The home of fiction author Val Gryphin…

Scribe and Quill accepted my story The Truth About Priscilla, which was originally published in a print magazine called Short Stuff for Grownups several years ago. Woot!

Right now I have 21 submissions out. Interesting statistics:

2 are at 100 days
2 are at 84 days
4 are at 82 days
1 is at 17 days (There were a lot of markets that responded faster which is a big part of the gap there. The 8 long times ones all have long response times on Duotrope.)
1 at 9 days
5 are at 7 days
and 5 are at 3 days.

1 Poem is out to 5 markets
2 Stories are out to 4 markets each
1 Story is out to 3 markets
1 story is out to 2 markets
and 3 stories are out to 1 market each

Any other interesting statistics? Hummm

11 of the 21 confirmed in some way the receipt of my submission.

by Tattoo Highway. It tied for second place in their “Picture Worth 500 Words” contest. Check out the story here, then come back and read my comments, and then pass on any feedback or comments you might have for me!

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Part three of three.

Part One
Part Two

Ok, so we’ve covered what a copyright is, and what it means to sell rights to publish a work. Now we’ll talk about bad ways to loose your first rights.

One bad way we’ve covered is to post your work online for free without having a clear plan on how you are going to use it for marketing your book. This goes for any site that is offering to put your work online to gain readers, publicity, agents, or a contract. Don’t stop, run. There is no such thing as “pre-publishing,” and posting your work online gives up your first rights. You do not have to be paid to give up your first rights! All that has to happen is your work be printed in a periodical, or put online where anyone can access it. Do either one of those and you loose your first rights, which are the most valuable in almost all cases. While giving away content in a controlled fashion where you know exactly what you are doing like I discussed last week can be a big boost, really anything else is screwing yourself if you are wanting to publish the material.

Another trap to give up you rights are those so-called contests where everything gets accepted, and then they try to get you to buy the book that your piece was published in. Poetry.com is notorious for this, but there are others. Dana K. Cassell has a great article on this called Writing Contest Cautions. Some of her points for spotting bad contests are:

No entry fees - Writing contests cost money to run. If they aren’t charging, how are they paying prizes and judges?
Entry fees that are out of proportion of the prizes offered, i.e. $20 for a $200 prize, of $5 for a $25,000 prize.
When they take your rights by putting them up online or publishing them in a book, or even just state that they will keep all rights even if you aren’t a winner. Legit contests aren’t going to take your rights if you don’t win - once the contest is over non-winning submissions should be released all rights intact. Read the contracts, particularly if there is a lot of fine print.

Finally, don’t put anything you might want to publish later on up on your website, even if you are asking for feedback. Right there you have given up your first rights, and really, the amount of feedback you get will more than likely not be enough to make it worthwhile.

I was web-hopping around this last Friday, visiting links from my fellow High-Fivers, when I ended up on the blog StoryCrafters. I started digging into it, and soon read an article titled” I’m a Mazzikin, or is that mizzikin?” that started out with the phrase:

I hadn’t been over to the Zooty & Flapper site for a couple days but was told he’d updated it and since I had some free time this afternoon, decided to check it out.

Whhaaaa? I read it and it was humorous, but I didn’t understand the background. So I went back into the archives to dig out the whole story, and actually found a more serious story than I was expecting.

The first post in the series was titled “ZootyandFlappers.com World’s First Pre-Publisher.” It was written by Jean Lauzier, and descussed the website Zooty and Flappers Pre-Publishing. From her summery of how they work:

First, you send him your novel. He sets it up and puts it on his site as a free download. The readers that download it, give it a rating of some kind. If enough readers like it, he pulls it from the “download for free” side of his site, and adds it to his “bookstore” as an e-book or cd and sells it with him paying you 45% of the sale price. Then, once you sell 10,000 copies, he will send a copy of your book along with a sales report and a readers report to “ten real agents.”

Hummmm, so lets see here, he makes money off of your writing on his site without paying you, and then if it starts making even more money, he’ll kindly to give you less than half. Then, as if that isn’t generous enough, he’ll send a sales report and readers report (because we know how well the agents will look at those!) to 10 “real” (as opposed to imaginary) agents, who will probably throw it straight in the trash when they realize who it is from. Mmmmmk, sounds good to me so far. He describes an author as (spelling and capitalization his own):

What does Zooty and Flappers consider a Published Author? A writer who has secured an agent, who has sold your work to a Publisher who prints books on paper, and sells your books to books stores.

And here I thought that you know, having fiction that I wrote published made me a published author. Damn, guess not.

So anyway, Jean published this post warning others about this scam, and this made Mister Domenic Pappalardo very unhappy. He started threatening her. Hence post two: Zooty & Flappers pt. 2 Here Jean outlined exactly what she said about him before, why she had problems with the site and then posts some of his comments responding to her first post.

What you have printed on this site, to the public, I shall take up with my attorney. If I can hold you and the chat room harmfull, I will.

I will take up with her in a court of law.

I understand why you have never been published by a Standard Publisher. I do believe anyone can go to a writing school, and learn how to write. But there are no schools that can teach talent. It’s like learning to sing. Anyone can learn to sing, but they still need talent. And you can’t learn talent. You either have it, or you don’t.The one thing you do have. You have the power to shut anyone on this chat room down when they won’t let you play the expert.

If you can’t beat them by logic, just scream really loud and hope they give up and go away.

The reason that this little “scheme” is so bad, other than just the money aspect, is that this is a form of publication, but not a good form. For one thing, no “real agent” is going to take this guy seriously. And, even worse, once a novel (or story or non-fiction book) is posted on that site, it is published. That means that should someone want to try and shop around a work that was on the Z&F site, even if the site is no longer in existence, they are going to have to tell every agent and/or editor that their work has already been published. While there are writers who have parlayed their online work into novel or non-fiction contracts, they are few and far between, and they were firmly in control of their work at all times. With this concept, the author is giving up a lot of control, and first publishing rights, for little or no payoff, and probably almost non-existent chance for an agent to pick it up off of that site.

So the third post, the I’m a Mazzikin, or is that mizzikin? post, contains basically a slander article that Pappalardo wrote about Jean, slamming her every-which-way and twisting the truth each time he makes a statement about her. Knowing the background puts the whole post into context, which I will only quote a little bit of, you have to read the whole thing for yourself.
He said:

What sparked her to go public with her writing? And what direction did it take?She said she read an article in a magazine. Angered, she wrote a letter to the editor, giving a rebuttal. Her letter along with those of several other people was printed. She had slapped someone down in print! How did that make her feel? In her own words, “I think I slept with that issue under my pillow for a month.”

The quote from an interview with Jean that he mangled was:

In fact, what really got me started on the road to becoming a writer was an article in a magazine. I wrote a rebuttal and it was published. The magazine was an international publication and I think I slept with the issue under my pillow for a month.

And a couple other choice quotes from him:

… I’ll tell you where you can nail my hide to the wall. Find spelling errors in what I write. I am a lazy speller. Heck I even put double words in at times…You put yourself out there as an expert as to what will work and what won’t. You name three other’s who have done the same thing. You say I can’t do it, because others have failed. Hmm? Come on kid, why don’t you stop trying to be an expert on things your not. I told my dog Ruff, “I don’t want to get down in the gutter with this gal and her following of Mazzikins. I have been asked by others to publicize some of your exploits. I know some of your readers think of you as a sweet person.

Humm.

I checked out his site of course, and the text is sloppy and has errors. The graphics that change on mouseover on the menu looks like either clip art or collected images, which gives it an amateur feel. So far it looks like he is his only client, although it seems that since the exchange with Jean, he has pulled most of the text down, and is no longer soliciting other authors’ manuscripts. Hopefully he’ll keep it that way. He is however, already talking about nominating a piece of work from the site for a Pulitzer Prize.

This was one of those things that I came to a little bit late, but I want to make a quick note about it, and what it says about the writing community as a whole.

Patry Francis is the author of the thriller novel The Liar’s Diary, which was published in February 2007. It did well enough that there was a paperback edition, scheduled to come out January 29th, 2008. Of course, for any novelist that is a huge deal. However, in November of 2007, Patry was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Life went from focusing on the book, to focusing on living.

In January of this year, a group of wonderful people got together, and decided that since Patry was trying to live, they in turn would try to help her by promoting her book. The result was over 300 writers, bloggers, agents, readers, editors, publishers, and many other people in one way or another, on January 29th, promoted Patry’s book.

There’s a lot of cut-throat in any business, but I think writers have a special bond, in that we love hearing about other writers, we encourage each other, help each other, and even when we think, Gee, I wish that was me, we are still happy for one another, and say You go!

I have not read this book, or heard of Patry before this, but I went through and read a great deal of her blog after hearing about this, and there is a lot that resonates with me. I’ll finish off with a post I found on her blog, when she first found out her book had sold.