An Interview with Author/Publisher Christine Weiser (Sept/Oct 2011)
[Bethlehem Writers Roundtable editor] Bernadette De Courcey sat down with Christine Weiser, a local writer, who grew up in Springtown, Pennsylvania, to discuss the craft of writing, the challenges of publishing and the ever increasing work load on authors to market their own work.
Christine Weiser’s debut novel follows the all-girl rock group, Broad Street, through the highs and lows of struggling for success in the male-dominated, mid-’90s Philadelphia rock scene.
Christine is also the co publisher of Philadelphia Stories, a non-profit literary magazine that publishes the finest literary fiction, poetry and art from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, and distributes free of charge to a wide demographic throughout the region. You can find out more about Christine at www.christineweiser.com and www.philadelphiastories.org.
Lets start with what every writer wants to know, how did you get your book published?
Well Broad Street is the first book to be published by PS Books, the new publishing division of Philadelphia Stories. I, along with the rest of the editorial board, do not publish our work in Philadelphia Stories and so when it came to PS Books my novel went through the regular process and review of the editorial board, and they decided to publish it. I was the ideal candidate for the learning curve for PS Books that was just starting up, and since I was affiliated with them I would be very understanding.
I love the cover of your book, who created it?
In keeping with our mission to support local writers and artists we use local artists for our magazine covers. Marlise Tkaczuk designed a couple of our magazine covers and we loved her work. I commissioned her to design my novel cover. I sent her a description of what the book was about and she designed this vibrant cover. She also did a black and white design, but I went with the pink and orange. She also designed the cover of our second novel Wonder Mom and Party Girl, by Mark Schuster.
Does PS Books want to focus mainly on distributing to local independent stores?
We want to be everywhere. The goal is have a local voice that is distributed to a national readership. Every day something changes in the publishing industry. Self-publishing used to be taboo and everybody wanted to get an agent and sign with a large publishing house. The problem is that the competition is insane. Now big authors are reevaluating that big publisher model and are looking at the print-on-demand options. To self-publish your book should go through the editorial process. You can’t just publish a book because you think its fabulous and your mom thinks its fabulous.
How long did it take you to write Broad Street?
It took me three years to complete this book. It’s my first book. I’ve actually written four novels and I’m shopping different ones to different places now. I wrote a sequel to Broad Street, and this book is untitled right now as I had called it Broad Street and I took that title to replace the title No Strings Attached. So I guess it’s Broad Street 2. The sequel picks up ten years later, Kit and Margo have had a falling out in the interim, Kit gets pregnant and moves back home, while Margo goes on to a TV career. They get back together to do a rock tour for women musicians. I shopped that and found an agent with a big agency in New York, within a few weeks she left the large agency and set up her own office. I went with her naturally as she was my advocate. She had connections but not the recognition to publish it. Now I’m shopping my mom detective series.
Sounds like you are following the advice of many to keep your plate of projects full and your options open. What is your mom detective series about?
It’s written from the perspective of a new mom, living in the art museum district of Philadelphia. It’s a character driven book with a mystery to solve that just gives the characters something to do while they are figuring out their lives. The main character is married to a musician in a rock band who goes on tour while she’s left at home with the diapers.
I am intrigued, as a new mom myself I wouldn’t mind having a mystery to solve in between diaper changes.
I had an agent for this one, and we worked on editing it and when it was close to getting shopped out, she decided she didn’t want to do commercial fiction anymore and so then we parted ways.
This type of disappointment happens to many authors, it’s the trend. I think its great that you do have so many projects going at once. How do you stay positive when these things happen?
I think so many authors get bogged down with trying to get published that they forget about the joy of the craft. You can probably count on two hands authors that make a living being authors and so everybody else has a day job. I’m a managing editor of a technical magazine. I also have a son and so I’m juggling a lot and moms especially juggle a lot. I feel like after this happened to me I had to remind myself that I’m doing it for the joy of the craft. There’s something about why people are driven to write.
So many people are writing now, competing to get their novel published, to get their articles published in magazines, to get their story published in the newspaper, to get the job writing for online publications, with so many people competing a lot of people don’t get paid for their writing. Considering that so few people make a living at writing, do you then write because you HAVE to write even if it does not get published to a wide audience?
Yes I feel like I have to write, I enjoy writing. As authors we also take on the role of marketing our work to get it out there and many authors that are with big publishing houses are doing all of their own marketing. My friend Kelly Simmons from my writers group, is with a large publishing house. She works in public relations during the day, and was attending five book clubs a week, promoting her book. Trying to balance a full time job, promote your book, raise a family and all this while trying to write, is really difficult. This is just an example of someone who is with a big publishing house and you still have to get out there and work really hard.
Did you do a lot of this type of promoting for Broad Street?
Yes when my book came out I did a lot of book signings and readings.
Did you enjoy that aspect?
No I did not enjoy it at all. (she laughs).
I think it must be hard for authors, it used to be that they did not have to interact that much with their audience, and now they are so accessible to their readers, through websites, facebook, twitter, blogs and meeting readers constantly at signings, book clubs, conferences and so on. How do you feel about that this change for the author?
It’s exhausting, the author has to blog, the author has to have websites and so on. We do an annual conference called Push to Publish, everyone is welcome, it is a one day seminar on October 15th, Steve Allman is our key-note. There will be speed dates with editors and agents. We also have marketing panels attending. One of the biggest questions for authors is when do I write if I have to do all this marketing? You almost have to have a split personality divided between being creative and writing your book, and shopping and selling your book.
Do you have any advice on how to this?
One of the best pieces of advice I heard was to decide and allocate a certain amount of time per day, or per week to marketing. There are technology tools out there like Tweetdeck, that allow you to appear more active on Twitter by posting tweets for you intermittently throughout the day for example. You can spend an hour a day, or half hour a day, or an hour every Monday where you load in a bunch of tweets and update your facebook and that kind of thing.
Do you feel like there is too much out there on the internet between ebooks, ezines, blogs, author pages, twitter feeds and so on, that authors work is just getting lost in the quagmire?
Not really, there has always been a lot of books out there to compete with. I think it has pros and cons. I think the pros are that there are more grass roots power with the author now that the author didn’t have before. You are not at the whim of your publisher anymore, and more big authors are thinking about self-publishing because you make more money. With a publishing house maybe you sell 10,000 copies and you make 5 cents a book, but you could sell 168 ebooks for $2.99 and make the same amount of money.
Have you sold more ebooks than print books?
We’ve sold more print copies. We changed our model with PS Books because honestly trying to follow a traditional publishing house without a circulation department was too much. Basically I am the circulation department. We have all volunteers and interns that help where they can. For example large distributors like Baker and Taylor and Ingram place their order every month at the publishing house and then distribute to the bookstores. A lot of places like Barnes and Noble are only allowed to order books through these large distributors and that’s a disadvantage to small publishers. But this is changing now also. So you were at the whim of the publishing house and the distributors whether or not your book will be ordered and how many copies will be ordered per month.
Do you think you can make the New York bestseller list by self-publishing and self-promoting your book?
I don’t know. Probably not because of the distribution issues. One of the advantages of going with a traditional house is that they have the distribution and the reach to get your book out nationally.
I think that the difference often times between a book that sells and a book that does not sell as much is not because of its quality but simply because people haven’t heard about it or don’t see it on the front promotional shelves of a bookstore. Would you agree?
Well a lot of people don’t even go to bookstores anymore. There’s a big shift happening in publishing, I don’t know what the answer is, I don’t think the publishing houses even know what the answer is. Nobody has the answer. The traditional model is you sign with and publish a lot of books with a publishing house and they promote your book heavily for six weeks and then you are on your own. If they don’t sell enough copies your book goes out of print. We started using Lulu which is a great print-on-demand publishing website company. It used to be that self-published books did not look so great. They had those glossy covers, they didn’t go through a good line edit and copy edit. Now there are tools, like Lulu available. Our acquisitions editor talked us into it as we were unsure. They offer so many different templates. The books look great and they handle all the back end elements, all the sales, all the ebooks. There’s another problem with online books as there isn’t a standart format, kindle is different, sony, ipad etc. That makes it challenging. I think its an exciting time for publishing. We can equate books to music as there is such a parallel between the book industry and the music industry. With itunes and even now with amazon, amazon is accepting more self-publishing so that to is shifting. People don’t buy cd’s anymore unless it’s a cool collection or something that would be cool as a gift. People are buying music on itunes and I think the same is now happening with people buying ibooks. There’s also a lot of impulse buying of books that are selling for 99cents.
When I was reading a review online of your book on a reader blog site, I came across other books that were interesting to me. If I didn’t have my itunes account I probably wouldn’t have just bought and downloaded this other book. Do you think this is the way forward for books?
Yes I mean if you were in a bookstore, these books probably wouldn’t have even been near each other, they may not have even been in the same store.
There seems to be a huge shift in the market place with independent bookstores, magazines and so on, becoming very specialized. Do you think the book market online is becoming more reader focused, advertising to readers in a custom way by demographics?
Yes absolutely, the advertisements we get through facebook, and other web sites are based on our online information and is customized to each individual.
Getting back to your book Broad Street if I may, did you read any how to books?
Yes I read Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott and similar craft books. Writing workshops are what I really recommend. Writing is such a personal experience that you can take and use all of this general information whatever way you want. Carla my business partner is an adjunct creative writing teacher, and she has an array of books she calls on. There isn’t just one book, but there are chapters in many books that can be helpful in how to craft a sentence, and the do’s and don’ts and that kind of thing. Ultimately while you may be following all the rules, your character may not be right or your story may not be flowing the way you want, or you may not have the momentum you are looking for and I think to me being in the right writers group is key.
Basically in how I wrote this book, I took a writers workshop and I rewrote the first three chapters for about two years, (she laughs) I don’t recommend this procedure. However to me it was my writing program. I had to figure out the voice of the story. And whether it should be first person, or third person. For me the voice is such a hard thing to describe, it’s kind of like the hook in a song, its abstract and you can’t quite put your finger on it. That’s a challenging journey for writers to get that voice and make it true and believable. It has to be fictionalized. With Philadelphia Stories we see a lot of under fictionalized stories. New writers pitch a story and I say I just don’t believe it and their response is often, but it really happened.
Brenda Ueland from Queryshark.blogspot.com, says if you want to write you must first and foremost have talent, and have something original and important to say? Would you agree with this? Did you have something important to say in Broad Street?
I think yes except for, what is important? Is it important in the sense that your goal is to change the life of your reader, probably not. I mean is it important to entertain your reader, yes that’s important. When I wrote I was thinking more about the craft of it as opposed to the audience. It wasn't until I was finished with the first draft, that I said ok who wants to read this thing. And then I went back and shaped it a little bit more. I just enjoyed telling the story, to me ultimately it’s a coming of age story, the main character, Dee, makes a lot of mistakes. Some things in here really happened, I took true characters and events and I gave them a narrative arc, I amplified the conflict. I took a lot of creative license to shape it into a story.
Did you give your characters desire or did that just come to you as you wrote?
This process is different for everybody. Some people like to sit down and decide the goal they want their character to have. Other people like Justin Cronin who has a book out now, describes writing as just getting to the next thing that happens. Some people map out their whole outline and its important for them to know that this is the journey their character is going to take. Other people sit down and say I have this character I’m so intrigued by, and I’m going to start putting words on the page and see where the character takes me. The end of my book changed before I published it.
People say the beginning and the ending is the easiest to write. But I think often you have to write a backstory to know where your story should start, who is voice of the story and often there are many ways to end the story and many places to end the story, did you find this to be true?
I feel like you have to write the whole story and get to the end to truly see the story you have created. Whether it’s the end of a short story, poem or a novel. Once I got to the end I was able to reflect, does this make sense and I just feel like you can’t make the right revisions until you get to the end. You can always change the end once you’ve gotten to it. You can reflect on your voice, on your characters journey and all the other characters that have gone through some kind of shift too. I’m going to go back to that original and important quote, as that is something we look for at Philadelphia Stories. We’ve read thousands of cancer stories, thousands of stories about alcoholics and dysfunctional families and millions of break up stories. So whether there are original plots out there anymore is up for debate, but original can be that fresh voice that tells a story that’s been told before but in a fresh way.
What was your first ending for your story?
In the first ending one of the characters, Adam the roadie, died. The story had to end so having someone die was a way to end the story. It was such a downer and when I was shopping it, I was told this is a really fun book, but man what a downer ending. So then I took another look and started remembering what happened back in the 90’s; and I remembered that Nirvana was supposed to come to Philadelphia that summer and of course Kurt Cobain killed himself a couple of months prior. So that’s why I changed it to the current ending.
Did you feel emotion taking over as you wrote the scene where Dee gets a call at work that her father is in the hospital and she walks to the hospital and gets soaked in the rain, because she forgot her umbrella? Was this emotion strictly Dee’s or were you remembering an incident and then putting your emotion into the scene?
When I’m writing I feel like I’m channeling this other person, this voice of my story in a way. In general I don’t try to force an emotion into a scene, I just let it come about naturally. Sometimes I will be writing a scene and I have someone in the scene reading a newspaper and then I think, oh I wonder what’s in the newspaper. And so the characters lead me. And like a lot of first time authors we write what we know and that is a challenge because its first person and people say, I can’t believe you did such and such. Of course I didn’t do these things and so I think like finding the voice, finding the distance is also important. A big trigger that someone told me is that when you are getting to a really emotional scene, and you start describing the room or inanimate objects, then that’s an indication that you need to look at this and see what is there emotionally that you don’t want to delve deeper into.
Speaking of describing, there is the mantra touted by so many writing experts, Show Don’t Tell, and I think that there needs to be some telling in the story, it has to be done well, but it has a place. For example the opening line of Pride and Prejudice.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a
good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
Here Jane Austen is telling us information and its written beautifully, so my question is, is it more important to write well or to stick to the rule, Show Don’t Tell?
This goes back to control, you can read all the books about all the rules and you can break all the rules if you do it with control. This authorial control is how you can get away with breaking the rules, but you have to do it artfully. The sentence you just read is a perfect example of an artful way to break the rules.
Another rule is, Not To Speak Directly To The Reader, and here is the first line of To Have and Have Not, which breaks that rule.
“You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still
asleep against the walls of the buildings before even the ice wagons come by
with ice for the bars?”
Here Hemingway is addressing the reader, and he is the one who gets most of the credit for changing how people wrote, when he said, “Show the reader everything, tell them nothing.” What do you think of addressing the reader directly?
There are ways with second person to clue the readers in on something, it can be jarring, like a slap in the face, and I’ve read a book like that where every now and then this second voice came in and addressed me the reader, but it worked. Again it goes back to writing artfully. Anything that distracts the reader should be avoided.
Do you have any advice for writers looking for writers groups?
Its important to find the right group for you, it is very scary to put your work out there and so it’s a good idea to join in with a group that you feel comfortable with. And know that most writers groups exist because they want to help and support each other and share their love of writing. I would also recommend checking out Philadelphia Stories, you can become a member on line and receive the magazine at your home. It is how we are supported.
On behalf of the Bethlehem Writers Roundtable, I want to say thank you, Christine, for sharing all of your experience with writing, publishing and marketing your debut novel, Broad Street, and thank you for supporting our local authors and artists. We look forward to reading your next novel.
This interview, by co-editor Bernadette DeCourcey, took place on August 12th, 2011.