On Submitting That Novel.

Louis Shalako

This is not criticism. I’m not complaining. I’m not bitching, or whining, neither am I pissing and moaning, or grousing or griping or any of those sorts of things.

Basically, I’m kind of doing my research, which is vital as an aid to thinking.

That’s all—just thinking.

I've been reading all these literary agent’s websites. The ones that might represent mystery or crime fiction are looking for 'upscale' works. I’m not too sure what that means. It has been said that authors rarely know what genre their own book fits into. My new book is a literary/crime/romance/suspense/satire/smack in James Patterson’s face kind of a book.

Hey, fuck, what am I supposed to say.

But that’s why I wrote it.

One agency wants a list of works that might be in competition and an explanation of why a book might be different, etc, etc.

The old, “Please read a few of our books and please tell us how your book fits into our catalogue,” sort of thing.

Regarding some publisher's submission guidelines, I saw at least one or two that are asking for the author's marketing plan. If I had a marketing plan, I would probably follow it.

What, you don’t have no fucking plan for my book?

Years ago, I went to the library and used something called the Media Market Guide and copied out, longhand, a bunch of addresses. There were dozens of Canadian publishers in there. 

Some of them are still around. 

It seems to be a shit-load of work to put together a simple query. It's not something that can be done in five minutes, that's for sure. As for the literary agents, this list is strictly Canadian and there aren’t very many of them. Not all of the listings have clickable links.

Quite a few of the names ring a bell. I would have been submitting to these agencies, somewhere around 2006, perhaps earlier or later.

When I looked at the list of Canadian publishers, I found quite a few dead links. Quite a few of the imprints belong to a couple of publishers who dominate the landscape in this country.

They’re not accepting un-agented submissions.

Ralan has a list of book markets. Quite a number do not accept un-agented submissions. 

Quite a number will be closed to submissions at any given time. One listing that has always bugged me is Poisoned Pen Press.

When they say, “Self-published and POD authors need not submit,” I’m inclined to take them at their word. Please understand, I’m already published under some pen-names. But I’m not going to lie to them and say I’ve never been published. We’ll let somebody else take the moral low ground. They’re currently closed to submissions anyways.

It can take the most excellent writer years to get an agent or place even one single book with a major publisher.

I’ve only spent a few hours at this, maybe three or four hours today, and I started off by looking at Canadian publishers. (Duotrope costs money, so I don’t use it. They have a free trial. If you don’t opt out by the end date, the odds are your credit card account will be charged until you terminate.)

It’s not that I can’t write the query. I would think that each and every query would be individually tailored to the agency in question, although the building blocks, i.e. the first three chapters, the author bio, might be common to other submissions. Some markets probably do accept simultaneous submissions. My expectation is that a 60,000-word ‘literary mystery novel’ is going to be a bit of a hard sell. I’ve never seen myself as anything other than a pulp-fiction writer. It is, in fact, what I set out to do all those long years ago.

My first six manuscripts netted me about a hundred and twenty-five rejection slips. I’ve had a few books rejected since then. On the more positive side, I got three contracts from what I can only describe as an aggregator, back in about 2006, before anyone really knew what that meant. That publisher at least had a two-year contract, (ostensibly). One well-regarded Canadian publisher of sf/f asked for a partial of Shape-Shifters, but declined after reading chapters four to seven. They were sort of considering Time Storm, (as an ebook, which I hadn’t even heard of at that time) but I screwed that up. I think I was petrified with fear or something—that was a long time ago, and basically, I just screwed it up. I’ve never blamed them for that fuck-up, for I clearly wasn’t ready for that big a change in my life…

It’s not a big surprise that when I did learn more about digital self-publishing, I gave it a try.

When the money doesn’t roll in like the surf, when it seems almost impossible, (using any sort of rational and recognizable means) to build sales and build what is (theoretically) a business, it’s pretty easy to get discouraged.

Is that why I’m submitting?

Of course not.

I wrote my nineteenth novel to be submitted. It might be a good thing that I wrote the book before taking any kind of look at possible markets. But I wrote this book, for better or for worse, to be submitted and that’s what I’m going to do.

I will submit the thing somewhere, and then write a few short stories. The odds are I will start my twentieth novel by about the middle of December. I never quite know what I’m going to do next until it just happens one day—a short story going a bit long or something.

Other than that, it really is a bit of a game. The more you learn about it, and the more you study it, and the more experience that you gain, the better the chances of winning. Fuck, at least once in a while.

I’m not going to turn this into sheer drudgery.

(If I wanted a fucking job, I’d go out and get one. – ed.)

Oh—and if all you want is money, there are a million better ways to earn it.

We play games to amuse ourselves. Anything else is just bullshit.

Let’s just say that I have my price and I have my concerns. I don’t know how much I’m willing to do for you.

If we’re not making a lot of money, at least we’re doing what we want and having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

Wish me luck, that is, if you believe in that sort of thing.

END

1,001 Rejection Slips, Old Memories Die Hard.

Louis Shalako

In one corner of my bedroom are seven boxes of model aircraft parts, tools, spares and hardware.

There are propellers and wheels, batteries, chargers, transmitters, receivers, electronic speed controls, catalogues, glue, sandpaper…you name it, and it’s probably in one of them boxes.

My dad died years ago. Flying model aircraft was something special that we shared. We flew control line planes when we were very young, He taught us how to do that, having built rubber-band models when he was a kid. He got into radio control when he was in his late fifties or early sixties. It was just something he had always wanted to do, and I guess he knew he wasn’t getting any younger.

I have no regrets about spending time with my dad. However, it’s hard to open the boxes, because it brings up a lot of sadness. My closet had a few other boxes in there, and so that’s where I began.

In three years, I have never driven a nail or hung a picture. It’s an apartment, which is not exactly the same thing as having a home. For whatever reason, maybe it’s time to lighten ship.

I threw out a couple of small shopping bags, several empty boxes, and two full, big green garbage bags. 

There was probably a hundred pounds of stuff there. This was mostly old college artwork, drawings, maps, plans for weird inventions, and photos going back to the Brownie camera my old man let me use when I was six years old…I suppose there was some sadness in those boxes as well. Fifty-something years of memories, mementos, trophies of a kind. There were faded pictures of one or two love interests in those boxes as well.

I put it in the big blue dumpster in the back parking lot.

***

My old man had a lot of model aircraft plans, many of which he designed and drafted himself. He was a very good draftsman, although he never actually worked as one. All of it is in the dumpster.

In one of them boxes I found a file folder.

Lo! And behold, ladies and gentlemen. A hundred and twenty-something rejection slips. All of them on paper. Remember? We used to put them in envelopes, on paper, and stick them in mailboxes.

Like a real hobbyist, I had saved the envelopes, probably for the colourful and exciting stamps. While I didn’t submit to every Canadian publisher, there is a good, representative selection in that file. Yep. Harper-Collins, Turnstone, Mosaic, Gaspereau, pretty much everyone you ever heard of, and some you have not. I submitted to every publisher whose guidelines did not indicate agented submissions were a requirement. I had multiple rejection slips from most or all of the agents as well.

***

I keep a document file. It’s called, oddly enough, ‘List of Subs.’ I keep track of submissions, and rejections, otherwise I’m very likely to submit the same story twice, to the same place, and you might not want to do that. It might not be very welcome. They might think you’re a dummy and that you can’t take a frickin’ hint.

When that document locked up on me—I’m still using this 13 year-old Pentium II computer; I deleted it. 

This was a mistake, because while I could not update it, I could still have checked to see what story had been submitted where, and when.

I guess that wasn’t very smart.

What I did was to publish virtually every story I had in the inventory. Then I didn’t have to worry. I published them on my blogs, I published them in collections and in stand-alone ebook novellas, short stories, etc.

Then I wrote a bunch of new stories and began submitting them around. I hope to write more short stories in November, possibly sooner if I get my next mystery novel done by the end of September, mid-October at the latest. That would be my 14^th novel.

My new rejection (Oops! Sorry!) list, of course I mean my submissions list, has over a hundred and eighty items on it. The first list was up to 703 items when it locked up. And I’ve gotten a couple of dozen, maybe thirty stories published, not all for pay, and none in pro or semi-pro markets. The biggest story I ever sold was for 140 Euros, that was to Ennea, (‘9’), the Greek Saturday comic supplement to an Athens daily.

Without subscribing to Duotrope, (I’m very poor) I’m limited to the Ralan.com market list, and so that whole pro/semi-pro thing has tended to dominate my thinking. I guess that really does fall into the ‘quest for validation’ category, a thought-process that might need to be reexamined.

Either way you look at it, I am so darned close to my 1,000^th rejection slip that it really isn’t all that funny, although I can guarantee that your friends will laugh if you tell them something like that.

“I told you what you gotta do, Louis!” (Roars with merriment.)

“And what’s that?” (Mystified.)

“You got to compromise your integrity.”

(That’s a good one. – ed.)

Anyway, John Creasy got 765 rejection slips before he got published, and quite frankly one or two of my books are better than one or two of his books…in my humble opinion.

Other than that, my closet is now much emptier, and sooner or later, I really have to go through all of those old model airplane boxes. If I can bring myself to throw much of it away, although some of it might be worth keeping.

Most of that stuff belongs in the big blue dumpster in the back parking lot, and one day surely I will get around to it.

It’s not wise to have too much baggage.

I don’t quite know where I’m going next.

Hopefully somewhere.

END

It Takes a Minute To Check.

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


After ten months of editing and re-writing, and then publishing my first four e-books, it feels good to get back to ordered routine and lighter duties. So far I'm basically just combing through my science-fiction folder and submitting stories that have never been placed.

I have also jotted down another three or four titles, which is often all I need to get a story going. I have a list of twenty-five titles! Until I get really desperate, I'm still not ready to write short stories. The foreign-language submissions are good practice, and I might just pick up another credit there. Another thing, is to put a steno pad and a good pen beside my pillow and write down my dreams. Usually three or four key words are all that is needed to remind one of a particularly weird dream. A few of them do make it into my stories; oddly enough.

At some point I really do have to update the list of sales and rights assigned. I have already caught myself once. Clicking on 'send,' firing an e-mail off into cyber-space, and then suddenly wondering who might be archiving that story, in what language, and for how long?

It only takes a minute to check, is what I am saying.

Let's see here. My list of submissions is up to about 546; and it is kind of hard on the eyes to scroll through it endlessly, but before I submit a story, I want to know if I have already subbed that particular one to that particular editor, and once or twice in the past I have in fact 'double-subbed.' It just makes me look dumb, right? Speaking of which, I really need to go back to many of those previously-published stories, and just maybe re-read the rights purchased, etc, by those publishers. It's a good thing to review once in a while.

It only takes a minute to check, I guess that's what I'm saying.

I just read three articles in Douglas Smith's website, about being interviewed. So far no one has asked, but you never know.

'Be prepared,' and even if it never happens, at least you were prepared.

As for the art today, the image appears on my French-language blog, 'les shalako,' which basically just gives me an excuse to fool around with translations.

It's called 'Snake Girl,' or 'la jeune fille avec une serpent.'

Mon Francais il ne pas bon!

My eyes get tired. I have to go back and check for typos all the time.

There are still lots of things to be done. I really should pick a standard size, and make all the pix of my books the same! It's just unprofessional. I really should update the poetry blog. But there is only so much time in the day. The key thing is to develop good work habits, focus in on the little details, for surely the beauty lies in the details--and let that work ethic have free rein.

Because honestly, I'm no stranger to hard work.

As for promoting the books, for some reason I'm still a little shy.

Let's see here. When Mike Resnick and I first 'friended' each other on facebook, I knew that I had read at least one of his books. A no-brainer, right? He's got like sixty-five of them, and I used to haunt the sci-fi section of the local bookstore. The problem was that I could not remember a title, and that bothered me. I dug through the shelves of a back closet and came up with a tome by another author. Not Mike Resnick, thankfully, for it wasn't a very good book. Anyhow, when Mr. Resnick posted a link about his book, 'Santiago,' I recognized the cover instantly. And yes, that was one hell of a good book, as I recall, many-many years later.