Never. Give. Up.

Two things that I have read today have motivated me to keep trying at this writing thing.

The first was a rejection letter.   Sounds wrong somehow, but there are three types of rejection in the world of query letter and manuscript submission.

1.  The first type is very anti-climactic: no response.  It's annoying, but doesn't hurt that badly unless it's from an agent or publisher that you were really sure was going to LOVE what you have written. 
2.  The second type is the form rejection letter.  It's more respectful than the no-response rejection because you get closure and can move on, but it hurts a bit more.  Form rejections basically thank you for your submission and tell you it was not right for that particular agent/publisher and encourages you to keep trying.  It's not actually very encouraging.  
3. But when an agent or publisher takes the time to write you a personal e-mail rejection, it can be encouraging.  It tells you that somebody actually read what you sent them and cares enough to respond.  Here's the one I received this morning.  It's from a publisher, in response to the query and MS I sent them of The Solstice Dance, a children's picture book I wrote quite a long time ago:

Thanks very much. Very charming material. But I'm afriad we're not in a position to do this kind of book currently, particularly if an illustrator is not involved with the submission. Particularly with this book, getting the geography, customs, garments, and other details correct requires specific knowledge in order to avoid cultural gaffes.

Perhaps a publisher with more extensive connections with illustrators would be a better choice? Thank you in any case for you interest and for sharing your submission.

I really feel like writing back to him, begging him to reconsider, offering to find an appropriate illustrator... but I won't.  I'll write back to thank him for taking the time to write me a personal e-mail.

The second thing that motivated me today is something I read on the website of a publisher's editorial guidelines.  They likened getting a book published to becoming a famous actor, and I thought about all the stories of actors going to auditions with hundreds of others, and getting rejected for years before getting a break.  Sure, some actors get lucky the first time, but those are in the extreme minority.  Some of them may go on to write scripts and produce their own movies, which is similar to self-publishing.  Instead of being discouraged by this comparison, I'm encouraged by it.  At least I don't have to live in Hollywood and try out in front of impatient directors.  

It is pretty exciting to hear back from agents and publishers, even when it's a rejection.  If you want to be a writer: Never. Give. Up.

Recording an Audiobook & Waking a resting project

As I've mentioned before, it takes a really long time to record an audiobook.  My book has 28 chapters, and each takes about half an hour to record.  So 14 hours, which doesn't sound long except that I really have other exciting stuff to do, like laundry, taxes, and tidying up.  So if I manage to record one chapter a day, I am happy.  Some days, I've recorded two, but that won't happen today because I promised myself I would work on the taxes, and I've also promised myself that I will write at least one blog entry a week, and it's already been a week...  And if you think that recording takes a long time, consider this: I am not capable of reading from my book for half an hour without making mistakes.  I mispronounce words, skip words, read in the wrong "voice"... the audio has to be edited.  The way I've been doing it is to just repeat the messed-up sentence and remove them later.  My lovely husband has offered to do the editing for me, but it takes a really long time for him, too, even though he's much better with the equipment than I am.  So I've asked OpenBookAudio if they do that sort of editing, and at what cost.  Worth asking, but I'm guessing it's probably more than I'm willing to spend.

There's also a question on my mind, of whether I should offer the audio as free podcasts until the audiobook is complete and for sale.  This could build interest and an audience, but I don't want to simultaneously offer my book for sale and for free.  So I could only do this if it's possible to delete the podcast once the audiobook is on Audible.  Something to look into.

Meanwhile, I've decided to continue querying a project that has been resting for about a year - it's a children's picture book I wrote about Nardugan, a celebration of the winter solstice, and the book is called The Solstice Dance.  I had some interest when I queried it to agents, but no bites.  I'm not even considering self-publishing this one, because the cost of self-publishing a picture book is prohibitive.  In addition, I'm not a great artist, so I'd prefer to have a real artist do the work.

I had a friend, who is an artist, do the artwork of three pages, and offered it when I queried, but I later learned that in fact it doesn't work that way.  You are either a writer who is paired with an illustrator by an agent or an editor, or you are an author-illustrator.  They don't seem to want you to find your own artist.  Unless you're famous, probably, but I'm not famous.  Rather than querying agents this time, I'm going to directly query small publishers.  I don't know how that works, either, but a few of them do accept unsolicited queries, so I'll try that once I've written myself a list of the publishers that might be interested.

So much to do, and so much fun!

Going International

An awesome blogger and prolific reader and reviewer in India has posted about my book on her blog: http://booksonmyshelves.blogspot.in/2012/05/secrets-of-summer-village.html.  As cool as that is, even cooler is that we have become "pen pals" for lack of a better word, with my book as the catalyst. 

My husband has his regular day job, and also has a side business selling fine wine over the internet.  I don't think we've made back the initial investment yet, but it's enriched our lives because it has helped us meet interesting people we wouldn't have otherwise met, and learn something new that we likely wouldn't have learned. 

The book seems to be life-enhancing in the same way.  Good reason to publish a book, and I'm not joking!

Blog Tour?

A blog tour is like a book tour or concert/album tour, except that the author doesn't actually have to leave her/his living room.  There are sites that organize blog tours for authors, but I haven't had the luck to "go" on one yet.  Instead, I'm slowly organizing guest posts for myself, finding blogs that are looking for guest bloggers via LinkedIn, MyBlogGuest.com, Twitter, and internet searches.  Reviews of my book are also trickling in. 

Today, I received links to my new blog guest post for an Australian writing website:
http://cutecopy.com.au/live-to-write/

as well as fabulous reviews on Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/285433004

and on Flipkart (think: Indian Amazon.com):
http://www.flipkart.com/secrets-summer-village-1463740115/p/itmd3fjggzgudehf?pid=9781463740115
by a reviewer in India whom I have never met in person. 

It is exceptionally hard for authors to get publicity for their self-published books, no matter how great those books are.  The effort does not end when the book is finished - that's when the hard part actually begins.  Every single day, you've got to do something to get and keep your name out there.  I don't know if my random guest blogging can really be considered a "blog tour," but at the moment it's the closest I can get to one!

I am so grateful to all you out there are supporting me, by reading my book, by writing reviews, and by sharing my book with others!

Audiobook and book trailers

That's write, I'm recording one.  I could have paid thousands of dollars to have someone else do all the work.  Time is money and it does take a lot of time to make a DIY audiobook, but I am not willing to spend thousands of dollars when I can probably do a decent job myself.  There is a great company called Open Book Audio that can make the audiobook for you, OR take a book you recorded yourself and take care of the distribution on Audible, for a small cut.  They require that the recording be of a high quality and that the book be broken down into 30-minute segments.  That's what I'm up to right now.  It may seem like a piece of cake, but I am completely unfamiliar with the technical aspects of recorded sound.  As if that's not enough, it's really hard to read out loud without making mistakes, especially for 30 minutes!  My book has 28 chapters, and each one will take me approximately half an hour to read, half an hour to edit.  That will add up to 14 hours of reading and 14 hours of editing.  28 hours of work... And let's not forget that everything takes longer than we expect. 

So far, I've recorded one chapter.  After dealing with some major technical difficulties (take one: recorded chapter one, forgot to save it, program crashed, lost it. take two: program crashed when I tried to export the file to .wav format, figured out that Firefox and Pro Tools are not friends.  take three: tried to send the file to the nice, helpful Open Book Audio people, but it's way too huge to attach to e-mail, finally uploaded it to Dropbox), I've sent Open Book Audio the Dropbox link, and hope they'll be so kind as to let me know if the sound quality meets their quality standards.

In the meantime, I'm also working on creating a book trailer for YouTube.  Apparently, this is what all the cool authors are doing.  I am so cool.

Sailing new waters, friends!

Live to write

I don't live to write, nor do I write to live.  That is not what this post is about.  When giving advice about writing, many authors (including myself) say that it's important to read and to write.  What they so often forget is to remind us to live.  Without traveling, talking to friends and family, eating, loving, laughing, crying, fighting, getting sick and getting well again, agreeing and disagreeing, being too hot and too cold, we aren't living.  And without living, how will we have anything interesting to write about? 

So, what have I been doing for the past 10 days?  I've been living.  I haven't done any writing (though I cannot stop my writer brain from recording visions, smells, and sounds for future books...).  I feel refreshed and ready to start typing again.  Got writer's block?  Live a little in order to write.

The Kirkus Review

I'm still waiting on the Midwest Book Review corrected review, but the Kirkus review is here. Am I thrilled with it? No, unfortunately. It's not all good, not all bad. There are some quotes I can use from it for promotion, however. To read it, click here: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/saskia-e-akyil/secrets-of-a-summer-village/.

Well, what do you think? Does it make you want to read the book? I'm not sure if it even makes me want to read the book.  What this whole experience of reviews makes me think is that so much of it is the luck of the draw. There are books I hate that others think are masterpieces (examples? Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, the former is well-written and miserable, the latter is terribly written, but a good story).  It's not different with reviews.  The people writing those reviews are individuals with their own tastes and preferences, their own life experiences that create filters through which they interpret the story. 

Is this reviewer an anti-feminist?  He or she seems to have really taken issue with an imagined dichotomy of girls being interesting and strong, boys being either good or bad.  Which is funny, because that was neither intended nor true in the story... the reviewer calls the boys in the story one-dimensional and either "good" (and traditional) or "bad" (and westernized).  WHAT???  Cem, Rachel's love interest, is neither one-dimensional nor traditional nor very westernized.  He is absolutely a mix between "traditional" and influenced by the US.  Aylin and Leyla's father is, to be fair, fairly one-dimensional and he doesn't play a big role in the story.  Rachel's father, however, is very important to the story, and I'd argue that he's not one-dimensional at all.  But that is what the reviewer felt when he or she read the book, and he or she really seems to have felt very strongly about this point to have written so much about the supposed dichotomy. 

But a review is a review.  Kirkus reviews gave me the option of posting the review or not, and I chose to have them post it.  So please go over to their site and rate the book.  Now let's see what the Midwest Book Review says........

Going mad

I don't remember any other thing I've done that required so much waiting.  When I was a teacher, I created lesson plans and taught, I sometimes gave seminars and lectures to other teachers at conferences.  When I worked for the state government, I created and filed forms, drank my tea, and brainstormed better ways to run our program.  Sure, I submitted articles and chapter proposals for academic publications and had to wait for responses about their acceptance, but it just didn't feel like such a big deal.  But now... it's different.  Maybe because I don't have anything else intellectual going on, but this waiting to hear from contest entries, from blog hosts on which I've applied to guest blog, from reviewers is making me lose my mind.  There's so much other stuff that I want - and need - to do in order to promote my book, but I need these professional reviews from Kirkus Indie and the Midwest Book review before I can do the other things on my list.  Here's my list:

1. Contact online bookstores in Turkey because they haven't listed my book yet (it is, however, listed in Finland, India, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK, and Poland).
2. Contact bricks-and-mortar English bookstores in Turkey to see if they will carry my book.
3. Write to study abroad organizations that organize trips to Turkey to encourage them to publicize my book to their clients/students.
4. Send application to Pearson, an academic publisher, to see if they'd be interested in publishing an ESL version of my book (modified).
5. Contact independent bookstores in Colorado to see if they'd be willing to host a book reading or book signing when I visit.
6. Write to more book review websites to see if they'll review my book.
7. Send the reviews to the agent who has my book - I haven't heard from her, but I want to remind her that I exist.
8. Write to/call newspapers that might print an article about me - local newspaper in Washington, where I most recently lived, local newspaper in Colorado where I went to high school, my college and graduate school....

ALL of this is assuming that the reviews say something nice about my book.  And if they don't?  Well, let's just hope they're kind....

Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award

Have you ever heard of it?  The Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award is "an annual award in the United States for a book that exemplifies literary excellence, widespread appeal, and a positive approach to life in young adult literature."  (Source: Wikipedia).  I had never heard of it myself, but I stumbled upon it, looked it up, and thought wow, THAT is the kind of award I would be proud to win.  So I looked it up and actually had to go to a lot of work to find contact information.  The hosting website wasn't working too well, but I was dying to know how to find out more about it.  Thanks to Google, I was able to find a contact from the award, who got back to me the next day.  She was so kind, and let me know that if I could get copies of my book to the committee members within five days, my book could be entered into the running.

Here are the submission guidelines:

Context and Criteria

Established in 2008 to honor the wishes of Amelia Elizabeth Walden, the award allows for the sum of $5,000 to be presented annually to the author of a book selected by the ALAN Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award (AEWA) Review Committee as “the title of the year most relevant to adolescents and having enjoyed a wide and appreciative teenage audience.” 

Per Walden’s request, the selected title must:

1)    be a work of fiction, ideally a novel (novels that are part of a series must be able to stand alone);

2)    be published within one year prior to the call for titles (in this case, 2011);

3)    be published in the United States but may have been published elsewhere prior; and

4)    possess a positive approach to life, widespread teen appeal, and literary merit (please see below for additional guidance):

A Positive Approach to Life

Submitted titles should:

§  treat teen readers as capable and thoughtful young people

§  offer hope and optimism, even when describing difficult circumstances

§  have a credible and appropriate resolution

§  portray characters involved in shaping their lives in a positive way, even as they struggle with the harsh realities of life

Widespread Teen Appeal

Submitted titles should:

§  be intended expressly for readers aged 12-18

§  have universal themes that transcend time and place

§  have themes that resonate with a wide variety of readers, regardless of race, culture, class, gender, and sexual orientation

§  provide readers a window to the world and/or reflect their own experiences

Literary Merit

Submitted titles should:

§  contain well-developed characters

§  employ well-constructed forms suitable to function 

§  include language and literary devices that enhance the narrative

§  suggest cogent and richly-realized themes

§  present an authentic voice

Do I have any chance at winning?  Or even at runner-up?  That depends on so much.   Primarily, it depends on whether or not the committee agrees that my book fulfills the "positive approach to life" requirement.  In my opinion, it does, but it's subtle.  Especially the part about difficult circumstances. Nothing terrible or unusual or terribly unusually bad happens to my protagonist, but she does face the sort of challenges that normal, everyday teenagers face.  

Even if I won "runner up" of this prize, I would be incredibly honored.  The criteria of the award is essentially an outline of what I want to write.  So, what kind of writer do I want to be?  I want to write books that would be eligible for this award.

What kind of writer do I want to be?

As I'm working on Book 2, I'm faced with a question - what kind of writer do I want to be?  Book 1 (Secrets of a Summer Village) is a coming of age mainstream fiction/YA crossover.  It's fairly light-hearted, upbeat, and positive.  The feedback I've gotten is that it makes readers feel good and learn something at the same time.  It also makes you feel good when you're writing happy, positive stuff.  That said, I don't want to write fluff.

In book 2, something bad is actually going to happen to the main character.  I am pretty sure I know what this bad thing is, and it's really bad.  But I don't want to write a depressing book.  The first voice I gave this as-of-yet unnamed character was too depressing.  I didn't want to make myself depressed having to write her.  So then I found a much more upbeat, cheerful voice for her.  It was so fun to write, and it just flowed out of me.  But then this really bad thing is going to happen to her, so she won't be able to keep that up, and I don't even know how this voice would have to change after a tragedy.  So I have to find another voice.  Something between depressed and polyanna.

I also have to choose an age.  Is this going to be mainstream fiction? YA?  Crossover?  I'm leaning towards crossover.  What I hope I'm writing is intelligent YA that adults can enjoy, since in this modern world in which lines are incredibly blurred, young adults often read mainstream "adult" literature (I sure did when I was a teenager), and plenty of adults unabashedly enjoy YA.  I was thinking of making the main character 13, but then I was told that 13 is a black hole because it's considered too old for Middle Grade novels and too young for YA.  So my main character needs to be either 12 or younger... or 15 or older.  Which is a shame because I think that 13 is a fascinating age.

I think my main character will have just turned 15.  I'm not ready to write Middle Grade books yet, though I hope to one day.  What I mean by that is that I still remember being a teenager, but my memories of being 12 are much murkier.  I'm planning on waiting until my children are "middle grade" readers themselves before I can imagine that world again.

So, what kind of writer do I want to be?  Second book will help steer me in a direction.  First book was a wild card of sorts, but second book will make me lean towards a genre... or not.  Something that has to happen for me no matter what, is that I have to like the main character and enjoy writing the book.  Bad things may happen, but the characters cannot and must not be destroyed by them.  I want to be a writer who people enjoy reading.