Elaine Ash, Editor & More, On Publishing

by Paul D. Marks

Since this will be my last post before the holidays, I want to wish everyone a terrific Holiday Season and a Happy New Year!

Today I’d like to welcome Elaine Ash, editor, writer and friend. Elaine was born and grew up in eastern Canada, but calls L.A. home these days. Under the pen name “Anonymous-9,” her crime fiction is included in numerous “Best of” lists every year. It’s won consecutive Readers’ Choice Awards from the House of Crime and Mystery, as well as Best Short Story on the Web, 2009 from Spinetingler Magazine. Anonymous-9 was invented as a blind for her hard-hitting, experimental short stories. Her work has been praised by T. Jefferson Parker, Ray Garton, Johnny Shaw, Douglas Lindsay, Josh Stallings, Robert Randisi and many others.

But Elaine also edits fiction writers, from established authors to emerging talent. As the former editor-at-large for Beat to a Pulp webzine, Elaine worked directly with writers of all genres to develop stories for publication. Some of those writers went on to fame and fortune such as recent Edgar nominee Patti Abbott (Polis), Jay Stringer (Thomas and Mercer), Chris F. Holm (Mulholland), S.W Lauden (Rare Bird), Kieran Shea (Titan), Hilary Davidson (Macmillan) Sophie Littlefield (Minotaur, Delacorte) and more.

Today, she works with private clients, helping them shape manuscripts, acquire agents and land publishing deals. She also ghostwrites and edits for industry clients.

Organizations book her for speaking and teaching engagements, such as West Coast Writers Conferences, the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society, Sisters in Crime, the Mystery Writers of America, the Coffee House Writers’ Group, and more.

Elaine has a new book out called BESTSELLER METRICS. It’s a different approach to writing novels and one definitely worth checking out. But today she’s the perfect person to respond to our question of the week. Take it away, Elaine:

Q: Business—If you were in charge, what big change would you make to the publishing business?

A: I would change the query process. Crafting a great query letter is a specialized skill. Most novelists need help writing a synopsis—they're long distance runners, not sprinters. After creating a full-length novel, the novelist might find it unfair that everything balances upon the fate of a one-page missive. But, that’s the way getting an agent currently works. Until we find a better way, mastery of the query is necessary.

There is a bright spot: The way you summarize your story in a query can translate well to in-person conversations. It focuses the mind on information pros want. Countless writers catch the attention of agents and publishers at conventions or writers’ gatherings with a quick verbal version of a query. This is commonly known as the “elevator pitch” and it’s a 30-seconds-or-less overview of your story, genre, word count and writer’s bio told in short.

Here’s the query synopsis for THE BIG CRESCENDO, a humorous private eye novel by Jonathan Brown:

—Synopsis — When Lou Crasher falls head-over-cymbals for a femme-fatale customer at The Practice Joint, a low-rent studio on the wrong side of  Hollywood, he’s soon embroiled in a musical equipment theft ring. Lou is forced to go undercover armed with only his quick wit and deadly dialogue. Clues lead to a missing colonial snare drum once owned by none other than Frederick Douglass—the African American social reformer and  abolitionist. But this precious artifact is now owned by a degenerate Beverly Hills music producer with a hardcore coke habit, forcing Lou to get funky with druggies and dealers. Good thing Lou can throw a drum stick as straight as a Bowie knife—he’ll need to watch his own back while dealing with local police, who are none too trusting of this amateur sleuth.

(Tip of the hat to Mr. Dan Kelly who added secret wordsmith sauce.)

Here’s the same synopsis translated into a more casual, conversational elevator pitch:

Lou Crasher is a journeyman rock drummer and an amateur P.I. His day job is working at a rehearsal space in Hollywood called the L.A. Practice Space. When the place gets robbed, Lou agrees to get the gear back for one of the musicians, Angela, because she happens to be a dime-piece knockout.
His thought is: get the gear—get the girl.

The trail leads him to a theft ring, which later takes him to a very rare snare drum once owned by Frederick Douglass, but currently owned by a big time coke-head Hollywood music producer. As Lou falls hard for Angela he bumps up against a dangerous drug dealer, the cops get involved, and there’s a dangerous little pissant bent on taking Lou out of the picture for good!

 See how that works better for casual conversation face-to-face?

There’s a lot of information out there on crafting a query, but not so much on pitching in a live situation. The key is to be practiced and ready. Be prepared to mention the word count, the genre, and a few writerly accomplishments without fumbling for information on the spot. You want to appear practiced and smooth.

When your query letter grabs agents, most will google your name. This instantly reveals if you have a social media presence, a blog post or two, and if you have a website. The more presence you have online, the more weight it lends the query.

Be mindful of your attitude as you compose. You’re ready to tell the world about your story, so be positive and confident. Seriously, get in the mood; watch a comedy, even have your mother tell you how wonderful you are. Whatever it takes, get a good state of mind going. Your energy and positivity will translate to the letter.

Agents and publishers really do want to hear from you. Their businesses depend upon you, the creator of fresh material. If cramming it all into one page causes stress, remember that a query is nothing more than a taste and a tease. It’s meant to pique interest, not tell the whole story or relay your entire history as a writer. A few highlights will suffice.

If the prospect of querying still fills you with dread, all is not lost. You can outsource the whole shebang to someone like me, who will synopsize your story, whip up a letter, source the right agents and handle correspondence.

For a free pdf copy of my query guidelines and samples, please go to  bestsellermetrics.com and use the contact form to make a request. A free copy will be sent to you.


Thank you for stopping by Elaine!

***

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"It's a compliment, really!"

"If you were in charge, what one change would you make to the world of publishing?"

by Catriona

Easy! I'd make the penalties so horrendous that people were too scared to . . . or just tweak people's brains so they didn't want to . . . or maybe do something technologically so far beyond me that I can't even imagine it that meant no one was able to . . . have you guessed yet? . . . pirate e-books.

It's weird, but even people who're not Zen Buddhists most of the time, people who believe in possessions as a concept and disapprove of theft like they disapprove of assault, somehow have a blind spot when it comes to pirated books.

I've heard:

• It's flattering. You should be grateful they want to read your books at all.
• Maybe they'll read one for free and then buy the rest.
• Everyone in sales gives out samples of merchandise.
• 
  

And usually I've bitten my lip and not said:

• No it's not. Buying them would be flattering. And there's no way to tell if the pirated books are read.
• Or maybe they'll read one free one and then another free one and then another. 
• But that doesn't mean they welcome shoplifters. 

If we could stop pirated books, writers would be paid more fairly for their work and more people would be able to keep writing and the literary landscape as a whole would benefit. Like music would be the winner if people would stop downloading illicit album files. (Are they still called albums?) And everyone in the film community from directors to corn-poppers would be well served if YouTube went down in flames, and don't get me started about the plight of photographers and . . .

Just this morning, fellow writer and pal Dean James outed "Open Library", a website that not only provides thousands of books, including thirteen of his and two of mine, free to download, but also has a Wikipedia style pop-up on the homepage saying  'please donate money to Open Library so we can keep stealing'.  Words fail me. And it's uncool to make words fail writers.

Changing (or using?) the business...by Cathy Ace

If you were in charge, what one big change would you make to the business of publishing?

The entire business seems to be in a constant state of flux, so it’s hard to pick on just one aspect to change. I wouldn’t change the people – who are usually delightful – nor would I change their enthusiasm and passion for books, which seem all-pervasive. It’s a bit of a Catch 22 question really – because I think it would be hard to change one thing without everything else changing too.

Since it is the way it is – at the moment – maybe the best thing to do is to tell you how I as an author choose to use the system that’s available.

Ta-daaaa...my new book!

I have just re-self-published a collection of novellas and short stories I first self-published ten years ago. I have spent the past six months rewriting them, working with an editor to polish them, have dropped some I originally included in the collection, and have inserted some new ones. It’s been a fascinating process which has allowed me to go back to where I "began" and apply what I’ve learned in the past five years of working with two different “traditional publishers” on two different series of books. 

 

I have set up a new corporation to facilitate my works

I have also worked through the process of formatting and setting up a manuscript for both e- and print versions, and working with designers directly to get a cover I want, as well as choosing typefaces etc for the whole book. It’s been a blast!  And now – this week – there’s an e-book up on amazon, and a print book too…actually in my hand. It’s amazing.

Now my readers can find out how my characters (Cait Morgan, Bud Anderson, the WISE women) all met and set up together in the first place. It’s been a weird feeling for me to do this because – having written all these “genesis” stories ten years ago – I always knew my characters’ backstories, even though they were a mystery (or something alluded to) for my readers.

By self-publishing, what I have learned is that – unless you’re a big name with big five publisher – you stand pretty much the same chance of getting the word out about your work to those who might read it as you do with a small publisher. But I believe the book is doing well only because I have the twelve books published traditionally behind me, with the Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Globe and Mail etc. reviews to go with them.

So maybe I wouldn’t change the way the business works, but I am hoping that using the way the business works in a different way will prove fruitful for me. Fingers crossed! Oh, and if you fancy giving a book as a gift, you could do worse than my anthology MURDER KEEPS NO CALENDAR which contains the first three Cait Morgan Mysteries ever, the first WISE Enquiries Agency Mystery ever, introduces you to DI Evan Glover of the Glamorgan Police Service, and several standalone tales of murder, and dark deeds! The links are below. Thanks!

PRINT IN USA CLICK HERE

KINDLE IN USA CLICK HERE 
PRINT IN UK CLICK HERE 
KINDLE IN UK CLICK HERE 
PRINT IN CANADA 
KINDLE IN CANADA 

Cathy Ace is the Bony Blithe Award-winning author of The Cait Morgan Mysteries and The WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries.  You can find out more about Cathy, her work and her characters at her website, where you can also sign up for her newsletter with news, updates and special offers: http://cathyace.com/

Memo from the corner office

Q: If you were in charge, what one big change would you make to the business of publishing?

- from Susan

I'd go backward in time, to the era when publishers felt it was their job to encourage, nourish, and support promising writers. Instead of pouring all their support into the few proven successes who bring in the most bucks, publishers would be delighted to help authors who wrote well, worked hard, had fresh ideas, and ambition to write The Best Damn Book of the Year.

No more using the star power of one author who is in his or her literary dotage by having junior authors take on the work for less pay as long as they were willing to drown their own styles and ambitions.

I'd go back to glamorous cocktail parties to launch books, budgets for author tours, budgets for ads in the New York Times for mid-list players, and in-house PR staff to court newspaper and magazines reviews for "our exciting new talent."

The people in charge of a company would be the taste-makers with taste, not those who count beans instead of reading. The point of publishing would be bringing wonderful writing to the world while making some money, instead of making as much money as possible by bringing only the most likely to make money to print.

This is why I am not in charge of a publishing company in the 21st century.

...and on that note, happy holidays to you all. May you find a corner of this unhappy world in which to enjoy a peaceful respite with family, friends, and a damn good book!

The Midas Touch

“If you knew that anything you wrote would be published and successful, what would you write?”

From Jim

My last book. I would quit writing.

There would be no challenge. No wondering or hoping or wanting. There would be no dream. I can’t imagine a more dreary life. Who wants to end up like Midas?

Bear in mind that a superstar hitter in baseball only succeeds about thirty percent of the time. How boring if batting became a conga line.

And since we’re on sports now, if I knew that every shot I took on the basketball court would go in the hoop, I’d quit that too. And golf? Imagine if every shot were a beauty? Every putt in the center of the cup? I think I’d end up cheating against myself.

Even the NFL understood that extra points had become too automatic so they changed the rules. Much more interesting now that it’s no longer a chip shot.

And soccer? If they wanted to make it easy to score, they would have made the goal bigger, tied goalies’ hands behind their backs, and never come up with the offsides rule.

That said, I wouldn’t mind hitting 52% of my shots on the court and maintaining a two or three handicap on the links. And, I would love to sell more books. But if a genie promised me that everything I wrote would be a wild success, I’d lose interest in heartbeat.

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.”
—T. Roosevelt

Overnight $uccess

If you knew anything you wrote would be published and successful, what would you write?

By Dietrich Kalteis

Doing what you love is anybody’s best shot at success. And I love sitting at my desk and making stuff up. And I don’t think any of us can predict what’s going to be a best-seller. I know if I tried to write what I guessed would sell, rather than writing what I loved to write about, it would be crap.

Okay, it sounds corny, but it’s the best thing in the world to get to do what I love every day, and that’s success in it itself. And if money follows, then that’s even better. Who’d turn it down? 

For most of us, it’s more of a slow grind than instant success. So, anytime I need a shot of perseverance, I recall that J.K. Rowlings was turned down a dozen times on the road to becoming the first author billionaire, Stephen King’s first novel Carrie was rejected thirty times, and Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce was bounced back over eighty times. The New York Times ran an article about him some years ago, the headline: Writer discovered after 23 novels. 

Writing every day is my best shot at standing out in a crowded field. And that need to write is an in-the-blood kind of thing. Being able to stay focused and positive helps, so does not thinking about success or the lack of it. And almost as important is reading and being inspired and influenced by great books.

And speaking of great books, since the Holidays are rushing up, I’ve listed some of the crime novels that I’ve read over the past year which stood out. As I’m writing this I just finished my friend Sam Wiebe’s second novel Invisible Dead, and I can tell you the guy writes like a champ. Then there’s Black Orchid Blues by Persia Walker, a bright and funny book. The Force by Don Winslow had to be the best-paced novel I read all year, and Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen had to be the funniest. Also very funny and well done (and Canadian) are No Fury Like That by Lisa de Nikolits or One Brother Shy by Terry Fallis. 

I reread a couple of crime classics that stand the test of time, ones that I’d highly recommend: Miami Blues, from 1984, and New Hope for the Dead by Charles Willeford, published 1985, and The Moonshine War by Elmore Leonard, published 1969. As much as I enjoyed Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels, I started his Jesse Stone novels and I loved Trouble in Paradise, the second in the series, published in 1999.

All the best to everyone over the Holidays.

What If?

For Dec 3

Today Terry Shames answers the question: If you knew anything you wrote would be published and successful, what would you write?

I always figured I’d write the great American novel, so if you had asked me this when I was in my twenties, that would have been the answer.  But when I actually started writing, everything I wrote turned into a mystery. Even my very first book, a science fiction book about aliens was really a mystery in sci-fi clothing. (This particular book has never again seen the light of day, so we’ll say no more about it.) After a while I realized that mysteries are clearly what I intended to write, so there was no sense in changing it.

That’s the short answer. The long answer is more complicated. I thought the first mystery I wrote would be published and highly successful. I really did think that, especially after it was snapped up by the first agent I queried. Lest you think I threw a bunch of words on the page and flung it out there, the book had been rewritten at least ten times, including the protagonist morphing from female journalist to female amateur detective….to a male cop. How’s that for editing! Alas, the agent was unable to find a home for it. By the time he told me it was a no-go, I had written a second book and decided to start fresh with a new agent. Exactly the same thing happened. This time with a very well known agent. And it continued to happen with two more books—each time with a seasoned veteran of an agent, each time with a rejection.

With every new book I thought, “Of course it’s going to be published and successful!” It took years of rejection and going back to the drawing board, to finally begin a series that took hold. That was my Samuel Craddock series.I feel as if in that sense, I have written books that are published and successful.

So I think I need to take the question one step farther: what would I write if I knew I would not just be published and successful, but wildly successful. Girl on a Train successful. Successful like Sue Grafton, Craig Johnson, Tana French, Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Susan Shea (okay, I slipped that one in to see if you were paying attention). To think of the answer to the question I need to think about the kind of book I would want to write. So many choices, so little time—thriller, police procedural, historic, foreign intrigue, caper, humorous, adventure, private eye….whew!

The answer is that every book I write I hope will be wildly successful. I don’t start a book thinking, “Gee I hope this book bumbles along and has a few readers.” I think, “This is great idea! What fun! I’m sure it’s going to be a huge success.” Then reality intervenes. At about 10,000 words my thought process is something along the lines of, “Maybe this is a mistake. I’m not sure this idea will work.” 20,000 words: “What was I thinking? This is going nowhere!” 30,000 words: “You can’t throw all these words away. Try to think of something to make it work. ANYTHING.” 40,000 words: “EEEEEEEKKK! Help!.” 50,000: “Just write the book.” 60,000: “Just finish the damn book!” 70,000: “Surely the edits will fix it.” Eventually I get to the editing stage, the first stage of which is, “What a hot mess!”

And then it goes through an amazing metamorphosis. Editing gets done, the book gets turned in to my publisher, it gets a good going over by my editor, my copyeditor, my proofreader. Final verdict: “Hey, this is okay! I think it’s going to be wildly successful!”  So I guess my final answer is, what would I write if I knew it was going to be published and wildly successful? Exactly what I do write!

And here’s the cover of my next book, which comes out January 9—the book I think is going to be wildly successful:

                                          

A Thousand Monkeys Walk Into A Room – And Start Typing Away

Scientists have invented a robot that can do your writing for you. You give it the basic plot and characters and it does the rest. Would you use it? Why or why not?

by Paul D. Marks

Aren’t some authors doing that already? Kind of doing factory farming writing – farming out their books to other authors. That seems kind of robotic to me.

And while it would be nice to have a robot take some of the burden off, I don’t think I’d do it. But like Sean Connery learned, “never say never.”

Part of what makes good writing is the author’s personal experience and how they interpret that experience and distill it into their writing. How s/he infuses their writing with their take on life. A robot or artificial intelligence would be missing that. Until they can truly experience life, not just have it programmed into them, their writing will lack a certain heart to it. And didn’t they try that with typing monkeys, thinking that eventually they’d come up with a Shakespeare play just by random chance. According to Wikipedia, “The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.” The same might be said for a robot. But, even if they could do it, having it programmed into them to whatever extent, it takes the fun and spontaneity out of writing.

Slate has an article about Shelley A.I., a bot that writes horror stories. ( http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/10/27/an_ai_bot_is_very_good_at_writing_horror.html ). I think the examples provided in the article show that the writing is, indeed, a bit “mechanical”. And, as they say in the piece, “The algorithms, like Shelley, still require human-made works to teach themselves how to create phrases and sentences from words, how to generate drama and rising action and climax, how to access a lexicon that delivers the right sort of tone and purpose, and more.” So it seems like robots or Artificial Intelligence bots have it one up over the monkeys, but I’m thinking that the A.I. writer still lacks something humans do, most especially life experience that puts what they’re writing in context and gives it a deeper texture. (I noticed that one of the commenters to RM’s blog earlier this week also mentioned this piece, so the word on A.I. Writer Bots is getting out.)

Wired also did a piece both written by and about robots or A.I. And maybe it works for non-fiction, at least a little better than for fiction. But for fiction it doesn’t seem like it would work, even if you wanted to do it that way. You can find the Wired story here: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/ 

There’s something to be said for the human touch, whether in the market checkout line or at the bank…or in writing. Yes, the ATM or auto checkout line might be faster, but sometimes it’s nice just to have a face to say hello to and have it say hello back. Of course if they’re talking to their co-workers or on the phone, well screw ’em.

And while it’s nice to have “robots” or programs that can spell-check, offer up Thesaurus words or even check grammar (more on that in a minute) and analyze your story, you have to be the one to do the creative work. I don’t even like those programs that plot for you or do other similar things because they take the “me” out of the writing and without that the work could be written by pretty much anyone – or any bot –, so what then makes it unique? Plus, do we really want robots taking our writing jobs away?

Now to grammar: If you’ve tried using a grammar checker as a fiction writer you’ve probably found that it’s way too formal. It might work for non-fiction, but fiction is more free-form. And grammar checkers can drive you crazy. So though a robot or A.I. bot might be able to come up with a story it might be stiff and talk and walk awkwardly like Robby the Robot. You also have to be careful that your bot doesn’t mutiny on you:

VIDEO REMOVED

Someday there might be robots or AI with enough heart to create a good story. Or maybe, ultimately the human element just can’t be replaced.

***

And now for the usual BSP:

Please check out the interview Laura Brennan, writer, producer and consultant, did with me for her podcast, where we talk about everything from Raymond Chandler and John Fante to the time I pulled a gun on the LAPD and lived to tell about it. Find it here: http://destinationmystery.com/episode-52-paul-d-marks/

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