I've worked as a writer, editor, or reporter my entire adult life--not that any of that means my books are written well, you'll just have to judge that for yourself.
Still, I do have some familiarity with publishing--indeed, when I graduated from college, the first place I worked was at a small-yet-hoity-toity journal, where I was a summer intern. The journal, which appeared once a month, published one fiction story in each issue. Half the fiction slots were reserved for name authors--people the magazine would contract with--and the other half were reserved for stories submitted by whoever.
In other words, in a year, the journal would publish a total of six stories by unknown authors. Part of my job as an intern was to screen the mounds and mounds of short stories that were submitted. I'm a pretty fast reader, and the losers were readily identifiable (no, no journal will publish your Star Trek fanfic, they don't have the rights to those characters), so I would say that on the average day, I would find one or two stories that I thought were really good and totally worthy of publication.
Doing that math? 1.5 stories a day x 365 days in a year = 547.5 publication-worthy stories received in a year. Of those 547.5 stories, we would publish six. I certainly wouldn't say that the six stories that got in were better than the 541.5 stories that did not, especially since those stories had to go through the publisher, who was far more interested in political content than in literary merit.
The moral I took from this was: FOR GOD'S SAKE, DON'T GO INTO CREATIVE WRITING!
That was a career philosophy that served me well for many, many years. I did just fine as an editor and writer in educational publishing, reference publishing and journalism. However, much like the well-respected family man who throws away career, marriage, children, reputation and security in order to join an S&M circus, the real me would come out. So now I'm writing disreputable adventure sci-fi. But I can still write serious stuff, and I plan to do at least one nonfiction book. I'm going to give the Cliff Notes version of my resume, so no one has to wonder where the hell I came from.
•Graduated magna cum laude in 1992 from Harvard University with a degree in English
•Edited two Black history books for young adults that were listed in the New York Public Library's Books for the Teen Age, one in 1996 and one in 1997
•Received a master's degree in Journalism from NYU in 2000; won the Edwin Diamond Award for outstanding achievement, the department’s highest honor
•As a reporter for the Trenton Times, won second place, Series category, 2000 North Jersey Press Club awards; second place, Health, Science, Technology and Environment category, 2000 Society of Professional Journalists of New Jersey awards; honorable mention, Business Writing: Daily category, 2000 Philadelphia Press Association awards; first place, Business category, 2001 Garden State Association of Black Journalists awards
•As a freelancer, wrote articles for reference books that won 2000 ALA/RUSA Outstanding Reference Source, 2000 NYPL Best of Reference, 2002 Library Journal Best Reference Source, 2003 NYPL Best of Reference, 2003 Booklist Editor’s Choice, 2004 ALA/RUSA Best Reference Source, 2004 ALA/RUSA Outstanding Reference Source, 2004 Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and Booklist’s 2009 Best Bets for Student Researcher
Where we are, where we're going....
Hi! You're at the blog of Mary Sisson--presumably you got here from my Web site, marysisson.com, but if you didn't, go there and check it out!
I'm a writer who is self-publishing a number of books. Right now, there are sample chapters for my science fiction novel Trang up on my Web site. Hopefully later today the Amazon e-book version will be ready, and I will link to it there and (ETA) here.
I also plan to have what my mother would consider a proper book--a print-on-demand physical book. I'm hoping to have that ready by the end of February, but that may be unrealistic. Amazon makes it super-easy to upload to the Kindle store--well, I did have to double-space the paragraph breaks because I couldn't get them to indent, but that's more a testimony to my technical ineptitude than anything else--and it's totally free for the writer. For a physical book, however, the text itself needs to be laid out, and you need a cover. One option is to have them do it, which is fairly expensive and would be a brand-new expense with each book. The other option is to do-it-yourself: I wouldn't necessarily recommend that for everyone, but I did spend many years working in publishing, and although I am really, really not visually adept, all-text books are relatively simple to lay out. So I'm going to pony up for Adobe Acrobat and see where I get--this may turn into The Revenge of the Art Department, but so be it. Given my lack of spelling ability, Trang is probably already The Revenge of the Copy Edit Department, so I might as well let everyone have their satisfaction against us prima donnas in Editorial.
So, that's the short-term schedule for now. Longer term, the second book in the Trang series, Trust, is slowly but surely making its way through my editing and revision process. I wrote a draft of it that I thought didn't really work, got sidetracked for a friggin' year on a large freelance project (that shouldn't be an issue any more), and then gave it a major restructuring, probably trashing a good 30K words and adding another 40K. Now it seems to have good flow, and I'm tweaking it and will probably give it to friends to read over fairly soon. Hopefully that will be out later this year.