10. Well, that's that: I am officially out of "skip days" until after March. My friend Debbie rather unexpectedly pinged me Tuesday to say that she would be in San Francisco starting Wednesday and would I have dinner with her? So we had dinner (and I dragged her along on the usual round of Wednesday errands, because there's "taking a skip day" and then there's "committing professional suicide"), and now I have to make word count every day from now to March 15th. Yes, that includes the days when I'm at conventions. I have no regrets.

9. ...okay, I have one regret: I am so far behind on everything I watch that it's not even funny. The only shows I've managed to keep up with are Fringe and Glee, and that's because I prioritize them in bitey, bitey fashion. Because I have to preserve my questionable sanity somehow.

8. I'm pondering a post on the financial realities of the Hugo Awards and the electronic voting packet, but for the moment, if you are eligible to nominate for the 2012 Hugos, and you haven't, why not nominate now? WorldCon isn't getting any further away.

7. Tax time is approaching. This means I need to clean my entire house, so that I can get my receipts into something vaguely approximating order. Oh, goodie. It also means it's time to make my annual pledge to set up a better filing system than "the bottom of my purse is full of receipts and Luna Bar wrappers, look in there." Although my faintly peanut butter-scented receipts are always nice.

6. Ryan is coming to visit! Which is wonderful, and will lead to much hugging and adoration (and also to the dry cleaning of the guest room duvet). Also much doll photography, since Ryan has promised to take some pictures of my unnervingly glossy-eyed collection for the edification of all those who think it can't possibly be that bad trying to sleep in my room.

5. I fly to Seattle tomorrow for Conflikt, where I am doing absolutely nothing official. It's going to be great. I get to spend the weekend hugging my friends, working on the books I have coming due, and going to Barnes and Noble to sign books. Plus the hotel is walking distance from the airport, so no one has to get up at four a.m. to drive me. That'll be nice for everybody. Well, except me. I still have to get up at four a.m.

4. I want to go back to Disney World. I find myself grumbling slightly at my taxes because I know that self-employment income (i.e., "writing") means that I'll be paying more than the cost of a really nice Disney World vacation. I actually like paying taxes, except for the "finding my receipts" part, but sometimes the sheer amount of tax that I have to pay makes me weep for Babylon.

3. Mailing is ongoing! At this point, there are only a few shirts I can't find, and I'm hoping they're buried under the more popular styles/colors. I got a list of inquiries on status from Deborah this morning, and I'll be answering her tonight, but really, patience is king. I'm doing this alone. Any future batches of shirts will be super-limited, because even aside from the part where some people are annoyed (and I'm sorry about that), I just can't process 300+ shirts in 30+ size/color/style combinations in anything resembling a timely manner. Like, it is physically impossible to do that and go to my day job and not miss my deadlines. And sadly, "pays the mortgage" and "makes my publishers happy" beat everything else.

2. I have been playing a little tappy game called "Pocket Frogs" during my admittedly limited free time. I don't think the game's designers intended it to be played quite like this, since I have a very "gotta catch 'em all" approach, but it makes me happy. As does slowly watching the breed counters go to 100% as I breed all 368 possible individuals.

1. Zombies are love.

Because this has become a very popular question in the past few weeks, here's the status of the Toby Daye audio books:

Brilliance Audio, which has been wonderful to me, and a joy to work with, only initially bought the rights to record the first three volumes. Audio book production is not cheap, and that makes producers move with caution. Right now, there is no contract to continue the series. I'm very sorry about that, but it's the only answer that I have.

Now, this does not mean you should flood Brilliance with demands that they continue; they need to know that there's a market, but no one likes to be nagged. It does mean that you can increase the chances that the series will continue in audio form by buying additional copies of the existing recordings for friends or family members who might have an interest in audio books.

I've occasionally seen people say, when authors made posts like this, "It's not my job to support your career." This is absolutely true, and I am in no way asking you to support my career (beyond, you know, buying books to feed my cats). But! If you are someone to whom the audio book editions are important, the best way to get more audio books is to buy things from and provide feedback to my audio book publisher. I can say there's a demand until I'm blue in the face; if the sales figures don't support it, I will not be heard.

Again, Brilliance has been nothing but a joy to work with. I would love to do more Toby with them. If the sales figures of the first three volumes support that, I will hopefully be able to do so.

People are talking a lot about eBooks right now. It would be impossible not to talk a lot about eBooks right now, given the recent mess with Amazon and MacMillan.* Before this, people were already talking about eBooks, for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons was what people are calling the "nuclear option": a tendency by some readers to go to Amazon.com and other review sites and post one-star reviews of products because those products are not available to them. The book you want isn't available in the country where you live? Give it a one-star review! That'll show 'em!

...except no. Not really.

People are talking a lot about book covers right now, and the fact that sometimes, the people on them don't actually look anything like the people inside the books. Sometimes they're bad. Sometimes they're terrible. And sometimes, yes, they're inaccurate enough to be insulting, presenting characters as the wrong race, gender, weight, sex, or species. (For a nice round-up on some recent cover issues, check out this excellent post by the always-charming jimhines.) This leads, periodically, to groups of people deciding that the best response is a boycott of the books in question—the classic "voting with your dollar" method that works so very well in other arenas.

...except maybe this one.

Authors have a surprisingly small amount of control over a lot of aspects of how their books are presented to the public. I say "surprisingly" because when I was a kid, I ranked "Author" as a position of power just below "Doctor Who," "The Great Pumpkin," and "God." Most people knock "God" off that list by the time they reach their teens (I did), but still, there's this innate assumption that the author has a lot of control over where their work goes and what it does.

...except no. Not really. Check out these lists for details.

Things the Author Probably Controls

* Whether the book gets written.
* Which publishing houses the book gets sent to.

Things the Author Probably Does NOT Control (unless the author is Stephen King)

* The cover.
* The title.
* The publication date.
* The format of the book.
* The cost of the book.
* Whether there's an eBook edition.
* Whether the book is published anywhere outside the US.
* Whether the book is published in more than one language.
* Whether there's an audio edition.
* Which stores, including Amazon, carry their book.
* How many copies are printed.

Who You Are Punishing If You Boycott the Book or Review It Poorly Because of Format, Not Content

* The author.

Who You Are NOT Punishing

* The publisher.

Now, I don't want my publisher punished, for anything. Both my publishers have been amazingly good to me. I love them like I love candy corn and fluffy little blue kittens, and I want everything they touch to turn to gold, because then maybe they can start paying me in remote islands and genetically-engineered dinosaurs instead of boring dollars. Plus, people take very poorly to being punished. If you hit me because I didn't bring you the sandwich you wanted, I'm not going to go and make you a fresh sandwich. If, however, you say "I'm sorry, I really wanted tuna," well, we can negotiate. The message you send when you pan a book for not being available in the format/language/region you want isn't "I really want this but you won't let me have it"; it's "this sucks." Remember, that nasty review is only going to be seen if someone takes the trouble to read it. Most people will just see what amounts to an announcement of "this is a bad book."

If there were a mass boycott of Stephen King or Tom Clancy, the odds are good that the publishing world would notice. Those are, after all, some damn big numbers. Most authors are not in that neighborhood. Most authors can't even get an invitation to that city. So for us, losing ten sales actually matters. For us. For our publisher...not so much. The message sent by a boycott is not "I am offended by this choice," it's "I am not a fan of this author." If enough sales are lost, the author won't be able to get another book contract, and will need to find another job. The publisher will keep publishing. Some of these choices don't punish the people you're trying to punish, and their side effects can be killer.

So how do you get your point across? Pick up a pen. If you're actively offended by a book's cover, try buying the book and mailing the cover back to the publisher, along with a letter saying something like "Thank you so much for publishing a book that was so well-suited to my interests and desires as a writer. Unfortunately, this cover is unsuitable, because..." Indicate that you wanted the author's work, but not the poorly-chosen cover art, and that you would love to see the book issued again with a better cover. Don't punish the author. If you wonder why a book hasn't been printed in a literary region other than the one where it was originally printed (so American books in Germany, German books in France, etc.), it's probably because the local publishers don't realize that interest exists. Write to them! Say "I am a huge fan of Author T. Author's work, and I was wondering if you planned to print their latest book." They might not know they want the work if they don't know there's a market. But don't hit the author for things that are entirely outside of their control. It's just not nice.

(*If you somehow missed the mess, here's a very quick-and-dirty summation: MacMillan said "we want to charge more for our books than you do. We also want to charge less for our books than you do." Amazon said "no." MacMillan said "but they're our books." Amazon de-listed all MacMillan titles, without telling anyone that they were going to do so. MacMillan got upset. MacMillan authors got upset, since the loss of Amazon as a retailer could potentially mean they can't afford cat food anymore. Non-MacMillan authors got upset, because dude, there but for the grace of the Great Pumpkin go we. Everyone did a lot of shouting. People who want cheap eBooks called MacMillan a bully. People who want authors to be able to sell their books called Amazon a bully. There are some very good accountings of the whole mess floating around the Internet; I recommend you go read John Scalzi's post if you want a solidly-researched starting point. This is not that starting point.)

We knew from the day we started shopping the Newsflesh trilogy that they would probably need to be published under an open pseudonym. There are a lot of reasons for that. The easiest to spot is "avoidance of over-saturating the market"—after all, as a relatively untried author, it's probably best if I not compete with myself.* Oddly, this isn't the biggest reason, just the first.

(*Before there's a general hue and cry of "but I'm planning to buy both," I should probably explain. I know that the readership of this journal is highly likely to buy both. This is one of the main reasons that I love you. The Internet readership I already have is a large portion of why we knew it would have to be an open pseudonym. It's the random bookstore browsers we're trying to avoid frightening away, the ones who won't know me from Adam until they get their hands on a copy of Rosemary and Rue or Feed.)

Genre separation is a much larger part of why I was happy to agree to writing under a pseudonym. Rosemary and Rue is fairy tale noir. It's dark, it's gritty, and it's occasionally brutal...but I would still hand it to a savvy teenager without fear that their parents would beat me to death with a baseball bat later. You could adapt the Toby books into PG-13 movies without gutting them. I won't cringe when I see high school students discussing them on my forums. Feed, on the other hand, is distopian political science fiction/horror. It has a high body count. There's gore, there's sex, there's bad language. I love it to death and consider it one of the best things I've ever written, but I so don't want you to buy it for your niece who loved Toby on the basis of my name alone. Putting a different author's name on the cover is a screaming neon sign that maybe the contents are also going to be different.

Do I expect the name to hurt sales? No. My publisher is savvy and good at what they do, and I'm really hoping this book will build a reasonable level of pre-release excitement, since it's going to be incredibly fun to do the viral marketing for. But I do expect it to make people pause and read the back cover before giving in to expectations.

So we knew I'd need a pseudonym, and after the trilogy sold to Orbit, they confirmed it. That meant we needed to pick one.

There are a lot of factors that go into selecting a good pseudonym. First off, it should be pronounceable (thus knocking my real name cheerfully from the running), and it should fall within the first half of the alphabet. That gets you a good spot on the shelf, which is important for catching the eye of the casual browser. People aren't tired of looking for something to read when they get to you. Who is Aaron Aardvark? Probably a best-seller. Your pseudonym shouldn't sound too much like the name of an author already working in your genre. We're not porn stars here. Calling myself "Maya Bone-hoff" or "Jane Hinds" isn't going to increase my sales, although it might get me slapped.

Your pseudonym should also be something you're willing to answer to in public, and don't hate. You should know what it means, since no one wants to choose "Variola Majors," thinking it's pretty, and discover later that they've just named themselves "smallpox." The Agent and I sat down and came up with a list of about twenty options, some mix-and-match, some not, all of which I was willing to live with (and all of which were somehow a complicated horror movie or television joke), and sent them to The Editor II. He gave us his preferences, we winnowed, we argued, and we settled on "Mira Grant."

"Mira" is an interesting name, in that it appears in a great many languages, always with a different meaning. The version I was looking at was from the Romany, meaning "little star." It isn't short for anything, despite its resemblance to "Miranda," and I will answer to it in public. Plus, since my real signature includes both a capital "M" and a capital "G", I shouldn't have issues during signings.

And that's why I am Mira Grant. First person to catch the horror movie in-joke in my pseudonym wins a prize (and if you already know, no hinting!).

Okay, so here's the thing:

At my DucKon reading, I was making jokes about "the thirty-five dollar retirement plan"—IE, "if everyone I know bought that many copies of my books, I'd be a lot closer to no longer needing a day job." While this really was a joke—I intend to be working in an office environment for a while yet, since I like having health insurance and paying for cable—there was also an aspect of seriousness to it. The midlist is in trouble, and has been in trouble for quite some time.

What's the midlist?

Well, to quote Wikipedia (source of all knowledge): "Midlist is a term in the publishing industry which refers to books which are not bestsellers but are strong enough to economically justify their publication (and likely, further purchases of future books from the same author). The vast majority of total titles published are midlist titles, though they represent a much smaller fraction of total book sales, which are dominated by bestsellers and other very popular titles."

Most genre authors are publishing "in the midlist." This has always been the case, and it's not a bad thing—my favorite author may be considered a blockbuster sort of a guy (Stephen King), but the majority of the authors I adore are solidly midlist, and have been for the length of their careers. I am honored to know that my books will be in the midlist, at least until my mother gets her way and convinces the entire West Coast to buy them. (If I don't type that, she'll hit me.)

So why is the midlist in trouble? A lot of reasons. Some of them have to do with marketing, some have to do with the business models of the larger chain bookstores, some have to do with the fact that people are reading less, and some have to do with the big books becoming bigger than they've ever been before. When most people only read one book a year, if that book was written by Nora Roberts instead of Jeri Smith-Ready, it matters.

Where's the math?

This will seem like a tangent, but bear with me: I was asked recently whether I had a problem with used bookstores and libraries, since the author only gets paid once. I do not have a problem with either of these things. I'd be a hypocrit if I had a problem with used bookstores, since every used bookstore owner in the East Bay knows me by name, and libraries are proof that humanity is worthy of existence. Plus, libraries do provide reporting, and they track what's popular, stocking additional copies of the things that people really want to read. Used bookstores are a form of recycling. I've always seen them as running on a sort of karma, since you only get what you really want if you're dedicated, lucky, and persistent. I have good used bookstore karma. I work very hard to maintain it.

That being said, especially with the authors in the midlist, numbers really matter. Let's say I got a ten dollar advance for Rosemary and Rue (for the sake of keeping the numbers simple). Now, I get 6% of the cover price of the first 150,000 units sold, and 8% of anything after that, since presumably once my publisher has sold that many, they really want to keep me happy. I think we figured out that this was roughly forty-eight cents a book, at current mass-market cover price. Let's call it fifty cents, because again, math is hard. It's like a word problem:

Seanan is paid a ten dollar advance for her new book. Her publisher credits her fifty cents for every copy they sell. After they have made more money than the amount of her advance, they will start paying her that money as royalties. How many copies must Seanan's book sell before she can pay the grocery bill? How many copies must Seanan's book sell before her publisher will buy the next one?

With these highly simplified numbers, the answer is easy: clearly, I need to sell twenty books to earn out my advance, and when the twenty-first book sells, woo-hoo, I can buy a can of generic soda! (Well, not really. Remember that my agent gets seven cents out of that fifty, to pay her commission. So really, there will be no celebratory soda until the twenty-second book flies off the shelf.) The trouble is that real advances, even small ones, tend to be larger than ten dollars, which means I need to sell a lot more copies before my publisher will be a happy camper.

How many copies need to sell before they want to keep publishing me? That math is truly beyond my ken, for which I am glad, as I like to sleep at night. But that is why I keep telling people where they can buy my books, and why, my passionate love of used bookstores aside, I recommend buying the books of currently-publishing midlist authors new whenever you can manage to swing it. Those little fifty-cent-per-book transactions add up, and it's the final number that really matters.

Math is hard. Where's my damn strawberry ice cream?

So I'm merrily cruising around my reading list—amusingly enough, and you'll understand why in a moment, right after composing a lengthy letter to my agent—when I discover that a friend of mine (hi, Jim!) has linked to an essay about literary agents. Now, I'm a big fan of literary agents. I go to have a look. Hmmm. The essay in question is titled "The Talent Killers: How literary agents are destroying literature, and what publishers can do to stop them." That's a mouthful and a half. I proceeded to read the essay, that being what one does in such a situation. Then I read an essay from Beth Bernobich about why agents are not, in fact, servants of the devil. And then I read Jim Hines's post on the topic.

And then I thought about it for a while.

And now here I am.

(As a digression: titles are important. I realize that not everyone aspires to grow up perky, pithy, and easy to say, but seriously? For an essay title? One that actively insults a large group of people whom you admit have the ear of the person or people you're trying to reach? This doesn't work for me all that well. Just saying.)

Look: many authors do not have agents. The agent-to-author ratio is scary, especially since you don't have to have some sort of training before you can tack "author" onto your name. Most agents are already representing several clients, and may not be able to estimate how many clients they can take in any sort of firm number. I, for example, am relatively self-starting; point me at something, tell me it has a candy center, and I'll check in with you next month. Olga over here, she needs daily contact or she starts to freak out, and when she freaks out, she's not getting anything done. An agent who could handle four of me may be hard pressed to handle one of me, plus Olga. Being an agent is something like trying to plan a dinner party, only instead of dietary restrictions and seating plans, you have amount of hand-holding and sanity exams.

Also look: many authors, who have written good, salable books, manage to sell their first book, or even their first several, without the aid of an agent. It's true that the number of major houses willing to consider unrepresented authors is down. It's also true that the number of accessible small press houses willing to consider those same authors is up. It can be difficult to tell the genuine small houses from the predators playing "print on demand," but if you want to be an author, you're going to spend hours in the research trenches. Researching publishing houses is the least you're going to be expected to do. The sentence to remember here is "who have written good books," not "who have written books." Typing "The End" is actually just the beginning.

I didn't find an agent the first time I tried. I didn't find an agent the tenth time I tried, either. And you know what? I'm glad. The books I was writing when I first started my search were...well, let's just say they weren't the best books in the history of mankind. Actually and honestly, they were, well, pretty damn bad. I had talent and I had enthusiasm, but what I needed was practice and time. (I know people whose response to this is "a good agent would have recognized your talent and taught you what to do." Sadly, no. World of no. Author to agent ratio again, remember? I would be seriously unhappy if my agent said she wouldn't be returning phone calls for a month because she'd found some green new writer to exhaust herself over. What's more, when I was that green new writer, I wasn't ready to hear a lot of the things that needed to be said. An agent who took me on then would have exhausted themselves for nothing.) My books are better because I had to face rejections and ask myself what I was doing wrong.

There's also the point of writing to sell vs. writing from the soul—or, as a friend of mine said recently, "I'm selling out as fast as I can." Something being popular doesn't make it bad, and wanting a client with an easy-to-pitch first book isn't bad either. Your future sales will be determined, in part, by your initial sales, and most publishers are going to be a lot more willing to take an "out there" second novel. Sell your vampires and you may find your race of symbiotic plant-people from the Outer Limits gets a much warmer reception. If an agent says "What else have you got?", it's not a judgment on your book. It's part of the necessary dinner party planning.

Finally—because I could talk about this topic for hours, and that means it's time to stop—keep in mind that when you're talking about people who read books and sell books for a living, reading comprehension really, really matters. Someone asked me the other day what I thought she had to do if she wanted to make it. I said "read the submission guidelines." They're sort of like airport security; if you set off the metal detector after you've been told to empty your pockets eight times, you may miss your flight. Well, if you ignore an agent's—or publisher's—submission guidelines, you may find yourself in the same situation. Metaphorically speaking.

In conclusion (for now), agents good, reading comprehension good, not getting signed not an evil plot to destroy your soul.

Promise.

I have spent my week being very, very productive, especially when you consider the fact that a) I just got a new kitten, b) Lilly didn't allow me to sleep for over a month during her "kitty go crazy" period, and c) the lack of sleep, followed by sleep's sudden return, has left me slightly sick and very definitely jet-lagged in my own body. It's exciting! But this week, I have...

...turned in an essay for one of those exciting "smart people try to sound smart while talking about television" essay books. I'm excited! This is the first time I've been asked to participate in something like this, but I've always been a little envious of authors who get to go and sound smart while they talk about, say, Supernatural or Buffy. Hopefully I've managed to sound super-smart, because I'd love to do this again. I have a list of shows I'm just dying to sound totally smart about. Like Fringe and Cupid. Oh, and if there's ever a "smart people try to sound smart while talking about shows that were canceled before their time" book, I can corner the market on Freakylinks.

...revised nine chapters of Late Eclipses, only to discover that one of those chapters needed to be combined with another to form a sort of, I don't know, "super-chapter," while another chapter needed to be cut entirely. On the positive side, I made these discoveries entirely on my own, without any outside assistance. Also on the positive side, this will help with my goal of getting the book down between 105,000 and 110,000 words. On the negative side, dammit, I already revised this part of the book. Damn plot. It's getting complications and fingerprints all over my stuff.

...set up the landing page for the Velveteen vs. series, including a brief description of what the series is about, a listing for the stories in order-as-written, and a listing for the stories in chronological order (which will matter more as the JSP-era stuff starts getting posted). All the Vel stories are being cleaned up and revised before they're posted, which slows it down a bit, but also lets me take care of all those pesky typos and logic problems that people have been so very kindly pointing out to me. Behold! For now I wear the continuity pants!

...submitted all my receipts, agreed to an estimate on my taxes, and confirmed that I'm ready to receive my extension forms, hence to turn my taxes in. Self-employment tax blows. The next time someone asks why I haven't quit my day job yet, I may pull out my tax receipts and a conveniently labeled graph. SCREWING A WRITER IN FIVE EASY STEPS. Step one: self-employment tax.

...introduced Lilly and Alice to one another without bloodshed (either feline or human), and without any major emergencies, unless you want to count Lilly forcing her way into the bedroom during what was technically the isolation period. I rarely, if ever, close my bedroom door all the way -- the cats like to be able to come and go, and the litter box in my room is a relatively recent development -- so I had totally forgotten that Lilly knows how to work the latch, and will work the latch if given sufficient motivation. Like, say, being locked out of the room. But all's well that ends well, and this has ended well.

What's everybody else's productive looking like?

I think 'get an agent' is one of the goals almost universally shared by aspiring authors. Having an agent is like having all the good cheat codes to the video game; it's like having the natural mathematician on your Academic Decathlon team, or having the guy who knows the whole town by heart on your side in the scavenger hunt. Whether it's true or not, we just know that the right agent will know everybody, will understand everything, and will be able to open doors we don't even quite realize exist.

To a degree, this belief is true. Not only is it your agent's job to understand the business side of the writing business -- not entirely So You Don't Have To, but partially, because there's a lot to understand -- getting good enough to get an agent is also a sign that you've reached a certain degree of skill. It's possible for really good writers to make it without an agent. It's actually harder for really bad writers to get an agent in the first place. (To all those agents I applied to when I was a teenager: I'm sorry you had to read that. Thank you for being so nice about it.)

Almost two years ago, a friend of mine sent me a letter introducing me to another friend of hers, one who happened to be a literary agent. The Agent and I started chatting via email, taking it slowly, navigating the wilds of acquaintance and understanding long before we reached the point where representation would become an option. It was a courtship, rather than a barroom hookup, and I am incredibly grateful for that, because anybody who's met me knows that my full attention can be an exhausting thing. She gets my full attention a lot.

A year ago today, we stopped courting.

The past year has been an amazing ride of wonderful, dizzying, confusing things, and The Agent has been there every step along the way to explain, encourage, and assist. I call her my personal superhero for a reason -- that's exactly what she is. Books on writing will tell you that the best thing a working writer can have is a good agent, and they're right, but what they won't tell you is that it's even better to have a good agent who understand you, understands the way you work, and is willing to see what you can do together.

So here's a happy, happy anniversary to my personal superhero, to the woman who helps me understand the business side of my chosen career, and to the only person ever to respond to my description of The Worst Book I've Ever Read by asking me to send it to them. Happy anniversary. Let's have ten more of these.

1. I'm not dead! Since it wasn't widely advertised before I went away, I'm in New York for Business Purposes (tm) this week, hanging out with the wonderful crew at DAW, meeting other fabulous people (hi, Colleen!), and generally being A Good Little Author. This has resulted in some truly fantastic things, many of which I'll be sharing when I'm not so tired that I just want to fall down and sleep for a month or more.

2. No, I haven't had a chance to try data recovery tricks yet -- I haven't had a chance to sleep. My flight landed at 7:05 AM on Wednesday, and I've basically been running since then (witness this being my first opportunity to get to the Internet). I'll be at Jon and Merav's on Saturday, and Will will be there; between Geek Thing One and Geek Thing Two, if it can be fixed, it will be fixed. I'll keep everyone posted.

3. On a similar note, while I try to answer every comment made on this journal, I'm not even going to pretend to bother with the data loss post. There's lots more of you than there is (are?) of me, and I'm tired enough that I'd start quoting nursery rhymes and giggling a great deal. Not actually attractive or entertaining. Well, potentially entertaining for you guys, but...

4. There's news on the Ravens in the Library front: while there have been printing delays, the editors are expecting books Real Soon Now. So if you were planning to order a copy before you missed the first wave, now's the time. Remember, I'll smile pretty and even sign it for you if ask me to.

5. Tomorrow, Sheila (my editor) and I are going to go to the New Jersey Pine Barrens, land of cranberries, blueberries, and cut-rate horror movies. I'm very excited about this, because I'm, well, still me.

That's all for right now; the good stuff gets to wait until I'm awake. I miss everybody. Be home soon.

So as I sit here, a safe seven months from my release date, I'm watching various friends and acquaintances as they madly dance through the steps required to promote and advertise a new book. It's important, especially for newer authors, to do something beyond just saying 'I have written a book and my mommy says it's awesome' when they have something hitting the shelves. (Although 'I have written a book and Seanan's mommy says it's awesome' seems to carry a surprising amount of weight for everyone but me. Does anybody else out there have a tattooed, foul-mouthed mother who'd be willing to fill that particular role for me?)

So the question becomes, what works? Book giveaways are obviously good things, but also somewhat self-limiting, as I sort of want people to buy things. (Oddly enough, I don't feel like earning back my advance all by myself.) Competitions are also good, providing the prizes are interesting -- and heck, prizes are just lovely things to offer. So what do you think would be a good idea? What kinds of promotion would you like to see? We have seven months to put even the strangest of plans into motion, so sing out!

Operators are standing by.

Okay: here's the thing. SJ Tucker is a sweet, generous, talented woman who has freely given of herself and her music for as long as I've known her. Unfortunately, a recent illness (entirely unplanned, as illnesses so often are) has left her with a lot of medical bills hanging over her, and the life of a bard has never been a terribly lucrative one...not in money, anyway.

They're often surprisingly rich in friends.

Ravens in the Library is a limited edition anthology, collecting stories and art dedicated to the health of S.J. Tucker. It will become available on February 22nd, and will remain available only for as long as it takes for Sooj's medical bills to be covered. For once, I can say with the utmost seriousness that this product will not be sold in stories. It's a real book, it's going to be real and physical in your hands, but it's not going to be real and physical on the shelves of the store down the street. Which makes it sort of extra awesome, really. You can view the original press release in Phil Brucato's journal. Phil is our mastermind and ringleader, and much of what this particular gang of Lost Boys and Wicked Girls does can be blamed on him. Who's along for the ride? We-ell...

Ari Berk
Francesca Lia Block
Phil Brucato
Sam Chupp
Storm Constantine
Charles de Lint
Ben Dobyns
Jaymi Elford
Neil Gaiman
Alexandra Honigsberg
Elizabeth Jordan Leggett
Shira Lipkin
Angel Leigh McCoy
Seanan McGuire
Kris Millering and Storm Wilder
Mia Nutick
S.J. Tucker
Carrie Vaughn
Catherynne M. Valente
Terri Windling
...and others...

Behold. For now we wear the human pants. There's also art! Art is key. And we have art by...

Amy Brown
James A. Owen
Brian Syme
...and others...

This volume is being edited by Phil Brucato and Sandra Buskirk, and to say 'for a limited time only' is to understate things more than a bit. It's great stories and glorious art for a good cause. Ordering information is here, in the press release.

I am so happy to be a part of this.

Up until recently, I was unaware that sometimes the reason I can't find certain books in certain stores is because those stores have just sort of decided not to carry them. This process is called 'skipping.' Books can be skipped because the store doesn't have room on the shelf for another new author, because their historical-romances-with-sharks section just isn't that big, because your last book didn't perform well enough, or because they don't like your cover. (I suspect this last is unlikely, but I'm not a book-buyer, so who knows?)

Now, this practice is absolutely not always malicious or cruel or even ill-intended. The economy is hitting everyone pretty hard right now. My favorite independant bookstores are being forced to make some very tough choices, and most of us -- myself sadly included -- will probably reply to 'we don't have that' with 'I'll just go elsewhere for this one,' rather than waiting for the special order.* So either they buy one of absolutely everything to avoid 'skipping,' or they only buy what they know is going to sell, and maybe lose a few sales as people don't go there for the other books. Bit by bit, the lack of disposable income nudges the bookstores towards whatever is currently 'mainstream.' No malice. Just money.

(*I did this just last week, when Other Change of Hobbit didn't have the new Kelley Armstrong. In my defense, I really needed the book to read during my flight to Ohio. That's still money that they didn't get from me, and would have had they either had the book in-stock, or had I been willing to wait.)

There's a fascinating post on being skipped and what it means here, which is really what got me thinking about the topic. I mean, no one wants to be skipped. The idea of being skipped has given me something entirely shiny and new to worry about, along with 'will my cover be awesome?,' 'will my reviews be good?,' and 'will the zombies come before my book comes out?' Now we have 'oh dear stars, will my book be skipped?'

The answer is, at the end of things, no, yes, and maybe. Will every store stock my book? Nope. Will most stores stock my book? Everything going well, yes. Will some stores order my book after the initial sales figures start coming back? Almost certainly.

There are some additional issues to be considered, and it's important to remember that threats of boycott and such have a nasty tendency to result in stores getting sour grapes and saying 'well, fine, I just won't stock any giant shark books at all, then,' which does no one any good.

It's a big topic. It has a lot of factors. It's a little daunting. But we shall be okay! Because our strength is as the strength of ten, and also, we have cookies.

Periodically, someone will get a look at something I'm working on and demand to know why it looks the way it does. (Most common question: Why are you double-spacing? Don't you know that wastes paper? Second most common question: Why can't you use italics like a normal person?) So I thought I'd take a few minutes and explain standard manuscript formatting. Because I can.

(Note that in today's world, where an increasing number of markets will allow electronic submission, these rules may be relaxed or even changed completely. Always check the submission guidelines of a market or publishing house before you submit to them. Also, these are novel formatting instructions, not short story formatting instructions, which are similar but different.)

*

Formatting Your Manuscript.

1. On the first page of your manuscript, please give the name of your project (underlined), skip two lines, and then provide your name and contact information, and the number of words in your work. Number of words is somewhat approximate, but try to stay within a hundred. Editors know. The submission rules mean that many of them can glance at a page and tell you how many words are on it. Deeply spooky. Do not screw with the editors. All this information should be tidily centered.

2. Most of us compose on computers these days. Computers have a lot more fonts than typewriters do...and you should forget about them as completely as you can. Set your font size to 12, select a basic font, and go to town. People will recommend both Courier and Times New Roman. Courier has the advantage of being monospace (every character is exactly as wide as every other character); Times New Roman, on the other hand, is so generic that it's rapidly becoming invisible. You want your manuscript to be invisible. Invisible manuscripts make for visible stories.

3. If you want something to be italicized in your final manuscript, use underlining. Seriously. You are not allowed to use any tricks your computer can do that your typewriter can't. If you want to be like Stephen King and make your readers crazy with little handwritten notes and such inside the text, become famous and talk to your editor.

4. Minimize non-essential emphasis. Titles will still be emphasized; depending on your genre, thoughts may be emphasized. But try to really consider how much underlining you have on a page, and keep it low.

5. Many rules of punctuation have become excitingly optional on the Internet. They are not optional in your manuscripts. Always put two spaces after any sentence-ending punctuation. Optional on the Internet? Yes. I don't care.

6. Begin the first chapter of your actual manuscript on line number eight.

7. Insert a hard page break at the end of every chapter. Begin the next chapter on line eight of the next page.

8. Signal intentional line breaks with either '#' or '*' alone on a line. The jury's out on whether this character should be centered or flush left. It's kinda up to you.

9. If you are printing your manuscript for submission, rather than submitting electronically, use only plain white non-erasable paper. You can get this at any office supply store. Better quality paper is always, well, better. Only print black-on-white. That's the easiest for people to read, and it's what's expected of you. Printing on weird paper doesn't make it more likely that you'll get published, sad to say.

10. Whether you're printing at home or submitting electronically, be sure to leave margins of at least one inch around all four edges of the page. This allows for taking notes, and makes it easier for people to read quickly.

11. Always double-space. If you're anything like me, this is going to look super-weird, at least at first. And yes, you'll kill a few more trees, but that's the way it works. You need to leave room for people to make notes on your document. Don't space-and-a-half, don't triple-space. Double-space.

12. Do not print double-sided.

*

There are a lot of other little tricks, opinions, and personal formatting touches that people use, but on the whole, 'black on white, double-spaced, underline instead of italics, leave plenty of space in the margins' is going to give you a really good start. There are entire books on the subject. Read one before you submit a book. You'll be glad.

Kate is attempting to get me ready for New York City. This involves, tragically enough, Dressing Like A Human. Now, my wardrobe consists of three basic modes: 'I own more T-shirts than any single woman ever needs,' 'the zombie apocalypse is coming, and I plan to have front row seating,' and 'Marilyn Munster asks me for fashion tips.' I have been assured that none of these is actually suitable for a New York business setting, even when your business is publishing and the people you're dealing with are used to the fact that they work with authors.

Yesterday's trip was an exercise in the word 'no.' From Kate, I got 'no, you can't wear that, it's synthetic'; 'no, you can't wear that, it has no sleeves'; 'no, you can't wear that, it makes you look like a barge.' From me, we got 'no, I won't wear that'; 'no, I will not wear that either'; 'no, I don't want to wear a jacket'; 'no, I refuse to wear heels when I don't know how much walking I'm going to do.'

It is honestly a miracle that both of us walked away from yesterday alive.

(This makes it sound much more unpleasant than it was. Kate is very patient with my ignorance of many aspects of living like a grownup, and I'm generally willing to take correction, as long as the rules make sense. The issue here is that the rules of the fashion world don't make sense, and there are a whole lot of them. I swear, I'm just going to wind up wearing my Marilyn Munster-meets-Elle Woods pink dress, curling my hair, and singing 'I Am So Much Better Than Before' on a street corner somewhere until somebody makes me stop.)

We're planning to hit the mall on Sunday, which will hopefully end with something other than Kate dragging me off to food because I look like I'm about to gnaw my own leg off. At the hip. New York draws closer, and they don't let you fly naked!