Each workshop is 6 weeks long and is limited to twelve people. (Again, it will take you about four hours per week to do each of these.) These are the starting dates of upcoming workshops.
All have openings at the moment. For sign-up and more information about each workshop, click the Online Workshop tab at the top of the page.
Starting June
Class #17… June 3rd … Cliffhangers
Class #18… June 4th … Pitches and Blurbs
Class #19… June 5th … Genre Structure
Class #20… June 6th … Openings
Class #21… June 7th … Idea to Story
Starting July
Class #22… July 8th … World Building
Class #23… July 9th … Plot Your Novel
Class #24… July 10th … Designing Book Covers
Class #25… July 11th … Designing Book Interiors
Class #26… July 12th … Essentials
Starting August
Class #27… August 5th … Ideas to Story
Class #28… August 6th … Openings
Class #29… August 7th … Genre Structure
Class #30… August 8th … Pitches and Blurbs
Class #31… August 9th …. Cliffhangers
Starting September
Class #32… Sept 2nd … Essentials
Class #33… Sept 3rd … Plot Your Novel
Class #34… Sept 4th … World Building
Class #35… Sept 5th … Designing Book Covers
Class #36… Sept 6th … Designing Book Interiors
Sign-up and more information under Online Workshops tab at the top of the page.
Dean, I’m wondering what your response is to this (from Spann’s post): “writers with solid marketing skills and platforms often have significant success building careers as independently-published authors.” There’s that marketing boogeyman again. I see it all over the place. It’s no wonder newbies (like me) have such a hard time believing it isn’t necessary when so many people in the industry parrot lines like that. Even though I’m a regular reader of your and Kris’s blogs and basically consider you guys my mentors, I still get caught up in the marketing thing sometimes. Of course, usually I wait until the urge passes and then go write some more fiction.
I’m wondering if I’m the only author whose eyes are starting to glaze over when any author – traditional or self-published – starts giving me advice.
What works for one person might not work for another. Or, as the old saying goes: one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
Thanks so much for linking to Susan’s post at Writers In The Storm! We all love and follow your blog and we’re honored at the shout out.
There is one more factor, which people don’t tend to look at as much, but I think young writers in particular should also consider:
What do you want to write? And where is that audience?
It’s something to think about in any choice you make in writing, not just traditional vs. indie. And academic literary writer is going to take a different direction from someone who wants to write books for young readers, who will take a different path from those who write military sf, or chick lit, or who are inventing their own genre.
So even if you are otherwise better suited as a person to traditional or indie publishing, your books and audience may be clustered in the other choice.
(Which is also by way of saying, maybe it’s best to keep all options open anyway….)
Camille, yup, just one of the many factors that each writer needs to look at for each project before deciding which choice to take.
I love having choices, but not having a set track to ride toward publishing drives many writers crazy. And I have yet to completely understand why someone says “You must do…(pick one…traditional or indie).” That cutting out of choices makes no sense at all to me. For decades writers had no real choice, yet now that we do, some writers want to stop the choices.
Silly, just silly. I love having choices. And I hated when I felt I didn’t have a choice and control over my own work. Not going back there, nope, not happening. (grin) But that does NOT mean I won’t sell to traditional publishers. That’s part of my choice.
So true. ^_^ Thanks for the link.
After being dropped by two publishers, I essentially had two choices: I could never write again, or I could indie publish. (Three choices if you include spending years approaching traditional publishers, which would be futile–no one wants someone who has been dropped *twice*.) Fortunately, I never doubted my talent. Indie publishing had worked out very well for me, and getting better with the release of every new eBook.
“no one wants someone who has been dropped *twice*”
Is that true? Granted I’m still a newb here, but I seem to recall several stories of writers (names escape me at the moment, sorry) who overcame worse black marks than that. Granted, maybe they had to use new pen names or something, but…
*shrug*
Call me starry-eyed, but it seems to me a great story is still a great story and would garner respect/desire from editors and readers no matter how many times the writer of it had “blown it” in the past.
Bettye, Michael is right, under the old system, you would have to change names and keep writing, and it would have taken some recovery time. The choice was still there, just tough. I had my career completely DEAD three different times, where no one wanted a book from me, and since I didn’t have the indie publishing choice back in those days, I fought my way through all three and kept going. Easy? Nope. Possible in those days? Yes. More difficult today? Nope, just as hard as back then.
But I do agree that right now, one of your ways back to a balance is indie publishing, and it’s a great choice and I would have taken it myself back on any of my “My Career is Dead” periods. If that choice had been available.
But I’m rather attached to my name, so changing it wouldn’t have been an option, either. I’ve done that twice, too, through marriages (although Griffin is my birth name). Took a long time to learn to sign the right name, and I always carried extra books to signings because I would usually ruin at least one by signing the wrong name!
My first publisher dumped me after 11 books.
My second publisher folded shortly after acquired a second book (never published) from me.
My third publisher dumped me after one book.
My (I -think- it was) fifth publisher dumped me between the hc and pb release of my second book for them (and never released the pb edition).
My (I -think- it was) 7th publisher folded shortly before releasing the first book they’d acquired from me.
My xxnth (I’ve lost count) publisher dumped me after one book and canceled the remaining two books on my contract.
My xxth publisher folded and disappeared a year after releasing my first book for them (I noticed this because they abruptly stopped sending me royalties and their phone was disconnected–but the book stayed in the retail market for 3 more years, paying dividens to someone who was not -me-).
I was also fired from the first book of a ghosting deal that, initially, had been anticipated as turning into a steady multi-book commitment. (But, in that instance, I was let go courteously and paid a fair kill fee.)
And a company that contracted me at very nice pay to be a launch author for a new program wound up not going ahead with the project.
I’ve never had to change my name (though I use a different name as an sf/f writer than I used as a romance writer), but I’ve had to break back into the business multiple times after publishers dumped me or folded under me, and I’ve had to recover from career crashes caused by publishers doing a bad job of publishing a title and thus dragging my sales figures down.
I wound up leaving the romance genre after 14 books and focusing full time on fantasy primarily because of the market–I always found it VERY hard to get a romance sale (and publishers had a tendency to keep dumping me), whereas my work hit the market with editors more often in fantasy (and the one time I’ve been dumped in fantasy, it was by a =romance= house that was trying to develop a fantasy imprint!).
If the self-pubishing market had been thriving back then, I’d probably have kept writing romance alongside fantasy, and just self-publishing it. I liked writing romance–I just couldn’t afford to keep writing and submitting proposal after proposal after proposal that I couldn’t sell, then finally getting under contract to places that promotly folded or dumped me. I -especially- couldn’t afford to spend time that way when my fantasy career was doing so well that trying to write romance was eventually -costing- me money by taking time away from fantasy.
Once all my backlist is finally self-published (a few more months to go), one of the things I’m seriously considering is starting with new self-publising by going back and filling in the gaps in my romance backlist: I started one trilogy that was canceled after two books, and another that was canceled after one book. In those days, that meant moving on–there was no realistic chance of finding a market for book #3 or books #2 and #3 of a canceled trilogy. But when I was prepping those novels for ebooking, I realized, you know, I’d like to finish these projects by writing and e-releasing the books that got canceled years ago.
I completely agree, Laura. Kris and I both have been dumped, dropped, or fired so many times by traditional publishers, the memory just goes. It’s part of the business. Always has been, always will be.
And Laura, I really love the idea of filling in the gaps in the backlist. We are working toward that now, and Kris has a new Smokey Dalton Nelscott novel in the planning and is working on the new Retrieval Artist novel. This is one of the wonderful advantages of indie publishing, we can give the fans the books they hoped for but that traditional publishing for one reason or another would not allow us to do.
Thanks, Laura, for two great posts. Spot on.
In fact, after writing that post, I realized I had forgotten two other houses that -also- dumped me after one book each.
Yet I’m still here and still selling to publishers. Because I am VERY persistent.
In fact, my June NINK column is entirely about the importance of perseverance, which was brought to mine because I have a book coming out this month which is ONLY coming out because of how persistent I am. I wrote the proposal for it in 1994. The first time it was published was 2005… so badly that it tanked, the contract was canceled, I was dumped, and that book went out-of-print almost immediately. I eventually managed to relaunch the series with book #2 at another house (which house agreed with me that it was a good series that had just been published badly, and that it could be rescued if handled right), but it took a lot more work (complicated anedote) to get book #1 clear of all entanglements and then, after that, into the publishing schedule at the new house… For release, at last!, next week. Nearly 18 years after I wrote the proposal for this book.
A good example of why I always cite perseverance (not talent, certainly not luck, and certainly not connections or marketing savvy) and the number one quality I’ve needed in my career and the number one reason that I’ve made more than 30 book sales.
Laura,
Spot on the money. That’s what we look for in writers to come to the workshops here. That light in their eyes that means they are not ever going to stop, no matter what. Perseverance. Plotting, character, and storytelling can be taught. You can’t teach drive and perseverance.
Thanks!
It’s not really a choice to decide to be traditionally published though, is it? We can decide if we want to SUBMIT our manuscripts to traditional publishers, but hardly any get accepted. So even if we do chose to submit our MS to a trad publisher, it’s not our choice if it’s published. Which it most likely won’t be. Unlike with self-publishing as eBooks. It just seems silly to write blog posts about making choices when one option isn’t really a choice at all.
Katya, really??? Wow, are you living under a cloud of wrong information. And trust me, as a person with over 100 traditional novels published with traditional publishers and over two hundred traditional short stories published with traditional publishers, I have no clue what you are talking about. Traditional publishing is very much a choice and still is for me and hundreds of thousands of other writers.
There is a path to both. One you work through a system of gatekeepers, the other you work to produce in some fashion your own book, become a publisher. So if your writing is good enough, it will sell indie publishing and it will be bought and thus sell traditional publishing. Two distinct choices.
You have been listening to all the bad press about traditional publishing just a little too much. Sure, it’s a tough road, but so is indie publishing. (Unless you get fantastically lucky on either road.) Most indie published novels will never reach the amount of sales a small midlist traditional published book will reach even given years and decades. But many decent-selling midlist writers will make a ton more money indie publishing.
There have been hundreds and hundreds of articles about the goods and bads on both sides, but sorry, Katya, it is a choice for writers, and a serious one.
Hmmm…looks like this is going to be a full blog post. I guess it’s about time. Sigh….
I read that a little differently: that the author is not the one who ultimately says, “Go ahead, print this work of mine next year,” but it is the other party, the publisher who does (hopefully with a lot of mutually beneficial discussion and negotiation with the writer). Therefore, deciding when and where and how a work gets published, traditionally, is not technically the choice. The choice is to work with traditional publishers or to not work with them. I might be splitting hairs.
The key difference I have experienced between traditional and indie is control over the process. Indie decides when to let that control go [sometimes too late!
], whereas with traditional, that control is mutually negotiated for mutual gain.
I think it can be confusing to try to master both of those things at the same time, so if you are a new writer, it might be in your best interest to get good at indie until you are comfortable with the inside of the publishing process (and can therefore better understand the traditional mechanisms). Once you learn, from feedback and sales, what really makes the book business tick (both for and against the writer) you’ve got a lot more stability and confidence to approach the traditional, and to push back on a contract that isn’t fair, or whatever.
And, frankly, that’s what good traditional publishers really want: writers who actually understand what they need and can negotiate for it. Otherwise, they are stuck assuming boilerplate contracts must be acceptable to the individual writer and then wondering why they quit on them in frustration.
But yeah. Every writer is different. Besides, unless you’ve got a nice flowing river of content, it doesn’t matter much what you decide!
If you don’t have options for traditional publishers to choose from, you aren’t helping them “choose” you, and if you don’t have a lot of offerings in the inventory for your indie readers, you are ripping them off and capping your income!
So the upshot is fill your product buckets with content enough to slather either traditional or indie readers (hint: they are the same folks – none of them shop by house) with your zesty word gravy and it’ll flow where it needs to go.
xdpaul, yup, content is everything. In both worlds, actually. How I made a living for so many decades was doing a lot of different books under different names, and then when a publisher dropped me or went out of business, I didn’t have all my writing in one place.
Now to everyone…. that lack of content is what makes me shake my head at the new writers today. Some of them write a few short stories and manage to finish a novel and wonder why they are not getting rich even thought they pestered their two hundred followers on Twitter. Folks, I wrote 44 short stories in 1982 and made ZERO money, made no sales, nothing. I wrote 42 stories in 1983 and sold six, keeping almost all of the stories I had written in the mail. This business takes time.
Being dropped by two publishers is just nothing. Hard to deal with, yes, but standard.
Writing a first novel and having it not sell is NORMAL. Expect it and keep going.
I never mailed out my first two written and completely finished novels. My first novel sale was my third written novel, and I didn’t sell my fourth. And that was after writing almost three hundred short stories.
I might be slow, granted, but if you think you should be selling thousands of copies of your first novel and wonder why you don’t, maybe it’s because your writing sucks. Maybe you haven’t yet learned to tell a good story in a way anyone wants to read.
Stop blaming no promotion, traditional publishers, or how hard this business is. If you are a writer, a real writer, you write the next thing and then the next and then the next. And focus on telling better stories. If you do that, eventually the sales will come no matter which path your pick to walk. It might take years, but crap, folks, getting a worthless degree in English takes four years and costs a ton of money.
(See why no new blogs lately? I’m in a take no prisoners, tired of the stupidity mood at the moment. I’ll pull back to more balanced place soon, honest. New blogs coming shortly.)
“The choice is to work with traditional publishers or to not work with them. I might be splitting hairs. ”
No, I think you’ve phrased it well. I indeed do not have any choice about whether a publisher WANTS to publish my book or makes an OFFER for it. Those factors are entirely out of my control.
My choices are things like whether to submit to publishers, how long and often to keep submitting, when to nudge, what to do if an offer is made, etc. I have no control over THEIR choices, but plenty over my own.
Which is the same in all endeavors. I’m currently trying to buy a house. I made a very good, very prepared offer for a house recently, which I, my realtor, AND THE SELLER’S realtor all thing is the most he can get for that house… And the seller turned out my offer and indicated he was 100% unwilling to negotiate a single thing. I have no control over the choice he has made. It was very disappointing to me, but the only choices I can control are my own: Do I wait until the house has sat on the market long enough that the seller becomes reasonable, hoping that I am the first buyer to get to him when that happens? Or do I keep looking? (I have chosen to keep looking, because I have more control over how assuduously I look for a house than over how long it takes that seller to come to his senses.)
I think Bettye and Katya are confusing what’s hard with what’s impossible.
Yes, it’s hard to sell a first book. It’s also hard to sell the second, third, fourth, and twenty-seventh books in most careers. But it’s certainly not impossible to sell the first book. If it were, there wouldn’t be dozens of first-time authors being released by publishers this year and next year and last year.
On my Writers Resources Page, you can link to two surveys, both done around 2010, both showing that first-time sale patterns really haven’t changed that much in the past couple of decades. But it is a common phenomenon that aspiring writers always think, “It’s harder now for me than it was for you.” I first started encountering this kind of statement from aspiring writers–that it was easier in my day than in theirs, so I didn’t understand the odds they were facing–SIX MONTHS after my first-ever book sales, before my first book was even in bookstores. And I’ve been hearing it steadily ever since.
Selling a first book is hard. It’s not impossible. It was hard when I did it, but not impossible. That’s what selling a first book to a publisher IS: Hard, but not impossible.
Similarly, it’s hard but not impossible to sell to publishers after being dumped twice. I’ve been dumped more times than that, and kept selling to publishers, as I still do. It takes a lot of perseverance. It’s hard, but no, not impossible.
From Dean: “… New blogs coming shortly.” Tease!
But I can see what you’re saying. There are choices to be made, and writers–new and old–need to research the field before deciding how they want their career to go.
Right now, I’m choosing to only self-publish, but I am open to submitting to traditional publishers (probably with my first SF novel, which is a couple of steps down on the list of what I’ve got scheduled for this year
).
That choice was made after reading and thinking hard about what I’d learned. Almost every day I read another blog, and collect that information/opinion for further study.
By the way, congrats on the forward movement in the company. And the new workshops sound great! I hope to be able to go to one in the near future.