No Really, I’m Big in Czechoslovakia

Getting published is hard; not laying asphalt on a city street in August hard, but nearly impossible in ways pouring concrete isn’t. Every aspiring writer knows there are generally speaking, two steps. First, you must obtain an agent, then that agent helps you get a publisher. It is also well known that getting an agent is just about as hard as getting published. In some ways, it is like having to do the impossible twice just to prove it wasn’t a fluke.

My first book was shopped around by my agent to a few major publishers and turned down. Then it started visiting the independents and landed with AMI. So it began its published life handicapped with an unknown publisher and virtually no marketing except what my wife and I could do. Despite this, a little more than a year later, Crown is doing remarkable well. It has hundreds of very positive reviews. It sold out its first printing, and has a consistent Amazon sales rank that beats most of the major published works that I tend to follow. Now publishers are making offers for the foreign language rights. I have received unsolicited inquiries from major houses in Spain, France, Germany, and Poland, and have received offers from two publishers in the Czech Republic.

But despite all this, despite the awards, accolades, and sales figures…I still can’t get an agent.

I had one. She was brilliant, but she left the industry before I was published. Since then I didn’t feel I needed one, but now with the advent of requests for foreign language rights, I think I could really use someone who understands this part of the business. I’ve sent out several queries listing the merits of the series and an explanation that I need them to negotiate existing foreign rights offers—what I would think should be instant money to anyone willing to represent me—and still I am being rejected. Talk about a tough industry.

So if you’re an unpublished writer with little or no credentials looking to find representation for your novel…well, maybe you shouldn’t have read this as it might cause an upsurge in creative writers laying roads this summer.

Round 3!

I am surprised to report that Avempartha has survived its second round in the BSC Tournament and is now one of the remaining “sweet sixteen.” With all the recent reality tv shows, I almost imagine all these books being forced to live in one drama-filled house as they compete daily, and forced to undergo bizarre challenges. There aren’t too many literary-based reality tv shows however, probably a reason for that.

Now, Avempartha is up against Cherie Priest's Boneshaker.



This matchup is particularly rough as I recently bought Boneshaker for my daughter who was interested in Steampunk. I chose it because I thought it sounded great, the first few pages were wonderful, and because of the numerous positive reviews. So this is a real good book. Just to add to the challenge my daughter informed me I might be in trouble because Boneshaker has zombies.

Voting is open and will remain open until 8:00 PM EST on 3/31.

So you have a little less than a week to decide to go with Steampunk zombies or Sword & Sorcery thieves.

While this contest has been great fun, as it consists of people voting for books and expressing why they liked them, and to an author that’s pretty nice to see, it has mostly come down to exposure, which is unfortunate. In a head-to-head matchup, people most often vote for the book they read and against the one they did not. At least in my matchups, only a rare few have read both. I expected this, but I expected to be slaughtered in the first round because all the other books have a much higher profile than mine. These are all big books, and big name authors released through major publishers. How I’ve survived this long is bewildering. Bewildering, but nice--very nice. Even if this is where I get voted off, the exposure has been great, and I can’t complain about the company. (Can you believe that Gathering Storm lost in the first round?)

Thanks to everyone who has supported me, and to BSC for including my little book.

Final Edits, Superpowers, and the Bermuda Triangle

As we come down to the wire I am receiving the final edits on Emerald Storm from proofreaders. As they do, I am adding to my list of mistakes I consistently make. I do this in the hopes of learning to avoid them in the future. Sometimes this actually happens.

I was a notoriously bad speller in high school, to a point where my friends referred to the stories that I wrote back then as being written in “Sullispeak” a language each prided themselves on being the greater scholar at. I was so bad that I spelled “evil” wrong. This was baffling to my friends who maintained it took real talent to screw up a word with only four letters. (I spelled it “eivl.”) This, above all, was what convinced me at the age of eighteen that while I had written three full-length novels, I could never be an author. That is how I ended up in the fast lane to artist. As you can see, I wanted nothing to do with a career where I might make money or even find employment.

It wasn’t until the advent of computers and spell-check that I contemplated writing again. Well, I never stopped writing, but for the first time I thought seriously about trying to publish something once I had a Sullispeak to English computer program. Back then, this was a DOS-based word processor called SAMNA. The intricacies of grammar came much later and I’m still struggling with its nuances. The good news is that, as an author, I have the Marvelesque superpower to defy grammar rules and even invent new words (like I just did with Marvelesque—impressive huh?) Still, it is better to know the rules before you break them; otherwise it’s just a mistake. Turns out spell-check is a great teacher. I can now spell evil…see.

As you might expect, as they come in, I watch for similarities in the editor’s comments. You would be surprised at how often professional editors contradict or debate each other. One editor will remove all the commas that another editor put in. As a result, I look for the commonalties, those aspects that all editors do the same. What I found was not a matter of grammar at all, and not a spelling error, not even a typo.

The one common standard I found consistent to all the proofers was their uncanny lack of any corrections in certain areas of the book. Always the same areas. It is as if there are little Bermuda Triangles in my story where editorial marks disappear. It could be that I merely succeeded in writing perfectly in these areas…but I know that’s not true because I found mistakes in the Triangles myself. No there’s a much simpler explanation.

They are the exciting parts.

I just hope my readers suffer from the same inexplicable phenomenon.

Round Two!

Thanks to those of you who voted, Avempartha won the first round of the BSC Tournament. Yet now Royce and Hadrian have moved to round two and the competition is strong. This time Avempartha is up against “Finch” by Jeff VanderMeer.



To vote

Voting is open from 3/20 to 8pm 3/25.

Royce & Hadrian Face Their Greatest Opponent Yet

Unbeknownst to me, my second book Avempartha has been included in the annual tournament competition on the BSC website where they pit 64 books released in the previous year in bracketed elimination match-ups.

I received this email from the organizer yesterday:

Good day Mr. Sullivan. Hopefully my use of 'Mr." won't cause this to fly into your spam filter. In any case, I wanted to let you know, on behalf of BSCreview.com that your novel Avempartha is one of 64 books that we selected to be voted on, starting Thursday, March 18th, in our book tournament for the best new genre release of the year 2009.

You can see the details of the tournament here


We invite you to encourage your fans to come vote in the tournament on your website, forum, Goodreads, or what have you, and we would be thrilled of course if you dropped by to promote your book.

The opposing book in the first round is Tanya Huff's The Enchantment Emporium and the thread where people will vote and debate the books will be here


The first round will be the shortest, beginning the morning of 3/18 and ending around 8:00 PM EST on 3/19. The winner will then move on to the next round starting the morning of 3/20 and that round (as well as each subsequent round) will run for six days.

I wish your novel luck in the debates to come and hopefully we will see you on the forum!

I expect to be trounced as all my competition appear to be from major publishers with much more exposure, but I must say—and not at all in an Academy Award way—that I really am honored--no--stunned just to be nominated.

Covers

Yes the rumors are true—I paint my own covers.

When I was eighteen and on scholarship at art school, being a book cover artist was my dream job. I imagined myself leisurely reading wonderful novels in the park and then spending a month doing grand oil paintings in a sky-lighted studio listening to jazz and drinking wine. I was living in a fantasy world even then.

Turns out illustrators rarely have the luxury of actually reading a book, but then I never got that far. My illustration skills were only good enough to do comps. Finished art was beyond my capability. Keep in mind this was at a time when cars were still often painted rather than photographed and they had to look as realistic as a photo…only better—hence why they didn’t just shoot it. Instead I worked as a designer, a job for which, my illustration skills were overkill.

It wasn’t until my first book, The Crown Conspiracy, was published that my mind returned to this dream. Only it wasn’t a dream anymore; it was desperation that drove me. I had explained what kind of cover I thought the book should have. In my mind I saw it as a loose watercolor, the kind of thing that Alan Lee did for The Lord of the Rings, series, that faint, hazy, mystical look. I pointed out that I really did not want a cartoonishly tight illustration of the characters on the cover.

I’m guessing focus groups have indicated that covers laden with characters attract American readers, as this is what modern marketing dictates for fantasy books. As a seasoned advertiser I knew that it was better to stand out than blend in, but honestly this was a personal desire on my part. Sales be damned, I wanted my books to look nice. Also as a reader I don’t like seeing characters before I know what they look like, and I didn’t want an artist (even if that artist is me) to control the imagination of a reader. I think people will envision what they want, what they like, and what they are comfortable with; this is far better than anything another person could ever achieve with an illustration.

I compiled a list of images that depicted the idea I was after, and my publisher being most polite, listened to my comments then hired an artist.
I soon received this rough sketch and became concerned. As an author, I had no control over the cover or even the title. This was something the publisher’s art director was quick to point out when I protested. But my publisher didn’t know about the dreams of an eighteen-year-old art student.

With encouragement from my wife, I very quickly painted what I wanted to see on my cover. To sweeten the pot I offered it to them for free. I even did a layout of the cover placing the title, my name, and the blurb. They decided to use my artwork although they altered the layout slightly. Having done the first cover they wanted to make them consistent and so I had a lock on all of them. And that’s how I came to have the lucky advantage of controlling the first impression readers have of my books.

I sought to establish a “look” or brand to the series, but I also wanted to separate them from each other in some way. I settled on keeping them all in a similar loose landscape style, but making each in a different color scheme. The first was gold, the second in blue, the third in green. That left me red, purple, and orange. None of them worked. Red, orange, and purple lacked the natural earthy quality of the others. Also the first three reflected the seasons the stories took place in, fall, spring and summer, and Storm took place in fall again. This caused me to consider repeating the colors.

The Emerald Storm became an instant problem because of the name. It should be green, only I don’t want to do two green covers in a row. Moreover, green would be perfect for Percepliquis, and Wintertide must be blue (I knew that from the start.) This left gold for the seafaring novel. As it can be imagined as a sunset or sunrise, I think it works. Still there was that annoying name. I actually considered changing the name for a brief time and created a comp of the cover calling it The Golden Storm. I knew that was wrong, and changed it back. My wife, Robin, eager to show off the new cover posted a copy of the image and it was promptly picked up and has been copied on a few blogs. So if you spot an image of the cover of The Emerald Storm with “The Golden Storm” on the spine, that’s why.

The symbols found on the spines and in the layouts are also my designs and reflect the general concepts within the books and also embody the idea of the medallions given to the heir and guardian.

In case there are those out there interested if your suspicions are correct about the cover images:

The Crown Conspiracy
The cover depicts Essendon Castle on the front cover and on the back is the river Galewyr that leads through the wilderness to the Winds Abby located on the hill on the upper left.




Avempartha
This is a rendering of title’s namesake tower with the Gilarabrywn in the distance. On the back, although not easily seen on the book, is the trail Royce uses to travel between the village and the tower each day.




Nyphron Rising
The image on the front cover is of Amberton Lee and is the scene Royce and Hadrian might have seen as they approached it that night.




The Emerald Storm
I suppose I should wait on explaining the Storm’s cover. No need to give anything away when we’re so close.



So as long as this series is in production I have a pretty steady job as a book cover artist, the trick it turns out is to write your own books.

Research

I recently received this and with the writer's permission will reply to it here:

Michael,

Hope all is well. I imagine Ridan is very busy with the approaching release of "Emerald Storm". Whenever you can spare a moment, I was wondering if you could share where do you turn for research for your books. It struck me how much of everyday life in your world you showed in your work, particularly the little village in "Avempartha" and the city scenes in "Nyphron Rising". Can you share where do you turn for research? Perhaps a blog post, or just a couple book recommendations. I am sure many readers and new writers like me would find it very helpful.

Thanks,

-Henry

I became serious about my writing career back in 1985, back in the days of continuous-feed, dot matrix printers, amber screens—and no Internet. I feel this is somehow analogues to Mark Twain reminiscing about the days before the typewriter. And yes, I had to walk through the snow to the library, uphill, both ways.

In the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, where I lived during my most productive writing years, (prior to giving up the dream of ever getting published,) the nearest library was two hours away, and they wouldn’t let me check the books out. This made research a challenge. To make matters worse, at that time I was writing contemporary/realistic novels. Just about everything I wrote I needed to fact check. This slows the creative process dramatically. Here you are cruising along and your main character is thrown into the back of a police car. It is at that point you realize you’ve never been in the back of a police car and haven’t the slightest idea what one looks like. Are there handles on the door? Window cranks? Seatbelts? I can’t imagine a police officer buckling a cuffed suspect in, but who knows. It seems silly to visit a police station and ask to view the back of a squad car in order to write a single paragraph of description for a novel about gargoyles. On the other hand, you are acutely aware that there are many people who will read this who know exactly what the back of a squad car is like. This makes writing this kind of novel a pain, and it’s why when I threw the yoke of trying to get published off and decided to just write for fun, I chose to write a fantasy series set in my own invented world. As long as I stay consistent, no one can ever prove I am wrong.

Initially I wrote off the top of my head. The Crown Conspiracy is almost total imagination. I did go back afterwards and introduce a few more accurate words, but nearly all of it is pure invention. By the time I got to Avempartha, I discovered Google.

At first, I used the Internet merely for ideas or for those moments when I knew there was a term for what I was trying to describe, but didn’t know it. This was the case with Dahlgren. I had no idea what medieval peasant farmers lived in. Huts seemed too tropical and log cabins too Abraham Lincoln. I wanted something more period-accurate that evoked a sense of squalor. So in this case I did a simple Internet search. I don’t recall now, but I assume it was about as sophisticated as typing “What kind of houses did Medieval peasants live in?” into Google. I saw some references to “wattle and daub” and so I did a search on this and at this site I found:

“Medieval houses had a timber frame. Panels that did not carry loads were filled with wattle and daub. Wattle was made by weaving twigs in and out of uprights. Hazel twigs were the most popular with Medieval builders. After the wattle had been made it was daubed with a mixture of clay, straw, cow dung and mutton fat. When it had dried, a mixture of lime plaster and cow hair was used to cover the surface and to seal the cracks.”

I found some images and realized this was what I wanted.


The Internet was incredible, revolutionary for a writer. I had the answers to any question just a few keystrokes away, instantaneous. Wow. This was almost prohibitive as I began looking things up I really didn’t need know and would spend hours reading about the lives of peasants when all I was after was to learn if they wore wool or linen clothes. So I began limiting my research to those moments when I was stuck or stumped.

The Emerald Storm changed things.

A large part of the story would be set aboard a sailing ship, and I’m not a sailor. This time I had to do research. So for a full year in advance of even starting that book, while I was still writing Nyphron Rising, I began reading everything I could about the Age of Sail. I read Nelson’s Navy by Blake & Lawrence, the Hornblower novels by C.S. Forrester, Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr. etc. I have notebooks full of jargon, terms and even maps of ship’s decks.

This resulted in its own problem. When you have no research, you focus on the story and characters, but neglect the setting and details, but when you have a wealth of knowledge on a subject, you tend to want to share this. The result is that you over do it. I anticipated this. It is the same concept as over-world-building, something I feel too many fantasy stories suffer from. An author works for years creating a world, but so little is really needed to tell any story that it is easy to become frustrated that all this cool stuff you spent months laboring over will never be known. It is easy to dump it in telling yourself that the readers will love the detail and depth. A few may, but I know for my own part, I prefer a story that centers on the characters and the plot and doesn’t take side trips. So I had to be careful not to include unnecessary information, that while I thought was really interesting, didn’t add to the story and was merely more words for a reader to push through to get to the good parts.

The Emerald Storm did teach me that more research could help the books, so I did begin doing more. I picked up William Manchester’s A World Lit Only By Fire, which gave me a clearer view of common life in the middle ages and the Renaissance. Sadly, I can’t recall all of them, there was a down-sizing move in there from Raleigh to DC that saw the loss of many things, but I read several other text books, and filled a moleskin notebook with notes and drawings that I referred to throughout the writing of the books.

Now this was at a time when I was writing Wintertide, and while I had an agent, I still had not found a publisher. So I could go back and add what I learned to the earlier books. This allowed me to beef up some of the descriptions and make them “more accurate,” or at least more consistent with Earth history. Then after being published, I used this information when doing edits and re-writes.

Avempartha improved from my having read that poor medieval families slept all in one bed and kept their livestock in their homes with them, and that they frequently did not have doors on their houses. Nyphron Rising benefited from learning exactly how a feudal manor actually worked, and from researching the inner workings of a castle. Most of this came from random Google searches to sites like the one I provided above. Again I simply typed searches into Google and scanned the various sites. Those that provided more detailed information I would bookmark, and I put all those bookmarks into a folder marked “book research.” Sadly the computer I had died two years ago and I lost that list. But there wasn’t anything wondrous on it. Most of the sites I found held only one or two bits of obscure information that I wanted. It wasn’t as if I had two or three sites that answered all my questions. I actually found it difficult to find hard data on the life style of the common man in the middle ages.

So to answer your question Henry, besides the listed resources, I have also read Chaucer and lots of old history text books that since I graduated high school I made a habit of reading when eating breakfast and lunch, mostly because they were big and lay open nicely, and because I like history. But the reality remains that I did very little research. I’m not sure why, but I feel that I should be embarrassed to admit that the vast majority of the series is just my imagination. Anyone one using my books to do a research paper on the life of a peasant farmer in 1100AD will be in big trouble. Despite this, I am surprised when people ask me if I am a practicing sword fighter. Some--who declare themselves as fencers or sword fighters themselves--comment on how accurate the dueling scenes in my books are. To this, I can only shrug. Who knew.

By the way, should anyone else have a question they would like me to answer, please ask.