Multiple authors sharing a booth and my professional looking banner helped make the festival worth it this year, at least for me. Participation should be carefully considered.
My writer friends and I have had multiple conversations about book festivals. The bottom line question is, are they worth it? We toss around questions like, can you sell enough books to cover the cost? Is it worth it to invest in banners, posters, cards and other give-aways? Does participation result in readers who look for you later to buy books online?
This is what I learned from participating in the 2014 Baltimore Book Festival.
What a weekend! The Baltimore Book Festival was a bit overwhelming and a lot exhausting. As crazy as it was to get past the massive crowds and find a place to park, it was amazing to see so many talented authors of every genre imaginable all in one place. I loved the opportunity to meet and talk to other writers about their experiences, but by far, the best part of the weekend was the opportunity to meet and talk to readers. What a joy it is to watch a stranger purchase your work--people who don’t know me as a person let alone as a writer. People who don’t know the books and yet, they still take a chance and buy the work. It’s an amazing feeling.
I’ll write more about the experience soon. Until then, here’s a little gallery of photos from the event.
I recently heard high praise for a book by a new author and immediately went online to purchase the ebook. When I saw the price however, I was shocked. $12.99 for an ebook?! The Bird Box by Josh Malerman, and published by HarperCollins, was so highly praised, I thought it was bound to be great. But that price completely turned me off. The pub
lisher wisely dropped the price after only a week, to $9.99 and even though I felt that was still a high price for an ebook, I went ahead and bought it. After reading it, I wish I’d waited a bit longer.
The experience led me to ask, what’s a book worth?
Stories about vampires and werewolves have been around for centuries but Michael Wallace manages to bring a fresh take to the old tale. Far afield from his stories about Later Day Saints enclaves in scrubby patches of desert, in The Wolves of Paris, Wallace takes us back centuries to 1450 to weave a tale of sorcery and deceit.
Two Italian brothers from a wealthy merchant family in Florence, travel to Paris to search for a man of their employ who has disappeared. They find a city terrorized, not only by supernatural creatures, but also by Dominican priests mired in the work of the Inquisition. One brother, Lorenzo, has already been “put to the question,” and resents his brother, Marco, for accusing him of heresy and turning him over to the priests who tortured him. The brothers also resent each other because they are both in love with the same woman; the beautiful and now widowed, Lady Lucrezia d’Lisle.
Sometime ago I asked the question, To agent or not to agent?
At the time, (was it that long ago?) my agent and I had been relatively successful. We’d made a bit of money and I was still hopeful that some smart editor would read my mysteries and fall in love with my characters, my premise and my prose. I even wrote a series of adult romance novellas that I was sure would finally get me back into a traditional publishing house. The novellas were smart and good, I thought, and in the serial format that so many people want these days. Surely, someone would snatch them up.
After a long list of rejections, multiple rewrites and more rejections we did find a publisher willing to give my mysteries a try. I felt excited about being accepted finally, by a publishing house even though they were a small startup. The editor was experienced and professional, the previous projects they’d launched looked classy and interesting, and it felt good to know that this publisher was willing to take a chance on me.
In the end, I guess I just wasn’t willing to take a chance on them. I’d worked too hard, and waited too long and had nursed my projects so diligently that the thought of my books languishing away somewhere, unnoticed and unappreciated kept me up at night. It had happened to my first book ever published. I didn’t want to see it happen again.
I was left with a tough decision. Do I tell this person, my agent, the one that had been by my side this entire journey that I was ready to go it alone? After knowing that she’d worked so hard to find a home for my stories and encouraged me every step of the way that it was time to part ways?
I’d been saying for months, to myself mostly and to others when I had the courage, that if something didn’t happen by some date in the future, I would indie publish. I kept changing that date in the future, moving the goalpost, still hanging onto hope, still thinking something different would happen.
Well it never did.
So, like thousands of people before me, I’m finally doing it. The good news is, I have so much material ready for print that I’ll spend the next few months simply preparing things for publication while trying to fit writing in when there’s time. By August, two of my mysteries, The Peacekeeper’s Photograph and The Sapper’s Tomb, will be published. Sometime after that, the adult romance series of four novellas called Genuine Date, will also reach the market. And shortly after that, the third book in the Master Sergeant Lauren Harper series will be ready for publication.
Am I sorry that I started this journey by writing query letters and finding an agent? Absolutely not. As I said, we’ve had some early success with ghost writing memoirs and I would never have had those opportunities if I hadn’t been represented by one of the most patient, knowledgeable and professional women in the business. I still LOVE my agent. But I had to finally realize that a traditional publisher wasn’t going to get my stories. They weren’t ever going to agree that people who love mysteries might be intrigued by a smart, tough and yet feminine professional soldier who gets herself into and out of all kinds of interesting scrapes. My agent got it. The publishers didn’t.
So, off I go on my own. So far, it’s been an interesting, challenging and fulfilling ride. I can hardly wait to see how it will end.
You write a book, you rewrite the book several times, you send it to a bunch of folks to read, you absorb their comments, you decide you’ve got your final product, you send it to your agent, your agent makes comments, you absorb those comments and finally it goes to your publisher.
Eventually, the manuscript lands in the hands of an editor who reads every word, analyses every phrase and comes back to you with more comments.
In my opinion, the pages and comments that come back from your editor are the pages that require the hardest work.
For every other set of comments, you as the writer can choose to accept or reject any of those comments. Some comments you will know immediately are spot on. You incorporate them with gratitude. Other comments aren’t so easy to hear. Some you accept, others you reject because they don’t fit your vision, perhaps you don’t trust the reviewer or perhaps you’ve decided as the writer, the comments are just wrong.
But comments from an editor are different. This is the voice of your publisher. These are changes direct from the person who will turn your chick into the bird ready to leave the nest for good. You’re not as free to ignore these comments and suggestions as you would any other. These comments, at the very least, should be strongly considered.
So you work with them, you wrestle with them perhaps. Rewrites should be fun. But to me, the rewrites that happen as the result of an editors comments have an extra added pressure to them, and aren’t quite as much fun as others.
The good news is, these rewrites could be the final rewrites before your book finally makes it to the shelves. So we wrestle with them, we dedicate ourselves to them and we try to answer every question the editor has. Hopefully, the comments, no matter how difficult they may be, will lead to a better book.