The single best source of advice. Ever.

Posted by Author on January 6th, 2009 filed in Blog, Review

There are literally thousands of places on the internet where you can read advice on breaking into the publishing industry. While I’m sure that many of these are wonderful (and more than half of them are just trying to scam you out of money), I honestly believe that there is absolutely NO better source of insight than the posts and comments over at Making Light.

Long ago and far away, I was a regular reader and poster to the rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan newsgroup. Of all the people who participated there, none were more insightful than TNH and PNH; mysterious acronyms who seemed to have some kind of inside scoop on the goings-on happening behind closed doors at Tor Books, Robert Jordan’s publisher.

Soon it was revealed (or at least publicized more widely) that TNH and PNH were known in the “real world” as Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (yes, their name is double unhyphenated, and if you want to understand that better please read more about it here).

Patrick and Teresa are MAJOR names in the SF-F publishing world.  Patrick is a Hugo Award wining editor for Tor, and Teresa is a sort of editor-at-large for Tor who seems to operate on a slightly more freelance basis…from her office…in the Flatiron Building…with the rest of the Tor employees…so…yeah.  I don’t really get how that works either.  Anyway, they are both inextricably linked with Tor publishing. Patrick seems to edit more “hard SF” stuff and Teresa edits more “fantasy” related material; although there are many MANY exceptions to that little rule-of-thumb, and they both have incredible relationships with MANY major names in publishing on both sides of the table.

Together they represent well more than half a century of publishing experiance, writer education, fanzine publishing, and just general love of the SF-F genre and tireless work furthering the genre’s exposure to more and more fans.

Did I mention that they’re really nice people?  It’s always easier to take really tough advice from nice people, and they are really good at dishing out the really tough advice.

Years ago, they each had individual weblogs up and running before weblogs were the cool thing to do(tm).  A few years later they consolidated their individual blogs into the new and improved (and quite possibly all powerful) Making Light.

Lots and lots of different things pass across the front page of Making Light.  You want politics?  Making Light has got you covered. Want to know everything there is to know about emergency response best practices?  They’ve got you covered.  Want a collection of the funniest and/or weirdest links EVER?  Making Light’s particles have TOTALLY got you covered.

But, at the end of the day, the best posts and comment threads are the ones that touch on the actual industry of publishing. For your reading pleasure, and industry elucidation, I direct you to the post entitled “Slushkiller” and the incredible trove of knowledge encapsulated therein.

Yes, the post is a long one.  Yes, there are more than 700 comments.  Yes, there’s more industry knowledge contained in that one page than some people can get in YEARS of college and industry employment.  Take a quick scan of the names in the comments section…yes, that John Scalzi…yes, THAT Elizabeth Bear…YES, THAT Jo Walton.  And yes, that REALLY IS Niel Gaiman.

Additional names that might not ring a bell but are of note none the less:

Melissa Singer - Prominent Editor.
Beth Mecham - Prominent Editor.
Charlie Stross - Author.
Jim McDonnald - Author and prominent member of the SFWA.
John M Ford – Author, Poetic Genius, Man of Great Thoughts; and a man sadly missed.

I can assure you that there are several (dozen?) other names that are notable that I just haven’t made the mental connection with while writing this post. Off the top of my head there’s about a half-dozen Hugo/John W. Campbell/Locust/Mythopoetic awards involved in the conversation. There are major international conventions that can’t put together a panel with that many notables discussing the basics of “getting published” in the industry today.

Everything starts with a discussion of rejection letters. More specifically, the nature of author reactions to rejection letters.  Which leads to a discussion of the whys of rejection letters, which leads to a truly wonderful discussion of what editors are looking for that will climb off of the slushpile and into the ranks of the published.

I should make a confession here, due to truly random and fortunate circumstances I have never received a rejection letter. Yet.

My submissions so far have resulted in publications, the few that I have. I don’t really think this means anything other than I haven’t submitted very much. I anticipate rejections by the metric ton. Not because I think poorly of my writing, but because I recognize that first,  more material is rejected than published; and (almost by direct corollary) second, even otherwise publishable material might not fit the buying needs of the editor it was submitted to.

Publishing is a business. It exists to make money for a few people by getting (hopefully) many people to pay their own hard earned money for publications containing the writings of authors paid a percentage of the anticipated money up front. Publishers make money by finding material that the maximum number of people want to pay money for. It doesn’t matter if you write the most unusual, innovative, unexpected or avant-guard string of words ever produced if publishers can’t reliably take a risk on it. And let’s be clear, all publishing is a risk. What might seem like a bestseller-in-waiting may never find an audiance. What might seem like a concept destined to reach two people and thier cat could end up being the next Harry Potter. Publishers are always taking a risk. Publishers hire editors to find and develop authors that can write books/magazines/whatever that will actually SELL to people with money.

(Editors develop relationships with agents who are also in the business of finding and representing authors, but that is a whole different ball game that I will save for a future post).

An editor’s job isn’t easy by ANY stretch of the imagination. Many thousands of people every year want to be writers. Only a tiny fraction of those people write well enough for publishers to be able to sell thier writing to others. Of that tiny fraction, there is the incredible difficulty in matching the right story to the right publisher. The job of matching those two falls to the editor. Sometimes the right book will go to the wrong publisher, and get rejected.  Sometimes the wrong book from the right writer will cross the desk of an editor at the right publisher, and it too will be rejected. Rejection happens. A lot.

Imagine if you will, what happens when a perfectly good short story crosses the desk of an editor at a major mothly magazine. Imagine that the story features aliens meeting Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.  It’s funny, it’s engaging, it’s PERFECT for the winter double issue. Unfortunately, the editor just closed the book on this year’s winter double issue last week and he already bought a story with aliens and another story featuring Santa vs. an autonomous stealth fighter. There simply isn’t any room for this perfectly good story.

But the editor takes it upon himself to send a personal rejection letter explaining that there’s no place for this particular story, praising the merits of the story and encouraging the author to submit it to other markets, AND indicating that he’d like to see something else from the author.

As a writer, I can assure you that I would LOVE to get a rejection letter like that. Unfortunately, there are countless many writers out there who would take that letter as a devastatingly personal blow.  See the Slushkiller post for the sad proof.

For those writers, it has stopped being a business; it has become a calling. In the last few years, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who honestly believe that there is simply NO ONE in the universe qualified to “judge” their immaculate conceptions. Not their friends and peers, not money grubbing agents, and certainly not some ivory tower ensconced editor who thinks they can dictate the value of ART from on high.

If you think professional writing is anything other than performing a job for a business, you are barking mad. When you want to write “for pay” you need to realize that someone else is writing the check. Quite simply, that means that you are performing a job. You are not, in fact, providing a service to posterity. When you have a job, you have a boss; when you have a boss, you should listen to them. Generally, they’re the boss for a reason.

Slushkiller pretty much explains the entire editor perspective in detail from some of the most powerful editors in the SF-F publishing world. Oh, and did I mention that they’re all really nice people?

If you have ANY desire to write SF-F, or even just a desire to understand the publishing industry better, I can’t recommend Making Light enough. There really isn’t anything else like it.