On the blog today, I shared the definition for hybrid authors.

I know we have a few in our community, and I wanted to start a conversation about your experience as a hybrid author. Are you happy you made the choice? Was it the right move for your books and your publishing career? What would you have done differently?

Also, if you're thinking about self-publishing and traditional publishing, chime in, as we'd like to hear your thoughts, too.

Brandi

I was fortunate to find a small traditional house that published two short story collections in trade paperback. Advantages of this publisher: personal attention, professional skills to put out a nice product, very little up-front money from me (I had to find my own cover image), and a very attractive royalty schedule. Disadvantages: a small marketing presence; selling the books is up to me.

I am working slowly on a novel which will not fit in the niche of my publisher. I will self-publish if it's rejected by regional publishing houses. I have a copy and recommend "The Indie Author Revolution: An Insiders Guide to Self-Publishing" by Dara Beevas. I've met Dara. She knows her stuff. There's plenty other resources in print and online. Assumed advantages: I'll have control over the content, production, pricing, and marketing of the book, and all (if any) of the profit. Assumed disadvantages: I'll have to learn to do everything, I'll have to find all the resources, I'll have to pay for everything that has a price or trust that the "free" services available are good enough, I'll have to market the book totally on my own, I'll have to find the answers to questions that today I can't imagine will be asked.

The crucial step in either self-publishing or approaching agents/trad publishers is a competent edit. Reading the submissions on another site (which is not really a critique site), I understand why it is so hard to get your thing looked at. I understand why we must impress from the first paragraph or risk being cast aside. I'm getting a bit burnt out myself with material that is full of errors and awkward passages, even before I get a handle on plot. I find myself less and less willing to continue when I find mistakes on the level of a character referred to as a retch instead of a wretch. I have so many books piled on my bedside table, that I need to read as research for my own historical adventure, that I am jealous of my reading time. Hook me quickly, or I'm gone. 

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The self/trad publish landscape is changing rapidly. Whether the establishment likes it or not, we have alternatives to years of rejection letters. Professionals have been the gate-keepers. Self-publishers must be their own gate-keeper now. From what I see, many are not up to the job.

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Book Country folks have given me excellent advice. Now my book is in the hands of a professional editor. Spend the money, for a chance at success with either avenue. There is an announcement on here somewhere: Jonathan Cape, UK publisher, will read the first fifty pages of any work submitted in June. They are a respected literary-inclined (I believe) publisher. It's a long-shot but, what a deal, right?

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That's what I'm gearing up for. If they pass me by due to subject/treatment/complexity, that's nuts and bolts style that I've considered at length and I'm committed to, take it or leave it. Grammar/typos, no way in hell am I letting those embarrassing errors sink my chance.

--edited by Mimi Speike on 4/24/2014, 7:24 PM--

Mimi,

You're absolutely right on the need to clean up any spelling/grammar errors before self publishing or submission. I have learned about other issues (crutch words, show don't tell, and others) while lurking here on bookcountry.  I met a man a couple weeks ago who has self-published four books using the do it yourself services on another site. The first thing I noticed in the chapter he gave us was that he used "weather" for "whether" (not to be confused with "wether") and that was off-putting to say the least.

I have not used a professional editor before submission. I do this at my own peril. In my day job I write all the time, and I edit and proof the writing of several others in my department. It's mostly business correspondence, reports, policies, operating procedures, training materials, web content, and labor contracts. With that background I have talked myself into not paying a professional editor for my fiction, but it might be a mistake.

Working with an editor has its own challenges. An editor hired by my publisher wanted to replace some 50 cent words with two dollar ones, and I had to argue against it. The narrator of the story was a rural twelve year old boy in the Upper Midwest. My narrator didn't know any two dollar words. I think the editor grew up in town, and had an advanced degree in big words.

A comment on the self/trad publishing issue. I attended an event to hear the book editor for a large newspaper. Very few newspapers do their own book reviews anymore. It would be a real coup to have a book reviewed in a newspaper with circulation over 100,000. She told us that she receives over 1,000 books a month, and has to pick about three dozen for reviews. She farms many of the reviews out to stringers on a piecework basis. She said that she will never review a self-published book. She said that she knew that wasn't fair, that there was a lot of good books being self-published, but she has drawn this line to pare down the pile she has to look at every month. That was disappointing news to some people in that night's audience.

Hi Perry,

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I agree completely that you have to chose an editor carefully, and use their advice thoughtfully, not take it as gospel. In my job, preparing manuscripts for publishing, the link between the publisher and the formatting, which used to be done by us and is now mostly done by a sister facility in India, I see up close the back and forth between the editors and the authors, and it can get ugly. And comical.

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I have seen editors try to put into standard English flavorful style. I have seen the authors’ comments in the margins: Put it back! It’s dialogue, you moron! Creep! Jerk! (I’m not kidding.)

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So far, my only experience working with an editor on my book was an unhappy one. She advised me to replace period flavor (a very restrained use, I assure you) with contemporary language. I found her edit totally useless.

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I don’t know what I’ll get from the new editor who will deliver her assessment next week. I am convinced that she has a more subtle mind. I have given her instructions as to what I feel is non-negotiable about my style, and she has assured me that she can work with me within my guidelines. I have faith in her judgment, as long as she understands that I am not trying to please a best-seller-loving audience.

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If she savages my flamboyant (and, for many readers, very likely annoying) choices, what will I do? How will I respond? I don’t know. This is going to be interesting.

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As for the retch/wretch comment I made. Some will say, read for story. Such nit-picks are easily fixed. But misuse of language is surely symptomatic of a general lack of sophistication, which I greatly appreciate and, in fact, require in order to enjoy a piece. 

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I love your comment, lurking on Book Country. I do a lot of lurking myself. 

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Check out thebookdesigner.com. You'll find much there to be useful. 

--edited by Mimi Speike on 4/25/2014, 6:28 PM--

Brandi, Lucy, I've been meaning to ask. Our workflow at a compositor for major publishers is as slow as I've ever seen it, for over a month now. I've been there about twelve years.

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We do periodically (every three years, as I understand it) have contract renewals, and we have gradually lost clients to India, that's why we have teamed with a sister facility and shifted functions, to be able to compete on price. An announcement is always made of publishers lost and it has not happened. We do have seasonal slowdowns, but never - never! - as bad as this. Do you folks in Manhattan with your ears to the ground, know something I don't? 

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I don't mind leaving early and eating into vacation time, I swear to God I don't. I'm lucky to have that job. But, we lose business, layoffs follow. I'll keep that job until they throw me out the door. The pay ain't great. But what a treasure-trove of pieces you would never know existed. I'm in reader paradise there. 

--edited by Mimi Speike on 4/30/2014, 12:19 PM--

OK, now I'll answer the question. Failing a miracle with Jonathan Cape, I will self publish book one of my series, and hope to attract the interest of a trad publisher for the continuation. I am only submitting to Cape because of the unusual offer they have made. I had not intended to subject myself to that hat-in-hand process.

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I do not intend to spend years querying when I know my thing is odd, and difficult (though also a lot of fun). I do think there will be an audience for it, but that audience will be long a-building. That's my belief. If I'm delusional, I'll find out shortly.

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And I'll announce it here: yes, gang, it's clear to me at last. I am an old crack-pot.

Mimi,

I've met one writer who did exactly that, and very successfully.

He's an essayist, not a fiction writer. He self-published several trade paperbacks of essays and built a regional following. Eventually he had a longer book picked up by one of the large publishing houses. This was followed by several more books traditionally published, a regular column in a large magazine, when he does readings locally he is accompanied by his acoustic rock band, and he has parlayed all this into a job as the host of a weekly radio program.

I think he was a starving artist for a while, but talent and hard work and good luck brought him a career.

I am more convinced than ever that I will have to self-publish. I worked hard on this thing, BC members' critiques in mind, though I did cut corners, and I expected my developmental editor to jump on me for the same issues. For my fixes are somewhat disingenuous.

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Nope. She's brought up a whole new set of problems. She likes my intrusions, which is my voice. I'm very surprised, and pleased about that. She only wishes it were organized differently. 

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I'm thinking that every new editor will have different likes and dislikes. So I'd better just please myself. And self-publish.

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To be fair, some of Melissa's criticisms are related to those I received on BC, but she comes at it from another angle, and is more precise, and I understand the problems better.

--edited by Mimi Speike on 5/6/2014, 7:20 PM--

Hi Mimi,

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. Have we heard about slowdowns in NY? (If so, no, things are going as fast as ever.)

Now that you've had a couple of days to think about your editor's comments, what is working for you?

Best,
Brandi 

Well, I’m hopeful that I am going to find my way with structure. I have laid out the entire journey for her, book one to book three, and we both agree that I am writing a Picaresque novel. She still thinks the footnote material/authorial intrusions should be in alternate chapters of their own. I disagree, for some of them, at least. I think my off-the-cuff wisecracks need to be more connected to the situation I am commenting on in the text.

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I am very thankful that she seems to love my anything-goes attitude. That’s one battle I don’t have to fight. Some of the things she objects to, I have taken them a bit too far, I have colored outside of my own flexible, forgiving lines, and I know it. My first fifty pages, which I shall proceed to get in shape for Jonathan Cape using her notes as a guide, will be my laboratory for solving some of the problems that she and I agree need to be addressed. I’ll spend the next month on that, then plunge back into the fray with the piece as a whole.

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Thinking over her comments, she wants changes in the organization and much more of Sly actively engaged in his nonsense. I do agree with that. She does not advise me to trim the backstory. She wants equal time for live action. I have rewritten my first chapter, it is way more active, I’m pleased with it, and she has only one recommendation, one deletion of a paragraph, that I tend to disagree with but am going to mull over. This experience has been a positive one for me, I trust her judgment more than ever, and I recommend her editorial services without reservation.

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So now I've got these footnotes that I'm already in love with, their original purpose being to sequester some of that backstory, so that no one has to read it but I have the satisfaction of retaining it. Once down that path, you know I had to work it, make it an additional joke. Melissa wants me to lose the notes and, like I said, shove that material into chapters dedicated to my Intrusive Author responses to Sly and his cohorts' lunacy. I'm thinking about it.

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Oh yeah, another problem. She says all my characters sound alike. Well, they're all (except for Pedro and King Rupert) scumbag schemers, they all feel they've been screwed by life and they're not taking it anymore. They're all quite articulate, to be a conman you've got to be. They're all birds of a feather and that's part of my joke. They're all malcontents.  They all want something better than what they have. (Don't we all?)

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I have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of work to do. But I'm feeling cautiously optimistic that I can get all these issues settled and solved.

--edited by Mimi Speike on 5/9/2014, 2:21 AM--