Ep. 185: Should I Look for an Agent for my Debut or Self-Publish It? (Bonus! How To Be an Anti-Racist)

Ep. 185: Should I Look for an Agent for my Debut or Self-Publish It? (Bonus! How To Be an Anti-Racist)

Rachael answers Tuomas’s question about what to do when you want to be a hybrid author, with a foot in both camps – trad- and self-publishing.

Also – if you’re white, what you can do to be anti-racist AS A WRITER! This goes beyond allyship (centering BIPOC voices) and activism (protesting, donating to BIPOC-led organizations) Anti-racism is the act of opposing ALL white supremacy including the racism inside you and within the system you live in.

Transcript

Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron, and this is a bonus episode brought to you directly by my $5 Patreons. If you’d like me to be your mini coach for less than a large mocha Frappuccino, you can join too at www.patreon.com/rachael

[00:00:14] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #185 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I’m so glad you’re here with me on this mini episode, which might not be so many when I’m done with it. We’ll see what happens. Let me look at my notes here. But in news of what’s going on around here, the book is done. I’m sorry that I wasn’t with you last Friday. I got up to about Thursday night and thought, huh? There’s not going to be a podcast tomorrow. That’s okay. Next week, we’ll go back to having a normal interview section. But honestly, I haven’t interviewed anybody in a couple of weeks because of the revisions I was doing on the thriller, Hush Little Baby. And I am so excited that I got it done. It ended up, so basically I wrote the book, I did my big revisions myself, send it to my editor and she sent back the big revision, which wasn’t even a manuscript that she had marked up. Then the revisions I needed to do were bigger than that. They were harder than that. It was a verbal conversation in which I took notes on what she wanted me to change to the book. 

[00:01:22] Everything that she wanted me to change made the book a better book. It did mean that I took out about 38,000 words and added I think 42,000 words. I keep forgetting the numbers. I have them written down somewhere. So now the book is 97,000 words long, and there are 93,000 words in the trash. So I’ve written two books to get this one book out. It is the book I plotted more than any other book I’ve ever plotted that a full synopsis, just this, the synopsis was broken and none of us saw it. I didn’t see it. My agent didn’t see it. My editor didn’t see it. I was trying to get away with something. I didn’t know I was trying to get away with something, but I was doing some hand-waving when I turned in that synopsis, like I wrote some good sentences and I promised to pull off something that I don’t think anybody could have done. But my language was good enough that they bought it and I bought it and I couldn’t write it. So that is why this book has been a little bit extreme but I got it done this Monday, 10 minutes until New York close, which was my deadline was Monday. So cut it in in time. It is truly astonishing to me how I can put something off till, it’s like this timer pops up in my brain. It’s this panic timer. And it says, okay, you have screwed off enough. You don’t have another second to waste screwing off anything. So that’s when you know, 14, 15, I think 15 days in a row without stopping all day, every day, I’d had four weeks to do the revision and I did it in the last two weeks because that’s what my body knows I can pull off. The exciting thing about that is it, at the very last minute, I came up with a framing device that I had not thought of. So in the last three days, I’m trying to pull off this framing device. I think it worked great, but it was one of those things that reminded me that we never really know what our books are meant to be.

[00:03:25] There is a possibility that my editor is reading my book right this very minute and she’s thinking, oh no, this isn’t what I wanted either. This isn’t a good book yet. And I might have to do this all over again. But I’m pretty confident that the next round of edits will just be lying in it. And that will be such a joy. In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of weeks off while she reads that. And I have been thinking about the next book, which is a large revision of a collection of essays that I have been trying to figure out how to make into an actual memoir. And yesterday I was writing with the Rachael Says Write Group and it was awesome. It was so good to be there, not working on my revision of the novel, but working on this problem. And suddenly it occurred to me and I, it was one of those moments of revelation where everything fit together. All of a sudden I saw the structure that was behind this collection of essays. Which I just hadn’t seen because I had forgotten the cardinal rule, which is I can revise anything. And these essays will need revision in order to pull off this structure. But it will end those essays will end up being more true. They will reflect a more, a bigger, and deeper truth of my life. And I know I’m kind of being vague about this, but the working title for that now, it has been replenished, it was a collection of 12 essays over the course of the year that I tried to figure out what was wrong with me. Basically, this was a couple of years ago and the working title now is, Replenish How Fixing Creative Burnout Accidentally Saved My Life. Don’t you want to pick that up? I want to pick that up. And I remembered, oh yeah, I could read by these essays to show what was really happening while I was writing them. Ooh, it’s exciting.  

[00:05:19] I also just, this afternoon, got a very strange and interesting offer from somebody that might change the course of my publishing career. I don’t know yet. I’m so overwhelmed by the thought of it that I don’t know what to do with it. So you know what I’m doing? I’m doing nothing with it. I said, thank you for the offer. I will think about it and I will get back to you. And sometimes that’s all you can do. So that is exciting. And again, I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t, but if it happens, if it becomes something, you will know. 

[00:05:55] We are going to get to a question from Thoumas, who is one of the $5 patrons who is using me as a mini coach. I don’t have too many other questions right now. So you $5 patrons, please send me all your questions. I’m your mini coach. Let me mini coach you. But before we get to Thoumas’s question, I want to lay something on you that I have been laying on my classes for the last week or two. I have not communicated with you in a couple of weeks because I’ve been on deadline.

[00:06:24] The other reason is because the world exploded in a big, huge necessary way. And it can be very hard when things are upside down to get our work done. We were already struggling with that with COVID-19, and now that the world has shifted in a big, important way, it can be even harder to consider why is my work important? Why am I spending the time doing this? I am writing a, you know, sweet Amish. Let’s make it a sweet, Amish fantasy novel with dragons. So you’re writing that. Oh my God. I hope somebody is writing that. Those, those authors are coming to me saying, what, what does it matter? How am I helping change the world? If I’m writing a sweet, Amish fantasy romance about dragon is number one, obviously, you’re going to make people happy by reading- writing that but, but honestly, it’s in these moments that we have to remember that we are artists for a reason. You are a writer because you can’t not be a writer. You are a writer who was the kind of person who listens to podcasts in their time off of writing and the rest of their lives, because you want to fill your brain with writing things. It’s the thing you can’t get enough of. You are called to be a writer because you are called to communicate. And I truly believe that with every word that we write as writers, with every sentence that we get better and stronger at our craft, those words are changing us as human beings and they are emboldening us and bolstering us and making us better humans and they are making us stronger in the fight that we must fight. It does not matter what the hell you are writing. I am writing a silly thriller about a pregnant woman who another woman tries to steal her baby. This is not going to change the world. My last thriller was about police brutality. Hey, Hey. So that one, I feel a little bit differently about it. I’m like, Oh, I hope it changes some people’s minds. This one is not it’s, it’s an escape for people.

[00:08:55] And the thing is escape is really, really, really important. You provide the service of giving a piece of art to someone and it can get them through their darkest night. It can get them through the hospital stay, or when they’re waiting at the hospital for their loved one to come out of surgery, you have done something incredibly important. You have changed somebody with your words, even more than that insanely awesome thing. You, as an artist, as a writer, have this power and almost unfortunately, this responsibility to share your truth with other people. Every word you write in your fiction makes you better at doing that. Every word you write in your nonfiction makes you better at doing that. I am not advocating that you are the one. You’re the one who should go on Facebook and fix your racist uncle Frank, because you can’t fix racist uncle Frank, you can’t change him. Our words are not used that way. We cannot build a battalion of words that can win that particular war. It just doesn’t happen like that. What our words do, and what we as writers do, is to inspire other people to be a little bit braver than they were before they heard you or before they read you. That is the power of word. You bring your idea to somebody and by doing so you empower them to say something to someone else to change a little bit in their world. And that is incredible. 

[00:10:41] And so at this point in this podcast, I want to speak to my fellow white people who have been really, really shaken up by some of this. I have been working in the anti-racist arena for a little while now. This is not new to me, however, I am talking to a lot of people right now for whom words like white privilege, white fragility. They are big, hurtful, scary words. And the first time you screw something up, when you are talking about systemic racism, oh my gosh, it hurts the first time that you, as a white person, I’m speaking just to you, white people right now. The first time you were hit with that white fragility stick, it hurts. You go into a cave and you rant and you rave and you say to everyone, I’m not a racist. I’m not a racist. This is look at me. I’m good, I’m a good person. This is when I just talked to you about the four stages of becoming anti-racist because it’s not enough just to be not a racist. P.S., we’re all racists. Like all of us white people are racist. That’s very hard to hear at the beginning. I know that I just lost some of you by switching it up, but just stick around for a minute because I’m going to answer Thoumas’ question about hybrid publishing. Don’t you want to hear that? Yes, you do. The first stage though, is awareness. The awareness that we live in a racist society. Merriam Webster just changed their definition this week. I didn’t look it up before the show. But it talks about racism being a system. Because you are white, doesn’t mean that you had an easy life. It doesn’t mean that you weren’t raised poor with an abusive family and had to fight for every single thing in your life. It doesn’t mean that. It only means that your life wasn’t harder because your skin color was darker than white. That is white privilege. And when you first become aware of that, when first, somebody first told you that, you definitely want to go into a shell. And if you’re just starting to kind of peek your way out of that shell, if anti-racism is new to you, welcome. It’s awesome out here working to dismantle that and it’s hard and it’s scary, but awareness is where it starts. And when you start realizing that racism is a problem that needs to be fixed. And it’s you who are going to do something to help dismantle that you can no longer be a bystander in this. 

[00:13:21] The second stage of being coming an- four stages of becoming an anti-racist, after you’re aware that maybe you could be one, the second stage is just education and I want to pull up this week’s New York times list. It came out a Wednesday. Number one on the list is White Fragility, which is an amazing book, which if you haven’t read, you should read it as by Robin DiAngelo. Number one, apparently they’ve sold out of these books all over the country. Traditional publishing is scrambling to republish these books, but you know what, you can get out on your e-book or from your library. The second one is, So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, which is also fantastic. And then the third one is How to Be An Anti-Racist, which I would, it’s my favorite that’s the one I would recommend is by you from Ibram X Kendi. But all three of them are incredible. And that’s just your next job just to get a little bit of education so that you can learn what you don’t know. We don’t know what we don’t know until we find out. So your job is to be looking to the bi- BiPAP community, which stands for black indigenous and people of color. Watching what they have done watching the documentaries, where they are speaking, reading the books in which they tell you things. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. People have been doing this work for a long time. Welcome in, see where you can join up, a but, number- but the first half to be comment, a little bit educated, I’ll try to put a link in the show notes for a Google doc that was circulating last week on where you can start. If you just have 5 minutes a day or 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day to ask us to be uncomfortable is insignificant. When it comes to people of color and what, how they are inconvenienced and made uncomfortable all day, every day in the society. 

[00:15:26] So the third stage is self-interrogation. And this is where you take what you’ve learned and you start to interrogate the ways in which you work in the world. You ask yourself the hard questions. This is also where yes, screw up. I had a, had a doozy earlier this week. I was in a class and a woman was talking about, and I don’t want to get too personal with this. I can’t give details, but she is now living a life where discrimination is going to happen to her in a big way for the rest of her life. And we were talking about that discomfort and I said something to her. I said, well, you know, there comes a time in our lives when we don’t, when we, when we get comfortable with living without discrimination. And the fact that you are now the focus of discrimination, is one of those things, which is making your life so difficult right now in which is making your book so difficult to write about it. And an awesome student of mine put her hand up and said, Rachael, I need to disagree with you. I, as a black woman face this discrimination every day of my life. It is not something that will go away or that will get easier you just learn how to say fuck off. And that was a place in which I was talking to a white woman, white woman to white woman. And I forgot that my experience is not mirrored by her experience. We tend to as white people, because this is what we have been trained to do by our entire society. We tend to center ourselves and make ourselves the most important person in the room forgetting that we are not, and our experiences need to be de-centered so that we can make room for the people who have not been heard for so long, to listen to them and we are going to screw this up and it’s gonna hurt. And in that instance, I got to say, well, I’m sorry. That is, I was just absolutely being a person full of white privilege thinking in my head that I knew everything and that’s complete baloney. Let’s just call it bullshit. And I think white person to white person here, I’m talking to only my white listeners right now. 

[00:17:46] This is the point at which when you’re in this stage of self-interrogation of learning about where you are on the anti-racist spectrum, is where you need to get comfortable with screwing up and apologizing clearly and trying to do better next time. This is never a place for a rationalization, but I thought it was being, but I thought I was, no there’s none of that. Just I screwed up. I’m sorry. I try to do better next time. 

[00:18:13] And the fourth stage, the final stage is community action. And I believe that as an anti-racist, I only have one job in community action, and that is to help encourage other white people to begin their own journey of becoming an anti-racist. This is what I should do now, which is why I’m talking to you, fellow white person, perhaps it’s time for you to start your journey of anti-racism. I got all of this from a, a starter kit online, which I will also link in the show notes. This is a fantastic time to start learning, and this is a fantastic time to be a writer and you may be really feeling moved to use your words, to fight right now, from the coziness and the safety of your home, where you are sheltering in place. These are things to keep in mind and be aware of, as we work for a better future. We have already really screwed it up in the United States and I truly believe that we can’t put band aids on anymore. We can’t do those easy fixes. This is the time to actually do the difficult work. And I am pleased that I can speak to you about this and I want to, I want you just to think about who you can speak to, in your community.

[00:19:48] And let’s talk about books. Okay, Thoumas says my long term goal is to be a hybrid author. I like the idea of having full control over my books, but I also like the idea of being traditionally published with this in mind, assuming I’m good enough to be traditionally published, which I have no idea if I am. Do you think it would be better to self-publish my debut book or to look for an agent?  Such a common question Thoumas, and I’m going to respond to it in a way in which I have heard other people say that they do not like. But I’m going to say it anyway. I like to use and I like to encourage people to use agent querying agents as kind of a test for your book. So if you would like to be traditionally published because it’ll make you feel good because it is a cache that you particularly want. You want to see your book on a shelf in Barnes and Noble, if they exist in the future. That’s totally, totally fine. You can want that just for the sake of wanting it. You never have to justify that to anybody. Give yourself a number of rejections that you will accept before you start to question this book a little bit more. This can be done at any stage in your journey to publication after your, of course your book is written and revised as, as good as you can make it. I don’t believe you need to get an editor to help you fix your book before you go on the agent search, because agents often act as that first editor. There, they’re often happy to do that. They’re not always happy to do that, but they’re often happy to do that. 

[00:21:32] That is not to say that you can’t hire an editor before you start an agent search. That is also often done and can be very advantageous. I always recommend Reedsy.com, if you want to go there and look for an editor before you go to print agent. But after you’re good and set your query letters set in stone, it’s beautiful. Perhaps you’ve sent it to me for my query service. Just go to RachaelHerron.com/query. I am glad that I stuck that in there. Then ask yourself, how many rejections do you want before you start reevaluating this book? Is it 25? Is it 50? Perhaps if you get 25 form rejections or just a no answer, which counts as a rejection, either your query letter is not working, well, if it’s form and you’ve not been asked for a partial or a full manuscript, there’s something wrong with your query letter. Or the idea behind your book. If it is an idea that has been, you know, if nobody’s buying a vampire book right now and I’m actually not sure if that’s true or not, I have no idea where vampires are right now, but it could be that you are querying a vampire book in the time when all of agents, agent has said, I’m not going to pick up a vampire, but because none of the publishers are buying vampire books. Then that is not a reflection on your query. But in, in other cases you want to see, is my query letter are actually good enough. If they’re asking for full and partial manuscripts, then my query letter is good enough. And if they don’t want to talk to me after they’ve seen that, then is my book good enough. 

[00:23:07] Having no responses or negative responses on these can help you try to figure that out. But, on a bigger scarier level, right now, publishing is reeling from COVID-19. They are selling, they’re having a hard time selling books to editors because editors at big traditional publishers are having hard times knowing whether they will continue to exist. I have heard a couple of different things. I know that McMillan itself is shrinking. They laid off a bunch of editors. I have also heard through the rumor mill that Harper Collins is gangbusters that they’re doing really well. So because of COVID, because more people are reading and because they also own Harlequin, which Harlequin suddenly is an incredible business model. Shipping out books on a subscription service who knew that that would come back. Right. But it’s back. So Harper Collins is doing well. 

[00:24:10] But buying books right now and selling books is hard for agents to do. So, again, there is nothing, this is a very long winded way Thoumas, of answering this, that if you would like to look for an agent and then self-publish, if that falls through, I think that that’s a valuable route to go. Other people, I have heard them scream and rail against this and say, no, if you can’t get an agent, then your book is obviously not good enough. And you shouldn’t fail a bad book over into being self-published. I just don’t think that’s true. I think that a hundred agents could look at this book, fail to see its worth. And it could do really well being self-published because it is super niche perhaps, or because it is language that the agents didn’t respond to, but your readers well and if you want to be both, then why not give that book a chance to be traditionally published? And if it fails, and you either rethink it and edit it, change it and try to get an agent after you do that, or you, or you self-publish it, or you do both. That is not a simple answer. That is not a yes or no answer. But I think moving a book that failed to get an agent over into self-publishing is something that can be very good to do. And you’re going to be learning from that whole process and the whole time that you are querying, you’re writing your next book anyway, that book is done. You’re not thinking about it right now and you’re- hello, kitty. And you’re writing your next book. So there’s really, you’re not losing in this. That is what I would recommend to do. If that sounds good to you Thoumas, you should let me know and, and tell me if that resonates with you.

[00:25:56] Everybody else, I appreciate- I appreciate you being with me here today. I hope that you are hanging on and that you are wailing along with your kitties like I do. I know it’s very sad, and that you are getting your work done, and I hope that you come tell me about it and send me an email, send me a Twitter. Let me know how you are doing in these difficult times and tell me what you are struggling with right now. You can also tell me that I’m full of shit and I shouldn’t have- sorry kitty, I shouldn’t have recorded this podcast, but I won’t care because I was speaking my truth to help inspire people like me, who are trying to be brave as well. And that is exactly what I was trying to prove in that middle point of this podcast. So, yes. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being part of my community. It means the world to me. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.