Every writer has one idea for a novel that won’t let go. Alex Hughes’ featured a telepathic detective trying to put a history of drug addiction behind him. Ten years, countless hours, and immeasurable heartaches later, Alex entered Clean in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Competition. Although it was eventually eliminated from the competition, it had captured the notice of an editor at Roc Books, a division of Penguin. A couple months later, Alex received the call every up-and-coming writer dreams of.
BWG: After so much rejection by print media, what convinced you to continue your pursuit? Did
you ever consider self-publishing an e-book?Alex Hughes: At thirteen years old, I decided I was going to be an author – and my parents (foolishly) told me I could do anything I set my mind to. A year later they took me to a writing seminar where the guy at the front said he literally papered his wall in rejection slips – spelling out Crash and Burn. He was halfway through “Die” when he made his first sale. I filled up a half-wall of the basement with rejection slips before I went to college, figuring I could follow this guy’s leads. The trouble was, I wasn’t making any sales.
I minored in writing in college, including an independent study with a very encouraging teacher, Dan Marshall, who invited me to his writing group. That group was determined to be published, and I worked with them for eight years to grow my craft and get better as a writer. But again, it was discouraging because I wasn’t making any sales. I started to wonder if this was really possible. I put my dream to the side a bit and concentrated on other things.
Fast forward a few years. I was newly married and unemployed and Sam was pushing me to give my dream one last try. I took this writing course from Holly Lisle and pulled out the book that wouldn’t let me go – Clean – and decided to give it one last polish. I went to writer’s conferences and talked to agents. I revised until my fingers bled, and then I revised again. And that January – January 2011 – I submitted the book for the second time to the ABNA (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award) and put in an application to Odyssey. I figured I had a year to make it in traditional publishing, and then I was going to publish the thing myself through Kindle. Sam’s a big gadget techie and had already started reading up on the process, and I was ready. But then I started advancing in the ABNA ranks and I got the phone call from the agent in June, at Odyssey.
There were moments along the way where I wanted to give up, and many times when I walked away for a few months or a year because it was just too painful to go on. I was getting rejection after rejection, some of them cruel and in person. I thought it was never going to happen for me. But the idea of letting my dream die – completely die – was more painful than the idea of going on. So I went on.
As I said, Sam and I had talked about self-publishing frequently in the beginning of that year. I had read the submission guidelines atApex Magazine (“Don’t get angry, become more awesome”) and had taken them to heart, so I was working my tail off on becoming more awesome. But the day was coming when I knew in my heart I needed to send my work out into the world, and if traditional publishing wasn’t going anywhere, it was time to do it myself. It was luck – and persistence – that let me find an agent and editor before that time came.
BWG: What do you think are the benefits of using a traditional publisher rather than self-publishing?
Alex Hughes: There’s a lot of talk on the internet about how traditional publishers are the devil, and some of the more calm folks with that opinion have some valid points. However, there are a great many benefits traditional publishers still have that self-publishing just can’t touch.
Firstly and most importantly, they have existing relationships with bookstores, and a sales team that hand-sells your book to the most important distributors. Unless you’re a hell of a networker or your last name rhymes with Pilton, you’re just not going to be able to get the Barnes & Nobles buyer to take your small self-published book seriously. Shelf space sells books. Period. Since as of a year ago, 85% of all books sold in the US were paper, bookstores matter. Shelf space matters – and getting it yourself is tough.
Next, they have big fancy printers and cover designers, and they will use them on your behalf without charging you for the privilege. We’ve all seen that cheaply-printed ragamuffin book that your Aunt Flo gives away at reunions – remember how you couldn’t get away fast enough? While there are self-publishing houses out there who’ll do your book justice if you’re willing to fork out the money and stay on top of the project, the big publishing houses will do it right the first time for free. Plus they’ll pay you for the content, and do subsequent printing runs for free. Again, paper books matter, and the quality of the book matters a whole bunch too.
Next, they have whole departments of copyeditors, marketers and publicists who promote books for a living. No learning curve here; any people they commit to your project will have done this before – a lot. Now, if your book is a debut from an unknown author, they may not commit many resources – but they have them. And, if you’re lucky enough to be somebody they throw their weight around for, you can find yourself on the bestseller lists fast enough to make your head spin. (Or you can bomb big; nothing in publishing is guaranteed.)
When I was looking at self-publishing, I was looking at it from a business perspective. A very big initial investment (for paper) or a smaller one electronically. Then, I’d have to learn to be an entire book marketing department, a publicist, an editor, a cover artist, a project manager, and a copyeditor – or I’d have to hire out those jobs at additional cost and stay on top of them. I’m a fiction author and I don’t have a big platform from which to sell my books – so I’d be starting from absolute scratch in a flooded market.
In contrast, with the traditional publishers (at least in the big house I’m with), most of what I have to do is write, the stuff I actually know how to do. Plus they pay me rather than me paying them. And I get shelf space – and readers – out of the deal.
BWG: How much marketing are you responsible for as an author getting published through the more traditional means?
Alex Hughes:Welcome to the brave new world. There aren’t any easy answers to this question, and every Joe on the Interwebs has a different strong opinion. The truth is, the industry is in flux – and pretty extreme flux – at the moment. According to my agent, even a few years ago all you had to do to make it as an author was write good books. This is no longer true, but no one can tell me with certainty how much – and what – exactly I should be doing in the meantime.
At minimum, it’s generally expected at the moment that authors will have a respectable website (with blog), a social media presence, and do enough other promotional activities to help sell the books. For someone with an interesting author story – for example, an lawyer writing legal thrillers – you’re expected to promote yourself and your author story along with the book. You need to build a brand, so to speak. But how that’s done specifically is often left up to you.
Right now, my task is to help distribute advanced reader copies (ARCs) to bloggers and reviewers. The publicist is going through their standard industry list, but I’m doing additional research and helping to target local people in my area, something the New York-based publisher just won’t be able to do. To that end, I’m networking with a couple writer friends who write reviews and sending a lot of email queries. I’m also in the process of putting together a launch party for the book and a few signings in the area, setting up a website refresh, and thinking about a blog tour.
But, as my agent puts it, my primary job is writer. Everything else has to take a backburner to finishing up the next book on deadline.
BWG: Did you ever become discouraged, thinking it would never be published? How many rewrites did you do? How does the book differ from your original vision?
Alex Hughes: Absolutely I became discouraged – seeing something you love called “mediocre at best” and constantly rejected is heartbreaking. When I sent off the book in January of 2011, I told myself this would be the last round with this book, and I settled down to work on something else. At that point I assumed my first published book would be another project. My heart had been broken and I was trying to move on. I was honestly shocked when I got the phone call.
Clean was my learning book. I’d written two and a half novels prior to it, but this is the book where I learned pacing, revision, characterization, first person POV and a whole host of other important things. As a result, it took a lot of drafts to get right. The version that went to the contest was draft seven. And most of the words in drafts one and two ended up on the cutting room floor; very little of what I started with made it to the final product. But, the learning – and the process – made me a much better writer.
When I sat down to write Clean, I’d just read Joan D. Vinge’s Catspaw, which is a gritty cyberpunk book with an unlikely telepath hero. I had a friend at the time who was a recovering anorexic, and walking through that with her was really rough. I sat down that year to wrestle with both ideas, to write a cyberpunk recovering addict telepath – but what came out was a noir police procedural instead. (Apparently all those cop shows as a kid made their mark in my brain.) But I have to say I’m happy with the result.
BWG: Getting your first contract through a contest sounds almost too good to be true. Did you have an agent? If not, how did you manage negotiations with the publisher?
Alex Hughes: The contest thing does seem too good to be true, doesn’t it? But I’d been sending out queries to agents and editors for years without any result, so I suppose it was time for something to happen – even if I didn’t expect it to happen anything like that!
I’d been contact by an agent earlier, someone who wanted to see the rest of my book based on the excerpt posted online through the contest. I’d sent off the manuscript and was waiting on her to get back to me when the editor called with the offer. I was literally screaming and jumping around after that phone call, as I’m sure you can imagine, but I had the presence of mind not to agree to anything until my emotions had calmed down. I have a standing policy not to sign anything until I’ve read it, and I think that helped me here.
But as soon as I could calm down enough to think, I asked the director of Odyssey, where I was at the time, what I should do. She talked me through my options and encouraged me to think them through. So the next day (after I was very calm), I called the agent who was already interested and told her I had the offer on the table. She finished up the book and we finalized our relationship – and she took over the negotiations from there.
BWG: What didn’t you know going into the publication of your book that you wish you had known?
Alex Hughes: First, your personal author story, your “bio” for lack of a better terms, matters an awful lot to how large of an advance you’ll get. I knew this was true in nonfiction – but it’s also true in fiction. If I had it to do over again, I’d figure out how to make my life and my story sound more interesting – and cash in.
Secondly, everything in publishing takes for-freaking-ever. For your own sanity, keep working on the next project and try to let go. The disadvantage of traditional publishing is that a lot of things are out of your hands – and happen on someone else’s time schedule. Be polite, be respectful, be prompt, be easy to work with to whatever degree you can, and worry about the things you can control – the quality of your work – and not the things you can’t.
BWG: You started writing this book ten years ago. Has the genre changed since then? If so, how?
Alex Hughes: When I sat down to write Clean, so far as I knew it was cutting edge. I’d never seen a detective novel that featured magic, or telepathy or anything of the sort. Cross-genre wasn’t really done, at least not like that. But, while I was working, along came Laurell K. Hamilton and a host of other very talented cross-genre writers and the world got interested in dark fantasy and cross-genre works. That movement in the genre towards darker, more atmospheric and violent books, and a larger acceptance for both science fiction and mystery (and the blend of the two) have only helped me. If I was trying to sell Clean in its final form in 2001 I’m not sure anyone would have bought it. But here and now it fits where the market has gone.
BWG: Could you describe your own particular style of writing? What draws you to this particular genre?
Alex Hughes: I always find this question hard. I write like me, of course, but in general terms I’d say I tend towards dark atmosphere (noir and similar feels), lush description, complex storylines, flawed characters, lots of action/danger, and at least a few science fiction/fantasy elements. I’m also obsessed with cop shows, which I think leads naturally to the cross-genre work I’m doing at the moment.
BWG: What have you learned from the time of getting your book accepted through to its publication? Were there any surprises?
Alex Hughes: Oddly enough, the largest surprise was the copyediting round. I adore my editor – she gets it, and her notes helped the book become even stronger than it was. So editing, while thorough and a lot of work on my end, was something I appreciated. The copyediting round – well, I’d made a number of grammatical mistakes on purpose for this first-person narrator, and I had to fight for them. Some of them I lost and some I won, and the process was a bit more intense than I was expecting. Still, in the end I’m very happy with the final manuscript.
Have you seen my cover? It is amazing – way better than anything I could have planned or imagined.
The biggest thing I’ve learned, though, is probably not to stress so much. I can be a perfectionist, and I like to have a plan, but those two things aren’t always possible in this process. It’s much better for me if I let things go and go back to the work, the reason why I started doing this in the first place.
BWG: Tell us a little about the world of Clean, how it came about, and your hopes for its future.
Alex Hughes: The world of Clean is a lot like ours, with cars and drugs, crime and cities. But the cars here fly with fusion reactors, people are afraid of computers, and telepaths and other Abilities are common enough to have a powerful Guild calling the shots.
The world evolved as the book did; the book fits into the world of another (as yet unpublished) novel, so the backstories had to jibe, but over time the Mindspace Investigations world took on a life of its own. Over time I hope to explore more of its nooks and crannies and discover how technology in all its shades, allowed and forbidden, might shape the people living in that world.
BWG: What sort of advice would you offer a writer who wishes to publish a novel in the sci-fi/fantasy genre?
Alex Hughes: I’ll repeat the famous quote from Apex – “When you get rejected, don’t get angry—become more awesome. Write something better, and better, until we have to accept you, because we have been laid low by your tale.” Become more awesome. Write until it hurts. Revise until your fingers bleed. And then – and only then – when the tales inside of you are crafted into fine stiletto blades of glory, release them out into the world to slay your readers. It’s not enough to be as good as everyone else; you have to be better. You have to be more original. You have to write better, or characterize better, or plot better – or all three. But, if you stick with it, if you work your ass off until you see the sharp-edged glory of your words cut the air in front of you, if you work even harder then, you will have gotten two things. One, the right to command anyone’s attention, be they reader or agent or editor, and two, the skill to write your tale on the world – and be glad of it.
BWG: If you could go back in a time machine and give your past self some advice, what would it be?
Alex Hughes: To be honest, I wouldn’t go back. If my past self knew how many years and how much work it would take, I’m not sure I would have made the whole journey. You can’t look at that much work and struggle at once; you have to do it day by day. But in the end, the journey’s worth it, as much for what it does in you as what it does for you.
BWG: Thank you for your time, and best of luck with Mindspace Investigations. The first novel in the series, Clean,will appear in bookstores on September 4, 2012.
Interview by BWG member Ann Decker