Thick or thin reading

Our little bookstore sells mostly used books, and we also like to stock regional offerings. So, we draw book scouts. In the old days, most book scouts were mostly looking to buy used books for other bookstores that sell used books. Sometimes they’d be scouting for a collector. Sometimes they were collectors themselves.

These days, we see more and more book scouts who are scouring the country in search of self-published books that they might sell to bookstores, or to big publishers (more and more of which are picking up previously self-published books). Ours is a small store, off the beaten track, and we see something between four and eight of these guys a month, as far as we know. How many of them are professionals, and how many are just winging it, I couldn’t tell you. It’s a new form of gold rush, in its way, with scouts hoping to strike gold with some obscure book or author they can launch to acclaim and bestsellerdom. Like all mining, it draws all types.

So, anyway, a few weeks ago a man who claimed to be a book scout bought one of my books, Why We Raise Belgian Horses. Later, he called my husband, and said that he really liked the book, and in the future it might be hailed as good literature (he said), but for today it was no good because people wanted shorter books. If it were only 130-140 pages long, he could sell it, he said.

We had to laugh. For one thing, in our bookstore, thick books often sell easier than thin ones. For another, of the four books we hope to get out within the next year or so, God willing, all four are longer yet. By quite a bit, in some cases.

For another thing, when we started in this business, we used to tear our hair out when people came into the store and obsessed over the length of kid’s books. We’d be asking what the kid would like to read about, or about what the parent would like the kid to read about, and the mother (carefully drilled by her child’s public school teacher more often than not) would be in anguish that she might buy her precious, fragile child a book that was too long for her, or that had chapters before the child was ready for chapters, or that had words in it that the child didn’t know already. (I did mention, didn’t I, that this made us tear at our hair? And if you’re wondering where I get my deep and abiding dislike of the self-esteem movement, this is definitely one of the reasons.)

But then Harry Potter came along. Overnight, or close to it, nobody cared about the length of children’s books anymore.

I guess these things go in cycles. Over the decades and centuries, the length of fiction has seemed to go through fads, and certainly, many publishers these days have strict guidelines on length for certain genres, or series, or what have you, and that’s their right. If I were writing for them, I’d fit my book-for-them into the template, if that was part of the deal. And I know that, as a reader, sometimes I gravitate toward thinner books or thicker ones, depending on my mood and my health. But I also know that while the big publishers have a tendency to run in packs on this as on other things, smaller publishers have often bucked the trend, and readers seem to be able to cope with the variety. Imagine that. (Those doggone readers, refusing to fit a mold, after all the time and trouble and money and research that goes into creating that mold…)

Anyway, I’m glad the self-proclaimed scout liked the book. That he thinks that he’s the exceptional reader who can handle ‘longer’ books (of less than 79,000 words, or 160 pages in that layout), well… No comment.

Should I laugh, or cry? (My default mode, if you haven’t figured it out already, is to laugh.)

P.S. Since that book scout told me my books were unsaleable, another scout took copies of my two published books (the second being Trouble Pug) to a bookseller friend of his in Portland, who read them, and then ordered three more of each for stock. This despite the length, and despite the fact that we’re still only putting them out in comb binding. We’re still not setting the world on fire, but it’s no longer simply a hometown effort.

Cross-posted at Suitable For Mixed Company.

Two books out, working on more

We launched Why We Raise Belgian Horses with a small print run – and then decided we wanted to change the format of both it and Trouble Pug before we printed any more. And then we ran into code problems (I am beginning to understand why some people have sputtered in frustration over Microsoft Word – it seems to be cancerous with code). And then life threw us a few unrelated matters that needed some attention. And then…

Long story short: both Trouble Pug and Why We Raise Belgian Horses are nearly sold out in the experimental horizontal comb-bound format, but we hope to have them in the more standard vertical format soon. We printed a couple of Belgians this week in the new style, and are conferring on whether we’re happy with margins, etc. So we’re getting there. We think. (Did I mention that life has tossed us unrelated matters that need attention?)

Just to make it more interesting, my husband is also talking with some folks who might publish one or both of those in a standard trade paperback format. Here’s hoping. It would be nice to have the books out in a professional binding, with someone else handling the upfront costs, the manufacture, distribution, sales, billing, shipping, basic publicity, etc., and sending me a check now and again, freeing me up to concentrate on writing, with only a few interruptions to go do book signings and interviews.

(Well, yes and no. To be honest, I thoroughly enjoy using paper cutters and punches and binding machines, and building books from scratch. But there are things to be said for delegation of tasks, and for books that don’t look homemade, and for books that have ISBNs.)

We also have some interest in the three ”Not Exactly” books I’ve been working on over the past several years. But we’ll probably launch them in self-printed editions in the meantime, unless we get a contract soon.

This week I decided to dust off the embryonic fourth book in the series, which I set aside long ago with only a first chapter done. After several days on concentrated attention, I’m up just past the 15,000 word mark in the first draft, so it has a long way to go, but by now I know the characters fairly well, and that’s speeding things up considerably.

My alternate future novel, The Smolder, also seems to be inching its way toward publication. Unlike most of my other books, in this one it is the ending that has given me fits. I’ve rewritten the last couple of chapters several times this winter. I’m finally to where I can hand it to preview readers, I think, to get some much-wanted feedback. Overall, it feels close to ready, but I’ve said that about other books, and found myself still wrestling with them years later.

Of the two books out, Why We Raise Belgian Horses is trotting past Trouble Pug in general appeal and in sales. Since it’s my debut novel (Belgians got published later, but I wrote it first), I have to admit that there’s a special satisfaction in seeing it do as well as has been doing. Not that I’m not fond of Trouble Pug, and not that Pug isn’t drawing its share of sales and positive feedback, but Pug is a book I kept reined in and simpler because it’s aimed at kids, but Belgians is layered, and more complicated, and more carefully woven, and did I mention that it was the first full-length novel I wrote?

I don’t want to leave the mistaken impression that I’ve sold great quantities of books (alas, I’m not an underground sensation yet ), but I think it’s fair to say I am past the ‘copies to friends and family’ stage, which is nice.

And we have some ups and downs…

After we got the first books on the shelf at the bookstore, we discovered that during the last edit run the computer had somehow inserted some lovely code changes. For instance, when there was an italicized word, the computer deleted the space following the word, except where the word bumped up against punctuation. Elsewhere, it added spaces between some paragraphs. Go figure.

Having already fixed all the typos we could find, it didn’t occur to us to go back through to see if new ones had been created behind our backs. Live and learn, I guess.

Deciding that we didn’t want a book out there with such gems as finallyswallowed and mightgo in it, we pulled the books that hadn’t yet sold, took them apart, and replaced defective pages with new ones.

But then, just before we finished that little project, we ran out of toner. (The cartridges that were supposed to be good for 5,000 pages each? They gave out at about 1,000 and 2,000 pages respectively.) Then we found that the toner cartridges had taken a rather substantial jump in price since last time we ordered. Then the toner cartridge we ordered got back ordered. So now we’re waiting for toner to refill the cartridges we have. (Where we live, we must do mail order for stuff like this.)

Trouble Pug is now available online at various places, from my husband’s website Uffda-shop.com, to Alibris to Biblio to AbeBooks (which, when I searched for my book, asked me if perhaps I didn’t mean pig instead of pug) to Barnes & Noble (where, not having an ISBN and otherwise not fitting the template for most new books, it only shows up under ‘used and out of print’). That’s for starters.

I’ll try to get some excerpts up before much longer, but the thumbnail sketch is that it’s a time travel adventure for kids on up.

We’re still looking for a place to get the books printed so we don’t have to do it ourselves, but for now we’re still doing it here at home. Or, we will, that is, as soon as the toner gets here…

Just to make it more fun, my husband and I have been battling some variety of winter bug for a week or so. (We spent Thanksgiving at home, perhaps defiantly eating an only-somewhat-scaled-back turkey dinner, when we’d probably have been better off with soup. What can I say? We didn’t want a measly virus interfering with a delightful tradition.)

Oh, and to make it more fun, this last weekend, when they put up the announcement on one of our reader boards in front of our bookstore, the employees put up “Kathy’s first book is here.” This pumped new life into a nickname I’ve gently been trying to leave behind for years. It also reminded me that I do indeed live in a small town. No last name was considered necessary on the sign. This, I might add, is more a mindset thing than anything else. The idea that everyone in a small town knows everybody else is a myth.

The official reason given for the nickname use is that, with four reader boards all drawing on the same pool of letters, they didn’t have the letters necessary to turn Kathy into Kathryn. This might be true. We’re not overblessed with letters, and we keep finding better uses for our money than to buy replacements.

The employees might also have thought more people know me as Kathy, since they call me that. (This is a nickname-prone part of the world.) I’m afraid to ask, though. They might think I’m upset, and I’m not, really. I’m laughing. I might be shaking my head side to side as I do it, but I am laughing.

Considering that I have introduced myself as Kathryn to everyone at church, this could be interesting, since now my new friends there might think that I’ve got a circle to whom I am Kathy, and they’re not in it. This is not the case. I just wanted to move to Kathryn now that I’m older, and also as a way to distinguish me from the all-too-many other ladies around here who are nicknamed Kathy. It’s a losing battle. Clearly. (For that matter, some of my e-mail uses kathy instead of kathryn. It was set up for me years ago, by someone else, and it just hasn’t seemed worth fussing over.)

As for the feedback on Trouble Pug, it’s pretty good so far, which is a relief to me. I worked as a newspaper reporter for years, and I’ve blogged for years, but fiction somehow is another matter entirely. It’s harder to write, and it’s harder to let other people see, or at least that’s the case in my case.

The feedback is also, in a way, a bit contradictory. One reader has reported she is reading it a chapter or so a night, in bed. She proclaims it a very good book for that, because it breaks so neatly into pieces. Another reader reported she couldn’t put it down and stayed up until 1:30 in the morning to finish it. Go figure. One person’s page turner is another’s bedtime balm. I do understand that each reader brings something of himself to a book, but this wide a spread surprises me a bit.

The first reader – the bits-before-bedtime one – has known me for years. The stayed-up-until-I-finished-it reader lives elsewhere and we’ve never met. I don’t know if that has a bearing, or not. Both are grown-ups. I haven’t heard from any kids yet.

Well, I don’t want to get too sidetracked wondering about it. I have several more books in the pipeline, some that only await typesetting and proofreading and printing and binding, and some that are still being written. I’m off to work on one of those.

And we have lift off…

Sorry about the prolonged silence here. It’s not because things weren’t happening, but because everything was in limbo. But we’ve decided to go ahead and print up the books that are ready to go, and sell them ourselves. Last night we got the first copies of Trouble Pug finished. They’re nothing fancy, just comb binding, and there were only eight in the first batch, but those eight went onto the shelf at the bookstore last night after closing, and were available to customers as of early this morning, so I guess I’m in the author business, after a fashion. We should have another ten copies, at least, made up today, and we’re hoping to keep turning out some nearly every day but Sunday for the foreseeable future. We should, God willing, have some available online soon. Other books should follow shortly.

It’s a true cottage industry project at this point. We have workstations set up around the house for the various stages of book production, everything from printing to shrink wrapping, plus everything in between. It’s fun, actually – but I can tell there are some muscles that aren’t used to being worked in just this way. Once I get in shape, I should be able to crank out quite a few books per day, but for now I’m easing into it.

Works in progress/ books for kids

In addition to working on full-length novels, I’ve been working on a couple of books for kids that I wrote back in 2001 and 2002. They needed a bit of rewrite, but I think they’re about ready to put out in preview editions, along with some of the novels. One is Joanne and I Burn Up, which was inspired by some things that happened to me when I was in junior high and high school. (And no, it’s not gruesome. The girls don’t burn up literally. More on this later.) The other is a book that was initially shopped around to publishers under the title Billy, but now is trotting around in a slightly revised version as Almost Hopeless Horse, or, in more expansive moments, as The Crazy, Silly, Good-for-nothing, Almost-hopeless Horse.

You may laugh at me now

Having said in my welcome post that I’d had to back off on reworking the books in the ‘Not Exactly’ series because they were being shopped around, this weekend I couldn’t resist rewriting a passage in the first book, Not Exactly Dead.

It was a short passage, and it wasn’t much of an edit, but I think it cleared something up. It also changed the pace just there, which I thought was good.

So then I had to confess my post-deadline editing to my husband-agent, and provide him with a fresh back-up. I offered to go with the old version if it would make life easier for him or the folks looking at the book. He graciously assured me that it was OK that I’d changed something.

I need to get these published, so I can get my life back…

“I think I could run the bookstore, if…

… you would like to write full time,” my husband said. This was back in December of 2000. I took him up on his offer then and there.

By August of 2001, Why We Raise Belgian Horses, a historical novel inspired by a story told by my husband’s grandfather, was at a major publishing house in New York, sitting in the slush pile. In September 2001, it jumped out of the slush pile.

You remember September 2001, don’t you?

Things were crazy for a while after that, in more ways than one. As far as the book went, it kept jumping out of slush piles, and then not making the final cut.

I was partway through a rough draft of the time travel adventure Trouble Pug on September 11. I had, as it happened, spent most of September 10, 2001, researching the sinking of the Lusitania, and wondering if it was all right to put such a disaster into a book aimed at grade school children and up. The events of 9/11 convinced me that I should put it in. I dug in and worked on Trouble Pug, ignoring, to the best of my ability, the ups and downs of Why We Raise Belgian Horses.

I soon had Trouble Pug in good enough shape to shop it around. Pretty soon it was jumping out of slush piles, but not making the final cut.

I hoped I wasn’t falling into some sort of pattern…

The encouragement was nice. The pre-orders I got were even nicer (i.e., we don’t want to publish your book, but send us five copies for folks in the office when it does come out). But this wasn’t putting food on the table or keeping a roof over our heads, and by now my husband was seriously ill with what some doctors were calling MS, and others post-polio syndrome, and others were calling something else. The days of full time writing were fewer and further between, but by now I was hooked on writing book-length fiction.

So I dug into finishing my next book, a spy caper/romantic suspense novel called Not Exactly Dead. Not Exactly Innocent followed. Then Not Exactly Allies. I started on a fourth book in the series, but put it aside to do editing and rewrites on the first three. I thoroughly enjoy the characters and adventures in these books, but trying to keep the universe together for three longer-than-average novels meant they all needed some overhauls. They also needed some fine tuning. And fact checking. And, of course, I keep thinking of things to add. And deciding on things to take out.

Since Why We Raise Belgian Horses and Trouble Pug were getting such good feedback as is, I’ve left them alone except for small changes suggested by proofreaders. But through the years I’ve been rewriting the Not Exactly books, and rewriting them, to my heart’s content. I’ve had to back off on that, though, because my husband decided it was time to shop them around. (He’s acting as my agent at this point.)

Last September, I started a new book, not tied to any of my others. It’s a novel set in the near future. The working title is The Smolder. It’s almost ready for my brave first readers to take a look at, once I get brave enough to let it go out to them. (After I’ve done a few rewrites on a ms, I alternate between wanting to know what people think of it, and wanting to shove it in a drawer where nobody has to deal with it or with me.)

Along the way, I’ve started some other books, some of which died on the vine, and others that are nearly ready to go. These days, while the Not Exactly books and The Smolder go out for second opinions, I’m working mostly on a cozy mystery, when I can find the time. I’m also doing research for a sequel to Trouble Pug.

In the meantime, I have yet another publisher looking at some of my books. But my husband and I are also thinking about self-publishing at least some of these. We figure that if they’re good enough to jump out of slush piles and make it through the early rounds, they can’t be all bad.

We’ll see.

Welcome to my world.