Guest Post: Karen Wehrstein – Dead-tree to weblit in 15 seconds or less

This Saturday’s Guest Post is by Karen Wehrstein, a traditionally published author who is now very active in the weblit community. See the end of the post for a brief bio and a linbk to her site.

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Dead-tree to weblit in 15 seconds or less

A traditionally-published author turns to the Internet to forge her own path

By Karen Wehrstein

Asked to write about migrating to weblit from the traditional publishing world, in which I published two solo novels, one collaboration and several short stories, and continue to work as a freelance journalist, I realized the difference boils down to one basic thing that can be expressed in simple diagrams.

Writer ———————————–> Reader

Fig. 1: Weblit

HOWLING ABYSS OF GEOGRAPHY

VALE OF TEARS

Writer —————> ARBITRARY GATEKEEPING ——————> Reader

OTHER PEOPLE’S DECISIONS

GLACIAL TIMEFRAME

Fig. 2: Traditional Publishing

Okay, maybe that’s a bit simplistic. Maybe Fig. 1 should look more like this:

HTML HELL

WEB DESIGN NIGHTMARES

Writer —————> CEASELESS E-SELF-PROMOTION ——————> Reader

SNOTTY WOULD-BE GATEKEEPERS

DEADBEAT READERS

But the difference, in terms of the width of the gulf between writer and reader, is still enormous, and the implications of that touch every aspect of the writing/transmission/reader relations experience.

When I first had writing ambitions, which was about the same time that the Internet was an obscure dot-matrix-delivered quirk of geeky computer science students, I learned about how traditional publishing goes. I learned about the double gatekeeper system (first you have to find an agent, then a publisher), the stacks of rejection slips (everyone has them), the endless waiting (since publishers want to be given two or three months each to reject your manuscript) and the fact that the vast majority of writers never get published. I was sure that there were people who would like my writing out there, but the gulf that I saw yawning between them and me I seriously doubted I could cross.

Once I did get a publishing contract, I learned that I still had not entirely crossed that gulf. There were still the matters of editing, packaging and marketing, none of which the writer controls. Other people tell you how your writing needs to be changed, design the cover, determine the branding, and decide how it’s going to be marketed, all based on their ideas of what will attract readers. You have no guarantee that these ideas are correct in your case, or that irreversible mistakes won’t be made.

Now my publishing experiences might have been unusually bad, due to a basic personality incompatibility between my publisher and me. I remain grateful since it allows me to bill myself as a published novelist for the rest of my life.

But, due to the publisher’s editing/packaging/marketing decisions, I had to cut the book length by a third, change the title to something I thought was somewhat deceptive and eliminate one gay relationship. These were all things that I would have been willing to do, if given the choice, to get published (though the gay relationship thing really stuck in my craw). I had heard horror stories of much worse. Cover art with all the details wrong is pretty much par for the course, so I didn’t much worry about it.

But one thing happened that I considered, and still consider, a disaster for my writing career: the editor wrote a line on the back-cover blurb for my first novel that created the false impression that the setting for my story had actually been created by someone else. It was a selling point, as it referenced an already-successful work, but it also cued reviewers to not take me seriously as a first novelist, ensured that most of them would ignore my work, and probably didn’t much impress readers either.

I didn’t get to approve or even see that blurb before it was written and 40,000 copies printed. It was a mistake that could not be undone. To this day, people who pick up my first book in used bookstores get the impression that I was not enough of a writer to create my own world. This happened nearly 20 years ago, and it still hurts. One reason why I got into weblit was to give that work another kick at the can without that taint. In traditional publishing, you have no guarantee that something like that won’t happen.

In weblit, other people do have some power over the fate of a work; the review sites spring to mind, and the benefits they provide can be outweighed by the costs in cases of ill-written reviews. However, there is simply nothing in weblit that allows an impact even comparable to the above. No review site or directory is the single pathway of your work from author to reader. And if something in your marketing gives the wrong impression, you can instantly rearrange, or ask someone else to rearrange, the pixels. On paper, it’s etched in stone.

Other little dangers in dead-tree publishing that writers often don’t foresee include publication dates being delayed indefinitely or payment problems due to the publisher having financial troubles (because you’ve signed a contract you can’t shop the manuscript elsewhere), a publisher going bankrupt just before they print your book and launch the splashy ad campaign, and the fact that if your book sells well, your publisher will pressure you to write the same kind of thing for the rest of your writing days. Then there’s the D&A factor that haunts any and all businesses and fields: among the people you work with will be a certain number of dicks and assholes. That is true in weblit, too, but it’s much easier to choose whom you associate with.

The upside to traditional publishing, however, is this:

PROFESSIONAL EDITING

PROFESSIONAL DESIGN

Writer —————> PROFESSIONAL MARKETING ——————> Reader

BROAD DISTRIBUTION

MONEY UP FRONT

Publishers hire good, sometimes excellent, people who specialize in editing, packaging and marketing, people who, chances are, can do these things way better than you can. They have established distribution networks through which your work is channeled. When you are in weblit, you have to do or arrange all this yourself, except for the money up front, about which you can forget. Woe betide you if you aren’t good at them or find them distasteful.

I have noticed that the people who are most successful in weblit are not just good and prolific writers. They also have good marketing instincts and a willingness to use them. They tend to be risk-takers, too. Alexandra Erin quit her day job; MeiLin Miranda sank money into her ad campaign; MCM undertook feats of endurance writing and ceaseless experimentation. You have to be willing to be out there and blow your own horn. It’s not for the faint of heart. That’s a challenge for me. I can write well, and lots, and lots well, but getting myself out there is a constant fight against deep and pervasive fear.

If you are the kind of writer—and many are—who is introverted, shy and afraid of rejection, and want to just sit in your little garret, concentrate purely on cranking out writing that others will champion for you, you’re better off in dead-tree publishing.

So there are pros, and there are cons: but there is one way in which the weblit medium wins hands-down, because you can do certain things that your dead-tree colleagues can’t even dream of. That is: speed of transmission, and the fact that the readers can just as instantly transmit right back.

In dead-tree publishing, your book is published months or even a year or more after you turn in the completed manuscript. By the time you get fan letters, you’ve galloped on to the next project, and you kind of don’t care about what they’re praising any more. With weblit, you can get feedback in seconds.

When I first decided to do this, I emailed Alexandra Erin to pick her brain. She told me that she thought the biggest adjustment for me, switching from traditional to online publishing, would be dealing with immediate feedback in comments, and that it might be tough. My feeling was—are you kidding? That would be like nirvana! I did have a little trepidation—the net abounds with trolls, for one thing—but mostly felt I’d enjoy getting immediate comments.

This has proven absolutely true. I can’t say how much I love and appreciate reader reactions. You become friends with your fans; you learn what kind of people they are; you feel their support day in and day out; you learn all kinds of things they offer from their expertise; they become a community. You can make instant use of their feedback, whether it’s line-editing-type corrections, in-depth critique, the results of surveys, or simply site statistics that tell you you’d better switch gears. You can use their negative comments for guidance towards improvement, and their positive comments as testimonials in publicity for a work you are still selling.

In fact, weblit writers are using the instant interactivity of the net to take reader participation to new heights. They take live requests for character emphasis, offer choice by vote on story topics and plot developments, integrate reader ideas instantly into ongoing stories, and are making writing into a performance art. MCM now bills himself as a livewriter; Shirley Meier and I do live chats in which our readers get to chat with our characters, challenge our readers to solve problems in the story and incorporate their ideas into it, and even engage very select readers in creating scenes by role-playing with us. These sorts of things, along with various forms of non-linear story-telling only possible on the net, add a whole other dimension to the experience of shared imagining between writer and reader. They are simply not possible in paper publishing.

At this point, I’ve barely made pin-money doing this, but I would not go back on my own initiative to the dead-tree fiction publishing world. I’ve learned to love the challenge of the midnight deadline, a forced daily discipline you don’t get in traditional publishing, that is excellent for developing writing speed and skill. I love being able to write explicit sex scenes (remember that gay relationship that didn’t happen in the paper version? Have a big fan trained on yourself when you read the weblit version). I relish the direct relationship with my readers: the 3 a.m. comments, the emails, the votes, the chats. I like being able to design my own packaging, with my own art—details correct, and blurbs that give credit where credit is due—so as to find my true readership, those who resonate with my work. I like knowing by a few clicks of the mouse that I am finding them.

And I guess… well, I am suddenly in tears as I write this, to my surprise. I didn’t totally quit writing after that back-cover-blurb disaster happened. But I was so demoralized, I quit seriously trying to put my writing out there. Now, doing it as weblit, and getting the reader responses I’m getting as I write, is healing that old wound and making me believe in myself as a writer as I never did before. As I look back, I realize that growing my readership gradually while developing a comfort level with having one is something I needed to do, and would have been better off doing back then, if it had been possible. But you can’t do that in traditional publishing. You go from zero to tens of thousands of copies of your book being on shelves, and if you can’t handle it you’ll flip out or do self-sabotaging things.

At its essence, writing weblit is this:

Writer <============================> Reader

Insofar as communication is what we writers are all about, it’s the perfect world.

Hey, readers! There’s nothing between me and you anymore.

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About the author: Karen Wehrstein published two solo fantasy novels, Lion’s Heart and Lion’s Soul, and a collaborative novel with Shirley Meier and S.M. Stirling, Shadow’s Son, with Baen Books in the early 90s. She has published several short stories in the horror and science fiction genres and innumerable news stories and features, has edited and published several small publications in the alternative health field, and is a practicing homeopath. Her weblit works, The Philosopher in Arms and asa kraiya : beyond the sword, can be found at www.chevenga.com.