Now It's Real: I'm in Print!!

There's nothing quite like holding the actual physical printed book. Finally! I'm a published author now.

Showing my age, I suppose, but somehow having an eBook to send out as an Advance Review Copy (ARC) doesn't seem much different from just printing the book out to PDF and mailing it to a potential publisher or lit agent.

It is utterly gorgeous. Kudos to Sunstone Press. High quality physical materials, really nice cover, good paper, solid-feeling construction. It feels like something that will survive on library shelves and hold up to being tossed into backpacks and knapsacks and whatnot.



Ten years ago I began writing what would eventually become GenderQueer. (I started trying to get it published in 2013)

Forty years ago I came out on UNM campus — the climactic event in the book. Long before there was any such term as "genderqueer" I described to people how the person I was inside was basically the same persona as what's more typical of girls and women, that this made me different in the same general way that gay and lesbian folks were different, but that it was something else. Not trans, either (I was physiologically male, and that wasn't the problem). I invented my own terms, created my own symbols, wrote my own manifestos and began dealing with the insinuations and innuendos and hints by dropping my own coy allusions and double-entendres into conversations, unworried about whether people could parse them or not, confident, finally, of who I was, what I was, how I was. Let other people be uncomfortable with it if they must, but I'm done with that.



I've been reviewed in a handful of college newspapers with more promised to come, and a couple have been entered on GoodReads. Amazon isn't allowing reviews to be posted until the official release date (I guess?) (3/16/20) and I don't yet have any reviews in commercial or LGBTQ publications but expect those to start appearing as well. Haven't placed any ads yet (aside from a blog tour package) but we're designing them and I do have an ad budget.

I've heard it said that this is a good time for folks to stay indoors and avoid the crowds and curl up with a good book. Read mine! Then, if you liked it, recommend it to your friends.

It's a different story than any you're likely to have read, and I want folks to hear it.



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My book is being published by Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon and now on Barnes & Noble

(paperback only for the moment).

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I've Been Reviewed!

The Whitman Wire, student newspaper of Whitman College (Walla Walla WA) has published a review of GenderQueer!



“GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet” explores the complexity of gender

Because I figured that my book would be of particular relevance to the college communities, both students and faculty, I solicited reviews from student newspapers. The Whitman Wire is the first to publish a review of my book.

I am very happy with the column, written by Jaime Fields, their Arts & Entertainment reporter. It's an analysis of the writing itself, including character development and pacing and readability (she compares it favorably to fiction novels and describes it as "compelling and enjoyable to read"), of the story line, and of the book's social relevance to potential readers.

I'm particularly pleased that the review characterizes the book as being intense and verging on overwhelming. After a long querying odyssey in which I was told over and over by literary agents and publishers that the writing didn't move them, that it left them wanting to know more about what my character was feeling, that it was dull, static, and lacked emotion *, it is nice to read that my book actually packs an emotional punch!



* e.g, Jason Bradley, editor at NineStar, with whom I had a publishing contract for this book back in 2017. Backstory available here

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My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).

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It's a Date!

There's been a delay -- my book will not, as previously indicated, come out in January -- but I do now have an official release date! GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet will be published by Sunstone Press on March 15, 2020.




So here's what the delay is about: if you pick up a nonfiction book, you're likely to see a block of text on the copyright and dedication page that tells you how the Library of Congress has categorized the book. Libraries and other institutions make use of this.

It's called a "CIP Block".

Here, for example, is the CIP Block for the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond:


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Diamond, Jared M.
Guns, germs, and steel : the fates of human societies / Jared Diamond.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-31755-8
1. Social evolution. 2. Civilization—History 3. Ethnology. 4. Human being—Effect of environment on. 5. Culture diffusion I. Title
HM206.D48 1997
303.4—dc21 96-37068
CIP
W W Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York N.Y.10110
www.wwnorton.com
W.W.Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London, W1T3QT


Sunstone Press is a publisher that does release nonfiction books that are purchased by libraries and is therefore a participant in the Cataloging in Publication program. More info.

Since I hope for my book to be acquired by libraries and to become assigned reading for women's and gender studies programs at colleges, it seems very much in my best interests to have my book enrolled and given a CIP block.

Well, the Library of Congress apparently doesn't always move with great alacrity when a publisher sends in a manuscript. And that's what the wait has been about.

Between now and March 15, I should be getting a listing on Amazon for advance orders. I'll keep y'all informed.


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Bookstores and Libraries and Community Centers, Oh My!

Having given approval to the formatted manuscript and the covers (back and front), I've now effectively switched effort-gears from "getting book published" to "getting people to read the book", even though it hasn't rolled off the Sunstone Books presses yet.

At this phase, where the book's availability is predicted but still slightly off in the future (January 2020, for benefit of the curious), the focus is on women's and gender studies programs at colleges, and LGBT community centers. I can be booked to speak at such venues even before it's possible to show up with a stack of the books on the table in front of me.

I actually did some of that in 2016-2017 when I had previously thought my book was on the verge of coming out. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Learned a lot, too. When I next have an opportunity to present, the presentation is going to be more closely focused on my specific type of gender identity and what it brings to the table. People like the "Gender 101" introductory material but I think I can encapsulate it in a much smaller portion of my talk.

Later, once the book can be purchased, I will add libraries and bookstores to the list of targets.

To be sure, a library or a bookstore, theoretically speaking, could also have a presenter or speaker before their book is available for purchase. But in the case of bookstores in particular, my research thus far indicates that they aren't much for "events", or at least not the kind of event that revolves around a gender-variant person discussing gender identity. Some of the new age and mystical / spiritual book stores do host events but they're most often focused on chakras and healing and the sale of gems and oils and other non-book substances that they market along with books on the subject. University bookstores generally don't do events at all, of any sort, and the remaining balance of independent bookstores mostly want the author's book to be available for purchase first.

Meanwhile, my publicist, John Sherman of Sherman & Company, is going to have an additional focus: getting my book reviewed. That, surprisingly enough (for me at least), is something that needs focused attention before the book's release date. Some important reviewers won't review a book once it comes out.



My day-job skills as a FileMaker database developer are again serving me well, just as they did for the querying process. For this publicity effort, I have 11614 records in my database (with many of them containing multiple contact persons to fire emails or snailmails or phone calls off to). Of those, 864 are college campus women's and/or gender studies programs; 412 are LGBT community centers, a mixture of on-campus and independent. Then I have 1552 academic libraries and a whopping 7263 public libraries, any and all of whom could theoretically acquire a copy of my book for their shelves. I have no experience pitching this possibility to libraries, but with any luck I will learn as I gain experience. Then I have 32 LGBT-focused bookstores (a declining phenomenon, unfortunately, although part of the decline may be that the subject matter is more mainstream and more often carried by mainstream bookstores), and 1351 other (generic) independent bookstores. The independent bookstores and libraries are dual-opportunity: they could book me to speak, and purchase copies of my book to stock and sell as well. Finally, I have 139 reviewers, bloggers, booktubers, and individual people who asked me to alert them when the book becomes available.

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I've Got the Cover!

That's the front cover, of course.

Here's the back cover and spine:

Pre-Typesetting: Final Author's Edits

I received from Sunstone Press the text of my manuscript, "formatted" and cleaned of violations of the Chicago Manual of Style and corrected for typos and whatnot, for a final author's opportunity to change anything before it moves forward to typesetting.

I have now gone past a landmark that I never reached with either Ellora's Cave or NineStar Press: I'm looking at the content of my book as it will be when it is released, give or take any changes that I make at this point.

If you are not an author--or even if you are but haven't as of yet worked with a publisher--the impact of that may not be apparent. Publishers accept an author's book contingent on a successful round of edits. Changes. Essentially, they're saying they would like to publish your book but first they want to do some things to it.

Even an established author with a high profile is not immune to changes to their work, and I'm not merely talking about catching typos and fixing errant punctuation, either. I've heard that when John Steinbeck submitted Travels With Charlie, the editor modified quite a bit of it before it went to press.

So although an acceptance letter brings great joy, it soon leads to apprehension and trepidaton: "Yay, finally my book will be published. I wonder what they'll want me to cut or write differently or stick in? Will I hate it?"

In my case, it wasn't a hypothetical situation, either. My editor at NineStar, in 2017, wanted to kill the first 35,000 words, the first five years of the story, and start it in the middle. "You can put some of it in as flashbacks, maybe", he told me. This was so far from acceptable to me that I ended up asking to have my contract revoked and my rights reverted back to me. Having a contract to publish and then finding the editing process so destructive that I had to pull out felt like being rescued from a sinking ship only to find out that my rescuers were cannibals and that I was better off jumping back into the ocean.

So although I had heard only nice and supportive things said about my manuscript by Sunstone so far, I could not relax or rejoice just yet. The editing pen still loomed over my work like the Sword of freaking Damocles and I'd wake up in the middle of the night imagining all kinds of awful dilemmas, horrible choices I might have to confront, depending on what they asked of me.

But they like it! They really like it! (He says, sounding oddly like Sally Fields). I've finished reviewing the first two thirds of the book and the book is still my book, intact, not missing any limbs or vital organs, its face not rearranged by plastic surgery into something foreign. The editor at Sunstone has a light touch and I'm seldom aware of where anything was changed, and where I do see it, he's usually made it cleaner and clearer.

I'm starting to feel like Sisyphus would upon getting the damn stone up over the rim of the slope and up onto a flat level place. Oh, sure, something could still go wrong. A meteor strike could vaporize the offices of Sunstone Press, or the economy could go into such a tailspin that the entire publishing industry shuts down. But I'm starting to feel optimistic that this is actually going to happen this time.


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Tréjà Vu — I Have a Publisher for my Book!

I'm happy to report that I have a contract with Sunstone Books for the publication of GENDERQUEER: A Story from a Different Closet. Sunstone is a Santa Fe NM based publisher, which I'm happy about since the action in the book takes place in New Mexico. I don't have a formal release date yet but I expect it to come out in the general vicinity of January 2020.

GENDERQUEER is the coming-out and coming-of-age story of a gender nonconforming male. Set in the late 1970s, it's a work of nonfiction and highlights the realness of an identity that is not gay, bisexual, lesbian, or transgender, but isn't cisgender and heterosexual either -- "it's something else".

It's a work of nonfiction. It's my story.

GENDERQUEER is a 96,000 word tale with real people, characters and dialogue, that is intended to make some fairly complex social concepts accessible to people who aren't regular readers of political and social theory.

It will be my first published commercial piece. So I'm a debut author.



I don't feel like a debut author. I feel like an old and rather weary traveler plodding across the damn desert.

That probably has something to do with the fact that this is the third time I've had a contract to get this book published.

Ellora's Cave was going to publish it in 2016 but they went out of business.

Original Announcement
Retraction

Then, in 2017, StarNine Press said they would publish it, if I worked with the editor to shorten and tighten the first third of the book. It turned out that by "tighten" they meant "discard", and we were unable to reach a mutually satisfactory understanding and publication was cancelled at my request.

Original Announcement
Retraction


I sent out nearly 1500 queries to literary agents about this book and never succeeded in getting a lit agent. Eventually I began querying small independent publishers and at this point the tally of those is 117 queries to publishers, resulting in three signed contracts.

The third of which had jolly well better be the proverbial charm.

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Depression

I'm in a dismal mood.

Doesn't happen very often. I'm seldom depressed. When I first obtained a clear sense of my variant identity, I received along with it a political explanation for why I felt pushed aside, why I was so often reviled and hated when I hadn't done anything to hurt anybody, why I didn't make friends, was perennially unpopular, and so on. It was also a political analysis that explained a lot of the worrisome aspects of the larger world to me, things like tyranny and oppression, poverty and inequality, even morality and spiritual meaning in life. So it was very empowering, and gave me optimism, courage, even some modicum of patience.

And you can sort of see why having that kind of understanding in my head made me want to share it, figuring it would offer those things to a lot of other people as well. And why wanting to share it gave me a mission and a purpose in life.

But I do get discouraged and trammeled down sometimes and it's been like that these last couple weeks.


I had a publisher on the line. I had a contract in my hands. There were problems and concerns -- I never quite felt that the editor I was interacting with had a clear understanding of the gender identity thing, either mine or MOGII* identities in general, beyond the average person's mainstream popularized shorthand stuff, and he didn't seem curious or sufficiently intellectually engaged to see what it was that I was trying to say to the world. It was more like "Hey, you write well, this could be an interesting entertaining book with a bit of effort".

I thought maybe I could work with that but the lack of any sense of being on the same channel worried me. He also gave every sign of wanting to be heavy-handed about changes. "I think you should add a scene where you muse about this, and then a scene where you blast out of town and flip off the city limits sign as you drive into the sunset... and I'd get rid of these scenes in this next section..." I got mixed messages about how much of these editorial suggestions I could veto and still have them publish the book. On the one hand, he stipulated that the publisher would not make any changes that the author did not approve, and when I did a preliminary round of edits , adding some scenes he suggested but not deleting material that I wanted to keep, he replied (somewhat sourly, I thought), "Well, do it your way, it's your book, and we don't want you to look back after publication and wish you'd never heard of us". Alongside of these ambivalent-sounding reassurances about my authorial authority, I received periodic comments about how the publisher could not afford to put a book out there that had so many flaws and weaknesses that it simply would not sell, or that would be an embarrassment to the publishing company.

I was sent a document to review and sign, titled "draft contract", and I wanted to modify some clauses to safeguard that the book would come out my way (final word on the book's cover, title, back-cover blurbs, publicity descriptions or synopsis, etc) and also push for a better deal in some places (better % royalties beyond the 2500th copy, because I'd be financing most of the publicity efforts, as tends to be the case with small publishers) -- I figured it did say draft proposal, after all, and that they might say "nope, you can't have that" and if so we'd negotiate to a compromise and then I'd sign and they'd sign and I'd hold my breath and hope we could work together on the edits, right?

Uh uh. I got a reply email stating that the publisher had decided they had too many projects going on and had decided not to publish my book after all, best of luck with it elsewhere, etc. After a day to cool off I wrote a letter of inquiry (and of hubris-acknowledgment). He confirmed that yeah, it was because I'd given them pushback instead of just signing the contract as is. And nope, no room at this point for continuing the discussion, sorry. So that was that.


What are your symptoms when you get down and despondent and mopey?

For me, it's like this:


* I get mad at myself and start blaming myself for the outcome, even though I'm still capable of an intellectual analysis that tells me I didn't do self-destructive things here. I blew it. I had a contract in my hands and managed to drive away the publisher. I must not really want to get my book published, I sabotage myself. Heck, I probably sabotage myself right and left every day, finding ways to not network or communicate, so that I can be a fucking dilettante and keep pretending to be an "activist" or a gender "revolutionary" when I'm really just Walter Mitty and none of this is real.

* I question my beliefs and understandings. Intellectually, I could tell you that it is good for anyone to question what they purport to believe; it makes the beliefs that withstand such questions more valid and sound, and it makes the person who subscribes to them less defensive and more genuinely confident and all that -- but in this mood, the belief-questioning is very dark and takes this form: "My difference probably isn't that I'm differently gendered. That's just an excuse. I'm inferior, there's something fundamentally wrong with me. People mocked and harassed me as a kid because I was pathetic, not because I was a sissy. I have had problems making friends and getting accepted socially because I'm not fun, not friendly, don't remember what is important to other people, and in particular because I don't properly soak up how to be, the little memes and clues, so I am not a part of things. I'm probably impaired neurologically or psychologically. Maybe I'm autistic, or I have some personality deficit so that I'm capable of doing mechanical things like dress myself or do data entry or write term papers for college classes but my brain isn't wired correctly to do people-interaction. Yeah, there's something wrong with me.

* The dark stuff isn't all of the self-blame variety. I have other forms of gloom to wallow in. Why have I gotten so little traction out of forty years of trying to share and explain these ideas? Well it's because I belong to a sexually dimorphic species, and I'm a sissy male, a feminine male, hence a minority and marginalized because of that; and I can try to call that "political" and make an "issue" of it all I want, but my species isn't buying it, there are evolutionary forces that select against it becoming okay for males like me to be accepted and embraced by society. Or (brain switches channels to a different gloomy perspective) it's a conspiracy of sorts, my set of theories and explanations is a potential meme that conflicts in parts with the predominant rising body of thought, which at the moment is the mainstream transgender narrative, What I am saying or trying to say is rejected because the popular social dialog only has room for a few prevailing ideas to proliferate. My notions are no doubt seen as transphobic, or at least they’re seen as incorrect and inaccurate when people compare them with the established transgender explanations. And back in the earlier years, before transgender viewpoints were established, my ideas were probably worrisome to gay people and their supporters, and were perceived as homophobic. So, you see, communication between an individual and the rest of their surrounding culture isn't free exchange; ideas that are not the ones chosen by the consensus get pinched off and blocked because they introduce too much noise, and mine are noise, not the memes that have been embraced and selected for wider audiences. Or (switching channels to one with even less light in it)…

* Ha, so silly to dwell on how poorly I fit as a male, when I should take note of how poorly I fit as a human being. I am not doing this "being a person" thing very well. I was born to a species whose tasks of life and patterns of behavior and interaction and challenges and so forth are a bad fit for me, and not much fun. I am tired of this. Not in the sense of wanting to be dead, not in the sense of craving non-consciousness and non-existence, but, yeesh, if I die and get to come back, I really hope I can come back on some other planet as some other species with a different nature, different characteristics. Or I could come back as a kitty cat, and live in back alleys and prey on mice and if I'm lucky get adopted and taken indoors. Or I could try my hand at being a sycamore tree, or bread mold or something. But this "being a human being" thing doesn't seem to be shaping up to anything like a passing grade. I'm just no damn good at it.


Meh. My way of coping with depression is to ride it out, and to wallow in it self-indulgently and immersively, until I get annoyed and angry and break out of it. I don't think I'm very pleasant company for the duration of these moods (I get even more self-immersed than I usually am, which is admittedly a rather narcissistic threshold to start with); I only listen to the loved ones and important associates and colleagues in my life in a sporadic and distracted way, and I get very forgetful (more spacy than usual, and again I have an embarrassingly bad baseline to start with). And I'm awake much of the time I should be sleeping and dozing off when I should be alert and awake.

But it's not like I don't understand why I would be feeling depressed. I got sufficient reason. So it's normal and natural and part of life for me.

I'll bounce back.


* MOGII = "minority orientations, gender identities, and intersex" -- an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBTQIAA++ acronym


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The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point

A pair of somewhat-recent rejection slips:

It is written in what I will refer to as an "extreme" narrative, i.e. it reads like a diary. The promise of an interesting read on the subject of a young man's struggle to determine his sexuality is never realized because the author lapses into a commentary on his being bullied by those who prey on the "undecided" identity seekers. One thing that makes this interesting is that although the author identifies more as a female, his orientation is clearly heterosexual. Readers may well be inclined to 'slug' through the pity in order to see how his obvious conflicts are resolved. Three stars because it is at best a 'possible."

-- from Black Rose, a small independent publisher

You’ve struck on relevancy with your premise. The story of coming-of-age trans during the 1970’s while battling a prejudice environment is compelling, but there still needs to be a gripping arc to carry the narrative. The characters didn’t come to life for me. I felt more like I was being told events, rather than living them with Derek.

-- from Judith Weber of Sobol Weber, a literary agency


I'm not sure how I can do a better job of making the characters "come to life" and bringing the reader to the point of living events with my main character Derek while at the same time avoiding making it an even more "extreme narrative" that reads "like a diary" in which readers have to "slug through the pity".

Meanwhile, I'm continuing to participate in author's reading events at Amateur Writers of Long Island as described in this earlier blog post. I read a 1500-word excerpt from the 8th-grade chapter early in the book and the other authors gave me much more pleasant feedback than the publishers and lit agents:

Your ability to express your vulnerability is amazing! It flows with ease.

Well-written, strong emotions. Sad, powerful.

Very well written and effective. Keep at it, it's near perfect.

Still, among the rejection letters I've received over the years, there have been two main themes (aside from form letters and short choppy "not for me" replies): that I don't have enough of a platform and that the story doesn't sufficiently grab the reader and draw them in.

We were impressed by The Story of Q's holistic approach to the underwritten topic of growing up queer. However, we struggled to engage emotionally with Derek because of the lack of specificity in prose. For example, it was difficult to understand why, in middle school, Derek found boys' behavior to be "bad" (rather than merely displeasing or disruptive), when Derek had not expressed a desire to be "good" or why Derek was ostracized growing up without knowing how exactly he was teased in each school he attended.

-- Nora Long for / Susan Cohen at Writer's house

I read you query with interest. Your premise is unique and definitely stands out! Unfortunately, the writing style did not draw me into your story's world as much as I would have liked.

-- Johanna Hickle at Talcott Notch


Well, that kind of feedback tends to make me think of perhaps letting go of my self-imposed barriers on manuscript length. Because for any individual event, writing it as a vivid scene with dialog and main-character mental processes and feelings and sound and smells and colors and all that means taking up more words to do it. In a vintage-2014 blog post I explained why. I'm still sure that the story I'm telling is the story I want to tell (as opposed to trying to include less). So the price tag for punching it up further is, at a minimum, to stop worrying about manuscript length and just let it take as many pages (and words) as it takes, you know?

Many of the books I've enjoyed the most have been quite a bit longer than The Story of Q in its present incarnation: Marilyn French's The Women's Room at 135,700 words (526 pages), Marge Piercy's Small Changes at 171,400 words (562 pages), Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone which comes in at 116700 words (465 pages). Mine has hovered around 97,000 words which would probably take up somewhere between 320 and 375 pages. Hmm, I could include a lot more dialog in the scene where the girl from Boston comes to visit and she become the love interest I obsess about... and I could insert some scenes with Boy Scouts illustrating more about how I was sort of not fully merging and kind of holding myself back from them, maybe a scene where the other boys are telling dirty jokes or something, and maybe some scenes at pot parties where I get into philosophical conversations with some of the girls while we're stoned...

But I also looked at some of the classic coming-out stories, to compare for length within the same genre, and that's a bit scary.

Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle ("Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America--and living happily ever after") is only 246 pages (63,960 words).

The Best Little Boy in the World by Andrew Tobias ("The classic account of growing up gay in America. An autobiography in which he spoke of his experiences as a gay boy and young man. He published it under the pen name "John Reid" to avoid the repercussions of being openly gay") was 247 pages (64,220 words).

Jan Morris wrote Conundrum ("One of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris’s hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was.") in a mere 176 pages (45,760 words).

Mario Martino did Emergence ("The autobiography of a female-to-male transsexual, written as a cooperative effort by the author with a medical journalist. It is one individual's story of the transition from female to male") in 273 pages (70,890 words).

The Last Time I Wore a Dress ("At fifteen years old, Daphne Scholinski was committed to a mental institution and awarded the dubious diagnosis of "Gender Identity Disorder." She spent three years--and over a million dollars of insurance--"treating" the problem...with makeup lessons and instructions in how to walk like a girl.") was 224 pages (55,552 words).

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg ("Woman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town") was 308 pages (77,000 words).

And Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There ("The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny. She’s Not There is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story") ran to 352 pages (91,520 words).

None of those is quite as long as The Story of Q. Is that worrisome? Relevant? I don't know for sure, but it doesn't make me very comfortable with the notion of making my book yet longer in pursuit of more vivid scenes and paragraphs.

I had two publishers sign contracts to publish this book; I need to remember that and not blame my writing for the rejection slips I get.

I'm looking for the sweet point, where I've laid down the trajectory of experiences I went through that culminated in me deciding I had a different kind of identity than the people around me, and explained that in enough detail and enough emotional vividness to convey that.


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Update on My Get-Book-Published Endeavors

I wrote a book about being genderqueer and I'm trying to get it published.

Those of you who've been reading my blog for awhile now are well aware of that, but I have recently joined several Facebook groups where I may not have mentioned that, and I'm now echoing my blog in more places in hopes of reaching a wider audience... and it's been awhile since I blogged about the book itself. Most of my recent posts have been about some aspect of gender or genderqueer experience.

Anyway, yeah, it's a memoir (nonfiction, my own story), a coming-of-age and coming-out story, about 97,000 words long (probably about 325 pages, give or take). And I've been querying literary agents since 2013 and small publishers (the sort that you can query directly) since 2015.

Here's where things are at at the moment:


THE REQUEST FOR A FULL


Every rare once in a while my queries to literary agents have resulted in a request to see and evaluate the full manuscript, an event known in the world of authors and author-aspirants as a "request for a full". It's akin to when sending in your resume results in an actual job interview. I've had six of those so far.

The most recent was from Lucinda Karter of Jennifer Lyons Lit Agency (or, more precisely, from her assistant Jadie Stillwell), on November 17 of last year. I sent in the full manuscript and didn't hear a peep, so on December 8 I sent a follow-up inquiry, just asking for confirmation that they actually received it. They had; Stillwell apologized for being behind and said they hadn't had a chance to look at it but would get to it in due course.

At some point in the spring, I went back to querying lit agents, if only to distract myself from the waiting.

Eventually, the 8th of March rolled around, and it had now been three months since I'd heard anything from them and four months since I'd queried them, so I sent a follow-up email, inquiring if I had perhaps missed a critical piece of correspondence. On March 20th, still not hearing anything, I repeated that inquiry, and on March 30th I got a somewhat formletterish "thanks for the opportunity to read but unable to fully connect with the characters and will have to pass" rejection letter.


THE DOLDRUMS


One of the literary agents that I subsequently queried wrote back to say my proposal looks interesting but that they have a policy of only considering material submitted to them exclusively — so did anyone else have it? Of course they did. So in a back-and-forth exchange of emails we established that they'd be happy if I waited until any still-outstanding queries were rejected or else timed out with at least six weeks elapsing from the time I queried them, and then subsequently didn't send any other queries out until they'd had a chance to make their evaluation. That point will be on April the 12th, two days from now. I'll let them know on the 12th that they now have exlusivity and then an additional six weeks will tick by before their exclusivity-window expires.

It's a long shot but all inquiries to lit agents are long shots. I decided to go for it. But it's meant not doing anything as far as lit agents are concerned from week to week and (at this point) month to month.

It's hard to feel fired-up and like you're doing something towards getting a book published when you're just sitting around waiting for a calendar date to crawl by.

Meanwhile, with the publishers, I'm in the same damn situation: there was a publisher I wanted to query, one that was highly recommended on the queer / nonbinary / minority orientation and sexual orientation and intersex FaceBook groups as a good solid publisher for LGBTQIA titles. They, too, have a policy of exclusivity. So I had to wait until the previous publisher submission (to Kensington Books) expired from lack of activity and then sent them my query, which they've now had since January 23. They want 90 days to evaluate manuscripts, so they've got exclusivity until April 23, another thirteen days from now.

So I've been sitting on my thumb, metaphorically speaking, not sending anything to anyone and watching the damn calendar.


BROAD OVERVIEW / REVIEW OF THE SITUATION


I have twice had a publisher sign a contract with me to publish this book. Generally what happens when a publisher signs a contract with an author is that the book goes into print. In the first instance, the publisher, Ellora's Cave, went out of business and revoked all pending books. In the second instance, with NineStar Press, the editor wanted to cut the first third of the book entirely, and we were unable to establish a working relationship. (I experienced the editor as heavy-handed and insulting, and I gather that he found me arrogant and impossible to work with). So I asked them revert my rights back to me.

This is extremely frustrating, as you can probably imagine. The relief and excitement and joy of having a publisher pick up your book, the anticipation of seeing it listed on Amazon and perhaps on a book stand in a book store, the enthusiastic planning of promotional talks and book-signings and lecture tours and all that... ripped out from beneath me.

I was going to write that this isnt fun any more. That's misleading: it was never any fun, this process of trying to sell agents and publishers on the idea of publishing my book. I detest this entire process, just as I hate doing job searches. I have said in the past that trying to sell myself like this ranks right up there with cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue. So "isn't fun any more" isn't the applicable phrase here. What's changed, I think, is that I won't be able to feel any of that relief, excitement, anticipation or joy when I finally do once again have a publishing contract. At this point I don't think it will seem real until the damn thing's actually in print and I am holding a copy in my hands. Maybe not even then.

"Well", you may be thinking, "why don't you just self-publish?"

It's an easy enough process to create a print run of my book. I even have a routine that allows me to print the whole book onto 5.5 x 8.5 format, two pages to a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, double-sided, so it can be whacked neatly in two with an industrial sheet cutter and bound. I could get bids and go with the cheapest bid, and that's before I even look into companies specifically geared to help authors self-publish.

Electronic printing is even more effortless, and free. I can generate a PDF at will, and Amazon (among others) will readily help me convert it to other standard eBook formats for paid download.

None of that is at all difficult. Most of that is not relevant.

The difficult, and relevant, part of what makes publishing different than mere printing is distribution and publicity. Running off five thousand copies of my book (and/or generating an eBook for electronic distribution) doesn't get it into people's hands. It doesn't get it reviewed. There are human activites that successfully overcome those barriers, promotional activities. I'm not good at them. If I were good at them, this would be a very popular blog with hundreds or thousands of weekly readers. It isn't. I'm not.

I'll still have to gear up to plan and execute a promotional campaign even with a traditional-model publisher, unless I get a large publisher on-board (unlikely); but even a small publisher makes the book "authentic" to the world of reviewers and opens up opportunities for distribution and consideration. I'm particularly interested in seeing it picked up as reading material for gender studies, LGBTQ studies, feminist theory, and other related academic course work, and hopefully also to find shelf space in LGBT community centers and support group meeting spaces and whatnot.


READINGS


One thing I have been doing more of lately is attending authors' groups where people bring samples of their work-in-progress and read from them and get feedback from the others there. I've been attending the Long Island Writers' Guild and the Amateur Writers of Long Island in recent weeks. Of the two, I like the format used by the latter somewhat better, as they allow up to 1800 word samples to be read and spend more time discussing each selection before moving on to the next. I've enjoyed them both, though.

The feedback I've received is encouraging. The people say my writing in general is vivid and effective, the characters and their behaviors and dialog strongly drawn, the paragraphs and phrases well-constructed. That's not to say I haven't received useful criticism, of the sort "you could do more of this up here before he says that" and "I found it a bit confusing when it jumped to this next scene, is that supposed to be later the same week or what?" and so on. But the overall takeaway is very good: my writing does what I want it to do, it works. At least in 1800-word chunks. (I still yearn for more feedback on the entire book as a satisfying or less-than-satisfying whole).


STATS


total queries to Lit Agents (counting requeries): 1171

Rejections: 1092
Outstanding: 79

As Nonfiction, total: 944

Rejections: 866
Outstanding: 78

As Fiction, total: 227

Rejections: 226
Outstanding: 1

total queries to Publishers: 30

Rejections: 22
Outstanding: 1
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, went out of business: 1
Pub Contract Signed, rights reverted: 1

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