Forum / What's the story of your own (first) book?

Marcus Speh
May 21, 11:02am

My recent blog post after publishing news for "Thank You For Your Sperm", my new/first collection of stories, made me realize how many surprises surrounded this step for me — it was an experience not unlike fatherhood. One might say I should have expected it, but I didn't, which is doubly surprising since I've been around the block a bit and I'm not wholly unacquainted (also as a professional) with change processes and with the dark magic of the unconscious...anyway, the question for this thread:

What's the story of your own (first) book?
How was it for you? Any surprises? What about marketing? Reviews?
Or if you're not published yet, what's your fantasy?

So many questions, so few answers (yet).

My blog meditations on this: http://bit.ly/TYFYSlove

Sam Rasnake
May 21, 12:57pm

The publisher, Sow’s Ear Press, asked me for a collection of poems that I was working on - had been for more than three years. The poems, Tales of Brave Ulysses, grew out of a large clump of turmoil in my life. I sent the poems, and they were accepted. As the book was being edited for publication, I changed my mind, and said no. If the collection had been published then, my writing life would have taken a radical turn from where it is now - and I did not - as I can absolutely see now - need to make that turn.

If the original collection had been published, nothing of what I have written over the last decade would have been written. Nothing.

I worked on gathering other pieces I'd been working on and a year later gave them to the publisher, and they were published as Necessary Motions.

I stayed with the original idea of that first collection of poems, discarding out all the poems but two, and made the collection title the title of a series - Tales of Brave Ulysses - added poems, and Religions of the Blood, a chapbook was published. Religions became part one of the series.

If I'd stayed on that original path of publication - Religions of the Blood would never have been published - and none of the poems in Inside a Broken Clock, a second chapbook in the Ulysses series, would exist.

I made the right choice.

Marcus Speh
May 23, 01:28pm

Personally, I have not been publishing long enough to look back at anything like a "'publication history" but I think if one has such a history is interesting to muse about the different paths that one may have taken with or without a particular book or a particular publisher. It's almost like a prompt for a meta-fictional account of publishing...

Those are great titles, too, "Tales of Brave Ulysses", "Religions of the Blood", "Inside a Broken Clock".

(I'm surprised nobody else wants to share that first book experience... I would have thought it'd be fun to think back to that moment but everyone is different I suppose!)

stephen hastings-king
May 23, 01:45pm

My first book experience is still on-going: it's to be published via Brill at the end of this year. It's a sort of history project. So far it's been largely about encountering the house style sheet after I sent out the final copy of the ms and spending lots of time transforming the footnotes and so on. And waiting. I'll let you know once it becomes something more interesting.

J.A. Pak
May 23, 06:38pm

My "first" book is Anchored Leaves. First in that it was the first novel I tried writing. The book is about love and memory and how our ideas of love is transferred from one generation to another. I worked on the novel for over twenty years and my biggest surprise was how little my ideas of memory have changed but how much my ideas of love has.

I've sent the book to many agents over the years and the response has been the same: beautiful but not marketable so not publishable. I then started to send it out on my own, even to publishers that don't take non-agented submissions. The editor-in-chief of one wanted me to rewrite the novel but in a way that would have made the novel her novel and not mine. Hers would have been very traditional with a clear protagonist, thus marketable. I also had a boutique publisher who wanted to publish the book but it soon became clear that she knew very little about contracts and the publishing world in general, so after some thought, I withdrew my submission. That gave me ten more years to edit. I suppose I never really felt my book was "done" until this year. Having had enough of the traditional publishing route, I self-published, hoping Anchored Leaves will find its own audience in its own time.

Marcus Speh
May 24, 09:44pm

Please do, Stephen, your many contributions in this forum over the years (not to mention your fiction) has made me curious to hear more from you, with more space to expand into and more patience than an electronic discussion forum can provide.

Marcus Speh
May 24, 09:49pm

@J.A. — This is a story that I have heard a few times from others, including several now very successful writers. Both the encounter with the agent (who may have different priorities than the writer) and with the publisher (who is equally likely to have different priorities than the writer) sound very familiar. While I have little experience with agents or publishers, I fully resonate with your need to edit until you felt that your book was "done". I think in the end of the process, and certainly at the end of our days, what remains is the need to being able to look yourself in the face and say out loud "this is the best book I could've written at the time". I wish you the best of luck with "Anchored Leaves"— the title is you, it's brilliant and filled with rich associations.

J.A. Pak
May 25, 05:48pm

@Marcus, thanks so much. And the best of luck with your own publishing journey. In many ways, it's the best of times to be a writer. There are so many more options and in a Wild West/can do atmosphere. The present seems very open.

Ann Bogle
May 26, 03:20am

I have written books, edited books, unedited books, carefully internally (by the page) composed not as books, and journals that seem to suck (the ones downstairs), downstairs in the wet wood box because they seem to suck. A paper I wrote in sixth grade is so great (for the age, any age, how odd) that I believe my teacher, Miss Epsky, may have had great faith in humanity to think I would survive high school. I almost did survive. Almost is good enough. Next I would like readers to hold copies of the short stories in their hands to read in bed. It is a practical matter and self-printing it would destroy its value as art. I love forecasting its contents and continuing to write it and other things. Sam's story of publishing (above) is worth bookmarking this page. Thanks for the subject, Marcus. So interested in your comparison of authoring to fathering.

Darryl Price
May 26, 05:37pm

The story of my first book is that I thought it would be fun. I also thought I had to give them away. Pretty soon they were all gone, even the one I'd saved for myself. Solution? Write another book. I remember chatting with the printer and the artist because I wanted them to be as excited as me about the project--they weren't.They just did what they did. But for me it was heaven all the way. And of course I thought I could do so much better next time around.Things change. A book stamps its thumb down on time and leaves a smudge. If you're lucky other people find that charming in the long run. But it's the next book that holds all the possibility for something amazing to happen. Something beyond. Something earth-shattering..unless nobody is listening.

Elizabeth Kate Switaj
Jun 01, 08:39pm

My first published book, Magdalene & the Mermaids, was written in New York and revised in China. I found out that Paper Kite Press had accepted it while I was checking my email in a very cold hostel in Beijing where I was staying for a week. (I had been living in Zhengzhou.)

Did it change my life? No. I'm not sure of the exact number of copies that have sold but it's neither especially high nor lower for poetry. It was reviewed more by feminist publications and blogs than by those focused on literature, which says a whole lot more than sales figures do, I think. (And any debate over precisely what it says would end when the combatants drifted away, with no one budging from their original position.)
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