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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

I got something on my work email yesterday. It was a website advertising a self-published fantasy novel written by a fifteen-year-old girl. It was a pretty good website,and included the novel's first chapter for free. Ther's a lot of this kind of thing going on right now. As a writer for young adults and a librarian who works with them, I hear more about the young writers than the older ones, but a lot of adults are self-publishing, too.

Until about ten years ago, self-publishing was a joke. It was an admission that you weren't good enough to get published by a real publishing house. You paid a fee to the "publisher" received all the copies of your book, and were left on your own to sell them. Nobody made any money but the guy who printed the book.

That's not so true any more. For one thing, there are a lot more ways to get your book printed than there used to be. For another, every once in a while, a self-published book sells enough copies (the last I heard, the magic number was 5000) that mainstream publishers want to take a look at it. After all, five thousand copies is a fairly respectable sale for a first book, and that's what nearly all self-published books are. One young editor I know of has nothing to do but scout for those self-published titles that have crossed the five thousand mark, and review them for his publisher.

The challenge is to get to 5000.

I have a friend whose first book was not exactly self-published, but whose publisher was so small that he was expected to market the book himself -- or not. Bob spent over a year going to bookstores all over, every weekend, sitting at a table with copies of his novel, meeting people and talking them into buying. (Interestingly, it's easier for Bob to get into a bookstore for a signing than it is for me. Bookstores love independently published guys because the bookstore takes no risk ordering copies that go unsold. Bob brings his stock with him, and takes it away again. The bookstore gets a free program.)

Over the last couple of years, Bob has pushed his sales upover the 4000 mark. His book has been reprinted once. Another  few hundred copies,and the young editor, or someone like him, will take notice.

It's not ideal -- Bob's exhausted -- and there are no more guarantees with this kind of publishing than with submissions through an agent that your book will be accepted. But it is a way to get read that didn't exist a few years ago, and it's getting a new level of respect.

When you write for Harlequin Teen, three things are required. Each story must have a female main character (teen, of course) a romance, and a contemporary setting.

The first two are no problem. But Number Three has been giving me fits. I like to write historicals. I used to teach history, and for me a story set in 1740's Rhode Island or the roadless wastes of 1910 Wyoming is just more interesting than one that happened last week. But in today's publishing market, teens don't read teen historicals. Possibly they're too busy reading The Dream of Scipio by Ian Pears, or Thomas Flanagan's wonderful The Year of the French. Or not. In any case, they're not reading Rogue's Island or Everything But the Great White Whale by Douglas Rees because they're not getting published. And it's not just Harlequin Teen that's turned them down.

So coming up with a second title to fulfill my contract has been a challenge. But a few months ago, on my sixth try, I came up with an idea that pleased everybody. Contemporary setting -- Guadalupe, California (which is really more or less San Jose where I live at present); female main character -- Miranda Hoberman, sixteen year old theater queen and Juliet wannabe; and romance -- in the person of Edmund Shakespeare, William's kid brother, who gets magically translated from 1597 England to Miranda's kitchen table. Miranda wants to play Juliet, and Edmund wants to play Romeo (he's already played Juliet; in fact, he was the first one, back in 1593 when he was thirteen) and of course they get their wishes.

If only life were as simple as theater ...

Now that my excellent and computer-savvy wife has updated my webpage, which won such plaudits at the Crystal Palace in 1855, I can start posting things about my books. And in 2010 there will be a lot to post. Things that I wrote as long as ten years ago will be coming out at the same time as things that I wrote last year or the year before, and the year before that. The result is that I have four books coming out this year, and a short story in an anthology edited by Lois Metzger. Four books and a short story. This should solidify my reputation as a hack.

Anyway, the first book is already out. Uncle Pirate to the Rescue is a sequel to Uncle Pirate, both published by McElderry, and both illustrated by the superlative Tony Auth. When he isn't illustrating my books, he's being one of America's foremost political cartoonists for the Philadelphia Inquirer. In this story, Uncle Pirate, AKA Desperate Evil Wicked Bob, disappears while trying to rescue his old crew, and Wilson the nevvy, Captain Jack the penguin, Ms. Quern the secretary, and Sneaky Purvis the principal all go looking for him in an old blimp.The Amazon posting says it's for third to sixth grades, but it's more like third-fourth. Which means that if you're a sixth grader and you try to pass either Uncle Pirate book off as an age-appropriate book report title, you shouldn't expect to fool your teacher. Instead, I strongly recommend:

Majix: Notes From a Serious Teenage Witch, published by Harlequin Teen. This is the ten year old book which is coming out now. This particular overnight success has been rewritten nine times and rejected twenty-four. Anyway, Harlequin Teen seems to think that I got it right this time, and it's coming out in July. Basically, when Kestrel (never call her Susan) Murphy has to go and live with her Aunt Ariel, she discovers that her own cranky approach to The Craft (as in witchcraft) is less effective than Aunt Ariel's way of going with the flow. I'm told they're working on a trailer for it, which will be a first for one of my books.

Or if vampires are your thing, you might try Vampire High: Sophomore Year which Delacorte is bringing out in July also. This continues the story of Cody Elliott at the world's most exclusive public school which is basically for vampires only. That's starting to change now, and the town of New Sodom is having to come to terms with opening up some dark old secrets about its past, especially the ones buried across the river in the old industrial slum of Crossfield (which was my original title for the book- Vampire High: Crossfield, but the marketing dept. at Delacorte said -- never mind, Douglas. Never mind.)

And then there's Bites: Scary Stories to Sink Your Teeth Into, published by Scholastic. More than half the stories are about vampires; some, including mine, deal with other horrors and frights. I am very proud to be in this anthology because it puts me a few pages away from Christopher Paul Curtis, a very fine writer who is one of my heroes. Curtis started out writing on his breaks from working on an auto assembly line. That was all the time he had -- thirty minutes a day. Think about that the next time you don't have time to write.

And in October, McElderry will be bringing out my second successful try at writing picture books, Jeannette Claus Saves Christmas with pictures by Oliver Latyk. You probably didn't know that (a) Santa has a kid named Jeannette and (b) the reindeer HATE going out on Christmas Eve. Cold. Nasty. Wet. But Santa is sick and she's got to deliver the goods by daybreak.

And that's it for now. So far, it's been a good year. The Vital Theatre Company in New York did the first-ever production of Uncle Pirate the Musical with music by Drew Fornarola and script by Ben H. Winters, who also wrote the novel Sense and Sensibility and Sea Serpents. And Harlequin Teen has just signed off on my second book for them, The Juliet Spell, an effervescent riff on love, Shakespeare, time travel, and Zeno's First Paradox.

Onward and Upward With the Arts.