Here’s how it works. Authors upload a short audition section of their novel and then prospective narrators who are interested upload auditions for the author to choose from. The author accepts one, and then they agree on payment of which there are two options. The author can choose to pay a negotiated fee to the narrator OR he or she can offer the narrator a fifty-percent split of the royalties. Since this is my first venture into audio I went with the latter. Fifty-percent of nothing is nothing, after all, but the narrator is gambling that my work is worth more than nothing.

There is a constantly growing pool of manuscripts offered and new narrators, but you can help yourself find someone to read your book for you if they believe you have a certain marketability. I am lucky in having four previously published novels from a well known New York house, having thirteen thousand tweeps, and fifteen hundred likes on Facebook, but you can find other ways to prove yourself (the best of course is having a remarkable blurb and great writing). Or, alternatively, you can note up front that you are going to be paying cash on the barrelhead not the stingy old royalty thing.

For now, onward and upward. I’ll keep you posted.

Let me preface that with the fact that I worked my ass off to put myself in positions to be lucky, but be that as it may, luck has been there. I wrote fourteen unpublished novels over eight years, received over three hundred rejection letters during that period from agents and editors, and actually signed with five different agents. But I was lucky enough in the end to find Irene Kraas, my beloved agent of nearly a decade who brokered not one but two six figure deals for me. Irene patiently guided me through the tricky learning curve of working with professional editors at a large house, and although we later parted on good terms I have missed her cutting wit and nurturing spirit. I hope she spends many more years building careers for new authors and I’m sure she will.

After that I spent another brief time in the wilderness before signing with a man to whom I had previously sent more than one almost successful query, Peter Rubie, who is arguably the best all round agent in the business today. I have never met a literary agent who is willing to immerse himself quite so deeply into the nitty gritty of a manuscript in order to turn every page into just the ticket to grab an editor’s attention. And a harder working agent would be hard to imagine. I thank Irene for teaching me that such editing is a gift to be cherished and not a slap in the face. THAT was the hardest learning curve.

So am I lucky? Immensely. I was lucky to work first with Kate Miciak, famous executive editor and Dragon Lady at Bantam. Kate was not what anyone would refer to as solicitous. She expected only the best and now. Thank you, Kate. I was so lucky to get to work with you.

There were so many others, Abby Zidle, Caitlin Alexander, and one brilliant young intern, Caroline Miller, without whom all the other luck would have been for naught. Thank you so much, Caroline. I hope whatever you are doing today you continue to change the world around you for the better.

Last but by far not least I have been lucky to have long ago found my soulmate, Rene, who bore me two precious daughters, and to have reunited with a third who bore me three precious grandchildren.

Lucky? Are you kidding?

First of all I have to say that out of the box Scrivener loses for immediate usability. It is simply too all-encompassing a program to allow for an author to open it up and start writing without some study. The online video tutorials are, however, quite well done and I would say that the average writer with average computer skills can be up and running at least on a basic level in under thirty minutes. Then, depending upon how involved one wants to get with all the bells and whistles of the program the author could probably have it operating in exactly the way he or she sees fit in a day or days at most of experimentation.

YWriter, on the other hand, just sort of falls into place, at least for organic writers like me who don’t outline and don’t need all the flexibility in that area that some writers want or need. Opening a new writing file and going through a fifteen second ‘wizard’ has you ready to write your opus and the writing screen and everything you need are there in front of you in tabs. Unlike Scrivener there is no need to figure out how to add folders for chapters and scenes. Chapter and Scene tabs are right there.

I also like the way YWriter intuitively handles the nexus between the writing side and the database side where all the info is kept on characters, locations, items etc. by tab. And the fact that I can create one of the above by simply selecting the text and double clicking. Then select add character, add location, etc and I’m taken to a database file for THAT particular character, location, or item where I can give second names, add backstory, ad infinitum. AND whenever I click on that highlighted character or location or item in the writing side I’m taken directly back to the correct database file. No more wondering who a character is or what the description of a location is.

I also love the fact that YWriter automatically follows each of the points above and keeps track of who, where, and what is in each scene. Naming a scene creates a summary of scenes and writing a longer summary in the notes box below that compiles a scene by scene synopsis which can be printed as a report. I HATE writing synopses, but YWriter makes it reasonably painless.

On the other hand Scrivener is infinitely customizable whereas YWriter is to a much lesser extent and I’m reasonably certain that if you spend the time you can learn how to tweak Scrivener to make it do something similar to pretty much everything I’ve detailed above for YWriter. Also if you are writing and want to add photos (you can have character photos etc in YWriter but only for your own info not publication in the text) you want Scrivener. If you are writing a much more complicated format such as magazine articles you definitely want Scrivener, and if you do a LOT of outlining and playing with your story BEFORE it gets written you DEFINITELY want Scrivener.

Let me add one caveat. There are YWriter authors who LOVE to outline and still love the program. For a brief (three minute) explanation of outlining in YWriter watch this.

I’ll close by saying that these are both excellent programs. I like YWriter because it almost seems like it was designed for me. But other writers might not feel the same connection and need a program that is much more customizeable to THEM. Since YWriter is free and Scrivener offers a Demo (wish I’d slowed down to see that) I suggest trying both to see what works best for you.

Okay. Sit back for the long version.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Million Word Rule, but over time I became a firm believer. There are exceptions, and everyone who ever reads the rule believes that THEY are it, but experience has shown me that 999 out of 1000 are wrong in thinking so. The Million Word Rule states that any writer has to write at least 1,000,000 words before they ever produce anything salable. King and Koontz will back me up on this from their own experience. The Rule works more often than most any other rule of the sort out there. And writers used to discover it all the time the same way I did. The hard way. Because by the time you have written one million words, 10-15 full length novels let’s say, you have either given up and quit or you have discovered 99% of what was wrong with the first ones and fixed it. Plus you have quit copying other people’s writing and fallen naturally into your own voice which does not come with 100k words.

But I digress. Sometime around 2001 I had had two events rummaging around in my subconscious. One was a shootout in a street outside a bank in LA in which the two perps were clad head to toe in body armor and armed with machine guns with armor piercing shells. The battle went on for almost an hour, several cops were killed and it was horrific. The other occurred when I lived in Alaska when a guy went crazy in a remote village and murdered 20+ people even going so far as to take potshots at the mail plane. I started writing without thinking of either, and 30 days later had completed Cold Heart. Within a week 5 agents contacted me and I chose the one I wanted. Two weeks later she had us a two book, $105k deal. And that began my first experience with professional editing. I won’t go into that here except to say that everything I had taught myself over nearly ten years of writing paled before what I was about to learn. If you are interested in knowing more about that I wrote a blog post on it which has been published around the net.  Three years later my agent got us another 2 book $120k deal.

Now, all that being said, how do I feel about Bantam vs Self Publishing? I’m incredibly thankful that epublishing was not an option for me during the 90s. Had it been I would have published a lot of stuff that was not outright garbage, but which in no way could even touch the stuff that Bantam and I produced later. Writing is an incredibly difficult art to truly master, and I am not by nature a patient man although I have perforce grown a lot more patient through my time in the industry. And that is true for 999 out of 1000 of the people who are self publishing today including to a degree myself. Most authors today no longer even attempt a query to the big houses much less 300 and they then self-publish their first novel, most often eschewing any editing whatsoever except their own. This is about to do to epublishing what Publish On Demand managed to do to self publishing in the 90s only even more so, since Publish On Demand for the most part never was completely free. I read recently that published enovels had gone from something like 50k a year to one and half million in four years. Imagine that YOU are the exception to the Million Word Rule, that you have written the next Hunger Games. How do you differentiate yourself from the ten thousand other authors claiming to have done so? On Twitter where hundreds of thousands of authors tweet optimistically all day back and forth to Themselves? By getting hundreds of Amazon reviews? How do readers know you didn’t buy them?

My theory is that this will all shake itself out over the next 2-5 years. It has to or readers will be hard pressed to decide if they even want to buy ebooks any longer. Amazon is stumbling toward some sort of review of reviews to make them more trustworthy while publishing houses like Astor+Blue are cropping up which will only publish works they consider quality and which will provide professional editing and distribution for their ebook authors at no charge. Readers will begin to gravitate toward them the way they did to professional houses before over Vanity Presses (and I firmly believe that this will grow the midlist again, as these smaller houses will make money there). Caveat- my agent is about to sign a multi-book deal for me with A+B, but I would not give them good press if I didn’t believe in them or the new paradigm they represent.

So, where does that leave us? Somewhere in the middle I think. I am having a blast rewriting some of my old unpublished thrillers (I should have mentioned that along with my earlier works and my Bantam books I also managed to write another twenty or so thrillers and about 500k words in a Steampunk universe. The Steampunk may see print as my agent is touting it now) and epubbing them. I enjoy hearing from new readers and interacting with them in ways I never did with my hard published works. But I still want to see my books in print from major publishers. Luckily, though, in this new world I don’t have to be torn. Publishers are learning that they cannot hold writers down to contracts that tie them into years with the same house when they have so much writing they want to get out. This will help everyone since ebook readers also read regular books! I hope I answered your question. If not let me know what I missed. I also think I’m going to use this as a blog post!

The first time I experienced professional editing was a traumatic moment in my career. I had been writing for years, had over three hundred (that’s 300) rejection letters and been through five agents when I finally got my first two book deal from Bantam. I was ecstatic. Then I received my editorial letter. Wham. I started throwing things (I never throw things). But eventually after revising I knew it was better. Imagine my surprise when I learned that now it needed copy-editing and line-editing. And BOTH produced problems neither my editor nor I had caught in the laborious process leading up to those edits.

I recently took the time to re-read Cold Heart after eleven years and realized it had a typo.

So you think YOU can produce a readable manuscript simply by meticulous re-reads? Good luck. I just finished an incredibly funny indie book by a new author and sent him a note to let him know that I would be happy to post a five star review of it as soon as he got some line editing. I have a hunch he’s trying to do it himself and I wish him the best of luck as well, but I know what the result will be because I have been there and done that as recently as my first indie book, Crossroads. With that novel I went so far as to not only publish it in all e-formats but paperback as well. I ordered forty copies only to learn that it needed editing and discovering that I had inadvertently not only left in typos but had copied one paragraph from the end of one scene onto the start of another later in the book.

And I READ that ms meticulously before publishing. My brain just saw what it wanted to see.

Now I have heard for years (and it does work) that you can catch more problems by reading the book aloud to yourself because in doing so your mind will not let you skip over typos. I have never been able to do this because I simply feel too silly. I know. That’s stupid, but there it is. And this will still not solve the problem of pole rather than poll etc.

I am not here to tout any particular editor, and in many cases writers may be able to avail themselves at little or no cost of local English teachers, for example. But for god’s sake don’t skip the process. You worked your ass off writing that masterpiece. Do you really want it to go out into the world with its fly unzipped?

I can no longer pretend that the two parties in this country are roughly equal in their moral standing. I can no longer pretend that the right is as willing to reach across the aisle as the left or that putting aside policy differences both want what’s best for the country. I can’t do that because it simply isn’t true any longer and hasn’t been true for at least the past twelve years if not much longer. I’m not going to argue with readers here about this vote or that bill. I’ve been refuting GOP bullshit for so long I have cleaned that Augean stable once too often. And that’s part of my frustration, that otherwise intelligent people can be convinced by soundbytes and obvious lies to vote against their own best interests. And I can no longer pretend that those foolish enough to do so are simply misguided and worthy of my sympathy.

I can no longer pretend that those people voting for the GOP are not my enemies and the enemies of my family and friends and all freedom loving people.

There you have it. If you will vote for people who cover up the truth to protect their ultrarich benefactors even when the truth comes from people THEY asked for it, if you are going to vote for the party that wants to pay my daughters less than their male counterparts doing the same job, if you will vote for the party that wants their rapist to have as much say over their bodies as they do, the party that wants to get rid of the EPA, the Department of Education, FEMA, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and return to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell then you are threatening our American way of life and my kids’ and grandkids’ futures. That makes you a danger to others and my enemy. If you will vote for a party that does everything possible to keep people from voting including scurrilous voter ID laws, threatening billboards, sending out official voter information cards which have directions in Spanish to vote two days after the election, hire voter registration companies that ditch Democratic registrations in dumpsters (the list is endless) then you are my enemy.

I know the old Internet rule that whoever brings up the Nazis first loses the argument. Rules are made to be broken.

After the war all the good Germans went around telling people (and themselves) that they never knew what Hitler intended to do, or what he was doing behind their backs. They felt terrible about how he had led them into the most devastating war in world history. Some people chose to believe them, mostly themselves. But the vast majority of people in the world knew that it was horseshit and that they were responsible for all the suffering just as much as Hitler. They had voted him in after reading Mein Kampf. So when our rivers are burning again. When our cities are blanketed by noxious smog, our Midwest and south are deserts and our coastal cities are underwater, when American women are dying again from back alley abortions and our gay community is hiding in the closet once more, when homelessness is rampant and the churches can’t produce enough soup kitchens, when our elderly lose their life savings to privatized Social Security and are flooding our emergency rooms because their private Medicare plan does nothing for them we, too, will remember who voted for the GOP. And we will remember that you were our enemy.

And so, when I decided back in late July to self publish a new fantasy/thriller called Crossroads I did so with more than a little trepidation. On the one hand I was aware that ebooks were exploding. On the other I recalled the vanity publishing debacle of the nineties. When two agents read Cold Heart  they both vied for it, and I got to choose the one I wanted which is a rare occurrence in the industry. But as soon as she learned I had published my own book, A Certain Slant of Light, she was absolutely appalled lest a publisher stumble across it and know that I had committed the unforgivable sin of self publishing. I immediately pulled it from the shelves, although you can still find a used copy now and then on Amazon (and I have every intention of revising it and republishing in the future as I loved the characters).

So, now I find myself in this brave new world in which authors control their own destiny, and perforce handle their own marketing. Woe is me.

Nah. I’m not that much of a wuss and I actually enjoy marketing now that I’m learning it. I just question if I’m doing it right (and since I’m following the lead of a lot of other people… well…).

Let me give you a for instance. Twitter. I have spent a considerable amount of effort building up a Twitter following of just under ten thousand tweeples, mostly other authors, some readers, and some political. I’ve actually come to ‘know’ and like quite a few of them, and they have turned into fans. I have become fans of some of their works as well. I can see how this could build a real fan base over the coming years (and luckily ebooks are forever and don’t have the three week throw away period of the old brick and mortar stores), but what I see by and large is an endless array of scrolling notes trying to get me to read just about every ebook out there, promising that the authors are international bestsellers, that the writing is amazing and they have the reviews to prove it. I’m not saying I have done anything different. In fact just the opposite. I watched what was happening and joined in quite gleefully.

I did the obligatory free days on Kindle and a couple of thousand people downloaded Crossroads. I have yet to receive one review from that giveaway. All the reviews I did get I got by interacting with People. And I know what many will say now, “That’s the point! You have to build your base one tweeple at a time!” I agree. Believe me I can see the reality of that in action, and I’m already working on it.

The same story could basically apply to Facebook as well, although FB isn’t quite such a bewildering flashbang of people in your face as Twitter, and you do get a lot more room for explaining yourself and interacting.

My goal now is to convert as many of my tweeple and FB peeple into real fans over the next twelve to twenty-four months as I possibly can rather than to simply grow my twitter and FB page follows and likes. I’ve also just pulled Crossroads from Kindle Select and it’s being converted for Smashwords so as to spread its visibility.

I know that readers are out there who’ll love my stuff once they find it because they have in the past. I just have to find them. And I’m not sure that spending a lot more time marketing myself to other indie authors who are in hot pursuit of their own readers serves a purpose at this time, but I will continue to tweet and post because my posts do get passed on and my tweets retweeted, so there are readers out there among the virtual chaff. And I continue to repost and retweet for my own fans, because I believe that one good turn deserves another.

If this post sounds down to you please don’t take it that way at all. I’m one of the most upbeat people you’ll ever meet. Authors for the most part have to be. I’m just noodling on the next big step in my marketing plan.

But then I’m one of those odd authors who comes up with a title first, or at least most times. That’s also why it’s so incredibly difficult for me to invent a NEW title after the manuscript is written, as I was forced to with In Shadows (Don’t get me started. That title represents the only time I yelled at one of my editors). Originally I came up with a perhaps not-so-original title of Blind Spot and then wrote the first scene involving a deaf-blind boy hearing and sensing evil all around him. The book took off from there. When Bantam published a work by a better known author right before mine with the Blind Spot title I had to change. I wanted In Shadows Fierce since that is from a line in the opening poem. My editor suggested Shadows but that was nixed as being ‘too Dean Koontz’ as if that could ever be a bad thing. Personally I think the ‘compromise’ which was really not one stinks and have hated it ever since, but there you are.

Cold Heart started out with a cop killing in Houston but it bugged me that there was nothing cold going on so eventually my crazy subconscious took us to a village in the Alaskan bush. Readers loved the weird shift never realizing that I had no real choice in making it. It was either there or the Antarctic where I have never been.

Night Terror I at least had a starting point since I knew I was going to write something about the horrible affliction with which my youngest daughter was burdened for most of her early years (For those of you who may be laboring under the misconception that Night Terrors are the same as Nightmares think again. That’s like equating being shot with a BB-gun with being blasted by a howitzer.) So naturally the first scene is that of a young woman shrieking in inconsolable terror.

I could go on through twenty plus or more other titles but you get my point. I just found myself curious if there’s anyone out there like me, crazy enough to start a three hundred page journey into the unknown on the strength of a couple of words.

The Remnant goes free Tuesday and Wednesday (16th and 17th of October) and the 1st 30 reviewers on Amazon will receive a signed copy of Crossroads!

The Remant is a tale of deceit and betrayal of family, friends, and fellow worshipers so evil that even God could not forgive it. Or at least one God can’t.

In any case I absorbed all the bizarre information and as it percolated I wrote a novel called The Remnant which–as my works are wont to do–incorporated some reality with some paranormal and ended up being the story of an investigative reporter tortured by the murder of his fiancee by fundamentalist assassins. When he survives an attack himself–thanks to rats, a lot more on rats in the story than you’d think–beneath the streets of New York and then learns that Ashley is still alive but in grave danger, well, I’m not going to give it away.

Suffice it to say that as soon as it was done and revised to my satisfaction I sent it to my agent. Now remember I said this was a few years back. She hemmed and hawed and finally agreed to send it out to editors in New York who all agreed to read it. They were unanimous in their opinion that it was unbelievable. Not because of the rats or the young girl who spoke directly to God. No. It was unbelievable because no one would accept that there could be such a thing as Mormon Fundamentalist Killers. My irony meter broke. No amount of evidence like that above would penetrate.

Folks, always remember that when you are writing facts are stranger than fiction.

BTW. The Remnant is scheduled for release under Kindle Select tomorrow. Sunday 30 September, 2012.