by Byron McAllister

Well, first there was all that writing and revising and collaborating with my spouse for re-writing and more revising, and at last all that querying of agents and editors. No agent and no editor would consent to look. That much is pretty standard, and if you haven't experienced it, either you haven't sought publication or something almost unbelievable happened. Finally an agent did write that she liked it. She doesn't charge a reading fee, which is good, because I'd been advised never to pay one. However , it turned out she wanted a rather substantial “retainer fee,” which I hadn't been warned again. I calculated how much it was costing to send the ms out again and again, weighed it against the “retainer fee” and paid.

That agent doesn't tell her writers where she's sending the ms, nor what the person or firm she sends it to says in reply. Oh, there was one exception, and if you've sent stuff off and had it rejected you know what it said. It said the same thing it would have said if I'd sent it myself, rather than having an agent send it, “…not suited to our present needs.” When her year was up she asked for a six months extension, and got it, because I was then even more naïve than I am now. No sale.

By attending writers' meetings, one can sometimes get the chance to meet with an editor or an agent. I did this several times (though not always for this same novel), and received only one potentially useful comment, but it was given by two people, so maybe it was right: I had written the novel in first person, from the POV of a young man in his late teens. I had moved the date of the action way back to 1964, since it was desirable for the kid to be fairly naïve—something like myself, obviously. The comment was that the voice didn't sound like teenagers of today, or at least not like any teenagers my two critics were familiar with.

Well, it sounded like teenagers of my own youth, but then I was 18 way back in 1947, and the way teens talk has changed. Still this was the only comment I had that could actually be used. Since I wasn't equal to putting it into 1999 (nor even 1964) teen talk, I rewrote the whole thing in third person. By then I was tired.

About that time I remembered an observation I'd made, about people who tell would-be writers how to get published. They always emphasize persistence and good query letters and stuff like that, but then they usually let it leak out, despite their best intentions, that they had some sort of “edge,” some sort of initial advantage, in approaching whoever finally accepted their work. I tried hard to find such an edge, and finally found one: an editor who had seen and, I felt sure, enjoyed some of my web postings. A slim edge, but better than none. Unfortunately, she wasn't an editor at one of the big major publishing houses. Too bad. She does, however, e-publish books, i.e. makes them available for downloading. And fortunately, she did think what she'd seen of my prose suggested she might like my novel. Her publications committee approved and we had a deal.

Now, editors of small publications of any kind, electronic or not, tend to be overworked, so there was considerable delay in making the book available, but not more delay than I'd been told to expect from a major publishing house. So I was pretty contented. The editor found a much better title than I'd been using, too. She suggested Undercover Nudist , good since, though the kid isn't a nudist himself, he helps some nudists investigate a crime. Also, although books on her website can't have “true” covers, being e-publications, they are accompanied by a cover illustration. The e-publisher's artist designed several very attractive alternatives and they let me choose one. It featured a pair of binoculars obviously trained on a decently naked lady reading a magazine called Spy Detective. The book came up on line at last, and my inexpressible joy was diminished only by the fact that e-books tend not to sell really well: the “e-book readers” that were touted so eloquently ten or fifteen years ago didn't ever manage to enter the sales mainstream, and many people don't like reading long documents on a computer screen.

True joy was mine when the editor pointed out that, thanks to the wonderful invention of Print On Demand publishing, she was bringing out some of her e-books on paper, and added that she'd like to include mine. Only, on line it was 100,000 words, and that would make the print price too high. Could I (we, really: remember that collaboration with my spouse) cut it?

Yes! We got it down to about 85,000 words. And the revision seemed to read a little better. It probably is a little better. So, nothing bad can happen now, right? Wrong. It seems the nude on the cover had come from a collection of supposedly public domain pictures, but somehow a photo taken from an actual nudist magazine, therefore copyrighted, had shown up in the collection. A representative of the Federation of Canadian Naturists saw the cover of the e-version. He contacted us, asserted ownership, and revealed that his organization was concerned that a book by that title might or might not treat the Naturist movement in an objective way: what if it purported to be an expos é? It isn't, but the book was already available on Amazon and half a dozen other places, and availability had to be cut off while the matter was under negotiation. The delay interfered with sales (not necessarily many sales, but some sales!) and also got it de-listed from some websites that had picked it up and mentioned it to their communicants.

Well, the editor created a revised cover, so that I (and, I trust, she) could ignore those naked Canadians and their reasonable but problematic demands, and the book became available. No doubt you think I'm gonna say that it immediately became a nation-wide best seller, but no, I'm not: Print On Demand books do not become nation-wide best sellers. There are reasons for that, having to do with the difficulty reviewers have in distinguishing self-published POD books from other POD books. But at least sales had started, and people not just nationally but internationally now had a chance to buy the book. Getting them to do so is, of course, another matter.

Meantime, a small part of that great market is the region near where I live. Quite a few of my friends and of my wife's friends have long known that we had at least one book in the mill, and we knew some of them would want to see the result enough to buy a copy. (Just giving them away isn't an option, because we don't get a hundred free copies or anything like that.) So we set out to have a signing or two.

For our first signing, the proprietors of the Magpie Bookstore worked very hard to make the occasion a success (which, by the way, it did end up being). One of the things they did was to send out an article to quite a few of the papers in our part of the state, complete with photos of the two authors. You probably think this inflated our egos a bit. Well, it might have, BUT…

As we returned (it was Halloween day) from delivering some books to those wonderful people, we realized we were hungry. Being near the Spotted Horse Coffee Shop, one of our favorite places for lunch, we picked up a newspaper and entered. My wife was reading the paper while I stared off into space, and suddenly I heard her exclaim, “Oh, my word!”

“‘Oh my word'? I said, “‘Oh my word' what ?”

“Look!”

I looked.

Somehow, our two photos had been placed above the respective obituaries for two people we'd never heard of. The proprietor of the Spotted Horse Coffee Shop suggested we drop in at the newspaper office and say “Boo!” or at least “Tricks or treats.”

First off, however, we had to say to each other, “What next?”

We did, indeed, visit the editor. We explained that there had been an error and that though it was merely amusing to us, it would probably be a very considerable bother to the relatives of the actual deceased. He followed it up, partly, by reprinting the obituaries with the proper photos. When the article on our signing appeared, he took no chances and omitted all photos.

A couple of people called to make sure we were still alive. Some others realized there was a mistake, and worried about our reaction. Only day before yesterday, at my dentist's, several people expressed relief that their presumption that there'd been an error was correct. If anything else happens, it'll be anticlimactic. At least we certainly hope it will. We've already experienced a final shocker that can add zip to an otherwise fairly normal tale of publication woes. Maybe it was just one of the many things you can expect when you submit a manuscript? No, I'm sure your weird happenings will be different. But you'll have some.