A Curmudgeonly Pontification on Editors and Self-Promotion

       I'm plenty old enough to be called a curmudgeon and I've occasionally written a post where I assume that appellation. A couple of observations have occurred to me lately that fall under that category.

      

Editors and Editing

 



Thanks to
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/editing.htm

       I'm probably the only person around who prefers to indulge in that tremendous no-no, the violation of which shocks and horrifies!  I prefer to edit my own books.

       I have recently encountered someone who knew her book needed editing, so she hired an editor and paid good money, and then everybody who reviewed the book talked about how poorly edited it was (including me).  I am not about to waste money for somebody to do what I can do better, and I have no desire to be patronized by somebody who just assumes that if you're looking for an editor, you yourself are an uneducated simpleton.   (To be fair, I should insert a disclaimer here: I realize that not all editors are like that.)

       I have a sufficient academic background in English and language that I think I know how to write English using correct grammar and usage.  And I certainly know how to look things up, not only in the dictionary but in other tools.  I was a librarian, for goodness sake!  And when I first started writing when I was 29, I had my mother right there.  She was an English teacher and she's the one who taught me most of what I know about grammar and usage.  She and I proofread my early writing together, in the proper way -- with one person following the manuscript and the other reading in a slow, detailed way -- one word at a time, with all the punctuation verbalized.  Somewhere along the line I was taught that method, but it doesn't seem to be something anybody knows about these days.

       Now my mother is gone and I don't have anybody to proofread with, and I'm aware that when you proofread by yourself, you can miss a lot of typos.  So I apologize if a few typos slip through, or possibly the occasional small grammatical error.  Still, I trust myself to catch, for example, misuses of  homophones like "horde" and "hoard," a couple of words I always check out in every book so I don't have the Shshi sending out a "hoard" to found a new fortress.

       I think the reason people need editors so badly (apart from dyslexia, which can't be helped) is inferior education (and also poor typing skills, but that's a different problem).  Where were they during their high school English language classes?  Off in some adolescent haze, I guess, because it was obvious they ain't never gonna have no use for what the teacher was trying to larn 'em.  I think that's always been true to a considerable extent.  I'm quite sure many people who sat in my mother's classes back in the '30s, '40s, and '50s didn't learn grammar any better than the kids do today.

 

Self-Promotion

 

Thanks to
http://jezebel.com/5738957/social-minefield-how-to-self-promote-without-being-a-jerk

       We indie authors beat our brains out trying to get people to buy our books.  I list all my special prices on Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook, Google+, and in special forums and listings. I post them on my blog and I get promos on websites like The Story Reading Ape (bless his furry hide!)  I've been interviewed, and I thank all those interviewers.   I belong to several book promo groups on Facebook and Google+.  You put your posts on those and immediately they sink like a stone in the sea. 

       So I've decided all this is based on a false premise:  that people are actually out there trolling all these sites, looking for books to gobble up in order to fill their cavernous maws that hunger for reading matter. 

       I don't think this is true at all -- I don't think anybody is looking for books to read.  I'm basing this on myself.  I admit I hardly ever pay any attention to the myriad of books posted on these sites (not cites, you notice).  That's probably a flaw -- I should pay more attention, especially if I want them to pay attention back.  First off, who has time to investigate every book that's just been published?  Secondly, most of these books are in genres I have absolutely no interest in.  Erotic romance? Forget it!  Vampires?  Likewise (I have read one or two with vampires).  Zombies?  tha'sask|>|| as my Shshi would say.  Paranormal in general?  Nope!  I realize that my interests and the books that I write are literary in style and trends don't attract me.  I've even quit reading most high fantasy (dragons and elves and magic don't seem to appeal much to me these days).  I read tons of it in the '70s and '80s, as well as a good bit of more traditional science fiction.  Ursula K. LeGuin was my favorite, however, and I think everybody realizes her stuff is pretty literary in tone -- carefully crafted, with deeply dimensioned characters.   That's what I like, and I hope that's what I write, whether it's laid in the real world of the future or on a distant planet.

       There are many books that I would like to read before I die and unfortunately most of them were written years ago -- standards that I never got around to reading earlier, like The Great Gatsby or The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende.  I cannot possibly check out every book that crops up on a promo listing no matter how much I want to support indie authors. When I do, sadly, the books often turn out to be a waste of time.  It's not only poor editing -- it's that the authors think they can toss off a book in a week or a month and publish it immediately and have a masterpiece that sells a million copies.  They need to write ... and write ... and write ... and put the manuscript away and let it cook and then go back to it months or years later after they've gained more knowledge and experience, and then judge if it was really any good.  Perspective -- authors need to gain perspective on their own works by coming to them as if they were new.  I have no intention of ever publishing anything I wrote in the first eight years of my writing life.  I rewrote it so many times that the beginning became nothing but a jumble.  I do have a couple of manuscripts from the late '70s or early '80s (the period around the writing of "The Blessing of Krozem," my free novelette on Smashwords) that I may resurrect someday, but much as I loved the really early stuff when I wrote it, I think it's consigned to oblivion.  Juvenilia, they call it -- only I was in my thirties at the time! 

       So I apologize if I cannot pay attention to every indie-published book out there, and I understand why mine get ignored.  If I don't like to read erotic romances, the writers of erotic romances surely don't want to read character studies of giant termite people.  But somebody out there does want to, and that's why I don't give up.  You just have to find your readership.  That is what is important, and probably the hardest thing you have to do!