Plato & Virgil

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Now that advance reading copies of Fireborne are out in the world, I’ve been excited to hear that some readers are curious to find out more about the books mentioned in the author’s note, and I wanted to follow up with further reading for anyone interested.

Below are reading guides to the Republic and the Aeneid, designed for readers who are curious about the texts but have little to no prior knowledge of them, but who have read Fireborne. For Latin students, the Aeneid guide contains references in Latin and English.

**Both guides contain mild spoilers to Fireborne. **

Further reading after Fireborne: Plato’s RepublicDownload PDF
Further reading after Fireborne: Virgil’s AeneidDownload PDF

Thank you to R. Stone and K. Weeda for consulting.

“What does an editor do? and why does publishing take so long?”

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It doesn’t always take two years to get from a book deal to a publishing date, but in my case—because I was quite lucky—it has. (Lucky! you say. Yes, as I will explain below.)

When I tell friends about the publishing process, one of the most common misconceptions I encounter is about the role of the editor. People ask if I like the editor I’ve “been assigned,” and they either assume by editor I mean someone charged with spotting typos, OR, when they learn an editor asks for structural changes, will offer me words of encouragement like “Don’t give in to her! Stay true to your book!”—as if I’m in a war and the editor’s trying to destroy my artistic integrity.

The reality is quite different. For fiction, one’s editor is the person who found your manuscript in her submission pile and liked it enough to offer you a book deal. In most cases, she has to convince acquisitions teams at her publisher to even allow her to offer you money for it. And she’s in charge of moving it through revisions and all of pre-publication stages—a bit like a producer for a movie.

She isn’t a copy editor or a proof-reader, though she will hire people to do these things for your book when the manuscript is polished and ready for them. In the meantime, she asks the author to make structural revisions. In my case, my editor asked for a year’s worth of them. I rewrote most of my novel from the ground up—twice.

This news is usually what causes people to start talking about “standing my ground” and “artistic integrity.” When I tell them I’m grateful for the year spent on revisions, they’re incredulous. How could someone telling you to change your book make it something you like more?

The thing is, revising a book is a bit like revising an essay for school—just 100 times longer. You’ve got something you’re trying to express as well as possible, but you need someone—a fellow student, a teacher—to check you over and make sure your argument makes sense. As a writer, I know what I want to say. What I don’t know is whether it’s coming through to the reader. The best kind of editors figure out what you’re trying to say and help you say it, better.

What did we work on for that year of revisions? Things I knew were problems already but didn’t know how to solve. Such as:

  • Pacing. Numerous readers complained with the earlier draft that they started to feel bored but couldn’t figure out why. My editor figured out why, and we fixed it—which didn’t require writing new scenes so much as moving the original ones around—and then rewriting them to fit the new spots they were in.
  • Character development. I knew one of my characters basically didn’t have an arc but didn’t know what to do about it; my editor made me keep at until I found it.
  • Bad writing habits. We all have them; I know what mine are; they’re the crutches I use when I’m tyring to hammer out a scene while tired. (You know you’re having an uninspired day when the characters start doing a lot of eyebrow raising). These were the last to go, as we worked on the line level to make sure the prose was as polished as it could be.

At the time, I thought that year in revisions was going to kill me, and I can’t count the number of times I actually slammed my forehead on the keyboard in frustration as I struggled to untangle knots I couldn’t see my way out of. But now, I’m proud of what my book has become, and grateful that I had the luxury—as not all authors do—of having the time I needed to get it there.

~~~

That all took the first year. But what accounts for the SECOND year, between finishing those big revisions and and October 2019 when the book comes out? A brief timeline:

-I begin writing the sequel, aiming to finish it by the time the first book hits shelves (in other words, I have 12 months to do a process that, for the first book, took 5 years—but now I’ve got an amazing editorial team to help me through it.)

-The first book changes hands from the editor to the copy editor, who goes over it for consistency, grammar, and typos, then back to me and the editor for approval

-From there it goes on to design, who lay it out in a design program and start to make it look like a real book

-In a charmingly analog holdover, the publisher overnights a printed version of the designed manuscript to me, and I mark it up for final changes

-The editor finalizes jacket copy (the official blurb that pitches the book) and works with a designer and illustrator to create a cover.

-Once jacket copy, cover, and pages are deemed good enough to go, galleys—otherwise known as advance reader copies or ARCs—are printed. This is a limited pre-publication printing of not-for-sale copies that will be distributed to reviewers, bloggers, and at conventions to generate interest in the book before it hits shelves.

-The book is proofread AGAIN to eliminate any typos not spotted in galleys for final publication (we really do try to get rid of them, guys!)

-I start pestering everyone I know to preorder my book so that its first week sales are high when it goes on sale October 15 (In fact, you can do that already! Check FIREBORNE out on Amazon, B&N, or Indiebound)

-October 15, Book 1 hits shelves and arrives on doorsteps.

-Around the same time, I turn in Book 2 and this whole process repeats while I begin writing Book 3, because it’s a trilogy.

Whew!

Evolution of a query letter

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This is a post I put up a few years back as a case study for querying writers interested in hearing about the publishing story of Fireborne. (For those who don’t know: querying is the stage in traditional publishing where the writer searches for a literary agent, who will in turn submit your work to publishers.)

I queried Fireborne for two years, revising both the manuscript and the query letter throughout. I accrued 70+ rejection letters over that period, which is to say that persistence paid off—but so did revising. What I want to do in this post is compare the first query I sent for Fireborne with the one that got me an agent two years later. In other words, to look at how a pitch evolved as I learned more.

I’ll point out now that that NEITHER of these queries describe the book that you’ve read, if you’ve read Fireborne. To hear more about the editing process Fireborne went through after finding an agent and editor, read my post on what editors do or my revision analysis.

Here’s one of the first query letters I wrote for Fireborne, from 2015.

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Fast forward through many evolutions and rejection letters to the query for Fireborne that led to representation two years later, in 2017:

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So let’s look at some things that changed, starting with the most obvious.

  • Tagline changed. “Plato’s Republic with dragons” became “Targaryens in Ender’s Game.”
    • Why? References should be as broadly appealing as possible. “Plato’s Republic with dragons” tickled my friends—but just because it tickles your friends doesn’t make it a good pitch. Maybe the literary agent you’re querying has read Plato’s Republic, but even if they have, that was probably in college years ago—how much will they remember, let alone be able to imagine with dragons? They’re as likely to be put off as intrigued. Whereas Ender’s Game and a GoT reference are both mainstream contemporary cultural milestones.
  • Word count went from 105K to 93K.
    • Why? Because I was revising, and in revising, I trimmed the fat. There turned out to be a lot of fat. Which goes to say: even when you think it’s as polished as possible—which I did, in 2015, when I began querying—it probably isn’t. (Curiously enough, the book is longer now—even longer than 105K—but the difference is, the pages that were added in revisions since the book deal were muscle, not fat. And we sold it at 95k.)
  • Comp titles changed.
    • Why? Comps are how you show you know the market. Ender’s Game and Red Rising are not a good combination of comps for a YA fantasy query. One of them is 30 years old, the other is adult, and both are SF not fantasy. Together, they made me look like I didn’t know my market at all. Red Queen showed fluency with what was a current, hit book of 2017 in the genre and age category I was querying.
  • Title changed!
    • This is just interesting to note because neither title ended up being used later on. Titles are hard.

Now let’s get into the meat of what was wrong with the content of the first query.

Part 1: Establishing premises

Here’s the first paragraph of the 2015 query again:

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Pretty much all of these words are wasting space. I’m speaking in generalities that neither establish the premise or the stakes of the story in clear terms. Compare to the first paragraph of the later query:

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Premise established—and with it, the background that will fuel the protagonist’s motivation.

Part 2: The Protagonist and Conflict

From the old query:

Screen Shot 2018-10-19 at 10.56.17 AM

It’s too much at once, and too vague. Who is this guy? What does he care about? What does that have to do with the central conflict? None of these questions can be answered.

Fast forward to 2017:

Screen Shot 2018-10-19 at 2.25.29 PM

Let’s ask the same questions again:

Who is this guy? An orphaned aristocrat rising in the regime that killed his family

What does he care about? Avenging his family–but also his friend Annie, whose history conflicts with that.

What are his choices and why does he care about them? He has to take sides in looming a war that will make him choose between family and friendship.

The second query took Lee’s conflict and made it personal–meaning instead of talking about his dilemma in terms of loyalties to ideas and institutions, talking instead about his relationship to Annie and his father, and the choice between them.

Looking back now

The 2017 query letter was far from perfect. But it did the job it needed to do, which is get the agent to read the sample pages, and they did what they needed to do, which was get the agent to request the full. I think it’s worth noting that these things take time. For me, querying one book took two whole years. You need time after you write a book to figure out what it’s about. And then you need time to figure out how to say what it’s about. I spent a lot of those two years beating myself up for what I realize, in retrospect, was really just time spent learning. I had to write the first query before I could write a better one. I had to write my way to it.

And then I had to write my way to something else. The book that we sold to Putnam had a single main character, Lee, who was taking care of a much younger friend/sibling figure, Annie. Julia only showed up at the end, there was no tournament plot structure, there was no Lyceum or Lycean Ball or morale visits, Power never practiced spillover training with Annie, and there was no (gasp!) romance. There was a visit to the ruins of a home that had been destroyed by dragonfire and a pretty devastating duel at the end–in other words, what I consider the heart of the story never changed. But everything else did. I say all this as a reassurance and a warning: if you want to publish, be prepared to edit. Everything. Repeatedly.

But also, be prepared to give yourself time.