Patricia J. Parsons

Backstory, Electronic Publishing, Publishing

When a publisher stops publishing: A writer takes control

Posted on 31 Oct 201331 Oct 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

So, it actually happens. In fact, it happens more often than you might think. And it has happened to me more than once, although I’m happy to say that not as often as it hasn’t! Publishers go out of business for one reason or another.

The backstory: Just like most serious writers out there, I had always gravitated toward traditional publishers. They have the experience. They have the expertise. They have the money. Well, maybe this last one is not a given. In any case, until recently, it was probably the only route to being taken seriously as an author, although it has to be said that in some circles this is still the case. Nevertheless, on almost a dozen occasions, I went through the long, drawn out process of querying, waiting, submitting, waiting, reviewing, waiting, editing, waiting and so it goes. Eventually the books saw the light of day and I moved on. But what happens to your property (your book that you slaved over for a chunk of your life) when your publisher ceases to publish? Notwithstanding the legal issues of who owns copyright (you should), here’s one of my stories.

In 2008 I finally found a publisher for my memoir about being the mom to an elite ballet dancer who happened to be a boy in a hockey-mad country. The publisher was a small one with a years-long publishing record and the publisher loved the story. When the book was published in the spring of 2009, I hosted the book launch, bringing my son, the ballet dancer, and one of his female partners from the National Ballet of Canada back to Halifax to entertain my captive audience. Of course they came to see him dance, but had to listen to me talk about the book! It was all very exciting.

Another Pointe of View: The Life & Times of a Ballet Mom didn’t really do very well, and the publisher was not into electronic publishing at all, so it was never available as a downloadable e-book, effectively cutting off a significant and increasing proportion of the potential readership. The publisher sent me 100 books that I did not order, and they sat untouched in my office. (I’m sorry, but I’m not one of those people who are prepared to sell books out of the trunk of a car. Nor do I think that people interested in ballet stories are likely to buy them that way. But that’s just me.)

For the next two years I tried to get the publisher to send me a royalty statement: even if a book sells not a single copy, the author is entitled to see the statements, and in fact the publisher was bound by our contract to send me one periodically. The truth, however, was as low as the sales might have been, I knew that there had been sales since several people mentioned to me that they had bought it and had enjoyed it. So, imagine my surprise when I received a letter one day in 2011 indicating to me that I owed the publisher $1800.00!

The letter was from a woman who indicated she had been hired by the publisher to wind down operations – this was the first I had heard. She told me that the owner of the company was ill and would be retiring thus freeing the authors from any further obligations to the publisher except for this unpaid bill for 100 copies of my book (how it amounted to that much money I’ll never know). M y response was as follows: I most certainly was not going to pay any money for books I did not order – she could have them back if she was prepared to send money for the shipping; nor was I going to pay money to a publisher who had not once provided me with a royalty statement and was therefore in breach of contract. I asked for all rights to revert to me and I wanted it in writing. That letter came and not another word was uttered about money owning. I guess threatening to have my lawyer in touch with them did the trick.

So there I was with the book that I might as well have published myself. So, what do you do with a property that returns to you?

The newly designed cover for 'Ballet Mom' created for me by Tugboat Design — The newly designed cover for ‘Ballet Mom’ created for me by Tugboat Design

I decided that the evolution in publishing over the past several years provided me with a significant opportunity to revisit the book and see if I could garner a new audience for it. At this point the remnants of the publisher were unable to provide me with the final, edited manuscript in editable form, so I took the uneditable form and had it converted, then began the process of updating the work.

I decided that the book might find an audience these days with the e-book readers. I hired a book cover designer to come up with a more eye-catching cover, and then finished formatting the manuscript for electronic downloads. Then I published myself it via Kindle Direct and began letting people know that it’s available.

It’s funny how things have changed over the past several years. With Twitter and Facebook and other online possibilities, I had a request for a copy for review within a week from an international dance magazine who evidently had not heard of it before despite my publisher’s so-called promotion based on the marketing plan that I had delivered to her.

I think that my next step will be to make updated hard-copies available as well, thus making the ones currently available from online sellers (and from which authors receive not a single cent in royalties once a book is out of print) outdated and unwanted.

But what did I learn from all of this (and what could I offer as advice to other writers?)?

Don’t trust your publisher to market your book for you. (I already knew this, but the experience brought it into sharp focus.)
Publishers go out of business and leave you high and dry.
Authors need to keep a certain amount of control over their properties, even when signing contracts with traditional publishers.
If you have a well-edited manuscript (read: professionally edited), you can feel good about indie publishing.

But most importantly I learned that…

You can breathe new life into old work.

…and that’s what I’m going to do with several other books, published by traditional publishers before the electronic era whose rights have reverted to me. Stay tuned!

Writing

Do writers need other people?

Posted on 21 Aug 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

It’s often been said that writing is a solitary occupation. Franz Kafka opined as much when he wrote: “Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” And my personal approach to writing is very private. I have rarely let others read my unfinished work.

The only person who regularly reads my work-in-progress is my trusty in-house editor, and sometime collaborator, my husband. I have never been one for writing groups. But these days it is next to impossible to completely avoid that kind of inter-author engagement given the plethora of social media and perhaps even the necessity for developing what has become that annoying phrase: the writer’s platform.

All of this begs a couple of questions for me: Do writers need other writers? And if they do, what do they need them for?

I’m working on a piece of writing that could use just such answers. In an effort to open my mind to others’ perspectives, I’m hoping that as many writers as I can “engage” with will answer these questions.

If you have an answer, please leave a comment or answer my poll.

Writing books, Writing craft

“Write what you know” – An outdated concept?

Posted on 19 Aug 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

I just finished reading B.S. Shapiro’s extraordinary novel The Art Forger. Not to give it away (because you really ought to read it), it’s the story of an aspiring artist who makes her living wage doing reproductions of famous artwork that are sold as that – copies. She does “copies” not forgeries – which is all about the intent of the piece.

I picked the book up in the first place because it is at least partly about Edgar Degas’ work, and I’ve been 20,000 words into a manuscript that revolves around Degas’ ballerina sculptures for several years now, having put it on the back burner while I finished other pieces of writing for publication (and in the meantime noting that I’m not the only writer of historical fiction who has found this an interesting subject). To say that I’m a devotee of Degas’ work might be stretching it a bit, but I am a fan, and I find some of the unanswered questions about historical characters too tantalizing to ignore (remember my book about Edgar Allan Poe?).

"More than a century and a half have passed since Edgar Allan Poe died, alone in Baltimore in 1849, and still no one really knows how - or even why he was in that city. But Bridget knows, and this is her story." — “More than a century and a half have passed since Edgar Allan Poe died, alone in Baltimore in 1849, and still no one really knows how – or even why he was in that city. But Bridget knows, and this is her story.”

Anyway, as I read the book, I felt myself becoming very educated about the fine points of both the art and the science of oil painting. I relied on the author of this fictional piece to have done her homework: I wanted to believe in the details that so made the story feel authentic and rich. But I always kept in the back of my mind that this is a work of fiction…so the question always becomes: where is the line between fiction and fact drawn in these kinds of tales, and does it matter?

Most authors whose fictional work touches on real people, places and things take great pride in doing their homework, and there is usually a note in the book somewhere indicating the aforementioned line: where researched facts give over to the imagination of the writer. So what, you might reasonably ask, does this have to do with the question of whether or not we should take heed of the old adage: “Write what you know”? It occurs to me that in these days of the World Wide Web, we can “know” a great deal more than we used to!

There was a time when research was much more difficult. If you’re as old as I am, you might remember slogging to the library to comb through page after page of real reference guides, real books, and real documents. I have to say that I think back on those days with fondness; I truly enjoyed those hours spent among the great tomes crammed with information just aching to get out. The trouble was just how long it took to actually find that information that would provide those all-important nuggets that add depth and breadth to a piece of writing.

The truth is that today, we can become semi-experts in many topics if we know how to do the research.

Writing in the New York Times earlier this year, Ben Yagoda, author of How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Errors and the Best Ways to Avoid Them and a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Delaware, clarifies for us as follows:

“Writers who are intimately familiar with their subject produce more knowing, more confident and, as a result, stronger results…the idea is to investigate the subject till you can write about it with complete confidence and authority. Being a serial expert is actually one of the cool things about the very enterprise of writing…”[1]

And therein lays the wonder of these days of information overload: for writers, this overload is among the most essential tools in our toolboxes.

The trick, as with all tools, is to become an expert at using it!

As my own writing segued from non-fiction into fiction, I’ve been forever grateful for the research skill I was able to hone through the years. For any of us who are writing fiction with a basis in fact, those skills are crucial to the authentic voice we all seek.

[1] Ben Yagoda. Should we write what we know? The New York Times online, July 22, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/should-we-write-what-we-know/?_r=0