Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story.

by Harper, Steven

  “Only about a thousand dollars,” he said.

  “Okay,” Sarah said gently. “Here's the thing. Your agent isn't above-board. She's scamming you. Real agents don't charge up front. They only get paid when you do.”

  “She's right,” I said. “If you pay an agent up front, she has no incentive to sell your book — she already has the money.”

  The guy looked like I'd just kicked his puppy. “That's not true,” he said. “That's not what she told me.”

  Sarah pointed to the bookshelf. “Well, those are my books, and those are Steven's. We really do know what we're talking about.”

  “Here's what you do,” I said. “You write that agent a letter demanding your book back and ending your relationship with her. Then you look for a good agent or publisher.”

  He still didn't want to believe us. Who could blame him? He'd already sunk a thousand bucks into his belief that his agent was doing right by him, and believing us would mean he'd wasted all that money. Sarah and I gave him a little more information about finding an agent and then fled the bookstore. Even though we hadn't done anything wrong — in fact, we'd helped him out — Sarah and I felt horrible. At least we'd stopped the guy from sending that crook of an agent more money. I hope.

  There are a lot of con artists out there just waiting to pounce on you and your manuscript. You can avoid almost all of them by remembering one ironclad, never-break-it rule: The money flows toward the writer. Never, ever write a check to an editor or an agent. Here's how the real thing works:

  When a publisher owes you money, the accountant sends a check for the full amount to your agent. Your agent cashes the check, deducts her 15 percent, and on the same day sends you the rest. By overnight mail, if you request it.

  Publishers also send you free copies of your book, usually between ten and twenty. (The exact number will be specified in your contract.) If you need more, you can usually buy them at cost, not retail. Some publishers will even send you more free copies, if you ask nicely.

  Con artists will tell you all kinds of sweet lies: Established authors do their best to keep new talent out of publishing because they see you as competition. (Actually, the prevailing attitude is “The more, the merrier!” and every editor in the business is dying to discover the next J.K. Rowling.) Authors must “share the risk” in putting out a book. (Actually, if an editor thinks your book is financially too risky, she'll simply reject it.) Everyone charges reading fees these days as a price of doing business. (Actually, no one charges reading fees — except the crooks.)

  Remember, you don't send a check to your publisher any more than you'd send a check to your boss. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or lying.

  SELF-PUBLISHING

  A number of tools exist these days to publish a novel yourself, both in print and electronically. Although self-publishing is an option, keep a few things in mind before deciding to go this route.

  First, you may have heard about some authors who have found great success through self-publishing. Some of these stories are true, some are exaggerated, and some are untrue. However, even the true stories are the exception, as in “winning the multi-state lottery” exception. The vast, vast majority of self-published books sell a handful of copies, maybe enough for beer money. Be ready to accept that for your book.

  Also, be sure that you've run through the venues of agents and editors first. Since self-publishing reaches fewer people (and I'm assuming you want your book to reach as many readers as possible), you really don't want to turn to it unless all other venues have been exhausted. And even then, perhaps you'd be better off spending your time and energy taking what you learned from the book you couldn't sell and writing another book you can sell.

  If you decide you do want to explore self-publishing, you'll also need to do more research into the type of self-publishing you want to use. There's the print model, which produces physical books. You hire a company to print your novel, buy a bunch of your books from them, and sell them to readers and to bookstores. There's print on demand model, which creates a book that's ready to go, but only prints one up when someone orders a copy. There's also the electronic model, in which you create and upload a version of your book to an online service for sale, and they typically take a certain percentage of the price every time someone buys and downloads a copy. In any of these cases, be absolutely sure that you maintain control over your book and its copyrights. Also be sure that you can pull your novel from publication at any time. This area of publishing is rife with the con artists I mentioned above.

  You'll also need to create a cover, have the book copyedited, design the interior, decide whether or not to buy an ISBN (the unique number booksellers use to identify your book), learn to create the various file formats for the different types of electronic book, figure out how to deal with accounting issues, ship books, and handle all the other bits and pieces that crop up when you go into self-publication.

  Finally, you should have a marketing plan. Booksellers almost never carry self-published books unless the author personally visits and persuades them. This means you'll need to get out there and meet booksellers, talk to them, persuade them to carry your book. If you're going the electronic route, you need to ensure Web surfers find out about your book in a way that makes it stand out above all the thousands and thousands of other self-published e-books out there. Just uploading it to an online bookseller won't be enough. And through all this, you're still working on your next book, since a single novel usually isn't enough to sustain a career.

  Some writers welcome all of the above as an invigorating challenge. If that's you, self-publishing is definitely your place. But if any of it makes you cringe, you're probably better off exploring the route to traditional publishing.

  No matter which route to publishing you take, there are some things you can do to help your career — and others you can do to destroy it. We'll examine those in the next chapter.

  CHAPTER 15: Destruction and Creation

  A great deal of a writer's career lies outside of his control. Publishers have quite a lot of power over it. So do book distributors, booksellers, and, of course, readers. However, there are a number of things that are under the control of the author. Some will destroy your career just like magic, and some can build it up with a little hard work.

  HOW TO DESTROY YOUR CAREER LIKE MAGIC

  It's easier to destroy than create in any business. A number of opportunities present themselves in publishing, too. You can wipe yourself out before you even get started, or wreck a fledgling career just as it's getting off the ground. I've seen a number of potentially brilliant authors crash and burn, taking some wonderful books with them. Here's how you can do the same thing.

  GIVE UP

  No one will make you write. There's no boss, no punch clock, no stock-holder. There's also no one to cover for you. If you get sick, no writing fairies will magically crank out a thousand words in your absence. The same goes if you have to plan a wedding, have a child, or have a really stressful month at work. And here's the harshest part — no one will care. Not one person will care that you didn't make your personal writing goal for the day or week. Not one person will care that your novel goes unwritten. Not one person will care that you don't become an author. You have to care, because no one else will. (Well, maybe your significant other will care, but we all know the reaction people get when they say to the husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend, “Honey, don't you think you should be working on your novel?”) If you can't make yourself work on your book, you're in the wrong business.

  Most people wouldn't dream of quitting their day jobs because of personal problems, but a large number of people set aside writing careers for them. In other words, they give up. This is the fastest way to end your career.

  You can't finish a novel you never start — or never write.

  QUIT SENDING IT OUT

  True story time: Brenda Clough, another author friend of mine, was attending a large book festival where
she came across a woman holding a book signing for her fantasy novel. Intrigued, Brenda stopped to have a look. At first glance, the novel seemed to be fairly well written, but the imprint page listed the publisher as a company well known in the writing community as a scam/vanity press, a place that sells a pile of books to the author and no one else. Brenda asked the woman why she had selected this particular company to publish her book.

  The woman admitted that she had submitted her novel to a major New York publishing house, but the book had languished for too long, so she had given up and submitted to the scammers instead.

  “Which New York publisher did you submit to the first time?” Brenda asked. The woman told her, and it happened to be Brenda's publisher. Suppressing a start, Brenda said, “How long has your book been there?”

  “A few months,” the woman replied.

  “My god,” Brenda blurted, “you were on your way! If they were going to reject it, they would have bounced it back to you in a week, a month tops. If it was there for months, it was working its way up the decision chain, sitting in people's inboxes, getting considered!”

  The woman had given up way too soon. Who knows what would have happened if she'd had a little more patience?

  I narrowly escaped the same fate. My first novel — the third one I'd written — went to over a dozen publishers. The very last one (Baen Books) took six months to look at the proposal and sample chapters I sent them, and finally asked to see the full manuscript. Six more months passed before they offered to buy it. Good thing I didn't send it to a vanity press.

  A fantastic way to end your writing career is to stop sending your work out too soon. The time to stop sending your novel out is after it's been to every paying market, not before. Sometimes it just takes patience.

  REFUSE CRITICISM

  We can all name a few writers who've gotten too big for their britches. You know whom I'm talking about — the big gun who turns out thrilling or fascinating novels early in his career and then seems to slide. You pick up his latest book, realize it's awful, and wonder how someone so skilled could turn out something so dreadful. What usually happened is the author got lazy and used his best-selling clout to introduce a “no-edit” clause into the latest contract. A no-edit clause means the editor can't criticize the book or recommend changes — she has to accept it as-is. And this is always a mistake, even for the best of writers.

  Listening to criticism about your writing isn't easy. It's not so much that the person is saying bad things about you — she's saying you have ugly children. The instinctive response is to snap something back in defense or storm away in a huff. What the heck does she know, anyway? Writing is art, and no one has the power to say what's good and what's bad.

  Once you've calmed down, though, take a good look at the comments you got. I pointed out earlier that agents and editors are extremely busy people, and anyone who takes a moment to critique your work must have seen something worthwhile in there — it's much easier to hand out a form rejection. And if you submitted your piece to a workshop or other critique group, you asked for a much-needed fresh pair of eyes.

  Look at the comments you received. Would they improve your writing? Are you avoiding them because it would be too much work to do the rewrites? As you read them, are you saying, “Well, yeah, but …”? Yes answers mean it's probably time to incorporate those comments into your work. Ignoring them is a perfect way to short-circuit your work — and your career.

  Because we can all get better.

  RESPOND BADLY TO REJECTION

  No one enjoys rejection. But no matter how ticked you get, the only appropriate response is … no response. You can destroy your budding career by responding with anger, sarcasm, or snark. The editor or agent will remember you, he won't be inclined to read anything else you submit, and word will get around faster than a curse. Instead, file rejections away and keep submitting your work with the thought that someone out there will eventually like your stuff.

  BADMOUTH BY NAME

  You can really wreck yourself by howling about publishing industry people online by name. If you have a beef (legitimate or otherwise) with someone, gripe with face-to-face friends, complain to your dad about it on the phone, and mutter about it to your dog, but don't put it in print or post it online. Once those words get out there, they get away from you. Not only might there be legal ramifications, but you can get a worldwide reputation as a whiner or troublemaker and no one else will want to work with you. Professionals avoid slinging dirt at each other, and you definitely want to keep a professional face in public.

  GIVE IN TO WRITER'S BLOCK

  None of the professional writers I know believes in writer's block. It's an excuse, really. Complain that you have writer's block, and your friends feed you tea and cookies (or maybe scotch and soda), pat you on the head, and make sympathetic noises. It also ends your writing career.

  When the work in progress won't move, change the point of view, skip ahead to another scene, write something really stupid that you know you'll delete but will get the story moving, or work on something else for a few days. Go for a walk, see a movie, work out for an hour, learn how to bake a soufflé. And then get back to the keyboard.

  ISOLATE YOURSELF

  Writing is a solitary business. You can't do it in a group setting, with others talking to you or constantly distracting you or otherwise expecting social give-and-take. But isolation leads to mental stagnation. Other people generate new ideas and new perspectives. They keep your knowledge of the human condition current. Much as you might want to be a recluse, you also need to get out into the world. J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee produced great literature in seclusion, but only one time each.

  HOW TO BUILD YOUR CAREER WITH A LITTLE HARD WORK

  Enough of the tearing down. There are lots of ways to build yourself up, too. None of them are magic, but these little extras can help push your career forward.

  USE SOCIAL NETWORKING

  Get your name out there in as many ways as you can. Learn to use social networking sites on the Internet. If you aren't Internet-savvy, pick one site and master it, then figure out another. Many of them can be linked to each other so you don't have to post the same newsworthy nugget about yourself five different times.

  Once your book gets published, arrange online interviews on other people's sites. (And be willing to return the favor.) Talk yourself up to build an audience. Host discussions about writing or topics related to your book. Hold contests for giveaways.

  The main thing to remember, though, is to do what you feel comfortable doing. No one really knows how much of an impact a writer's Internet presence has on book sales. Some writers swear they'd have no career without the Internet, and some highly successful authors have almost no Internet presence whatsoever. Using the Internet can't hurt, which is why lots of writers use it. But if you find yourself spending more time online than writing, or if you cringe at the thought of putting together online profiles and constantly updating your status, I have one word of advice for you: don't.

  READ, READ, READ

  Read everything you can get your hands on, and not just in the paranormal genre. Read mysteries, science fiction, romance, historical fiction, literary fiction, and best-sellers. Read nonfiction in every field and genre. Not only does reading feed your internal idea generator, it teaches you how to write.

  At a conference I once met a guy who told me that he avoided reading because he didn't want to be influenced by other writers. He wanted to be sure his writing was “pure.”

  Rubbish.

  Art students study great paintings and sculptures to see how artists create. Acting students attend movies and plays to see how great actors perform. And can you imagine a culinary student who refused to try a master chef's recipes?

  As a new writer, you need to study how other authors put words together so you can learn from their example.

  ATTEND CONFERENCES AND CONVENTIONS

  If finances and location allow, go to literary
events. Writers conferences abound in this country, and they're easy to find thanks to the Internet. And any given weekend, there's a fantasy/science fiction convention taking place somewhere in the United States. Since you're writing a paranormal novel, you'd be a natural attendee. Such conventions (or cons) are easy to find online. Some cons are big, some are small. Some are great for making professional contacts, and some are only good for socializing. However, howing your name and face among the people who have the greatest chance of buying your book is always a good idea.

  If you've never attended a con before, don't worry — fantasy and science fiction fans are generally very welcoming toward newcomers, and many cons even hold a little orientation meeting for first-timers. Find one and go!

  LEARN PUBLIC SPEAKING

  Public speaking terrifies a number of people, but being an effective speaker is a valuable skill for any writer. Once your book comes out, you'll want to talk about it, and it's much better if you can manage to be interesting and engaging when you go about this. Local libraries, schools, book clubs, and other venues are oft en interested in having local authors come to speak for them, and some of them pay rather nicely. Conventions and conferences want speakers as well. Some only give free admission to the event, and others pay an honorarium. Quite a number of writers make some decent pocket change as speakers, in fact, and good speakers are in high demand. Most speaking events will let you hold a signing afterward, which lets you get your book out there.