what Editors Know

Recently, I read this line on a chat group I hang with:  An editor who does not charge is not a true editor.  That sort of logic if taken to writing would say that an artist or writer or composer is not a true WHATEVER unless he or she is making money at it; unless and editor is making money at editing, he or she is not a real editor.  This sort of snobbery has existed in NYC book business forever as they pay editors so well (HA!).  I have had many many editors, some who woud place a comma between many many and some who would not, and I have as yet to find one properly compensated by anyone.  I have also operated my own editorial services (Knife Services) from my website, and I charge half or a third of what some editors charge, and lately, the business is slow as molasses.

No one wants to pay for editing services.  To this I can attest.  To qualify that, few want to pay for editing services, but one way or another every author needs a great editor or two or three in order to truly get a MS to sing.

An editor for your work is worth his or her weight in gold, even if he or she edits your work for nothing but the opportunity and "privilege" and charge you nada...for no charge. Despite the line this blog began with, there are capable and surprisingly fine editors among those who do not charge a fee; I know because I have availed myself of some excellent editorial help at no charge over the years.  These people are my early readers.  People I have cultivated a strong friendship with as a result of our making great books together, people who wind up in my acknowledgment pages.

It may upset some pricey editors (some priced at ten dollars a page if you can imagine it) to hear such talk from a professional writer and published author, but I have relied all my life and career on people who have a sixth sense about what works and what does not work in a manuscript, items you want OUT before the MS goes to press or release to Kindle or Smashwords or wherever you are publishing nowadays.

My Children of Salem, my highest grossing Kindle title, was put through the grist mill by two editors in particular who suffered and struggled with me like Jonah and the Whale until we GOT it.  My work in progress, Titanic 2012 has had the tremendous help of two editors in particular who have wrestled that one to the mat where they MAKE me wring out rather than ring out the right words and save me countless embarrssing moments as well as point out plot weaknesses and sags. They are simultaneously copyeditors and developmental editors these folks.

I go back as far as 1965 or 6 working with my Wells High School managing editor on the school newspaper for editorial advice, and damn but she was good with langauge and writing; one lesson she taught me then stayed with me all my writing career - Acitve over Passive. I get cudos for making my work "compelling, fast-paced, a page-turning roller-coaster ride" etc. etc. due in great part to my editorial board -- and now that I am a writer turned publisher putting out Original to Kindle titles, I rely even more on my early readers, my editorial board. They have recently truly impressed me, digging damn deep to make the work the best it can be to the point it is no longer about me but the novel itself that comes first.  Of course, it helps that the publishing industry has long, long ago beat the living ego out of me.

My apologies to those who consider themselves legitimate editors because they charge a fee, whether fair or exorbitant, but sorry as I am, I must say that there are people who are not just willing to be early readers for an author but who become invaluable editors an author can and does TRUST, often just as much as he trusts an editor within a publishing house or with a logo.  I love editors, love them all, and feel they all deserve a raise but the practice of authors cultivating two, three, four early readers is not likely to stop but increase as we go to press as Indie author-publishers.  Certainly been the case with me, but then I had always cultivated early readers.  By the same token, over the years, I have learned a great deal from my contacts with all editors, those who were paid--even if poorly by the publsihing house--and those who have graced me with thier help out of the goodness of heart and understanding and unfettered desire to be a part of the process of creation.

Sneak peek of Children of Salem and/or Titanic 2012 is available at http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

Thanks so much for coming by and do leave a comment, good, bad, ugly, indifferent but leave some word....

Robert W. Walker (Rob to my friends)

The Right Writing Age: Attitudes Struck & Myths Dispelled

Whenever I begin a new Creative Writing Class, I stand at the board and ask people in the class--people of every size, age, stripe, to give me a list of reasons why they find themselves unable to write...what negative reasons one's mind gives the would-be writer to give up before they begin and invariably, high on the list beside "I am too young to write, too inexperienced" is the opposite: "I am too old to begin writing now! Too old to start a writing career, too old to dabble, etc., etc..."

Trust me, I get a long list of negatives on the one side of the board, and this is followed up by asking the class to help me REWRITE all these negative statements into POSITIVE statements such as "I am at the perfect age to write. This is a wonderful time in my life to write."

As awful a negative as I have heard - "I can't write because my job, working with kids all day, sucks all my imagination out of me..."  and "I can't write because my mind is on worrying about my dying wife" these too can be rewritten and the attitude that these are damn good reasons to write can prompt wonderful results.

On a Five Star chat group among Five Star authors, a negative similar to those above came up and suddenly Jim Ingraham (author of Sahara Dust, and Evidence of Evil, work in progress: Duff Kerrigan)  leapt into the fray with the following comments that I believe every 'older' or just starting out author, young or old, ought to hear.  Here's Jim in his own words after all this came up via the catalyst of my urging authors to take up the standard of becoming an Indie Author publishing with Kindle/Amazon.  Here's Jim in his words:

"It's not how age affects me as a writer that's important. It's how it affects me as a man. Because I have shed many illusions about myself and my life and have accepted who I am and who I have been, my relationship to people and to my work is more sensible than it once was. I am no longer crippled by fears that I won't "make it." I know that "making it" is an illusion. The only important result of writing is the work itself.

I liken it to playing golf. Winning a tournament is fun, but trying to is not what keeps me playing. The real reward is striking the ball well, that feeling coming into my hands when I watch the ball sail down the fairway, when I watch it fall into the hole from 30 feet across the green.

If the reward of your work is something other than finding the right word, building a solid paragraph, turning out a well-crafted story, then you miss the true rewards of being a writer.

If I am true to myself, the results of my work will reflect the gains I have made over all the adversities that have plagued my life. I hope that readers grow from my work. It pleases me that others enjoy my stories. But I write, not to please others, but to please myself."

Jim Ingraham
following is a photo of Jim & his son at the piano!

                                                                        
Wow...Man, wish I had Jim in my class. Jim is 87 years old by the way. Read his book Sahara Dust from 5-Star, and Evidence of Evil on Kindle/Amazon.  And do find Jim at http://www.jimingraham.com/ - great website. You won't regret it.

Now I am outta here, kiddies, kiddos, and kid-kids.  Happy Writing and do affect the right attitude. Attitude is the one and only thing we ultimately can control in this life...that and sometimes our characters.

Rob Walker
Chidren of Salem, Killer Instinct, and coming soon to a Kindle near you, Titanic 2012 - FREE first 14 Chapters for a click found at http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/  That's seven chapters per each storyline, 1912 and 2012

eBook Wars - What They Portend For Writers by Robert W. Walker

With all the hoopla, smoke, and mirrors going on in the publishing world over ebook pricing or what they call the sales model for ebook pricing, there’s been a lot of confusion. Confusion is in fact the natural state of most authors in relation to their publishers. Publishers routinely keep writers in the dark about many aspects of their practices and why not on how they price a book? I don’t mean to sound as bitter as I actually am but there you have it. For when it comes to such matters as cover art, for instance, or the size type on your title or name or both, and when it comes to how a book is distributed, if the publisher uses or does not use jobbers, if the publisher has cut any sweetheart deals with big box stores like Costco or Wal-Mart, and if in such cases an author earns any royalties, and if a royalty statement ever comes to an author can it be read?

The long long history of writers and their publishers has not been a gentle, kind one but rather every horror story you have ever heard at the bar about a writer and his publisher is true, true, true. In the end, typically, the writer gets it in the end—and I mean that literally. Now comes an opportunity offered by Amazon.com for authors to go “Indie” – to become their own publishing concern in partnership with Amazon acting as bookstore and distributor in one, and for the first time in history authors are getting paid what their efforts are worth.

In the meantime, while many authors have been partnering via ebooks over the hard years when it was generally believed by print publishers that ebooks were a flash in the pan and would go the way of many another fad—authors and Amazon have been in the business of ebooks. Major publishers of the NYC variety have eschewed and seldom understood this area of book sales and in fact have not supported it. Until now. Until the day it appears ebooks can and do outsell paper books on occasion—as with this past Christmas. Now suddenly, Macmillan is decrying the situation as Amazon has defined it—that no Kindle book would cost more than ten bucks, because as Macmillan CEO says, authors can earn more money if their ebooks are priced higher, and so he flies to Seattle, meets with Amazon CEO and offers up an ultimatum when Mr. Bezos says no to 15 buck ebooks for Macmillan titles. Most Macmillan authors think that they won when Amazon backed down and accepted the price increase for Macmillan books, and the general consensus among Mac authors and many others is that the giant publishing firm struck a blow for writers.

Nothing further from the truth. Amazon knows its clientele better than anyone on the planet, and they know that few people believe that an ebook priced at above the 9.99 promised price for years now is going to earn out far more monies for authors than the higher prices—which will be boycotted in huge measure by readers of ebooks. Ebook readers are not interested in titles priced high whether they are bestsellers or not. Ebook readers love FREE books, public domain books are being gobbled up at an unprecedented rate! Followed by the .99 cent book and the 1.99 cent book. Ebook readers are voracious and most have enough reading piled up for the moment to last them months. They are not in the market for Dan Brown’s latest at paper price or ebook price if it is over 9.99.

Of these facts I am sure because I have been watching this trend for years, and I have had ebooks on FictionWise for years, and I have ten Kindle titles onboard with plans to add seventeen more, and the titles that are moving, selling, are not my 7 dollar titles priced by the publisher as the SAME price on the paperbacks, and not my 8.99 – half priced latest hardcover. My titles that are selling like hotcakes at a county fair are priced respectively at 2.99 and 1.99 – and as a result of volume sales, the Amazon model, like the Wal-Mart model, I have made more money in the past three years from ebook sales than I have made on paper sales. Writers pricing at bargain basement prices gain more readers who talk to other readers and fan the flames of word of mouth. This aside from the paradox of making more with smaller prices works in favor of the author, not against him or her.

The CEO of Macmillan had a major chip in his pocket—Apple’s IPad which wants to get into the ebook business too and they want to charge more for books, and they were talking to Macmillan about fifteen buck ebooks. So when Macmillan CEO states he is doing this for the benefit of his poor, put upon authors it is a croc and a major croc at that. A croc full of it. It also amounts to short-sightedness and not understanding the clientele—ebook readers, most of whom are assembled under a banner of boycotting any book priced above 9.99.

You don’t have to believe me about such matters but before you decide I am dead wrong check out JA Konrath’s recent blogs and articles on this exact subject. Joe is the man most in the know. See what he has to say on his platforms.

Meantime keep your ego up by placing a chapter or more up at http://www.authonomy.com/ where you can get feedback on your book and share feedback on my Children of Salem. The writing is the darling part of this business, and the rest can be an awful pain.

Rob
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

On Becoming An Artful Writer by Robert W. Walker

Martin Scorscese was awarded a special life's work Golden Globe award for directing films, and his acceptance speech was a long eulogy to all those who came before him, all those he learned from and built upon. Ever watch a young artist at work? Go to any museum and you will find a young painter at an easel set up before one of the Masters—Van Gogh, Renoir, Picasso, Rembrandt. A look over the student's shoulder shows that she's not painting just anything, but rather she is attempting to duplicate the master artist's method, trying to determine precisely how the artist in question used line, shape, light, shadow, brush stroke, color, medium, pick, pencil, charcoal—the whole of it. A student of art learns skills, tools, and techniques via mimicry and imitation, or if you prefer stealing—focusing so closely on how Renoir did it to learn it and own it. The how and why of the masters has to be harnessed. Even if one doesn't care for Picasso's art, one needs to know how he pulled it off. Writers do the same, but they do so via voracious reading. As a writer reads, so shall he reap. Learning the art of establishing shots, openings, dialogue, settings, character, plot, props, symbols, metaphor, simile, texture, depth, color, tone and the marriage of all the parts amounts to working on a PhD in Letters. Steinbeck liked to say, "I'm just a storyteller" and that's all well and good, but he was also an artist to learn from—a writer's writer in other words. Writers who succeed in finding their own brush stroke(s) or style do so by closely examining and trying their hand at crafting words in the "voice" of various writing masters—either consciously or unconsciously. All artists in all fields build on the backs of those who came before. Even the genius Shakespeare built upon playwrights who came before. For the struggling, thrashing young writer mimicry and imitation is the wisest form of flattery if one is to eventually learn from the masters and succeed. This success is measured in how far the young writer then moves on to find his own voice. In short, read it, study it, steal it, own it, and use it. As a crime writer, thievery comes easy. Look at E.B. White's description of the barn and later the rope in Charlotte's Web. The method he uses—simple, straightforward, making a singsong of the verb WAS—has become for me a tool I use when called for. I read those depictions and studied White. I can now move others with a simple description when I need it, where I need it in my own work. Does it harm White that I stole his method for my purposes? No, not at all, and I have no reason to apologize. My first novel was to be the sequel to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and I never looked back. Whether you plan to write literature or genre fiction, it behooves one to challenge oneself to learn the tools and skills of the masterful hand at work. The student writer has to set up his easel before the master, be it Dickens, Dumas, Austen or Dean R. Koontz, and put that understanding into actual practice—as in writing a chapter of Twain or Hemmingway, or Faulkner, trying out all the various ranges from simplicity to complexity and back again: the serpentine sentence to the hammer blow of a two-word declaration. Try out the extremes. Test and challenge oneself with the two-step of an O'Henry or the beauty of a Chekov. If it's Stephen King you wish to unseat, you do a chapter of King. It's your story in Kingly style. The point is any struggling writer can and should learn from the classics and the masters just as painters, sculptors, poets, and film directors learn. I for one am still learning, but thanks to those who came before me, I have learned a great deal, and I owe homage to them all. Thanks and do leave a comment, and find my 8 Free chapters of Children of Salem at www.authonomy.com and Dead On at a bookstore near you. Rob www.robertwalkerbooks.com

Where to go w/Your Set Piece…SETTING the Stage…Setting is Character

Setting quite often is not only what entices a reader to open a book (“Oh, look…it is set in my home town of Seattle!”) but it is often what entices a writer to begin a novel (“Fascinating place…think I will set a book down here, and why not?”). Setting is as important as the author or reader want to make it, it would seem. In fact, if an author’s attitude toward his setting is that he simply wants or needs a generic city – any city of a given size and population will do, then that surfaces in the story; and some authors do quite well with quick few broad strokes to construct their metropolis or countryside or small town. I admire those who can do this well, immediately place you into middle America or a village in Tanzania or Mexico and get on with the plot and characters. I also admire those who can take a village, a town, or a city, or an entire island nation or country and delve deeply into its complex character – thus making it a separate but equal character in the cast of characters in the novel. The former takes as deft a hand, but the later takes a deft hand and a good deal of research and/or experience with a place.

James Lee Burke’s novels come instantly to mind when one thinks of the New Orleans area, in particular New Iberia, LA. Mark Twin leaps to mind for Life on the Mississippi and for Missouri in particular. Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens for 18th Century London and environs. Some authors are so closely associated with a given geography that we must know it is due to their depiction of that area in such intimate terms due to their intimacy with place.

Setting does not always take such prominence in a novel, but when it does get “captured” like a running film with all its quirks, pimples, darkness, and light, it becomes a character in a sense, one the main character interacts with, relates to, is fascinated with and loves and often protects, or detest and is often at odds with and will decry its ugliness for instance. And true sometimes the protagonists has terribly ambivalent feelings about his or her surroundings—be it Chicago, LA, New York, Miami, Houston, etc…etc…

In Pure Instinct, I became so enamored with Hawaii that I provided a complete character of it, but in the novel it is my interpretation, the place having been put through the prism of Dr. Jessica Coran’s eye—sifted through the mind and heart of my protagonist. This makes the character of Hawaii in that novel uniquely mine, yet it is based on facts and research and having visited the state, and having come away with a powerful, moving impression that the place made on me, the author. Until then, I had never so thoroughly engrossed myself in presenting setting as character, but here was a setting that informed all the characters in the story and shaped them as well. After writing Pure Instinct, I began a concerted effort to always “characterize” my settings; to make setting equal out to character. As a result, that plan has served my novels well from my depiction of 1893 Chicago in my Inspector Alastair Ransom series to modern day Atlanta in Dead On, Houston in my Edge Series, and a variety of major cities in my Instinct Series as well as Early New England of 1692 infamy in Children of Salem.

Whether an author chooses to use quick and generic brush strokes or fine and detailed brush strokes regarding setting, the attitude an author strikes about this extremely important element in story is all important. In short story, I feel, the quick, generic strokes are needed due to space limitations, but in a novel, I look to do the finest detail work I can muster…but that’s just me.

Let me know what you think of Character is Setting. Would love to hear from you! I imagine that I have sketched a city near you at one time or another.

Happy Reading and Writing,
Rob
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/
http://www.authonomy.com/ (free 8 chapter peek at Children of Salem)

There's Editing & There's Editing...What's Your Process? By Robert W. Walker

The business of editing your story once you’ve got it going is an important consideration, and the first consideration is precisely WHEN do you do your editing; what is your best choice of processing the process? Do you edit as you go, line by line, or afterward altogether at once? I imagine some folks do it scene by scene, chapter by chapter as they go—which I do nowadays, but in my youth, I used to do my serious editing only AFTER the manuscript was completed and entirely out of my head. Some say you can’t do two jobs at once—create and edit—in the same breath as each job requires the opposite side of the brain, but as I have matured as a writer, I have come to discard that notion. I edit much more as I go nowadays than I once did, and I will consciously be editing a line as I write it, a scene as I write it, a chapter as I write it. I will also re-read and edit two or three scenes and chapters before I continue on to the next scenes and chapters, rather working in a parabola fashion, like a wave action, back and forth.

I won’t catch every misplaced modifier or weak metaphor or missing comma or apostrophe, but I know for a fact that I am too close to the trees to see the forest, or too close to the forest to see the trees, or both since like a client in a courtroom who represents himself, I have a fool for an editor. I know it needs a judicious second and even third eye; in fact, better than most, I know I need all the help I can get. To this end, I have cultivated close friends whose advice and editing eye are spot on—folks I can rely on. Such friends can drive you insane as they are so detail conscious, but they are, as I said, spot on.

I have seen errors in my finished books, however, and this after I have written and rewritten the story to exhaustion, and it has been vetted by my readers, and it has had a thorough going over by my editor and a copy editor as well, and guess what – still typos and words like Lamb for Lame filter in or are crammed in by the ink gremlins (creatures that abound in magazines, playbills, brochures, how-to’s, and novels). Still we try and try and try.

No novel in the history of novels has been rewritten more than my Children of Salem and yet my hero, Wakely gets spelled as Wakley at least once, and tomb should have been tome in the first chapter. So it goes, but we must strive to make the version that goes to an editor’s desk as clean and error-free as we can possibly make it, as this is a major part of the job at hand.

TEN items I edit for as I write (in fact both sides of the brain can work in tandem with experience)

1 - Edit for LY words and other modifiers, adjectives, adverbs to hug the word they ‘modify’.

2 - Edit to catch pronouns that are ‘fuzzy’ or confusing for whatever reason and in need of being replaced by naming the person, place, or thing the pronoun is standing in for. Constantly ask who are they…what is it…who is he/she.

3 – Edit out as many prepositions and prepositional phrases as possible as in switch: ‘stood up from the chair’ with ‘stood’ – and such phrases as ‘out of the back of the car’ with ‘from the car’ and excise so many sentences that unnecessarily end with ‘to me’. Anytime you can replace two or three prepositional or directional words with a single word that is a WIN.

4 – Omit as many of the word VERY as you can find along with many another qualifier in the narrative; look up the part of speech that is called a qualifier and avoid them like the plague; they are related to adjectives, adverbs, and modifiers and are often meant to emphasize but instead they manage to de-emphasize the otherwise strong subject and strong verb they qualify or modify.

5 – Put in as many ‘absolutes’ as you can, often replacing the qualifier with an absolute word or phrase. Instead of VERY replace it with an absolute as in: ‘The swiftly flowing wind roared very loudly’ with ‘A swift bearlike roaring wind peeled its anguish’.

6 – Edit out trivial matter in both narrative and dialogue. Trivial matter is such material as is metaphorically spinning wheels and not moving the story along. That is description that serves no purpose or has no connection to your character(s), and/or dialogue that fails to illuminate character or push the story along.

7 – Make sure that all description of people, places, and things are filtered through the five senses of the characters.

8 – Make sure that all description of people, places, and things come about as thought and speech while your characters are involved in some action or actions. Avoid whole paragraphs of simple passive description or thought or inner monologue.

9 – Edit for whole paragraphs and scenes that fall into telling only and no showing; rewrite these by dialoguing the same information, spreading out these “telling” lines to various characters who may speak them aloud inside quotation marks. In other words: Dialogue dull scenes into walking, talking, doing scenes that involve the five senses of your characters rather than the speechifying of your narrator.

10 – Make certain each character has his/her own speech patterns, mindset, psychology, props, ticks, and anything that sets each apart. The worst thing your novel can do is have every character working in similar tone and attitude. No two can walk or talk alike unless you’re doing twins.

It’s not by any means an exhaustive list but these are major items and issues editors will be dealing with when autopsying your book, and the worst sin of all is the sin of being unclear. All of these steps help me in self-editing even before they are dealt with by your first readers, critique group, agent…editor. I hope the list is helpful; I use it all the time with my own work and when I am acting as an editor for others when wearing my freelance editor’s cap. Bringing this back around full circle, if you are first starting out as a writer, you may well prefer and want to get the entire book out of your head before you begin a serious, all encompassing rewrite – unless you find it easy and fulfilling to edit scene by scene as you go. Find what works for you as we all must find our own working methods.

I welcome your comments and we at ACME have made making comments a walk in the park; it’s that easy, so don’t hesitate. Meanwhile, find me on facebook, at Twitter, on Myspace and for details about my editing service visit me at www.robertwalkerbooks.com

Happy New Year of Writing and Reading,
Rob

Robert Walker, author of Dead On & Children of Salem, the INSTINCT and RANSOM series

http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/ and find me on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Google me!

Raising the Dead (Manuscript) PART II by Robert W. Walker

Yes, more about the novel I dug out of its grave to breathe life into it and reshape it and publish it. I have kindle-lized my so-called “dead” novel that would never see print according to the powers that be—the people who determine for you and me what is bestseller material, what they will get behind, what they will put on shelves for our reading pleasure. I am still waiting for a green light from a traditional publisher for Bloodroot which is now Children of Salem, but now it is a different book as a close friend and fanatical reader on finishing the last rewrite of this cursed book said to me, “This is an historical romance, Rob.” And she gave me a number of points in the novel where the romance could and should come to the forefront and such things as the geography of a witch hunt needs find the backdrop. She was right, of course, and I changed the title thereafter from Bloodroot to Children of Salem and subtitled it “Romance in the time of the Witch Trials.” And thereafter on the final final rewrite, I transformed this opus (160,000 words that breaks down in three books – another reason for its being a cursed book in the eyes of agents and editors I have known).

I transformed Bloodroot from a seriously wrought historical novel pitched on the fork of one attitude on my part to an entirely different pitchfork…the attitude of the writer of romance and intrigue, and a far less serious-seeming attitude it is.

I use the term serious here to describe my approach, my internal dialogue with myself about the nature of the novel that changed so much over the years from a dissertation –literally as it was my dissertation at Northwestern University in first draft in 1972 that set me to work on this accursed journey to craft a truly worthwhile novel that would go well beyond the famous play, the Crucible written by Marilyn Monroe’s husband as an allegory for McCarthyism. Arthur Miller did his homework and crafted an amazingly close to the truth play, and I suspect he read Francis Marion’s nonfiction work on the subject in order to write his play. I was determined to write an expose to shed light on every aspect of the event, something no play could do but perhaps a novel might.

Of course while putting the novel away and taking it out every couple few years to rewrite it, I wrote other titles—in fact over forty-five—and I honed my craft, and in writing my Chicago City series begun with City for Ransom and the award-winning Shadows in the White City, and the trilogy ender City of the Absent, I realized that what I took to 1893, I needed to take (this attitude) to 1692. Finding the right attitude toward the work and going back in for a final time to rework it as a thriller yes but a romantic thriller and a romantic historical changed everything down t the title – Children of Salem.

Not that the curse has been lifted as it sits on the desk now of one agent for what will be a year in February….and it has continued to be turned down with a lovely note attached but now I KNOW it is not the work that is cursed but the so-called business of traditional publishing that is cursed. And so it was with absolute confidence that I set myself up as my own digital publisher and published Children of Salem via the Kindle store where it is available on the Kindle and in many another format for a modest price. And I have also placed it on the paperless, virtual shelf at www.thedigital-bookstore.com

Admittedly, in its earlier permutations and form, Bloodroot should most certainly have been rejected but not Children of Salem. I had every reason and the some to give up on this novel; I even began to believe it had a curse on it and did not want to be told—that perhaps the villains in the piece, based on real historical people, were working against me. But by the same token, Jeremiah Wakely would not let me off so easily; he kept coming back at me and demanding my attention and time and devotion to this story. A good thirty years later I don’t need traditional publishers to finally get this tome, this opus, this book I was born to write out of my bottom drawer forever and into the hands of readers. It is outselling all my other ebooks put together, including the HarperCollins pubbed City Series books that have been priced to high for the typical kindle reader’s liking. Bottom line is that technology I could not have imagined even a year ago has given me a platform and a publication springboard for Children of Salem. And now a first review of the book has popped up on Amazon and it is vindication balm for its author—a FIVE-STAR review. You can read the review and see the great artwork at:

http://www.amazon.com/New-Title-CHILDREN-Romance-Trials/dp/B002GU6LIC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257400408&sr=1-1

Thanks for reading this obsessed author’s blog and happy reading and writing to you. Do leave a comment and let me hear from you.

Rob

http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

Raising the Dead Manuscript from Its Grave: Part 1 by Robert W. Walker

I published myself after a lifetime of eschewing any sort of vanity press. And I did it using a “dead” manuscript about a “dead” subject filled with “dead” historical characters in a “dead” time period which one editor, a true pro, said of: “It is the hardest time period to write about, to make come alive, and especially to display any sort of sexual encounter, but in your hands Rob, if anyone can pull it off, it’s you.” That sort of trust and confidence in my writing and even rejection letters laced with lovely and positive remarks has kept me going back and back to the grave to unearth this dead manuscript. Rejected hundreds of times and stowed away off and on for some thirty years or more. I had every reason to lower it into the ground of my past writing attempts and leave it buried and chalk it up to part of that large graveyard of previous work that stays in the grave but represents lessons learned, craft-building, and I am a firm believer that book X could not have come into being as it is had I not failed on book Y from which I learned so much of what to do and what not to do.

Recently as July I began putting up ebooks on the paperless bookstore called Kindle (for the Kindle reader) and I put up a number of out of print titles, and a book of short stories, and a how-to book that is doing well there, and then I decided to place up an original never before seen anywhere else title – Children of Salem, one of my books that had been buried by a stack of rejections so heavy as to be used as the headstone.

Why put it up on Kindle, a book rejected by EVERY New York publishing house twice over in various permutations? A book turned down in fact by any and all publishers, editors, and agents who ever took a look. Was I just being arrogant and publishing the work out of anger or angst or what? No frustration is the word. Fed up with traditional publishers who could not SEE the possibilities of this novel, a novel I had kept faith in for over thirty years, with agents who loved it but couldn’t sell it…with editors who could not turn it down without writing personal notes about how it affected them, etc., etc., I saw the new technology as a godsend for Children of Salem and decided to take the bull by the horns and put it out there. My risk? Only my reputation.

Maybe all those people who had rejected the novel were right, but I didn’t think so and I trust that readers will agree with me, and at least one has! One who has given it a Five-Star review on amazon.com now finally. It feels freeing and great to have taken control and vanity or not, whatever you call digital publishing, for me it was and is VINDICATION as Children of Salem is outselling all my other ebooks save my how-to (Dead On Writing). To see the review and the fantastic cover art my son, Stephen, designed for Children of Salem you need only click here:

http://www.amazon.com/New-Title-CHILDREN-Romance-Trials/dp/B002GU6LIC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257400408&sr=1-1

http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

I kid you not, I never give up on a novel idea once I have determined it is a worthwhile project, worthy of my time, energy, blood, sweat, and rewrites. This goes for this manuscript that may even be thirty years old, rewritten countless times, given the “drawer” countless times, but never thrown into the flames or fed to the landfill. Is this a good or a bad thing? I suppose it depends on the idea and the execution of the novel, the crafty crafting of the craft.


I bring this up because my Children of Salem, which for decades went by the title of Bloodroot, and I tenaciously held onto the title until I changed my attitude toward the novel. Bloodroot as a title for me was a double entendre: poisonous nightshade or bloodroot posed the idea of a poison in the blood of Puritanism, and it held the image of a rooting in the old world, a poisonous idea that followed mankind on the ships that led us to America and the Bay Colony of Massachusetts.

The title simply felt like a good fit, and the novel was a serious, heavily-heavily researched and layered tale of the Salem Witchcraft episode as it was never portrayed before—a unique look at the economics, the politics, the theology of witchcraft, as well as the geography and history and sociology of the belief and use of that belief during an election year to condemn and thus win reelection. I saw so many connections to modern life in what happened to “us” in 1692.

I can’t count on two hands the number of editors and agents who turned the manuscript down with the proviso that it was a great book “But I can’t sell it.” So it was stashed away again and again, trotted out every couple-few years and rewritten again and given its chance with a new agent or another editor only to chalk up more rejections than Babe Ruth strike outs. But always with the warmly worded, “I can’t get the scenes out of my mind and I loved the book BUT I can’t sell it.”

Again to the bottom drawer, literally. It fit no “commercial” needs or cubby holes, no pigeon holes and no category. It was historical but scary as in real—reality-based terror in which neighbor hangs neighbor but it was also a sociological tract that shed a light on human activity that points a finger at us all. No one was safe and everyone was guilty, and even our hero, Jere Wakely, had unspoken issues that only helped to fan the flames; and it was a condemnation of church and state in bed together, and it was multiple point of view, and somewhere in there a romance was at work….

Little wonder it has always been a hard sell; loved ones considered my angst with this novel as simple—the book had a curse on it, and it had control of me, and it would never give me my freedom. It was a deep well and I was its ghost with chains upon my feet. Loved ones confused my passion with obsession, and at times I too decided it was all a cursed foul matter that I should burn in the nearest roaring fire. Instead I would pull on something within me that insisted this story could be reshaped to get something other than a wonderfully kindly gently worded rejection.

I intend to carry on this discussion NEXT FRIDAY here at Acme so do return. There is a great well of resolve required to have faith in your own work for as many years as I held this belief for my Salem Opus. And so this blog needs be split. Hope to see you back here then and in the meantime do leave me a comment as we make it soooooo easy to leave a comment here.

Rob
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

Light In the Belfry by Robert W. Walker

There are times as a teacher when you want to run screaming from the classroom as when a student tells you he or she does not know who Teddy Kennedy is; orrrrrrr when a student hands in a paper not only handwritten but done so with such a small script and a light pencil that it is impossible to read. Or when a student tells you, "History?? I hate history; it's done nothing for me--has nothing to do with me or my life!" That's about as good as when someone tells the awful gov't'ment to keep its awful hands off "my mdicare!"

It is rather frightful to find students enrolled in college who have not the vaguest idea of anything beyond their immediate needs - and all else can go to Perdition.
Still, the rare gems are found among the students. Those who have somehow come through our current system of education unscathed, unscarred, un-scared to speak up and who can write a complete essay with a minimum of errors and actually have something to say, have a point of view, and know the differnece between irony and sarcasm.

I keep teaching in order to get out of the house (certainly can't be the money, right?), and I enjoy seeing an aha moment manifest itself in a student's eyes. Today I pulled out the comic strip assignment, a Walker special for studnets to learn how to balance narrative with dialogue as I teach imaginative use of writers' tools even in what is supposed to be an essay (dry, dull thing unless doen well) or nonfiction which is supposed by many to have no imaginative techniques embedded whatsoever (ever face off against a board of directors?); of course, I totally disagree; I believe the writer of nonfiction and the essay can and should know all the tricks at the disposal of a fictionalist--to dramatize an issue and to argue an issue and to tug at the heart strings. And so I teach my 101 and 102 English introductory classes as production shops, workshops, hands-on, finger exercises, you name it with many a sample taken from fiction to point to what makesfor good essay and good nonfiction as well. Use of quotes, dialogue, dramatic moment can greatly enhance any issue-orientated essay or research paper so far as I am concerned and in fact all the essays--including student essays--that make it into the textbooks are chock full of the techniques and tools of fiction.

Have a great day of writing and or teaching and or both! Catch Children of Salem on Kindle!
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

http://acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com/

www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks.com

"Dead On takes the reader's capacity for the imagination of horror to stomach turning depths, and then gives it more twists than a Georgia backroad that paves an Indian trail." - Nash Black

Evolution of an E-book Author to Publisher by Rob Walker

Sure every author wishes to be discovered by Random House or another of the biggies of NYC but since my first publication in 1979 the pinnacle of publication has gotten thinner, higher, spikier, snarkier, and harder and harder to manage. In fact, since the early eighties, getting a novel published has only become more difficult to the point of its being like making the NBA or NASA or winning an Oscar or the Lottery. It has gotten further and further out of reach and every author is nowadays faced with brick walls, even a well published author—and often he or she is finding it harder than the new kid on the block.

As a result, over the past several years, I – like so many others who must write – have turned to smaller press venues. First with Echelon Press with PSI Blue a number of years ago. More recently, I have signed with Five Star for DEAD ON coming out this month. Between these two publications, I published three books with HarperCollins, my Inspector Alastair Ransom series. So I have a unique view on what it is like to be publishing with large and small presses. Recently, too, I have submitted a book, Cuba Blue, to yet another small press. I don’t have to enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of going large or going small, but I do feel a lot more Zen with the smaller presses; with them it is far more about the work and far less about the sales figures, although everyone wants to see good, healthy sales. I have published titles with Dorchester, Zebra, St. Martins, Pinnacle, Berkley, and a few imprints no longer in business along with my early YA publisher Oak Tree Publications, as well as HarperCollins, and family, friends, fans who read me can simply not fathom why I am not far, far more successful in this business, and why my work has not landed on the major bestseller lists.

Aggravation fills my days and nights if I give it much thought and that negative energy can swamp you, so I try to remain positive and have damned the torpedoes and have always written the book that I wanted to write, the one I was most passionate about, and I have never written a book with the direct intent of becoming rich and filthily wealthy but I have hoped to have an income, to have some return on the huge effort or time and energy one puts in but it has not always worked out so. I do know that I have had the worst representation in the business, and that due to the bottom-line mentality that ties the hands of editors at major houses, editors who love to work with me but can’t, that I am in a sense black-balled. Not overtly so but one look at my last sales numbers and that is all it takes to have an agent or editor run screaming from me. And as this is how the business truly operates, I have turned to other means of getting the work in print, so I thank God for small presses and publishers that have come into being since the early eighties.

Then comes a pale rider called the eBook. I was fascinated with the idea way back when Stephen King experimented with it and found it rather a failure so far as he was concerned, but I kept the faith and have always kept my eye on the evolution of eBooks and the hardware from the hefty Palm Pilot of the early days to the slim, light, lovely state of the art Kindle now set at $299. Keeping close tabs on the Kindle, reading about it in every article I could find, I kept close watch for its success and I predicted it would go large—which it has! I put up free pdf files on my website and I offered free chapters and whole books on my site, and on chat groups I offered simply to send downloads. I got my toes wet doing this sort of thing. Information kept coming in that the big publishers were experimenting now as well and sure enough HarperCollins asked for an addendum to my contract to place the Ransom Series on Kindle and that was a major spark. After seeing these on kindle at the Kindle Store, I was hooked, and about then Joe Konrath informed me that he had placed a number of books up for Kindle readers and that he was controlling it all from his computer—and making money! A rare thing for most writers! I mean we are expected to give back an honorarium to anyone who allows us to speak about our writing right? We’re expected to give it away, right?
So then I took the plunge and opened up the url for putting my work up on Kindle and in effect going into a partnership as a small publisher myself with Amazon. That is at dtpamazon.com. In a three-step process and with my genius son’s help and Konrath’s encouragement I became my own publisher overnight. I put up a book of short stories with commentary called Thrice-Told Tales, a book on How To Write entitled Dead On Writing, and an original novel, Cuba Blue, followed by Deja Blue – two suspense books, followed by a set pair of horror novels, The Serpent Fire and Snake Flesh Wars, and most recently Children of Salem. Finally, another suspense novel went up.

The beauty of creating these E-books is that I control the art work/cover, the editorial content, the length and breadth of the work, the date of publication, and primary suggestion for pricing which may or may not remain as I suggest. The three Harper titles have been priced way too high by Harper and they are likely not selling well, but I have no way of knowing because as with everything you do with a major publisher, you, the author, are the last to know. But I have educated myself to this market and kindle readers do not want to pay the same price for the ebook that the mass market was priced at—which is the case here! In fact, Kindlekorner and other kindle reader chat groups make it clear that if they can’t get the book for free, the highest they are willing to go is around two and three bucks. But they are LEGION –those who have purchased the Kindle reader so two bucks a book you work on volume.

The ZEN of being one’s own boss, one’s own publisher…well that’s been a lifelong dream and Children of Salem has been a work that has had a curse on it forever, racking up more rejections than any ten other authors in their lifetimes have racked up, but I believe in this book with every instinct and bone in my body. Yet it sits on an editor’s desk and languishes for another year…and on an agent’s desk and languishes for another year. So I said to hell with it and took the bull by the horn and pressed the button that read “publish” today and now it is up and out in the world! Published! The publisher of the work, Robert W. Walker, yowZA!!

Thanks for reading –
Rob Walker
www.robertwalkerbooks.com