There is a rumor that best-seller lists don’t count books that are sold early, only the ones that are sold in the official week of release. This is a question of some relevance, because my books are almost always on the shelves two weeks before release date. So: does it matter to the lists?

And the answer is yes and no. Almost everybody has to deal with the same soft release problem that I get (a hard release is like Harry Potter got: you were not gonna get that book before midnight the day it was supposed to come out). The NYT apparently aggregates the numbers/momentum over the first weeks of release, whereas USA Today evidently only counts books sold from the week of release (though if you buy it on the Sunday when it’s supposed to come out on Tuesday, that counts as the release week).

We looked at some of my numbers with some of the Walker Papers and concluded that there are enough early sales that it *could* affect my ability to get onto some lists. So ideally? Really, really ideally? My readers would torture themselves and not buy the book until the actual release day, and then everybody go out at once and buy it immediately. This, however, is asking a lot of readers, and I can’t corral everybody and release them all at once. :)

There is also a rumor that Amazon’s numbers don’t count toward any lists. That one is apparently more true than not, though apparently Amazon falls on and off in usage for the lists depending on how willing they are to release their numbers, which varies.

B&N.com, however, *does* count toward list numbers.

Amazon also *always* ships early unless it’s a hard release date. I don’t know if B&N does, but I gather B&N aggregates the numbers shipped anyway and lists them on release day/week. So–without biting a hand that feeds me–it’s probably of more use (not just me, but to any author you like) for readers to pre-order through B&N.com instead of Amazon*.

Now, all that aside, here’s the other vicious truth: I’d really need literally everybody who buys my books to buy them in the first week/month of release in order to have any hope of making seriously big numbers. I have wonderful, loyal readers who have given me an amazing career and have kept my books on the shelves for a long life, which is hugely, hugely important to continuing to do this for a living, but if I want to level up to the best seller lists**, something has to change.

Possibly what has to change is I have to write something different which catches fire, but that’s very hard to predict. :) In the meantime, though, the best I can probably do is hope to get something going that leads into a big splash for the final book of the Walker Papers.

Because we’re on the downward slope here, guys. There are nine books planned for the series, and the timeline is pretty much hell bent for leather from the start of SPIRIT DANCES all the way through to the end of book 9. It’s probably too late to rack up some kind of magic momentum for RAVEN CALLS, since it’s out in four weeks, but I (we, if I assume you’re in this with me) have two books after that to try to hit it out of the park.

*This is not a statement intended to make people with Kindles feel bad. If you have a Kindle, for heaven’s sake, buy a Kindle book. I get the *royalties* the same no matter what; this post is just about whether there’s hope for me to reach a bestseller status over the next few years. :)

**And I do. I have always been in this game to–for lack of a better phrase–win it, and my personal definition of “win” is not “beat the other guy” but “get onto the national bestseller lists”. There is nothing wrong with being a mid-list writer and I’ll take it if that’s what I forever land at, but my completely-out-of-my-hands goal is to have that awkward first name “New York Times Bestselling Author” preceding the already-on-the-covers “CE Murphy”. :)

This is a business decision, not a lack of enthusiasm. The people who have contacted me about the Inheritors’ Cycle have loved it, as do I, as does my publisher. But let me try to explain what happens in the life cycle of a book (and writer).

THE QUEEN’S BASTARD sold pretty well; THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, rather less so. Therein lies the problem.

When bookstores order books to put on their shelves, they look at the last book a writer has produced. If that book sold 10 copies at their store, then they’ll probably order 9 copies of the next book. Maybe even eleven. It doesn’t matter if it’s part of the same series. All that matters is who wrote it.

So if the last book sold 3 copies, they’ll order two. And it still doesn’t matter if it’s a different series. They’ll order two, and that means only 2 people are going to be able to grab it off the shelf when it comes in. And they might say, “Great, those sold, we’ll order two more!”–but if there’d been 10 in the first place, and 10 people had snatched them up, they’d be ordering 10 more.

So if PRETENDER’S CROWN sold 3 copies, the bookstores aren’t going to say “Oh, different series, these ones move faster!” when DEMON HUNTS comes out. They’re going to say, “Oh, she only sold 3 books last time, let’s not order more than that.”

You can see the potential knock-on effect this has on a writer’s career.

So at the moment, both the larger part of my reputation as a writer and the market is interested in urban fantasy, not alternate history epic sci-fantasy. That’s what’s selling for me, and it’s what my publishers are interested in, and it is therefore what I’m interested in.

Don’t get me wrong. I hope the worm will eventually turn and I’ll have the opportunity to go back and write more in that world. But for now, well, this is how I pay rent, so I’m pitching urban fantasy ideas, and we’ll see how that goes.

I know that some authors find rewriting easier (in some ways) than the initial creative process. Me, I can whip something out of nothing without breaking a sweat. But whenever I try to approach the highly necessary rewrite of my recent novella, I get almost immediately overwhelmed by the minutiae of things that need tending to. I am pulled this way and that, trying to keep track of the myriad of details that need to hover simultaneously in my forebrain–and I end up just fiddling with the niggling little grammar nits, polishing word choice, questioning whether that adverb is really necessary, and reassuring myself that all the independent clauses are safely sequestered within their parenthetical commas.

Consequently, the real work–that is, deleting scenes and rewriting the whole cloth of large sections–goes undone because of these distractions of questionable value. Sometimes, I think I might be better off deleting the damned thing and starting over from scratch.

So, my question: In your subsequent drafts, how do you keep the story from getting in the way of your rewriting?

Answer behind the cut.

I know writers who do, in fact, just start their second draft from scratch. I don’t personally, but sometimes I can see the appeal. I also am not one of those writers who finds the revision process vastly more rewarding than the initial writing process, although I do like the end result of all that flipping work. But the actual revision work is exhausting, because I’m trying to hold three different versions of the story in my head at once: the story as it was, the story as it is in process of being revised, and the story as it needs to be.

From the lead-in to the question, it sounds like it’s the second stage where it’s falling apart for the writer, which makes sense to me, because it’s the second part *I* find really headache-inducing. Knowing what you have to do, knowing what the story should look like on the other end, is a hell of a lot easier than figuring out how to do it. And I hate to say it, but on some level, it’s just a matter of practice. It’s also a hell of a lot easier if a third party (like an editor) has said, “This is a part that doesn’t work. Make it work,” or, “I need to see some motivation for this action,” or “I need more sense of setting here,” because that gives me something to work off of.

Okay. *rubs brain* This is hard to think about, actually, or at least hard to explain, because so much of it for me is just grim damned determination to get it done. But one thing I do is start with a hard copy. I _have_ to start with a hard copy. If I just try to work on screen my brain dribbles out my ear and I lose all will to live. More importantly, my brain is extremely consistent: if I start doing revisions on screen, what happens is I think, “Oh! This is a place to insert a clever line!” and I revise to insert it, then discover that a page and a half later, I already had that clever line in place. Hard copy prevents me from doing that, and believe me, after about the fifteenth time *of* doing it, I’m very happy to have read the bloody book all the way through and made myself aware of where my brain is likely to come up with clevernesses that it has already come up with. :)

Having a hard copy also means I can physically strike sections out, even if all I leave myself with beyond that is a note in big letters saying “MAKE THIS MORE BETTER” (which, yes, is usually exactly what I write). It is, one way or another, a visual cue that this part needs *work*.

I usually start at the beginning of the story, but I don’t think there’s any compelling reason to do it that way. Another advantage of hard copy for me is that when I’m further into the book and I’ve found something that needs setup earlier on, I can go back and leave myself a note on the paper that says “Joanne’s facing Wile E. Coyote on page 235, there needs to be some kind of foreshadowing *here*, in this scene where I can stuff in a Looney Toons reference without it being too gratuitous.” Then when I get to that in the on-screen revisions I can go “oh yeah” and take care of it immediately instead of having to flip back and forth.

Trust yourself–and when I say ‘trust yourself’, I also mean ‘forbid yourself to nitpick’–on the sentence structure level, by and large. There will, yes, be times and places where the sentences need work, but put that into a different mental space. That’s copy-editing, not revising. It comes *after* revisions.

I will very frequently cut and paste the sections that need work out of the manuscript. So if I need to strike seven pages out of chapter three and just rewrite them wholesale, I’ll take a version of chapter 3, save it into the Second Draft folder, and then delete everything that needs to go in one big chunk. It’s completely psychological for me: somehow it’s less awful to gut chapter three by itself than it is to take it out of the manuscript and watch the whole page count of the manuscript collapse by eight pages. It also gives me a place (or usually more than one) where the original version of the chapter or scene is saved, so if I need to go back and rescue a sentence, I can snag it out of the original.

I use a lot of white space when I’m working on screen. If I’m working on a specific part of a scene and I know there’s still shitloads to do further down, I just hit carriage return until I can’t see the later material. Again, it’s pure psychology. It’s a matter of being able to *face* one page of revisions at a time, but having new text that needs work continually scrolling up to face me is just disenheartening.

Focus on one major problem/storyline/thread/whatever at a time. This year an editor asked me to do a major revision on a book. M.A.J.O.R. revision. What ended up happening was I rewrote the first half of the book heavily and the second half less so, and then in the second round of revisions, ended up rewriting the second half of the book heavily. I *knew*, when I submitted it the second time, that there were still problems facing the manuscript, but I had just run out of steam. I needed someone else’s feedback to say “these are the things that can be punched up”. Basically what I did was face one set of problems the first time through, and an almost completely different set the second time around (they had been touched on in the first revision, but it was sort of an emotional storyline revision vs an action storyline revision, and I didn’t have the mental capacity to manage both at once to the degree they both needed work).

All right. If I have any more thoughts I’ll add them later, but right now this is all I can come up with. I hope it’s at least of a little use.

Someone asked recently if there would be more books in the Inheritors’ Cycle. I have plans for 2 or 3 more books in that series, but I haven’t yet sold them to Del Rey, the publisher for that series. I’ll be writing up a proposal toward the end of the summer, so hopefully I’ll have more information about whether the series will continue by the end of 2009.

In the meantime, DEMON HUNTS, book five of the Walker Papers, has been completed and delivered. There is, however, still time to bid to become a character in that book, and if bidding on both my auction items combined (the Irish gift basket is here) goes over $450 by the close of the auction on Sunday, I’ll write a new Walker Papers or Old Races short story for my internet audience. :)

And speaking of the Walker Papers, the mass market editions of books 1-3 should be available now! I’m ridiculously excited about these, as they’re my first mass market releases under the CE Murphy byline. May they be the first of many!

Margrit’s story will be wrapped up with the third book. I do have about eight other ideas for stories set in the Old Races world, and she may be a supporting character in some of those, but writing them is a long way out: I’m planning to finish the Walker Papers before I go back to the Old Races, so it’ll be several years before I return to that world.

The good news is that there’ll be a Janx and Daisani short story in an anthology published by Subterranean Press released next year (I think released next year o.o), so there’ll be at least a hint here and here of more of the Old Races. :)

Fell down the stairs on a bus a couple days ago and am a seven-fingered-typist right now; I jammed the holy living crap out of my fingers and while it doesn’t hurt all that much, it looks just *awful*:

That was yesterday. It’s better today, but man, my 12K wordcount goal this week has been shot. *squinchy face*

Fortunately last week was a terrific writing week and I got 30,000 words–a little more than 1/4th of the length of one of the Walker Paper books, or pretty much exactly the length of “Banshee Cries”, for reference–written. I’m working on THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, sequel to THE QUEEN’S BASTARD (which is out in May), and had I not smashed my hand I’d have made the halfway point by today. Bah. Oh well, not much to be done for it.

Lots of people’ve asked questions in comments, but for today I’ll bring up the most recent and answer it (this is something I’m going to try to get into the habit of doing!).

Thelma H said:
Cate: Loved your Bombshell Books. Will you be writing anymore of that type?

Sadly, not for the foreseeable future. The Strongbox Chronicles were actually planned as a 12 book (or maybe 13 book) series, with 4 trilogies, each starring a new heroine and a new aspect of the Sicarii to face down (and then possibly one blow-out final book which would’ve been called THE THIRTEENTH CHRONICLE). However, with the combination of the Bombshell line being cancelled and my schedule of writing CE Murphy books being so very busy, any further development of the Strongbox Chronicles has been put on a very back burner. I’d love to go back to them someday, but if I do it’ll be years down the road.

-Catie