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So my publisher, Del Rey Books, aka Random House, has decided on a schedule to release the three books they bought from me. They had originally said they were looking into publishing in fall of ’08.

Fall of ’08 is a LONG time away, when you sell your books in June of ’07, I thought, but my agent told me that a delay of about a year is standard, and not to fret about it, and that I should take the extra time to really rip into the sequel.

It was sound advice, and I took it, toiling away on book II, knowing I would have no reader input on the first book until long after the second was finished.

But now they tell me that they want to print the first book in Spring of ’09, to avoid being lost in the ’08 holiday shuffle.

I can appreciate that I am a new author, and am less likely to stand out amidst all the tinsel and half-off signs and whatnot, but this is still frustrating for two reasons. One, it means I essentially have to write all three books before I hear what readers have to say about them. I know you shouldn’t worry TOO much about what readers think, and focus on the stories you want to tell, but I was kind of looking forward to that input as a tool to grow my craft.

But more than writing in a vacuum, I just don’t think I can wait another year and a half for the book to come out! Holy shit, man. This is the culmination of my life’s dream, and I have toiled for countless hours in obscurity over it. I am signing conracts and filling out tax forms and selling the work all over the world, dealing with the project day in and day out, and now I have to wait 19 more months?

I can’t even friggin’ wait for the Iron Man movie, and that shit is coming out in May.

What am I going to do? How am I going to last that long? I already can’t sleep at night. It’s like I’m in Narnia, where it’s ALWAYS winter and NEVER Christmas.

But then it hit me. I could freeze myself.

I got the idea from an episode from Season 10 of South Park, where Cartman is so excited for the Nintendo Wii, which is coming out in 3 weeks, that he can’t contain himself. After pacing in front of the electronics store for days, he finally decides that he can’t take it anymore, and decides to freeze himself, like astronauts on long space journeys do in Sci Fi movies. That way, his friends can then unfreeze him in 3 weeks when the game is out, and it will seem as if no time has passed.

I should TOTALLY do that.

Of course, there is the risk of me being buried in an avalanche and waking up in 2507 when the world is at war with hyperintelligent sea otters, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take.

Posted on September 14, 2007 at 7:53 am by PeatB
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Got an offer for hundreds of thousands (of yen) for the first book of the Painted Man series today. It’s not huge compared to the Western offers, but it is apparently quite sizeable for Japan.

I know the Japanese tend to be much more literal in their book titles than Americans, and it winds up translating back weirdly. I am excited to see how that shakes out. I am also totally stoked at seeing my work in Japanese characters.

Maybe they will want to do a manga comic version of the book, too. They could call it Painted Manga!

I’m ordering sushi tonight, and cracking open that bottle of sake in the fridge.

Posted on July 25, 2007 at 5:56 pm by PeatB
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So as I mentioned, the publisher wants to change the name of my book.

I really like the title The Painted Man. Honestly, I think it is the best title for the story I have written.

But the publisher’s point, which I will concede, if not like, is that the title is a marketing tool as much as it is a capturing of the spirit and soul of the book. As such, its purpose is to entice browsers to pick up and read the book, which works to everyone’s advantage. The publisher makes money, I get more people exposed to my work (and money), and the reader hopefully gets a book they enjoy.

The general feeling was that The Painted Man did not give enough of an impression about what you’d get inside to catch the attention it warrants.

I was a bit upset about it at first. I loved my title and was ready to fight for it. But then I realized that my publishers were investing a LOT of money into my work, and it was only fair for them to try to maximize profits (from which I would also benefit).

It took a couple of days, but I managed to emotionally separate my book from its title. Now I have to think of a new one, and get it past the marketers. That might actually be fun.

But coincidentally, I learned what can happen if you go the other route. A VP at my company called me into his office today, and pointed to the listing for my sale on SFScope.

“Is that you?” he asked.

“Guilty,” I said, and the guy launched into a whole thing about how he was a published author with like 3 books, but had given it up for more lucrative ventures. We talked for like an hour.

I told him about the title thing, and my decision not to fight it. “What, am I going to jeopardize my life’s dream because I won’t budge on a title?” I said. “I’m not going to try and wrap up all my artistic integrity in having my first pick title on the book.”

“You handled it more maturely than I did,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I had two 2-book deals,” he said. “But I only published 3 books. The first two weren’t so good, but the third intoduced a new detective character, and in the fourth book I really perfected him. It was the best thing I ever wrote. I even had the perfect title: The Rape of Ganymede.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“The publisher didn’t like the title,” he said. “I fought and fought, but they wouldn’t budge. So, rather than have them force a new title on it, I took the book back, walking away from the deal. I figured some other publisher would buy it, and let me keep the title.”

He paused a bit. “But I couldn’t,” he said. “And I haven’t sold a book since.”

Yow.

Posted on July 21, 2007 at 10:12 pm by PeatB
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Fucking Jardir.I’m hard at work on the sequel to The Painted Man (soon to be named something else), and it keeps growing. Even as the first book sells all over the Western world, there is universal agreement on one thing: It is a fucking brick. 565 double-spaced pages in MS Word.Your average novel by a first-time author runs about 80,000 – 120,000 words. That puts you in the 300-400 page range, and publishers usually either bounce or edit to fit anything outside of it. I guess that it has a lot to do with print costs and expected returns and reader satisfaction/fatigue, and a million ofther decisions that have little to do with actual storytelling and more to do with the business side of the industry.But epic fantasy is a very verbose genre, and people expect thick books. If you’re churning out a formula novel, like a Piers Anthony Xanth novel or something from Wizards of the Coast’s Forgotten Realms series, you stick to the 120,000 word cap. If you’re writing something more like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, that’s an epic, and the rules go out the window. The problem is, you don’t normally start out writing epics. Jordan didn’t. He wrote a bunch of successful Conan formula novels before he hit it big and started churing out 900 page monsters. Publishers don’t usually want to take the chance and pay huge print costs for something they’re not sure is going to get them a solid return on investment.But despite knowing this, I have always been in the latter category. I don’t know how writers stick to a page cap. That’s why I don’t think I could ever write comics, much as I would love to. How do you make every story fit into 22 pages? God, I would go nuts with that. It is a special art.

Myke told me for years that this was going to bite me in the ass. He was always going on about how I was shooting myself in the foot; disqualifying myself before I even entered the contest. It was a valid point, but my response was always, “I gotta be me.” I go where the writing takes me, and not the other way around.

The Painted Man was 184,000 words when I finished the second draft. At my agent’s urging, I cut whatever I could, trimming it down to 170,000. We still expected that to be a problem.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t. We had no trouble selling the book, and my editor wants to cut some things, but she also wants to add others. There might be a modest reduction in word count when all is said and done, but I doubt it will be anything approaching the 50,000 words we’d have to cut to make it the average length.

I started the sequel, The Desert Spear, with a tight stepsheet and story arc, expecting to keep it at least the same size as the first book, and probably a lot smaller. Alas, it seems not to be. As Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings, “The story grew in the telling.”

Take Jardir, for example. One of three main characters (Jardir, Renna, Arlen), he was supposed to have maybe 40% of the book’s focus. The first chapter was supposed to be a quick account of his “origin” story, showing how he came to be the person he was. This theme is very important in my writing. I like to show all my leads as children first, so you can see the events that shaped them into the adults who drive the story.

So I started in on Jardir, fully expecting the story to grow a bit from my notes, but still thinking it would be two chapters, tops.

So far, that bastard has eaten up FIVE chapters, LONG ones, and he is still going. Every time I start to write about him, I start overflowing with ideas, and his world just grows and grows. His wife gets a chapter. His friend gets two more. Every time I’m ready to wrap it up, I get some huge inspiration and it just goes on.

I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. I am immensely proud of how it’s going. I think it’s some of my best work. The overall story is better for me having explored him so thoroughly.

But I haven’t even started on Renna yet, and I just know I’m going to fall in love with that bitch, too. And let’s not forget Arlen, the Painted Man himself. I can’t very well cut him out of the story, can I?

This book is going to be a million pages long.

Posted on July 21, 2007 at 8:40 am by PeatB
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Okay, this is getting to be ridiculous.Yesterday, I got two rejections from small publishers in Germany. My agent tells me not to worry about it. “With what’s going on in the US & UK, the ones that can’t afford you will always be the first to refuse,” he says. “The bigger German publishers will either buy in now, or they will wait as you break a bunch of other markets and then jump on the bandwagon.”

“If you say so,” I say.

So he calls me today. “You just got a sizeable first offer for all three books from one of the big three in Germany,” he says, “and the others are still reading and may yet bid. Either way, you’ve broken the German market.”

“Ich bin ein Berliner!” I said.

“Ja,” he replied. “And with all this attention, I’ve gotten requests to read your manuscript from Hungary, Spain, France, Japan, and a few other countries. The Japanese publisher had me send him a word file so he could put it on his PDA to read on a plane!”

“Bizarre,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. “You wrote it on a PDA.”

“Point,” I agreed. “So what’s our next step?”

“I don’t know,” he said, surprising me. He always knows. “We’re kind of breaking new ground here,” he went on. “This is really rather amazing. I’ve never had such international interest before the US version sees print, not to mention the ridiculous pie in the sky size of the offers.”

“So I shouldn’t get used to this?” I ask.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” he said. “Just sit back and enjoy the ride while it lasts.”

“I can do that,” I said.

Fuckin’ A, I can.

Posted on July 19, 2007 at 2:00 pm by PeatB
Filed under Germany, Life, Sales, Writing
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