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What happens after you get accepted by a publisher?

As some of you may know, I’m a professional editor who used to work as an in-house editor. I see many posts about how to query and stuff, but very little describing what happens after you sign the contract. Of course, this varies between publishing houses, but I’ve worked as an in-house editor in three publishing houses, and I will relate my experience with them.

I’m your primary contact person. I will send you the contract, signed by the publisher (my boss), and answer any questions you have before signing it and sending it back to me.

Then you probably won’t hear from me for a few weeks. I’m thoroughly reading through your manuscript, and usually simultaneously a few others as well. When I’m done, I will get back at you, to let you know if there’s any rewriting work to be done on your book. There usually is. In fact, over the years, I’ve only had one author whose book could be sent to the text editor straight away. So don’t take it as a bad sign.

Major rewritings can also happen before you sign your contract. This means we see your potential, and it’s big enough for me to invest my time in you (my salary costs money too), but you have to prove that you can rewrite it. See my other post on “What if your publisher asks for a complete rewrite” and some nuance and other nuance for more information on, well, complete rewrites.

I will never put you to work without helping you, and you can always call or email me if you’re stuck or if you don’t know what I want. In fact, I’d rather have you contact me than you trying to hide the fact that you will most probably miss your deadline.

After the rewrites have been done, what happens then? In the bigger publishing houses I worked at, a freelance editor corrects your grammar and spelling and stuff. They work on a sentence and word level. In the small publishing house, that was also done by me. That doesn’t change anything for you.

I will send you the manuscript with the corrections for you to approve. Usually, authors agree. If you don’t understand or don’t agree, just let me know and I can either explain it to you or see if you have a point.

Meanwhile, I will put the cover designer to work. I will tell them what kind of a book it is, which genre, which target audience. If I have ideas for similar covers they can use, I tell them as well, but usually I trust the designer to do their work. I think in words, they think in images. To each their strenght. If you have ideas for a cover, we will look at them. (But usually cover ideas by the author are not commercially interesting, and they end up liking the cover we designed better.)

I will send you some unfinished cover ideas, or sometimes the one cover we all agreed on. You usually have veto power, but authors rarely veto a cover (”It looks so real now!”) because our cover designers know their job ^-^ The cover needs to be approved by a lot of people: you, me, the publisher, the people from marketing, the salespeople… Negotiation about 14 conflicting opinions is part my job.

By now, you’re probably done with approving the corrections in your manuscript. I check it one last time and send it to the lay-out people.

The publisher decides on the format of your book (softcover/hardcover/fancy edition…), based on what is financially possible and commercially interesting.

The lay-out person sends me a sample, usually the first five pages. I print it to see if the font, margins, interline, readability… are okay. They usually are, and I give the lay-out person a “go!” to lay-out the entire book. A few hours later they send me your book in pdf.

I will now send it to a second freelance editor, whose job it is to check for typos and weird line breaks etc. They will send me their corrections and the lay-out person will take care of it.

I will send you your final, clean manuscript and you will beam with pride to see your book as a “real book”! ^-^ (Similar feelings as when I send you the first cover.)

I will have written a blurb, sometimes based on your query letter. Everyone who had to have an opinion on the cover will be consulted again for the blurb. I will send you the definitive version, but to be honest, in practice, you can’t change much about it, unless you have Good Reasons, because this is the version the 14-headed monster - I mean, committee of colleagues - agreed on.

The cover designer now makes a back and spine cover.

Now there is nothing else for you to approve, you’ve seen everything. I’ll send the covers and the text pdf to the printing house, confirm the publishing date and then we play the waiting game!

Next, my colleagues of the marketing devision can take over, or sometimes they take over earlier in the process, or sometimes they don’t consult you at all.

When your physical books arrive on my desk, you can be sure that I am as proud of you and your book as you are. After some happy unboxing and bothering my colleagues - “just LOOOK at this BABYYY!” - I will send you a few copies through the snail mail for you to unbox and bother people with. (At least, if this is stated in your contract. At the publishing houses I worked at, usually it said that an author gets 5 copies of each edition.)

We usually don’t organize and pay for a launch party, but if you want to have one, go ahead. For debutants, a launch party doesn’t help selling copies that wouldn’t have been sold anyway. Journalists don’t scour book launch parties, it’s usually the author’s friends and family who attend, and they were going to buy a copy anyway.

And then it’s time to keep your fingers crossed, hope for good sales, and start writing on your next book!

***

I hope this was helpful. Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions, and happy writing!

Follow me for more writing advice, or check out my other writing advice here. New topics to write advice about are also always welcome.

Tag list below the cut. If you like to be added to or removed from the list, let me know.

Keep reading

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#writerblr #writeblr #amwriting #writing community #writerslife

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So, I finally got my personal website up and running! It took a while and a good bit of work, and because of that I haven’t been quite as active on tumblr lately (I’ve been far more active on twitter), but hey, now it’s finished. Check it out for info about me as a writer and my current WIP’s. It’s small right now, but I’m proud of it.

#writerblr #writeblr #amwriting #writing community #wip

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letting a traumatized character have their happy ending where they can recover from their trauma will always be a thousand times more powerful than killing them off for shock value

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So I get a lot of questions from people along the lines of “what is the right way to do this?”, or “I feel like I’m doing this wrong and I don’t know how to fix it”, or something along the lines of “is it okay that I do this in this way?”.

Remember that writing doesn’t have a right answer. It’s a craft that’s the epitome of if it works for you, then it works!

If the most popular method of outlining doesn’t work for you, you don’t have to use it. If you disagree with a piece of advice that’s been reblogged a million times, you don’t have to follow it. If something works really well for you, you don’t need anyone’s permission to do it.

Everyone has a different process for writing — it’s okay for you to have your own different process too.

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writing is the worst

u wanna write a single, passing line of dialogue so u fact check it to make sure it’s historically accurate, then suddenly you’ve lost track of time, space,, urself

for instance: I wanted to know how frequently fighter planes were used in WWI and now I’m several pages deep into the history of witchcraft in ireland

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The point of a twist is to enrich a story, not feel superior for outsmarting your audience.

@ The Magicians writers

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Having OCs is the best because all my headcanons for them are confirmed

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If you write, you’re a writer. Don’t forget it.

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Raven’s Faith | An Excerpt

So, I’m going to be posting something a little different today. I know I haven’t really posted any of my writing in a while, which is honestly because I haven’t been doing a lot of writing lately. While I have been periodically editing my current draft of The Shaman Society, I’ve also gone back to take another look at the WIP I’d completed before I started The Shaman Society, called Raven’s Faith. 

It’s a fantasy novel, which I actually finished several drafts of and had a professional edit done on it, however I shelved it a couple years ago after going through a down time in my writing and sort of forgot to go back to it. But now that I’ve been revisiting it, I’m realizing it’s not as bad as I remember, and thought I might as well share some of it. I wrote this before I even started making an online presence though, so I’ve never shared it before and never had it beta read or anything like that. So maybe this might be a good way to test the waters on how people might potentially feel about it, should anyone decide to give it a look.

The following excerpt is actually the entire prologue, so that’s also something to keep in mind.

Synopsis: Raven Allard has always aspired to be something more than a simple blacksmith in a tiny town. She dreams of knights, and valor, and serving a higher purpose for her kingdom of Gremoria, and for the Maker. When she and her longtime friend Ulric are attacked by a frightening abomination, only to be saved by a mysterious woman transporting a cursed artifact, she soon finds herself embroiled in a secret conflict between Gremoria and the neighboring land of Servia. 

Now, Raven may indeed end up serving a higher purpose, just not in the way she’d always hoped, as the following events brand her an enemy of Gremoria and force her into a desperate flight for her life. Falling in with a band of enemy fugitives, her eyes open to a wider world of magic and terror that will bring her to question her faith, her loyalties, and every belief she’s ever held dear.

---

Heidrik would never forget the screams. That discordance of insanity, reverberating through the chamber—had he ever heard anything so vile? He’d been right to take caution, clearing out this wing of the palace before beginning the ritual; there would be no servants or guards to overhear this madness. But he could. He had to listen to them. Same as the ones that plagued his nightmares, but still they found all new ways to send his skin crawling from his bones.

Elena thrashed atop the bed sheets, arms flexing against her metal bonds in desperate futility to break free. Like a bound animal, wounded and frightened. For all his spite towards the Maker, was he any better, as he watched the only person he loved in the world driven towards agony of his own creation?

He resisted closing his eyes to her torment, to her sweat pouring in buckets across the sheets, to the blood smearing from the manacles grating around her wrists. She was doing this for him and him alone; the least he could do was witness it. But curse the Maker, did it have to be so terrible?

Throughout it all, he continued chanting those dreadful, guttural words he'd spent weeks memorizing. Instinct drove his need to offer words of comfort, but a greater will bade him to resist. Interrupting the incantation now would surely kill her, or suffer her a worse fate. So he spoke with unflinching conviction, each word a riposte against the most dangerous opponent he'd ever faced.

She had chosen this. She'd asked for it, begged to be given the chance. He’d have sooner given himself to the Void than put her through this, but Elena had always been willing to do anything to please him, consequences be damned. What else could he do, but allow her this chance? There was no one else, and they needed to know if this worked.

And so here they were—he, who watched unblinking as his lips continued their rapid, incessant chanting, and she, who displayed her unwavering devotion in excruciating detail with every terrified cry and spasm. He, who some called a mad king broken by his grief, and she the peasant girl he had plucked from the streets so many years ago. He, the tormentor, and she his victim. By all rights, he was a cruel, wicked man. By his own rights, he was far worse.

Heidrik’s chanting grew faster, as coils of black mist coalesced around the bed in the form of twisting, spindly tendrils. He chanced a look down at the tome spread out before him to witness the same mist emerging from its pages. By the cursed Maker, this ritual—this horror—was almost complete. The tendrils reached around Elena as she thrashed about the bed, embracing her with all the gentle caresses of a dear, sweet lover. Mist settled upon her, burning away patches of her fine silken tunic wherever it touched. When it cleared away the restricting fabric, it sank deeper, into her very skin.

Her screams exploded, sending her body into wild convulsions. He paused for but a moment, lifting a hand to reach toward her. At the sound of another maddening wail, he pulled back and slammed his eyes shut. He chanted. Please, no more of this. Let it be done!

In an instant, the chamber went quiet. Heidrik opened his eyes to the sight of Elena lying still atop the bedsheets, her chest rising and falling with a steady calmness that belied her previous torment. She was well. She had survived. Where, then, was his relief?

He found no joy looking at her now. Gone was her beautiful chestnut hair, soft to the touch with bouncing coils falling to her shoulders. Her hair now was black as pitch, as though plunged into a bucket of quill ink and left to soak every drop. It did not coil or bounce. Rather, each strand clung tight against her visage, sticky and damp. Her skin, once rosy and vibrant, had lost its color. She appeared ashen, and cold—skin so pale and lifeless he could have lost her in a winter snowfall.

When she opened her eyes, Heidrik clutched a hand to his heart. By the Void, what was this? What once had been brilliant orbs of emerald green had shifted to sickly yellow, burnt red around the edges. They were not the eyes of the woman he’d known as a daughter, but a creature of twisted origin. A creature he had created. When those Voidborne eyes turned to him, locking onto his own, a nauseous shiver cracked through him.

“Did it work?” she uttered, her voice hoarse and tired. She pushed herself to her elbows, her inhuman body shuddering to support her weight.

Heidrik paused, willing his mouth to respond. When he could stand her expectant stare no longer, he bowed his head with a relenting nod. “I fear it did.”

#writerblr #amwriting #wip #amediting #writeblr #raven's faith

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Hey I just wanna tell you that your writing might not be perfect, but it certainly is yours so own it like it’s the best fucking thing on earth

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Creative writing prof: You’re in control. You’re the puppet master. You control these characters - what they do, what they say, what they think-

Every writer I know: My characters stopped listening to me and now I’m 8272836 words in to a plot that went of the rails on page 3

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other words for “walked”

credits n stuff - i wont tag tho @/msocasey aka the person who created this post (you can tell i was inspired through the titles lol) ((except mine are less funny)) @/blujay-png for the short list she created over a year ago @/artieye for sending me a whole bunch of words

DEFINITION DEPENDS ON CONTEXT Moved (this one is so vague lol) Paced Padded Stepped Treaded

LET’S GET OUT OF HERE OR ENTHUSIASTIC/HAPPY Bounced Bounded Hopped Jumped Leapt Skipped Sprung

NERVOUS, SCARED OR MAYBE JUST CLUMSY Crashed Scrambled Shuffled Stumbled Trotted

ANGRY/LOUD Pounded (on the ground) Stamped Stomped

SNEAKY MOTHERFUCKER/QUIET Crept Loitered Prowled Slipped Slithered Slunk Snunk Stalked Tiptoed

I’M IN CHARGE HERE, BUDDY/CONFIDENT Led Marched Pranced Strode Strutted

GOTTA GO FAST Bolted Darted Dashed Fled Hurried Jogged Raced Rushed Scampered Scooted Scuttled Sprinted Whisked Zapped

I’M CHILL (OR MAYBE JUST LAZY) Ambled Dawdled Drifted Sauntered Strolled Waddled

AND I WOULD WALK 500 MILES Hiked Roamed Set off Trekked Wandered

AND I WOULD WALK 500 MILES (BUT NOW I’M TIRED) Dragged (themselves) Lumbered Staggered Trudged

NOBODY’S GETTIN’ PAST ME Patrolled

OH, I’M IN THE WATER NOW Paddled Splashed Waded

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Writers: It’s Okay to Experiment and Be Weird As Fuck

With so much writing advice out there telling you what to do and not do, it can be easy to forget that writing is an art, and there are no rules in art.

Yes, learning about different writing techniques is great. Developing a language to talk and think about writing is important. Absorb everything you can. Reading, studying, and practicing are integral to improving your writing. Obviously, I run a writing blog, so I believe in the power of increasing your knowledge about writing and literature.

But don’t forget that, in the end, you can do whatever the hell you want to. Experiment. Have fun. Play. Follow your instincts. Break the “rules.” And don’t listen to anyone who says that no one wants to read weird, nontraditional writing. They do.

For most of my writing life, I’ve kept my crazy, experimental stories hidden away, because it seemed like anything I wrote that wasn’t a straightforward, traditionally-structured story with a main character and a plot wasn’t appreciated by readers. But guess what? One of my weird-as-fuck stories won second prize in a contest this fall, and when I asked the editors why they chose it, they said they liked it because it wasn’t like every other story in the submissions pile. It was different. It was weird. It took a risk. And for that reason it stood out from everything else they read.

It took me years to quiet the chorus of conformity and embrace my weird side. Don’t let that happen to you. Get wild. Write whatever you want. Do it now. We need freaks like you, or we’re all going to whither and die of boredom. Give us everything you’ve got. We need it. We need YOU.

//////////////

The Literary Architect is a writing advice blog run by me, Bucket Siler. For more writing help, check out my Free Resource Library or get The Complete Guide to Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. xoxo

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Handy guide to writing asexual characters:

1. Have them have friends! The lonely asexual story is getting really old.

2. Introverted asexuals are cool, but why not have extroverted asexuals?

3. Asexual and Aromantic are not the same thing. Try giving your character a sexless romance.

4. Or have them have sex, that’s cool too! Remember. Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction, and does not mean the character is opposed to sex.

5. Asexuality varies. If you want your character to be a victim of sexual assault that’s fine, but don’t make this true about every asexual character. Some people don’t want sex and it has nothing to do with past sexual experiences.

6. No more sociopathic asexuals, okay?

7. Don’t paint your asexual character to be the essence of innocence. You can have your asexual swear. They can be rude, like to dance dirty, have crude humour, literally! Anything! Any! Other! Character! Can! Be!

8. Your ace character can be sex repulsed, but do not have that be the defining characteristic of your character. Give them personality.

9. Do not write an ace character just to have your protagonist *suffer* because they love them, but won’t satisfy them sexually. That’s gross.

10. If your whole point of having an asexual character is to have them meet “the one” and “cure” them of Asexuality, DO NOT WRITE AN ASEXUAL CHARACTER.

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Find The Word Tag

tagged by @corishadowfang​ -thanks for the tag!

The words are: tired, cool, gorgeous, and vigilant.

I’ll be doing this for The Shaman Society.

Tired

She kept moving, one delicate step at a time. Despite her best attempts at being stealthy, tired floorboards creaked with the slightest touch, as if to shout “she’s right here!” through the entire house. Stupid floor, be quiet! Please. At least until she made it to the end of the hall. Maybe he wouldn’t stop her. Maybe this once he’d leave her alone.

Cool

Rei followed Saki northward from the paper mill, beyond the border of Milton into a vast expanse of dense forest near the base of rounded mountains. With every leap, her gut sprang into her throat with the thrill of weightless adrenaline. Okay, so maybe she had to spend this mission being lectured at by her jerk of a cousin, but this was pretty freaking cool. Like some kind of wild, human grasshopper. If a grasshopper was powered by a magic gem channeling all the energy of the spirit world.

Gorgeous

A long table stretched before him, splitting the center of the room. At one end sat a man dressed in a fine suit and tie, most of his gaunt face highlighted by dancing candlelight form the chandelier above. His hair was dark and slicked-back, and he had a heavy brow. The Master. At the other end, there sat a ginger haired woman in a red, low-cut dress, her long waving coils framing a round and lively face—gorgeous, he supposed, by human standards. The Lady.

Vigilant

I am afraid this word does not appear. That’s a shame, it’s a good word.

My words are: evil, splendid, scowl, and ruin

I’ll tag @everynextdream, @unicornaffair, @seamusings, and @mania-junkie-writes

#tag game #the shaman society #amwriting #writeblr

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Writing Characters with Enhanced Senses

Characters with extraordinary senses come up a lot. Maybe your character is of supernatural or alien origin, or maybe they were just born with a genetic quirk. Maybe they have a sensory disorder that only makes their hearing seem extraordinary. There are lots of reasons why a character might have extraordinary senses and a lot of different ways those senses might be put to use, but here are some of the drawbacks you might consider when writing a character who has a super sniffer, excellent eyesight, or high-quality hearing!

Sight: If your character has super sight, chances are that they can see farther and more clearly than anybody else, which is pretty cool except that the human eye can still only really focus on one thing at a time…so your character might want to be careful not to get distracted when they’re, say, crossing the street. If they’re watching a burglary occur a thousand yards away, they might not notice the car that just whipped around the corner behind them. Other super-drawbacks might include heightened sensitivity to light, color, or movement - and you have to remember that nobody can see three-hundred-sixty degrees at all times, so your character is probably going to have a blind spot (unless they’re an owl). Also, they may frequently look like they’re staring off into space when they’re really just watching something very intently.

Hearing: Have you ever been standing in a crowd of people who are all talking at the same time? Now imagine if you had super hearing! It can be hard to pick out individual pieces of information or even follow a single conversation when you can hear everyone in a six-block radius…and it’s not just conversations. You can also hear every car, every pet moving around, every jingle of a key, the air moving through the vents, and so on and so forth. This is another one of those abilities that may make it look like your character is just really easily distracted - it’s not that they don’t want to pay attention to their friends, it’s just that they’re playing “name that tune” with a radio four blocks to the southeast!

Smell: Think about your shower routine, whatever it might be. How many scented products do you layer on your skin? Soap, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, deoderant, maybe perfume or cologne, shaving cream or aftershave - the list goes on and on. If you had a super nose, you might be able to smell every single layer a person was wearing, and that kind of assault on the nose could be eye-wateringly overwhelming. Consider your reaction to someone wearing strong perfume! There are a lot of other types of smells in the world too, from cut grass and shoe polish to rotting garbage…and a lot of bodily functions have smells too: passing gas, excrement, or urine, menstruation, or sweating, for example. Your character might even be able to smell disease. This type of character might have to wear a mask or a scarf over their face to dull their super-sense, which might give them an odd appearance, but just imagine how much weirder it would look to be standing on a street corner sniffing at the air when all anyone else can smell is car fumes.

Taste: What’s the strongest flavor you’ve ever tasted? Maybe it was something fishy, or spicy, or sour. Everyone’s answer is bound to be different, but imagine if every single thing you ever ate or drank tasted that strong. Eventually you might get kind of tired of it and start preparing food that is more bland, right? Alternately, imagine if nothing ever just tasted like itself to you: you’re eating a french fry, but instead of tasting “french fry” you’re tasting potato, salt, oil, the metal of the fryer, the latex in the gloves used to scoop them into the paper tray, the paper tray itself…that would be pretty overwhelming! The major drawback to super taste is that your character might have trouble eating out or eating in front of other people. When you taste a lemon, your face puckers up…just think of how much more sour it would taste with a super tongue!

Touch: Did you know that every day you suffer a million tiny hurts and your brain just ignores them so that you can keep on functioning normally? If you had an enhanced nervous system, that might not be the case. Think about the number of tiny things we ignore every day: actions like walking, scratching, accidentally biting your tongue, or blinking could hurt pretty bad if you were super sensitive to touch! People with super touch might have a hard time getting comfortable all the time, and they might have to deal with not liking the feeling of clothes, being annoyed with air moving over their skin, or being extra-sensitive to physical contact. If a hug felt to me like someone was trying to break my ribs, I’d avoid them too!

So what are some things to keep in mind when writing about characters with extraordinary senses, other than drawbacks? Here are some things to consider:

Set limits. Your character shouldn’t be able to see past the curve of the earth - that’s just silly! Likewise, if they can hear something happening through the entire planet, you may want to rethink. Consider things like range and clarity when you’re setting limits on super senses: how far away can they see things and how clearly can they see them, for example. When it comes to touch, this is a little more tricky, and you might want to think more about the direct effects of pressure on the character: how much pressure does it take before it hurts?

Enhanced senses require enhanced brainpower. I don’t mean that they raise your character’s IQ level, but consider how much effort it takes to sort through and process sensory information. If your character’s brain can’t handle it, they might be in a constant state of sensory overload.

Speaking of sensory overload, that might happen to your character sometimes anyway! Everyone faces extreme situations in their lives where their brains just can’t keep up with the workload, and the threshold for that point is probably lower for people with super senses. If you’ve got a character with super hearing and four people are trying to talk to them at once, they might experience sensory overload and have to go recover for a while, so do your research into sensory overload and what to do to help them.

Finally, their super sense is going to impact how they experience and relate to other people. Maybe your character doesn’t remember a person’s name or face but they’ll never forget her voice. Maybe they just can’t even be in the house with Great-Aunt Helen because she always wears the same musty old perfume and it gives your character a headache. Maybe your character appears to be constantly zoning out when really they’re just looking closely at peoples’ jewelry. How your character perceives others, and how others view your character, is going to be impacted by their ability - count on it.

If you’re writing about a character with super senses, I hope that this has been helpful and maybe even inspiring to you, and I’d love to hear your thoughts too! Thanks for reading, and good luck!

-Kyo