Keep it in your Pants

Or drawer. Or hard drive. Under the mattress at your great aunt Tilly’s house. WHEREVER your old manuscripts are (of course that's what this post is about! What did you think?!), for the love of coffee, if you’re waffling over whether to write something new or raise the dead…KEEP them there.

I’m not saying there’s no possible way they’ll sell, or that they aren’t any good. Timing plays a large factor in when things are picked up in publishing, and sure, the timing on an old manuscript may not have been ideal and now it is (i.e., your NA five years ago vs. NA now). And many authors are seeing success with self publishing novels that don’t get picked up.

But if I have a client who says, “Oh hey, you know, I’m not quite sure what I’ll work on next, and I haven’t done anything new, but I have these short stories I did when I was twelve – want to take a look at those?”

I think: No. No, I really do not.

I will probably say, “Sure.”

I mean, I won’t just discount the possibility that an old dusty manuscript a client wants to send to me just needs some polishing and voila! Again, see the comment on timing above. But how many stories do you hear of where the author touts, “Oh, I had this just sitting around for years, and all of a sudden, I thought, why not, I’ll send this off and see what happens!”

Not many. Because many times these manuscripts are what I would call “starter manuscripts”; the drafts written to hone and perfect your craft. It is highly unlikely a manuscript from five years ago is going to be as good as anything new you could write. Not even speaking just to craft and style; speaking also to marketability and dated references. The audience you were writing to is also aged, and a new one moving in; is that new audience going to like what the old did?

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind. -C.S. Lewis

So. If you MUST take them out again and want to contemplate sending them off into the big wide world (I know it’s tempting) PLEASE re-read them ALL THE WAY THROUGH FIRST. Then decide what you want to do. Is it REALLY the next best foot forward you can present? REALLY a victim of poor timing/market glutting that should and could be revived, either traditionally or via self-publishing? Or is it a starter manuscript you’re desperately trying to fill a gap of writer’s block with?

The truth is, one of the hardest things a writer has to think about is having tomes of unpublished drafts and works that just…won’t ever go anywhere.  But guess what: it doesn’t make you a bad writer – it makes you a career writer. A writer who writes…just for the love of writing, whether published or not.

And that’s the kind of writer I want to work with.

You can't start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading your last one. -Michael McMillan

E-BarGAIN or E-BarLOSS?

I saw a Tweet a while back that said something to the effect of: why is it that people are ok with buying a greeting card for $5 but expect a BOOK to be $.99?

It’s a good question. I was reading that as people expect E-BOOKS to be $.99 and, the heart of it, I think, is because they’re digital; they’re not tangible like a physical book and, psychologically, it’s harder to justify a non-tangible item for more money. Which is completely not fair, considering all the time spent on a book, the respect that should be given to the intellectual property of an artist, etc etc I could go on and on.

My question is: will this trend continue?

Cover your ears book lovers – I’m about to blaspheme. 

I think that NO, it will not continue…because as physical books become less and less popular, and electronic books more common, there will be far less of a physical vs. digital mentality for readers to balk at.

(end blasphemy)

Looking at the music industry, for example, when digital music first came on the scene for iPods and even CD burning, everyone wanted to get their songs for free. It was a big battle to end that (and well, no, it’s not really quite over) which involved a total overhaul in how music is accessed. You CAN now go to iTunes and buy a single song, or listen endlessly on Pandora  or even YouTube.

But the music industry didn’t die. We’re not craving any less new music. We’re just accessing it differently.

In that time, CDs have become all but extinct. If I wanted to purchase music, I wouldn’t go buy a physical CD; I’d just go online and buy the song, or the whole album, digital. And if I DID buy a CD, I certainly wouldn’t expect it to cost MORE than the digital album. In other words: as time has passed, I’ve come to accept the cost of electronic music, and its worth, to a point that it’s just about equal in my mind, because digital is much more prevalent in my life.

Of course…there were also those huge campaigns against illegal music downloads, lawsuits, sitting in movies watching a preview that screams at me IF YOU BUY A BURNED DVD YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW AND ARE AN EVIL PERSON AND THE WORLD WILL DIE AHHH!!!

So that probably also played a part in instilling a respect for an artist’s work, equating it to money. The rest is time; time for technology to evolve and make physical music formats irrelevant.

Time is already changing the format of books. E-readers are becoming more affordable, which means they’ll be trickling down to more and more readers, and soon, maybe we’ll have a YouTube of the book world – a new platform to figure out how to use to our advantage.

So all we need is that second part…that campaign…that screams out IF YOU PURCHASE AN EBOOK FOR LESS THAN $1 YOU ARE SLAPPING THE AUTHOR IN THE FACE!!!!!

Or you know. Whatever. Just a suggestion. I certainly don’t want to DISCOURAGE e-book sales (and freebies and discounts are a great way to gain readership).

What do you think?