Welcome to the WRITERS section
It's a new subletter.
Hello
Firstly, if you’re not a writer, you can log into your substack and remove this subletter from the buffet of content you get here. You can remain subscribed to FREE FICTION FRIDAY without incident.
These are still Phillip Carter stories, and they still have some comedy in them, so I think if you like my standup you might like these.
I don’t plan to post to this subletter too often. I’ve taught Creative Writing before, and this is sort of my way of doing it again. I want the advice to be dense and high quality, not just so it stands out amid AI-churnalism, but so it actually helps people.
Weird to think that might be my Unique Selling Point in a few years.
SO, in a world where new writers can sometimes stumble into making mistakes that more experienced writers have learned to avoid, I feel it is my place as a grumpy, skeptical dude to step in and help out where I can.
Because I have seen or made those mistakes, so I can tell you about them to help you avoid them.
An example:
I have fallen victim to a vanity press before
It’s a bizarre thing to think about, because as a 16 year old I had sent a manuscript to a publisher hoping they’d bother with it. They of course ‘read it’ within a day and called me. Apparently, my parents didn’t need to speak to them.
I was suspicious, and I asked the lady on the phone specific questions about my plot. She made things up. So, I cut her off.
The weird part is that’s not the press that ripped me off. Somehow, years later, I let my guard down. Luckily, I was only ripped off to the tune of £25, plus the train fare to their awards event.
This second press were a British publisher whose main income was made from ‘publishing packages’ worth between £700 and £3000 in value (if memory serves me well). They got popular by hanging onto the coattails of one or two popular ‘youtube poets’ whose names I can’t remember.
In 2015 I was firing my work everywhere, and, having had student loans pouring in, didn’t much mind their submissions fee. I had recently been published by The Pygmy Giant and Postcard Shorts, so I felt I was on a roll.
The £25 sub fee for this vanity press seemed fair.
I put a little bit of effort into my poem, and got in.
The poem was a spoken word (rhyming, I’ll have you know) piece about an existential crisis I was having. My older fans will currently be sighing at this, yes, the crisis did really last that long. Anyway the start of it was close to this poem, where I felt I had to split myself across social media and classes at uni to be a poet, OR an author OR a comedian. That I couldn’t be everything at once like all the cool famous artists are (Bowie was a painter).
They took the poem, obviously.
And I was invited to an awards ceremony, at which we would all read our poems and then a final winner was decided.
The ‘prize’ was a free publishing package. The big one.
They would print the book and even pretend to edit it.
All 100 of us were already in their print book, which we had to buy ourselves if we wanted a copy. The prize was for a single collection by the winner.
That book of 100 poems was poorly edited, with author names not appearing on the right pages, formatting causing poems to slip away onto the next page like drunk students escaping someone’s garden party through a fence, and a contents page that you could tell had never before been seen by human eyes until I opened it and looked at it.
This was a book they had rushed out.
And people were amazed by the thing.
I realised it was not as high quality as they claimed, read my poem, drank about seven bottles of free wine, and started chatting with some other writers, all of whom weren’t that friendly. Perhaps they too had realised it was a farce, and were now on high alert for anyone who seemed too nice.
Looking back, I get it.
So I returned to my hotel (I forgot to mention the event was miles away) and in the morning returned home, to uni, my spiritual home.
My poetry tutor reminded me some days later that he thought paid competitions were
“a tax on the untalented”
and wounded though I was (this shattered my worldview that some presses really did need my £25 to stay afloat) he was right.
I have since not spent a penny on contests.
And, as a writer, I barely find any free ones worth entering either. But that’s a story for another time, about how my writing is weird, which you knew already.
Note: some small presses do sometimes ask for submissions fees, and that does keep some of them afloat. But you should probably know these people quite well before submitting work to them. The payment, from a writer’s perspective, is a gamble on future success. Decide if you want to take that gamble or if you would rather have a nice sandwich. I usually pick sandwich.
Keeping your eyes open
A fellow writer on a writing page on facebook shared this today, and I wanted to make a post about it.
Here is a list of reason I wouldn’t trust it.
1. no profile picture on their email
2. formatting of the email is not good
3. "we have received and read your we have your work"
4. 'co production publishing' means they want you to put money into it, which is something I imagine you can manage on your own
5. there is no reason a successful publisher would go around buying up books from authors they don't work with, just to read them, and then send this sort of email
6. any good publisher does not need to email you. In fact, you might spend years trying to get them to reply to your queries, as many thousands of authors will be sending them queries
7. whilst individual editing and formatting services can be useful for some authors, I managed to teach myself in a few years because I had the privilege of spare time. With paid services, consider what you are actually paying for. Is it the service, or is it the idea that having had the service done will make you a bestseller?
8. look at other books they put out. contact the authors. see how well they are doing
9. look back at point 6
You can also check WRITER BEWARE for these things.
My next post should be a summary of April’s FREE FICTION FRIDAY things, which this month are being hosted individually over at Realphillipcarter, because they are all sci-fi related.
I am headed on a writing holiday from April 5 to May 3, writing my next few novels, standup shows, poetry books, etc, in America at popular UFO hotspots. So I might not reply to comments right away, but I intend to read them all when I return.
I’ll have a lot of new stories and jokes for you as well.