Horse Tales - American Classic Pedigrees

The Final Hurdles

11/2/2023

It’s that time again. Not for the Breeders’ Cup—for proofreading and index construction, in this case for The Kentucky Oaks: 150 Years of Running for the Lilies. The good news is that these are the last steps before actual printing, at least on my side of the production process. The bad news is that they’re thoroughly tedious.

Reading the final proofs is a nitpicking task. The time for major revisions is long past, trying to make a major change now would jack up the expenses of producing the book and delay publication. This is the stage at which I’m trying to catch any typos that slipped by the first two rounds, fix any other errors (such as the spelling of a name), write in minor updates to make the text as current as possible, and fine-tune the writing that has already been done on a one-word-here, one-word-there basis. The keys here are concentration and attention to detail. Even with my best efforts, the text probably won’t be perfect, but my job now is to get it as close to that standard as possible.

Compared to constructing the index, though, proofing the text is a walk in the park. The basic rule of thumb is that if it’s a proper noun and appears in the text, it needs to be in the index as well with page references so that the reader can find every instance in which that name appears. Important concepts may also need to be included. If a particular topic is frequently referenced, subheadings may be needed. In a book like The Kentucky Oaks, in which the text touches on several hundred horses plus their owners, trainers, and jockeys, the index is by nature going to be extensive; add in references to other races run by the Oaks fillies, to racetracks, and to other significant people, locations, and institutions, and … well, I’m up to 43 single-column, double-spaced pages so far on my list and still have a third of the book to go through just to add all the needed subjects to the index. After that, it’s time to go back and add the page numbers on which those subjects are found.

Fortunately for the publisher and the reader, at least, the index as it actually appears in the printed book won’t take up so many pages; smaller font sizes and multiple columns will be used to compact the index while keeping it readable. And formatting, thank goodness, is not my job. Even so, a pretty fair chunk of my next three weeks will be committed to getting these final chores done. I hope the results will be worth the effort.

Picture This

10/26/2023

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’.

Road Ode

10/23/2023

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!

Copy Editing

10/5/2023

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.

Mea Culpa

9/29/2023

As the timing of this post (intended for yesterday) shows, it’s all too easy for me to let time slip by, right along with my good intentions about getting down to the business of writing. Since I don’t have a fixed schedule to help keep me in line, it’s up to me to figure out how to juggle household needs, personal business, and writing to make sure I don’t fall too far behind in any one area. Most of the time, I think I do pretty well. Yesterday...well, not so much. Granted, I was legit busy with some things that had to be done, but I suspect the biggest reason for my lapse was simply feeling that I was off the leash after finishing copy editing for my upcoming Kentucky Oaks history on Wednesday.

Anyway, it’s time for me to get back on track. So, my apologies to anyone who looked here yesterday and found no update. I don’t have the hubris to say it won’t happen again (I know better), but I hope you’ll continue the writing journey with me even if it gets interrupted at times.

Looking Back

9/21/2023

I’m sure most writers have had the experience of coming back to a piece of writing after shelving it for a while. The good news is that rereading after a period of weeks, months, or even a year or more lets you come back to your work with fresh eyes, often leading to some significant improvements. The bad news is that you have to confront what you originally wrote. If you’re lucky, you’ll actually find you did a good, solid job requiring only minor tweaks. If not so lucky, you will find yourself confronting a literary train wreck in all its appalling glory. (This is admittedly more likely if you were drunk, high, seriously sleep-deprived, or otherwise in an altered mental state at the time you wrote it.) Even worse, if anything, you may find your work so sunk in mediocrity that you wonder if there’s anything in it that can be salvaged except as a remedy for insomnia. An outstandingly terrible piece may still contain an image, a conversation, a turn of phrase worth retrieving from the wreckage; a work as colorless as a bad textbook or the minutes of an average town council meeting is probably irredeemable.

That’s the nature of rereading a work in progress, but what about something that has already been in print for years? That was my experience recently when updating The Kingmaker: How Northern Dancer Founded a Racing Dynasty, which is scheduled to be re-released by Lyons Press in May. Seventeen years have gone by since the book was originally published, and since then, a lot of water has gone under the bridge.

Given that the book was initially released to good reviews, I didn’t expect rereading it to be a disconcerting experience. I already knew about a couple of relatively minor errors, which I was glad to have the chance to fix, and I remain reasonably content with the quality of the writing. Not completely satisfied; I’m sure I could do a better job now with nearly two decades’ further practice of my craft if I started from scratch, but that’s not the purpose of a reprint. The bulk of my time was spent on updating the accomplishments of the Dancer’s sons and descendants, which was a predictable issue given that some of his sons and virtually all his major grandsons were still in service at the time of The Kingmaker’s original release.

The moments of strangeness during the revision came when I had to update the tense of passages from present to past, reflecting the deaths of people and horses who had been very much alive at the time of initial publication. It is sobering to reread the words of someone you actually talked with while you were writing a manuscript and realize that they are now the words of the dead, and there is a sense of dislocation in revisiting the memories of events and horses that were fresh then but have now passed on while you continue.

I don’t find such reflections particularly morbid, but they are a kind of memento mori, a reminder that I, too, will pass on in my time and leave whatever wisdom or information or even humor I may impart in the words and memories I leave behind me. When I have gone on to my true home, I would like to think that what I leave behind will give rise to a smile or a moment’s thought or gratitude, just as others have left these things for me to remember when I read their words and remember a little of the life behind them.

Letdowns

9/14/2023

Letdowns are an inevitable part of a creative person’s life. You painted the best picture of your life; you sang your dream performance; you starred in the community theater’s play; your YouTube channel is up and running; your book is published … and invariably, that little voice comes up in the back of your mind that says, “So now what?”

I think part of the lost feeling is because you actually have time to stop and think about what you’ve done, but the passion that’s been driving your thinking for months or years is suddenly in the past. Part of it may be anxiety: how is your work being received? Part of it is probably going into an adrenaline slump after running like mad to get this thing done. And part of it is feeling like you need a new passion to latch onto, only you don’t quite know which way to turn.

It’s easy to turn the feeling of letdown into spinning one’s wheels or paralysis, but the fallow periods following a major achievement do have a place and a purpose. If you can keep from being sidetracked into either a hasty search for the next project or a depressed funk, the suddenly empty space is where you can reflect on where you have been and what truly draws you onward. It’s also a good place for discovering the work of others, for reading, for spending time with family and friends and green spaces—renewing your energies and refreshing and refilling the wells from which new ideas can arise. After all, we are not human doings; we are human beings, and it is in our being, not our doing, that God made us to have worth and value. We need the between spaces to come apart from our own busyness, remember who we are, and rest … before we just plain come apart.

The Emotional Roller Coaster

9/7/2023

In a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, C. S. Lewis wrote, “Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.” Over thirty years later, with fourteen books published in genres ranging from scholarly literary analyses to poetry to science fiction and the first book of his beloved Narnia series (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) just hitting print, Lewis portrayed his relationship to writing in another light: “Ink is a deadly drug. One wants to write. I cannot shake off the addiction.”

I suspect that for most writers, the relationship to the Muses is similarly ambivalent; writing can be a joy, but it is also quite capable of being obsession and sometimes sheer drudgery (as any writer who has plowed through the tasks of completing a major revision or constructing an index can attest). What it is not—at least in my experience—is good therapy, at least not when writing for eventual publication. (Journaling as a therapeutic exercise is a different ball game altogether, and is best left between oneself and one’s therapist.) Perhaps it is different for poets, who (by their own testimonies) often don’t grasp the full import of what they have written until it is reflected back to them by others. And perhaps a fiction writer can take the path of Stephen King, who admitted that he used his childhood phobias as the foundations for his bestselling horror stories. For most of us prosy sorts, though, it’s best to have one’s psychological house somewhat in order before committing ink to paper, for putting a book out in print is more likely to reveal what shape your self-concept is in than to heal it.

The reason that writing for publication generally isn’t therapeutic is simple: it isn’t about you. In writing for an audience, you are putting not just your writing but your investment of yourself on the firing line of others’ judgment. More often than not, the exhilaration of seeing your brainchild in print is followed by the low of realizing that sales aren’t what you hoped. Reviews? If you did your job well, you can expect to see more good than bad ones, but it only takes one scathing opinion—put out in public for all to see—to leave you feeling as if you’d taken a dagger to the gut. Never mind that the critic’s opinion may be based on personal agendas, ideology, or a general dislike of your topic rather than the specific merit of your writing; even the kindest and best-meant of criticism is not easy to take, let alone the sort that is anything but.

With Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold coming out in five days, I am getting reacquainted with the emotional roller coaster that comes with releasing a book. The difference between my experience as a novice author twenty years ago and my experience now is this: back then, the emotions were raw and new, and I really had no realistic idea of what to expect. Now, I know what can happen; I just don’t know what will happen. I am not sure that this is an improvement. Still, as with much of life, all I can do is to prepare myself to accept the worst while hoping for the best.

So You Want to Write a Book

8/17/2023

Let’s suppose that the writing bug has bitten you and you want to write a book of your own. That’s great! You’re looking at embarking on a creative pursuit that can generate tremendous satisfaction. Sharing your passion and your vision with others, whether in fictional or nonfictional form, is a truly enjoyable pursuit. It is also tremendously time-consuming and can put your ego up for some serious battering when reviews don’t match your hopes and potential readers seem disinterested.

If you’ve got a book inside you that’s hammering to get out, don’t let me discourage you. But before you commit yourself to the project, ask yourself a few questions:

1) Why am I writing? I touched on this last week, but the question is worth repeating. To be blunt, if you don’t feel the work is worth doing for its own sake, you may want to think twice. While it’s hard to come up with exact figures, the most common estimates on the Internet are that about 4 million new titles are published annually. No more than one in four get published through a traditional publishing house; the remainder are self-published. And the average sales for a book? No more than 1000 copies lifetime for traditionally published works. Self-published authors fare worse; most sell only a handful of copies. Very few authors break through to the extent that they can make writing a full-time vocation; for most, it’s a side gig at best.

2) Do I have the tools to produce good writing? Maybe your English classes in school were a total bore, but if you can’t spell well or use correct grammar and syntax, readers and editors will know it and will be turned off. Don’t count on spell-checkers or grammar aides such as Microsoft Editor and Grammarly to fix your problems, either. Spell checkers are notorious for missing spelling errors that result in homonyms (words that are spelled differently but sound the same, such as their, there, and they’re). Grammar aides can be very helpful in composing an email or a business letter but in my experience lack the depth of command of English grammar, usage, and style needed to write a book and have it emerge sounding as if a real, breathing, feeling human being wrote it. If you cannot write consistently and correctly at an eighth-grade level (usually considered the sweet spot for a popular-level book for adults), work on getting yourself up to that level.

3) How much time am I willing to commit to the project? You can commit half an hour a day; you can commit eight hours a day, depending on your stamina, your attention span, and other demands on your time. The point is that writing a book takes plugging away, day after day; very few people are so struck by the Muse that they can turn out a publishable manuscript in a few weeks or even months of fevered work. If you don’t develop the habit of writing regularly, the chances are that after your initial burst of activity, your work will languish in a drawer or a computer file for years, if not forever. This isn’t to say that you can’t take a break from working on a manuscript, whether it’s to work on another project or to take care of other things that have come up in your life; sometimes you spot things after taking time away from a given piece of writing that will lead to your making some major improvements. But do set a time to come back to your work and start working with it regularly again, or it may stay on the back burner permanently.

By the way, when you are looking at time commitments, don’t forget research time. It should go without saying that nonfiction writing requires a goodly amount of research, even if you are a recognized expert in the field in which you are writing. Top fiction writers also spend a good deal of time researching, more than many people think, so that they can create believable fictional worlds and make the needed suspension of disbelief possible.

4) Do I have the support of significant others in my life? If you have a spouse, a live-in S.O., or children, your devoting a lot of time to writing is going to have an impact on them. Apartment roommates may not care much if you vanish into your bedroom or workspace for hours on end to work on your project, but family members almost certainly will. If they begin feeling neglected or ignored, or put-upon because they are taking on what they consider to be an unfair share of chores or expenses, you may find yourself facing serious opposition to your writing, seriously damaged relationships, or both. You’re wise if you get them on board ahead of time.

5) Am I willing to put time and energy into marketing? If all you want to do is write memoirs or poetry for your family and friends, this may not be of any concern to you. If you want to actually make any money from your book, you will have to invest in the process of marketing and selling your books—that means getting word of mouth going, advertising, arranging book signings and appearances, and doing promotional activities and personal sales. Authors with standing reputations and big names may get sizable marketing budgets and efforts devoted to their latest works by their publishers, but that’s not most of us; count yourself fortunate if your publisher (assuming you have one) is willing to assign you a marketing specialist who will help you develop a promotional campaign, with you still doing most of the legwork and assuming most of the expenses.

I haven’t scared you off yet? Good—happy writing!

Why Write?

8/10/2023

Why write? Especially, why write books?

I suppose there are as many answers to that question as there are writers, but if you can’t answer it for yourself, you probably have no business even trying. Why? Because the answer you give will shape the kind of writing you do, your tone, your approach to your work, and your willingness to persevere when the inevitable writer’s blocks, snags, and disappointments hit. The writer most likely to fizzle out or to write drivel is the one driven by extrinsic motivations: “publish or perish,” prestige, posturing to Support a Cause, fame, money. (Oddly, money is the least troublesome of these; a money-driven writer is often more hack than artist but at least has some motivation to stay on track and to produce something that an audience might actually want.) The writer who writes with genuine passion and interest and has a desire to share that passion and that interest with others is the one who is likely to stay the course, all other things being equal.

I write because I get grabbed by a story and find I can’t let go of it. I suppose I can be considered a historian of sorts, but my vehicle for exploring history is story; I want to know the feeling as much as the facts. It isn’t always a comfortable passion, and it’s certainly time-consuming; there’s always the itch to try to dig out one more fact, one more reminiscence, that might bring a person or a horse more to life. It certainly hasn’t made me rich or anything close to it—but it has made me a richer and deeper person, and helped me to connect with people who enjoy the tales I tell. I’ll take that. (Though more money would certainly be nice.)