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Picture This

10/26/2023

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While chatting with some of my fellow authors during and following the Kentucky Book Festival last weekend, the talk naturally turned to some of the difficulties we encounter in getting our books out. At the top of the list? Getting pictures for illustrations and book covers.

Fiction writers don’t generally have this issue, other than coming up with someone to do cover art if the publishing house isn’t seeing to it; most fiction readers beyond the elementary school level don’t expect interior illustrations. Nonfiction audiences, on the other hand, do. This is a problem for authors, not because we don’t want to please our audiences, but because getting the means to do so is neither cheap nor easy.

I will admit to being spoiled with my first three books, because I didn’t have to worry about pictures at all. All three were published through Eclipse Press, then the book-publishing arm of The Blood-Horse, Inc., and the pictures were pulled by publishing staff from in-house resources at The Blood-Horse. I didn’t realize that this was not the norm until I contracted with the University Press of Kentucky for Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold and found out that I was expected to supply any pictures I wanted to use along with the manuscript—at my own expense, of course.

Given that UPK is a relatively small press, I was not too perturbed after the initial surprise; small- and moderate-sized publishing houses have pretty limited budgets for both book production and marketing. The trouble is, my budget is also pretty limited, and I rapidly found out that getting licensing rights for pictures can be a major consumer of both time and money. Just finding pictures can be a real challenge, especially if you don’t have the resources to travel and examine collections for yourself. Sure, you can use the Internet, but then you have to track down the origin of the picture (not always easy), contact the originator or current owner, and be sure that you’re dealing with the person who has the right to authorize its use—always assuming that you can make contact, because some people and entities are very poor about responding to inquiries, and the bigger and wealthier the person/entity is, usually the worse they are about getting back to you.

Simply locating a suitable picture is not enough; you must have license to use it in your book, and this means having to develop a grasp of U.S. copyright law, knowing that if you make a mistake and someone comes looking for royalties or damages, it will be coming out of your pocket instead of the publisher’s (yes, it’s in the book contract). Since I, like most authors, lack the money to lawyer up if someone decides to sue, this can lead to a bit of paranoia about what one can and can’t do. Even pictures that are 95 years old or more and thus in the public domain are not necessarily safe to reproduce; my understanding of the law is that if the negative still exists, the owner of the negative is the party who has the right to authorize use. (Good luck on finding out if the negative still exists for a picture close to a century old, unless the photo is in a library or museum collection or is from the files of a major news organization.) I don’t want to even think about having to get authorization for pictures that are under foreign (including Canadian) copyright. Then there are the fees for licensure, which can range from nothing (bless you,. Keeneland Library!) to $1,000 or more for a single photo. You would think that a large publishing house might help its authors out with some of this as part of the production budget, but no—one of the authors I was talking to got her title published through a major New York house and still had to pony up 100 percent of the usage fees for her illustrations, plus all the costs behind the legwork to track them down.

Just to add to the fun, there is the need to translate the photo requirements for use by your publishing house. For those of us who don’t speak photography tech, this is a bit daunting, but the bottom line is that a low-resolution picture downloaded from the Internet or taken from a newspaper photo probably isn’t going to be reproducible at the quality needed. I had to regretfully turn away from trying to use several pictures the Keeneland Library had because they were from scans of old books or other print media and couldn’t pass muster with the needs of publication. Eventually, that led to the choice of not providing interior illustrations for Dream Derby because I didn’t want a photo collection that didn’t include Black Gold’s owner, trainer, and jockey—the omissions would have been too obvious—and the one good, clear, reproduction-quality photo that showed all three was in the hands of the entity that wanted $1,000 for its use. Considering that I would have to sell over 400 books at the full cover price for the softcover version just to recoup the price of using that one photo (remember what I said in an earlier post about average sales?), and that I certainly didn’t and don’t have $1,000 just lying around, I think the reason for my decision (and believe me, I didn’t like having to make it) is pretty obvious.

Understand, book publishing is a tough and highly competitive business, margins are tight, and most books will not turn a profit for the house. Even so, given the amount of work and expense that authors are expected to shoulder nowadays between book production and book promotion, it would be nice to be able to get a little more help from the publishing companies in the interest of turning out a more appealing product without the author having to go into extra debt to do it. Just sayin’.
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Road Ode

10/23/2023

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Most writers prefer writing to any other book-related activity (except perhaps reading), but in the modern era, when you’ve written a book, you pretty much have to resign yourself to doing most if not all the legwork for marketing. In my case, this meant making a 1400-mile road trip over the course of four days, accompanied by patient husband who served as chauffeur, bodyguard, equipment-carrier, and general source of encouragement. (Anyone wonder why I’m still very much in love with this man?) My target: Lexington, Kentucky, where I was scheduled to give a talk on Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold on Friday, October 20, and to participate in the Kentucky Book Festival on October 21.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed giving the talk; while I’m on the introverted side, I actually like public speaking, provided I don’t have to face an audience armed with rotten tomatoes or the kind of bad manners that should have been drilled out of any civilized person in kindergarten. And the book fest was a lot of fun, though by the time I’d been there about five hours, I could sense my energy starting to fade, along with everyone else’s. It’s a challenge to strike the right note, to be pleasant, friendly, and open toward anyone who approaches without being too pushy and aggressive, and to keep that up through a seven-hour day.

Unless you are a much bigger name than I am, you’re not likely to sell enough books at a festival or signing to cover the expenses of attending, let alone make a profit. So why do it? Two key words: accessibility and networking. Of course you want to connect with fans; they’re your lifeblood as an author, and besides, what writer doesn’t get a rush from talking to someone who’s engaged with the story you wrote, who wants to ask questions and is thrilled to get a nicely personalized copy of your work? You can’t do those things via social media, and a happy and excited fan giving you and your book great word-of-mouth publicity is a sales booster over the long haul. As for networking, while you can do quite a bit long-distance in today’s interconnected world, there’s still nothing like meeting your fellow authors, your editor, the staff of your publishing house, and other interesting people face-to-face. You never know who’s going to show up at one of these events, and what seems like a chance meeting may have more impact on your success than you could ever have predicted. (My fantasy—as yet unfulfilled—is that someone is going to show up who wants to talk about movie rights to Dream Derby. I’ll keep you all posted on that one.)

At the moment, I’m exhausted; I’m not as young as I used to be, and frankly, I’m grateful that the next festival on my schedule is only 35 miles away from home. But I’m glad to have had the experience, and I’m actually looking forward to the next one!
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Story Selection

10/12/2023

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History is often associated with dry academic writing—the kind of work that feels choked with dust before the ink has dried on the page. Perhaps this is necessary when the intent is to demonstrate that one is scholarly and objective, but there is something lost when humanity, humor, and a sense of the ridiculousness of our whole crazy race is excluded. A bare recounting of the facts regarding an event or personage may be an excellent chronicle, but to me history needs blood and breath. To come alive, it must be a story, but a true story, one recounting what actually happened as processed through the mind and perception and heart of the historian.

That being the case, selection of the right story to tell is just as critical for the historian as for the fiction writer, if not more so; a fiction writer is at liberty to craft character, plot and action to suit the story to be told, but the historian must work with the material supplied by reality. Thus, in writing Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold, the dramatis personae and the events of the story were already set; the question was not what would happen and to whom, but how I would present Al and Rosa Hoots, Useeit, Hanley Webb, J. D. Mooney, and Black Gold himself as individuals who both acted in and were acted upon by the events of the time they lived in.

When the purpose of writing is to entertain at least as much as to inform, nonfiction and fiction writers must consider similar elements if readers are to be attracted and held. The protagonist(s) must be appealing to the audience in some way; even an antihero must resonate with the reader somehow, such as by becoming the instrument of justice against the truly despicable or by displaying some distinct virtue in spite of being badly flawed. Heroes must have a dream or a goal toward which they are moving, and obstacles—preferably both internal and external—that must be overcome in order to reach the desired end. The unlikely, the unpredictable, and the unusual spark and hold interest as they drive twists and turns in the characters’ behavior and in their responses to events. A story of unbroken successes, however true and admirable, soon palls to all but the most devoted fans; a struggle with which readers can identify keeps them hooked until a satisfactory closure is reached.

Horse racing holds many great stories, but it is no coincidence that the Thoroughbreds with the greatest bodies of literature built around them—Seabiscuit, Exterminator, Phar Lap—have been outsiders who became great champions against the odds. In my own small way, I hope I have made a contribution to that tradition, telling the true-life story of a little black horse and an unlikely owner, trainer, and jockey who, for one golden moment, stood atop the racing world.
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Copy Editing

10/5/2023

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​If there is one chore that can bring you down from the high of completing a book manuscript and actually getting it accepted by a publishing house, it’s copy editing. It isn’t exactly the equivalent of baring one’s soul in the confessional, but for a lot of writers, it probably isn’t too far off in terms of discomfort. The difference is that in the confessional, you voluntarily admit your sins; in copy editing, the copy editor reveals them to you.

Now, I don’t know anyone alive who enjoys criticism (no matter how constructive) and having their mistakes pointed out, and I am no exception to the rule. Having just gone through this process with The Kentucky Oaks: 150 Years of Running for the Lilies, I have now done this five times with five different books, and I can’t say I like it any better the fifth time than I did the first. It’s embarrassing to be caught out on typos and basic grammatical and spelling mistakes, especially after I’ve read and re-read my own text several times before ever submitting it. I know perfectly well why this happens: the mind, familiar with both what it is seeing and the intended meaning, simply skates right over the errors without processing that they are there. It takes fresh eyes to catch these things, and on one level I’m grateful to the copy editor for bringing the mistakes to my attention; better her (or him) than the eventual readers. On another, I still feel like the kid who gets a paper marked up with red ink back from the high school English teacher.

The markups regarding questions about meaning and wording are even less welcome, though equally necessary. Writers are nearly as jealous and sensitive regarding their work as a mom with a new baby, and equally likely to feel resentment and hurt that their offspring is seen as less than perfect—even blemished. Good sense and civility both demand that you not take it out on the copy editor for doing the job she (he) is paid to do; if the editor isn’t clear on what you mean or finds something potentially problematic, chances are at least some readers will feel the same way. Some things just have to be reworded for clarity or to bring in a greater depth of meaning, and that’s part and parcel of the writing process. When it comes to sensitivities that are more personal or cultural—well, that’s a judgment call. Sometimes it’s best to acknowledge a blind spot and bow before the prevailing wind; at other times, you may decide that you must take your stand with Horton the Elephant (“I meant what I said and I said what I meant!”). I’ve done both.

Aside from dealing with the inevitable corrections, the copy editing stage has one other aspect that would make a lot of writers prefer eating a super-sour gummy worm (my apologies to those who really like super-sour gummy worms), and that’s a fresh opportunity for self-criticism. After being away from your work for weeks or months, chances are that some of what you’ve written is going to strike you as well below what you hoped for when you originally put it down. If you’re lucky or less self-critical than most, there will also be parts that you look at and find pretty darned good, but for me, most of the time the satisfying parts tend to be outweighed by the “I-wish-I’d done-this-better” parts, even when the passages that I find acceptable or better outnumber the others by ten to one. Since copy editing isn’t really the place for massive overhauls (those should have taken place earlier, probably under the eye of the acquisitions editor and the review readers), about all I can do when I hit these points is to accept that I’ve done what I can, learn from them for next time, and move on.

Ultimately, getting through the copy editing phase of book production takes three things. One is the self-discipline to stick to a tedious task until it is finished. One is the maturity to accept that you’re not perfect and to continue growing from the process of correcting your mistakes. And the last one is to recognize that when all is said and done, you and the copy editor are on the same team, with a common goal of producing a successful book.
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    I'm Avalyn Hunter, an author with a passion for Thoroughbreds and a passion for writing and storytelling.

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