Under the Bibliography topic, I have listed a bunch of the books I have written that I can claim at this point. A pretty long list. I just had a book out this month that I can’t claim, but I wrote. You won’t see that book on the list. Or another one coming out next spring. But a large percentage of the almost one hundred books I have written are on the list.

Cheers, Dean

Wow, I didn’t realize how long it had been since I posted here anything of value to anyone. The two weeks of teaching the Master Class just toasted the writing brain, at least the part that has a desire to talk about the process and the business of writing.

Let me talk for a minute about that Master Class.

This year, the first master class in four years, we had 16 writers attending, all housed in this really wonderful hotel.  The Anchor Inn is just made for writers and is one of the nifty places on the planet. Each writer had a two room suite and we had a wonderful meeting room that felt like a living room, with old over-stuffed couches and chairs. They got free breakfast every morning and there was also another huge lounge to go write if they wanted to get out of their rooms. The beach was also just a block or so away.

We met every morning at 10 and the class, taught by me and Kris and Loren Coleman went for four hours every day, all 15 days. Then in the evening, they were back in class at 7 to be taught be me and Loren Coleman and Christina York with help from Steve York as well. That class also lasted 4 hours. Scott Carter came in one evening and helped out on marketing and Mary Rosenblum helped out on another night with a great genre discussion. And then New York editors Ginjer Buchanan and John Douglas came in for the last three days as well and did a fantastic job.

The writers also had a lot of writing and exercises to do, along with other smaller questions and assignments to answer. So the 16 writers who attended, all published in one way or another, were jammed busy as we poured information at them and forced them to work. Someone totaled it up and said the writers attending wrote almost 400 thousand words of short fiction, novel queries, and assignments in the two weeks while attending eight hours of class for 15 straight days.

And all of them made it through with flying colors. Tired and exhausted, but full of more information than they will ever remember.

As for the instructors, well it darned near killed all of us.

Loren Coleman, editor, publisher, and author of over twenty novels, stayed in a room beside the meeting area and helped glue back together everyone at one point or another. He got maybe three hours of sleep per night. Maybe.

Kris taught in the morning and then spent the entire rest of the day carefully reading the fantastic amount of writing, exercises and other production that the 16 writers turned in. Her job was to help them find the weakness and the strength in their craft and then help the writer solve the issue. She had the toughest job of all of us in my opinion.

Chris York was on book deadline during the master class and also works this wonderful job at another hotel, yet she still came in every evening for 5 hours to help me and Loren with the business. She even managed to get pages done on her book deadline, but she was as tired as we all were when it was over.

My job was to do all the detail work, hold the entire thing together, and be the lead instructor for both sessions, putting some sort of form and logic on all the information. And read the short stories and about six thousand query and novel blurbs the writers were constantly turning in. And run the writing business simulation we put the writers through called The Game. Teaching for eight hours a day, basically on every detail of the business, was draining to say the least. And when everyone finally left town, the idea of talking about writing here on this blog just didn’t seem attractive to me for some reason.

But now time has passed. There is the time before the Master Class and the time since the Master Class and they seem to be divided by this void in my mind. So if you asked me a question about writing before the Master Class and I didn’t get to it, ask it again and I will now. The brain’s interest in actually thinking about writing is coming back again, along with other details of life that I tended to space over the last two or three weeks.

Now I remember why it was four years since the last master class. It took that long to forget how hard they really are to teach.

We pushed the marketing workshop that was supposed to be ending right now back to March and the next Master Class back to next October. So if you are interested in any of the classes, the new schedule is under workshops here on this site. Don’t hope or expect us to teach any after the ones listed. We’re getting burnt out again.

And besides, I have novels to write as well. And so does Kris. And that’s how we make our living. Thankfully, the book industry is mostly recession proof.

I’ll be back to these posts regularly now.

Cheers, Dean

I’m back, finally, but the brain is lagging behind a few days. So some longer posts soon. But for the moment I wanted to let you know I just turned off the comment feature on these blog posts. Today alone I got almost 100 from some spammer.

So, if you have a question for me, just e-mail me directly and I’ll post the question in the blog entry.  Even if you post a question on one of the older posts, I will no longer see it and it will no longer be approved and moved to the site.

Ah, the nature of the computer age.

Cheers

Dean

I had a good question on how you find a first reader, and what is the difference between a first reader and a workshop.

First it would be important to understand what a first reader does, so let me start there.

– A first reader reads your story when you feel it is ready to go out to an editor. (Never before.)

– A first reader reads for pleasure to see how the story works to a general reader.

– A first reader stops the author from mailing a story that might be wrong in execution or too many craft issues.

– Some first readers copyedit a manuscript, but not a critical feature of first reading unless you have trouble with typos and such as I do.

So, what makes a good first reader?

— The good first reader must understand and like your style and voice.

— The good first reader must look forward to reading your next story.

— The good first reader must be able to stand up to you and tell you a story doesn’t work, and exactly why, when given the chance to explain. And must be as excited for you as you are when a story really works.

— The good first reader does not have to be a writer, but must love reading.

— The good first reader must not have any agenda of their own to place on your work.

So, with all that, how do you find a good first reader?

Simple answer. You don’t. They are not just out there waiting for you to come along and pluck like some fruit. Any good first reader takes some training. But you have to find a person who has the interest to be trained and is a reader. And this person needs to be willing to stick with you for the long run.

So let me talk about ways to find that person who might be trained.

Back to where this question came from. Writers’ workshops are a great place to find a first reader. I met Kris at a writers’ workshop. Over the years, Kris and I have taught many professional level workshops, and what often is the top thing that comes from professional writers getting together is finding that first reader who can be trained.

This week we start what we call a Master Class, basically a boot camp for newer professional writers to help them jump their writing and their business knowledge years and years forward. The writers who are showing up here today and tomorrow are committed. They paid money for the workshop, carved two weeks out of their lives, left jobs, and got here to learn. They are already successes in many ways and just having that attitude is the reason why. They are willing to go and learn.

What will happen when these 16 very, very driven people get together these next two weeks is that some of them will like what some of the others are saying about story. And those will gather together and get to know each other, even though they are from different corners of the planet. In the five previous master classes many first readers have been found by other writers in their same class. Like-minded driven people willing to read other fiction.

A second place to find a great first reader is across the kitchen table from you. Often your spouse, with work and understanding, can be trained to be a fine first reader. There is a reason the two of you are together in the first place, so the basics of liking each other are there in most cases. Often it just takes an invite by the author to start getting the spouse involved in both the business side of things and the reading. But remember, the spouse does not know as much about writing as you do and is not as passionate about it. But they are a great audience.

And if they hate what you are writing and you are not selling, you might want to give their opinion some weight and ask them exactly what they hate and why.

So, can you use a workshop as a first reader? Sure. Over the years I did that a great deal. But there are some really important ways you must approach a workshop if you want them to do this for you.

– You must ignore 95% of the crap that comes at you, only listening to the people in the workshop you respect, and then only a part of that.

– You must only look at them as an audience, and ignore anyone who is always negative, workshop after workshop. Workshops breed those kind, and they are not worth your time.

– You must never think you are taking a story to a workshop to get it fixed.

– You must learn how to judge audience reaction. For example, if your workshop splits on your story, with half hating it and half defending it, you more than likely have an award winner. Don’t touch a word, just mail it.

One other point about first readers. Writers often train two or three. I only have one, but I have complete trust in my first reader. After all, she’s a Hugo Award winning editor and a Hugo Award winning writer. What’s not to trust?

There is a ton more about first readers and using a workshop as a first reader, but the best thing a professional level workshop can do for you is help you find other driven writers at your level. Find one.

And by the way, there are some things Kris just doesn’t read of mine. For example, I am doing a rescue book right now, ghost writing a novel. She won’t read that one because I am imitating another writer’s voice and she would not be able to tell where I screwed up or was doing something intentionally. So understand your limits on your first reader as well. If they hate romance and you write one, might want to just let them pass on that one.

Good luck. I am now off to spend two wonderful weeks with 16 highly motivated professional writers talking nothing but writing and the business of writing. No politics. Nothing but writing.

I am walking into heaven.  I’ll be back in the real world eventually.

Cheers, Dean

I got some great questions this last week and will try to get to them one at a time. But relating to the last few posts I have made, I want to talk about collaboration. And the question of how I do it and how do I keep my work fresh and my own when working with others.

Let me start off by saying that officially, on book covers and behind the scenes, I have written books and stories with more people than I seem to be able to count. Not kidding I’m afraid. Why? Because not only have I done the collaborations with the authors on the covers, but I have also gone in and rescued a bunch of books by other authors, which is a collaboration. In fact, I am working now on a project that the author did the first half and I need to finish the second half as a rescue. I like doing things like that because it is a challenge to try to even come close to matching another author’s voice.

On the first Spider-Man novel, it has David Michalanie’s name on the cover with mine, but he only wrote a one paragraph idea and I wrote the book. I have never met David or a dozen or more of the other collaborators I have written with, including a number of bestselling writers and a number of Hollywood movie stars.

Also, one fine weekend a long, long time ago, ten of us got together and tried an experiment. We, together, wrote two novels that weekend and one of them actually got published under a well-hidden name. Except for that weekend, never once have I ever wrote a book in collaboration with the other author in the room, or even offering feedback in the process. Not once. One way I keep my fiction my own, even when writing with another person in the mix.

So, how do I work with another author? Depends on the project, to be honest, and very few projects have been similar. I suppose the most traditional collaborations I have done have been with my wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Our names are on a lot of books together, and under the pen names Sandy Schofield and Kathryn Wesley.

We started off convinced we would never collaborate on anything. We come at story in very, very different ways which always seemed to lead to shouting on one side or the other. To this day we can’t brainstorm ideas together. I’m fairly certain this has more to do with us being different types of writers versus being married. Fairly certain.

But one day back in 1991, when offered the chance to do a Star Trek novel, we worked out the issues very quickly. And what we came up with was that I was more comfortable with plotting and she was more comfortable with characters and setting details. So we did what I now tell other authors to do. We went to our strengths.

I plot the book (mostly without any input from her for fear of arguing) and then write a very rough draft, about 1/3 of the length of the final book, doing all the plotting, basically setting up where everything has to be done and how. I love doing that and find it easy. Then Kris takes the draft and fills in the characters. She likes it since she doesn’t have to work on the plot. She calls it coloring between the lines and she’s fast and good at it.

So we go to our strengths and both do what we like to do. And it has worked for well over twenty novels. But warning, on some of the books, Kris did more than I did, and on some of the books, I did more than she did. Can’t tell from book to book, but not all the books are balanced. Nature of collaborations.

Now some words of warning about collaborations Unless you can find a writer at your same level, who complements you perfectly in style and likes and dislikes, there is no logical reason on the planet to collaborate. None. Write the book yourself. It is easier.

And if I can’t stop you, then for heaven’s sake, have a contract between the two of you before either of you write word one. A very good contract that states who is responsible for final drafts, who gets do the work of marketing, who gets to do the work of proofs and copy edits if the book sells, and things like that. And how to split the money exactly. You will thank me later.

Now, how do I keep others out of my work when collaborating? Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes collaborations such as the book with David that I mentioned are original novels. With Jonathan Frakes, all I had was a cover and wrote a book around the cover. Other times, it’s not possible to keep the other writer out completely, such as the book I am working on now where the other author wrote the entire first half and then had an issue so I stepped in. The key is realizing how much exactly the other author will be involved when you go into a project. And know what you are capable of doing and not capable of doing in writing situations.

I have sold over ninety novels, so I have a pretty good sense of what I can do and can’t do, where I know another person is going to be in the writing process and when they will not be. With Kris, she’s not involved in any of the writing I do, and then when I pass the book to her, I’m not involved any more at all. I don’t even look at it again. Next time I see it is in Safeway.

And that brings me to the last point. Ego. If you have an ego about your words, think everything you write doesn’t stink, and that every word is golden and no one would dare touch it, then stay the hell away from collaborating with anyone. With collaboration, you have to do the best job you can while writing, then let go completely.

And I do mean completely.

If you start caring what your collaborator is doing to the book, chances are you will lose a friend and just might end up in the police station having a mug shot taken.

Collaboration is not a thing to try, especially for any writer with ego. If you must try it some day, wait until you have a dozen or more novels published and then only do it with an enemy you hate. And have a good contract and a good lawyer.

You think I’m kidding. Nope. I have collaborated with half the planet at this point in time. I know what I am talking about. Don’t do it.

Remember the old saying about collaborating on a novel. It is twice the work for half the money.

No truer words have ever been said.

Cheers

Dean

I got a great question about workshops, how to use them, what they are good for, that sort of thing. So let me expand here my opinions on workshops.

First off, I started (with Steve Fahnestalk) an amateur workshop, bootstrap workshop, in Moscow, Idaho in 1982 when I decided to get serious about my writing. We met every week and followed what we thought was Clarion style. Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Lori Anne White, Jon Gustafson, and others joined in, including M.J. Engh at times. Jane Fancher often sat and drew while listening, becoming a published novelist later on. But at the time we were all beginners pretty much.

In Eugene, Oregon, in 1987, Kris and I started another workshop with a ton of young professionals in it which a lot of editors attended during the years. One Tuesday night in 1991 we had over thirty people including ten professional writers, the editor of Pulphouse, F&SF, Amazing, and Writers of the Future all sitting at the huge table. It was also run Clarion style with some additional talking time about markets and such.
I also went to Clarion east in 1982 and taught at Clarion in 1992.

Kris and I now run professional level workshops here that serve to focus on an area of the business or craft for professional or near professional writers. And one big boot camp class called the Master Class that focuses on everything.

So clearly I believe that part of the learning a writer can get is from workshops of different sorts.

So to the question. How do you learn from a regular workshop?

First off a few huge warnings! Warning! Run away from a workshop that reads stories aloud. Run away from a workshop that holds you back and tells you that you work too hard or write too fast. Run away from a constant negative workshop that gets jealous of a writer’s success. Run away from a workshop that looks at works in progress in any fashion. No exceptions to these warnings. You are wasting your time and hurting yourself.

Workshops are group think, so if you go into a workshop hoping to “fix” a story, you are dead wrong and will only make the story worse by listening to the people attending no matter how experienced the people are. Listening to a group and then trying to fix a story edits out voice, edits out anything that makes the story unique, and basically is just plain silly. Writing by committee is never a good idea. Ever.

So why put a story through a workshop? My opinion is that you can get a number of good things by doing this.

1) Details (if you write them down and remember) about what you did correctly, what people liked, so you can continue to use that in the next stories. (But remember Asimov’s Rule: You hear nine good things and one bad thing, you only remember the bad thing. So write down the good stuff as well as the bad stuff.)

2) Details in your craft that you need to work on in the next story. (Your opening is slow. I couldn’t see your setting. There was no emotion. Your story really got going on page five (no editor would get there). And so on.) Understand you screwed up the story if everyone said the same thing, then work on it in the next story.

3) Audience for the story. You were attempting to write a horror story but everyone thought it cute and funny. Audience for a story is the best way to understand what you did right or wrong to use for the next story.

4) Information on the business. In amateur workshops, this is always suspect unless there is a source behind the information, and even then check it. Professional level workshops like the ones Kris and I teach here are like continuing education for any professional. You have to keep learning and working on your craft, but getting feedback and good business information is always hard. My rule is I always listen to people who are farther down the road than I am in the business and then I only take what I agree with and that sounds logical to me as a writer.

5) Networking. I can’t even begin to stress the value of gathering with other writers. You often pick up a detail that will make all the difference simply by having conversations with other writers at your own level. Learning in writing is not set in a school, but picked up one tiny detail after another, and workshops put you in a position to pick up that detail.

6) Reading and trying to figure out what in another writer’s story didn’t work for you, or did work for you, will be a very learning experience if you give it the time and actually look at the task as a learning experience instead of a chore.

7) Deadlines and motivation. Use a workshop as a deadline to finish a story.

So why do I teach workshops for younger professionals or near professionals? I learn as well all the time. Again, just being around other writers is a way to learn and I never stop learning. Ever.

So, in summary, workshops are great if you use them correctly and have the right workshop. They must be supportive and you must use the workshop to work on your craft and help your next story get better.

One hint: I used to write a story in a week and mail it. Then after I mailed it, I would turn it into my workshop. (I never once rewrote a story after it was rejected even though my workshop hated it, and I often sold a story that was beat up by my workshop.) Remember, workshops are to help you learn how to write the next story better.

And speaking of workshops and seminars, Kris and I are going back out for a short time this late fall and winter and doing the one day Kris and Dean shows in different places around the west. The day is sort of a summary of how to be a professional fiction writer, boiled down into a day of massive information and some fun as well. This came about after the one hour sessions we did at Worldcon that had a lot of people asking us afterward to do the one day event again. We are still setting them up, so watch this space for information.

Cheers, Dean

Okay, I got a good question about how it can be possible to keep a short story in the mail for as long as I say I have done, and yet not go to lower pay rates.

Let me start this discussion with a few simple rules I follow when trying to find a market. I look for the following factors in a market:

1) How much do they pay?

2) How much attention do their stories get (circulation)?

3) Value to my career selling to the market?

I tend to rank every market with those three items, and of course, The New Yorker comes out on top every time. I don’t edit for them, I just send them everything that I write on spec. (Yes, even sf stories. As I said, I don’t edit for them.)

On the lower end, I never go below 5 cents per word unless it is a top literary market that will give me lots of bonus for selling to them.

Second thing that is assumed in this discussion is that I NEVER send out multiple submissions. One story to one market at a time. I don’t care if they do say they take simultaneous submissions or not, I never do it. I have been a short fiction editor and I know what that really means. (Automatic rejection.)

So the question is simply, how can I keep a story in the mail for so long?

Well, the math works out simply like this.

I start at the top market and when the story comes back, I fire it to what I consider a second market and so on, until eventually, sometimes in a year or so, I get down to a genre magazine, depending on the genre of the story. (Remember, I write across all genres.)

And if I was following the story per week as I did when I fired up and got serious, I would get up to seventy or eighty stories out there before the sales started pulling the number down.

With the one sf/horror story I had out with over thirty rejections on it, I had been mailing it for just over three years. I wasn’t running out of markets, since I just picked one and fired it, not realizing that first off, the market I sent it to hadn’t published fiction in five years (bad on my research). They liked the story and bought it anyway for 10 cents per word. That was a gambling magazine.

The vast numbers of markets for short stories is amazing, not counting all the new ones coming in all the time.

The key for many markets is in your cover letter. If I am sending a story with sf or fantasy in it to The New Yorker or Glimmer Train, I mention my literary and poetry sales in my cover letter and never once use the science fiction term. If I am sending a story to an airline magazine, I also stay with the more familiar stuff I have published, slanted to literary a little. In other words, I slant cover letters to the market, often changing the cover letter on the same story from market to market as it comes back and goes out.

But now let me talk for a moment about the big issue here.

Fear.

Every writer gets ready to send out a manuscript and fear grips them. The fear is stupid, since no editor will take a gun and shoot you for sending a story in. And no editor can even remember the ton of stories that don’t work for them that they look at. In reality, there is nothing to fear, yet fear stops most writers. Fear of mistakes is the biggest fear.

“Oh, if I send them this story and it doesn’t fit, they will be mad at me.”

Of course no basis in reality at all. Editors often don’t know what they want to buy until they see it. And if you write a good enough story that holds their attention and they can make fit, they will.

So, there are hundreds and hundreds of markets out there, and more coming into the mix every day, and that’s just in the States. Add in overseas markets that pay well and you can keep a story in the mail for a decade or more without ever slowing down. The key is you must get over your fear, go search for the markets, and make the process fun. Don’t try to hurry rejection, just mail the story and forget it.

And most importantly, have fun.

Cheers, Dean

Follow Heinlein’s Rules every week. His rules are simple.

1) You must write.

2) You must finish what you write.

3) You must not rewrite unless to editorial demand.

4) You must mail your story to an editor who will pay you money.

5) You must keep it in the mail until someone buys it.

Simple rules, very simple rules. Yet I get a ton of comments about how the writer making the comment knows more than Heinlein about writing and needs to change these rules for themselves. And these comments always come from newer writers, mostly unsold writers.

What these writers are saying to me simply is this: My belief system does not allow me to follow Heinlein’s Rules.

Belief Systems. I call them “Myths.” They are very, very powerful things in all of us, especially when it comes to writing and the process around writing and even more the mailing and marketing of stories to editors.

Some of these simple, but wrong belief systems are:

“I need more practice. My work isn’t good enough yet to send to editors.”

“I need to polish my work before I dare send it out.”

“An editor will hate me if I write a bad story.”

…and so on and so on. Plug in your own personal myth or belief system into this discussion. But every one of them, without fail, are designed to make sure you don’t succeed, don’t write, rewrite to excess, and then don’t mail your work to editors.

Heinlein told you simply how to do it. Most long-term professional writers I know follow those rules and did follow those rules almost from the beginning. There are exceptions in short term professional writers with five or six books out, but none that I know of in long term careers.

So why are the five simple rules so difficult to follow. Easy answer. They all fly into the face of myths around publishing.

1) You must write. (Myth that this rule jumps right into the face of is the myth of being creative, being hit by the stroke of genius from the creative fairy. I must STRUGGLE for my art, make every story perfect, only write a page or maybe two per day to keep myself clean and pure and fresh. Crap, all crap. Long term professional writers sit down and write, when they feel bad, when they can’t think of a thing, when the process hurts, when they would rather be out in the sun. This is a job, a great job, but still a job.)

2) You must finish what you write. (This rule hits in just about every story when the brain switches over in the middle of the story to “I’m writing crap, what’s the point, I should just stop this pile of crap and move to something new and better. This will never sell. It’s just stupid.” Well, professional writers have learned to just power through the mind issue, which never goes away and is with us all every project. We finish what we write because that’s what we do.)

3) You must never rewrite unless to editorial demand. (This smacks right into the biggest myth of all. Long term professional writers do a clean-up run-through of a manuscript to fix details and such, do a spelling draft and mail it. Understanding how the creative side of your brain works vs. the critical side of your brain helps with getting past this myth. But every beginning writer I know rewrites their manuscripts to death and never sell. Agents take young writers and force them to rewrite a manuscript until the voice is gone. Workshops tell you how to “fix” a story so that you end up writing to group think and we all know how that kills anything original, dangerous, and voice-filled, which is what editors are looking for. I could write a hundred posts about this myth and you beginning writers would still never believe me. Your fifth grade English teacher is just too deep in there, along with your college profs. But another way to get around this is to find out how long it took a favorite writer of old, before this myth gained hold, to write something. For example, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol overnight to hit a magazine deadline. Learning stuff like that helps.)

4) You must mail what you write to an editor who will buy it. (Not an agent, agents don’t write checks. And this rule hits the fear myth the hardest. I wrote crap, I didn’t even “polish” it, how could I send this out to an editor? The editor will hate me. I will ruin my career (when you don’t have a career because you never mail anything) and so on. If you follow #3 on the rules, this one really hits home hard into the myth world and stops some great writers.

5) You must keep your story in the mail until someone buys it. (This hits the “rejection myth” really hard. Some editor bounced my story, so it must be flawed and I had better look at it and rewrite it to “fix” it. No, never look back. If you follow Heinlein’s Rules, you are not going to rewrite it anyhow, so why look at it again. Just mail it to another editor. Fantastically hard to do at times because it hits the “what’s the point” button in all of us after five or six rejections. Following Heinlein’s Rules and never looking back or rewriting, I sold a story on the 34th time out in the middle 1980’s and got 10 cents per word for it.

So, one more post on Heinlein’s Rules because of a few private e-mails and a workshop coming up this week with Sheila Williams of Asimov’s. She and Kris and I are going to be going over stories together for this workshop, helping authors with craft issues and so on. But what I am noticing so far is that some of the stories have been rewritten into mush. It’s always easy to tell when all voice just has vanished from a manuscript.

Voice is something you can’t see as an author and what you get rid of in rewriting.

The writers coming don’t have problems with finishing manuscripts, and they are all great professional level writers who are putting their work on the line to learn. It’s going to be an interesting week. And a fun one, that’s for sure.

Cheers, Dean

Just as with school starting back, publishing sort of “starts” back up this Tuesday. I always look at the day after Labor Day as the first day of the new publishing year.

Huh? (I could hear that all over the place. <g>)

To save myself even more spam, let me back up for a little history. Back in the early days of publishing in New York, before air conditioning, editors, publishers, and just about everyone else tried to avoid the hot days. I was in some of those older offices and I don’t blame them at all. And, of course, summer is the time for family vacations, as it should be. That hasn’t changed.

So fast forward to modern times. Much of New York publishing goes to a four day week in the summer. (Left over from the old days.) Add on top of that vacations and conventions and BEA and everything else, and there is not a lot of office time.

Then add on top of that the fact that it takes an army these days to buy a book, from editor to sales to publisher to art. All are involved in buying a book, and they all take vacations or conventions at different times, so it is almost impossible to get everyone to sign off on a project. So very little gets bought in August. If you don’t believe me, just go back and look at the daily listings on Publisher’s Marketplace this last month. Sure, some stuff gets through, but not like in the fall or winter or spring.

Now, in my opinion, there is nothing at all wrong with this. It is just a fact of the business and living in New York and family and vacations. But it does make September interesting.  Suddenly everyone is back in the office at once, rested and mostly ready to work. Bestsellers and the biggest fires get worked on first, which takes up much of the first week or two of September, but starting the middle of the month, watch the flood.

As a work-for-hire writer who gets hired to do books a great deal, I love this time of year. I often get hired to do ghosting books when an author, after a long summer, suddenly tells the publisher they won’t make it. Or I get hired to fill holes in schedules with books that need to be done quickly. Or I just get hired for new projects that are finally making it through the process.

Yes, the excitement of a new season is almost upon us, a new year of publishing is out ahead, with who-knows what projects.

And on the home front, we are just one month from the first Master Writing Class in over three years arriving here to stay for two weeks. I love the master classes, since even though I am teaching them, I learn a ton from the great writers attending. I love the excitement of them and the challenge.

So, sitting here on Labor Day evening, looking out ahead, I’m excited for the coming new year in publishing. I plan on writing a ton. It’s going to be a blast.

Cheers, Dean

Okay, as promised, this is a short summary of my opinion about the value of going to a convention or a writer’s conference.

First off, a definition of the difference. A convention in my language means a gathering such as the World Science Fiction Convention, or BoucherCon, which is the World Mystery Convention. Conventions are attended by fans, by writers, by readers, book dealers, and many others. There are thousands of these types of conventions ranging down the scale of size around the world every year. If you are a well published writer at these conventions, you do book signings and are on panels.

A conference for this discussion is a gathering of writers, editors, agents only. RWA Nationals is the largest of these and very educational focused on the writing business, both in and out of the romance genre. But there are thousands of these around the world every year as well.

Kris and I used to go to a wonderful writer’s conference in New Mexico before it folded its tent. We then were invited for years to a conference in Vancouver B.C. until I said something that pissed off the new people running it. Last year, and upcoming this January, Kris and I will be attending another wonderful small writer’s conference in Cocoa Beach, Florida in January. As you might guess, we are pretty selective on which writer’s conference we attend.

So, to the value of attending.

For professional writers of any age, any level, you flat must get out to conferences. And if you are working tightly inside of one genre, you also need to hit one or two of the conventions in that genre. You must get out and meet the editors. That simple. But there is another reason for my opinion on this. Young writers, and older farts like me, must get out and learn.

Let me say this clearly right here: The learning never stops, no matter how many books you have published or how much you think you know it all.

You can only learn so much reading books, reading blogs, going to your local writer’s group. Kris and I offer workshops for young professionals to help them learn how to jump to the next level, but going to conferences is also a highly intense learning experience. Not only do you get face time with editors at appointments, but there is a ton of paneling you can go to where people talk about subjects you might need to know about.

Often in this business it is one tiny piece of advice, often tossed off by a speaker, that hits a bell, jumps you forward and into selling regularly. And unless you put yourself into the position of getting that tiny piece of advice, you will never know and struggle alone, maybe eventually giving up.

Saying you can’t afford to travel to learn in this modern world of writing is like saying you want to be a lawyer but just can’t afford to go to law school. You have to pay the price for your craft. Part of that price is sitting alone in a room and practicing hour after hour, day after day, but part of that price is getting out and learning from people farther down the road than you are.

Now, a caution about both conferences and conventions. The speakers are sometimes a person no father down the road than you are, or a person who is just flat giving bad advice. You must go in with your bull-sh*t meter running at full speed, watch the speaker bios, and maybe even ask when the writer broke into the field to figure out if the advice is old or modern advice. For example, this year in Denver at the World Science Fiction Convention, the person doing the programming thought for some strange reason that they needed to fill the panels with Denver people. So the older pros were often shuttled to the back or just talked over by younger people with no credits who happened to live in the area. Kris and I had two panels the entire five days. Yeah, silly, but part of the problem.

At writer’s conferences, there are all kind of scam artists as well working the crowds. So very large doses of caution are needed in which information you take or leave.

Kris and I go to conventions for a number of reasons. One, we want to see old friends, both writers and editors, who we seldom see except at conventions and conferences. Second, we want to learn. For example, I sat in a fantastic panel given by Melinda Snodgrass, the novelist and Hollywood writer. She was talking about plotting and I learned a bunch, in fact regretting I didn’t have my notebook with me at the time to take notes. I learned a ton as well talking with old friends, listening how they were handling different business decisions, getting advice on different things. I spent five days in Denver and learned a ton.

I have edited, been a publisher, and have over ninety novels sold, and I went to Denver to keep learning.

The learning never stops. I tend to go out to three events per year outside my local area. And without fail, every year I get the tapes from RWA Nationals and listen to much of it. It was eleven years since I had been to a World Science Fiction Convention, but that does not mean in those eleven years I had just sat home. Nope, I had been out all the time at difference conferences and other genre conventions. Learning.

You want to be a professional fiction writer, pay the price and get out there and learn. You never get good enough, you never know everything about this business, and this business is always changing just ahead of you. You must go out to learn, and trust me, that’s part of the fun of this business.

Cheers,

Dean