The Four Types of Publishing Part One by Jo Wilkins

What does it mean to get “Published”? Dictionary.com defines it as follows:

Publish: to issue (printed or otherwise reproduced textual or graphic material, computer software, etc.) for sale or distribution to the public.

During my seminars and when I receive queries from writers, I am inundated with questions on how much traditional publishing should cost. The misconception that ‘all publishing has a fee due to the publisher’ is ludicrous. Over the next few months, I would like to break some of the misconceptions on the types of publishing available for the prepared author.

I will present information on the four (4) types of Publishing. These types are defined as:

1.      Traditional Publishing

2.      Subsidized Publishing

3.      Self-Publishing

4.      Vanity Presses

There are a few steps every author needs to prepare before submitting their work for whichever type of publishing you choose. It is imperative to follow these steps before any publisher is allowed to review the manuscript:

1.      Put the manuscript through a grammar and spell check

                       Every word processing program has some version of spell and 

                       grammar check. These simple errors will prevent a publisher from

                       reading more than the first page of your submission.

2.      Make sure your story hits the proper audience

                       Your main character's age should be in the middle of the target

                       audience.

                       Young Adult books should have a main character between late teens                        and 25 years old.

3.      Have a professional editor edit the manuscript.

                       Do some research on who is appropriate for the type of story you are

                       writing. Always get references and have them do sample pages. This is

                       the most important step. Unedited manuscripts printed into books are

                       becoming the ruination of the publishing world.

4.      Carefully read the submissions guidelines for the publisher you choose

                       This is the first test by the publisher and determines whether they put

                       you under contract. If you can’t follow simple directions, they may

                       think you will be difficult to work with and pass over your wonderful

                       manuscript.

A commercial or traditional publisher is one who distributes books under its own imprint. It puts the manuscripts from authors under contract and handles the cost of producing those manuscripts: Cover and interior design, formatting, printing, marketing in conjunction with the author, distribution, etc. The author is not expected to pay any of these costs. The cost of marketing generally falls to the author. The copyright on these books is leased by the publisher and remains in the publisher's possession until the contract expires. The author receives a percentage of sales in the form of royalties outlined in the contract. Using a commercial/traditional publisher has the following advantages:

* Advances and royalties.

                 Some imprints have the resources to give advances, but not usually for 

                 first-time authors.

*  No cost to author.

                 This is very important to remember - Commercial/traditional publishers will 

                 never charge you any type of fee.

*  Prestige.

                 Reputation of the imprint is important, so do your research. Some small

                 houses may not be well known, but may have a great reputation with their

                 authors and their peers.

*  National Marketing.

                 For reviews and distribution.

*  Everything for producing your book is done by the imprint.

                 Remember, you should not be charged for any of this.

Realizing that it takes from $3,000 to $5,000 to properly bring a book to the reading public, there are some things you should be aware of that may keep you from using the commercial/traditional route.

*  It can be very difficult to get published─100,000+ manuscripts are submitted each year.

                  Publishers, in most cases, are part of an old-boy network and it is very

                  difficult to enter their network without connections.

*  You are still responsible for a large part of the marketing for your book.

                  Some imprints have you write another book on how or what you are willing

                  to do to help market your book.

*  Very small number of manuscripts selected each year.

                  Get to know agents and publishers at conferences and workshops so you can
                  help your submission stay out of the slush pile.

*  Publisher has a greater degree of control over your work.

                  You will not have any say in cover art, blurbs for the book cover, etc., unless

                  the publisher agrees to let you have some say in the book production.

*  Limited amount of money earned for each book sold.

                  Most contracts give royalties of 10% to 12% (depending on the resources of the                   imprint)

In 2010, the Sunday Times of London sent 20 British publishers and agents previously published prize-winning books as manuscripts. These manuscripts were represented as new authors seeking publishers. Two examples were the opening chapters of, In a Free State, by V.S. Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Holiday, by Stanley Middleton. The object of this effort was to see if the agents or publishing houses could distinguish true talent.

Both of these were Booker prize winners from the 1970s and were lauded as British novel writing at its best. None of the publishers or agents recognized the manuscripts. Some rejected both Booker prize-winning novels. Of the 21 replies received, all but one were rejections.

Responding to the Naipaul manuscript, in which only the author's name and the names of the characters had been changed, a submissions department reader for PDF, a major London literary agency, wrote: "Having considered your material, we do not feel, we are sorry to say, not sufficiently enthusiastic or confident about it."

The Blake Friedmann agency also sent apologies: "In order to take on a new author, several of us here would need to be extremely enthusiastic about both the content and writing style. I'm sorry to say we don't feel that strongly about your work."

A few publishers and agents, when they realized they had been stung, blamed the sheer volume of manuscripts they received and lack of time to read every page. "With other forms of entertainment today there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is," added Naipaul.

Nicholas Clee, former editor of The Boookseller magazine, said publishers are no longer eager to take risks on untried authors because they face fierce competition as supermarkets force down prices. "Publishers tend to go for newcomers who have something sensational to offer, or authors with established names. They're putting big promotional efforts behind just a few titles," he said.

My advice as an author and a publisher, knowing how hard it is to get past the first hurdles of submissions and now seeing some of the badly done submissions we receive here at Ink & Quill and NewLink,, is never send out your first draft. Make sure that you have it reviewed by someone who knows what the industry is looking for. Make it spot on perfect in grammar, spelling and content. In other words, learn the craft you plan to pursue before you submit it to the industry. 

Traps and Tips for Character Development Part 2 by Richard Draude

Continuing my post from last time here are five tips to help develop characters to draw your audience into your novel.

Character Development Tips

The Devil Is In The Details. Some writers have a tendency to throw too much at the reader all at once—to give a full physical description, tell the life story, and reveal the innermost thoughts of a character as soon as he or she is introduced. But that’s not necessarily the best approach. Think about a character you’re introducing as someone the reader is meeting for the first time. When you are introduced to a person for first time, you do take in that person’s physical appearance, but only on a fairly perfunctory level. Think about the people you met today, you don’t remember very much about them except that she had dark hair, and he wasn’t very tall. You don’t remember every detail about what they’re wearing, because you didn’t notice. If one of the people you met was wearing a Princess Leia costume, or was dressed as Captain Kirk you would remember a lot about that person, and it would certainly be worth including in a story. So we don’t notice everything at once when we meet a new person. We do, however, notice a few details that can give us some idea of that person’s personality and life situation. Is the character well dressed? Does he or she bite their nails? It makes it easier to stay consistent too, because you have a fully developed idea of the character’s personality right from the start. The slow reveal is the best. You don’t tell the reader your character has a phobia, instead that fear comes out when he or she comes face-to-face with what they fear.

Observe Human Behavior. Another way to develop characters is to observe human behavior. You can base characters on real people you don’t know. Sit at a mall, I like the food court, and take notes. People-watching is best done where multitudes congregate. You can observe them when they’re at their best and worst. Pay close attention to how they talk, their mannerisms, hand gestures, what they wear, their attitudes and body language. You can pull all that into your stories. Combining gestures and habits from one or more people is another good way to build your characters.

Everybody Has A History: Our experiences determine who we are today. Life shapes us and molds us. Even if you don’t reveal your characters’ pasts to your readers, you should know about them, at least for your primary characters. You should have complete biographies for your main characters in mind (better yet written down) so you understand what drives them. Why is this important? Because if you don’t understand a character, your readers won’t either. An example of an effective character history, is Captain Quint’s back story in the movie Jaws. In one scene, Quint, Chief Brody, and Matt Hooper, are in the cabin of Quint’s fishing boat, and they start comparing old scars. Quint has a tattoo that was removed, and Brody asks him about it. In response, Quint tells the other characters a horrific story about many of his friends on the USS Indianapolis (true WWII story by the way) being eaten by sharks, and all of a sudden it’s easy to understand Quint and his hatred for sharks. Can you imagine Jaws without Quint’s back story?

Don’t Neglect Secondary Characters. Sidekicks can be some of the most likeable and interesting characters in the story. Often, they are the readers’ favorites. One example of this is Pippin Took, from Lord of the Rings. Pippin acts before he thinks about the consequences of what he’s about to do. That leads him into great peril, yet at the same time his brashness propels his character into a driving force of the story. Well developed secondary characters can, and will, enrich your book. They’re like the supporting instruments in a symphony. Secondary characters can be a gold mine of wit and charm, and every one serves a purpose. Some add color or assist in world building, and some act as foils for the main characters. Foils are characters who can’t stand your hero or heroine. They do nothing but gripe about them behind their backs. They can be great fun. Make sure you know a lot about your secondary characters even if you don’t end up revealing all of it to the reader.

Detail Your Villain: Pay close attention to your villain, without whom the story would not exist. Often, I hear authors tell me that the villain is their favorite character, the one they love to write about. Bad guys can be very tough to do well, and it can be even tougher to get readers to empathize with them. Whenever you write a villain, keep in mind that he or she needs to be just as well developed as your main characters. Instead of being flawed, however—because obviously all villains are flawed—the villain should be imperfectly bad. In other words, the villains should have redeeming characteristics where our heroes have flaws. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkin’s use of Gollum is a great example. While we can empathize with Gollum, even feel sorry for him, sometimes, we have hope for him, and wish he could be redeemed. And then we loathe him, and despise him, and because he’s so annoying, we wish somebody would just cut his throat. Gollum is a character who is definitely ruled by evil most of the time, but he also a victim, an unwitting pawn of the ring’s power, so we can empathize with him. He is a great antagonist. These can be among the most difficult of all characters to create but also some of the most satisfying.

So there you have it, five traps and five tips. Whether you write good characters or poor ones will determine whether your readers stay with you to the end of the hero’s journey or abandon him or her after your first book. If the characters fail, the story fails. Hopefully this post will help you avoid that, but if it does happen, pick yourself up, write the next book, and develop more complex and complete characters. Remember, always look ahead, but learn from the past.

Traps and Tips for Character Development Part 1 by Richard Draude

As fiction writers, we all have the same goal—transporting our readers inside the pages of our novel so they feel like a part of the story. Your characters are that vehicle for transporting your readers to the world you’ve created. Characters aren’t just a way of transporting the readers; they drive the story. In fact, I’ve learned to listen to them when they argue with me.

So as fiction writers, how do we develop, memorable, effective, characters? We can start with deciding what differentiates an effective character from an ineffective one. Most writers like to read, so you can probably think of characters that are particularly memorable for you and also some that you didn’t feel any connection with. Let’s look at traps that lead to ineffective characters. They are all connected, because one often leads to another, and some writers are guilty of all five: they create characters that are one dimensional, they’re stereotypical, they’re too perfect, they’re inconsistent, or they’re just plain dull.

Traps and Tips for Effective Character Development. Part I

Characters Development Traps

One-dimensional: Writers create a one-dimensional character when they don’t devote enough time to developing a character. These characters are flat, don’t seem real. Bear in mind not every character deserves or merits equal development. Every novel has its main and secondary characters. Unless you intend to write the sequel to War and Peace, you can’t develop each and every one of the secondary characters.

One-dimensional characters are fine if that character’s role is not important. But if your character has a significant impact on your story, then by all means take the time to flesh out your character and develop his or her strengths, weaknesses, habits and foibles. For example, you have a character in your novel who is a detective, and he’s married to a woman who is described as a Southern housewife. She may be described physically, but if all we know about her past, her personality, and her motivations is that she’s a Southern housewife, that’s not very much to go on. We only know that she can cook fried chicken and chitlins. A character like that is going to fade from the stage of our memories quickly. One way or another, we’re not going to care what happens to her.

Stereotypical: Because they’re not unique, stereotypical characters are uninteresting. It’s important to note here that being stereotypical is not the same thing as being consistent. Your characters should behave in ways that are consistent with how you’ve developed them, but that’s not the same thing as being stereotypical. What would you think of a fantasy novel where all elves are haughty and all dwarfs are gruff, and they hate each other? Or a story where all the rich people in your stories are shallow, greedy, and uncaring? Or of the wealthy women are tall and extravagantly dressed, and they’ve all had plastic surgery? It’s when a character breaks free of the stereotype that he or she becomes believable and memorable. These are stereotypes. But a novel where the Elves are pot smoking hippies or the munchkins are cannibals would pull you in and make you keep reading. Real people don’t act according to stereotypes in every respect. Everyone is unique in some way. You don’t want your readers to think, didn’t I just see that character in so-and-so’s work. Only now he’s got another name and brown hair? You want your characters to be unique and therefore memorable.

All-too-Perfect: These characters tend to make reader’s eyes roll. If you’re doing a parody it’s okay to have a character who is perfect in every way. But in real life perfection doesn’t exist, so it shouldn’t exist in your writing. It’s hard to empathize with a perfect person, because none of us is perfect. Everyone, no matter how noble, is flawed in some way. For example, an effective character might be someone who is heroic in almost every way—he’s a good fighter, he’s nice to look at, he rides well and shoots well, and he’s brave and compassionate—but he’s totally indecisive, so if he has to take command in a battle, everyone’s going to die. It’s much easier for readers to relate to someone with a flaw, because they can say, “Yes, that’s just like my buddy, Jeff. He’s a great guy, but he can’t make up his mind to save his life.”

There’s also a particular kind of too-perfect character you could refer to as the Betty Jane or Gary Plain characters. They’re the kind of character that is the writer’s idealized version of himself or herself. This character comes from humble beginnings, achieves impossible goals, ends up saving the galaxy, and then dies in the arms of the King after having become the first female knight of the realm. How is any reader going to relate to that except you, the author? This is an author living out his or her fantasies. Every writer does that to some extent, but Betty Jane is the extreme version of that kind of wish fulfillment. You need to be conscious and careful of your character.

Inconsistency In Your Characters: Nothing is more jarring and pulls your readers out of your story faster than an inconsistent character. You take the time to develop a character with certain traits. Readers will expect your hero or heroine to behave in accordance with his or her motivations and personality as you defined them. If that character behaves in a way that doesn’t make sense, your readers will notice it every time. Consistency applies to everything from small things, such as a character’s eye color, to big things like the character’s manner of speaking and important choices they make. If a character has blue eyes in chapter one, she’d better not have green eyes in chapter five. Unless you have a good reason why your hero or heroine speaks like an aristocrat one minute and uses street slang the next, it’s going to take the reader right out of the story. Or if a character slaughters a bunch of innocent children and then goes into a monologue about the evils of child abuse, that’s inconsistent. The fictional characters you create must feel like real people to the reader. If you don’t have a firm picture of them in your mind, they’re going to become shaky on the page. You should be able to see them and hear them speak and watch them go through their actions. And because you know them that well, they will be consistent; they will tell you when you’re stepping out of bounds for them. Do this and you won’t fall into that trap.

Just Plain Dull Characters. Of course, some characters are supposed to be dull, but in that case they’re usually foils for more interesting characters or events. If you think you might have a dull character in your book, the first thing you should ask is whether you need that character at all. Why is that character there? What is his or her role in the story? If you can’t come up with an answer, then that character is just stage dressing. Some stage dressing is allowed, but if you don’t even need the character for stage dressing, maybe it’s time to do away with that character completely. Another option is to make a dull character come alive by adding some unique traits. Perhaps your drab character has a secret fantasy life or an intriguing hobby, indicating that he or she is much more interesting than appears on the surface. That sort of thing will give a character life.

Okay, so now you’ve avoided these five traps. Now your characters are three-dimensional, unique, flawed, consistent, and interesting. My next post will be on tips that can make them even better.