 And I appreciate you staying for this and for the reception and for Kim's reading tonight, if you can. I understand if you have to go. Kim has to go. What's that? Kim has to go. Kim has to go. Kim has to go. Right. But she'll be here through her reading. Right? So if you can stay, that would be great. You certainly, you can stay until tomorrow morning. If you haven't worked it out with your mentor, you can meet at breakfast. You can do that too. But I want to say before we get started on this that I appreciate all of your efforts this term and also this residency. And it's been a delight working with you. I miss the people who are graduating this time and I look forward to helping the folks graduating next time to get there and everybody else. So any other comments, co-director? Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to place this panel on the last day is so we could kind of use it interactively, not only the comment on what we've seen, the agents, all the rest of the stuff, but so that you could turn it into a question and answer of your own. If you want to talk about publishing, just talk about it. Just ask questions. Let's keep it as informal as possible. I in particular will be sort of going in circles I think. So please don't expect a lot of cogency from me because you probably won't get it. Who wants to go first? The longer I can wait, the better. Well, I may actually look better coming after you. You will look better. You want me to go first? I'll go first. I just have a couple of comments. When we got this panel together, we, Bill's idea was to come at it from a couple of different angles, from small press, large press, from editing in a press to sending out stuff to small presses. So I'm just going to have a couple, just a little background and then jump into some points that I have gleaned over the years as a writer and as an editor. And then we'll move on down the line and then we'll open up the questions. If this lasts for half an hour, that's fine. Or an hour, that's fine too. I started with my experience as I, in publishing, started with, well, sending out, sorry, but then I started my own fiction magazine, Yearly Anthology, called American Fiction. And I did it with Al Davis for, we have a kind of syncopation with a coffee. Because I'll make it go into it if I start laughing. For 10 years I did American Fiction with Al Davis and he's continued that. And there's still a Yearly Fiction Anthology. And I'll just throw this out for those of you who want to get into the publishing area and, or the writing area. I founded it as a privately published, privately financed edition of an Anthology. And my goal was this. I wanted to take, like, the Best American Short Stories or the Pushcard Awards or the Southern, or the Editors' Choice Awards or all these awards that would pick best stories from the year. And usually pick a hundred and then boil them down to twenty. I wanted to have that kind of look to the magazine so it looked more like a book, you know, three, four, five hundred page book rather than a quarterly. And the difference is we picked previously unpublished stories. And that was a kind of twist. We picked big name writers to do the judging of the last twenty. And we did that for two years. And then my agent saw it, liked the idea, liked the concept, and sent it first to Birch Lane Press, which is this sort of medium-sized press in New York City, Carol Publishing. And they published four. They gave us a four-book contract, two and then two. So we did four more years there. And then we did it for, I think four or five more years with Al Davis and then it went out, it went on a hiatus for about four or five years or more. And Al, over the last three or four years, has picked it up again. So American Fiction has continued to go. And then about, I think fourteen years ago it started Dogwood magazine, New Run Now, and that was through and supported by Fairfield. So the first one is just initially privately funded. And I bring that up because I've been saying in my workshops about don't do self-publishing. Well, I wasn't publishing my own work. I was publishing somebody else's work and I was starting my own magazine. And then once it did well and started to get a name for itself, publishers picked it up. Dogwood I did for about eight years as the general manager, managing editor, and then fiction editor, and then passed along to Kim Bridger. And Sony has been doing it for the last three years. So that gives me about eighteen to twenty years of experience as an editor of literary magazines. I've read thousands and thousands of stories, probably ten or more thousand, about a thousand every year for at least a thousand every year for the last years of doing American Fiction. So I gleaned a lot of stuff from that. I'll talk more about that in just a moment. As a writer, I've published about fifty-five stories in little magazines, three or four larger national magazines. I had a sense from the writer's point of view, working with literary editors, what that means, what the contractual stuff is on the writer's side, also on the editor's side. I did one short story collection with a small press, University of Missouri. I'm doing one novel with a small press, Tuscany Press, that I read from the other night. So I have experience with large presses, Harper Collins, William Morrill, St. Martin's, and what that means. Small presses, University presses, and small presses for published novels. The perspective that I would give you from that experience, both from the writer's side and from the editor's side, my work on a lit journal, Small Press, helped me understand more about writing, I think, than my three or four years in grad school. Reading thousands of stories really proved to me that that is the best teacher. Reading both the good and a lot of the bad. And just, we've heard people say this, by reading a lot of the bad stories, you say, jeez, I did the same thing, I did the same thing. I can't tell you the times, I'd be reading a story that was good, but made some major mistakes and said, I did the same thing, I did the same thing, I did the same thing. Also, it proved to me that if you're going to pick a subject, like Alan, I used to joke about it, we'd do this long distance, we'd call each other at night, and say, how many are you reading tonight? I'd read 100, you'd read 100 or whatever. Literally, the last several years, it was 12 to 1600 that we split between us, so lots and lots of stories. You'd see patterns emerge, and it was the kind of the story idea of the month, or the year or something, and we were doing it in the 80s, and then early 90s, AIDS was just coming out. So you get the AIDS stories, or you get the cancer story, you get the abuse story. And so what I came up with was that a writer has to follow his or her passion. I've never written a story or written a novel that I didn't say that's what I want to write, ever. I've never listened to my editor saying, let's write a sequel, let's do this. No, I want to write what I want to write. If you look at my books, they're different because I follow my passion. So what I would say to a writer, reading lots of stories about AIDS or sexual abuse or whatever, is that if that's what you want to write, then write it. That's your prerogative. That is what the writer's purview is. That's your choice. You should be able to do that. But if you're going to write a story that everybody else is writing, what do you think you should tell yourself? Do it differently? Do it differently. Make it new. Make it fresh. For instance, Al and I used to laugh at night perversely at cancer stories. There'd be one cancer story. I don't mean to make fun of you so very seriously, but they do the same old thing. And how many of you get it? I got three. How are they dying here? How are they dying here? What kind of lymphoma do they have here? And I know that sounds coarse and crass, but as an editor, you have to keep your sanity. And then every once in a while, we get a story that just came out of the left field in terms of writing something old but making it new. And I remember we published a story in Dogwood some time ago that was, I think it was Dogwood. And it was about a woman who was dying. And she didn't want to go to a funeral home and have a funeral person do the stuff with her. Take the blood out and do all that stuff. She wanted her husband to do that because that's who she trusted. And so he jumped in and started learning how to do, using formaldehyde and all this stuff. And that's what I said, wow. Holy crap. Holy crap. And that was a new story. It was a brand new story. It was the old story but retold in a new kind of fashion. So if you're going to tell the old story, that's one of the things I learned from reading these thousands of stories. Tell it new, make it new, make it fresh. You can tell your story because that's what you're burning to tell, but you've got to make it new. I mean the whole notion that they said there's 37 different plots, supposedly somebody sat down and did that. So you're not going to tell a new story. There's nothing new under the sun. It's the way you tell it. The way the voice is going to be new, the angle that you take, and so on and so forth. As I said, you'll learn the good and the bad. Two, you'll make contacts. And contacts are very important. Don't let anybody tell you they're not. If you work as an editor or an agent and you're a writer too, you're going to make a lot of great contacts. If you work as an editor for Literary Magazine, and you're accepting stories, and when you send your stories or poems or essays out, and you send it out in the letterhead of your magazine, like Mason's Road, they're going to take a closer look at your work. Now I know that the ethics of that are questionable, but that's the reality. That is the reality. I know. I think that's another good reason to get involved either in a magazine or a Literary Magazine, Mason's Road or Dogwood, or one of the editing things that we have here. It's a good way to make contacts connected. Learning your craft, making connections. When I used to send my stuff out as a short story writer before I became a novelist, before I wrote a novel, I saw a really interesting article by Richard Ford, and he had a pyramid. He said, I wanted to climb that pyramid, and the bottom of the pyramid were small magazines, and the middle of the pyramid were better magazines, and the very top of the pyramid were the very best magazines, and that time it would have been the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's Esquire, and then the very, very good Paris Review, those kinds of magazines. And he felt that he would climb that ladder as a story. And I would say that's poetry. I would say that's short fiction, essays, articles, and that letter. He didn't succeed in doing that. He was able to write a novel, and he was able to jump up to the top of the pyramid, according to him. And I love Richard Ford as a writer. And then, so I think as a writer, you need to know what the marketplace is out there. And I think this program should give you that, and should give you the curiosity to find out about that marketplace. The marketplace has changed. When I was doing it in the 60s and 70s, sending out stories, you know, there were about 10 or 12 big marketplaces that you'd submit stories to. Even airline magazines had stories. In America, I had a story in an American way, American Airlines. That's virtually not out there anymore for us. You know, New Yorker publishes occasionally. Atlantic used to be the best publisher of fiction once a month. They don't publish regularly. You know, they publish sometimes summer fiction. So that market is not out there for you. So where do you go? There's plenty of other great literary magazines. Who is the woman here for the literary magazines the other day for the panel? Kathy, okay. She talked about that, okay. And the three books you need to get your hands on would be The International Directory of Literature and Magazines and Small Presses. We've talked about that in our workshop. I'll say that again, International Directory of Literature and Magazines and Small Presses. And that comes out every two years. I get the latest edition because magazines typically go out of business very quickly. And Poets and Writers, I just subscribe to that. Or the A to B, the Writers Chronicle. Okay, and there's also a Fiction Writers Marketplace. You can get that as well. But you get that and you have a better sense of what's out there. And also, I would never suggest that you write for the market. You know, except maybe in a non-fiction topical book that's, you know, hot right now or an idea that's hot right now or an essay that's you. But for fiction and poetry and not creative non-fiction, I would suggest that you write what you want to write, something that moves you, touches you in some kind of way, and then try to find the market. But you should know what's out there, where you can send these things. Huffington Post says, you know, you've published in Huffington Post, right? I mean, there's lots of places like that that are really prestigious, that may not be a print journal, but I'd also look for contest and theme issues of different magazines. You can find that in Poets and Writers and the AWP Writers Chronicle. What do I mean by that? Let's just say you wrote a story about a horse, and it's a really good story about a horse, either creative non-fiction or fiction, and you look and lo and behold, there's a contest that says, we're looking for stories about horses. Okay? Suddenly, you jump way up in terms of your possibility of getting accepted there. There's thematic issues. I'm sure you've seen that. Simultaneous submissions. The writers on the panel may disagree. I strongly suggest that you do. Okay? And I can talk more about that later in our Q&A, but I strongly suggest that you do have and do employ simultaneous submissions. I'll qualify that a little bit later, but let me just say that. I don't send your work before it's ready. Don't send your work before it's ready. How do you know it's ready? Your mentors could say it's a great poem. This poem is ready to go out. This essay is superb. Get it out. Or a story or a chapter from a novel. Also, do send when it's ready. Don't let it sit in your desk or on your computer. Just sitting there, collecting dust. I have a lot of other things I can talk about. I think that's it for now. I'll follow up on some of what Michael was talking about. So I'm the managing editor of Dogwood. I've also worked for quite a few years as a reporter and a journalist. And started my first creative publication was I found a call for anthologies that was in the classified ads at the back of Poets and Writers magazine. So those classifies are a great source for, you know, specific interest anthologies and journals and contests that might be smaller so they're really great as places to break in. So I second what Michael said about looking at Poets and Writers. I want to talk about just a few things specific to publishing online. I think that even six or seven years ago my advice to writers about publishing online would be very different than what it is now. So I previously would have said, oh, publish online sparingly. Or there's no way that an online publication is going to have the same prestige as a print. But that has definitely changed. So now there are a top, there's a top tier of literary journals that are either publishing only online or they have an online exclusive as a supplement to their print publication. But the fantastic thing that we have now that we didn't have, say a decade ago, obviously is this complete wealth of information about literary journals online. So if you're not sure at all about pages to publish, there is no substitute for the time that it will take to just slip your toes into the world of literary journals online. And a good place to start is some place like New Pages. So just google newpages.com and that is sort of an overwhelming list of literary journals. A to Z. And also a separate listing of small and independent publishers. And really there is no substitute for just randomly diving in, clicking on a link of a journal that seems interesting. And then you slowly get to find what you like. And finding of all the hundreds and literally hundreds of online journals you start to educate yourself and start to get a sense of what the most prestigious are. So you can start randomly. Another good way to start to realize what the ecosystem of literary journals is, is to go to a big place, like say the Paris Review and click on the links of other literary journals that they consider to be in there like themselves. And you'll gradually get a sense of what names become familiar as you click around. But you have to read some of these journals just to get a sense of what you like. And you should submit to journals that are publishing stuff that you actually enjoy reading. Like that might sound too simple, but that's how you know what place is right for you. So find the stuff that you like before anything else. Can I interrupt you one second? My agent, I told my group that I had the same agent for 33 years. He found me because he read about 75 or 180. He subscribed to 75 to 100 literary journals. And that's where he found my story. Sent to me he says are you agent? I said no. That's been 30 years something years ago. That's great. That's wonderful. So right, so a huge benefit to publishing both online and in print is that it gets your work out there and then hopefully someone will find you who wants to help you along with your career. So the question I would think number one question facing a writer is if you're going to publish your work and what are the benefits of publishing in print versus online? Right? As I said, the prestige is different now than it used to be. I actually tend to like publishing online. And I have my career in a pyramid. I think everybody every writer sort of has the pyramids of the places they've published and then where they want to go next. But for me it's actually right now it's pretty gratifying to be able to publish something, publish not fiction and then immediately connect with writers and other readers. Right? So for me that actually is a benefit I used to be aiming solely for print publications but now I'm really looking for a mix. And then two last things I want to talk about briefly is sort of the role of social media for writers because there's this big thing that I've heard about and a lot of worry for writers about like, I hear you can't get published if you don't have a platform. Or if you don't have 2,000 Twitter followers no publisher is going to touch you. And as far as I've heard there's no clear formula. And I've heard some writers you know go so far as to say that really if you're working on every minute you spend building your platform is time that you're not spending writing. So it really can be a sort of a sinkhole of energy that doesn't go where it's supposed to go now at the stage of your careers. On the other hand I think that spending a conservative amount of time at least having a Twitter account having other social media it can be a good investment in that it allows you to send out information about where you're published when you get published. And having those contacts as Michael said in the real world and also online really helps. So for example I have a number of social media contacts that started out that way and conversations have developed that led to invitations for readings that led to invitations for appearance at conferences panel proposals. So the social media environment among writers is pretty rich online. So I mean I think rather than seeing it as again that you have to friend everyone and that your platform has to be bigger than anyone else you should really find authors that talk already inspires you who who are giving information out there that's helpful to you just nurture that section of your contacts and that will end up paying itself back to you. And then finally I think social media is really good as a way to send fan mail to your writers and that has actually been really critical for my own career. Just sending a friendly note whose work you love it's been surprising to me how often that has actually ended up helping me. And then the last thing I want to say is the issue of blogging for writers I think that's also that can be dicey because say you've got a story that everyone's rejected or ten people have rejected and you have a blog and it can be really tempting to say wow just put it on the blog then it's published. And I would say that on online presence of some form like a blog is helpful right but it again does not have to take a ton of your time. Having an online presence a way for people to find you is great. For me the way that I would do a blog is I strictly limit it to a place for people to contact me links to my published work which is helpful for people who want to follow you and then bits and pieces of stuff that I'm not even going to bother trying to submit anywhere you know just sort of like the half-assed notions. So I would really I think there's a hope for some writers that blogging can develop into like a full scale means of supporting yourself and I think that that is a whole separate career but I don't know if any of us are able to really advise people on but monetizing a blog and blogging full-time I think is different than the career of a literary writer. So I mean I've heard from people that a blog can reach up and really consume you so I would actually urge you to have a presence but not to put too much of your work online because if it's published these days on a blog most literary outlets won't take something that's already that's already appeared on your blog so don't publish too much there so those are just some fun I don't even know what a Twitter stalk is what is it? What's a Twitter stalk? Twitter stalking? It's like when you just find someone on Twitter and you send them a Twitter message I know Cliff's the same way, he's like I don't know how to Twitter Twitter stalking sounds wrong to me that's why he's even got this written here Twitter stalk I couldn't believe it, did I spell it right? Well what would a panel be without a handout? I'm kind of a handout and I think luckily some people have gone home so I think I might have enough Thank you Here you go the characters you get them too This is going to be because of my condition it's going to be kind of a collage presentation which means it's going to be associative balance all over the place you know I've been thinking about this for over three months and I've come at it from about five different angles and self-publishing is my bailiwick today and the first thing you can see on here is in the self-published books and you'll probably be shocked by a couple of these Ulysses there's a grass that's right up there in Shockland Time to kill Huckleberry Finn The Commitments by Ronnie Doyle who were talking about that Fifty Shades of Grey that doesn't surprise me at all but you know that's kind of exactly what I'm going to talk about The self-publishing world is just totally I'll talk about Twitter stuff self-publishing world is crazy and it's changed remarkably in a minute I want to read collaboratively the second piece in here about which is Lisa Jenner which is pretty interesting I ended up being made into a movie but there are plenty of changes in the self-publishing world 20 years ago it was totally different than it was 10 years ago and now everybody is doing it editors at Random House with us regularly trolls, smash words and other self-publishing sites to try to see which ones are doing well so we can acquire them the publishing world is in a huge sea change and everything is true all at once everything that Michael said and Sonya said is true in terms of magazines in terms of presses and traditional publishing that's all there and if you want that route there's nothing wrong with that route self-publishing you're in control of the whole thing for the most part until things change let's take a look at the second thing Lisa Jenner's story I'm going to read the first paragraph but I'm going to have you guys talk to do it I'm going to go to Emily and Jennifer and Andrew and you guys do a paragraph about what you're writing it's called Books Unbound it's the second one in here Lev Grossman from about six years ago here's a literary parable for the 21st century Lisa Genova, 38 was a healthcare industry consultant in Belmont, Massachusetts who wanted to be a novelist but she couldn't get a book published for a lot of money she had a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard but she couldn't get an agent I did what you're supposed to do, she says I queried literary agents I went to writer's conferences and tried to network I emailed editors nobody wanted it so Genova paid $450 to a company called iUniverse which were both still Alice herself that was in 2007 by 2008 people were were reading still Alice not a lot of people, but a few and those few were liking it Genova wound up getting an agent after all and an offer from Simon and Schuster of just over half a million dollars Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs Barnes & Noble made it a discover pick on January 25th still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times bestseller list at number 5 so this is extreme to extreme right Genova says this time last year I was selling the book out of the trunk of my car something has changed and it's not just the contents of Lisa Genova's trunk we think of the novel as a transcendent timeless thing but it was shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by creative genius passing over a few classical and far eastern entries the novel and its modern form really got rolling only in the early 18th century this wasn't an accident and it didn't happen because a bunch of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we should be reading long books about imaginary people it happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances new industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books cheaply a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could sell them and for the first time there was a large increasingly literate relatively well off urban middle class to buy and read them once those conditions were in place writers like Defoe and Richardson showed up to take advantage of them fast forward to the early 21st century publishing industries and distressed publishing houses among them Simon and Schuster, Macmillan Harper Collins Double Day, Clinton Midflint Hardcore are laying off staff left and right random houses in the midst of a drastic reorganization salaries are frozen across the industry whispers of bankruptcy are cluttering around borders Barnes and Noble just cut a hundred jobs at its headquarters a measure unprecedented in the company's history publishers we predict that 2009 will be the worst year for publishing in decades a lot of headlines and blocks to the contrary publishing isn't dying but it is evolving and serrativate that we may hardly recognize that when it's done literature interprets the world but it's also shaped by that world and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since well since the early 18th century but it has always been exclusively sensitive to newness hence the name it's about to renew itself again into something cheaper, wilder, fashioner, more democratic and their safer than ever what's the matter with publishing it isn't the audience people are still reading according to a national endowment for the art study released on January 12 literary reading by adults has actually increased 1.5% since 2002 the first such increase in 26 years so that's not the problem, what is the economy obviously plenty of businesses are hurting and it doesn't help that new media like video games sales up 19% in 2008 are now competing with books for our entertainment hours and dollars while publishing has deeper, more systemic problems like the fact that it's business market involved during an early fiscal era it's an antique a financial cold cap that dates back to the depression consider the exam system whereby a publisher pays an author a non-returnable upset fee for a book if the book doesn't earn out in the industry, the publisher simply eats the cost another example publishers sell bookstores on a confinement system which means the stores can return on sold books to publishers for full refund publishers suck up the shipping costs both ways plus the expense of printing and then hoping to merchandise they print way more than they know they create a buzz and then they end up taking half of those books back as Sara now sent these systems were created to shift risk away from authors and bookstores and onto publishers but risk is something that the publishing industry is less and less able to bear if you think about it shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty funny essentially now most of the books shrugging off their expensive paper exhausts how they form what devices like the Sony Breeder and Amazon are being devoted to all of them who goes to fan with his scam more than 790 books in his online papers plans to scan them all every single one for the next 10 years writers contest their books and post them chapter by chapter on why four of the five best-selling novels in this time is 2007 along with an entirely new literary form called P.T.I. to show specialty novels written and read on cell phones compared to the time it costs to replicate a digital file and shipping it around the world that a zero and nothing printing books on paper sales for little Callie Elizabeth hey Elizabeth will you jump to the next page so Vanity of Vanity is all of Vanity alright Neva had reached the end that part was that am I in the right direction? yeah when Jennifer had reached the end when Jennifer had reached the end of her unsuccessful search she told the last literary agent who rejected her I've had enough of this I'm going to go self-publish it that was by email she says he picked up the phone and called me within five minutes and said don't do that you will kill your writing career before it starts it's true saying you were a self-published author used to be like saying you were self-taught I'm sorry over the past five years Vanity publishing has become practically respectable as the technical challenges have decreased if you can turn a word document on your hard drive into a self-published novel on Amazon it's going to start in about five minutes so has the stigma you can sign fantasies for Paulini started as a self-published author after Brunonia Barry self-published her novel The Lace Reader in 2007 William Morrow picked it up and gave her a two book deal and offered to moon the fact that William P. Young's was initially self-published hasn't stopped it from spending 34 weeks under New York Times bestseller that's enough I think you get the point I see change lots of new stuff I published four books before I published Saving Troy I published three books since I self-published Saving Troy in the first edition and the reason was my publisher which was BOA very precious Steve Hoff who was my editor said I'll publish the book we don't do prose but we'll start a prose line and I'll publish the book and I said but how are you going to market the book and he said well we'll do the same thing we've always done we'll print a thousand copies and you know it'll go to our distributor consortium and I said yeah we'll sit in the warehouse because you don't spend any money advertising and he said well yeah we don't have the money advertising so I said that's not going to work for me so I had an agent Don Condon who was a great agent he was a wave siren he liked the proposal he sent it around and he did a great job he sent 18 or 19 presses editors and they all said exactly the same thing which is we love the writing in this book what's with Troy in New York who cares if you're in New York City or LA will buy it and I said it's about Troy I can't just send it in LA sorry it's a non-fiction book so I talked to Gray Wolf and a couple of other people and a bunch of people made noises about publishing it but I finally said you know I'll screw this my friend Gene Marivelli had run a press called Spring Harbor for years and he said Bill just start your own press this was 2004 I asked a friend of mine he paid for the lawyer to set up the LLC and I started the press and I found a publisher in China and they would do exactly what I wanted them to do I wanted to put photographs in the front and in the back which I did like Walker Revenson, James Agee the only other book I know that has photographs in the front and in the back I said I want to do that and I think you say to a regular publisher oh by the way there will be 48 black and white photographs from the back so you can't write we're not doing that publishers don't smile so you know what smiles so means you take the signatures it's like when you open a book like this how many times does it look cracked and then boom the pages start to fall out that's because it's glued well smiles sewing is they take the signatures and they sew each one well the press in China so I ordered 3,000 copies which was insane and it was like 350 each it was like 10,500 and that didn't include all the other stuff the lawyer for the LLC the book designer, the cover designer there's lots and lots of costs in doing this that's probably 20 grand into it and this was November of 2004 and I had no idea how I was going to sell it I just got interested and curious about starting a press I thought that would be fun I'll publish a book let's do it and the guy who had been on the book I think Phil Bailey had been a TV news reporter and I ran into him at a dinner and I said hey Phil I'm just publishing a book and you're in it and he said get out of here next thing I know he goes on this TV news show which is at 6am and he holds a book up and he says I'm in a book now I haven't done anything with a book I have a seller full of boxes I have 150 boxes of 20 books each and my wife has said this was a great idea a whole seller is full of these books all of a sudden the phone starts ringing bookstores newspapers, TV stations they're like hey what's that book Phil Bailey say and pretty soon like it was flying out the door flying out the door we sold 5,000 hardcover copies in 3 months which was incredible we sold the first 3,000 on the first month and so I ordered another 3,000 thinking wow we have a hit I'm going to keep going oh that was a big mistake so in any case here's a perfect little anecdote from this which will I think set me into what I would really say about self publishing it's no longer about who will validate me it's no longer about should I be embarrassed I've self published this book I ended up selling to SUNY Press they bought the paperback edition they bought the 1,700 copies I hadn't sold they tore the covers off they put new covers on and they're still selling still in print the book can even have another life even a grandma house doesn't pick it up a university press will pick it up so Susan Awatmi runs the place called the Book House and all of them which is a terrific independent bookstore and she's very savvy independent bookstore owner's association national organization so she called me up and said we're selling a lot of your books coming to a signing I showed up to do the signing it was Christmas it was about 2 weeks before Christmas and I pull up and I'm not taking anything I've got 3 boxes of books in the back and I think well okay we're going to sell some books boom boom boom and I look at the front of the store and she's got these 2 big windows and the windows are full of my book there's no other book there must have been 200 copies of the book in this book unlike these vertical and horizontal racks and I have this out of the body experience I was looking like holy crap that's my book and it's filling both windows and so for a minute I felt that elation you feel like wow this was my dream right? and then I thought really that was my dream the window you gotta come up with a better dream that's not a good dream so then I went in it was a great signing we sold 105 books people were like out the door for hours it was great and she sold I think 900 copies of the book at that location 1700 of the 5000 books I sold sold by 2 bookstores which is pretty amazing so the question for you is what is it about are you looking for a validation it's time for a reality check and because everything has changed so radically in the last 10 years around self publishing you can make the decision about whether you want to be in control of your work or not you don't have to get random house or sign a change or Harper Collins are all the terrific traditional publishers to support you you know for one thing you gotta go through a whole editorial process you gotta go through an agent because editors aren't gonna read the military agent the agent's gotta accept you the editor's gotta accept you the editor's gotta get it through an editorial meeting with the other editors to sell it you know this process your books have done this all the time it's very hard to get one of those big presses traditional presses to take your work and get behind it my friend Marion North Smith wrote a book with Michael Bayden remember Michael Bayden he was the guy, he was O.J. Simpson, the guy who did the O.J. Simpson case he was very famous Marion did a book with Michael it was called The Dead Book and it was all about forensic medicine and it came out in September 10th, 2001 and Simon Schuster which had published 100,000 hardcover copies cancelled the whole thing she had a 15 city book tour and it was like cancelled the whole thing so you know, there's no guarantee even if you get what you think is gonna be your dream, there's no guarantee so my reality check for you is I even have a form for this of course which I can find it, I'll read to you where is it yeah, no matter what you're gonna do I think you gotta establish your purpose why are you writing what you're writing ask yourself that question here you're writing it because you have to have a thesis to completely the MFA, you've got that but pass that, you know when you graduate and you take that thesis and you say wow, this is great it's much better than when I started I'm gonna write a book from this why are you writing that book and what do you hope is gonna happen here and I think you should be aware of the practical considerations of it, the emotional reasons philosophical spiritual goals that's all really essential stuff to think about and do you wanna spend three years or longer finding an agent having an agent send it around basically weathering all the stuff that happens, but you wanna self publish that book and I don't mean with ex-leavers or our universe or the vanity presses those vanity presses are still out there and they're crap, they do omnibus ads at the New York Times once every few weeks and it's embarrassing you don't wanna do that, what you wanna do is be in control of your own work and there are plenty of ways to do that secondly, who's your audience who are you writing for can you reach that audience on your own do you need a large publisher to distribute that book and I don't know if you've talked to bookstore owners recently you know what they order two or three books the end of the anecdote about Susan Novotny is I had to go back to her store the day after Christmas that year to pick up some books there was no book in the window there was no book on the front table there was no book anywhere in the store except in the regional section there was one copy which was turned the wrong direction bookstore owners are not loyal to you they don't care, it's just a product so once you realize that Simon & Schuster publishes your book and they send it two copies to every bookstore in the country and six months later when they don't sell those two copies go back and unfortunately there aren't that many books that do that well so your audience your primary reader, editor, agent, teacher, advisor, friend, enemy, whatever secondary readers who else might see the piece of writing of them the person from whom it's intended what are the unforeseen possibilities and what's the total disaster that's going to happen if nothing works and here you're all about getting the book done so here it's all about method but when you finally get to when you say how do I get this out to readers because frankly that's the point you want people to read what you wrote you want to be able to communicate your ideas and your meanings to people so how do you I mean clearly I haven't done all that self-publishing I did one book and I didn't go back to it seven of the eight books have been published by other presses but I still think it's really important to do something that gives you control of your work so I guess what I'm saying is don't just write off self-publishing because you think it's vanity stuff it's not necessarily can I get the flip side of that sure and I think Bill is exactly right to suggest that certain books because of their market their niche are maybe perfect for self-publishing I think Troy is a perfect example of that it's specific to a city and they're going to be obviously be a lot of interest and major publishers are not going to be interest as you said it's a regional book and I think that makes sense and I think the list here is also revealing but it's also if you give a list of successful self-published books here I could give you a catalog of the ones that weren't so successful and there's 3,000 books in some basement and I also rebuild that and you should know that and also self-publishing is changing and it's becoming more just like online just like online is becoming more not the norm but more accepted and I think that's important too I talked we had an agent come here about a year ago and he was the agent for John Clinch who wrote Finn there's a story about Finn's father he got all sorts of great reviews he came out with another more regional novel and then his third novel the Thief of Auschwitz he decided to avoid that and wanted to have control and Thief of Auschwitz was self-published the book was not a nice copy like that it was printed in paperback and it's not a nice copy I bought the book up in Vermont pages are falling out didn't have any quotes on the back nothing from the New York Times the problem with self-publishing is the problem with the other things that go along with publishing it whether it be a big house or a medium-sized house or a small house you have an editor there that's important so many self-published books are sloppy, lousy because they don't have an editor or two or three editors major editor major changes the line editor and then somebody who's doing copy-editing and proof-reading and fact-checking you don't have that and most people can't afford either the time or the effort to pay somebody to do that but you need that too to make an average book or a good book into a really good book or a great book and then reviews and distribution and promotion that's your stuff that's going to fall back on you now control is important but it's a novel, let's say, or a book is a collaborative work between editor and writer and I've had some bad editors I just read with them and I've had a lot of good editors including my agent who's helped me a lot in all my books who's helped me get the book in shape to send it out to either big press or small press and part of the question you should have and Bill frames the question very, very thoughtfully and correctly I think what kind of book are you writing if you're writing a highly literary novel with experimental stuff maybe you shouldn't be sending to one of the big general-purpose general presses but before you send to to self-publishing or go that route it's always the option you could say what if I go to a really good a great experience with Markman published by University of Missouri Press they were careful editors they were supportive, they sent my book out everywhere just like big press and I've had six books published by big press sometimes Soulcatcher they did everything but in the other ones I had to do a lot of legwork and I knew that and I would say whether you do it self-publishing or big press or somewhere in between a lot of the legwork and that means promotion getting on the phone, emailing sending letters out doing all that stuff, contacting people it's a huge amount of work I took a year off to do it from start to finish just a quick story my brother's blood I think I talked a little bit about this I know I talked to in my group but I don't think I shared this with the group my agent thought it was ready an auction there were a couple very close but one place really wanted to be revised I did, it later became I went to Random House and my editor left Random House after about a year I went to Harp Collins and the book sat in limbo for three years, three years I threatened Sue finally and it scared them and they were going to print 4,200 copies back in the old days before this print out of demand 4,200, a little small hardback number and they were going to say 4,200 get off her back, we printed your book publish your book, now go away and I took up the mantle and I spent two hours a day for about a year calling people this is before the widespread use of email sending it out to everywhere, buying copies sending them out my own copies my own gas, my own everything and it went through one edition, a second edition it went through eight editions in hardback and then it won awards and went through a second and a third and a fourth but you had to do all that stuff I can't imagine what it would be like to do it if you were self publishing one of the things that are big or medium size and all of the American fictions editions were not big presses, they were medium size presses in New York City or small presses, they can get behind it and they can do things you also have to do things but what a big medium or small press can do is the editor and all of that, the various editors the promotion, the reviews the distribution and I think Bill makes a good point that sometimes self publishing may be the way to go either based on the project you're working on or the type of book or whatever but I would my argument would be try the other ones first before you go that route also don't get me wrong I'm not admonishing you to go out there and self publish because we're trying to give you a spectrum of possibilities here I happen to get the self publishing part of this my rhetorical argument is hey that's not as bad as you think it might be right? and the two editions of American fiction I self publish before I sold the next so I did that too all of these things are possibilities and just consider them all options what about things that don't tend to be read by the general public a lot like poetry after I write a successful novel haha well poetry presses know that you know well I mean you're naturally going to be sending to poetry magazines and poetry presses anyway but you know the good poetry presses you know Steve Tiger Bark Press and BOA and Copper Canyon there are plenty of University of Pittsburgh plenty of great poetry presses they for the most part I think they still publish quality work they know they're not going to sell a lot of them so they're looking to be prestigious they're looking to publish really good books and poems do you agree with that? I agree completely I mean if you look and that's why it's good to do your research while you're writing after you finish writing I strongly suggest that for the most part unless you have a very topical kind of either essay or nonfiction book you don't write for a market you write the best poetry short short stories novel and then try to find and then work on it but like poetry there are hundreds of really good journals and there are dozens of really good poetry presses that publish good quality both the quality of the material quality of the writers and they have good editors that will work with you there's plenty of that and there's also so both for poetry fiction literary side a lot of these small and medium sized publishers will run annual contests so that's the way especially poets will you know the entry fees can be a little bit steep but it's a good investment to try it if you're towing a lot or that way the thing the other day with the agents that I found really disappointing especially with Mark Gottlieb is that he just wrote off whole sections of literature he wrote off poetry he wrote off short stories and then sent to write a novel first yeah because in his terms in his terms they aren't commercial look where he's coming from he's an agent in a big agency and agents are only going to do nonfiction, memoir and novels because they're going to sell a significant once you get an agent and you have to have a certain amount of 10,000, 20, 50, 100,000 okay poetry doesn't do that short stories don't do that there are some essays with some exception and I know we said there are some notable exceptions for short stories but for the most part 99% of the short story collections even no matter how good they are are not going to be handled by major presses you know now if you make a name for yourself Jill and Bill Harry or Louise Erdrich and there are other examples like that of one big prizes but usually they do a short story after they come out with their other stuff where they somebody just comes in on the on the scene and with a short story collection wins an appeal that's great but as a poet, as a short story writer you have to look at the little magazines and presses and you know when I was for 17 years and I wrote short stories not a novel that's where that's where my work was short stories it was and I edited stuff so I was editing short stories and sending them out I could see it from both sides there are plenty of those magazines out there and as Sonya said you know the online is becoming much more respectable I think you're right and one thing in all my time doing short stories I ran to one person I went out to see Elle Davis when we were out in the bar and she comes up she heard my name and she said did you have a story in Nebraska Review and I said yeah it was the only time any literary magazine somebody came out but if you get it online there's thousands of people reading this stuff so that's a good thing I mean there are plenty of terrific short story collections and poetry collections that come out every year from a lot of good presses do not be dissuaded by Mark Golly he knows that one area and I'm not sure he quite knows that area but we had one questions questions I think everybody's tired of that right even if you editor and publisher put you on a book tour that doesn't mean that the bookstore will be cooperating and I found Greg Stevin was from his book in Houston when I lived there and I heard the interview on the radio I knew where the bookstore was and I couldn't find it anywhere and I found them on the back of the second floor in a place pretty much equivalent to where we had our reading at the Fairfield bookstore and I got the manager of this door to put up a table by the door and I waited people and I said hey do you get a Greg Stevin's interview today on the radio? and I said there he is, that's the book I've just sold ten at an hour so Anne you have a new job as a publisher it's giving you a new role but you need some pushy person to do that for you and it could be you, it could be somebody else spouses are good for that do you remember when Poets and Revis were in Coda? Coda had a three people on the cover maybe twenty years ago and Terry McMillan the African-American novelist was on the cover and two other female writers who had novels published by small presses and she had her novel published by large press and they gave ideas on how a writer has to market his work and I remember taking notes and a few years later I had need all of those things and for instance you know when you go to a bookstore everybody loves to go to a bookstore you go to a bookstore but if the press or you don't do your pre-work homework before you go to a bookstore you go there and three people will be there I remember being put I did dozens probably a hundred Barnes and Nobles for several books and you go to these bookstores and they put you in the back and no one came except this little kid and he kept talking to me talking talking picked up my book, looked at it he says you wrote this and he's going like this he's turning it around there and then little shit didn't even buy it I spent twenty minutes talking to him and he didn't even buy it so what I found is that if you're going to go to a bookstore if you're going to go to a bookstore and the company whether small or medium or big don't do the homework first which means getting on radio getting a newspaper, getting on TV you're going to go there and you're not going to get many so what you have to do is call up and I did this a lot call up out of the blue and say I'm going to be in Charlotte I'm going to be in Raleigh one of my books they sent me to a bunch of places I called up and I said I'm going to be here I had a lot of hoax book and I got on TV shows and radio shows and then at the end they'll say where are you going to be I'm going to be at the Charlotte Barnes and Noble and then you get fifty people instead of three and some of them are not little kids can you just tell the fact that you're going to have to mark it at work you're going to have to do it no matter who publishes that was it your agent who did that for you no agent sells your book puts it together and they have a marketing promotion I had a guy who was from St. Martins I think and it was from my fourth novel and he was a young kid and he called me and he said hey I just lined up a bookstore for you and I was living in Wilburham West or Mass at the time I got a bookstore for you and he said it's in East Long Meadow I said East Long Meadow he said yeah it's just one town over from you there's no bookstores in East Long Meadow no there's a bookstore here and so I'm talking to him and as I'm talking to him I get my phone book this is phone book time a couple of years ago and I'm looking through and I said oh jeez this is a pornographic bookstore this dummy got on the phone and just looked up bookstores and lined it up and I don't know what the people on the other end were thinking it wasn't fifty shades of gray you know I didn't go I said come on he didn't know what book was it Garden Mars it was going to be this depressing book with no sex now if you're a book if you're a book any other questions any other questions you guys have I'm publishing I just think you know Bill's comments were great and stuff he passed out and Tony is great too and I just think that what we're all saying is learn the field the business side of things we try to do this by having the publishing editing and agent panels we try to do it in our workshops and talks like this panel you know even if you say I'm not there yet you certainly don't want to put the cart before the horse and be worried about where you're going to send it before the damn book is good and done whether it be poetry or short stories or novel whatever but you should start now learning what's out there and I think so one piece of advice I heard a long time ago is that if you have authors who you love look at the complete list of every place they've published and then just try and follow in their footsteps right from the little magazines in their first career just follow along after them and that'll give you some path to follow and if you want to learn short story writers and poets look at you know like best American short stories editors choice push cart look in the back and they'll have the places where these things are published if you like that poem don't worry that essay you can send out to those places and if you want to learn about the industry go and subscribe to Shelf Awareness and Publishers Lunch they're both online they're both free and they're daily Shelf Awareness will send you two emails a day and you learn a huge amount Publishers Lunch which is really about deals and I tend to delete that constantly because it's not interesting to me most of the time Shelf Awareness is really good yeah Shelf Awareness.com they're both excellent and everybody in the industry uses both of them the publishing editing and panels like this is not made to depress anybody and I mean it's made to make you aware and as much of the bad news as we've given you that's important for you to know there's a lot of good news out there in terms of online stuff and places to send and how you can increase your chances of getting something published again, if you have a story and it's a thematic issue and they're looking for something I send out to you guys probably three to five to eight a week places they're looking for stories and poems and essays and articles so when you get that stuff and you say jeez I just finished a poem in my workshop and they thought it was really good and I'll send it I think if it's a thematic issue I just want to say that in the period after before my first book was published I'd sold it but I was living in Marin County Northern California and there's one of America's most aggressive and best independent bookstores there in Corda Madeira in Marin County called Book Passage I'm not going to do that so today we had authors come in and I went to work in that bookstore for about three or four months before my book was published I learned an enormous amount Elaine Patrick Shelley who owns the store was the woman who started BookSets which is now indie indie something but I learned a lot just by sort of being a bookseller and I wasn't much of a bookseller but I saw the books and I saw how they were unpacked I treated the books I saw how they geared up for writers who came writer events and appearances of readings and stuff like that and it was immeasurable I can't say a single sort of particularly salient thing that I learned at that time but I got a real sense about independent booksellers hand-seller market and appreciate books and what they thought of I heard them talk about the big publishers the small presses and stuff like that that was very valuable for me and I subsequently went on a book tour and that really helped me connect with people in bookstores who do stay loyal to an author and hand-sell bookstores one of the best stores I was in was RJ Junior which I didn't know about I think it's great that you brought that up this is about having a life not just publishing a book there are lots of aspects to that I mean, self-publishing you can start a press you can get two or three friends and start a press that's how Alice James books started in Cambridge that was a feminist press for a long time but now it's just a collaborative press back in the 60s and 70s it was happening all the time and it started to happen again you can have fun doing that you can make money doing that maybe not a lot of money but you may be able to pay the bills that's the important thing you're so soon? yeah, I want to thank you guys