This great picture is my very first book signing. (Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s first signing as well.) This is right after Writers of the Future Volume #1 came out. It is in front of a mall store in Moscow, Idaho.

Seated from left to right is Lori Anne White (who was in WotF#2), me, and Algis Budrys, the editor and author of many classics in science fiction. Standing is Nina Kiriki Hoffman, also in #1.

AJ was staying in my old bookstore on this trip. (I had sold the bookstore a year before, but AJ was also friends with the woman I sold it to.) I lived in an apartment about a block away from the store (I was single after the fire), Nina lived over the bookstore, and Lori lived a few blocks in the other direction. AJ would come into town, stay for a week, and his visits were always a blast, and a huge learning experience. AJ is one of the reasons I do these blogs and the workshops. I can’t pay him back since he has left us, but I can pay forward as he did.

I had not met Kris yet. And the first Writers of the Future workshop would not happen for another six months or so.

This was my first ever book signing and not one person besides a few friends bought a book. Not one. Great learning experience, watching people walk by in the mall and stare at the idiots sitting at the table. Sure gave me a quick learning of how real life works in publishing.

Also note, if you can see the books on the table, there were a few copies of The Clarion Awards edited by Damon Knight on the table, since that was my first published story along with a story from Nina and Lucius Shepard’s first published short story. Nina’s first story was in Asimov’s, her second Clarion Awards, her third WotF. My third, also out at the time, was in OUI Magazine, but I figured no point in having that there. (grin)

Laura Resnick wrote a fantastic article today about the difference between self-publishing, regular publishing, and vanity press. Fantastically clear and concise and anyone interested in writing and publishing should read it.

She talks directly to new writers in the post, not to professionals, so keep that in mind. There are reasons that professional writers self publish at times, but that’s another long post and not the topic of her post. For beginning writers, she lays it out very, very clearly. Read it. There may come a point when you are very happy you did.

And pay special attention to the paragraph on practice. That alone is worth the read.

http://www.ninc.com/blog/index.php/archives/publishing-printing-or-scam

Cheers, Dean

Folks, if you are interested in writing fiction, and are not following Michael Stackpole’s web site and his posts, start now, and spend some time going back over his older posts.

The last couple posts he’s been talking about a writer getting better, or not getting better as the case might be. Great stuff.

Go now, check it out. http://www.michaelastackpole.com/

Cheers, Dean

I had a wonderful lunch today with a fantastic group of published novelists. Great fun, great writing talk, great people in general. I can’t begin to tell you how lucky I feel every time I get to attend a lunch like today.

But on the way home, I got asking myself one simple question: How did we get here?

Part of the conversation today was about agents, as it is with any group of published writers these days. This last weekend, I spent exactly three hours at OryCon SF Convention in Portland, Oregon, and ended up hearing horror stories about two different agents, and then I went to a book signing and ended up hearing another horror story about yet another agent there.

In two weeks, I have heard exactly five horror stories about how agents have hurt a writer’s career. So my question yet again: How did we, as writers, get here?

Sure, all through time, all through all jobs and professions, employees can really hurt a business. Not saying that isn’t normal. But in writing, it’s just become excessive.

And worst yet, the writers, as the bosses, let these agent employees stop them, hurt their career, slow down their work, and sometimes drive them completely out of business. One story last weekend was about an agent flat stealing from a writer, another story last weekend was how an agent refused to mail out a writer’s book for two years. And so on.

One story right after another about an agent hurting a writer’s career, and the writer knows better, yet has let them.

So, once again, my question, how did we get here? How did writers let agents get in control of anything? As a group, are we really that stupid? That fearful? That much buried in the myths built up around agents? Seems all the evidence points to the fact that we are.

So, even though I have covered this topic a couple times in past posts in different ways, I want to line out exactly what an agent does. And doesn’t do.

WHAT AN AGENT DOES

1) An agent negotiates a book deal with a publisher after an offer has been made. This allows the editor and the writer to remain friendly and working to make a good product while the agent does the nasty stuff. But in the end, the writer still signs the contract. So, an agent is just a voice box for what the writer wants in a negotiation.

2) An agent can sometimes, if the situation is correct, work one publisher against another in a negotiation. Again, writers makes the decisions, but an agent does the heavy lifting on setting this sort of thing up.

3) Agent gets the books out to other agents in other countries and to Hollywood. With the internet, this is becoming less and less important, but an agent is needed in the mix somewhere along the way to negotiate the contract with an overseas publisher when an offer is made.

4) Agent chases the money, keeps the publisher following the agreed contract.

That’s it. Anything out of those for major areas and you, the writer, are letting an agent have too much power in your life and your livelihood.

WHAT AN AGENT DOES NOT DO

1) Agents do NOT edit books. They don’t ask you to rewrite a book, they don’t ask you to fix a book. If they knew how to write, they would be doing it and making the 85% instead of the 15%. (Folks, if they don’t like your book, find an agent who will like it as you wrote it.)

2) Agents do NOT hold a book you want sent to a certain publisher. Agents have no control over where a book goes or doesn’t go. That is up to the writer, and the moment you give that control over to an agent, you are asking for trouble and rejections. You know your book better than anyone else, and it is frighteningly easy these days to do market research. Pick your own editors, your own houses to send your book to. Take control of the submission process and then direct your employee. (Again, if the employee says no, find an employee who will follow your directions.)

3) Agents do NOT tell you when a book has no hope. Just because it has five or ten rejections doesn’t mean your agent has the right to tell you to put it away. History of publishing has hundreds and hundreds of stories of major bestsellers and classics getting rejected upwards of 50 or more times before selling and hitting it big. Five or ten rejections doesn’t mean your book doesn’t work, it means your agent is lazy.

4) Agents do NOT help you plan a career. They have no right to tell you to slow down, to change a habit, to write under another name or not write under another name. The hard truth is those are your decisions and you have to make them for what works for you. The moment you let marketing and agents and outside voices, like those of your workshop, into your art, you are doomed. The frightening truth is that most agents don’t have a clue what it is like to be a writer, or even what happens in a writer’s life. Get advice from other writers farther down the road than you are. Not some agent.

I hope you can keep the above points in mind, but to be honest, it still won’t help you much with decisions about agents. I know, I was at lunch today with nine of the smartest novelists in the business and the myths still kept coming up in all the agent discussions. I had one of the myths hit me this week as well and took me three days to get past it, three lost writing days because I let something from an agent into my office that didn’t belong.

Agents are important in this business to work for writers and help them with contracts and business. But they are nothing more than an employee. They do not know how to write, and they suck at marketing compared to you, because you know your own book better than anyone.

Keep the control in your own hands, find an agent who can work for you.

And I guess I did finally answer my own question. How did we get here?

Answer: We lost sight that there were choices, that we were in control, and that agents work for us, not the other way around.

Remember that and it will help you keep moving ahead when everyone else is falling by the wayside, listening to their agents thoughts on rewriting, believing their employees are gods.

Cheers, Dean

I’m sitting at my internet computer in my office, staring out over the Pacific Ocean, watching the huge waves left from yesterday’s big wind storm. As far as storms go here on the Oregon Coast, it wasn’t that bad for us.

What’s not bad in a storm with winds gusting over 90 mph? The power only went off for a short time and then just dimmed a few dozen times as the evening went on, so both Kris and I got a lot of work done. With the wind really pounding, we finally gave up the writing at midnight and retreated to watch the new Castle.

Kris’s new office is on the north side of the building, away from the wind, so her office remained pretty quiet. My office overlooks the ocean and my window was getting pounded by the rain and top winds, since we live on the top of a hill. It got noisy at times, I’ll tell you.

This morning, the damage was light around our compound. We lost the tops of three trees that came down across the driveway, and it took me some exercise to clear the driveway so we could get out for lunch. But today turned sunny and beautiful. Not a day for a walk on the beach, though. Really high tides and huge surf, cresting over 30 feet. Stunning to watch from a distance.

Last night during the storm I got up the start of a new web site for a pen name I just mailed a novel off under. The book hasn’t sold, but I figured I might as well start the site and have it ready. If you want to take a look, it’s Dee W. Schofield and I even put up a blurb I wrote for the book under that name. A science fiction romance called Subway Martians. I’ll shout if it sells. I have a second book written under that pen name I’ll be mailing out shortly as well. When I do, I’ll put up a sample chapter of the book on that sight.

Now, the news is telling us that a second storm is headed our way, as bad if not worse than the one yesterday. It’s due on Thursday. We can only hope they are wrong.

Is it worth living here overlooking the wild Pacific Ocean? Right now, the sky is bright pink, the huge waves pink with the sunset colors. Yeah, it’s worth it, even with the high winds in November every year.

The following picture is out my window, taken from my writing desk, just after I moved into this office, one beautiful night this last summer. The white cat is Walter White Kitty, a lost cat I rescued about a week before this photo and who now stays right with me most of the time. (He’s on my lap as I type this, actually.) Today, the colors are pink, not orange as in the picture, and the waves huge instead of calm as in the picture. But you get the idea.

Cheers, Dean

Scott William Carter was one of the writers at this last weekend event. Actually, he was the instructor, leading all us newbies through a ton of details on how to do web sites, Kindle editions of our stories, and so on. A fantastic day and I want to publicly thank Scott for the great work. Far above the call of duty. My poor old brain hurt, I learned so much.

Also, from that weekend, Scott got thinking about how much a writer should be online and he just finished and put up a great post, with graphics and everything. I agree with him completely. In the last year I’ve climbed up his scale from zero to maybe three or four, working to keep this all in moderation but yet use all these great new tools.

So go read Scott’s post since you are here, reading this, and clearly spend some time online. It will help give you some perspective on all this stuff.

Great post, Scott. And thanks for the great day of internet learning.

Cheers, Dean

Well, maybe not of the minds, but of the writers. Tomorrow about 10 professional writers are getting together here in a big suite at a local hotel and brainstorming a ton of different stuff about this great new world of publishing online we are living in.

All of us attending have figured out the standard older ways of publishing through New York, and are making a go of that, but over the last few years so much has changed and none of us want to be left behind. Besides, there is some money to be made publishing online and outside of New York at times.

Some of those attending are farther down the road in some areas than others when it comes to web sites, online publishing, epublishing, Kindle publishing, and POD publishing. So we’re going to combine knowledge.

It should be a blast.

I hope to make some changes here over the next few weeks spurred directly from this meeting. I do plan on putting up some original fiction here, and a few books serialized. So stay tuned for fallout of what I am sure will be a really fun and educational day for this old guy.

As for the writing side of things now that the big move is over, I had a pretty good week last week. Started and wrote and finished and mailed a short story called “Sighed the Snake” to Asimov’s. (Yes, same title as the Al Wilson song. I listen to too much 60’s music.)  I also wrote a proposal and added in some sample chapters from a novel called THE SLOTS OF SATURN that I have finished, and got that package off to six editors. It’s a Poker Boy novel, for those of you who have read some of my Poker Boy short stories. I’ll put one up here on this site at some point in the next month for those who haven’t.

So far this week I’ve finished some sample chapters and have a proposal ready to mail out for a book called MARTIAN LOVERS written under a pen name I’ll tell you all after it sells. A very strange and I hope funny paranormal romance.

What’s up for next week besides the changes from this meeting tomorrow? I have a new post in the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing coming up. This post is about Books as Events. I figured it was a good time to bash at that myth since this is the month so many people set out to write a book in a month. Stay tuned.

Cheers, Dean

This topic post is the first for me of what many writers do on their sites, which is talk about books they are reading. I will move these posts in a week or so to a static page so that they can remain there in order.

I guess, a better way to describe this topic is recommended reading, but to be honest, many of the books I read and like are strange books, and I wouldn’t recommend them for everyone. But I won’t talk about a book I don’t like. No point, life is too short.

I just finished reading tonight a book called MASSACRED FOR GOLD by R. Gregory Nokes. This is a nonfiction reporting of Mr. Nokes’ attempts to discover the truth behind a massacre of Chinese on the Oregon side of the Snake River in Hell’s Canyon. More than 30 Chinese miners were killed and no one was ever caught or paid any price for the crime. Again, this is Nokes’ personal journey to research this event from 1887.

Since I come from pioneer stock in Idaho and Oregon, I found this book a fascinating look into the history of the Northwest. And also a clear, eye-opening account of relations between whites and Chinese in the West. For anyone fascinated by history of this country, told in a very personal way, I’d suggest this book.

MASSACRED FOR GOLD by R. Gregory Nokes. Oregon State University Press. 2009. For ordering information, click on the picture to go to Amazon.com.

Today, I moved the last of the books. Never thought I would ever say that.

Kris and I are going from three buildings to one very large building, which means that everything in the other two buildings needed to be moved into the one building, which meant that everything in the big building needed to be shifted to fit better. After 13 years in the three buildings, we just got tired of the vastness of the place, I got tired of the upkeep, and we both got very, very tired of being anchored to this compound.

So, now, after a few more hours of work this weekend, we are down to one large house as most normal humans and the other two buildings will be going away on Monday. And I can’t begin to tell you have relieved I am. And how much I am enjoying my new office, which looks out over the Pacific Ocean just as my last office did, only this one is actually much more comfortable. As I write this, the huge waves from yesterday’s storm are crashing on the beach and a cool breeze is blowing in through the slightly open window. Doesn’t come much better.

Kris asked how many books we had and I didn’t want to even think about it until they were all moved, since I moved them all, either from the other two buildings, or shifting them inside this house. Now, as I take new pictures for the insurance, I have a basic answer. In this house we have just over 100,000 comic books and right at 100,000 books. The comic books take up a lot less room, but they still fill, in boxes, most of two bedrooms.

The books cover every wall in this twelve bedroom home. Every wall.

Our nonfiction library, which consists of around 8,000 hardback reference books, fills two bedrooms with library shelves. The thousands of digests (full runs of many major digests, like Astounding/Analog, F&SF, Amazing, IF, Hitchcocks, Queen, and so on) fill the four walls of one huge bedroom. One large room with library shelves coming out into the room from all four walls is used just for Kris’s extra copies of her books. My extra copies are in a storage unit. The mystery collection fills a huge room, the paperbacks fill hallways and parts of another room, and so on and so on. It is a twelve bedroom house after all.

At 100,000 copies, it’s more books than many small town libraries. Ah, the life of two writers who can’t seem to pass up a book.

So finally, after working on this since February, this is almost over. Today, I replanted nine trees to make a natural barrier between the big building and the other two. (A 59 year old man should not be replanting six-foot pine trees. At least my back is telling me that now.) I have about four more hours tomorrow of last minute clean-up to get the two buildings finally cleaned out.

I can’t begin to tell you all how happy I will be getting back to just writing and running.  And reading. Picking up one book at a time.

Cheers, Dean

Way back last December, I did a number of posts about motivation, and then in January started a page here on this web site under the label “Streaks.” Then, at the beginning of every month (with a few monthly glitches on my part) I recorded the writing streaks people were reporting.

Numbers said they were starting and never did, a number of streaks fell to the retired side of things (see the rules at the bottom of the Streak Page), but a number of people have been reporting regularly around the first of the month for almost a year now.

That’s a stunning amount of consistency in writing, and I admire it a great deal, since I have been unable to be anything but a sprint writer over the years. Those of you who can hit regular page counts day in and day out are my heroes.

One writer, who has sold numbers of novels to different publishers, came to one of our master classes just over six years ago and left with the idea to start a writing streak, producing two pages per day without a day off. Her name is Pati Nagle and as of this month she has not missed a day for 2,222 days in a row. That means writing on Christmas, birthday, sick days, and travel days. For over six years.

Stunning, just flat stunning.

There is a real reason she is selling novels regularly. Check out her new book and web site at Pati Nagle.

Congratulations, Pati, and everyone else who has continued streaks this year. As I say with each response: Keep firing! You people are my writing heroes.

Cheers, Dean