Okay, I have a confession to make.  Cinderella is my very favorite fairytale.  Mind you, this might be written into women, because Patricia Wentworth once said that if you wrote a Cinderella story you couldn’t go wrong.  And she wrote it a lot of times.  Though even PW improved on the formula.  Her Cinderellas do stuff rather than just suffer nobly and then get everything handed to them on a plate.

The original Cinderella brought her troubles on herself, mind.  My mom had a book a relative had given her, which was about a hundred years old when she got it in the forties.  It had the beginning of the story, in which the evil (Future) stepmother cozens up to the kid because the father won’t pay any attention to her.  And the little girl keeps telling her father to marry the nice neighbor, until he – who is hunting mad – tells her that he’ll marry her when the pockets of his leather jacket wear out.  So Cindy (coaxed by the evil one) puts salt in his pockets, and then calls him on his promise. 

This actually explains how the woman gets to abuse Cindy, since Cindy’s father is a totally detached parent, more interested in hunting and riding than in the family.

But in the version most people heard, it’s all about Cindy being a noble suffering victim.  It merged with the whole “passing the tests of the gods” thing and then being wafted up in a magical chariot to Elysium or the fairytale equivalent, without having to move a pinky.

Unfortunately that’s the version most writers have taken as the plot to their writing careers.  They’ll endure the noble suffering, working for nothing in garrets, or at least in the back room before/after their day job, and stealing hours from sleep or fun.  And then, they’ll have passed enough tests and sudden the sky will open, and angels will sing: Yes, you are chosen.  Come up and be one of us.

I once expected the same.  Surely I’d suffered enough, worked enough, studied enough.  Surely my first published book would be a bestseller, right?  This was encouraged when they decided the very first book would be hard cover.

I was an idiot, see?  I knew nothing about the inner workings of the publishing house.  What happened is that I’d sold the book on spec, and they expected it to be fun low list fantasy.  Instead, because of my excellent education™ I turned in a book with all the marks of Literary Fantasy.  (This is not the same as great literature, “literary” in the publishing market is a genre.  The markings are allusions and having a higher level vocabulary.  Also, it tends towards the grey goo, though I didn’t do that.  Well, maybe the second book.)

This did not as I expected, move the book from low list to high.  High list is something else and it’s based on their ability to SELL the book – it has to do with the author’s “profile” (i.e. does the author have a ready-made following?  Like, say, a TV star), or is the author a very young and beautiful female? (I wasn’t bad.  But I was 33 and overweight and had kids and didn’t want to tour.)  Or does the book have tons of explicit sex AND is the writer a young and beautiful female?  Or, did the writer go to school with the editor?  (No this doesn’t impact the ability to sell the book, but it does seem to make you high list.  Go figure.)  Or even “does the writer have private wealth and the ability to publicize the book?”

Instead, it moved the book niche.  I.e. they no longer expected to sell it to the great unwashed.  Instead, they were going to make it a prestige thing, and aim to the people who read “Literary Fantasy” – all 1200 or so of them.

This meant bringing me out in hard cover, which I – of course – misread.

So, you see, I had the illusions too.

I lost them rather rapidly in the aftermath of that crash, worsened by the fact that the book came out right after nine eleven.  Mind you, it still outsold expectations for a literary fantasy.  (No?  Well, it sold more than the print run, so by definition it outsold expectations.)  But now the house had pegged me as lit. and knew that never went blockbuster, so they tried to fire me.  That didn’t work because … because I don’t do hints and suggestions well.

In the process I learned several things, including how to stay afloat while the Titanic of publishing was sinking.

And this is where we are.  The Titanic has hit the iceberg full speed ahead.  There aren’t NEARLY enough life boats, and people are not being very nice about letting women and children (aka, the dahlings, or the people the houses treated very well compared to how they sell) into the lifeboats there are.

Some people like me have – unwarrantedly in the dahlings’ opinion – snagged a seat in the lifeboats and are quite happy with it, but we’re aware that it’s going to be a long night’s wait and it would be good to have something on the side, like some of that booze the guy on top of the piano is guzzling.  And the drag of the ship might take our boat under, so we’re trying to have a backup plan.

Or to put it another way – traditional publishing was a mess when I came in.  It had actually already hit the iceberg (i.e. it was already fatally wounded) but people weren’t aware of it, and were still going on like the model could endure forever – until the water in the hold got too much to deny.  Or in other words, until e-books came in and showed the fatal flaws in the “we push from the publisher to mega bookstores that stock according to the decisions of people who never read the books and over a tri-state area” model.

From the position I was in when I was bought, I couldn’t have made high list by doing ANYTHING to the book they bought.  I could have turned in the best, funniest, most accessible book and still wouldn’t make high list.

The only way I could have made it from low list to high list was to make myself special (as much as it annoyed me, yes, had I had it in me to write a “biography” like Rigoberta Menchu, I would have catapulted high list, because I’d have become “politically sexy” for NYC) or to be involved in something spectacular and worthy of news nationwide.  Say if I’d dropped down a canyon and it took a month to rescue me.  Or been in a reality show.  Whatever.  The point is, it had nothing to do with the book or my writing ability, because that wasn’t how traditional publishers picked whom they’d push.

Having lost the plot in the mergers of the eighties, publishing houses were no longer run by people who loved books.  They were run by the executives of multinationals.

To the extent these people understand entertainment they understand HOLLYWOOD.  Which is why they behave like Hollywood.  You have to be of the demographic they’re targeting.  (Being born in the sixties, I spent my twenties being told I had to be older, to sell to the boomers, and then my thirties being told I was too old, because teh hawt was the boomer’s kids who was the “next big buying demographic.)  You also should be pretty (G-d help me if I know why.  My favorite living author bears a disturbing resemblance to the apes he loves.)  You should have money, and travel in the right set and have the right credentials.  (Does any of you know where Pratchett graduated from?  Or even if he did?  I don’t.)

Anyway, so when I came in my best bet was to publish one or two books lowlist and then disappear forever.  That’s what happened to most authors who came in as I did. 

But what if you wrote a book people really liked?

No matter.  My friend Rebecca Lickiss had (I think) three reprints on her second book, Never After.  She sold 21k copies of that book, which for a low list mass market paperback is amazing and was at the time.  She also was a Sci Fi book club selection.  What did it get her?  She never got bought again.  Why not, you say?  Because they didn’t know what to do with her.  They’d pegged her as low list.  She wasn’t writing the politically-charged, hyper-politically-correct stuff they thought SHOULD be high list.  (They did ask her for a “big” book but despite my coaxing, she either couldn’t understand or couldn’t stomach what they wanted.  So  they didn’t take what she sent in.)  And she’d burst the bounds of low list.  So they didn’t know what to do with her, and put her aside.

I somehow – mostly through being really stubborn – beat the odds and survived s a midlister, a position that didn’t even exist when I broke in.

I seem to be doing what a midlister used to do too, and moving up the list in incremental steps.  Because I’m speshiul.  No, mostly because I’m in Baen, which still allows the old model to flourish.

BUT other than Baen – and yes, Baen has limited slots and publishes only one genre, and prefers plot-oriented books – the publishing establishment has only gotten worse.

I’m here to tell you, (All you Cindies) that there isn’t a gold plated coach to take you to the ball, and that the mice will remain mice.

I’m here to tell you that the publishing houses are STILL trying to make do with the push model, except that on top of that, the average advance is now three thousand, and the average book number before being dropped is one.  Yep.  One.

On the other hand, they will swoop anyone who does well enough in indie and buy them, and make them high list.  Because the person has proven they can sell.

For those few high listers – some caught from indie, some just the usual dahlings for the usual flawed reasons – they will pull all the stops.  But for the run of the mill author they bring in?

You will get a stock cover – don’t believe me?  Go look at dreamstime and you’ll find the covers of most romances, at least. This is the reason for the “symbol” cover in fantasy and sf, too.  It reduces the need for coherence between cover and plot.

Also, go to any convention and talk to the just-sold-nothing-special.  Those people are having to promote, push, etc. as much as any indie.

The time when you sold to a traditional publisher and suddenly, Puff, you were in every bookstore in the country are long gone.  (I did tell you of the year I had six books come out, Berkley and Bantam, and not ONE of them was on bookstore shelves in Colorado, right?)

So… what are your options?  Well…

You can go indie and make a stab at one of those high slots.  Only be careful, because mainstream has been known to bury some indie successes, through just being themselves.  And read that contract carefully.  There’s an awful lot of salt in the pockets, if you know what I mean.

But, you say, you want to be on store shelves.  And you want to have a cover designed by a professional, and you—

Yes, I want a pony too.

Look, you can get there, if you want to, but it’s not as easy as having a magic wand waved over you, and voila you’re a princess.

Part of this is an author’s dream.  Part of the success of indie is to write A REALLY GOOD BOOK.  This being defined as a book people want to read. 

If my friend Becky had had the sort of success with her second book in indie that she had in traditional, not only would she be about 90k richer, but she would have built her name for the next book, and the next, and the next.

Part of it, though is it can’t be just one book.  It has to be books at regular intervals.  And some will still inexplicably sink without a trace.

What indie does in a way is restore the old mid list path.  You work and build with each book, and you become a bestseller – eventually.

But that’s how life works.  Life is not a Cinderella story.

Yes, you’ll have to learn to do covers.  Yes, despite everything you hear, cover designers who UNDERSTAND what you want are not easy to find, and cover artists don’t work for nothing.  So in the end, a lot of your stuff will use stock, and you’ll learn the art of design by doing.

But in the end – if you work hard and persevere – what you’ll have is a career and not a false glimmering shell that dissolves at midnight.