Susanna Fraser is the author of the delightful The Sergeant’s Lady, which is her first novel. Her hilarious website is here, which has gotten her attention from all over the place. She also has a much more traditional blog, and she is quite active on Facebook.

~*~

When Tia invited me to be a guest at Debuts & Reviews, she suggested I talk about my journey to “The Call” and what I learned along the way.  I’m happy to do so, even though that journey took some scenic routes I never expected when I first started writing.

I wrote my first draft of the manuscript that became The Sergeant’s Lady back in 2005, and I loved writing it.  It was my second manuscript, so I had the confidence of knowing I could finish a book to spur me forward.  The research fascinated me, especially building a backstory for Will to cover every step of his army career before he met Anna.  And most of all I loved Will and Anna as characters, and I knew I had something special in them and their story.

I was still new enough to writing to think that would be enough, and that selling The Sergeant’s Lady would be easy despite the unusual setting and hero.  Surely I wasn’t the only one craving something different, and surely at least one editor out there would feel the same way.

I tried.  I really did.  I found an agent in 2006, and she submitted the manuscript extensively to print publishers.  I got a lot of compliments on my writing, a lot of comments, positive and negative, on how different the story was…and nothing but refusals on the manuscript.

Once The Sergeant’s Lady finished making the rounds, I concluded that maybe I wasn’t meant to be a romance writer after all.  I set the manuscript I’d written in 2006 aside.  (You’ll get to see it in 2011 if you’re interested; it’s called A Marriage of Inconvenience, and it’s a Sergeant’s Lady prequel with Anna’s brother James as the hero.)  My agent and I parted ways amicably, and I spent 2007-09 working on an alternative history manuscript.

That was my biggest mistake on the journey to publication, by the way.  Not switching genres–I love fantasy and romance equally, and I hope to be published in both someday.  But sticking with a book through three years and four major drafts was a wrongheaded.  I was so convinced that the alternative history was the best idea I’d ever have in my life, and also that I had to sell that story to prove I wasn’t a failure and was meant to be a writer after all.  Selling the next story wasn’t good enough, and nor was going back to my romances and trying to sell them, even though I could see that the historical market was shifting and there might be a home for stories that had been too different to sell just a few years before.  I’m only a year removed from that mentality, but I can’t explain it.  I had crazy ideas then.  I’m better now.

It’s too late for me to get those years back, and I don’t regret everything about them.  I learned a lot trying to write that book, among other things that I enjoy writing the character type the TV Tropes Wiki calls the Four-Star Badass (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourStarBadass).  That book’s alternative-universe Wellington may never see the light of day, but there will be others like him.  Oh my, yes, there will be others like him, and if I do my job right, you’ll think they’re sexy.

But still.  Don’t make my mistake.  Know when to cut your losses.  One serious, start-over-from-scratch rewrite is the most you want to do for any single story.  If it’s still not right, start something else.  That story will still be there if you decide to go back to it later.  And it’s not the only good idea you’ll ever have.  Trust me.  I’m full of ideas now that I’m no longer so stubbornly sure I’ve already found The Only One.

Anyway.  Fast-forward to early 2010.  By then I was trying to sell my alternative history, but getting rejection letters with head-spinning speed.  Discouraged and not even sure what to write next, since the plan had been to SELL the alternative history and get right to work on its sequel, I pulled out The Sergeant’s Lady and re-read it.

And I realized that it was good. It’d been long enough since I’d written it that it was almost like reading someone else’s book–and I couldn’t put it down.  So I decided to give it one more chance.

I didn’t want to submit it to any editors who’d already read it, but there were a few houses my agent hadn’t submitted to back in 2006–including the ones that didn’t exist yet, like Carina.  Back then I never would’ve considered an e-publisher.  I’d heard too many stories of authors getting burned by fly-by-night publishers, and besides, the market only seemed viable for erotic stories.

But four years is forever in technological terms, and by 2009 I had a Kindle myself, plus a good sense of which companies were viable and which seemed dodgy.  Carina, with Harlequin’s backing, struck me as the best choice of all, so I submitted to them first.

Six months later, here I am.  Published in the genre I thought would never want me, with the book I’d given up on.  This industry will take you on a strange journey if you’ll let it.

~*~

Susanna will be hanging around if you have any comments or questions. I know I have a few, which I’ll post in the comments to get things started.

For the Love of Pete, Don’t Mix Your Genres;
Or… The New York Times Book Review Hates YOU, but I Don’t;
Or… Why Where Your Book Gets Shelved Determines Your Intelligence, Work-Ethic and Value to Society

- Read Part 1 at SFSignal -

Part 2: The New York Times Book Review Hates YOU, But I Don’t.

We have just seen how we, the prejudiced book-buyers, are at least partially to blame for the state of the publishing industry. But why are we so prejudiced in the first place? Simple, we have been taught to be prejudiced! By whom, you may ask? Well, by everyone, of course. As readers we tell each other that the greatest strength of all, the most important thing to be, is critical – and by this we almost always mean deeply, embarrassingly prejudiced. I don’t know that we mean to do it. But we do. We take sides. EVERYONE takes sides – including both publishers and reviewers. I’m not sure why publishers do it. I have some theories, but nothing that makes sense from a business perspective. As for reviewers, they do it because they are human beings, and so labor under a host of imperatives and misconceptions that arise both as a result of the needs of their peculiar business and their prejudicial upbringing as readers.

Let’s start (and more or less end) with the BIG reviewers, publications like The New York Times Book Review (I choose that rag because it’s my hometown nest of vipers, and because it’s a good representative, not because they are the only such publication), henceforth to be called the NYTBR for laziness reasons. What a great many of us (maybe all of us) know is that the NYTBR is deeply conservative in their absolute fealty to that aforementioned monolith, ‘literary’ fiction. They throw a bone to the imaginative types every once in a while – likely to keep us from kicking their doors down – but at heart they are deeply prejudiced against fantasy, sci-fi, horror, YA, romance and all the rest of the so-called ‘genres.’

Don’t believe me? Just for fun, let’s see what the NYTBR thought of The Name of the Wind, a book that was all the buzz of the fantasy world just a couple years ago. It won awards, was almost universally praised by readers and online reviewers, and given all sorts of stars by pre-publication reviews like Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. So what did the NYTBR think? Hmmm… You know, they don’t seem to have reviewed that book. It was on their best-seller list… but no review. Still, they can’t review EVERY book. Even good ones have to get left off once in a while. So let’s make it easier on the poor NYTBR. I know; I’ll link to their very best review for any book by Janny Wurts. She’s got so many books. Surely they’ve reviewed at least… What’s that? Not even one review? But she’s an almost universally admired fantasist! Obviously I’m being too tricky. Let’s try a really easy one. Let’s look for the NYTBR of the first Harry Potter novel. Hooray! We found a genre novel that the NYTBR seems to have found worthy of reviewing! http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/14/books/children-s-books-199338.html I feel good about this. I really do. Maybe the NYTBR isn’t quite as prejudiced as I thought.

But wait, Harry Potter debuted in this country in October of 1998, and they didn’t review it until February of 1999, after it was already a huge success overseas, winning awards by the bushel, and vacuuming up piles of cash. You don’t think the old gray girl printed a review so that she wouldn’t seem totally out of touch? I mean really, how rare is it to have a book four months old getting reviewed by the NYTBR? It must happen all the time, right? No? But not never, surely. Only for books they somehow missed the first time around? But how in the name of Thor did they miss Harry? He was GREAT! Everyone knows that now. Even they know it NOW, it seems. So how did they miss it back in October of 1998?

The answer, of course, is that Harry Potter is a part of two genres that the NYTBR is prejudiced against, namely fantasy and YA. And the NYTBR is not alone. The simple fact is that ‘genre’ work is ghettoized by big print media. It’s not that there’s a lack of excellent science fiction, YA, romance, fantasy or horror being published – I think even the editors of the NYTBR would agree that there most assuredly is – its just that those types of works are not really eligible for those types of big national reviews. The exception, of course, being ‘genre’ works by established ‘literary’ stars like Cormac McCarthy. The NYTBR loved The Road, and well they should. I loved it myself. It was probably no worse than the fourth or fifth best post-apocalyptic novel I have read (none of the others won Pulitzers, however). But let’s face facts, it is a sci-fi novel as sure as anything.

So what’s wrong with big print media focusing on ‘literary’ fiction? Remember the accusations our friend Sonya Chung made? It’s so much easier to be a writer of ‘imaginative’ fiction, right? The ‘literary’ types need their big print reviews or else they’d dry up and blow away. Is this correct?

Let’s be honest, fantasy readers are not one whit more likely to pick up a fantasy novel by a writer they have never heard of than your ‘literary’ type is to pick up a novel by a writer she has never heard of, regardless of the quality of the book. But without a big voice backing them, the kind only big print media has, how exactly is the average reader supposed to hear about new books and new writers in the realm of imaginative fiction? The internet does huge service in that regard (thank god), but it’s a crapshoot at best. Even the most visited sites have only a fraction of the readership of the NYTBR, and are more often than not staffed by a tiny group of dedicated reviewers, nowhere near the numbers necessary to give each and every book a shot. The one way in which internet reviewers truly have it over big print media is that they for the most part do what they do for love, and so are not as irreparably bound in by prejudice as the NYTBR and its ilk. Sure they have specialties, but as they are more like Mom and Pop enterprises there are no corporate sponsors who will cry if they decide to go outside their normal milieu.

Well, now THAT is a horrendous accusation! Am I suggesting that big print media is somehow bought? That they are beholden to some faceless corporate sponsor? I am not. The corporate sponsors are anything but faceless. You need only get a copy of any of those big reviews and glance at the advertisers to get a taste for who really owns those publications. So who are these advertisers? I bet you already guessed it! The publishers themselves.

If you’re like me, the whole sickening nature of these big print reviews is starting to come into focus. But there is one more major player – as usual, the most major player – the identification of which will go that much farther toward explaining why the NYTBR hates You. And that is $$$$$$.

I am going to admit something which may surprise some of you. I used to work in publishing. I worked for an agent. It was a good job, with lots of free books, an inside view of the industry, and the opportunity to converse with loads of talented, dedicated people who all cared about the same sorts of things I cared about (and still do). But one of the things I learned while working at the agency is that book advances are not equal, and really confusing. And this is where the whole pot begins to bubble over.

You see, the bigger publishing houses pay huge advances to the ‘literary’ types. I can remember, all too often, high six-figure advances for first novels. FIRST NOVELS! Unless you’re hugely famous and a proven money-maker, you are not going to get that type of advance for any sort of ‘genre’ novel. But we don’t even need to use those huge six figure advances to see where the problem lies. Let’s imagine that our friend Sonya Chung (the ‘literary’ apologist we so enjoyed eviscerating above), got an advance of $20K for her forthcoming first novel (A lot of my genre friends are salivating, I know – and believe me, in the world of ‘literary’ fiction 20K is NOTHING). If she gets 10% (the standard royalty rate) of the sale price of every book sold at a cover price of $25, she would have to sell eight-thousand copies just to earn her advance (royalty rates do escalate as you sell more copies, but this is a good place to start). If we believe her rhetoric, that ‘literary’ books are so underappreciated and undersold, how in the name of heaven is she going to sell 8000 copies? And what if she has to sell enough to earn back $60K? Or more? How many books do those six figure advances have to sell? The mind boggles, and I think we can all agree that her publisher had better get busy making sure that we all hear about her book pronto!

Of course, that’s where the NYTBR comes in. They may not be willing to review books by relatively unknown fantasy writers like Patrick Rothfuss or Janny Wurts, but they review first novels by ‘literary’ types all the time! (A recent example: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/books/review/Thomas-t.html?ref=books) They have to! If they don’t constantly turn out a stream of information about the ‘literary’ newcomers, the publishers are going to go broke! And then who will buy ads in their publication?

The worst part about this is that, during the six years I spent working at the agency, there were only a handful of times when these ‘literary’ works actually managed to earn their advances. I won’t name names, but suffice to say that there are biggies in the field of ‘literary’ fiction who have likely never received a royalty check, and never expect to. Which means, undoubtedly, that the big ‘genre’ writers – folks like Dean Koontz, Nora Roberts and Dan Brown (the very writers Sonya Chung so damns) – as well as a whole army of struggling lesser-known imaginative writers, are in essence subsidizing the losses incurred by all those poor ‘literary’ types like Sonya Chung! And she has the gall to hate us?

You may ask yourself, why don’t the publishers simply stop giving out those huge advances to unknown, underperforming and underwhelming ‘literary’ writers? Then ‘literary’ fiction could take its rightful place as one genre among many; the NYTBR and its brethren could begin to review based on quality rather than prejudice; and as readers we could all hope that the cream of real literature might rise to the top, regardless of what color cow the milk came from. You know the strangest part? Holding back the huge advances would, in the long run, help the vast majority of the ‘literary’ writers as well, most of whom find themselves laboring under ever-growing records of low sales and losses, which even the publishers begin to see as odious (making future books that much more difficult to get published at all, regardless of quality. Remember this, oh hopeful writers, ALL failures are ultimately laid upon the head of the author!). It sounds so easy! So why don’t they just stop giving all those debilitating advances? Now that is a question I can not answer. In fact, no one can. No one knows the answer to that question. At any rate, don’t expect it to happen anytime soon. Nor should you expect the NYTBR to begin to see the light of openness, impartiality or artistic achievement in the ‘genres.’

So let’s all give a big hand to our master-mixologists, John DeNardo, Tia Nevitt and John Ottinger, as well as to all of their fellow philosophers of the fantastic, fun and imaginative, for keeping some tiny spark of hope alive for the new ‘genre’ writer. Without them, frankly, our side would be sunk.

And just to finish this topic off completely, keep in mind that there are ‘genres’ where the problems of prejudice and publicity are even more acute. Fantasy does pretty well for itself, all things considered. Think what would have happened in the present climate to some of our classics? JD Salinger died the other day. What do you think would have happened to his classic novel, The Catcher in the Rye, if it came out tomorrow, labeled and shelved as YA? What would have become of our poor friend Huck Finn, if he’d been published last year? Would the NYTBR give either Holden or Huck the time of day? You can bet your life that it would NOT.

This brings me at long last to that bit of advice I promised for all the up and coming writers hoping to make a first sale. I offer no writing tricks, only a word of warning about what to write if you hope to get published and sell a big pile of books . . .

- Read Part 3 and Official Comment Thread at Grasping for the Wind -

Links to Buy page at IndieBound

Justin was born in Boise, Idaho in 1974. He graduated from Boise State University with a degree in philosophy, and from Columbia University with an MFA in fiction. He is the author, most recently, of Year of the Horse, an all-ages fantasy-western that tells the story of sixteen-year-old Yen Tzu-lu, the child of Chinese immigrants and one of a band of treasure hunters brought together from every corner of the continent to recapture a stolen gold mine. Leading Tzu-Lu and his gang is the gunslinger Jack Straw, a figure who is as much legend as reality, as much magic as lead. Ultimately, this band of outsiders finds it must learn to live together, trust and care for one another. If they make it across a wild continent, they’ll be rich; if they don’t, they’ll surely be dead. Get your copy at Indiebound (why not support your local store?), BN.com, or Amazon.

Justin is roughly six feet tall, weighs somewhere around 185 pounds (often more, to his chagrin), has dark-brown hair and eyes, and suffers from near-sightedness, motion-sickness, and a tendency to get angry at airport personnel. His wife, Day Mitchell, a licensed master social worker, is trying to help him overcome this last item, but finds the going hard.

He can be contacted via justin-allen.com.

~*~

If you have comments or flames for Justin, he will be hanging out at Grasping for the Wind. Don’t leave them here unless you just want to talk to me.

Jennifer Estep is the author of the paranormal series, Bigtime. Three books were published in the Bigtime series, including Karma Girl, Hot Mama and Jinx. Now she’s changing gears with an extremely gritty urban fantasy about an assassin named Gin. The first novel, Spider’s Bite (which is available next week), received favorable advance reviews and Jennifer has just sold books four  and five in the Elemental Assassin series.

~*~

Greetings and salutations! First of all, I want to say thanks to Tia for having me back on the blog. Thanks so much, Tia!

So today, Tia asked me to talk a little bit about what it’s like to change genres as an author.

As some of you might know, my first three books – Karma Girl, Hot Mama, and Jinx – were part of my Bigtime series. The paranormal romance series was basically a comic book spoof, set in a city full of sexy superheroes, evil ubervillains, and smart, sassy gals looking for love.

But I have a new book – Spider’s Bite – coming out on Jan. 26. It’s the first book in my Elemental Assassin series and focuses on Gin Blanco, an assassin codenamed the Spider who runs a barbecue joint in her spare time. Spider’s Bite (and the Elemental Assassin series overall) is as dark and gritty and violent as the Bigtime series was goofy and campy and over-the-top.

Yep, I’ve gone from penning light, fluffy paranormal romances to writing dark, gritty urban fantasy books about an assassin. And you know what? I didn’t find it all that hard to switch genres.

I know a lot of writers struggle when they switch genres. They struggle with the voice, the characters, the setting, even the plot. So why didn’t I? Well, for one, paranormal romance and urban fantasy aren’t all that different. Authors cross over from one genre to the other all the time. I’m certainly not the first. It’s not like I went from writing sci-fi space operas to historical non-fiction. Now that would be a big leap.

But mainly, I think that the reason I found it so easy to switch gears is because the Bigtime series and the Elemental Assassin series have a lot of the same core elements in common. Both feature sassy, kick-butt heroines, a cool magic city/world, and lots of action/fight scenes. (I really love writing fight scenes.) Everything in the Elemental Assassin books is just dark, gritty, and bathed in shadows, instead of being dazzling, neon, and candy-coated like in the Bigtime books. I still think the Elemental Assassin books are a lot of fun, though, just in a darker, different way than the Bigtime books are.

I really didn’t approach writing Spider’s Bite that much differently than I did Karma Girl or any of the other Bigtime books. Once I created my gritty southern metropolis of Ashland and figured out what kind of magic/powers I wanted my heroine Gin Blanco to have, I could concentrate on giving her a really strong, tough voice and persona to match the dangerous world that she lives in. Once I got Gin squared away as a character, the rest of the book just flowed.

Now, of course, I know that some folks won’t like the switch. I’m fully prepared to get e-mails from readers who are disappointed by my change from light paranormal romance to gritty urban fantasy. But I had been wanting to write a darker story for a while, and Spider’s Bite gave me the chance to do that. Not to mention that the darker urban fantasies and paranormal romances are what seem to be especially popular with readers right now. I do hope that fans of my Bigtime series will give Spider’s Bite and the rest of the Elemental Assassin series a chance – especially since I think that I’ve done some of my best writing to date in them.

And I don’t want to stop at urban fantasy. I’d love to write a contemporary romance, a really elaborate heist book, an epic fantasy young adult, and even a western one day. Yeah, my muse is all over the place – and that’s just the way I like it.

What about you guys? Do you like it when an author switches genres? Why or why not? Share in the comments.

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As an added incentive to comment, Jennifer is giving a way a copy to a random commenter. This contest is open to residents of the United States and Canada.

Kelly Gay, author of The Better Part of Darkness

We’ve been following Kelly Gay‘s fledgling career since shortly after her sale was announced last summer, and she has appeared at Fantasy Debut in a series of guest posts on her milestones as an upcoming author. The first post was called “ Switching Gears” and was about going from query mode to contracted author mode. The second post was about signing that contract. And the third post was on revisions and copyedits. Tomorrow is release day for The Better Part of Darkness, so here she is with her last post as a pre-published author.

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It’s your intrepid, and slightly harried, debut author here. It’s been a while since my last ‘Milestone’ post, so we have a lot to talk about. We’ve covered what it’s like to switch gears from the aspiring writer mindset to that of working writer, getting the contract, as well as revisions and copy edits.

In the last few months, I’ve worked on book 2 revisions, held my first book in my hands, gained experienced in promotion, stressed over reviews, and am now biting my nails over the release. I’m not afraid to tell you that I turned a very nauseous shade of green when my editor told me that Amazon and B&N had started shipping their pre-orders.

So let’s start with 1) Revisions: Now that I’ve had some experience with revisions, I know I can handle the notes on book 2, though, the fact that I’m working on them in the midst of Book 1’s release is something new—some days are definitely harder than others when it comes to concentrating! 2) Holding my book for the first time: An incredible feeling, and, for me, a very quiet moment of affirmation. 3) Promotion: I’m getting the hang of it. I love interacting with readers and writers, but I never realized how time-consuming it would be. It has made me improve my time management skills, for sure. 4) Reviews, the topic of today’s post: Totally nerve wracking to consider, but also a necessary and vital part of the book industry. Without reviewers, without readers expressing their opinions, a lot of books would simply go unnoticed.

I hoped and prayed for months that my first review would be decent. If just one reader out there liked my book, then I could handle the rest. And when it came, I was griped with such dread and anticipation; it felt like I was standing on a bridge with a bungee cord about to jump. Thankfully that first one was pretty decent, and my relief, as you can imagine, was overwhelming.

Once the reviews start rolling in, they spawn a rush of emotions: hope, fear, dread, hesitation . . . I hold my breath, I tense up, preparing myself against the bad, and then I dive in and read like a speed demon. If it’s a good review, I go back and read it again, absorbing all the wonderful words. Good reviews are big, glowing, wonderful boosts in confidence, and I feel like I can accomplish anything.

But, with over a decade of writing and several manuscripts under my belt, I’ve had my share of harsh critiques and judge’s feedback, too. In some ways, harsh reviews are like harsh critiques only made public. And that’s where the real fear comes in. It’s public. It’s out there for all to see. And that is scary. When someone doesn’t like my work, whether it’s presented in a nice, gentle way or a malicious way, it still hurts on some level. Writing is so personal, how can it not hurt?

One of the keys to handling the not-so-great review is to realize I can’t do anything about the review, but I can control how long I let it affect me. It’s also great to have a support system of other writers that I trust. People I can rant with, commiserate with, and jump for joy with.

So, as the reviews come in, I’ll try to remember that it’s a subjective, creative medium. And like any art medium, some people will get it, some people will be baffled, some people will hate it with a passion, and some will love it so much they plaster the bathroom walls with my pages. (My parents need to redo their bathroom anyway).

~*~

As for me, it’s been a delight to follow Kelly from signing to publication! Best of luck, Kelly!