Samhain Publishing Ltd. Weblog

All about self-editing

When I got my reminder last week that it was my turn again to post a blog, I couldn’t think of anything other than things that have already been done. Query letters, professionalism, submissions….and I think I was even the one who wrote two of them. Nice, huh? So I got to thinking about it and I decided that I needed to do one on self-editing. And no, doing a Spell Check doesn’t even begin to cover what you need to do to prep your manuscript for submission. Keep in mind that when you submit something, the cleaner and more polished it is, the more it is going to be looked at by the editor in a positive light. Don’t even ask me what we think when we see something full of grammar mistakes, word misusage, punctuation errors… The list goes on. The easiest way to do this is to number them, so, well, that’s what I’m going to do. =-)

To brand or not to brand...

That is the question.

Before I start off, I want to state that this blog post is my opinion, just some food for thought, so to speak.

There is always a lot of talk about branding. You’ll hear a lot of editors, agents, etc. that tell you to brand yourself, and you’ll hear just as many tell you not to. And what do I mean by branding? Genre branding. Promoting yourself as a paranormal, historical, sci-fi, contemporary, etc. author. And only that genre.

Personally, I’m not big on branding. I think of it as pigeonholing yourself. What happens if you have branded yourself as a historical romance author and the muse suddenly hits you with an idea for an awesome paranormal vampire book? A book with the potential to rival Anne Rice or Sherrilyn Kenyon. If you’ve branded yourself as a historical writer, you won’t get the people who don’t enjoy historical but enjoy paranormals reading your books. Plus, you’ll have to take up a whole new plan of promoting. You’re going to have to promote the heck out of that paranormal book, way more than you would have to for your historicals, to get those people who normally would read your stories to buy it.

And you get some who have different pen names for different genres that they like to write, which is usually not a good idea, unless you are phenomenally famous, like Nora Roberts, and everyone knows that your pen name of J.D. Robb is really you. Or Ann Rice with her erotic books, wrote as Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure. But if you’re not an already big time author, you’re going to have to double promote. And we all know promotion is time consuming as it is. Can you imagine doubling or even tripling it? Wow. And I’m sure you all know that you can’t sell books without promotion. Promoting the book after you’ve written it is just as important as writing it and getting is published (just my little editorial reminder, of course).

There are going to be many people who prefer to brand, and that’s okay, that’s your choice for your career. It really works for some people. But I’d hate to see someone unable to get a really great book of the ground because they’ve pigeon-holed themselves as one thing, and their “new” book is something completely different.

Something else to think about, if you’re really stuck on a paranormal or sci-fi idea but you “only write historicals or westerns”, are you going to ditch that idea or try an force it out to fit into your branded genre? Or even giving up on that great idea entirely. Forcing your writing is not going to make a great story.

I’ve had some of my authors ask me about genre branding, and I’ve told them not to. Why not brand yourself as an author who follows whatever path the muse takes them down? I think I like that idea. =)

Let's Talk About Professionalism

What is professionalism in writing? I know you’re all dying to know, right? If you’re not, you should be, since it greatly affects your career.

First, let’s establish that professionalism in epublishing is just as important as professionalism with a big New York house. We take our careers just as seriously as anyone in a New York house, so we expect nothing less from our authors or prospective authors. Now let’s take a look at a few different aspects of professionalism.

E-mail addys = Not such an obvious one, is it? Look at is this way. If you were applying for a job with a Fortune 500 company, would you send your resume in via your sexymama69 account? I should hope not. And if you would….well, that’s a different blog. Professionalism matters on all levels, and your e-mail address is one of the first things we see. Sexymam69 isn’t going to make a good first impression, and it doesn’t cost anything or take but a few minutes to set up a new Gmail account (or Yahoo! or Hotmail) to use for your writing.

Follow-ups = You have to give us some time to follow up. If you’re one of “our” authors, of course you’ll probably have a faster response time. If you’re not, you have to remember what the submission guidelines say. It’s highly doubtful that you’ll hear back from us within a week, so don’t wait a week and then e-mail us asking us “have you had time to read it? Huh? Huh?” And don’t put yourself down, either. “I know you’re probably laughing at my feeble attempt, but have you had a chance to read it?” Yeah, not very professional. Wait until the specified time on the submission guidelines page has passed and then if you haven’t heard back, you can send an e-mail in.

On-line persona = Oh man is this one important. So very important. Each time we make an offer on a manuscript, we’re not just looking at the manuscript quality. It’s so much more than the book. We look at you as an author. You have to sell us the whole package. And if part of that package is a terribly rude online persona, we may decide to pass on your book. An unprofessional persona will reflect poorly on Samhain Publishing. It will also result in lower book sales, which affects us, too, since we get paid based on how many books you sell. If you don’t sell because you’re abrasive and insulting, we don’t make any money. And that’s on top of trying to be a buffer for you and the romance community.

I could go into these issues for hours, but I won’t. These are just some of the basics. Entire books could be written on this subject, and have been. The main thing I want to get across is that this isn’t a hobby. This needs to be taken just as professionally and seriously as any other job you would have to put food on your table.

Happy writing!

Tera Kleinfelter