publishing

Why Publish? Why Write?

June 8, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My head’s swirling. I’m editing, rewriting, drafting, doing other projects, maintaining a rather hectic if not torrid pace when I’m suddenly stopped cold by a question.

Why do I want to publish?

I have three novels and a non-fiction book published. A fourth novel and a collection of stories are in the works.

Why?

It’s not as if the novels have been so wildly successful that I can live off the royalties. So why am I doing this again, when each novel has turned out to be far more of a wrestling match than I expected?

Is it because I feel called by God to do this? Actually, no. I’ve talked before about “being called” to be a writer, and I’ve never heard that call. My call is the call of every Christian – to know God, and to honor and serve God in all I do. That includes my family, my friends, my job, my church, people who don’t particularly like me, and how I deal with rudeness and trials and setbacks and successes. That includes writing, too, and publishing a second or a fourth novel. But I’ve ever felt “called” to publish.

Is it personal pride or vanity? I think the answer to that question is also no. Publishing a book is to travel to the land of disappointments, unmet expectations, surprises, uplifting encouragements and depressing discouragements. The world is not going to beat a path to my door. I’m not going to get oohed and aahed over at writers’ conferences. No, publishing a book isn’t about pride or vanity. If that is even a part of it, you’re going to be brought down to reality pretty quickly.

The fact is, I knew all of this going into it. I had seen enough of others’ experiences to know what to expect. It’s a trial for first-time novelists, but even well-established ones find themselves with a large, well known and respected publisher who overlooks marketing (except for a press release), or editors suddenly changing and the latest manuscript of no interest to the new editor, or the publicity firm dropping the ball, or a million other things.

So, unless your name is Karen Kinsgbury or Max Lucado or Stephen King or John Grisham, you can’t take anything for granted (and I suspect even those authors can’t take anything for granted).

So why do I want to publish?

The reason is simple. I have a story to tell, a story that’s been part of my life for a decade or more, and it was and is time to push it out and let others see it.

In Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity and Writing, L.L. Barkat has some good advice about publishing:

Learn if you’re really ready to tackle the story you want to write. Sometimes you need to calculate the cost, and I’m not speaking of the financial cost but the emotional and even spiritual cost. The story you have to tell may still be too raw, too “unborn.”

Write for small audiences first.

Learn how to connect (or network) and how to hold back or “not network” – there are ways to “not network”).

Understanding the economics of publishing – what a publisher has to risk and what you have to risk if you self-publish.

I followed some of this advice. But for what advice I didn’t follow, I knew I wasn’t following it. And I knew why.

I still went forward.

I had a story to tell.

Photograph by Hannah Olinger via Unsplash. Used with permission.

I Know My Platform Holds at Least 2 or 3 People

April 27, 2018 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

The year 2013 was not the easiest for me or my family.

My mother had to be moved from her home of 58 years to a retirement home, which meant the “breaking up” of her house and the breaking up of where her three sons had spent most of their formative years.

Work, normally a state a barely controlled chaos, dropped the “barely controlled” and went through severe regime change and was rather suddenly “under new management.” Work demands on my time escalated, and sharply.

I was trying to get a book manuscript completed (what was eventually published as Poetry at Work) and I know I was driving the editor frantic (on a good day) and off the cliff (on a bad day) as we struggled, or I struggled, to get it done. I was also trying to promote my second novel, A Light Shining, published right at the end of 2012. That was three books published in two years.

I wasn’t thinking a lot about marketing and promotion.

I don’t have a household name. I don’t have three million people following me on Twitter, or hundreds of thousands of likes on Facebook or Google+. I’m not on the public speaking circuit.

To use the word that is the Holy Grail of agents and publishers everywhere, I don’t have a platform. Or if I do, my platform is barely big enough to hold me and two or three friends.

Publishers like authors with a pre-existing platform – it helps guarantee sales, and publishers like to make money. That’s how they stay in business. It makes perfectly good business sense for a publisher to contract with, say, Justin Bieber, rather than a more literary author. (It also provides an interesting commentary on the state of American culture, but that’s another story.)

For an author, it’s only marginally easier if you write non-fiction rather than fiction. Self-help has been a major publishing category for much of the last 100 years. If you have a method or a formula that will seemingly help lots of people do something they want to do – get hired, lose weight, deal with difficult relatives, conquer depression – then you have a pre-existing platform and audience. And the publisher may help you find it.

But you, the author, have to work at it. I know the writer’s mantra – “I’m a writer not a marketer” and “I’m an introvert not a gifted public speaker” (been there, done that) – but the fact is that self-promotion of what you write isn’t a luxury. Even the best and biggest publishers won’t do that for you, unless your name is Jan Karon, Max Lucado or Karen Kingsbury in Christian publishing or Stephen King and James Patterson in general publishing.

So, what about the rest of us?

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker (co-author with Charity Craig) has something simple yet profound to say about this, and based on her own experience: “Promotion and marketing – whether speaking, radio interviews, social media interaction – are best positioned as an extension of the original book (or story or poem) a writer felt compelled to write down and submit for broader distribution.”

In other words, the promotion and marketing you do for your writing is simply an extension of the story you’ve already written.

I stumbled partially (and rather marginally) into this with A Light Shining. To help promote the book, I interviewed the two lead characters as if they were real people (and for me, they had indeed become real people). While this didn’t result in a massive increase in sales (in fact, I’m not sure if it increased sales at all), it’s this kind of approach – understanding that your story doesn’t stop at the end of the book – that will lead you in the direction of creating and building a “platform.”

And this, too: your reading audience isn’t going to magically find you. You have to find the audience.

Unfortunately, that takes work, work that isn’t strictly writing. Seeing is as an extension of your writing, part of the same creative process, will help.

Photograph by Paola Chaaya via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Writing and Publishing

April 6, 2018 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I started reading a novel recently where what mattered to the writer most was being published. I stopped after four chapters. The writing was bad. What got the book published was lust dripping from every page. I suppose some authors would be thrilled to write like that if it meant being published.

I wasn’t. You might call me the reluctant novelist.

I worked on my first novel, Dancing Priest, for years before I showed the manuscript, or even a piece of the manuscript, to anyone. I wasn’t uninterested in publishing it. I did join online groups, followed what everyone was saying about publishing, followed the blogs of agents and publishers, sent our query letters to agents, and talked to editors and others writers. And I was reading a lot of fiction, both in the general and Christian genres.

I attended a writer’s conference, and even had a session with an editor who had read a portion of my manuscript and then a group reading session with an agent and other writers. Both sessions were personally encouraging. I kept at the writing. I even kept writing after an awful experience with a review and an editor that taught me that some Christian publishers were no different than general publishers. It’s a business, like any other business, and it is business considerations that rule over everything else, including what kind of quality is published.

So, when a small publisher approached me and said they had heard I had a manuscript, I said no. It took almost a year of prodding before I finally agreed to let the publisher see it. When they came back with the offer to publish, it took six months for me to agree. I was still reacting to that negative experience with the Christian publisher, and I also understood what kind of effort would be required to market and promote the book. I already had a full-time job that was about 50 percent more than a full-time job.

We went ahead and published. And I was right to have been worried – the amount of time required was huge, in reverse proportion to the result achieved. The same thing happened with the sequel, A Light Shining.

But I learned a lot. And that made the entire experience worth it.

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Charity Craig (co-author with Ann Kroeker) quotes author Anne Lamott, who frequently sees people at writing workshops who are less interested in writing and more in being published. “The problem that comes up over and over again,” she says, “is that these people want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.”

Charity and Ann both describe their own experiences with trying to be published. Both eventually got there, but not because they wanted to be published. They wanted to be writers first; they wanted to tell the story they had in them to tell. They both eventually realized that sometimes, and perhaps most of the time, it’s better to concentrate on the writing and making your story the best it can be before rushing out to try to get published. And sometimes life intervenes, and your writing dreams get put to the side.

The writing is what matters.

Photograph by Helloquence via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Dancing Priest:” The reluctant author

December 4, 2017 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Dancing Priest and its characters had been a part of my life for more than eight years when a friend who happened to be a publisher said, “I hear you have a novel manuscript. I’d like to read it.”

No.

That was my first reaction. I also went back to the manuscript, and re-edited it (and rewrote it) yet again.

He kept asking, and I kept saying no.

This went on for six months.

He asked again. For reason or reasons unknown, I said yes.

He was the second person to read the manuscript, after my wife. And then he said he wanted to publish it.

No.

I wasn’t ready. The manuscript wasn’t ready. I could think of all kinds of reasons to avoid publishing it.

He kept asking. And one day, I said okay.

A professional editor went through it, making it bleed. A cover photo was found and the cover designed.

Six years ago, at the beginning of December of 2011, Dancing Priest was born. Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes saw the light of publication. I was terrified. Exhilarated. Hopeful. Scared. I was all of those things authors experience at the birth of a first book.

People responded to the story.

“I didn’t get the feeling that I was reading a typical book,” said one reader. “It was almost as if I were spying on these people’s lives. I was the insider into an amazing array of people and situations that had me at times happy and more often than I’d like to admit in tears. Young is not writing a behemoth novel for page or word count. He is telling a story.”

“I’ve read a lot of good, and not so good, and this was part of the best,” said another reader. “The death had to be, but was not dwelt on to the point of being revolting. Jimmy is someone I’ve known. Sarah I liked. Michael is someone I would like to meet.” The reader was 92 years old.

“This book isn’t ‘deep,’ but it is deep,” said a pastor in Indiana. “This book isn’t meant to be challenging, but it will challenge you. This book isn’t meant to be a life-changer, but it is life-changing.”

A pastor in Lexington Kentucky ordered copies of the book for his staff and elder board, saying it was the best description of lifestyle evangelism he had ever seen. I reread the book to figure out what he meant, and I surprised myself when I found it.

An Anglican priest in Australia said it got several things wrong about Anglican priests. And then said he saw what I had done to wriggle around it. He was right, but if I had focused on getting everything absolutely precisely I would have lost the main story. So I wriggled around it.

“It is a novel in the traditional sense, but it is so much more,” said another read. “It is a testimony of God’s grace and mercy weaved into the lives of its characters. It is a powerful reminder to live intentional lives for Jesus. That while there is loss, heartache and pain for every one of us, there is also great joy.”

One reader put off household chores to read it. “Instead of chores,” she said, “I was gifted with an evening of beauty. An evening to explore a story told in delicate dialogue that revealed more than just the goings on of the lives of two characters — it revealed their hearts and ultimately, their faith.”

Top photograph: This mountain road in Spain is the type of road envisioned for the road race in Greece in Dancing Priest.

publishing

Footer

Meet the Man