Pitch to Publicity 2016

I got a little side-tracked by Pitch to Publication 2016, #p2p16. I recognized three of the editors with a couple more being kind of familiar maybe. I found out about it the day before the deadline but didn't have time to put something together. Due to lack of submissions, they extended the deadline by a day. Even with that, I was still rushed and didn't have a proper pitch letter. Remember the YA book I mention sometimes but haven't done the final edit on? It's in good enough shape that I sent the first 5 pages to see what would happen. Since the book wasn't quite done, I thought maybe I should work on enough of it to cover a larger sample in case an editor asked for one.

I added the editors I submitted the sample to on Twitter. They each said something like "all the submissions are great". All of them? Alarm bells. Then I started seeing things like "great pitch, great pages, too much work" and "great pitch, great pages, too much work for a month". Alarm bells. The Archive, Blog Posts and Success Stories pages on the site are all blank, and this is not a new event. Evidently, no one who has done this has gotten a book deal. Alarm bells.

Finally one of the editors tweeted to the effect that the manuscripts need to be grammatically and stylistically perfect. My comma usage is never grammatically perfect. That's what editors are for. :) There was no explanation of exactly how the whole process is supposed to work. Specifically, there's no FAQ. For example, they asked for 5 pages but have no margin or word count specification. Alarm bells. Etc.

After absorbing this for a few days and reading tweets, which you can check out for yourself by following their Twitter links on the Editor page, I realized something. They're not looking for the best books. They're looking for books that need the least amount of work. Basically, they want books that are already agent ready or need an absolutely minimum amount of editing.

It's pitched as a helping hand, but the writers who need this the most are automatically disqualified by the 4-week editing time frame. The people who benefit from it are the ones who don't need this kind of help. They're already agent ready whether they realize it or not. As I write this, I'm still waiting to hear from two editors that haven't said they're done going through submissions to see if they want a larger sample. This late in the week, I don't really expect to hear anything.

So, if this doesn't benefit writers, who does it benefit? Follow the money. It's a publicity gimmick to drum up business for the editors, especially during a slow time of the year like the holidays, when writers are spending money on everything but editing services. It's essentially free advertising. However. It's not a pure scam. It may not even be a deliberate scam. It may just be poorly designed. One month is too short a time frame. To get the best books instead of the easiest books, it needs two or three.

At least one editor said she was going to send feedback to the authors. Submissions are limited to 100 per editor. Only two editors were listed on the site as having that many, although one mentioned receiving over 90. I don't know how many the one doing feedback had, but sending feedback is an incredible amount of work. I don't think a scammer would work that hard. Even if the whole thing is just a publicity stunt, some of the editors are putting real work into it.

Anyway. I know I should be more cynical about "free" opportunities and not be so disappointed, but I found this whole process to be extremely discouraging. Messengers isn't widely commercial, but the YA book is. I was hoping that somebody would see something of value in my work, even if it was a little rough, and be willing to take a harder look. To find out that I'm automatically eliminated and never had a chance to begin with really sucks. If I'd found out even a week earlier, I could have polished my terrible pitch letter and thought through some of the risky things in the first 5 pages such as the real jargon I used. Authentic and immersive world building to be sure but very, very risky for such a conservative industry. To an editor who hasn't seen my other books, it was probably an alarm bell.

The point is I got a little done on Book 2 but not what I should have. I tried to get the break I needed, and it didn't work.

Have a great weekend.

Behind the Scenes a Little

The weather turned last night. It was unseasonably warm with temperatures over 80(26.67C). Today it's about 65(18.33C). Why is that important? Because the cool front came with wind that knocked the power out and interfered with the blog. I don't have everything in life scheduled, but the blog is one thing I have a set time for.

I transferred the corrections from the printout of Book2 to the computer. Some of it was simple like fixing commas and typos. I had things like "barely had barely" and "be been" where I'd rewritten sentences and missed a deletion. They don't show up in spell correct. Not that that always helps. Part of working on books 2 and 3 required checking things in The Rise of Aethan Lightbringer. Right away I found a spelling mistake that spell correct showed the whole time, but somehow I didn't see it.

Other parts of transferring fixes to computer involved changing paragraphs or how a page flows. I had this one really weird sentence to start a paragraph.

“Eleven at last count,” Mussarev said. “As long as we were being bombed, we lost no one. ..."

What? That doesn't make sense, considering how many people died at that time. What was this guy thinking when he said that? I spent several minutes reading the context and pondering. He stepped off stage for a few minutes while the dialogue continued without him. When he came back, he kept going with his own thought, and I'm not sure what that was. I think he meant they lost no one in the air. I ended up deleting part of it and saving the original to a Remnants file to go over later. My Remnants file is a file where I save things, if I have to delete paragraphs or pages or sections. When I was getting back into writing, I hated deleting something in case I needed it later. It made it mentally easier to delete things into which lots of work had gone. I don't use one any more. If it needs deleting, I just delete it.

Something more disturbing was a discrepancy between the printout and the computer file. I use OpenOffice. There have been instances over time where I thought something had been changed by the program during the save process but couldn't prove it. This time the printout did not match the source file, and I don't remember fixing anything after printing. The printout said "is". The book's file said "his". His was the correct word. I've been thinking about getting MS Word for a while, because OpenOffice won't save the settings for widows and orphans. Maybe I should think harder about that. It's annoyed me the whole time I've used it and interferes with how a book looks in print.

So, the corrections are all done. The next step is to go through and work on things that are too big for the correction stage. I did a bit of it with the page flow changes I mentioned. Sometimes an entire page doesn't quite work. Usually, it's too choppy or feels rushed and needs a few extra sentences to smooth out the flow of it.

I'm still trying to get YouTube videos made. I need more wardrobe for the Messengers channel, and I've spent a lot of money lately that I hope will pay off in a few months. I checked a second-hand store this week but wasn't able to find what I needed, although I did pick up a shirt I can use later for a gag. One of the problems is I don't want to rush to get it all started only not to have enough time to get a video out every week. It takes a lot of time to make and edit and upload videos. I've been doing tons of research in the evenings. I can't do it all.

That's mostly where things are at the moment. Have a great weekend.

More of an Update

I finished up the first going through of Book 2 last week. This week has mostly been hours and hours of research I had to do for something else. It's more or less finished now. I should be able to apply it to the YouTube channels in future videos. I'll have more about that later, if it works out the way I'm hoping.

Book 2 needs to be gone through again. I'm starting to think about the YA book. It's getting closer.

Congrats to the Cubs! They beat the Giants to advance to the next round of the MLB playoffs. I was hoping they would play the Giants. They looked like an easy team to beat. The next round should be harder. They're playing the Dodgers.

It's been a bit of a long week. The tired had set in by last night. This was more of an update than a full blog. Last week's was a bit long. Maybe this one balances it out. :)

Have a great weekend.

Surprise in a Box

I've said before that things don't seem to be going my way. A lot of obstacles show up where none appear to be ahead of time. Maybe it's not as bad as I thought. In a previous blog I mentioned Lynx, a feral cat I take care of. There's a picture of him here. Last winter I made him a shelter out of a cardboard box from Walmart and a cat bed. I put plastic sheeting over it and duct taped it to make it a little weatherproof then put it on the back porch where he could find it about three feet off the ground.

This summer he decided he's domesticated. He uses the front porch now and hardly ever goes on the other one. It's been chilly at night recently, around 55F(12.78C). Last weekend I decided to move the bed to the front porch. When I got to it, the barrier I used to protect it from the rain had blown down. The box had some condensation under the plastic on the top. I reached inside and squeezed the bed some. It felt okay. I picked it up by the top of the door I made in the side and started carrying it around the house. It was kind of heavy, so I was swinging it a little and changed hands.

I put it down on the front porch and showed it to Lnyx, but he wouldn't go in. I tried to talk him into it. It didn't do any good. He would just smell the doorway. Once the tame cat noticed the box, he ran over to it, because he likes boxes. He wouldn't go in either. That's when I saw the tail end of the snake that was inside it along the bottom of the doorway. The bed had a pattern on it that made it harder to spot, even though they were different colors. The snake wasn't moving much. It seemed to be stuck.

I ended up having to take the box apart to kill it. Mammals rule! What appeared to have happened was the duct tape I put around the doorway so Lynx wouldn't get cut on the sharp edges pulled away from one side of the doorway when I was carrying it and swinging it and changing hands. Somehow in all the movement the snake landed on the sticky side of the duct tape along the side of the doorway. My hand was along the top of the doorway during all that.

It wasn't a baby but was still pretty small and looked like a rattlesnake with no rattles. After looking at snakes online, I thought it seemed like a cross between a diamond-backed copperhead and a black king snake. I've seen plain copperheads and king snakes in the yard but no rattlesnakes. I really can only guess. I'm not sure copperheads and king snakes date each other.

For me not to get bitten, everything had to work out just right. It didn't get me when I put my hand in the box. The tape had to come apart in the right spot. It had to be sticky enough to hold a snake, when most of the tape on the box was brittle and no more good. The snake had to be the right size to get stuck. It had to land in the exactly right spot. It had to get stuck at all and not merely jostled around. The head had to get stuck and the tail be free. There was a lot going on so I didn't get bitten at the time or later. Same for the cats.

A few days before that, I checked the weather on the Weather Channel. I have Directv. The weather guide takes a while to load. While I was waiting, there was a show about snakes on. I saw two people who had been bitten on the hand. It's copperhead season here. They've been running around having babies and stuff. I thought of that while I was watching it and turned it off and prayed for protection from snakes and for the snakes to be turned aside, etc. Maybe things aren't as bad as I thought. Maybe there's a purpose in all this. The devil set a good trap. Being three feet off the ground, I thought about snakes but didn't think one was likely to be in the box at that height. God watched out for me with the snake and turned it aside and trapped it in just the right way. Preventive prayer works. Even the traps can be turned backward and trap themselves. Psalm 91.