Q: Did you hear back on your proposal for The Empty Nest?
A: Yes.
Janet Reid said, "Sorry but no."
She
said she read several websites regularly, and several blogs, and she would no more
pay to read them than she would pay to read a query letter.
Q: She is paying to read a query letter. Paying her time.
A: She said even Stephen King couldn't get readers to pay to read his book online.
Q: You're not asking the reader to pay to read a series of books online. They're free online. You're asking a publisher to publish a series of books that has appeared online, like Lynn Freed publishing "Doing Time: My Years in the Creative Writing Gulag" in Harper's, in July, to drum up an interest in her collection of essays, Reading, Writing & Leaving Home: Life on the Page, to be published in book form in September.
A: I'm not Lynn Freed.
She has a platform. I don't.
An
ambitious project like a series of 12 books, by an unknown writer, has price point
problems.
Q: What are price point problems?
A: I haven't the foggiest. But apparently J. K. Rowling would have price point problems if she was trying to sell the whole Harry Potter series, untested, at once, before she wrote any of the books. Who the hell is J. K. Rowling?
Q: Are you going to abandon the idea of writings a dozen books in your 35th year, and serializing them, online, as you write them?
A: No. It's my 35th year. I'm going to do something special. But I'm going to do something else, too. To pay for it. Something commercial.
Q: What are you going to do?
A: I had projected a one-volume book for August called HURRICANE SEASON.
I think instead I'll write a memoir called SORRY BUT NO: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNDERGROUND
WRITER. A one-volume memoir, starting at Tulane, going through Philly Zine Fest
2005, and including my proposal to write The Empty Nest and one agent's response
to that proposal. "Sorry but no."
Q: Your response to her response.
A: Yes.
Sorry, but yes.
Q: You're going to write something commercial?
A: Yes. To pay for The Empty Nest.
Which has price point
problems.
Q: One problem being it is free. So why pay for it.
A: The book isn't free. Only the online version is free, and who wants to read something off a computer?
Q: I do. I do so every day.
A: You don't count.
Q: One thing you have to teach a student in writing school is to quit worrying
about what will sell and write the best book you can.
Actually, the student
must teach himself that. It can't be taught. It's called vocation, and you either
have it or you don't.
An agent has to teach herself to quit looking for the
book she knows how to sell and look for the best book she can find, and convince
a publisher to publish it.
Good agents, agents with a sense of vocation,
do that.
And editors with a sense of vocation look for books like that even
if they are unagented.
You have to find an agent or an editor as dedicated
to excellence as you are. As committed to excellence.
They're out there.
Find one.
A: Thanks. I needed that.
Q: One book won't be easy to sell.
But it will be easier to sell
than 12 books.
A: That was my idea.