Straw poll

December 13, 2005

I got an email this morning that started me thinking. Among other things, it said:

Will you ever do a follow up to “To Visit The Queen?” I love those books!

Well, I love them too — I’ve always had a soft spot for those characters. After a few moments I wrote back:

Though I had a third book planned, the first two have never sold very well on either side of the Atlantic, so there is (unfortunately) zero chance that any publisher will buy a third one. I have occasionally considered writing the book and self-publishing it — but again, there’s no guarantee that enough people would ever buy the self-published book to repay the investment in time and money that it would take me to write and publish it. For the time being, at least, it seems that I’m going to have to concentrate on the “mainstream” YW books.

But thanks for your interest!

And then I started to get up and go make some tea.

And then I sat down again.

The outline for the third book, The Big Meow, was completed in 1998. The series’ then-editor at Warner read it and liked it, but after consulting with the sales staff — as editors must — she passed on it: what we both knew at that point was that the first two books weren’t selling anything like strongly enough to justify taking the gamble of publishing the third one. So I sighed and put the outline away. (For those who’re curious, it completes the trilogy, and — like the second book — has a strong time-travel component: but this one’s set in just-post-WWII Los Angeles. Those who remember the film “Cast a Deadly Spell” will immediately catch somthing of the intended atmosphere.)

Every now and then I’d get another of these emails, and send out a response more or less like the one you see above…and then I’d sigh. Because it’s a book it would be a lot of fun to write. And of course every now and then a fan will say, “You should just go ahead and write it!” And I sigh some more. Though I absolutely do my work because I love doing it, I’m also running a business here. And I have a lot of calls on my time. Right now there are about six other projects cooking along on the top of my creative cooktop (…yes indeed, she’s going into food idiom again…this is what happens when I blog before breakfast…) and in each of those cases, people have put it in writing that they’re going to give me money when I turn the work in. I therefore know that, when the dust settles, my cats (and husband) will eat. And that’s a good thing.

This situation, though, would be much different. I would be taking something of a leap of faith — itself not so terrible a thing: I do that every time I sit down at the computer to write something. But this leap — essentially writing a book “on spec”, something I have not done since my first novel twenty-five years ago — would involve putting in months of labor (which at this point in my career translates into a pretty hefty pile of cash) for a very, very uncertain return. I might never see even a reasonable percentage of that investment returned…which I would find extremely annoying. Time is too damn precious to waste.

So now I turn to the readership and ask you/them to give me some data to work with.

The obvious solution to this problem is publication on demand (POD). I don’t mind doing that. But you have to understand that it ain’t cheap at the reader’s end. Without dragging you all through the math — which would take me a while, and I have enough trouble with math after the caffeine hits, let alone before it — let’s just say that a “trade paperback” perfect-bound copy of The Big Meow is going to cost you hardcover prices, not paperback. If I’m to make any money at all on the deal (by which I mean, at least recoup my publishing and labor expenses), you’re going to be paying $20-25 for a copy of this book.

Would you?

If you would, drop me an email at this address:

thebigmeow@youngwizards.com

I’d also ask those of you who read this blog and frequent LiveJournal or other communities where there might be interested parties to please forward the contents of this message to them in whatever ways seem most appropriate. (Either post the URL of this blog posting’s permalink — see below — or just cut-and-paste the pertinent contents. Or just paraphrase the basic message and pass on the email address where people can indicate their interest. In any case, folks, please spread the news around any way you can to those who would be interested in seeing it.)

The address has an autoresponder on it, so anyone who mails to it will know that what they sent was received. You don’t have to write a message if you don’t feel like it — if you do, you might like to add the subject line “Response to straw poll” so I’ll know that message has something in it.

I’ll leave the mail address working for some months, as there’s no way I’d be in a position to start doing anything about this project until the spring anyway.

The ball’s in your court(s) now. Let’s see what you have to say.

(…An addition: the following material appeared in a later post — I’m moving it here.)

It occurred to me that it might be smart to test-run another aspect of this experiment. Specifically: which works better — paper-and-electronic formats, or just electronic?

A lot of you, in responding to the post above, have said “I’d buy anything of yours…” (Which, by the way, is incredibly flattering, and thanks.) Well, there’s one book of mine which very few of you will have ever heard of…because, though a publisher paid for it (indeed, it was sold twice), it was never published. It was written, though…so we can try out on this one some of the techniques I’ll later be using on The Big Meow. What’s also interesting is that this book’s situation is almost the inverse of TBM’s: it was the first book of a projected trilogy, rather than the last.

A Wind from the South was originally outlined and written as part of a three-book package sold to Corgi Books / Transworld in the UK. The other two books (The Door into Fire and The Door into Shadow) were easy enough for Corgi to market, but they didn’t quite know what to do with Wind in terms of marketing, as it didn’t fit into any of the (then) expected categories. It was a 125,000 word fantasy novel with a very strong historical component, but it took place in the country which would eventually become Switzerland…and for some reason, the Corgi sales staff had real trouble figuring out what to do with this. Eventually — because Fire and Shadow weren’t selling all that well in the UK, and they decided to cut their losses — Corgi elected not to publish Wind, and released the book back to me. No other English-language publisher was particularly interested in Alpine fantasy at that point…so finally I put the book back in the box and got on with other things. Then, a few years ago, the book was bought again by the publisher Heyne Verlag in Germany, and very nearly had its first publication in German — which would have had kind of a strange resonance considering some of the events in the novel. But not long afterwards Heyne was bought by the Bertelsman publishing conglomerate, and in the ensuing corporate downsizing, many projects in progress were dumped, AWFTS being one of them.

At any rate, I’ve been intending to turn this book out into the great world for some time. (There were some even some abortive attempts at home-based POD some years back, but it was too labor-intensive at my end, and didn’t work out.) A Wind from the South could well be a perfect-bound paperback from Lulu.com eventually. But for the moment, I don’t see why I shouldn’t release it as an e-book.

So here it is at RaetianTales.blogspot.com. At that page you can read the first two chapters (as a .PDF file). If you like the sample material, the whole book’s yours for $5.99 via PayPal. The “buy it now” button is in the middle column of this blog, and also over at RaetianTales.

Thanks!

Posted in "The Big Meow", Online life, Writing, Young Wizards