Happy Birthday, Mama Bitchstress!

Today is a very special day for the Evil League of Evil Writers.

Besides our founding anniversary, the anniversary of our beloved co-founder's birth is one of the ELEW's High Holy Days.

You think I'm joking, but I'm not. We don't joke here at the ELEW. If we're laughing, you should probably be running.

I looked at last year's post to make sure I didn't repeat myself with this year's acknowledgement, and found that I could pretty much say exactly the same thing, only with a few changes to the amount of money our Bitchstress Dreamkiller has raised for charity this year.

Our anniversary month (April) this year was dedicated to one of our own. Senior Pie Coordinator and Clubhouse Keeper's husband had a serious accident involving a chainsaw fought off a grizzly bear and racked up some absolutely hellacious medical bills (and I'm not talking the fun kind of "hellacious" either). The ELEW stepped in, and, with the help of a metric shit-ton of people, made that bill GTFO.

You know who was the driving force behind that fundraiser? That's right. Skyla Dawn Cameron was the Indiegogo campaign leader. I (Gothic Goddess Dina James) was the co-pilot.

I'm not even going to count the other awesome stuff she does for charity in her total raised this year. It's over $12,000 with the Evil for Julie fundraiser alone. She also does stuff for cats (because she's a Crazy Cat Lady) and takes her beautiful dog Sophie to the hospital to visit inpatients, as Sophie is an official Trent Hill Therapy Dog. I'm pretty sure when things are totaled up, Skyla has raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 this year, and guess what?

This year ain't over yet.

Who knows what no-goodness she'll get up to the remaining three months? She'll probably invent time travel or cure cancer or get that "world domination" thing off the ground. Oops...did I say that out loud? Whatever she does, it will be awesome. And I don't mean that in the mundane way. I mean that in the evil way.

Our Bitchstress Dreamkiller isn't just an evil writer...she's a person whose awesome you should aspire to.

Happy birthday, Skyla!

The Best-Seller Label

One of my books was the Kindle Romance Daily Deal last week. (Oh yeah, for those of you who didn't know, I'm also Julie Particka. Surprise?) It was one of those awesome but really stressful things. You see, when you're a KDD, that means Amazon is promoting you--they're sending your title out to all their readers and saying "look what's on sale!"

What if it still doesn't sell?

That was literally my thought when I woke up that morning and looked at my 7:30 am ranking. I was stuck in this void of "OMG, I totally suck."

The universe must have liked me that day because the rankings kept climbing and climbing. (Bear with me here. I'm only showing evidence for the discussion to come.) Eventually I had this:

#19 overall in Canada!

And this:

#93 overall in the US

And this:

#1 in NA/College! WOOT!

Which...is pretty fucking cool. I mean, between this and hitting something like #7 on the Australia iTunes with the book, I can technically call myself an international best seller.

But I don't.

You see, I know what kind of numbers people have to hit to make the NYT and USA Today lists. For most people, those are kind of life-altering sums of money. This? Not so much.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy as a clam about doing as well as I did. However, I've been paying a lot of attention to how people use the best-seller label, and it makes me a little squicky.

There is an author I know who gave away one of her self-pub books on amazon for several days. Lowered the price to FREE! and then advertised the hell out of it. I don't remember exactly how high her book got on the free list, but she proceeded to start calling herself a best-selling author.

*blink*

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm happy for her that she grabbed so many new readers. But I kind of have this thought that to be a best-seller you have to actually sell the books. I mean, if she'd lowered the price to $0.01, technically that would have been selling, but all those people who click on all the freebies might not have grabbed it. I don't know, but I don't count that.

I know another author who joked because their book hit #1 on some small, obscure sub-category that they were now a best-selling author. (Thankfully in that case, it was a joke, because I would have lost some respect for this particular person who legitimately deserves to sell enough to be a bonafide best seller.)

Now, in my case, the NA/College list isn't obscure. That's a pretty tough list (Colleen Hoover, Jamie Maguire, Jennifer L. Armentrout...the list could go on for a while), but until someone "in power" slaps a title on me, I'm not going to use one because it kind of feels like crowning myself mother-of-the-year or something.

Words have power, and people have used "best-seller" so deceptively (I won't say they are out-and-out lying, but making the best seller list at a specific publisher for a day or week is not the same as making an amazon list, is not the same as making the NYT or USA today.) that it's almost ceased to have meaning. If the time comes that my publisher decides they can legitimately put it on my books, I will probably start using it, but until then, this post is as close as it's going to get.

So my advice to all you aspiring authors, indie authors, new authors--choose to use the best-selling label with care. In order for it to have meaning to readers (which it's starting not to), it has to have meaning to us as authors.

Recycled Post: Another Post on Queries - Basic Etiquette

So I'm being lazy today (as I'm still playing catch-up offline, so you're lucky I'm even here right now and found this lovely gem in the archives for your reading pleasure) and offering you a timely recycled post on "how to write a query letter." This is something of a follow-up to our wonderful Senior Pie Coordinator's bit on Three Stupid Things Writers Do. Where she is deadly calm and concise, I'm going to go into massive detail with screaming and cursing. Because that's how I roll, people.

This was originally written in 2011, right around this week, coincidentally. Again, awesome timing! Here we go:

In order to understand what prompted this rant week's blog post, go give this post a quick read. Go on, I'll wait.

http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2011/09/lol.html

You see the part down at the bottom there, where some douchebag is fighting with the autoresponder to his query?

Yeah, that.

It shouldn't need to be said, but apparently it does: DO NOT FIGHT WITH THE AUTORESPONDER.

Honestly, if you bothered to research enough to find out where to send your query via e-mail, you should be smart enough to recognize an autoresponse when you get one. In addition to that, you should be GRATEFUL that you received an autoresponse – it means the email address you used was not only working, but correct. Writers are a paranoid, impatient bunch and we like to know things just haven't disappeared. Autoresponders give that sort of psychological reassurance. It's nice of an agency or business to have an autoresponder set up for that very reason.

Now that the "what set Dina off" portion is out of the way, let's get to the real subject of today's post.

Today we're going to talk about queries.

No, we're not going to talk about writing a query. You should already know how to do that, and if you don't, there are some great, free, reliable sources out there online that you can follow. This is more a list of do's and don'ts.

DO:

- INCLUDE YOUR NAME AND CONTACT INFO right at the top of the letter, just like professional letterhead. You're trying to be a professional, this is how it works. For e-queries, make sure again that your (correct!) contact information is there, but only once. If you have your contact info in your signature line, don't junk up the email with it everywhere. If it's an e-query, they're going to reply to the address you sent it from, so if you want your reply (autoresponse or not!) to go to a certain email address, send your query FROM that email address. Agents don't have time to compare email addresses, so don't send your query from your work email then wonder why you didn't get a response to your home email. Again, this shouldn't need to be said, but…yeah.

- KEEP IT TO ONE PAGE. A query letter is just that – a letter. The synopsis or first five chapters or whatever the submission guidelines ask for will tell the story for you, so you don't need to put it in your letter. Narrow your pitch down to a paragraph or two. You get 30 seconds max to make an impression. Don't waste time by telling an agent how you were inspired to write this. They don't care. Get to the good shit.

- FOLLOW THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES. They might not make sense to you, and you might not agree with them, but they're written the way they are for a reason and it's not your place to question it.

Here's the deal: You're asking an agent for the one thing that they don't have a great deal of – their time. DO NOT WASTE THEIR TIME. I hear you over there. You're saying, "Well, I put so much time and effort into my query and they didn't bother to give me the same." SO THE FUCK WHAT. Cope. Deal. Stop crying. They aren't your babysitters. Also, a QUERY letter is just that. A query.

QUERY – question, inquiry.

Your query letter is basically a formal way of asking this agent if they will represent you/take you on as a client, but really, you're asking for much, much more than that, so show a little fucking respect.

- INCLUDE THE WORD "QUERY" OR "SUBMISSION" IN THE SUBJECT LINE OF YOUR EMAIL unless the agency wants you to put something specific there. If you're sending a query via e-mail, this helps the agent. Remember, helping the agent save time is a good thing.

- HAVE THE CORRECT INFORMATION AND A COMPLETE QUERY PACKET. Again, you might not understand why they want a synopsis and a letter and the first five pages, but that's not for you to question. It's for you to follow. And honestly, if you can't follow simple directions and put together a proper query packet, what is there to make them think you could follow the directions for anything else? An editorial letter or a deadline? If you can't manage a simple request when they've gone to the trouble to outline what you're supposed to do for them, that doesn't exactly bode well for any future relationship with you.  A little research goes a long way, and you've spent all this time getting your book ready to fly. Don't fuck up the landing. And speaking of research-

- RESEARCH THE AGENT/AGENCY. They have all the information out there you need. If you found an agent in the Writer's Market, make sure it's a current edition. Go online and make sure that person is still with that company and is still looking for what you're querying with. If they have a blog, go read it and make sure you don't have any of their pet peeves or red flags going on. Like this: http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2011/07/red-flags.html

- FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. Make sure you send what they ask for AND NO MORE. Do not "save them time" by sending the whole manuscript when all they want is the first five pages. Remember learning about that in elementary school? There's a reason. Querying isn't like cooking – you can't just improvise the recipe and hope you make something edible. Do your homework and follow the guidelines and you'll stand out, I promise.

DON'TS:

- DO NOT REPLY TO A REJECTION. Just don't. (See the part about fighting with the autoresponder.) Agents get hundreds if not thousands of emails a day, and as you can see from the link above, a lot of those emails are rude responses to rejection. You don't need to add to their plethora of mail to wade through. If you simply MUST reply, be sure to include "Thank You For Your Consideration" or something in the subject line.

• EXCEPTION – If the agent you're querying has been corresponding with you or has met you at a convention or something and you have some kind of less-formal relationship, go ahead and send them a POLITE thank you in response to a rejection. Keep it short and sweet. Just say, "thanks for your time, I'm disappointed we won't be working together on this project, I appreciate your consideration" or something and leave it at that.

- DO NOT BEG THEM TO RECONSIDER. This is extremely bad form, and they won't remember you. If they do, it won't be in the "good way." Once an agent sends you a rejection, you've been removed from their consideration. They've moved on to the next query letter and you've been forgotten because they've already decided which "pile" you're in. You're dealt with and done and pitching a fit about it isn't going to help you. They rejected you for a reason, and unless you've changed something dramatically, they're not going to reconsider the same query, either immediately or in the future. Rewrite the book or the query or something. If they said no, there's a reason for it, even if it's not given. Also,

- DON'T ASK FOR CRITICAL FEEDBACK/THE REASON YOU WERE REJECTED. If it's not given in the rejection, don't pester them about it. They don't have time to go back and look up why they rejected you (if they even have that information - many agencies don't keep old queries on file for long, if at all), and if a specific reason wasn't given, suck it up and move on. It could be something as simple as the genre not being right for their agency at the time to an overabundance of that particular storyline. If you're lucky enough to be rejected with a reason, learn from it, fix your issue and go on.

- DO NOT ASK CONSTANTLY FOR STATUS UPDATES, ESPECIALLY THROUGH TWITTER OR FACEBOOK. Just. Don't. Do. This. Just don't. If you see an agent anywhere online or out at a restaurant or whatever, they're on their own time. They're not at work, so you shouldn't ask them about it. They don't have their work in front of them, and it's not fair of you to ask them to recall something on the spot. Also, they don't know. Okay? They just don't know. Again, see the part about hundreds or thousands of messages a day. You honestly expect them to remember your name out of all that? Can you? Name every person who has sent you an email in the last 8 weeks off the top of your head. Go on. If you can do that, you shouldn't be a writer. You should be working as some kind of smarty for a government organization somewhere. If you're NOT a superhero like most of us and can't name every person who has sent you an email in the last 8 weeks, why would you expect an agent to do that? Also, why would you expect them to take time (remember the "time" thing we've been talking about?) to find your note out of all those? I know you want special attention and are impatient and all that, but don't. Just sit and wait. Why? Because if you make a pest of yourself, chances are you're not the kind of person that agent wants to work with. Just sayin'.

• EXCEPTION: If you haven't heard back from an agent within their stated response time, a POLITE follow-up mail is acceptable. NOT a Facebook or Twitter message!

- DO NOT SAY ANYTHING LIKE ANY OF THESE LETTERS: http://slushpilehell.tumblr.com/

So there you have it. Basic query etiquette. Be nice, be polite, do your homework, and read up on things.

For more information on How Not To Be A Douchebag Author, please visit Skyla's blog [ETA: The archives on Skyla's blog aren't updated with her Shiny New Site yet, so just] click the HNTBADBA tag here on the ELEW blog and see what's there. There's a whole slew of posts on the subject.

Baby Evil Writers 101: Three Stupid Things Writers Do

Baby Evil Writers 101: Three Stupid Things Writers Do

Julie Butcher

So I‘ve been around publishing for a while. There have been people who should have known better than to do what they did, but went ahead and let their stupid fall out all over everything. Since you are beginning evil writers, I’ll list out the things and then you do not do them. If you go ahead and act like a mental midget, it’s your problem. I won’t try and save you. I’ll just wave good-bye and leave you in the pit that you dug for yourself.

1.      Fire off a nasty email in reply to a rejection letter.

You can print it out and stomp on it. You can yell in your house. You can eat ice cream and cake and watch sappy movies and cry. There are a million things you can do instead of snapping out a rude and angry reply. Out there in publishing land, they send tons of those emails. They are not an insult to you. They are a reply to your query. If you don’t snap, that particular door is still open. Later you can send another manuscript. When you snarl and curse and bite, that door shuts forever. There are a limited number of doors. Don’t be stupid.

2.      Reply negatively to a review.

Everyone gets bad reviews. If you don’t believe this fact then go and look at the top authors on Amazon. They have one star reviews. Totally you are allowed to feel badly. You can cry. You can put that reviewer’s picture on your wall and throw darts if you like. What you absolutely cannot do is to go online and refute what they posted. My suggestion is not to read reviews period. Then you are not temped to get in a cat-fight in the comments, or to fire off another terrible email which can be copy pasted and shown to the world. For goodness sake keep your dignity. No one wants to work with a toddler who throws tantrums whenever they don’t get their way. People are allowed to have an opinion—even people who don’t like your book.

3.      Insult other publishing professionals.

If you are trying to be published (or if you are already there) and you disparage any other publishing professional you are shooting yourself in the foot. Do not moan about how long Agent X is taking to reply to your query. Don’t insult other people’s books—like writing scathing reviews online or elsewhere. Don’t gripe about your editor or agent. Use some common sense. Publishing as a whole may seem enormous. It isn’t. Everyone eventually knows everyone else. Yes, this is an eclectic bunch. Yes, you won’t like some of them—too bad. Put on your big kid pants and act like a grown up.

Most of this should be common sense and good manners people. Don’t make it harder than it is.

The Author Website Challenge - Does Yours Pass?

A few weeks back I went to the Willamette Writer's Conference. This time around (having learned from hard experience how important this is) I attended a slew of marketing classes. And I learned a lot. Whether I ever actually use what I learned in a meaningful way, or not, is still up for debate.

As it turns out, all I want to do is write books. Some things never change.

But one of the pieces of advice that made a lot of sense to me was about the author website. I went to a class taught by author William Hertling. And then I went to another class taught by William Hertling. He seemed to know what he was talking about and has sales to back up his claims. Some of the information he presented is difficult for me and I haven't got my mind around it yet, but I'm chipping away at some tasks.

One of the first things I did after I got home was to make some changes to my own website. It's not perfect, but it's better.

Want to try the challenge on your own website? Open it up and look to see if the following five things are readily visible. You get FIVE SECONDS to decide:

1. Is your site easily identified as the "right place?"
2. Are there easily discoverable links to buy your books?
3. Is there unusual or valuable content?
4. Is there a visible mailing list sign up?
5. Is there a clear bio/about me section?
6. Make sure you include contact information.

Most new visitors to your site will give it about that five seconds before deciding whether to hang around for a bit or click away.

And that, my friends, is it. You can check out William Hertling's site here.

Baby Evil Writers 101: How Long Does Publishing Take

Baby Evil Writers 101: How long does it take to get published?

Julie Butcher

Write a million words.

So you see my sweet evil babies, it all depends on you. If you wrote one thousand words a day, every day. Then, in one thousand days, you would have your million words. But even the most fervent writer doesn’t work each and every day. The evil children must be fed and if you miss the evil queen mother’s birthday—you’re toast.

So let’s assume that you do not write for two days of the week and that you do write for five days. (Like a real job) Now you’re down to twenty-two days per month or 264 days per year and this doesn’t count holidays. Let’s take away twenty days for holidays and making dinners and birthdays and blowing up stuff on appropriate holidays. Now we have 244 days per year.

“Oh!” You say. “That is 244,000 words or around three manuscripts.”

Not so much. You’ll spend twice the time editing that you do writing—if you do it correctly. It will take a lot longer because you are new at evil. After a few books you’ll only use one day to edit for every day you write. Eventually, you won’t have to edit hardly anything because you learned all of the things. But now, that takes away from your actual working time so you’ll have one book to edit and I’ll be generous and say that your book is 100,000 words.

There’s one tenth of what you need to be awesome. Ten years until awesome hits the shelves.

Unfortunately, most of us are not quick learners. All of your words need to be filled with evil and wonder. Each word needs to further the plot of your book. Add two or three years to learn to plot without holes and to write concise sentences. (At 1.000 words per day it will take that long.)

Now we’re at twelve years if you write 1,000 words five days each week.

So put on your big kid pants, put your butt in the chair, and write. Dreaming about writing will not get you there. Stalking agents and editors on twitter will not make you one word closer. The one and only thing that will make your journey faster is to write.

Teachers

Teachers come in a lot of different forms. Sometimes they are traditional, classroom educators, certainly, but more often than not, our greatest teachers are not technically designated as such. We can learn from situations, from trauma, and from the individuals that wander in and out of our acquaintance.

Or we can ignore the lessons and fail to recognize the opportunity to learn.

I keep an eye out for teachers because I personally believe that we're here to learn as much as we can. When it comes to the craft of writing, I'm certain of it. The learning never stops. The author is never, ever, too good to learn something new and improved.

I've had the great pleasure of working with some amazing editors over the course of my publication. I consider each one a teacher. The process of editing a manuscript as a team (and it is a team effort) is both eye-opening and incredibly instructive. I don't think you can do it without learning something about craft, about your own habits, faults, strong points, and about the things you can do to make your prose stronger.

Sadly, this year I've lost a few good editors. For different reasons, my regular editor is no longer my editor, twice. Each time I've adjusted to a new editor, I've also had to adjust to new ways of working, but the flip side is, I've learned a whole new set of lessons with each change. As hard as it is to be forced from your comfort zone, this is exactly where you learn new things. And so, more teachers, new teachers and new skill sets pass through our experience.

We get to seize that opportunity...or fight it. But if we truly want to be the best writer we can, then hard or not (and we do like our safe little trenches) we can open up to the next experience and see what new information we can harvest from it.

In the same way our readers can teach us, our reviews and our beta readers and our fans and our peers. If we're open to feedback, and if we are looking for the lesson, we'll find it's all around us.

Buy the Book

So, a while back, I took this class at a conference. It was talking about using beat sheets for outlining.  The speaker talked about Blake Snyder's Save the Cat, which I'd seen referenced all over the internet for a while. But, the lesson seemed really straightforward, so I did what any money-conscious idiot would do. I plowed ahead...without reading the book.

Now, I don't know about you, but I always read the directions when putting stuff together. In fact, I tend to have the directions sitting right next to me for reference the entire time. I'm completely anal that way.

I was also the student who read every word in my textbooks. I'm talking every class from elementary school through college. If it was assigned, I read it. Period. No questions asked. Because I always believed there was more in the book than just what the teacher/professor presented. (I was not always correct about that, but I digress.)

Anyway, I'm not sure where I lost that habit, but I did. It never occurred to me to read, much less buy Blake Snyder's book. After all, it's just about filling in these blanks on this worksheet. Come on, a monkey could do that.

Then I got a new editor. We were talking about outlines/synopses and how I really hated the way my previous editor made me do my outlines. I detested it. She brought up the beat sheet thing. And I was all, "Oooooo...hey, monkeys can do those! Perfect!"

I will say one thing for the synopsis style I hated. It made it very obvious to me that what I was filling in monkey-style wasn't going to cut it. I'd missed some key piece somewhere along the line. After wrinkling up my forehead and staring at my computer screen, hoping the answers would just reveal themselves like some well-timed pop-up ad, I decided there were better uses for my time.

So I messaged an author friend who is all about the non-fiction. I asked if she did beat sheets. "All the time." Then I asked if she used the book or just the sheets. The pause was ridiculously long, as if she was sitting at her laptop, waiting on the punchline. Then she said something to the effect of, "That book has saved my life more than once. Get it."

Of course, being of a very frugal nature, I looked up the price and laughed (used copies are as pricey as new ones!) then I hit up my local library and borrowed a copy. I've never kicked myself so hard for not just buying a book. I wanted to highlight it--in multiple colors. I wanted to take notes in the margins. And I sure as hell didn't want to give it back.

Ahem.

As Sean Connery said in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, "There is more in the book than just the map." I had the map all along. The book...is the key to reading it. I really wish I would have figured that out a year ago.

Seriously though, probably the best book on story structure I've ever read. I have to return this copy to the library soon. I've already ordered one of my own.