My heroine has been going through hell in hopes of achieving a tremendous goal, only to have everything she worked for ripped away from her because she chose integrity over compromise. 754 words tonight. Story, Help Wanted.
Headache is pretty bad right now, but I finished out scene two with a nice cliffhanger.
How are your words coming?
I’ve had to take a bunch of days off, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
However, when I’ve been up to it, I’ve been working. On Rebel Tales, on NovelWritingSchool.com, and also on fiction.
I was doing pretty well with TalysMana, but my daughter has some scheduling problems right now, so we’re having to put that on hold until she gets her schedule worked out.
Meanwhile, I’m putting together some shortish serial fiction for Rebel Tales. The current piece is Help Wanted, introducing a new heroine in a new SF world. I also want to write some Cadence Drake shorts for Rebel Tales. And I’m considering what I could do in the way of Tonk short stories for Rebel Tales Fantasy–probably not Talyn, probably not Hawkspar.
You can watch the progress on the progress bars to the right.
ADDED LATER: Got 581 words on Help Wanted tonight.
You’ve probably read about my war for the midlist—to recreate something that should never have been destroyed.
You may have read my New Year’s Resolution.
Well. I’ve almost got one piece of the puzzle done. And I just turned fifty a couple weeks ago, so I’m even almost on schedule.
Holly Lisle’s Rebel Tales is accepting submissions NOW—however, we’re still in beta, so they are not yet OPEN submissions. If you would like to submit your story to Rebel Tales (and currently we’re seeking Fantasy, Science Fiction, Paranormal, and Suspense), please sign up to the Rebel Tales Priority List and get your Rebel Tales Query/Synopsis manual.
If you’re not sure what we’re looking for, here are the critical links:
And if you want to meet other folks involved in this, join the Rebel Tales Community.
My editors and I are waiting. Let’s create something wonderful.
No less a writer than Norman Spinrad has hit the publishing death spiral, and with a flip of the bird to those who tried their damnedest to ruin my reputation when I laid out the whole evil “buying-to-the-net” process back in December ’06, I’ll simply say:
When my two older kids were younger, I used to charge them five bucks every time the word fair slipped out of their mouths.
“That’s not fair? Five bucks, please.”
Since five dollars was, at the time, equivalent to a week’s pay for chores for them, and since I actually made them pay me, that word quickly slipped out of both their vocabularies.
The only word in the English language I have less respect for than fair is bored, which means the person saying it has voluntarily turned his brain off.
One summer vacation, my two oldest complained that they were bored. I told them to find something to do. They whined that there wasn’t anything to do. So I showed them how to turn their brains back on.
It took one complete summer vacation, but they learned how to NOT be bored…and if either of them reads this post, I’m sure they’ll regale you with the horror story of what they had to do that summer…and why, to this day, neither of them has ever claimed boredom in front of me again.
Back to fair, though, which is the subject of this essay.
Over in the Rebel Tales community right now, a discussion on publishers’ target audiences popped up, and drifted into writing awards (ack), and into a comment that women don’t get as many awards for writing SF as men do, and that this was probably because the panels are made up of men…and the writer appended the comment with the stated hope that Rebel Tales would “set a standard of fairness in all genres.”
Five bucks, please, for using profanity in my house.
If this were the best of all possible worlds, everyone would receive equal justice.
Meaning: Everyone would reap the rewards for the consequences of his or her own actions.
Life in this world that we live in is not evenly just, but the concept of justice is born of a clear standard that can be objectively identified and objectively remanded. All men are to be held equal in the eyes of the law. Actions = Consequences.
Justice is an attainable standard, even if it is rarely attained.
Fairness, on the other hand, ignores actions and consequences. It ignores where things come from, how they are created, who created or acted, why they did so, and to what end they worked.
Fairness states not that all men are equal under the eyes of the law…but that all men are equal.
And all men aren’t.
Fairness demands that more women should be in positions of power because there are more women than there are men.
Fairness demands that people who have built businesses with their minds and hands and backs should make no more money than those they employ, because everyone who works at the company is ‘just a person, like everyone else.’
Fairness demands that competence be ignored as a standard because competence is unfair: some people have it, others don’t.
Fairness demands that half of all awards in all fields at all times should be granted to women and half to men—and that those awards should be further subdivided across standards of
…Fairness has no respect for achievement, no respect for effort, no respect for quality, no respect for intelligence, no respect for ability, no respect for motive.
And this is because FAIRNESS has no respect for the INDIVIDUAL.
Fairness, because it insists that all men are equal, can see humanity only as a vast, faceless lump.
The instant fairness looks past the dogmatic lie that “all men are equal” to see individual people with their individual and unequal skills, motives, morals, integrity, desires, and actions, it dies choking on that lie. So it doesn’t look.
Justice is the desire of the honest individual, who takes action with integrity and accepts the consequences as his earned due.
Fairness is the desire of the unthinking herd, that envies what it has not earned and demands a piece of it just because it’s breathing.
Justice is my standard. I will not accept any other, nor will I compromise.
Fairness earns only my contempt.
So, no. Rebel Tales will NOT set a standard of fairness. We will reward competence and quality. If the only people who demonstrated competence and quality were men, then I would publish only men.
If you want a place in Rebel Tales, earn it by being good enough to belong there.
That surprise I promised?
There are actually two, though I spent all night working to get everything up and running on both. (And for those who got the e-mail first and discovered you couldn’t post anything, please pretend you didn’t notice that I clearly should not be setting up anything complicated at 3 AM.)
The Rebel Tales community opens today. (And if this is old news to you, my reply is, “But now I’ve fixed the bugs!”)
And the TalysMana Be A Character Contest is finally back on track. You can vote for the character you most want to see in the book, but you only have a week to do it, because I want to get back to writing the story.
A question came up in a previous post on whether Rebel Tales editors could publish stories by other Rebel Tales editors.
Frankly, I thought the answer so obvious that it didn’t occur to me to mention it—and now that it’s been asked, I have proof that it wasn’t obvious after all.
I’m going to invent a term here—Editor Incest. And I’m going to define editor incest as “Editors competing for limited publishing space in the same market with the authors whose careers they are supposed to be trying to help build by buying their own or each other’s stories.”
And now I’ll state the policy that I thought too obvious to state before:
No.
Rebel Tales will not permit editor incest, either by editors publishing under their own name or by pseudonym.
The integrity of any publication is dependent upon writers being able to trust that their editors are on their side. Permitting even the possibility that an editor might grant a prize story slot to himself or an editor friend will destroy that trust.
What about me? I’m a pretty well-known writer, and my story in a season could ostensibly sell more issues and make more money for the other writers in that season than if my story wasn’t there.
I may in fact publish some of my own work in Rebel Tales. If I do, I’ll publish in a separate, unpaid slot. I’ll only get paid as the publisher, not as one of the writers, in order to avoid cutting the percentage other writers make on their stories, and to avoid taking up a paying slot.
And if this policy causes some of my prospective editors to drop out?
I’ll go through existing applications and contact those people I wanted to say “YES” to and couldn’t because of space restrictions. As noted in an earlier post, I still have a huge number of qualified applicants waiting.
…is on hold because I’ve run into a problem finding appropriate software. It make take me a few days, or even a week. Watch here for updates.
Craig Campbell and I have a new version of HollyLisle.com up in beta.
If you could click around it (excluding the writing diary and shop, which are unchanged) and give us feedback here on what works, what doesn’t, what you love, and what you hate, I’d really appreciate it.
It’s not in final form—we’re looking for input and a chance to fix what doesn’t work for you before we take it live. Thank you.
I received 152 applications, and in what has to be a world record for someone taking job applications, more than half were not just qualified, but WELL-qualified.
It was both astonishing and gratifying.
It was also hell to get through, because I had 32 slots to fill, and 152 prospective people to fill them.
I had the fun of telling 32 prospective editors they’d made the first cut, and got to move on to the tryout phase.
And then I got to write out 120 personal rejection letters. I mentioned this elsewhere, but no matter which end of the process you’re on, saying No is no fun.
But now I have my first group of folks, and I have something cool coming up for everyone else in just a couple of days—Rebel-Tales-related, and for readers, writers, editors, would-be publishers…
More on that tomorrow.
I’ve now filled all try-out slots for Fantasy and Suspense editors. I took the weekend off, spent all day yesterday catching up on customer service, and today I’m going to get the last SF and Paranormal applicants.
I received more than 150 applications, and was blown away by the skills, experience, and vision of the folks who responded.
If you’ve applied, I’ll do my best to have a response up for you today or tomorrow.
It wasn’t that long ago that science fiction and fantasy were genres supporting a lot of midlist careers. And if you say “What’s the midlist?” you’re not alone.
The midlist was where writers who’d never had a New York Times bestseller, but who created great stories regularly, lived. They weren’t household names. But they were full-time writers, they sold a lot of books, their backlist (their old books) stayed in print and earned them royalties twice a year, and their frontlist—their NEW books—brought them new readers who then found all the old stuff they’d written and bought that, too.
Backlist was the keystone upon which you built your career. Your older books kept making you money year after year after year, while you wrote new books and gained new readers and built a following. Your older books were your assets, and they paid off just as any good investment pays of.
And when I first got into the field, this was still what writers thought would happen.
Only publishers don’t keep backlist in print anymore.
So there are no midlist writers anymore, because if you don’t have big numbers on your first book, and bigger numbers on your second book, you don’t have a career.
Now frontlist is all that matters, backlist dies, and writing fiction for a living has become not building a career but playing the lottery.
There are a lot of reasons why this happens, I have gone into them at great (and contentious) length elsewhere, and WHY has ceased to be my issue. I have discovered that I cannot fix the problem from the inside.
So I’m attacking it from the outside.
We know what readers need. Great stories. That’s a given. So to head off a lot of “but what about readers” arguments in response to this post, let me say right now that what I’m doing only works if there are great stories to put into print. I’m not on any mercy mission here, Princess. (Yes, a Darth Vader misquote.)
There will be no pity publishing, no “but I need to sell something because we’re broke” sales. If you’re a writer, work your ass off and turn yourself into a good writer. If your stories suck, I’m not going to buy them, because the people who pay you when you’re a writer are readers, and I’m not going to screw over readers. Period. Haven’t done it with my work, and I’m SURE not going to do it with yours.
With that said, however, we are not here to talk about readers. We are here to talk about writers, and the brutal state of publishing. The question NOBODY has asked (ever, as far as I can tell) is “What do writers need?”
Now I’m writing from the perspective neither of a reader nor of a publisher, but from that of a writer—one who has written a helluva lot of novels, who has a huge backlist of good books—novels that have won rave reviews from reviewers and readers alike…and who has watched as the damn backlist I was supposed to have been able to build a career around has gone out of print one book at a time.
There are no every-six-month royalty checks to pay me while I write the next book. There is no buffer from closing on 20 years of professional work as a novelist. There is a treadmill of “write a book, write another book, watch the previous book go out of print, live on the the advance from the next book, and never gain any traction.”
The midlist is gone.
You want to know what writers need? Writers need a way to get paid every month for their backlist while they’re creating their newest book. They need to be able to build careers where the readers who find what they’ve written most recently can find everything they wrote before, still in print. They need to stop being publishing’s redshirts—replaceable, disposable, forgettable.
What writers need is someone to bring the midlist back—to bring back the place where you can gradually work your way to bestsellerdom (if that’s in you) by building an audience of loyal readers who look for and can find everything you wrote…and where, if you’re too offbeat to become a bestseller, you can still do what you love and get paid enough to live on while doing it.
Writers need someone who will print, distribute and promote their frontlist while keeping their backlist in print—and who will pay them regularly and reliably for every sale of every item they have in print—and not AFTER figuring profits, either.
You don’t need to have a publisher sit for six months on a book that has been finished, turned in, and accepted, while your payment works its way through accounting and your credit rating goes down the drain because you have no money. (Yes, I’m talking about myself. I have a deep, personal, bloody-mindedly determined stake in making Rebel Tales happen BECAUSE of that publisher, that six-month-delayed check, and the havoc it wreaked on my life.)
I found a way to keep my head above water by teaching other people how to write. It’s fun, I love it.
But there aren’t all that many other writers out there who have published more than 30 novels, who know the ropes, who have analyzed their own mistakes and success over the past 25 years, and who know how to teach what they’ve learned from that.
So what I’ve done isn’t a model that’s particularly repeatable for other writers.
Besides, if you want to write fiction for a living, there should be some way other than winning the Twilight lottery (horrible book) to make a living doing it.
What a writer who wants to do this for a living needs is:
In one of my How To Think Sideways lessons, I tell my students when dealing with editors, agents, publishers, and the publishing industry as a whole to think before they pick a fight. To ask themselves, “Is this the hill I want to die on?”
Up to now, I’ve only gone to war once, and that was in the publication of Hawkspar. I took that hill, I didn’t die on it, and I figured that was it. I’d won my battle and considering how long I’d been writing before I hit that one, I figured I’d never need to fight another.
Rebel Tales, and what it can mean to writers if I can make it work, is the hill I’m willing to die on—and considering the current unknown state of my health, I can’t pretend that’s entirely a metaphor. I don’t know how I am.
But even the possibility that I’m running out of time faster than I’d hope has forced to examine my priorities, and to decide where to put my time. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, I can’t plan based my future based on what life MAY do to me—I have to plan based on what it CAN. That means accepting the worst-case scenario as my start point and working from there.
If I only get one last battle, it’s going to be this one—to create a publishing house and a working model for other publishers that values writers and helps them build careers as part of its goal—and I’m starting the push to get it done now. I acknowledge there are no guarantees I can make it work.
But I’ve always been pretty good at picking my battles. I’ll only fight in self-defense, and mostly my philosophy is that the battle avoided is the battle won…but creating a publishing house designed to build rather than destroy careers is worth the fight.
I’ve been fighting behind the scenes for a while—this is not a “someday” fantasy for me.
Since I first made the announcement about Rebel Tales and bought the domain, I have invested thousands of dollars of my own money in developing the software that will ALLOW me to pay writers (and editors) monthly out of gross sales on every sale. As software goes, it’s a complicated bitch, and when you’re working with other people’s money, you want to be damn sure you get it right. So Margaret is being careful, and I am giving her the time she has to have to make the software perfect. This matters.
I’ll invest more to finish the software, more to integrate it into the publishing platform, more to make the website both pretty and functional (you will have noticed that right now it looks like crap) and a lot more once I start paying people.
| NOTE FOR OTHER CAPITALISTS: If you want to invest thousands of dollars of your own money into something, and you don’t have thousands of dollars lying around, you have to invest a little at a time as you go—and the process takes longer. If what you’re investing in is complex, it can take a LOT longer.
Whether you make the investment or not comes down in the end to how much what you’re doing matters to you, and why you’re doing it—and how much you have to maintain control in order to make sure your goal doesn’t get subverted by partners or shareholders who would dilute what you’re doing. |
I don’t anticipate seeing a profit from Rebel Tales for years, though I will get there (or my heirs will). I have bigger reasons than personal profit for doing this, though, and the biggest is to fix what’s broken in a field I love.
If I could pick my legacy, leaving behind a whole lot of writers who had built careers and were making a comfortable, reliable living writing fiction because of what I’d done would be it. Every nonfiction work I’ve done has been headed in that direction. This is simply the last critical piece of a very big puzzle.
To that end, I’m ready to start sifting through applications to find the people who want to fight this battle alongside me.
I’m looking for several really special people, and I’m asking for a lot out of the ones I’ll hire. You need to be as dedicated to the WHY of all this as I am. This isn’t going to be just any editing job, and you’re going to have to show me what you can do to get it.
When I’ve found people who make my inital cut, I’ll open up the query section of Rebel Tales (it’s already set up and waiting), and writers can start submitting queries to prospective editors.
NOTE:ALL PROSPECTIVE EDITOR POSITIONS HAVE BEEN FILLED.
We’re getting ready at this point to start accepting queries.
If you’re a prospective reader, writer, editor, site designer, artist, or someone else interested in getting involved in Rebel Tales, sign up for the Rebel Tales priority notification list. You’ll find the sign-up form in the righthand column on the site.