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The Slush Pile

I just read this:

The shocking truth about the slush pile, where she tells her horror story of having to read the junk that makes up what editors call the slush pile.

Here is my answer:

I know what you mean. I own a publishing house. Our books are all written in-house (by staff members) so we never had to worry about having a slush pile of submissions before. Two years ago we planned on adding a fiction magazine. To date we have yet to start the magazine. Why? Because of the hundreds of emails we get, we have yet to get a single submission that:

1) meets our guidelines

and

2) is legable enough to publish

I’t's pitiful really. We had such hopes for our fiction magazine. If only we had enough good stories submitted so we could go to press with it.

The problem I’m seeing is that most writers start out with:

<i>”I posted this on my blog and my readers loved it so I’m sending it in for your to publish.”</i>

or

<i>”I write for this great RPG and I can do stupendous first person accounts for my super great characters, that I just know you’ll love, even though they are from Harry Potter, I’m sure it’ll be alright if you publish my story.”</i>

Okay, first off, we don’t publish fan-fiction and secondly, how many people read your blog? Your mom and a few friends, right?

The problem I see (at least in our slush pile) is that every Tom, Dick, and Harry who owns a blog, thinks they are a writer, and, though they can post on a blog, they have a long ways to go before what they are blogging, can even begin to pass off as a great novel.

The hardest part of being an editor (for me anyways), is haveing to tell people this. I mean, I know what it’s like to get rejection slips from editors, I’ve got a stack of them myself. I was writing long before I was editing, I know how much it hurts to hear the truth about what you’ve written. Now I find myself being the one writing those rejection letters, and believe me, it’s not fun.

~~EK

My Website ranks at 32!!!!!

OMG! My Squidoo lense now ranks in at 32 on the Squidoo top 100 list! 32 out of 220,000 lenses! I can’t believe it!

Here it is if you want to check it out:

http://www.squidoo.com/PublishingMethods/

Narration for Writers Explained

Attention writers! Have you ever wondered what’s the differance between one type of narration and another? Look no farther, I shall explain them all here. Check it out.

http://www.squidoo.com/Narration-for-Writers/

My Website ranks at 32!!!!!

OMG! My Squidoo lense now ranks in at 32 on the Squidoo top 100 list! 32 out of 220,000 lenses! I can’t believe it!

Here it is if you want to check it out:

http://www.squidoo.com/PublishingMethods/

Why I Write Horror

It has been asked of me, more than once, by multiple peoples:

“How can someone like you, who loves peace, non-violence, and animals; how can you write the horrible things you do in your books?”

This question is most often presented after someone reads about either The Lansquin or The Red Dragon, the two vivisecting blood crazed villains from The Twighlight Manor series.

My answer to that question: As writers we write what we know. Every writer will tell you that they get their ideas from events of their own lives. I am no different than they. As my fans, friends, and family all know, I am more outspoken for animals rights than the average animal rights activist.

Ask anyone who knows me personally, and they will warn you to stay clear of that subject with me. They warn you for good reason. I was only 6 years old when I began my early protests. I lived on a chicken farm. We ate chicken. One day when I was 6 years old it occurred to me that my beloved babies in the yard and the food on the table were both called chicken, because they were in fact the very same thing. I stopped eating chicken and turkey that same day. About a year later I found out that steak was cow, and I stopped eating that as well. By the time I was 8 years old I had become a devote vegan, and have been so ever since. What does this have to do with me writing horror? I’m getting to that.

As most of you know, I had already written the first 2 volumes of The Twighlight Manor series by the time I was 8 years old. Those early stories of cute talking animals and Herbie-esce living cars, were markedly different from the later rewrites that dripped of horror and blood. Friends Are Forever, originally written in 1978, has undergone 3 major rewrites since it’s first creation, each more grim than the last. Why?

By 1982, I heard news stories of a young girl who refused to dissect frogs in science class. The school expelled her, even though she was only 12 years old. The story mesmerized me. It was one of the few times in my life that I became truly interested in watching the news. I began to tell anyone I could about the evils of frog dissection.

When I was 12 years old, I was with my mom, while she was visiting one of her Avon customers. Who was also one of Maine’s most dramatic and outspoken PETA members. I listened for 2 hours as she retold her latest adventures of rescuing a circus donkey, followed by her latest craze: she was hell bent on telling the world about the horrors of a company known as Proctor & Gamble. It was the first time I had ever heard of them. At this time, almost no one knew anything about P&G’s vivisection and Draize testing, as the horror of this fact had only been just discovered that same year. My mom and me went home that day with a carload of pamphlets about PETA and animal rights and how evil animal testing was.

Over the next few months, I sent for every free pamphlet, brochure, magazine, and catalog I could find about the animal rights movement. By the end of the year, the first revision of volume one of The Twighlight Manor series, Friends Are Forever, had been written. Into the series had been added a new set of characters. The cars were no longer living cars, but now had owners who had taken on the characteristics the cars had had. That same year I would start writing The Wild Years.

the new characters included also a new planet into The Twighlight Manor solar system: Planet Diona, and its formidable scientists who had infiltrated the earth. Testing lab scientists on Earth, were no longer humans, but now aliens. A later, rewrite would change this, and instead of animals, the alien scientist would do word for word everything that P&G did, only my scientist would do it to humans.

In 1993, The Twighlight Manor series took its final turn, becoming what it is known as today, when the addition of a prime villain known as The Lansquin was added to the series. The Lansquin was everything in my book that Proctor and Gamble was in real life. Every bloody glorified horror straight from the laboratories of Proctor & Gamble went straight into my books, under the guise of a deranged madmen bent of torturing every human to cross his path. His reason? For the good of science. For the good of mankind.

And that is how I came to write horror.

Though I write a wide range of other things, including children’s books and romance, it is for my Twighlight Manor series and it’s M rated graphic tales of horror that I am most well known. Yes, I love animals. Yes, I hate war and promote world peace. Yes, I abhor fighting and violence. And yes, I write some of the most graphic tales of gore ever written. Why? It is because I love animals and hate fighting that I write what I do: to open readers’ eyes, so that they too, may come to hate fighting and love peace. Peace for all, including peace for those who cannot speak for themselves. I speak for the animals. I write the tales they themselves cannot tell. I write in memory of those who died for the name of science, for the good of mankind. That is why I write horror, so that the animal who have died at the hands of P&G scientists, may not have died in vain.

~~Wendy.

Averages…

I was just reading this blog post:

Reading, writing, and arithmetic

I must say, though the concept is sound, I’m afraid his dollar amounts are a bit off. The average advance for a first novel is $1,000 or less, and it’s rare that you’ll get an advance until after you have a bestseller. For the average author an advance is just a mythical dream they hope to someday be famous enough to aquire.

The average book sales for a first time novel is 500 copies world-wide. This is also the average sales for books that are not first time novels.

To become a best-seller you must sell 10,000 copies per printing, but only a handful of publishers print more than 2,000 copies per printing.

The average writer hits best-seller status with their 9th novel.

Of course these are the AVERAGE figures, which means it’s a half-way point, divided between the highest paid author and the lowest paid author; the highest sales per book vs the lowest sales per book. It’s not uncommon for a first novel to sell 10 copies world wide, but only a rare few ever sell 100,000 world wide, and even less ever hit the million mark.

Ad only those who have already sold over 100,000 copies of a single printing well ever see an advance as astronomical out of proportion as the $100,000 figure he gave you.

He might want to check his facts better before he teaches to many more workshops. It’s wrong for him to be setting up aspireing writers to what well quickly be an earth-shattering heartbreak once they make an attempt to get their first novel published.

This may have been what happened to him, but this is an exception to the rule, not what the average writer can expect.

~~EK

Self Publish? Vanity Press? Traditonal Publisher? Something Else?

A question I see time and time again is: Is *name of business here* a self publisher, vanity press, or traditional publisher? How do I tell the differance?

While there are many branches of the publishing tree, these 3 are the big limbs, from which all the branches shoot off of. Here is how to tell them apart:
a self publisher, is an author who gets a business license, buys the ISBN #s, hires a printing press (print shop/printer) to print the books, than sells them themself… the author keeps 100% of the profits, because no one pays royalities; you keep 100% of the copyright (which btw, does not cost a penny)… you market the book and distribute it through local bookstores and Amazon.com

a vanity press is a print shop/printer/printing press, that does that for you, they usually ask you to pay money for them to edit your MS, they also chagre you if you want a color cover, (often they charge you for such things as “the right to keep your copyright”, or the ISBN #, in addition to the cost of everything else they chage) and than pays you a percentange (royalty), after you first pay them for the books… the royalty they pay, though it may sound high, is actually very low, because you don’t see that money until after they have deducted what you “owe them” for printing the books… in short, they make money, while you go broke, and you may or may not get to keep the rights to your book, depending on how much money you paid to buy your own rights back from them… you market the book and distribute it through local bookstores and Amazon.com

a traditional publisher, hires editors who read your MS which you send to them; they recive thousands of MSs each week, so it may take up to 2 years before they get around to reading it; after they read it, they either reject it or accept it; if they accept it, you well be sent a contact (and often with a recommendation that you go over it with your literay agent/lawyer before you sign it). Once you sign the contract and send it back, than the publisher’s laywer checks it to be certain that all is in order (and done legally). The publisher is given the tempory copyright allowing them to print and distribute your book to the public… they hire and editor to type set and spell check your MS, than they hire an artist to create the cover art, they distribute the book to bookstores worldwide, you never own them a cent, they pay you royalties

in other words:

self publishing is you starting your own business (a publishing house) and earning an income

vanity press is you doing a lot of hard work, getting your book printed, and getting scammed out of the money that should be yours, while they get rich and leave you with nothing

traditional publishing is you hireing a business to to the work for you and you both earn an income

I hope this helps

~~EK

The Slush Pile

I just read this:

The shocking truth about the slush pile, where she tells her horror story of having to read the junk that makes up what editors call the slush pile.

Here is my answer: 

I know what you mean. I own a publishing house. Our books are all written in-house (by staff members) so we never had to worry about having a slush pile of submissions before. Two years ago we planned on adding a fiction magazine. To date we have yet to start the magazine. Why? Because of the hundreds of emails we get, we have yet to get a single submission that:

1) meets our guidelines

and

2) is legable enough to publish

I’t's pitiful really. We had such hopes for our fiction magazine. If only we had enough good stories submitted so we could go to press with it.

The problem I’m seeing is that most writers start out with:

<i>”I posted this on my blog and my readers loved it so I’m sending it in for your to publish.”</i>

or

<i>”I write for this great RPG and I can do stupendous first person accounts for my super great characters, that I just know you’ll love, even though they are from Harry Potter, I’m sure it’ll be alright if you publish my story.”</i>

Okay, first off, we don’t publish fan-fiction and secondly, how many people read your blog? Your mom and a few friends, right?

The problem I see (at least in our slush pile) is that every Tom, Dick, and Harry who owns a blog, thinks they are a writer, and, though they can post on a blog, they have a long ways to go before what they are blogging, can even begin to pass off as a great novel.

The hardest part of being an editor (for me anyways), is haveing to tell people this. I mean, I know what it’s like to get rejection slips from editors, I’ve got a stack of them myself. I was writing long before I was editing, I know how much it hurts to hear the truth about what you’ve written. Now I find myself being the one writing those rejection letters, and believe me, it’s not fun.

~~EK

Writing Career

Writing is what I do more than anything else. I’ve got one novel complete, several started (some near completon, some just started, others at points in between.), and I’ve got about a hundred short stories (some finished, some not). Writing is my passion, but so far, I’ve not been paid in money/cash to do it. My goal is to change that and not oly get paid to write, but get paid to write on a steady basis so that I can make a living with my creativity.

See more progress on: get paid to write

Rant: When Did Gothic Go To Hell?

What happened to Gothic? Where did it go? And who are the black clothed demons that took it’s place? There are times when I get totally pissed over little things. This is one of them. I have been a fan of Gothic since the mid 1970′s. My entire life has been built around Gothic. I wear 13th century gowns of rose velvet. Haunted houses are more than a hobby, they are the core of my existance. Top hats and frock coats are part of my daily wardrobe. I wear burnoose and houplandres and cockscombs. Men I love are romantic owners of haunted house dressed ala Vincent Price. At age 9 my favorite book was Jane Eyre. Gothic flows through my viens. More than half of my fiction books are Gothics written from the 1850′s through the 1970′s.

So what brings on this rant? I just did a Google search for Gothic fiction, because a search on Harlequin’s website revealed that they no longer sell Gothic fiction. You know what I got back as results? Vampires. Death. Sex fetish cloths and weapons. Death. Black leather. Death. Demons. Death. Grim Reapers. Death. Blood lust. Death. Suicide. Death. Depression. Death. More Death. And, well death again. Not one single book. No romance. No haunted houses. No 13th century fashions. In other words, not one single solitary thing that is Gothic.

From what I can tell of Google search, the Gothic of today is nothing like the Gothic I grew up with as a child. Where is the romance? Where are the castles? Where are the handom men in poet blouses and frock coats? When did Gothic die and go to hell? When did Gothic raise from the depths of hell and return as a pit of demonic blackness of suicide and depression? When did Gothic stop being Gothic and start being Satanic?

Where has Gothic gone, and what is this grim blackness that claims to be Gothic today?

~~EK

LuLu Has a New Blog here on WordPress…

Well, my goodness! LuLu, every writer’s favorite printer, has got a blog here on WordPress!

For anyone not familiar with LuLu, you can read this post  from their blog:

So, what’s Lulu?

Posted by henryhutton under Lulu , publishing
1 Comment 

Good question. Let’s start here:

Our founder is Bob Young of Linux fame. He founded Red Hat in order to bring Linux into the world as a viable product that could compete against Microsoft, and harnessed the power of a world-wide developer community. And, as you know, Linux is open source, so users have much more control over how they use it, and therefore aren’t at the mercy of someone else to improve it. They, the user of the product, hold the keys to the castle. If you want to have a feature added to Microsoft Word you can request it, and you might get it in a few years if enough people complain. If you want a feature or functionality added to Linux that can happen much easier, and generally in a level playing field.

In many ways Lulu was the same idea, but taken one step further…
CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS POST

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