Hens Lay Eggs
food for thought
April showers bring … mud
Spring in southwestern Ohio is notoriously wet and the weather unpredictable. Last week, we got three inches of rain last week. Monday morning, I woke up to snow.
My poor magnolia!
With nearly 10 inches of rainfall thus far this year, my yard and pastures are … boggy. The barnyard is downright soupy. The packed dirt floor of my barn squishes underfoot.
In short, it’s wet out here. Really wet.
This is the season during which I discover whether my Muck books have spring a leak. Slogging through a shin-deep slurry of mud and manure quickly reveals the integrity (or lack of) of my boots rubberized construction. Trudging back to the house after feeding the livestock, I repeat to myself, “It’s just mud. It’s just mud.” After shedding my outer garments, I’ll strip off my brown-stained socks and find clean socks, because it’s not “just mud.”
I can’t lie to myself that convincingly.
Flooding and rushing water filled the scenery on the drive to Logan, Ohio for the 10th annual Spring Craft Show. Proceeds from the craft show benefit the Kalklosch Scholarship given to Logan School District students. Southeastern Ohio has a reputation as being underserved in education with poor literacy and poverty depressing the economy in the Appalachian foothills. The craft show was held at the Hocking Hills Retreat Center, itself an interesting building with metal and fabric construction reputed to be able to withstand hurricanes due to its ability to flex in high winds.
Not that we get many hurricanes in Ohio, but we do get high winds and tornadoes. I can’t see the building withstanding a direct hit from a tornado. From what I’ve seen, an encounter with a tornado leaves nothing intact.
I was not the only author participating at this event, although I dare say that I was the only author who traveled to far to participate as a vendor. The season’s unpredictable weather dumped more rain on us, rain which we blamed for low attendance at the event. The organizer, Jim Kalklosch, circulated among the vendors to gather feedback and admitted that this year’s event had lower than normal attendance. He suggested returning for the Fall Craft Show which is typically blessed by better weather and much greater attendance.
I’ll consider it. After all, the organizer can’t control the weather.
That said, my next event will be a return to the Beech Grove First Friday Art Walk on Main on May 2. This event takes place outdoors on Main Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues in Beech Grove, a southwestern suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana. I’ll have copies of The Bounty: Jones and The Bounty: Gerlaugh, FOCUS, Champion of the Twin Moons, Double Cut, and Single Stroke as well as the usual assortment of original paintings to sell.
Let’s hope for good weather. Since vendors are not permitted canopies or tents, inclement weather means I won’t be there. Books and paintings don’t hold up well in the rain.
Keep an eye out for Light of the Twin Moons, the sixth and final book of the Twin Moons Saga to be published this summer.
Pay to play
Publishing is an unregulated industry, thus rife with bad actors and scams. Authors who don’t exert the effort to educate themselves fall prey to predatory practices and find themselves out of a lot of money.
Follow the money
The first rule of publishing is to understand the differences between traditional publishers, hybrid publishers, and self-publishing. Who pays whom is the key differentiator.
Traditional publishing: The publisher pays the author. Full stop. The publisher either subcontracts work or employs professional editors, graphic artists, and designers. Because the publisher pays wages, it means the author receives a small share of profits on books sold. Traditional publishers also provide some marketing assistance, although authors are expected to shoulder the burden of that effort. Publishers put their big marketing bucks behind those authors they know will generate profits.
Hybrid publishing: The author pays the publisher. Don’t be me wrong: some hybrid publishers deliver good value and service for the money. However, most are predatory vanity presses that prey on ambitious, naive authors who fail to do their research. (I was once one of those authors and know whereof I speak.) A vanity press doesn’t care about the quality of the produce (your book). A vanity press puts no effort into marketing your book because they’ve already got their money—the money the author paid for them to publish the book. Most authors receive advice to avoid this publishing model because the likelihood of being taken advantage of is so high.
Self-publishing: The authors pays for professional services but is his or her own publisher. This is where a lot of inexperienced authors also stumble. They hire a hybrid publisher calling itself a “self-publishing company.” There is no such thing. Self-publishing means YOU, the author, are the publisher. As such you accept the responsibilities undertaken by a traditional publisher, but on your own behalf. Those responsibilities include hiring professionals such as editors, graphic artists, and book designers to produce a quality product (the book).
Literary Agency Representation
Many publishers, particularly the Big 5, require agency representation of authors. That means they do not accept unsolicitied submissions. Effective literary agencies have contacts within publishing companies and understand what acquisition editors are looking for. Genuine literary agencies operate on commission; they do not charge authors fees for representation.
If the author has professional representation from a literary agency, then the publisher pays the literary agency, and the literary agency then takes their cut before disbursing the balance to the author. However, in no part of this arrangement does the author pay the agency (or the publisher).
In the past, many so-called literary agencies preyed on authors by offering representation only if the author used their services to have their manuscripts edited. Authors who fell for this scheme paid for the editing service and never received representation because the agency got their money from those fees.
There’s a new twist on agency representation scams. Writer Beware has an aritle on this topic: https://writerbeware.blog/2025/03/28/a-new-scam-to-watch-for-pre-paid-agent-commissions/.
The thing is, what vanity presses do and what fake literary agencies do is not necessarily illegal. Immoral, yes. The veterans of predatory business know this and have contracts to lock authors into unfavorable terms that greatly benefit the companies at the expense of the very authors they purport to serve.
It pays to be informed and to use critical thinking skills in this business. Don’t let eagerness, ambition, and ignorance leave you with empty pockets.
Setting the hook
A potential client recently accepted my offer to provide her with a sample edit. I received the first 1,000 words of her manuscript and dug in.
The first three paragraphs dwelled on world-building, expository description of the protagonist’s immediate environment. As description goes, that was well-written. The description was evocative and atmospheric, poetic even. The action began in the fourth paragraph. Unfortunately, that was three paragraphs too late.
The problem with beginning your story with paragraphs of description is that nothing happens. Although the description may convey sensorial detail and mood, it’s an information dump. And nothing happens.
According to book coach and author Sally Lotz, the author has 30 seconds to hook the reader. Writer Christopher Garlington says the author has three minutes to engage the reader’s attention. In a Stack Exchange discussion on writing, answers vary as to how long a writer has to hook the reader before the reader sets the book down and never finishes it. There’s some consensus that the hook—that thing that snags the reader’s interest and convinces the reader to keep reading—should occur on the first page. Some even state it should occur in the first paragraph.
Today’s short attention spans may even demand that the hook occur in the first sentence. One writing-oriented Facebook group has a regular theme of “First Line Fridays” when authors are encouraged to post the first line of their manuscripts. Group participants then deliver feedback as to whether the first line (or three or four lines) grabbed their interest or not.
The moral of the story is not to drown your reader at the start of your story with a deluge of information. No matter how poetically written, descriptive detail is not action. In fact, such dumps delay the start of action or stop the action in its tracks. It serves as a barrier, a road block.
I understand the allure of beginning with description. Writers, especially those who write in fantasy and science fiction, spend a lot of time and effort on world-building. It’s important they and their characters know and understand the fictional realms in which those characters operate. However, readers don’t need to know the intricacies of that fictional world. Let me blunt: readers don’t care.
But the environment in which the characters operate and some physical details are important. That means weaving the important details into the story.
I explained it to a client recently: You, the writer, cannot transfer the image in your brain to the reader’s brain. The reader will already have formed an image in his or her own mind. What you need in writing is not photographic detail, but a general impression. Think Impressionism, not photograph.
Let me be blunt: If you want to ensure the reader sees in his or her own mind what you see, then you’re in the wrong business. Get into film making where you can impose your vision onto the minds of others.
So, you now know to avoid beginning your story with an information dump. But what should you do instead? You have three basic options:
- Begin with dialogue. The first line of The Bounty: Jones is “I need bullets.” When posted to that aforementioned Facebook group’s for the First Line Friday theme, it received a plethora of responses, all of which indicating the those seeing it wanted to know more. The hook was immediate and effective.
- Begin with action. This means someone, the protagonist or not, is doing something or something is happening. Action often conveys a sense of urgency and leads the reader to discover what happens next. In Russian Lullaby, the heroine drops the books she’s carrying when she’s kidnapped.
- Begin with a declaration, an opinion. A controversial opinion works well, as does one with irony or given with sly wit. My favorite first line actually comes from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” That first line not only sets the tone for an entire genre, but it alludes to the tenor or theme of the entire book: the hunt for a husband.
Each of the tactics mentioned above has its pitfalls and perils. Doing any of them well is a challenge, which makes starting a book with description easy by default. However, easy is not necessarily effective.
Author
Hard boiled, scrambled, over easy, and sunny side up: eggs are the musings of Holly Bargo, the pseudonym for the author.
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Karen (Holly)
Blog Swaps
Looking for a place to swap blogs? Holly Bargo at Hen House Publishing is happy to reciprocate Blog Swaps in 2019.
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