Publishing on the Kindle – 2

Astute as you are, Dear Reader, you will have noted a considerable hiatus between my entry “Publishing on Kindle – first steps” and any other Kindle-related activity.

The Grand Hiatus was actually composed of a series of Lesser Hiatuses.

First, no sooner had I congratulated myself on formatting Elsie Smith for the Kindle, but I realised that I was lacking a vital ingredient of even a Kindle book: a front cover. Yes, unlike a physical book, when you’re reading a kindle version, you can’t see the cover. But you still need a cover to go on the Kindle Store.

Art is not my forte. At photography I am mediocre. Photography it was then! But what to photograph? At length I settled on a dead hand, displaying a ring which features in the storyline. Having so decided, I needed to find and buy a ring resembling the ring in the story – which took some time.

Then it was time for the photograph. Several sessions followed (I’m grateful to my daughter for supplying the hand), but a “perfect” hand shot never emerged. Either the hand didn’t look dead, or it looked dead but the ring was not displayed to good effect. (On one occasion neither I nor my model had noticed that the ring was UPSIDE DOWN.)

Eventually I settled on making a cover from scratch, but that’s another story.

Hiatus number 2 was the title. Elsie Smith Vampyre Hunter had been Elsie Smith Vampyre Hunter since I first conceived of it and started making notes (2008). However, over the last year several external factors have been trying their best to push me away from that title.

The first of these was the film “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.” I couldn’t quite believe it when I saw the trailer for this at the cinema. By all accounts it is rather different in tone to Elsie Smith. (I haven’t seen it.) The second of these was the book “Anita Blake Vampire Hunter,” which my wife spotted in our local department store. Luckily this too (a series apparently) is also quite different in tone to Elsie Smith. (I haven’t read any of them.)

Well, Vampire Hunter appeared to be taken – so what else might I call the book? Several brainstorming sessions followed, which led to my daughter and I compiling a longlist of more than 30 possible titles or title fragments. Some of these revolved around times of day or the near extermination of humanity, or vampyres themselves and their characters.

Times of Day That are Dark are certainly well used on the Kindle Store. Here are the results of a search I did one morning:

Time of Day	Hits in Kindle Store (16.x.2012)
Night	8091
Dawn	3078
Twilight	1867
Midnight	1784
After Dark	169
Dusk	164
Till Dawn	12
The Gloaming	6

Even “The Gloaming” has 6 hits! Times of day were clearly out.

I eventually decided to stick with Elsie Smith Vampyre Hunter for now. However, maybe I should change “Vampyre” to the standard form “Vampire”? If you search the Kindle store for “Vampire” you get 12,182 hits (as at 16.x.2012), but search for “Vampyre” and you only get 122 hits. Maybe people don’t search for “Vampyre”? Maybe I should change to “Vampire”, albeit to appear as item 12,183 in the Kindle Store? In the event I have decided to stick with “Vampyre.” We’ll see how it goes. My ham-fisted attempt at a cover:

Publishing on Kindle

Knowing how astute you are, dear reader, you will have noticed that I have been quite quiet about Elsie Smith recently. I have hitherto had no luck with the MS, which could mean one of two things. Either the MS is BS, or else getting your MS off the slush pile is just plain hard even if it's actually quite good. The slush piles of the world would, after all, stacked on top of each other, probably be taller than the Petermann glacier (see above). They would then be frozen solid and buried for ever, or something, unless global warming slowly thaws them out, at which point a harrassed junior agent would run screaming for the hills.

Stubborn enough to highly rate my own work, I thought I'd float it out there on the Kindle.

This seems like a good idea, what with the Kindle being an all-round marvellous device, and with the mighty Amazon hosting your work gratis (they take a cut if you ever sell anything, of course).

Although the chance of significant sales is a small one, you never know. Too, this is an education, and one which, in the posts that follow (or precede, if you're reading this in the future), I'll be sharing.

Wordle of Elsie Smith

go to wordle.net to make your own... thanks wordle.

Apologies to my reader for the substantial lag in posting. This will be remedied when I have more time. Honest.

The Covering Letter

I have already talked about one aspect of a submission pack, the synopsis. But what about the covering letter?

First of all, the covering letter is going to be brief. Our hassled agent’s assistant is not going to want to read three or four pages of even the best letter writing. My view is that all that needs to be said can be said on one page. Taking into account the addresses, salutations, farewell, signature and Enc, we’re talking about half a page of detail. And it’s no good reducing the font size or the line spacing. 12-pt font, double-spaced lines, and you must say all you want to in half a page. Everything must exude professionalism. That means no typos. Grammar all checked. So, what should be included?

(i)What have you written? Title, genre, length, and target age.
(ii)A plot summary in one or two sentences.
(iii)Why your MS captures the zeitgeist, or why it is a timeless classic, or what it is that is new and unique about it. Who is going to read it, and why. Is there series potential?
(iv)Who you are. What is your experience of writing? What is there to indicate that, even if your book is excellent, you are any more than a one-hit wonder? Are you dedicated to becoming a writer, come what may?
(v)What state is the MS in, i.e. is it complete and ready to read?

All in half a page.

More on the covering letter later.

More on Submissions

Wherever an aspiring writer looks, there he or she will find depressing advice about submissions. The first thing that everyone says is: “Don’t bother with publishers. There’s no hope that a publisher will even read your covering letter, let alone your sample chapters. Get an agent.”

The next piece of advice is, if anything, more depressing. “The odds of getting an agent are akin to those of getting struck by lightning.”

Ann Coburn in this how-to about writing for children mentions odds of 3000:1 for one agent (one new writer after 3000 MSS and 12 years). Another agent received 300 MSS a week for 20 years and took on 3 writers (i.e. odds of 300x52x20 to 3, or about 100,000:1). With odds like that, lightning strikes seem to make a not-too-frivolous comparison.

Of course, the two numbers (3000:1 and 100,000:1) are quite different. One refers to MSS read, the other to MSS received. In other words – and this is completely non-scientific guesstimation, based on the memories of two agents – there is only a 1 in 30 chance of getting your MS read, and a 1 in 3000 chance that your MS, if read, will be taken on by the agent.

And this is calmly overlooking the possibility that the agent may not be able to sell the MS to a publisher. The odds of this are a further unknown (but are certainly much shorter than anything else I’ve mentioned).

So, to the point at last. Your submission (and mine) is going to land on the desk of a hassled assistant whose job it is to winnow the oppressive pile in front of them down to a manageable size, before skim-reading the survivors and passing one or two onto the agent to assess. What we are not going to do is give our lovely assistant any reason to throw us out of the pile, right? That means following the agent’s submission guidelines to the letter. At least then we won’t go straight in the bin without at least being glanced at.

When the agent’s assistant glances at us (I’m going along with this personification, because it seems true somehow), what will they see? Generally, and there are exceptions:

i)Covering letter

ii)Synopsis

iii)3 Chapters of the MS

I’ve already talked about the synopsis. In the next few days I will address the remaining two items in the submissions kit.

Writing the Synopsis

Writing a synopsis of your work ought to be easy, right?

Well, not for me. It took me about half a dozen goes at a synopsis of Elsie Smith to come up with something that I was remotely happy with.

The problems of writing a synopsis are fairly obvious. You have to compress an entire book into a single page. Enough must be on view on that one sheet of paper to sell your story. Not everything that happens in the plot can be included – some things will have to go. Which ones, and how to decide? Is there room for any discussion of character traits? What about the conclusion of the book – do you really want to give away the ending in a single-page summary?

So much so obvious. Any writer should be able to summarise their work. Just pick out key facts, arrange them in a series, and you’re there. Easy in theory: but every time I started to write the synopsis for Elsie Smith, things quickly went wrong – I ended up with what sounded, baldly stated on a page, like a series of clichés. Elsie Smith is not clichéd. So why did the synopsis come out sounding like it was?

Here’s how one attempt began:

“The world is empty and silent.

Britain is gone. The USA is gone. Civilisation itself has gone. By day the world is an eery, ghostly place, full of rusted cars long abandoned and mouldering buildings falling into ruin. Wild creatures are all that move – but behind blacked-out and boarded-up windows, mad figures lurk and wait for nightfall. There are no prey for the vampyres any more: all are dead, or, like them, in tormented undeath afflicted with the curse of unquenchable thirst…

Only on one isolated island are there survivors. Here a few hundred souls eke out a precarious existence, battered by fierce Atlantic storms and beset by boatloads of vampyres from the mainland.”

Appalling. I’ve used nearly half a page, haven’t mentioned Elsie Smith or anything about what actually happens. It didn’t matter how I started, I always felt that I had to paint the setting first, and that always wasted nearly half the available space. Carry on like that and I’d be looking at two sides at least.

I don’t usually put the ending in my synopses. But I read somewhere on the net that you should, and having read that, I knew at once that this was so. Why? It is the difference between getting someone to read your book for pleasure (blurb on the back of it) and getting someone to read it with a view to selling it to someone else (your approach to an agent, who has to know how an editor will receive it).

That being the case, I hit upon a theory. What if I started the synopsis at its end? Just write down the ending. Then go back a step and put down the important thing that happened before the end. Six such jumps and I was back at the beginning. OK, so I still had a page and a half, but it read a lot better. The opening bit was reduced from the quote above to this:

“Civilisation has been destroyed by a plague of vampyres. Only on one remote, windswept island do people remain.”

Conclusion: there is no room for description in the synopsis. There is very little scope for character traits. “Determined and dutiful” was all I could fit in for Elsie. For Zero, “arrogant and flamboyant.”

One thing about synopses: to write one, you must know what your book is about. If that sounds silly (“You’ve just written the damn book, how can you not know what it’s about?”), it’s not meant to. It’s possible to write a book without ever considering what it’s actually about.

Elsie Smith

The first idea that I had for this book was this. I am writing a fantasy. Therefore, I can have whatever I want, go wherever I want, make whatever happen I want. So I decided to have a plague of vampyres wipe out humanity. Yeah! Take that, humanity. What next? Well, there have to be some survivors...
Survivors. The next obvious question is, who are these survivors, how do they survive, where do they survive? All questions with a variety of possible answers, but mine were, respectively: a rag-tag bunch of refugees (the ‘lucky’ ones), by the skin of their teeth, on a remote, tiny island.
Next question: who’s the main character going to be? What will happen to them? (The Plot). Will their character change over the course of the book? Well, because of the target audience, the main character kind of has to be a teenager, right? The sex of the main character has a bearing on lots of things – how other characters treat them, for a very good example. Elsie Smith is a girl, if you hadn’t guessed. Because this is a fantasy, and as its author I can make anything happen, I’m going to take her from the little island back to the mainland, where survival is impossible... or almost impossible. It is just about possible to survive by a combination of luck, skill and bravery: so our character has a thorough test.
Other characters? Well, a companion. No companion, no one to talk to, no conversation. Arguments are more interesting than chat, so let’s have them not get on. Let’s have the companion be a boy, too. Let’s have his character be diametrically opposed to Elsie’s, and have him be a mass of enigma (why is he called Zero? Why does he have an apparent death-wish?).
Why do Elsie and Zero have to journey to the vampyre-infested mainland? Why, because they have to rescue someone. There has to be a reason to risk everything in this enterprise, for Elsie at least, so let’s have the lost person be her sister, and have Elsie driven out anyway.
Whether Elsie and Zero succeed in their quest – well, that’s not, in the end, the point of the story. The point is what happens to Elsie, how what happens changes her as a person.