test out your writing? Submit to PageToFame or sign up for WEbook.  

The New Slush Pile: Benefits and Drawbacks

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Here’s a daunting figure for aspiring writers: most literary agents receive 100-300 queries per week. Of those, they usually request extra material from 1 or 2 writers, at most. Out of that coveted request pile, agents typically only take on a handful of new clients per year.

So, basically, the slush pile odds are not good. If you take a look around places like Slush Pile Hell, or un-agented author websites that advertise their litany of rejection notes, it can seem like getting signed is impossible. Futhermore, it doesn't help anyone feel better to read the streams of articles about the entertainment industry’s universal belt tightening in their search for new writing talent.

Despite these foreboding signs and predictions, I do not believe the slush pile is dead, nor is it a futile climb to nowhere—it’s just changing with the times, like everything else in publishing. And in some important ways, it’s changing for the better.

Remember the old-school query process? Authors found agent addresses in Writers Digest, printed their queries on some stationary, mailed them in with an SASE enclosed, and crossed their fingers. It was a lonely and slow moving process.

Things are different now. Almost all agents accept queries via email or through online submission forms. Even better, some agents check there email continuously throughout the day, and may respond to queries much more rapidly than before—sometimes even within minutes! It’s also a short online skip and jump to find a database of agent contact info and submission guidelines. Basically, access to agents is often easier, faster, and more transparent than it was, say, ten years ago.

However, with this ease of communication comes a substantial increase in the number of queries agents receive. For writers, this makes it all the more important to write a concise, eye-catching query letter. This need played a key role in the design of our AgentInbox application’s online interface, which helps writers quickly display the unique elements of their project to interested literary agents. I believe that, for better or worse, querying will continue evolving into a more streamlined and efficient process as agents explore ways of moving through their slush faster.

Yet, with all the changes that are taking place in publishing, some constants remain: if a writer understands the current market, is persistent and strategic with their querying efforts, and (most importantly) has a good manuscript that engages readers, they stand a good chance at securing representation from an agent. To catch that glimmer of hope and some inspiration from the bottom the slush pile, (if that’s where you’re currently standing) check out some success stories (from WEbookers too!) and remember, they all started in the same place.

I'm interested to hear from writers as well. How do  you feel about the changing agent submission process and slush pile?

—Ardy Khazaei, President of WEbook 

Ardy is a veteran of the digital media world—both as an entrepreneur and a corporate executive, including six years at HarperCollins Publishers where he was the SVP of Electronic Media. Go here to learn more about him.