Overcoming the rejection spiral

No sooner had I received a nice little cheque from Amazon for sales of "In Her Mothers' Shoes" and was thinking all was well with my writing world, along comes a double whammy: not one but two rejections in just over a week. Applications for two mid-career writers' awards had both come to naught. Of minor consolation was that I had been short-listed along with some very illustrious writers for one of the awards - so illustrious in fact that I knew I was unlikely to win. But just the same, rejection, when it comes, hits you hard. 
But then, with timing that looks almost like karma, I came across a link to a restorative piece by Rose Tremain about how over the years she had plenty of time to perfect the art of not winning a prize. Written a couple of weeks ago when she didn't win a prize for her novel about Merivel, the piece described how she has learned to frame her smile at awards ceremonies for the moment she learned someone else had won, and how she tried to console herself that the book itself should be all the solace she needs: "It's still there, after all. It hasn't even suffered the wounding that can sometimes be inflicted by critics. It has just "not won". It has almost won, but not quite. It is evidently vain to see this as a catastrophe.Some measure of depression, however, almost always creeps in. A "non-win" is of course a loss." 
You can find it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/08/art-of-not-winning-literary-prizes
About the same time, I came across a passage in a book of Kate Granville's which was equally timely and made me, for the time being, abandon thoughts of giving up writing forever and bring the persistence to bear that I am so well known for: I never give up.
Like Kate Granville, who was amazingly persistent, it's going to mean a lot of rewriting. Hopefully also like Kate Granville, it will result in a much better next novel. 

Publicising your book - how far do you go?

The lengths an author will go to to have the front cover of her book published in one of the country's top magazines... This is from the current issue of NZ Listener magazine:

October 27-November 2 Issue 3781

COVER STORY
The Secrets of e-Book Success

Felicity Price and Rebecca Macfie report on e-books and how they are revolutionising the literary world, with advantages for both readers and writers. Also in this issue, Carroll du Chateau reports on New Zealand’s first Social Entrepreneurs School and how it is helping grass-roots people build businesses out of their ideas and passion; and Diana Wichtel talks with Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville who says he hasn’t let period-drama fame go to his head.

Last month I wrote a story about e-books and self-publishing - surprise! - and it was published in the NZ Listener for this week's edition. It included this piece on self publishing:

Print is still prized above digital

Despite the rapid rise in e-book popularity and the rush to self-publish online, every author I’ve come across still prefers to see their book in printed form, to have and to hold, to bury their nose inside the fold and inhale that wonderful combination of new paper and printer’s ink.

In July, I published “In Her Mothers’ Shoes” – a novel about the adoption triangle and mother-daughter relationships – up on Amazon Kindle as an e-book. But I couldn’t quite come to terms with not having a real book. When a growing number of people said they couldn’t access it because they didn’t have an e-reader, in August I had it printed as well.

As an e-book, it joins the one million others apparently published for the first time in the last year alone, along with the 20 million e-books available online worldwide, many of them classics scanned and available free, many more on sale for under $5.

That’s the expectation we have of the internet – most stuff is free or extremely cheap. Which begs the question: how can readers expect to receive a quality product when it’s written by amateurs with little or no editing and none of the quality control a professional publishing house would impose?

The answer is simple: the market decides. Currently, the market is deciding it wants paranormal and erotic fiction and it doesn’t care if it’s not terribly well written. And the market is coming full circle. Authors of this hugely popular stuff, who couldn’t get their books published a few years ago and self-published online instead, are now being offered eye-wateringly lucrative publishing contracts by traditional publishers so they can sell the printed version in the high street bookstores.

Increasingly, established authors like me are learning not only how to get your creative masterpiece into a professional-looking e-readable book form with an attractive cover, but how to price it and then promote it, so it sells more than the usual 100.

Self-publishing has become a huge industry, with hundreds of companies offering services to design and publish your book. My initial foray has so far been limited to Amazon Kindle – it offers special deals for short-term exclusivity, it covers the majority of the e-book market, it already has my last three books listed, and Amazon makes the experience (which is full of pitfalls and complexities) comparatively easy.

Amazon also offers a service called CreateSpace that allows you to self-publish your book in printed form and buy as many copies as you want, complete with barcode and glossy colour cover.

Photo Caption: Rejected by my publisher, “In Her Mothers’ Shoes” is now on Amazon and in bookshops. It tells the fictional story of two mothers – my teenage birth mother who never even got to see me let alone hold me before I was taken away for adoption, and my adoptive mother who had waited for a baby to call her own for over ten years of marriage. And it traces the adoptive child’s constant need to fit in, to find a sense of belonging.