Pivoting

 

I was 23 years old when I wrote my first book, 25 by the time it was released across the country by a national book publisher. Ah, the good old days! Back then, I wrote first drafts in longhand, then typed them on an IBM Selectric typewriter, edited each page, and typed a final draft, so that everything I wrote was replicated at least twice, sometimes three times.

The submission process back then was similar in some ways to what it is now. Despite what we might see in the movies (proud, independent women marching into editors’ offices and plunking down weighty manuscripts with entreaties that the work be considered), the whole deal begins with a simple letter, dubbed a “query” letter, because it’s basically a question: “Hey there, I wrote this book about this person/thing/idea. Care to read it?”

Pre-computer age, these letters were sent off via USPS in great numbers with, of course, a self-addressed, stamped envelope (the sacred SASE) enclosed for the reply. Then the waiting began. Weeks, often months, sometimes years later (or never), a response would finally arrive: “We regret to inform you” or “Thanks for your recent query letter regarding blah blah blah book. However….” Or (blessedly) “Hello, Kay! I was intrigued by your idea for a book about prepared childbirth. Please send me a proposal.”

The proposal is somewhat like a very lengthy query. In it, the writer is once again asking that the work be considered, but the first three chapters or fifty pages are included, plus an outline of the entire book, plus, in recent years, the author’s marketing strategy, and the author’s bio including previous publishing credits.

Once the proposal (typed and retyped on that trusty machine) was packaged up and sent out (again via USPS, again with a SASE tucked inside), the waiting would begin again… weeks… months… years. No exaggeration. No kidding.

Of course, if one desired to be published by one of The Big Five New York Publishers, one submitted queries to an agent, not the publishers themselves, as the Big Five will not take unsolicited mail from the likes of us lowly urchins pecking away at keyboards for fun or for a living. Ahem.

Nowadays—O joy!—we live in the whizbang era. I can write queries on my laptop, send them out to writer friends for feedback, make changes rapidly, and email them out—for FREE! No stamps, no SASE, no waiting! Well, okay, still waiting… weeks, months, years for a reply. But at least no waiting for the mail to arrive at its destination.

[Side note here about the whizbang era: I once sent a short piece to the Home Forum editor of the Christian Science Monitor (a publication which pays very nicely) to whom I had submitted successfully in the past. I sent this new essay at 5:30a.m., via email. By the time I got to my day job at 7:00a.m. and turned on my computer, the editor had responded with a short email in reply: “Hi Kay, I read your piece over my first cup of coffee this morning and loved it. It’ll be in our October 30^th issue. A check is on its way to you. Thanks for thinking of us.” Holy hot damn. That’ll make your day, won’t it?]

I digress.

One more note about querying publishers or agents: In modern times, this can also be done by (a) spending $250-$500 or so to attend a writers conference and “pitching” one’s idea directly to an agent or publisher face-to-face (known as offering the “elevator pitch”—in other words, if you encountered said person in an elevator, how might you quickly describe your story idea in a way that grabbed the listener’s interest enough to be offered a read—or (b) participating in “pitch wars” on Twitter, during which one tweets out (in 280 characters or less—that’s characters, not words) a synopsis of one’s book idea—for all the world (and hopefully an agent) to see.

I love writers conferences, but can no longer afford them. I am reluctant to share my story ideas with the masses before they are in print, especially in today’s world of I-saw-it-online-so-it-must-be-fair-game-to-copy, so neither of those options will work for me.

All of the above is a verbose, reminiscent preface to make this short announcement (mostly as a follow-up to my post of 27 February of this year): After a good deal of rumination, two brief forays into the modern publishing world (during which I was told the first book in my middle-grade series is “too long” for that age group and also four books in the series is “too many” for a small press), and a couple of great conversations with two writer friends, I have decided that my series will be published “independently” (as we now say to avoid the sad and defeatist label of “self-published”).

What this means for me:

No waiting.

The first book will be released as soon as I can get it formatted and have a cover design professionally created. Booyah.

I have total control over the creative content; I will not need to change the titles of the books in the series (to suit the marketing department of any potential publisher) or the characters’ names, nor will I have to cut the book length from 70,000 to 50,000 because “children don’t want to read long books,” as the industry believes. (I keep suggesting the so-called experts ask kids, but no one is listening to me. Again, I’m just the urchin pecking away….)

It also means that there will be a handful of fellow writers who will shake their heads and cluck their tongues in an exercise of group schadenfreude because “poor Kay couldn’t get her kids’ books published so she did it herself.”

Sigh. It used to bother me that I didn’t get respect among my writer friends. But seriously, if they’ve read my work (and many of them haven’t), and they don’t think I’m “good enough” by now, I can’t help them with that. They are not the readers I’m concerned with, anyway. The ten-year-olds who read this series can let me know if they like the books or not. And I’m pretty sure they will (like them, I mean—but also let me know—because that’s how ten-year-olds roll).

So: Those of you who are mentioned in the books or have become characters in one form or another, you won’t have long to see yourselves in print. Wondering if that’s you? Stay tuned….