PNWA Author Panel: Poisoned Pen Press

Copyright © 2011, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

Last month, I attended the September member meeting of the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association. The program consisted of a five-person panel of authors who have published books with Poisoned Pen Press of Scottsdale, AZ, which is an independent publisher of various mystery genres. According to the panelists, the editors are Barbara Peters and Annette Rogers. Unlike the big New York publishers, they take unagented submissions. They accept works between 60,000 and 90,000 words.

The panelists raved about how the editors spent a lot of time with them to get their book just right. In general, they recommend that authors start out querying small, independent presses because the author has a good chance of receiving good feedback on their work, even if rejected. Like any other publisher or agent, 99% of submissions will be rejected; they receive a lot of poorly-written submissions.

Poisoned Pen’s advances aren’t large: about $1000. But, there isn’t a lot of deadline pressure, and they won’t necessarily drop you as an author because of poor sales. After your book’s first print run, they utilize Print On Demand for subsequent orders, and distribute through Ingram Publisher Services. This means your book never goes out of print. From day one, your book is published in hardcover, trade paperback, audiobook, and large print.

On the subject of marketing your book, the panelists emphasized the importance of sending out advance, pre-publication review copies to the big industry reviewers, such as Library Journal or Booklist. Poisoned Pen will send out the review copies. Once the book is published, these reviewers will not look at the book. They only review advance copies. Unfortunately, most newspspers no longer review books. Ones that do: LA Times, Seattle Times, Washington Post.

Also attending the meeting was a man (I didn’t get his name) from New Libri Press, a small publisher in Mercer island, WA.

Beta Testing Your Novel

Copyright © 2011, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

When I'm not writing novels or short stories, I develop software to keep the lights on and the fridge stocked. A key stage of the software development cycle -- the steps taken to engineer a software product and release it to the world -- is "beta testing."

There comes a time when the development work is essentially finished, but the product is in a rough, largely untested form. The engineers have run it through rudimentary tests, and the quality assurance team has subjected it to some of their battery of standard tests. But, it is still imperfect. That's where beta testing comes in. You send a series of these rough versions to your best customers, who have bravely volunteered to be Guinea Pigs, with the understanding they will use it every day and ruthlessly report back on its bugs.

This concept is also valuable to writers -- especially for novels and non-fiction books. Once we have edited our first draft into a readable second draft, we are at the stage where we need honest, knowledgeable "beta readers." These are people you trust, who will dedicate themselves to read through your manuscript, cover to cover, without delay, and make detailed notes on its flaws and charms. I have been trying to find a few "right" beta readers for a long time, but as yet without success.

Family usually doesn't qualify because they will feel compelled to say nice things to you or, conversely, they still hold a grudge from when you were 11 years old and will rip your work apart just for sport. If they say, "It's great. I loved it," are they really cringing inside about how lame the story was and how it's better suited for insomniacs?

I've tried local librarians and booksellers, but they insist they and their staff are overwhelmed by required reading. Writer friends ought to make good beta readers because they have more knowledge of the mechanics of writing. But a writer whom you barely know, and who doesn't care if a friendship ever develops, may be the ideal beta reader. They have no axe to grind either way. They'll let the chips (and worn out clichés) fall where they may. And you should get the honest feedback you really need.

It's Soooo Obvious, I Didn't See It

Copyright © 2010, Steven E. Houchin

I read a posting on Anne Mini's excellent blog "Author! Author!" titled The dreaded Frankenstein manuscript, part XXI: Millicent holds these truths to be self-evident. Trust me.

It discusses two aspects of editing your manuscript to eliminate phrases that drive agents (or their slavish manuscript-reader underlings) crazy. One she calls "statements of the obvious". These are phrases like "nodded his head" (what else would he nod?) or "shrugged her shoulders" (what else would she shrug?). The second is the "Walking Across the Room" (WATR) problem, where you describe your character's every movement as she rises from the chair and walks across the room and bends over to pick up the tray of biscuits. Once you tell us she rose from the chair, the reader can fill in the rest until she picks up the tray. That is, unless she has suddenly suffered a stroke and is now dragging her left leg.

The examples Anne gave prompted me to scan my latest manuscript - the one I am currently shopping around - for these terrible language faux pas. It was an enlightening exercise, even though I found only a few of the bad phrases. Some of the phrases that didn't cross Anne's lines, did have other things wrong with them, or could be written better. Here are the words I searched for:

* Blink
* Wave
* Nod
* Shrug
* Walk

I noticed "blinked rapidly" several times. I tried to do that, and found it thoroughly unnatural. So, the word "rapidly" rapidly got the axe. I had used "waved her hand", one of Anne's obvious no-no's, and discovered a few bad nods and shrugs as described above. But, the exercise caused me to reevaluate many of these gestures in context and rewrite them slightly, or caused me to notice that I'd overused them in a particular scene.

As far as examining "walk", I was able to eliminate a few altogether, and to change some to other words, such as "stroll" or "saunter" to better fit the feel of the action.
When I was all done, one hundred words had vanished from my manuscript, which I'm struggling to keep below 120,000 as I continue to do edits.