status: I'm feeling more positive since I realized that I can salvage about thirty pages or so out of the eighty plus I've written on the earlier pre-writing draft (WIP).

music: “It's a Fight” by Three 6 Mafia

On today's #askagent, someone asked if agents check a potential client's blog before offering. Colleen Lindsay responded:

Always. And I don't want to see whining about how many times you've been rejected. A huge turn-off.

I'm always amazed at the kind of information people put on their websites/blogs and other public places. Nobody wants to work with someone who is high maintenance or crazy or just doesn't know how to act professionally. Would you put the following on your blog while job hunting?

It's been five months since I sent my résumé to fifty companies. Only ten wanted to interview me. I went to all of them, but they all said no. I hope I get a better result from the other forty.

Writing feels like “art” and therefore some may feel that they're entitled to act like artistes. That's a huge mistake. Creating a story is art. The other aspects are anything but. Treat getting published like a business and you'll have more success.

P.S. My agent read my blog before offering. I was amazed at the amount of information she was able to garner from my posts, including where I lived, my quirks, etc. So beware!

…check out Lynn Viehl's post on the reality of a NYT bestseller.

mood: upbeat; well-rested and happy
currently thrilled about: All the King's Women 1st draft
signed up for: another workshop; this time, Holly Lisle's How to Think Sideways

Yesterday went pretty well. I figured out exactly how to end the story, so I'm feeling quite pleased. :)

So here's yesterday's progress:

I want to address one of the points brought up re: Pre-Published v. Unpublished because I got quite a few comments / messages on MySpace.

I'm not against being positive or wanting to reaffirm one's dedication to one's dream. If your goal is to become published, good for you. But…!

If you want to be published, you need to understand how publishing works and present yourself professionally. Misusing terms and misrepresenting yourself do not help your cause.

There are many people who want to feel good, feel validated, feel warm and fuzzy, etc. etc. But it's all about feel, feel, feel.

Forget feel for a moment. Put on your thinking cap and think. Imagine you're an industry professional. Let's say…an agent. And someone misrepresent their publishing credit / status. Even if it was born out of ignorance or desire to feel good, wouldn't you be annoyed that you wasted your time googling the writer's name to see what that person has published?

IMHO, most professionals want to work with someone who understands how business works. Someone who's done their homework. And when you're putting yourself out there as a professional, it's not the time to feel, but to think.

mood: excellent
cooked: spicy chicken & veggie soup, sweet & spicy shrimp pineapple stir-fry, Cajun potatoes
just watched: You Don't Mess with the Zohan

No writing progress today since today's my official day off. I'm still trying to not write at least two days out of a week, unless I absolutely must (translation: contractual obligations, which I don't have at this point). I'm itching to write a scene, but I must calmly wait. Oi…!

Onto to the real meat of today's post —

I've blogged about it before elsewhere, but decided to repost it since I saw another writer misuse the term “pre-published”.

I hope people would just stop using the term “pre-published” to describe their “unpublished” status. So many unpublished writers use it, like it somehow makes them more special or something to call themselves “pre-published”.

Pre-published is a very specific word describing a very specific situation in publishing. Nephele Tempest, a literary agent, explains:

Pre-published implies that an author has sold a book, but it hasn't actually hit the shelves yet.

I don't understand why people think that calling themselves “pre-published” when they're really “unpublished” is affirming and positive.

Do you call your friends on diet “pre-thin”? Do you call your single friends “pre-wives” or “pre-husbands”? Do you call people with cancer or other terminal illnesses “pre-dead”?

Surely not.

Calling yourself pre-published when you're not only makes you sound pretentious, ignorant and/or worse, foolish, like you don't know what the word really means and/or use it anyway to sound “cool”.

Diana Fox wrote an interesting post on agents with day jobs. You should all go read it. It's very illuminating.

Something else to consider in addition to what she's written:

Agents only make 15% of what you make. Since publishing pays authors very very little and agents take 15% of that very very little pay, do the math.

Furthermore, I think it was Donald Maass who said that it's extremely stressful when a client quits his day job too soon and begs his agent to sell anything so he doesn't have to get a job that gives him steady paychecks. Unfortunately the client is too depressed and/or worried about money that he can't produce his best work, and his agent is reluctant to shop substandard projects.

Now reverse the above situation. Imagine you have an agent who quit his steady paycheck job too soon. He realizes that he can't survive in the commissions he makes, so he tells his clients to pump out books faster so he can start shopping projects around, hoping to get commissions faster even though the client projects could've benefited from an extra month of revision. Or worse, he may get tempted by the client money and embezzle. (Desperation can make people do stuff that they would never dream of doing otherwise.)

I'd rather have an agent with a day job who doesn't pressure me to write faster than I'm comfortable with and / or doesn't get tempted into doing anything questionable / unethical.

…check out this post by Andrew Wheeler. Some of the most interesting parts include:

By the way: that's what it's called when your book isn't picked up by a particular bookseller. Your book is “a skip,” and they have “skipped” you.

…bookstores are businesses, not public conveniences. No store has the responsibility to carry every book published — although, to be honest, that's a straw-man argument, since no one is asking for that. (They're just wishing that their books, the books they like, and the books by their friends be spared the chopping block.) I market books for a living, so I can tell you an unpleasant truth: the order for any book, from any account, starts at zero. The publisher's sales rep walks in the door with tipsheets and covers, past sales figures and promotional plans, to convince that bookseller's buyer to buy that book. In many categories — SFF is still one of them — the chain buyers say “yes” the overwhelming majority of the time. But not all the time. Sometimes, that buyer is not convinced, and the order stays at zero.

I should also point out that chainstore buyers have budgets; they don't have an infinite amount of money to play with. They have to buy books for all of the stores in the chain, in their category, given the money they have available — this is called “open to buy,” and varies depending on recent sales, returns, and what else is publishing that month. Like any other budget, I'm sure buyers start with the most important things — the big books that month — and work their way down the list. If the money runs out before they hit the bottom, that's it.

Let's talk specifics. Frost's Lord Tophet was skipped because his previous book (the one Lord Tophet is the second half of), Shadowbridge, didn't sell well enough.

…

Frost points out that Shadowbridge “received glowing reviews and went back to print twice in its first six months.” But neither of those things, sadly, mean anything on their own. Lots of books are glowingly reviewed and don't sell — ask the literary writers selling 1,500 copies of their first novels — and reprinting twice in six months can just mean that the first printing was tiny. What I can say: Shadowbridge sold less than 2,500 copies, as a $14.00 trade paperback, across all reporting sales outlets (which include Borders, B&N, Amazon, and others), since the beginning of this year. Of those, almost 2000 were sold at the “Retailer” level, which includes Borders, B&N, and other brick-and-mortar stores. If those were sold evenly between B&N and Borders superstores, and nowhere else, each superstore sold a little over a copy and a half.

Pat Cadigan all but called for a boycott of Borders in her post. Even allowing for the effect of anger, and the tendency of blog posts to be overly extreme and rabble-rousing, I can't see that this would be a good idea. Even if it had a noticeable effect — and that's a big “if” — getting SFF readers to move their business away from Borders is exceptionally unlikely to get Borders to start stocking SFF in more depth. Rather the reverse, actually. If Cadigan wants Borders to cut back on SFF, she has an excellent plan. If not, not.