Ensnared in the Internet (Part 3 of 3)
As Constant Reader may recall, Dr. Dick Kessler and I spent several months trying to get literary agents interested in taking a look at the book we’d co-authored and getting only negative responses – or no responses at all. And CR may also recall that we finally took Bitter Medicine to a small but genteel publishing house which graciously accepted our manuscript submission, agentless though we were. There were no condescending questions or preliminary rigamarole, just a pleasant “Of course, we’ll be happy to take a look at it. You’ll hear from us soon.” We were delighted by this unexpected display of good manners.
After a decent interval, well before we had a chance to become anxious, a letter from the editor’s assistant arrived in my mail box thanking us for allowing the editor to take a look at our book and telling us that, unfortunately, she had decided that . . . well, you know.
“Although we were intrigued by your book’s connection to our mission,” the letter closed with, “we are such a small publisher that we can release only a very few titles per year, so we have to be highly selective in choosing books for our list. I thank you for giving us the chance to look at your work and wish you the very best of luck with it elsewhere!”
This old-school publishing house had at least made an effort to soften the blow of rejection. It was a courteous, respectful rejection letter. There was just one little thing wrong with it. The title of the book being rejected belonged to somebody else, not us.
Obviously, the assistant had us mixed up. Were we being rejected or was the editor rejecting the other guy and his book? But had both books been rejected? Or just his and not ours? And how in the world was I going show the letter to my co-author?
Fortunately, the letter had been sent to me, not to Dick. He was accustomed to having the correct surgical instrument slapped into his hand the moment he said “scalpel” or “forceps.” But he’d become used to waiting a bit longer for something to happen in the book business. So I had a little time to get this straightened out.
My first impulse was to pick up the phone and raise Holy Hell with the editor’s assistant and demand . . . what? A clarification? An apology? Another letter replacing the title of this other guy’s book with our title?
But wait a minute! What if the editor wasn’t rejecting our book and was just rejecting his? If the editor had indeedrejected our book, maybe her assistant’s mistake gave her an opportunity to reconsider her decision. Or maybe learning about the mistake would give the editor an excuse to fire her assistant!
Well, I sure didn’t want that to happen. She was probably a lovely young woman, not long out of college, a lot like my daughter when she was starting out in the business world. Or me when I got my first job in radio on my 21st birthday writing sports and choking up trying to spell Joe Garagiola’s surname just minutes before my boss went on the air to read my script.
I decided to be careful not to get the assistant in trouble with her boss and so I mailed her a “Personal and Confidential” letter along with a copy of her note with the other guy’s book title highlighted:
“Thank you very much for your quick response. I have a hunch that what you sent me is not the letter you wanted Dr. Kessler to read. I don’t intend to share it with him – or anybody else – because I believe everybody is entitled to one mistake. but before you and [your editor] send us the appropriate rejection note, may I suggest that you give our submission another look? I think you’ll find that, without realizing what you’ve done, you made one of the same sort of simple errors that Dr. Kessler warns his medical students to avoid in BITTER MEDICINE.
“You may indeed have no room for our book on your list, but perhaps you might have a suggestion or two about where it might find a home. We’d appreciate that.”
The letter worked, but not in the way I hoped it would. I had expected a quick response from the editor’s assistant. Instead, I got none at all. So, after a few days, I made a follow-up telephone call and got the assistant’s answering machine. I decided to leave a short message. “This is Patrick Trese.” I began, adding “T-R-E-S-E” because it’s pronounced Tracy. “I’m not calling to question your editor’s decision, but I’d like to ask . . . .”
A woman came on the line. “Hello,” she said and introduced herself. She was the editor and publisher. Her assistant was out of the office. She had read my letter and would be happy to help me. Caught off-guard, I blurted out that I had wanted to keep this matter between her assistant and myself without getting her involved.
“I appreciate that,” said the editor. (Or something like that. I was so surprised to be talking to her that I forgot to take notes.) She said it was kind of me to be concerned, but that I needn’t worry about her assistant who did excellent work and seldom made mistakes. “And we’ll certainly be happy to correct this one. You’ll receive a new letter very shortly.”
I thanked her and asked that Dr. Kessler’s name be placed ahead of mine in the salutation this time. She laughed and said she understood. She’d make sure his name comes first.
“Oh, Dr. Kessler’s not like that. He’s pretty unassuming, but he’s the principal author, after all.”
“Of course,” I think she replied, “and that’s one reason you’re finding it difficult to place your book. I doubt that you have any idea how many doctors write books and how few get published. About five percent. Perhaps ten.”
She paused for moment or two. Her businesslike tone softened as she elaborated on the final paragraph of the letter. A small publishing house like hers, because of rising production costs, changes in book buying, book selling and book distribution, all force her to be increasingly selective about the relatively small number of books her house decides to print. She believed that this pressure was being felt by publishing giants as well. There was less and less margin for error and therefore too much risk involved in publishing marginal, mid-list writers with no track record or name recognition.
If Dick and I wanted to get published, she suggested, we might consider doing it ourselves. I replied that I’d always had a dim view of self-publishing. So had she. “But times change and we have to be open to new ideas, don’t we? It’s something you and the doctor might consider.”
That wasn’t what I had wanted to hear. But I’m glad I heard it. A kind lady who knew what she was talking about had taken the time to confirm what I’d been hearing from other writers: the book publishing business was changing rapidly and would continue to change; the decisions publishers would be making would have more to do with estimates of profit and loss than with the content or quality of the books they selected for publication.
Oddly enough, that didn’t make me feel discouraged or cynical. I felt liberated.
My writer friends told me I could now forget about dealing with agents, editors and publishers. It was possible for me to help my doctor get his book published (and mine, too) right away instead of next year – or never. I’d no longer have to waste time trying to seduce literary agents into representing my work – nor wait weeks or months for rejections by editors no longer empowered to buy anything less than “sure things.” I could by-pass all the book-business middlemen and deal directly with readers. All I had to do was learn how to do it.
It was tough trudging up the E-publishing learning curve, but I got as far up as I really had to go. I got some strategic tips from John Locke’s book about how to find and keep an audience. He enthusiastically explains how he found a million readers for his books and provides a pretty good road make which I began following, more or less.
I had three private sessions in Greenwich Village coffee houses with filmmaker/journalist and NBC News alumna Barbara Rick. We huddled around her laptop as she showed me how to set up my Twitter account, taught me how to use it and finally sent me off to Tweet confidently.
Two of my prolific writer pals, Jerry Mundis and Larry Block, sat me down and showed me how they published their new and out-of-print books and short stories on Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, et alia. (And patiently answered my questions, often more than twice.)
They introduced me to romance novelist and E-publishing wizard Jaye Manus and her informative and witty blog. The clear instructions and visual examples she posts helped me solve many baffling electronic formatting mysteries and exorcize most of the typographical demons and gremlins I encountered.
Thanks to all of these younger friends, I was able to learn how to publish BITTER MEDICINE as an e-book on Amazon Kindle. That pleased Dr. Kessler, but what he really wanted was the kind of book you can hold in your hand and inscribe for your students, friends and colleagues. And so, with the help of a superb project team at Create Space, I was able to produce a paperback edition of BITTER MEDICINE.
Now all I had to do was sell the book and for that, I was told, I really needed to learn to set up a blog to attract readers. (I decided to go with WordPress.com because it seemed user-friendlier and it seemed to work well for Larry Block and Jaye Manus.) So here I am, ensnared by the Internet, E-publishing, Tweeting and Blogging. And for what? Just to sell books?
In all honesty, that was my intention when I began this journey. But I learned something important (to me, at least) along the way. What I’ve posted so far on this blog – an account of how I learned to do all this new stuff – may be helpful to some accidental reader, young or old, who may be a little afraid to try to do something he or she has never tried to do before.
So here I sit at my Mac: an old dog who was taught to do a lot of tricks over the years, yet still managed to learn some new ones. Maybe I can’t teach you how to do those old tricks, but I remember how I learned them from a lot of kind, talented men and women, now long gone, who let me sit and watch how they did their stuff. I can tell you about what I saw and heard – and how it helped me..
So I’ve begun to think that maybe the real reason I find myself here on Mr. Blog is simply to keep blogging – to pass on to whoever you are what I remember about how I learned to tell stories. What do you think?
Originally published on October 3, 2012