The Kamikaze writing the Big Book

My mother in law asked me what I was working on. Usually I just say something vague, but I told her I was working on a big book and that I was six hundred and sixty pages into it. She paused, then looked at me and said "who the hell wants to read a book that big?" Fair enough. It gets worse because I will probably break a thousand. But when writing the big book you are a bit like a kamikaze where you are not sure you are coming back from this one.

First of all no one wants a really big book anymore. They are expensive to publish. And there is that old thing that peoples attention span is getting shorter not longer. Look at Kindle singles. Look at what is selling. Look at twitter! And there you go, writing an opus along the lines of Gone With the Wind or War and Peace. Talk about insane. Your agent doesn't want you to do it and yet you persist. Why?

Maybe because you can. Maybe because you wont ever do it again. Maybe you just want to see if you can write the big book and take a swipe at the "whats it all about sweepstakes." Why not? You have written everything else. Why not throw in everything but the kitchen sink and go for it. You only live once right? And so you strap yourself in, start the motor, and fly toward your final destination. A human torpedo headed for total destruction or total nirvana.

That's the big book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

All The Sad Lonely Men of Starbucks

Market is up. Recession over. So who are all these men in Starbucks? I have been coming to coffee houses for many years to get a little release from writing. I usually shuffle in the afternoon to a Starbucks and flop down in an old wing chair and get lost in some Fitzgerald, Yates, Whitman...just anything to cool the brain cells. But lately, all the chairs are taken. And they aren't taking by women, they are taken by older men. Middle age dudes of the forty something fifty something variety. They sit in their comfort jeans trying to look inconspicuous. These men do not read fiction. They stare at newspapers or some jabber away.
  
 When I first saw these men I thought maybe it was a fluke, but everyday they increased until yesterday the place was overrun. We might as well be sitting in a union hall. They look like they should all be in offices. You see the hands reaching for something to do, expressions trying to navigate the strange duplicity of sitting in a Starbucks in the middle of the afternoon when the rest of the world is working. They go to the bathrooms, order more coffee, sit with legs crossed staring intently at nothing. They just don't know what to do. In Britain they call them being made redundant. And there is that feeling that for a lot of these guys they are now redundant. They are of the middle management variety and that is something the new economy will not carry.

   The day passes and one by one they look at their watches and finally rise to put on their coats. The fact they have nowhere to go yells at you. I have lived a life of uncertainty as a writer, but you can tell these guys did not bargain for this. They are now redundant men, put out to pasture too early in a Starbucks in a small town: the sad lonely men of our time.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Publishing Worm in Apple

Yeah. I get why the big publishers went to Apple and said you know what; lets fix a price we can all live with here. Amazon is a leaking ship on the good seas of Ebook commerce and the economics are devastating. Ebooks drop pricing to the floor and Amazon was intent on doing just that. I set my own prices on my ebooks (I happen to own the rights) and one thing I found out was that ebooks are priced low low low compared to regular books. You can see the IPOD nightmare of publishing over the next hill with .99 cent downloads.

But you still can't stack the deck. And whose to say what really happened at this point, but it sounds like the publishers tried to turn back the clock and stop the hemorrhage. And it is a hemorrhage. You are talking about a twenty five dollar hardcover versus a ten dollar ebook or worse. And once file sharing really kicks on ebooks that will be getting nothing for that old hardcover. So now what? Well...people still like to read books. And they like a quality ebook.

So instead of fixing the price with Apple for books on their IPADs, really the publishers should come up with their own hardware or high end ebooks. Look. There are a lot of people who do not like the Kindle but there isn't a lot of competition out there.  The Nook. The Sony Reader. They all still feel like a computer. Yeah. I have a Kindle but I still prefer a book. What I'm saying is we are not there yet and there is a lot of room for someone to get it right.

Old Steve Jobs knew that. The IPAD. The IPHONE. The IPOD. Even though he went along with the price fix, he knew it is really all in the delivery.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Writing the Big Novel

Hmmm...about 571 pages into the Big Novel. Probably end up around a thousand. The interesting thing about the Big Novel is that it keeps growing out like an atomic mushroom cloud and instead of retracting as most novels do when you pass the halfway point, it just keeps growing. That is because the Big Novel does not play by the usual rules. Most novels just start and have a middle and an end. Very egg like. And you usually roll in around four hundred pages or so. And you can almost feel the arc and where it will end. The Big Novel follows none of these rules.

And so you are constantly stoking the fire and you have to put all your fears aside that naturally kick in. What if this thing just keeps going? Much like fission the fear is not that it will go off but that it won't stop going off. Then the second fear hits you which is: who the hell is going to want to read something this big? But of course that is ridiculous because predicting reading tastes has never been the purview of novelists.

So you roll along and watch the Big Novel grow. Eventually you figure it will run out of steam and start to close down. Because really, what goes up, must, eventually, come down. At least you hope it works that way.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Hunger Games for Authors

Hmmm...young adult his hot right now. Very hot. If you can write a YA novel that gets on board the Hunger Game juggernaut then you are set. The problem of course is that young adult novels were dead for a very long time until they wern't. The genre became inflamed with Harry Potter and it has been a red hot hand for YA authors ever since. You think writing a YA novel would be easier than writing an adult one but this is not true. Walking the line between what entices teens and adults is a strange blend of writing for different worlds.

You take the old books like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird. Adult YA I would call them. Take Harry Potter. YA that adults can read too. The problem is that if you read YA novels a lot of them just aren't that good. They are written down for kids and read like army manuals. Many of these books are series if not all of them and they get progressively worse. So why is it that something like Hunger Games would catch? Well, kid gladiators. High concept plot maybe. Or just that strange weird thing called mystical kid appeal.

You cannot write for this market and not be in it. You have to live through your character and so you must find a portal into the young adult world. My first novel was YA but it was more traditional and did not ignite the minds of young adults the way later mystical dystopia novels would. Harry Potter books are wizards and magic and well written for their genre. To take aim at this market with the intent to make money brings on failure and disaster. You simply can't slot a book, though many try.

And so we watch over the fence as Hunger Games tears up the book selling world and now with the smash movie. Hey man. More power to that author. You never know what is going to hit and you never will.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Novels as Commercials

Just read a novel that should have been a commercial. There were so many gang banger mainstream idioms that I surely could have been watching a commercial for Vans(which were probably mentioned twenty times as well as Timberlands) and maybe that is what it was. A very long YA commerical for hip hop gang banging dudes and dudesses who really could walk off the page and hawk some product with a yo  inference and then slink back into the book in their hoodies and Vans and cruise away sucking on jungle juice, giving us all "daps" and slouching into the fade away sunset.  CUT...that's a wrap.

The director was the only dude missing in the novel. But he or she was there in the editing looking for a hook. The bi-racial hook was the one used in this novel and one can see the plot slither away under the pressure of this editing. I don't think we need this...maybe a little more angst about being half black and half white...and so the author lays it on, but there is a fault line that gets violated. What was the authors original intent? What engine drove the story.

Books are written from the inside out and not the other way around. The problem with the publishing environment of today is that a lot of editors will tinker around and ignore the core of the novel and try and hang "popular" ornaments on the novel tree, but like a tree that is over decorated the book sags and eventually falls from the weight. These ornaments slow the book down and destroy the focus and worse they stand out as bogus...someone elses design other than the sculptor. And it happens all the time.

The author wants to get published. I get that. What is sad,  is that the original intent of the author , the thing that got he or she  to write the book in the first place is really the only chance for a book to take off.  Originality with a big O. You cannot fake it....though some try.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

No New Books under the Sun

Just had a friend tell me there is a book out very similar to the one I just finished. Whoa! You mean that book I just spent two years writing... someone else wrote? That is your first thought. So you scurry and download the sucker onto your Kindle because you want to find out if somehow somewhere somebody busted out your book before you could. Yeah the plot is similar. Heart pounding now you read along and the main character does seem like yours and now you are into the thick of the reviews and synopsis and yes there are more similarities and you might even think this book influenced yours, because the character and the plot and the action are all similar....but....it's not your book.

Not by a long shot. You didn't write it. This is not Hollywood. You did not just come up with the Horse Whisperer ala high concept plot that someone else can steal and then produce and you are out half a million on that screenplay that would have been produced. This is a novel.. And novels are individual. Period. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks everyone said it had been done. To Kill A Mockingbird. Trial.Twelve year old narrator. South. Racism. Nope. Been done. So the publishers kept saying right up to the auction with ten publishers bidding.

Why? Because there is nothing new under the sun in terms of plot, but there is everything new with every book. It is simply you. A book is your view, your voice, your breath. It is everything about you and somebody might write the same book, same plot, same characters, but it really doesn't matter. The reader doesn't care about that. Look at sequels. People know a sequel is the exact same story just done a little differently and they pay to see it again. Why? Because people are always up for a good story.

So when someone tells you, hey I just read a book like the one you just wrote. Say, yeah. I know. But it wasn't my book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Advantages or Reading and Writing Fiction

The New York Times Sunday Review just had an article about the neuroscience of reading novels or fiction. The upshot is that reading fiction is good for your brain. Apparently all those neurons like the connotation of metaphors and description. Your brain lights up like its on crack from reading fiction and goes dark like a dead bulb watching television. But there is more. People who read fiction have more social intelligence and pick up on social cues faster. They seem able to decipher human relationships and understand people more quickly  as opposed to their nonfiction reading breathen. To those of us who have been reading and writing fiction for years there is nothing new here.

You always knew that your ability to finish other peoples sentences, pick the word for them while they said,..what that's word...I know it...was related somehow to all those books you read that no one else cared about. Or the way you could know somebody from a single sentence, gesture, nuance. It just happens like that. Reading fiction is probably the most intelligent thing anyone can do because as the NY Times article points out more of your brain is used in the process than sucking in information via digital land.This makes perfect sense.

You quickly saw your ability to speak when reading fiction shoot up. Reading a novel or a poem allows you to simply think faster. There is something totally engaging about a great story that probably allows your brain to play in a way it cannot when stuck in some turgid nonfiction task. Great fiction really gets you going because it engages your humanity and probably touches your soul. Now you are really getting a great bang for your buck from that novel...it is simply teaching you how to be.

And if you want to knock it down to a more utilitarian sense...fiction blows out your vocabulary and allows you to connect the dots quicker and understand situations faster that your non novel reading friends. So you can make the sale, get the friend, win the girl, and appear witty, conversant, and more than all that, well read.

What more can you ask of a book? Or a Kindle?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Athletics of Writing

You start out by trying to wake up and get the brain going so you go for a run or a bike or something to flood the neurons with blood and get the connections going that make writing writing. The best plots laid while shooting down country roads or jogging paths or pumping under a big iron dumbbell. And then there is the shower to further get you into the world and getting dressed and then  it is time to fuel up. An article in the New York Times says that your brain is depleted by exercising, that the glycemic index plummets and then when you eat it ramps up sixty percent higher than before. Rocket fuel.

So now you are finishing up your eggs and toast and coffee. Two cups while you read your latest jumpstarter novel or short story to prime the pump. Pop the vitamins and read a little more and now you are buzzing. A lot of psychic steam is in play from thinking, exercise, food and caffeine. Close the book and walk upstairs to your garret. During all this prep you talk to no one. You watch nothing. Maybe a little low classical music to further wake up the brain. And now you are shutting the doors and drawing the blinds and sitting down at the chair in the darkened room.

Kick off the shoes and put your feet up on the legs of the chair and position the notebook with your latest notes and maybe some sugary cereal for an extra buzz and in go the ear plugs and you look at the page and go for two hours straight. You blast along like a madman letting all that psychic steam out and by the end you need the cereal and you finish your ten or fifteen pages and it is game over for the day. Now you spend the rest of the day reading and thinking and doing life things until you start all over and wake up the next day and wonder if you ever will write again.

But you do.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Mockingbird Film at Fifty

If you read the book then the film follows. I always felt the book was better. To Kill A Mockingbird was just so rich in atmosphere and literary sugar that the film always seemed a bit awkward to me. Maybe it is hard for Hollywood to hit the mark on Southern stories. There is Gone with The Wind and then there is what...Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...or Mississippi Burning...but Mockingbird is Gregory Peck. No doubt. Atticus Finch became him or he became Atticus Finch. But once you saw the movie you were stuck with Gregory Peck in your head.

Scout always seemed a little tougher than the girl in the movie. Jem probably was right. Dill was Truman Capote...good luck with that one. Boo Radley was Robert Duvall. He was awful good looking for Boo but he did seem deranged. But the set never seemed to do the book justice. It just didn't conjure up that small Alabama town in the Depression. And again the novel exists apart in time so Hollywood can only do what it can with lights and sets and actors.

Of course the story set the bar. After Mockingbird there followed a whole rash of bad Southern sheriffs in small towns picking on African Americans and Northerner's. And lots of courtroom scenes in hot stuffy Southern towns. Well it's a great motif and in Mockingbird the blend of a child narrator and the adult story is dead on perfect. There would follow many child narrators set in Southern towns as well (see Tobacco Sticks) But there I go talking about the book again.

I am glad there is a Mockingbird film and I am glad there was a novel. When I tried to get Harper Lee to review my novel Tobacco Sticks, I spoke with a man Roy who said he put the book on her nightstand. She never read it. I am glad. There is really only one Southern novel of racial injustice that is resolved by a man of conscience. And only one film.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Tobacco Sticks... Explosive racial tension  and a dramatic denouement in a sweaty Virginia courtroom are entwined in this haunting tale, which has all the characteristics of a good summer read. Publishers Weekly

The Sword of Age

In this country it is all about those two numbers that correspond to that weird date on your birth certificate where you left the cosmos and started your life on the planet earth. And from that day on the bastards started tracking you. They  just had to know how many years had passed since the day that nurse spanked you on the ass and you screamed out in protest because you had just left this nice warm dark place and you intuited that from here on out it was every man or woman for him or herself.

And so you tooled along and went along with the birthday parties where they made this big deal about this number and gave you presents and cake and ice cream and you were down with it because it all worked in your favor and who cared about a little number anyway? Then the little number started to grow and the birthdays changed. Not so many presents or cake and ice cream ,but still everyone wanted to always know what that number was. In fact it was the first question out of a lot of peoples mouth a lot of time.

And then somewhere it started to become this thing around your neck. People didn't seem to care about your birthday at all anymore, just the little number. And you noticed people used the little number against you especially if their number was smaller. And the weird thing was that people always guessed your number about ten years off. Thinking your number was ten years light. But they always persisted and had to know...really what is your number...how old are you really?

And then you realized at at point that number was a sword. They couldn't get you any way else. People a lot dumber than you, slower, uglier, still wanted to know that number. And so you start to lie to them. Just to piss them off. And they would look dismayed. But i thought you were...nope. Not that number, this number. Really? Oh yeah. My number is less than yours. And you leave them there wondering, staring at you and you think to yourself, fuck em.

I mean, what's in a number, really?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...funniest novel since Straight Man...Chicago Sun Tiimes

Authors and the Fight Between Amazon and Barnes and Noble

There is a big fight going on between Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Basically Amazon is trying to squash traditional book publishing with the Kindle and Barnes and Noble is fighting back and saying they are Custers last stand between traditional publishing and the cold windy streets of Ebooks. Authors are in the middle but according to the NY Times article we will suffer if BN goes down because people will quit buying books and we will be left with our little downloads to make a living. That would suppose authors are making a living now.

The one percent rule applies here. About one percent of the authors make all the money and the rest scramble for the crumbs. Shelf space is the dividing line and if you cannot get shelf space in a store then you do not exist. You may be one great writer but there are only so many slots or so much space in a store and your book might not make the cut. So you have effectively disappeared. Or you never got up to bat in the first place. Getting a book of fiction published has never been easy and now it is something like winning the lotto (except for the money of course)

So where does that leave authors. Wellllll (as Ron Paul would say) you know having an ebook out there might not be like having a real book but it beats the alternative: oblivion. And I don't mean you are not still writing oblivion, I mean you are still writing very good books that you simply cannot get published or get onto the shelves. So you really don't exist. And that is a very real fate for most authors in the old paradyme. Not to say we all don't want the book published route, but if presented with some water verus no water in a desert, I will take the few drops offered.

So who knows if BN will win. The big authors do have a lot to lose. They are making real money. The literary mid list fiction writing authors probably will do better in an Amazon dominated world. At the very least they will get their books out there and if they hustle and word of mouth gets going, they might even sell. And they can have all the shelf space they want.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one word...plastics

Serial Sex Murders and the State of Publishing

I had  a friend say to me he was glad he had published his two books when he did and gotten the contract he did then because now it would be impossible Maybe that is why a film company is bringing out a 3D version of The Great Gatsby. They said it would allow them to give a faithful telling of the novel by bringing a stage quality (3D) to the film. Hmmm. Or like my dad said the other day, the only  people getting published are those that do something notorious (branding/celebrity) and suggested I go ride a motorcycle off a mountain or leap from this planet to the next and write a book about it. Thanks dad.

But if you are a fiction writer then there is a bit of feeling of yelling into a void. It would seem that Fitzgerald might reach more people in his 3D format than the original pulp version. Or that might friend might not get the contract he got before or maybe I really should jump into the next universe and write about it. But certainly a lot of the rules governing fiction might be on their head between the Kindle, the economy, and the more brazen publish somebody famous and play it safe.

Saying all that you have to believe good fiction by unknown writers is still being published. I remember a letter I received when I first started out and she said I had a good novel (an agent) but that serial sex murderers are what get published now. But for me to keep at it, "quietly good books do get published" One would like to believe that but maybe that quietly is the undoing of it all now. Quietly might not suffice in the age of the Internet.

We live in a loud polymorphic culture of multiple stimuli. I run my UVERSE from my phone and DVR movies while I  sit in the dentist office so I hae them to watch when I get home. That is a lot of  options to have in the palm of ones hand. And yet there those novels I still flip off the television to go read. I am a writer, so I may be the exception, but maybe those "quiet books" are the ones that people will still seek out. But you have to have a publisher take a chance on those people who will turn from the media of the age.

I have to say though, a good story should be the determining factor. As a novelist you have to cling to that notion and ignore everything else. So in a way I guess I am back to to battling it out with the serial sex murders with the book quietly published. Let's hope it still gets published.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

It's called Fiction Folks

That question.You get it on the tip of the tongue. So what do you do supplement your incom? It is asked as the innocent probe sandwiched in there with how are the kids. And you treat it the same way. Oh, a little of this and that because what they are really asking is how do you keep writing? Why are  you not working a job like I am? And they are pleasant. You still have your house? My last novel was about a man who was losing his house and a financial wreck. Rocket Man It's called fiction.

But in the reality of our reality age there is no line anymore. Of course you are writing about yourself otherwise why would you write? So I get the looks, the side glances. Does your wife work? No. That throws them off but they keep coming. Well I hope you are still with her and she can put up with someone like you. Where do you go with that one.. But the last novel also had a crappy marriage at the center. Again, you surely are not writing about someone else!

Writers get this kind of stuff  all the time. It goes with the territory. So is your dad really that much of an asshole. Did you really blast off all those rockets? Did you really cut down the sign to your subdivision? Oh your poor wife. So when are you moving? Do you really hate the suburbs that much? And what other jobs do you work?

It called fiction folks. Remember. Suspension of disbelief. You make it up. Right. Sure you do.

www.billhazelgrove.com

Why publishers won't buy your book

Mmmmm....this is a tough one. Why wont publishers buy your book. Well, let's break down publishers into it's component parts. We are not talking about Max Perkins. We are talking about someone, probably a twenty something someone or a thirty something someone who quite possibly is female and is working in an office in Manhattan with books flying at her all day long like leaves in a ferocious autumn wind. The books literally rain down and these are books from agents but the slush pile detritus is put into the mix as well. Now put that person in the year 2012

Publishing is on  it's proverbial ass. Mainstream publishing where the brick and mortar press cranks up like an old dinosaur still rules, but there is that comet rolling though space and the temperature is falling. Books still dominate and a publisher can put an author on the map, but at a million kindles a week, the times are a changing.  Let us be clear. This has everything to do with why your book is getting rejected and it has nothing to do with your book getting rejected.  Your book is getting rejected for reasons that mystify and convolute, creating more smoke than fire. Well...so what are they?

Not right for our list. Not right for us. Not right for the genre. Not right. Hmmm. Ok. Don't care for the characters. Could not get into their head. Don't like the voice. Don't reallly see a spot for this book. Too much action. Not enough action. Not enough character development. Too much dialogue. Not enough dialogue. Too Slow. Too long. Too short. Episodic. Been done. No one would care about your characters. Already have a novel like this. No brand. No platform. Just....NO!

Believe me I have heard it all. But here is thing. Do not take it personally. There are so many variables pressing down on this decision that you will hear maybe 1/8th of the truth and that is that they just dont know if they can sell it. And you know what, that is true. No one is sure what sells and what doesn't and throw in the Kindle factor and now you are off to the races. So really, it all comes down to what you think of your work and if you believe in yourself.

Listen to the advice, listen to the criticism, make the changes, don't make the changes, submit it again, write another book. Move on, but never take it personally. It's just business. 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one word, just one word...plastics

The Twittering Author

I talk a lot of smack in person. I can launch serious about politics or social issues but my preferred verbal mode is to shit around and spar and goof and on just about anything that is not serious but more like verbal gymnastics. Highly enjoyable but not much insight especially in 140 character bursts. But I do post. I'm a writer and that's the way I express myself through sentences and paragraphs with a beginning middle and end. It's just the way I'm comfortable in twitter land.

Not so with other authors. They talk directly into the twitter feed. They are comfortable shooting out 140 character missives to other people and responding. I really don't think I have anything valuable to say in 140 character shots except to talk smack and who wants to hear that? But others do. Others can say what they want in a quick blip and then they are done. I guess it comes down to what kind of writer you are and how comfortable you are pulling back the curtain.

In Anne Trubeck's piece in the Sunday Times she cites authors as being in two groups, the ones that cannot let the veil down and the others who want the feedback twitter provides Also there are sales. Sales Sales Sales. Publishers don't know if twitter gets people to read books or not. The logic would go something like, well he seems like a witty tweety fellow, I wonder what his book is like. Ah, but you have to stop twittering to go get that book and for many of us twitters we are already on to the next tweet.

Social media does break down the isolation of the author and some don't care for it. The big guns tend not to twitter or if they do it is some sort of mass PR twitters. I don't know. You have to find your comfort level and do what you do. Me. I like letting people know my thoughts and maybe they get a kick out of it and maybe not. Then I go talk smack. Or write another novel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic (surviving as a writer)

Downloads Top Album Sales For the First Time

Something we all know has arrived. The download is now preeminent in the music world and those CD players we have are now in the junk heap of history. Sure Sure. People will still buy a physical medium to claim ownership, but that accessibility will trump ownership eventually and the digital medium is proving it more every day. A million kindles sold every week by Amazon. A million. If the writing gets any bigger on the wall there will be no more wall.

Not that books are songs. They are not. Readers are a persnickety group and a lot of people will prefer the book, but when my eighty nine year old father in-law and my eighty year old mother in-law are sitting in their La-Z boys hunched over their Kindle screens then something is definitely up. The speed of this transition is taking away our collective breath and is already leaving authors and publishers scrambling to keep up. The proof is in the download.

The Kindle is not the IPOD. Not yet anyway. You still want a break from the Kindle with a book. I know I do and have read the last three novels in the old paper format. Music has no such physical drawbacks. In fact having all your music in your pocket is fantastic compared to carrying around a bulky CD player or worse a boom box. But, portability is a big factor in the Kindle reader also. You don't lug books, but the tech revolution of the IPOD just doesn't seem as much of a Watershed as the Kindle. It is still a better tactile experience to read a book if not visually as well.

But the Kindle is still evolving. Paper screens may not be far off along with brighter screens that are easier on the eye. Who knows, maybe they will even get that pulpy old book smell puffing out as you read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...a hilarious well written novel about one mans search for the new American Dream James Frey

The Stigma of Self Publishing

You bet there is a stigma to self publishing. Get over it. If you are a writer then you have a commitment and that is to the work. Publishing may go into deep freeze or they may be burning the house down to bring out your next work. Either way the work is what drives you to get it out there in whatever form you can. Art is never greeted with open arms and neither will your book. There may be a million reasons why reviewers and publishers and agents and everyone else view a self published novel as something less than standard. You cannot worry about that.

Your first responsibility is to write the book. Your second is to get it out there where people can read it. If you only want to see your name in print then that is not going to take you far. If you truly believe in your work then you will do what is necessary. That is why you only want to put out your best work because you will have to stand by it through thick and thin. This is not for the I want to publish a book before I die crowd. This is for the I want to give the world something new crowd.

In Our Time. Hemingway's small chap book of stories was self published by Ezra Pound in Paris on a rotary press. No one would publish the fellow with the strange stories. My first book was brought out by a printer in Chicago who had never published a book before. Hemingway went on as we all know and the very people who turned my book down bought it on auction years later. The point is you are part of the big struggle and you may well be trampled underfoot anyway, but use every tool at your disposal and then make up some along the way.

Being a writer is not for the feint of heart, but who knows, you might just buck the odds. Either way, it is the work that matters. Only the work.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...surviving as a writer

The Millionaire Troll Author

By now you have heard of the girl in Minnesota who couldn't get published or considered by agents and so she shot her troll based novels out on Kindle and made a cool million dollars then got a big contract with a publisher and made even more and now her books are being made into movies and life is good for the twenty something (barely) who took a chance on herself and hit the lottery of new technology and sidestepped publishing and essentially hit the lottery of mass entertainment. So what does all that mean to authors and publishers?

Well nothing new under the sun. We have heard of these stories of the unrecognized author who is dug out of the slush pile or self publishes and the world is introduced to a book that would have suffered the fate of most rejected manuscripts: the moldy box in the basement. But what backs this story into something new is the ease in which this author broke the back of main stream publishing. She simply uploaded her books and people started to read them and  more people started to read them and then more people started to read them. The digital bestseller is a bit like an atom bomb. Fission is possible.

But of course for most of us this does not occurs. The atoms do not bang up against each other in the proper sequence and the uploaded book takes it lonely place in cyberspace, unreviewed, unread, a little catalog of bits and bytes. But here it worked fabulously. Expect troll books up the ying yang. YA will be seen as even more of a gold mine than it already is. Expect more ebook success stories. Expect publishers not to change. Expect authors to remain frustrated.

Publishers cannot recognize the gold in front of them because they don't know what it is anymore. Especially now. Large conglomerates push down hard on editors and the bottom line long ago pushed over literary merit. The divining rod has clearly bent to commerce if it ever bent away in the first place. Weird things happen. People get struck by lighting, win the lottery, publish books about trolls that make millions of dollars. Does this matter to the writer? Yeah and no. It is good to know it is possible, but you view it the same way you hear about someone who gets the catastrophic disease or writes a hit song. How does that happen? What must it be like to be that person.

Ultimately though, you pick up the pen and start again. Hmm...lets see.  Ok. I got it. A boy wizard who turns into a troll! What?  It might work....I was seriously thinking of a troll book even before Mrs. Minnesota. No, really. You don't think I would follow a trend for money. Please.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...surviving as a writer
Rocket Man...keeping your house shouldnt be this hard

The Best Guess of the Novelist

You know what your best guess is. It is the book you have not undertaken because it might be great or it might be a colossal failure of years and time and money. The modern novelist is stuck between selling and fame and artistic merit if not immortality. You could out Franzen Franzen but if you fail then you will have used up precious ideas not acted upon and the fact is you literally only have so much time to write so many novels before you earn yourself a slab in a cold dark cemetery.

These are the thoughts novelist deal with every day. Write something containable and marketable and safe or throw it all to the wind like that first novel you were never sure you could finish or even what the name of it was going to be. You settle down with novel two and three and four is the beginning of something new but you have not knocked the roofs off for a while if ever and you are wondering if your best guess as a novelist might really be your best.

And so there you stand at your crossroads. Take a shot at the prize or keep drinking the swill that might pay off with repetition and various ideas if not various genres. The stakes have become very high now. Only one novel gets the prize of the New York literary establishment lining up to ensure success. This years winner was The Art of Fielding. A wide ranging baseball novel that was pretty milk toast when it came to the end, but no matter, it had won the prize and publishing lined up and swung the big bat and the ball did sail out of the park.

So there you have it. The prize or settle into your comfortable mediocrity and produce good novels that hopefully lots and lots of people will read. Or take your best guess... and go for it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...a writers survival guide