What editor's do

Most of the editing I do at SFeditor.ca is necessarily confidential, so I obviously can't post examples on my blog. So I am always pleased when I stumble across examples of typical editing that authors post to illustrate the process. Award-winning Canadian YA author, Arthur Slade, has two excellent posts that illustrate typical interactions with one's editor. Whoever these editors are, their style is pretty similar to my own, though it never occurred to me until I saw the second post here that one could upload photos to the "comments" section.

Typical page of editor's markup on a 'finished' manuscript:
See My Editor Tear My Work to Shreds

and

My Editor Says These Two Words I Use Make Kitties Cry

Slade, if you are not already familiar with his work, is a fabulous writer. I often assign his novel "Tribes" in my education classes, for example, but all his series are wonderful.

Editor Guest of Honour at When Words Collide / Canvention 36

I am deeply honoured to have been chosen as the Editor Guest of Honour for the When Words Collide Festival (Calgary), August 12-14, 2016; which is also that year's Canvention, the Canadian national SF&F convention at which the Aurora Awards are presented. Previous Editor GoHs at WWC have included Adrien Kerr (Editor of Commercial Fiction at Penguin Canada) and super literary agent, Sally Harding, so I feel I am in very distinguished company.

I have been Fan GoH at various conventions back in the 1980s and 90s, culminating in Fan Guest of Honour at the Worldcon, but this is the first time I've been invited as a pro Guest, so that's pretty special to me. I had always dreamed of being a pro GoH, though back in the 80s I assumed that it would be as a writer, not an editor. (But apparently, you have to actually finish your novel to qualify as an author guest.... as I have admitted many times, editing a novel is a lot easier than writing one.)

I find it fascinating how many of the fans I did zines with back in the 80s have subsequently gone on to become pros. We were just kind of goofing around, but I can count four with published novels, two who became editors, and one who became a prominent book designer. I can't help wondering if Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr will produce the same % of next generation authors....

Anyway, excited but a little intimidated by the opportunity--Sally Harding's GoH speech at this year's WWC was wonderful: funny, insightful, and uplifting. Tough act to follow!

I'll do my best.

When Words Collide Festival Report

When Words Collide (Calgary) convention was once again wildly successful, with great programming, wonderful Guest of Honour speeches, and 650 wonderful-to-meet-and-talk-with attendees. Small enough convention to feel 'intimate', but large and diverse enough that one constantly learn new things. The cross-genre format of WWC leads to a lot of cross-pollination. (For example, the launch of Sleuth at WWC this year, a new mystery magazine from the people who have put out On Spec SF&F magazine for the last 25 years. Would that have happened if there hadn't been a WWC to bring those folks together?

Five Rivers author, Susan Bohnet, reading from My Life as a Troll at WWC.

Highlights for me of 2015 edition were:

Robert Sawyer presentation: I've always made a point of getting to Rob's sessions and have heard him many times at various conventions over the years, but every time he manages to deliver something completely new and insightful. This time he talked about lessons learned over his 25 year career, and aside from some wonderful anecdotes, he drew out a half dozen extremely useful morals for any writer, including:

• Don’t try to write for everyone; write for that narrow section of the market for which you are their favorite author. The example he gave was that every writer's workshop tells you to avoid 'info dump'. But Rob's fans love information, so info dumps in Rob's writing is not a mistake, something he and his editor missed, but a requirement. (Kind of a revelation for me. It's not a bug, it's a feature! Sorry for ever doubting you man!)
• Avoid Parawriting Activities. Rob gave several examples of how writers get so wrapped up in being writers--volunteering for writing organizations, giving talks on writing, tweeting out writerly tweets--that they forget to write. You're a writer when you're writing; everything else is distraction. [I'll add the industry standard here is that writers should schedule 10% of their time for community development to give back, and to develop the community of readers necessary to sustain the industry (e.g., school readings.) I don't think Rob was talking about that (since he does more to help new writers than most people I know) but was saying not to get carried away.]
• Closely related, stay off line. Okay to tweet when one has a new book release, but otherwise it is a trap. Good advice, but like dieting, difficult to follow.
• Sawyer has done 350 TV and 350 radio interviews so far (and he noted that it was interesting both media were neck and neck here.) What publishers look for is someone who can get "off the book-page coverage". Appearing on book review page is not that helpful because nobody is actually reading that page. So, to get off the bookpage onto the news, you need to write about the hot topics so can be interviewed about that topic every time it comes up. The strategy obviously works for Sawyer, not sure it would work for me. It also helps if you have some journalistic/media background and a good voice like Rob.

He had more to say, but those were the highlights for me personally.

Marie Powell reading from Hawk at Random Readings session.

Mark Leslie Lefebvre Director of Kobo's Writing Life program: Again, I always seek out his sessions because he has access to current insider data on publishing trends. Where the rest of us try to guess what's hot, he can tell you down to the nickel (or yen, or Euro) what's selling and what's not; how different price points affect sales; whether "free first in series" promotions work; where books sell—with the very clear message that we have to stop just looking to the US in a global market; and so on. I also greatly appreciate his honesty in weighing out the relative benefits of traditional/smallpress/self-publishing, and similarly, the relative merits of Kobo/Kindle/Amazon etc. But really, it you're going to self-publish, Kobo's Writing Life is the place to start. (I had known of Lefebvre before Kobo recruited him, and I said to anyone who would listen, that was the smartest hiring decision ever made by any corporation. A writer and booknerd of the first order, he is on the authors' side, and as a former Chapters manager and former manager of the McMaster University bookstore, the guy understands authors, booksellers and consumers better than anyone else in the country –including 'Heather'. When I finally met him in person at an early WWC, I discovered he is also a really great guy.)

Marie brought cookies!

Five Rivers Book Launch: Marie Powell's Hawk and Nowick Gray's Hunter's Daughter. I had ten copies of Nowick's book, and a bunch of other recent 5R titles, but only 3 copies of Marie's Hawk made it to the conference. Disappointed, but at least we had a copy to hold up and one for a photo-op of "first copy sold". Attendance was down from last year, but not unexpected given that the new WWC venue allowed for several additional streams of programming with which launches had to compete. I understand the other publishers had a similar decline in launch attendance. We might want to move to a different format for next year. But we can hardly fault WWC for being too interesting....

5R Book Launch: Robert Runté (left); Nowick Gray (center); Marie Powell (right)

Meeting Jill Cabrera, Five Rivers Social Media / Promotions staffer, in person. In this day and age of virtual corporations, we have staff members in four different cities, so pretty great to actually spend time at same event. Jill came down from Edmonton to help out with the 5R book launch and other 5R promotions.

Similarly, great to welcome Kim Greyson to 5R editorial team. Kim is taking over editing of the PM of Canada series. I met Kim at a previous WWC, and through those conversations realized he was perfect candidate for our new editor position. Kim has previously been a first reader for authors such as Dave Duncan as long as I have, and done some freelance editing for Tor.

Seeing Sandra Kusturi and Brett Savory from CZP press again and getting to have breakfast with them and CZP author GMB Chomichuk. I bought Chomichuk's graphic novel, and he kindly drew original cartoon on the flyleaf of his interpretation of CZP logoguy. Sooo coooool!

Photo by Brett Savory

I was on the publishers panel along with Mark Lefebvre (who moderated), Sally Harding (this year's editor guest of honour and super agent!), and Romance acquisitions editor,Danielle Rayner, from the Southern California. Nice diverse group there, but best moment for me was when Stacey Kondla spoke up from the audience to challenge something I had said. I love it when I learn something new, and clearly what I 'knew' was out-of-date. (In my defence, everything any of us knows about publishing is out of date by the time we say it a second time, so, yeah: why one needs to attend WWC to stay current.) But such a collegial environment,

I did two bluepencil café sessions and was impressed by overall quality of what I was seeing. Told two of those attending to send me manuscripts if they were interested, they were that good. My experience has been that the quality of writing of those attending WWC improves every year, either because in attracting more out-of-province writers, those tend to be more experienced writers; or because, the regular attendees are getting to be better writers thanks to what they're learning at WWC.

I sat on the Early Bird Live Action Slush session, wherein authors anonymously submit first page of a story/novel, and a reader (in this case the fabulous voice of author Edward Willett) reads out the page while the panel of editors listens. Each editor then raises their hand when they would have stopped reading because the number of problems had reached critical mass to move the manuscript to the 'reject' pile. The reader stops reading when 3 of the 4 hands goes up. (Sort of like the gong show if you're old enough to remember that.) Of course, the object is for one's page to get through with no hands up, at which point author has option of claiming ownership and taking a bow. The point of the panel, of course, is to show authors common mistakes they're making and the sorts of things that drive editors crazy; but also to see that what one editor hates, the next might be fine with (so pick carefully to whom you are submitting your manuscripts.) Was slightly embarrassed that one of the manuscripts I trashed turned out to be by one of my own author's, but it was okay because she was aware this new piece had problems, was hoping panel could articulate what that might be. (I can see the problem, but am at a loss how to fix it. Sometimes writers come up with issues I'm not good enough to fix because they are, frankly, challenging themselves to reach a level above my own ability. Which is why you want a press with more than one editor....Lorina is the one who edits this author.)

Five River's author, Candas Jane Dorsey, was at WWC, but everyone was focused on her too cute dog.

Had a pitch session. Five minutes is too short to really make a decision, so have asked these be lengthened to 12 minutes in future; Randy said he may give publishers the choice in future of 12 or 5 minute format, since others have expressed preference for 5 minutes. Again, high quality pitches, with me asking to see several manuscripts. Several others who had been on the waiting list and not made the session pitched to me in the hallway to same effect.

Attended several readings, particularly of new writers so I can monitor who is being published by whom, and to scout possible authors I might want to work with. Really love the 15 minute "random readings" session, because cram a lot of newly published writers into 3 hour slot.

I love WWC because I get a lot of work done there. In addition to the 15 or so pitches from authors, I sought out five other authors and asked for them to pitch. (I had asked to see a sixth, but stupidly forgot to hit 'send', so found my email still sitting there that evening when I got back to my room—wondered why she hadn't responded.) I look to get four to five book deals out of the weekend, plus some tentative discussions about setting up an audiobook cooperative; plus talking to two of my authors about how their books were coming; plus sitting down with the coeditors of an anthology to which I've submitted to talk about the changes they wanted to my story; and taking to two other editors about my submitting to their respective magazine/anthology. So yeah, very productive weekend. I calculate that I get about six months worth of deals/work every WWC. And that's all on top of how much I enjoy the conference personally.

Five Rivers author, Susan MacGregor, at When Words Collide 2015.

There were also the panels I hated to miss but had to, either because I was myself on a panel/giving a workshop, or because I didn't know how great it was going to be until after I heard other people rave. An example of the latter was workshop on "How to do a Chapters/Indigo book signing session" by Chapters manager, Stacey Kondla. Talk about useful!

Fail: Of course, not all panels out of a three day, 11 track program can be wonderful. I knew better than to attend a session entitled "Readability" (because fundamentally a wrong-headed concern) but colleagues that did were shocked and appalled by presentation based on rhetorical questions with predetermined (and largely wrong) answers, rather than, you know, actual data. Well, in a democracy everyone is welcome to their own opinions, so no criticism of the WWC programming here: I wouldn't want them to censor out this presenter just because I think she represents the forces of darkness. (Well, the forces of stupidity, but you get my point.) I do worry a bit that beginning authors will be taken in by such self-styled experts. My personal opinion is that dumbing down your writing will not increase sales, but on the contrary, means that editors like me will simply reject your work before it can see print. Pretty obvious to me that people who accept rules like "only five semicolons in a manuscript" end up doing vanity self-publishing. But, you know, your mileage may vary.

It raises a point that author Barb Geiger has made to me: if you go to craft fairs, it's not the crafters who make sales, it's the guys selling the beads to the hobbyists who rakes in the cash. I think we're seeing the same phenomenon in publishing these days. The people who are selling 20,000 copies of their self-published books are not the novelists, but the people writing books entitled, "How I Sold 20,000 of My Self-Published Book". You know?

So all in all, WWC was and is a fabulous convention I cannot praise too highly.

Robert Runté talking to WWC Board Member, Cliff Samuels, at Dead Dog party (i.e., after convention party, last night of festival.) Photo by Kirstin Morrell.

The Life of An Editor

So...my 11 year-old is having trouble getting to sleep one night, so I offer to sit with her until she is asleep. I bring my computer so I won't be bored and so she can't talk to me when she should be trying to get to sleep. And I'm doing my email, because that's the sort of not-having-to-concentrate work you do when you're in a dark room waiting for your 11 year-old to finally fall asleep, when I get an email from horror writer JW Schnarr...which I open to see this:

...which not something you want your 11 year-old to see last thing before she goes to sleep, particularly since you're there because of the potential monsters under the bed. I yank the computer screen to face the other way before she sees it, and of course that motion causes her to sit up and ask what is wrong and etc., and I'm trying to think of how to explain why there is a man eating a leg on my computer screen, when I realize she has a sleep mask on and couldn't have seen anything anyway.

Phew.

I calm her down again, and then turn to replying to Schnarr's email. My problem is, I had asked Schnarr to send me a photo for a poster I was doing for Five Rivers Publishing featuring a number of authors, Schnarr included, because he had objected to my using this photo:

Now, I had assumed he vetoed this one because it was too aggressive, particularly in a poster featuring the smiling, approachable head-and-shoulder photos of the other authors. But apparently I was completely wrong, and he had objected because it was too tame. I forgot that horror writers do not see the world quite like you or I.

So, I wrote back saying that he had perhaps misunderstood the purpose of the poster, which was to help attendees at the When Words Collide Festival recognize Five River authors to make them more approachable, and not, as he apparently believed, a wanted poster to scare people away. I further explained that sending me such photos as I sat with my afraid-of-the-dark 11 year-old was counter-productive, vis-a-vis getting her to sleep. To which he replied:

Definitely not "calm down and go to sleep, there are no monsters" material.

My daughter was brought up on a slightly different strategy. The "Yes there are monsters, and they are hiding under your bed waiting for you to get up or make some noise, so they can drag you away into the darkness..." strategy.

Worked like a charm! My kid NEVER got out of bed!

Did I mention horror writers see things very differently?

I should clarify that Schnarr is in reality one of the nicest guys I ever met, and I've met his daughter who seems a well-adjusted, creative teenager.

JW Schnarr will be at When Words Collide Festival, Calgary, August 14-16, 2015, along with six other Five Rivers Publishing authors and two 5R staff.

Barbara Geiger on the Secret of Good Writing

I asked Barbara if I could reprint this column on the secret to good writing because what she had to say resonated strongly with me as both a writer trying to fix my own novel, and as an editor trying to fix everyone else's. Words to live by folks.

---

It's really stupid, and I'm sure it's common knowledge to some, but it was hardwon for me. If you're asking someone to pay their after work and social obligations time and their after taxes and fixed expenses money, you're providing a service like any other person out there who has something and wants money for it. If that's the case, your story has to be worth something, and that something has to be as much entertainment as what that ten dollars and four hours *could* be doing.

Which means not only do you have to catch the attention of the pre-reader with the kind of character, problem and world that from page one is going to make the exhausted, underpaid and over-worked intern think that she wants her boss to come back from lunch so she could share this amazing ______, which doesn't have to be the best _______ out there, it has to just tell from the very beginning why it's going to be different from every other _____ out there. But then, after the amazing beginning, you need to leave a trail of bread crumbs, from about every 1000-1500 words that you can point out to your ideal reader and say *this. This part is going to tickle you*.

And then follow the formula where every single time you don't know what to do, or you find your main characters just leaning around and talking, you throw the worst possible thing at them. You need to have all the parts line up and it needs to say something about the world that when someone asks you what's it about, you can say "it's about overcoming your fate and crushing all those who oppose you" rather than "it's a girl who does stuff." And when all of *that* comes together (you know, just pluck the ace of spades out of a card deck eleven times in a row) you've got a great story.

Which is like saying...lose weight by diet and moving more. We all know *what* we have to do, but I've found ways of figuring out *how* to make sure all of those are done in a way that other people think I've accomplished the same goal. Which is the 90% of the problem I was talking about. I'd thought I knew all the cheats around so I didn't have to eat less and exercise more, but then I figured out for *me* at least, the best way to lose weight is to do the obvious things. Some people plunge into an ice pool and use SCUBA gear to breathe because being cold burns more energy. I don't know if that works just as well, but yeah. I figured out that the things people have been telling me since the beginning were, no fooling, the only way I figured out how to write after fifteen years. I'm not saying I'm the brightest person out there, but learning to know that you need to learn how to know to write is again, 90% of the battle.

And the how is...you just do it. We talk about writing as though the answers are multiple choice and we just need to recognize the work when we see it. That's the lowest level of "knowing" how to do something. There are five or six, but it ends with synthesizing new things from what we know about two different things. So the "how" is to show your work that you know the rules of writing. Life is long answer format.

Start with a main character who has a problem. You don't need to know the iceberg level of the problem, you need to see what the tip the MC says. Characters who see the whole issue are like the AI characters in the Two Towers who were smart enough to look at the problem and run in the opposite direction. Big problems need big pay grades. Small problems need characters who just need to step out of their life momentarily.

Then as they figure out what the problem is, so do you. You're learning what they're learning, then as soon as you know what the iceberg problem is, in your rewrite you rewrite it like you knew what the whole problem was from the very beginning and as soon as you know what your character doesn't, it's really easy to provide the clues in the rewrite to the audience.

---

Another thing I see a lot as an editor is the talented youngster who fails to fulfill their promise. I like what Barbara has to say about that too:

I remember how absolutely sure I felt in my 20's that I was doing absolutely nothing wrong and that the last thing I needed to do was learn how to write. I thought I just needed to be discovered. Coming to the realization that what I was writing wasn't very good and that I had to learn how to write in my thirties was a major shock to the system. So many writers, like me, had started life just a little bit wiser than most--which makes you brilliant at 17 and so stupid at 27--if you've never had to learn that that little bit of extra you started with is just a drop in the pan to what's possible when you put your mind to it.

I can relate to that, only just add a few decades to the ages given. Just now starting to get a glimmer of maybe how to start writing stories that work--most of which I learnt by editing other people and then turning around and saying, "Oh wait, I screwed that up in exactly the same way!"

As Barbara would say, if you're not selling, learn to write better.

Ruth Rendell Obituary

BBC news this morning carries obituary of Ruth Rendell, dead at age 85. She was a much beloved and highly successful mystery author, but I have to say that I loved hearing that her career as a novelist started when her career as a journalist ended with a huge FAIL:

"Rendell began her writing career as a reporter on an Essex newspaper. However, she was forced to resign after filing a story about a local sports club dinner without attending. Her report failed to mention that the after-dinner speaker had died half-way through the speech."

Okay, bit sorry for her that people STILL going on about it 50 years later, because really, after 60 novels, I think you should have earned the right to have lived that down. But on the other hand, pretty much best example ever of god telling a writer to stop messing around with the day job and get writing.....

More Effective Use of Social Media

I was just handed a lesson on social media by my Faculty's communications officer, so I thought I would share it with SFeditor.ca readers.

Saturday, I received an Aurora Award (see previous post). Here's what I (re)-tweeted at the time about getting an Aurora Award:

@Runte scores an Aurora Award at #vcon

I retweeted someone else's live tweet partly because I was in a hurry (I was on a panel right after the awards ceremony) and but mostly because retweeting someone else's tweet felt somehow (i.e., irrationally) less braggy.

There was not a lot of response to this tweet, but tweeting about the award again seemed, you know, worse than braggy. I don't like Twitter streams where people keep repeating announcements about their upcoming books or whatever, so didn't want to be that guy. But on the other hand, really DID want to adveritze that I had received the award, and no one seemed to have noticed my first (re)tweet.

When I got to work Monday, I thought I should mention to the Faculty's communications officer that I had received an award on the weekend, because we're supposed to, and because I thought there was a chance she would put that in the Faculty Twitter feed. And she did, but here's how she tweeted about it:

ULethbridgeEducation @ULethbridgeEdu · Congrats Dr Robert Runté! Recipient @PrixAuroraAward for work on speculative fiction http://bit.ly/1vJnXcO #uleth

Thinking her version might be slightly more effective.....

So, deconstructing here, she grabbed a picture of me from her files, slapped that onto a powerpoint slide; looked up the paper to grab a suitable quote for the target audience (i.e., Faculty of Ed students and faculty), used a couple of different typefaces, and ta-da! Since she had this out within an hour of my telling her, that's that max time she could have spent on it, but I'm guessing she had other more important stuff to do at the same time, so probably a lot less.

I've tweeted text I have thought worth quoting, and announcements, and I've tweeted photos, but um...feeling bit stupid that it never before occurred to me to make a custom slide to combine the interesting quote with the announcement on a strong visual.

Well, duh! This is freaking awesome!

And the result of her tweeting this on Faculty stream was a wave of new twitter followers on my twitter feed....

So from now on, any time I send out an announcement, I'm figuring out some kind of interesting tag line, and putting it out as a visual.

My apologies if this is obvious to everyone else, but thought I would share a lesson learned.

P.S.: My faculty's communication expert is Darcy Tamayose who is herself a published author