It was supposed to have been published for both Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook several weeks ago, during my flurry of conversion and publishing, and it certainly got converted to both formats, but it seems that the actual publishing part of that got overlooked by someone who shall remain nameless. That would be, of course, the caveman who is in charge of publishing things around here – bald-headed, bearded, gaining in girth, and forever nameless!

Ahem. Moving on. Yes.

To punish the back office (that would be the aforementioned caveman) the front office (also bald, bearded, and too big around, but never-to-be-confused-with-the-other-caveman at all) has decided to make A Place to Die available until Christmas, 2011, for just ninety-nine cents.

Yes, you read that right. 99¢ for the next two months!

For a novel! That’ll teach that nasty caveman.

"Who are you, that you should forget the Lord your maker, who has stretched forth the heavens and laid the foundations of the Earth?"

Do you believe in God, if you believe he won’t answer your prayers for yourself, but that he may, in fact, answer your desperate pleas for the one you loved so much and couldn’t help? Do you believe in God, if you believe he saved your life, but didn’t give you a reason to live? Do you believe in God, if you believe he let your fiancée drown?

When Matt lost his job hours before he was to propose to the girl of his dreams, when he lost her at the bottom of a river an hour after she said yes anyway, he knew that God was the God of others, and not of him. The only thing God’s plan for the world needed from him was his death.

So he set out to find a place to die.

A Place to Die is a dark, edgy, Christian novel about where and how we die in order to live.

Buy it for just 99¢ (regular price will be $4.99) for Amazon Kindle and B&N Nook.

Buy it in paperback for $11.95 from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other sources.

One of the fundamental problems with the publishing world today is the very existence of the query system. It’s true that this is only one of many problems, and that fixing it would not magically change the current landscape into something I would want to play in, but it would be an excellent first step.

My argument is that writing a query is nothing at all like writing a novel. My evidence includes, but is not limited to, the fact that so many lists of titles circulate through the ether with “This title was rejected seventeen times!” and “That title was rejected by every publisher in the UK!” The agents and editors and deluded writers who circulate these lists think, strangely, that they are evidence that “The systems works! You just have to give it time!” I think they are far more powerful evidence to the contrary.

• If the value of the novel can be determined from the value of the query, then how can one of them fail while the other is successful?
• By delaying the success of the novel, the system clearly has failed the author.
• If the novel, when it finally came out, was successful (regardless of how you measure success), then the system clearly has failed the people who rejected it.

But now we have an agent’s invaluable insight into the magic of this process.

From an article in the Wall Street Journal, interviewing literary “superagent” Andrew Wylie:

We try to avoid people who can’t write. You can usually spot them from the first sentence, or from the cover letter. It’s a little like sitting in the audience at Carnegie Hall and watching someone walk up to a piano. If you’re trained, you can tell the difference between someone who knows how to play and someone who doesn’t.

The ability to determine whether or not you can write a novel by assessing whether or not you can write a 250-word query letter pales by comparison to the awe-inducing skill revealed by this quote. Why, if you’ve been trained, if you’ve been trained, you can determine how well a person can play the piano by watching them walk!

If you’ve been trained, you don’t need to listen to them play.

If you’ve been trained, you can tell before they even get to the bench whether or not they’re going to waste your time.

It’s no wonder these superhumans can determine the value of your novel from your ability to perform an almost completely unrelated task. Why, they can tell if you can play the piano by watching you walk!

Now all I have to do is figure out what all of those supernovel rejections actually mean.

Here’s a novel none of them ever had a chance to reject.

If you don’t love it, I’ll give you your money back!

That’s the novel every author supposedly has in a trunk somewhere, or the deepest, darkest bottom of a desk drawer. It’s the one that never got accepted, and never should have, and after about title #3 or so, the author begins to hope that it never sees print. What would happen if I died, and that book got published? I’d be spinning in my grave so fast it would slow the spin of the Earth and reverse time!

Well, here’s a little secret about the POD process that nobody ever told you:

You’re going to have a trunk POD, except, like the truth, it’s out there.

Unless you learned the secret arcana of cover design and page layout somewhere where there was a more experienced mind to say “Um.. No.” then you’re going to have to go through the process. You’re going to have to put a book out there. And yes, you’ll make a half-dozen changes before you approve a version, but guess what? You do another book, and another and another, and that first one is going to begin to look, um… shabby. You’re going to begin to see it as the poor cousin who came to Christmas dinner and never went home. You’re going to hope no one buys it.

Yes, you can change the cover, change the page design, change this and that as you go on, as you learn more, but that gets expensive and it confuses the market. My first book out had a bad cover. I mean ugly. [AUDIENCE CALLS OUT] “How ugly was it?” You could stomp that cover in a bowl of dough and make gorilla-butt cookies, is how ugly it was. I changed the cover, but the pages are still ugly.

Some day, I tell myself. Some day. But here’s the funny thing – no one has ever said to me “Hey, dude, that first cover? Totally tossed my gorilla-butt cookies, man!” They didn’t read the cover. They didn’t buy the cover. They don’t lie on their beds and stare at the ceiling after they finish the book and think about the cover. And had I never put that first book out there, I never would have gotten to where I am, and I kinda like where I am.

*****************************

I’ve never been happy with the cover, and I’ve been pottering away at it in odd moments for several months. Here it is in all its glory:

Doesn’t the sun always come up again?

Dear Auntie May,
    We had this thing we had to do at school, a writing assignment, where we had fifteen minutes to write about “The Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Seen,” which is pretty stupid if you ask me. Most of them wrote about “The Most Important Thing I Ever Saw Was When I Saw the Mayor,” or “The Important Night That I Saw Britney Spears in Concert!” I wrote about watching the sun melt into the ocean at Ocean Shores, about how, in those last few moments, it melts into liquid gold on the waves, and skitters away, circling around behind you for tomorrow’s sunrise, and then I had to read it, and when I was done, there was this silence for a few seconds.
    “Can you really look out over the ocean and not see land at all?” this boy dressed all in black asked me, and I think they’d think I was crazy if I told them that what’s really weird is looking out over the land and not seeing ocean at all.

Jillian has lost her mother, her home, her favorite aunt, and every friend she’s ever known. Now she’s found Royal. But is he the counter-weight that will help her regain her balance, or is he the anchor that will drag her under forever? Is he the most perfect man ever made, or is he a serial killer with a grudge?

Read the first 16 pages…

Click here to order Jillian’s Gold (424 pages, $14.95)

(The price has been reduced $2.00!)

It has become extremely commonplace to hear people say that you just have to learn to take rejection, or that you have to be willing to be judged, or that the agents know better what will sell and what won’t, and on and on and on. All of this ignores one simple, basic fact: I don’t write for agents.

I don’t care whether one agent or another likes the book. I don’t care whether one publisher does or doesn’t think it “deserves” to be published. One thing you have to learn as a writer is to write for your own market, and my market is neither agents nor publishers. My market is readers.

There are people all over the world who have read my books and taken the time to contact me and tell me that they enjoyed them. I’ve heard from readers in India, Australia, England, and South Africa, as well as the United States, where I live and write, so I must be doing something right. I have no doubt that there are people who have begun one or another of my books and put it down half a dozen pages into it. Fine. So be it. There isn’t enough time in life to read all of the books you do like, so if you don’t like mine, please don’t waste your time on it. I’m a big boy. I can take it. But the fact that you didn’t like it says nothing much at all about my book. It simply says that what I wrote isn’t what you want to read.

I’ve been accused of painting the entire publishing industry with a rather broad brush that has been dipped in the pot of greed-colored paint, that I think the fact that they need to make a profit makes them evil. Not at all. All I have ever said is that the fact that they need to make a profit from a business plan that is centered on the blockbuster decouples them from the value of the book as an item to be read and enjoyed by those who will. They want to sell a copy of the book to every person on Earth, with no regard one way or the other for whether or not those copies actually get read, while I want to sell a copy of each of my books to those who will read and enjoy them, without any regard one way or the other for whether or not the rest of the people on Earth ever get a copy. Their business model will not allow them to publish a book with that goal, and so they do not attempt to do so.

Nor is it true that I turned to self-publishing after being rejected by the traditional publishing industry because my book wasn’t good enough. How do I know this? Very simple: No one in “the publishing industry” has ever read any part of any one of my books. At least not that I know of. It is true that I was turned down or ignored by all of the thirty-one agents to whom I sent queries for the first book I attempted to publish, but since not a single one of those queries included a single sample page (following the submission guidelines of the agents involved), it would be a stretch of the imagination to say that the rejections had anything to do with the book in question, a stretch even my well-exercised imagination can’t make.

The second step down the wrong path for the argument that begins “You just need to be patient, you just need to learn to take criticism, you just need to learn to take rejection…” is the tired old list of “This famous author was rejected 72 times for this famous book, and that famous author was rejected fifty-seven times for this other famous book, and so-and-so over there wasn’t even famous at all in his lifetime, so you just need to…” blah blah blah, ad nauseum. These lists circulate on the internet like popcorn at a slumber party, and all they do is serve to illustrate very well a point that I think too many people miss: These lists are prima facie evidence of the failure of the publishing system.

We’re told in one breath that we need to learn to be patient, that we need to learn to write the best novel we can, and that when we are good enough, we will be published. Don’t try to take shortcuts. Don’t jump the rails. Wait your turn. You’ll get there. Then we’re told in the next breath that all of these famous books were rejected over and over, that all of these famous authors were rejected over and over, that some people never get widely read at all in their own lifetimes, and appreciation only comes to them after death.

Well, I say this: Every single time a book is accepted, published and loved that was ever rejected before, that is proof of my point. The publishing industry is so out of touch with the needs of writers and authors alike that it points to its own plentiful failures as proof of its success.

Publishers need to make a profit. Of course they do. Every single thing we undertake in this life needs to be profitable, in one way or another, and for business ventures, the measure of profitability is pretty simple: do you have more money afterward than you did before? But the successful publishers of the future are going to be, as Steve Jordan said in his comment on my guest post at Teleread (actually a guest post at An American Editor, reposted to Teleread, where Mr Jordan made his comment) “an entity that profits off of authors,” rather than “an entity that profits off of book sales.” (Sorry I took so many words to say what he said so succinctly and clearly. This is why I write a great novel, and can’t write a query for it to save my life.")

To those who say that “legitimate” publication is some sort of holy grail that you must sacrifice all else to pursue, all I can say is this: In less than three years of serious effort, I have published five novels and a book of novellas, all of which have been read by real readers, out there in the real world, most of which have been reviewed online somewhere or another (all favorably), and none of which had to pass any kind of test held up by the gatekeepers of the old dynasty.

So the next time you hear someone say that self-publishing is some sort of tacky, illegitimate, shameful shortcutting of the proper process, simply ask them what the goal of the process is, because I say that if the goal of the process is to be read, then put the book in the hands of a reader.

And to those who would stand between me and my readers, all I can say is ”Get out of my way!”

I read the bridge advice columns in newspapers.

Don’t misunderstand – I don’t play bridge. I’ve never played. My closest friend for thirty-five years now (except for my wife, of course) does play bridge, and he’s tried to explain the game to me from time to time, but when I read the advice columns in the paper, I have no idea what they’re saying. None at all. “North threw an ace to dummy’s spades, then cashed all his hearts. He ruffed the club and …” He did what to the who? It’s like a foreign language.

Reading Ghost Notes left me with the same feeling.

There’s a lot about music that I don’t understand. I know what I like and what I don’t like, and beyond that I let it all slide. Out of six children, four of them have been heavily involved with music, and they sit around when time and space weave their paths back together for a while, and they talk that foreign language like it makes sense. I guess they get it from their mother.

The jam sessions and sets and gigs in this book, by shining light in a direction I can’t follow, gave it a depth and a life it might not have had otherwise, bringing back those feelings again.

But reading this novel left me with something else, too.

Something I do understand, something I’ve experienced again and again and again within the pages of books. That total weightlessness, that floating, the buoyancy of all great writing. Make no mistake: this is great writing. Every wrong turn a character made left me wanting to shout into the book, to tell him “No, not that way! Don’t do that thing! Do the other!” Every person in this book was someone you know, someone who lives right down the street from you, someone you used to work with. And every one of them was someone you’d never met.

So go meet them. Read this book.

Ghost Notes, by Art Edwards (@artedwardsIII)

Defunct Press, 2008, 212 pages

“The nail that rises up will be hammered down.”

–Japanese proverb

In many ways, this is a hard book to talk about.

Partly, it’s hard to talk about because it’s so easy to read. I go back to the book to get a quote and I get swept up in the sheer lyrical poetry of it, and the next thing I know, the time I’ve allotted for working on this review is gone, and I’ve written nothing.

My son,

You are only a child as I write these words, far too young to understand, but the day will come when I hope you will read them. It is in my mind, as I begin this account and look sadly on the days that fade behind me, that these are truly the Latter Days of the Law. This country that men still call the Land of the Gods is split in war; there is no loyalty between servant and lord, no regard between son and father, no bond between husband and wife.

Partly, it’s hard to talk about, because for such an exquisite story, it’s a rather mundane story. It’s the story of a reluctant man who went to war and came back changed forever, and we’ve all read that story before, haven’t we? Well, yes… and, uh, no. Not written like this one is, you haven’t.

In the end I made my decision by doing nothing. I cannot say how many hours I sat in the clearing, my bare knife by my side. I was waiting, I suppose, for that moment of fierce devotion that would drive me to act. The moment never came. I began to grow hungry, and I felt the cold touch of the mountains on my skin, and I knew that my chance to be a dutiful son had passed.

Partly, it’s hard to talk about because Mr Doggett set himself a rather harsh task when he chose Watanabe Kenjiro as his protagonist. When you set out to write a novel, it’s nice if your protagonist can tell the reader some of the things you need to get across, and yet Watanabe is so wrapped up in his own misery that I honestly think he never did see the true picture of what was happening around him. One mark of a gifted author is the ability to tell the reader much more of what is going on in the story than the characters see, especially when writing in first person, and Mr Doggett not only achieves this goal, but he makes it look pretty easy.

I was not happy with our situation, but I trusted him without reservation, as if I were a child. But I was not a child. Amaya understood these things; I mistook her sadness for fear.

Ghost of Iga is the first-person record of Watanabe’s life from his mid-childhood to his adult years. Although this was a period of near-constant war, and although it is, in many ways, the story of that war, nonetheless Watanabe tells us his unique, personal view of the events of that war, or rather, of the events as he saw them. Pursued by the ghosts of his dead brother, his mother and his nurse, his warrior father, persecuted by the very armor and weapons he must now trust his life to, he sets out into the battles believing only in death, and never quite finding it. The moment never came. Or, perhaps, it came and slipped past him in the dark, as so many moments do for each of us.

This is, of course, not a perfect book, but the flaws it displays are formatting errors, not errors of writing. There are widows scattered through the book, and an occasional line was set with a hard return, resulting in a line feed less than halfway across the page, but there is nothing that can be said against the writing itself.

This is an excellent book, and I strongly encourage you to read it.

You can also read D. Hamilton Doggett’s excellent blog, Doggerel, and he is on Twitter as @doggerelblogrel.

Ghost of Iga, by D. Hamilton Doggett, published 2009, 181 pages, 5 1/2” x 8 1/2” perfect-bound $12.95
(also available as a digital download)

Sometimes the deepest secrets are hidden behind the thinnest veils.

The first five chapters of Light Always Changes are up now. If you’re getting impatient, you can buy the book here.

introduction
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five

The first four chapters of Light Always Changes are up now. If you’re getting impatient, you can buy the book here.

introduction
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four

I had an interesting discussion some time back with another self-publisher. Not a fiction author, to the best of my knowledge; he was writing cookbooks, but that doesn’t really change anything. I told him I had written nine novellas, and that I liked the form quite a bit. He said, “Yeah, that eighty-to-one-hundred-thousand-word range, that’s nice because you have enough room to expand on an idea, but you’re not writing a full-length novel.” It turned out that he felt anything under 80,000 words is a short story.

Now, I admit that a couple of my novellas are shortish, because I tend to write short, period, but the shortest one of the bunch comes to over thirty pages, and that’s a pretty long short story, while the longest is only about eighty pages, certainly not a novel. That’s why I publish them in books of four.

So here are my questions:

• What are the break-points?
• What’s a short story?
• What’s a novella?
• Is the term “novelette” as ugly to you as it is to me, and if you use it, what does it mean?
• How short can a novel be?
• How long can a novel be?

I know, there are a bunch of places online that have lists of such terms, and I was going to list some links here, but I decided to let you do your own research, or post your answers based on what you believe now with no additional research. Please do, however, feel free to support your beliefs with evidence and sources.

Personally, I’m betting no consensus emerges.