A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
― Edna St. Vincent Millay
Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.
― Margaret Atwood
I often think publishing a book is like doing a poo. Once it's ready for the world, you have to relinquish that control and let nature take its course. A few will be impressed by your creation, others will be disgusted. Plus, no one will enjoy your success and achievement in producing it as much as you did.
― H.O. Charles
This was actually the third workshop I attended at Writersfest, the first one of day two. The late afternoon workshop on my first day there was cancelled, so I took the opportunity to do a little shopping. :-D
You’ve drafted, edited, spit, and polished. Now that the writing is done, how do you get it in people’s hands so they can read it? Hazel Millar and Jay Millar have been the dynamic force behind Book*hug Press, a radically optimistic Canadian independent publisher working at the forefront of contemporary book culture, for two decades. Come with your burning questions!
To be honest, this was more of a lecture than a workshop, there wasn’t much for us to do except sit there and listen, and take a few notes as they went through how they got started and then expanded.
They began as a small press imprint, growing from there until they became the fully independent publisher they are today. And they did it all without any corporate funding. They were able to build and curate their catalogue on their own terms. They look for voices that aren’t being published through other means, contributing to an expanding landscape, publishing about twenty books a year.
They started in 2004 by publishing translations of poetry, then novels. Before long they weren’t just publishing translations, they were publishing novels and anthologies as well. Their goal was to make the work as public as possible, and to that end they did all the marketing and publicizing themselves. The book market in Canada is the most saturated in the world.
They have an open submission policy, which means they are open to submissions all year round, and are most interested in writing that takes risks and challenges and pushes the boundaries of cultural expectations. A general guide for manuscript length is as follows:
Poetry – 72 to 100 pages
Anthologies – 8 to 10 stories (which seems like a low number to me)
Novels – 50 to 80 thousand words
Submissions are made with hard copies, no electronic submission. They create traditional trade paper copies first, then e-books and audiobooks as needed.
They went on at length about copyright violations and permissions. You are not to use song lyrics in your novel unless you’re paying for those rights. Everything needs to be credited and permissions granted. Passages in the public domain of less than a sentence do not need to be permissioned.
Only about 10% of the book’s list price goes to the author. If an advance is paid (which it usually is) you do not start receiving royalties until the advance is cleared. If the advance doesn’t clear, you don’t have to pay it back, you just don’t receive any royalties.
This workshop was definitely not what I was expecting, but it was still full of interesting information.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
WORDAGE REPORT
THE WEEK IN REVIEW
Last week’s word is . . . heartening, which is a synonym for “encouraging,” which I believe I’ve already used. :-)
The weather was not in my favor last week, it was dull and dismal and occasionally rainy, which depleted my energy and generally made me want to just curl up in my recliner with a cat or two and a cup of tea and just read.
However, despite another encounter of the mousey kind, a whole day away, and a doctor’s appointment, the blog posts all got done. I was up super late Tuesday night finishing my poetry post, but that was more me not planning ahead than anything else.
The new fridge isn’t so bad, and I’m trying not to get too attached to it. I like that the freezer is bigger than the one in the old one, and that it has flat glass shelves. Also, I like the deli drawer in the fridge part and there seems to be more space for stuff in the fridge door.
They did not have a floor model of the fridge we have on order, so we can only go by the pictures on the internet. While I like the idea of a bottom drawer for the freezer, I’m pretty sure it’s a wire drawer, which I don’t like. And I don’t think the fridge part is laid out as nicely as the loaner. It’s too bad we couldn’t have taken our time picking it out.
The father-in-law became sick enough Tuesday evening, that the hubby and his brother took him up to the hospital to be looked at. Having spent the entire day at a stitchery retreat, I took advantage of the hubby being gone to get to work on my poetry form for Wednesday.
I had abandoned the form I was going to use in favor of a simpler one, when I hear the cats playing with something in the hallway. Then I heard squeaking. You guessed it, they caught another mouse and were having a grand old time playing with it.
This little sucker was really fast, and the cats were relentless, so I was not able to catch it to put it outside. Eventually it escaped down to the basement, the cats hot on its heels, and I thought that would be the end of it. It would either find a place to hide – plenty of them in the basement – or the cats would kill it.
After about half an hour, Dinsdale came proudly up the stairs, carrying the mouse in his jaws. He brought it to the middle of the living room . . . and let it go. The poor thing was still alive. The chase was on again, and again I tried (and failed) to catch it. I gave up when they all headed for my office, and tried to focus on my poetry post.
There was no sign of a corpse, and the next day they appeared to have lost interest. I wasn’t sure if it had escaped or they ate it, but at least it was gone. Then Thursday morning I was in my office working, and Dinsdale was in the hubby’s office playing. I realized he was playing with a mouse (dead this time). I didn’t know if it was the one from Tuesday and they’d just stashed the corpse in there to play with later, or a new one, but I closed the door to my office so he couldn’t bring it to me to throw for him and waited for the hubby to get up to dispose of it.
Then Friday morning the little monsters played a Halloween prank on me. They left their stuffed mice at the bottom of the stairs for me to step on when I got up. It was really dark, and I couldn’t see what I was stepping on. Not funny kitties!
NEW WORDS:
2522+1313+237+1121=5,193
UP: 386 – words
This is mostly due to my Monday post being extra long. I really should have made it into a couple of posts – I left out a lot of stuff I could have said – but it was getting late and I was in a rush.
The end of Winter’s Child is where the word “heartening” comes in. Not that I finished another serial, but that I got it done and scheduled on Thursday. I didn’t start working on it until late in the morning, but by lunch time I had the creature’s part done. I broke for lunch and then started on James’s part. So far so good.
Because of the weather, I had a bad headache brewing. So I made myself a cup of tea and took an Advil. When I went back into my office I had the music going, and I was texting with the daughter, and I was feeling frazzled because the scene wasn’t going well. And I don’t know what happened, but I accidentally exited the document without saving. My entire scene was wiped out. Gone. Vanished.
There may have been a bit of cursing. There definitely was a hissy fit involved. There might have even been a bit of name calling aimed towards the lap top, Word 2019, and Windows in general. But once I got it out of my system I took a deep breath, turned off the music, ignored the phone, and started writing.
And I still had the scene finished before supper. If that’s not heartening, I don’t know what it.
Goals For Next Week:
Keep up the good work with the blogs; find an idea for NaNoWriMo
POETRY:
Yeah, I know I said something about trying a form that was a little more challenging, but after spending the whole day at the stitching retreat, and then the whole mouse thing, it just wasn’t going to happen. I did have a more complicated form partially done, but not the example. Ironically, I may have been better off doing that one because I still had to do the research for the easier form. But if you read my Wednesday post, you’ll understand what inspired my examples.
The examples can sometimes be as time-consuming as the informational portion of the poetry posts, which is why I’m trying to get them done ahead of time for NaNo. This will cut my blogging time in half. And if I have time to do the examples ahead of time as well, so much the better. So far I have three forms waiting for an example, and four more waiting to be researched.
Goal For Next Week:
Keep working on the new forms; get some examples written.
CRAFTING:
Tuesday was the one-day retreat with the stitchery guild. The place we held it was out in the country, a restaurant turned wellness spa and inn. I’ll go into more detail about it on my Monday post, but we had a wonderful time, and I’m sure we’ll be back again.
We were given a large, sunny room with a view, and all the tea, coffee, and water we liked. At noon we broke for lunch, and a few of us went for a walk along the trail that took us deep into the surrounding woods. At four o’clock we packed up our stuff, and then went into the dining room for high tea. All in all, it was a lovely day.
I took both my zentangle and my kit with me to work on, and I’m happy to be able to say I worked on them both. Maybe not as much as I should have, but any progress is good progress, right?
I did pull out my kit to work on Thursday night while I was watching Loki, but the action was so good I really didn’t get much stitching done. LOL
Goal For Next Week:
Get my stitchery homework done.
WHAT I’M READING:
It took a couple of days before I started looking for a new tree book, but I finally settled on Spells For Lost Things, by Jenna Evans Welch. I didn’t realize when I picked it that it was Y/A, but I like reading them every once in awhile, and so far I’m enjoying it.
On the Kindle I finished Mystic Pieces, by Ada Bell, and then read Of Potions and Portents, by Nyx Halliwell.
Goal For Next Week:
Keep up the moderate reading habits; update my Goodreads.
THE WEEK AHEAD:
Despite the crappy weather, that new leaf of mine might have gotten a little bigger. It may even have a new shoot or two trying to sprout. Hopefully I can keep nurturing it this week.
This is the week for digging down and establishing regular office hours. NaNo is just a week and a half away and if I’m going to have a prayer, I need to get into a writing routine now. I have optimistically ordered my winner’s tee-shirt, so there’s no going back.
Tuesday is a regular meeting with the stitchery guild, and I have yet to complete my homework, so I’ll have to get that done on Monday. And if I’m going to have the sewing machine out anyway, I might as well make a skirt or two for the fall. I have the patterns and the material, I just need to cut them out and sew them.
I have three poetry posts that just need examples to finish them off, and I have four more I’d like to research. The research is usually pretty easy, it’s the distilling it down into a post that’s the time consuming part. But if I do it this week, then that’s more time for writing during NaNo.
You may have noticed that I took Editing out of the wordage report. Seriously, who am I kidding? I haven’t been doing much in the way of editing since I finished with the hard copy of Elemental Spirt, and it’s highly unlikely I’ll be doing any during NaNo. I may, or may not, add it back in for December, but most likely it’ll be gone until the New Year.
I’m really happy with the way Winter’s Child turned out. I think this is the story it was always meant to be, I just lacked the skill to do it when I first came up with the idea. For this week’s Fiction Friday post I’m probably going to use an excerpt from my first (failed) NaNo. I don’t want to get into anything new right before NaNo, and I’m not even sure I want to start another serial. Maybe in the new year.
AND I have to settle on an idea for NaNo. I have three or four possibilities, and a couple that have been discarded because they need more research than I have time for. I’m leaning towards one I have a one page synopsis for. It’s not much to go on, but I went with less than that a few years ago when I wrote Shattered for NaNo. The beauty of it is that it’s completely unrelated to anything else I’ve got going on, but I could actually tweak it so it becomes a sequel to Shattered.
I would like a sweater to go with one of those as yet unmade skirts I want to sew. And the easiest way to get one that fits right and I like is to knit it myself. Having my evenings free to do crafting in front of the TV is all well and good, but I need something a little more mindless than stitching if this is going to work. I have to pay too much attention to what I’m doing when I stitch, but once you get into a rhythm with the knitting/crocheting, it doesn’t take the same focus.
And there’s always the Christmas stuff I could be doing. I have some crocheted snowflakes done, all they need is to be stiffened. I’m nor sure if there’s anything else I could be doing in front of the TV, but it might be worth a look in my dresser of craft supplies.
I had a nice balance between tree reading and e-reading last week, and I’m hoping to keep this up this week.
I managed to make it through last week without the aid of my lists, but I still think it might be a good idea to start them up again, just to keep the track headed in the right direction. The forecast for next week is a mix of sun and rain, so a list might help combat the energy sink from that too.
I need all the help I can get.
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