My “Write that Book” Teleseminar has been scheduled and the invitations have gone out to the contest winners. If you’re a contest winner and you haven’t received an invitation, please comment here to let me know.
I have some plans for expanding this seminar into a seminar series, but I can’t talk about the details now. Keep watching the blog for update.
Readers often ask what inspired me to write The Amen Sisters and where the idea for the book originated. The Amen Sisters has a long and, I hope, interesting history. The idea for this book came to me around 1990, about the time that I was able to start talking about an abusive church situation I had experienced a few years earlier. I had a story I wanted to tell, but I had no idea I’d tell it in a novel. I wasn’t even a published author at the time!
Sometime in 1998, I think, after publishing seven romance novels, I signed a contract to do a three-book, Christian romance series with Tyndale House Publishers. The first book in what became The Genesis House series was Awakening Mercy, my first Christian romance, which was published in 2000. The second was Abiding Hope, published in 2001. The third, Enduring Love, has never been published. Enduring Love was the first incarnation of The Amen Sisters.
Tyndale loved Awakening Mercy and thought I had perfectly hit the tone they wanted in a Christian romance novel, so I had very few revisions. Their response to Abiding Hope was not as positive. They sent it back to me with the recommendation that I make it more romance-y, more like Awakening Mercy. That’s when I began to wonder whether I had another Christian romance in me. Thankfully, I was able to revise Abiding Hope enough to make it the Christian romance that my publisher and readers expected. When I turned in Enduring Love a year later, my publisher and I knew we were at the end of our road together. The book had a romantic element but it was definitely not a romance along the lines of Awakening Mercy and Abiding Hope.
Since Tyndale didn’t think they could successfully market me as a Christian women’s fiction author at that point in my career and since I was pretty sure I didn’t have another Christian romance in me, we parted ways. Since they’d already paid me half of the advance for the book, I had to repay it. The good news is that my contract gave me six months to do so.
So here I was with a book that my publisher didn’t want and that really wasn’t ready for women’s fiction land. The good news is that the publisher at Walk Worthy Press was interested in having me do women’s fiction for her new publishing venture with Warner Books. Seemed like at perfect match!
Almost. When I went to contract with Walk Worthy, I had this finished book, Enduring Love, which not quite a romance and not quite women’s fiction, on my hands. I decided my best option was to try to make it a “big” romance and sell it to a romance publisher. Well, even though I wasn’t contracted to do romance for Walk Worthy, there was a clause in my contract that gave them the right to see the romance before I shopped it to another publisher.
Guess what? Walk Worthy wanted to publish the story as women’s fiction. Good news, right? Well, sorta. Though my new publisher and I talked about what a women’s fiction version of Enduring Love would look like, it became apparent after about a year of revisions that we were miles apart in our visions for the book. At the end of my rope and exhausted of all hope, I made a fateful call to my new publisher, fully prepared to terminate the contract and, once again, pay back an advance. Imagine my surprise when my publisher said, “Write your book, Angela,” or some words to that effect.
Those words freed me up and seven months later, I turned in The Amen Sisters. That wasn’t my original title though. I can’t even remember if I had a title, since Enduring Love had long since fallen by the wayside. The Amen Sisters, as a title, was my publisher’s idea. All I had to do was change the last name of my main characters from Thompson to Amen and a book title was born.
So that’s the story of The Amen Sisters. You never would have guessed, would you?
For those of you who are wondering, I do still have a few romances left in me. I realized over time that what I needed in my writing was balance. In case you didn’t know it, most romance writers are married women. As a single woman, I found it difficult to continually turn out stories of women who ended up happily ever after with the mate God had chosen especially for them. I needed to also tell stories of godly women whose lives were not headed towards holy matrimony. In other words, I needed to write stories about women like myself.
That’s it for now. Enjoy your weekend and be blessed!
The SORMAG Online Conference is now going on! This is a great online conference for writers and readers. It’s the perfect opportunity for you to meet authors, editors, agents and others in the publishing business.
The conference started on August 26th and ends on September 1st. The goods news is that the conference is free! You have the wonderfully giving LaShaunda Hoffman, who’s provided this fantastic opportunity for a few years now, to thank. Kudos, LaShaunda! Your good work has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated.
So head on over to http://sormag.blogspot.com/ and join in the fun. The conference is hosted in a blog format so even though you’ll be joining late, you won’t have missed a thing!
Oh, yeah, you can see the full conference agenda here: http://sormag.blogspot.com/2007/07/online-conference-august-26-sept-1st.html
Last, not but least, be sure to click on one of those “Make a Donation” buttons and support the conference effort.
Enjoy!
Since I haven’t talked much about publishing lately, I thought I’d take a moment and talk about royalty statements since it’s that time of year.
September 30 was a big day for a lot of authors. It was royalty day. Publishing contracts typically pay out every six months. The contract states that royalties for the Jan-Jun 2006 period must be mailed to the author by September 30. So, if you visit the blogs of all your favorite authors and they’re deliriously happy, it probably means they got paid. 
Some authors out there may not be so happy as they may not have earned as much as they wanted to earn. That’s the way it goes.
A couple of contract clauses can make royalty time a bit depressing for authors: joint accounting and reduced royalties on deeply discounted books. Let’s talk about these two so that you’ll know what authors face.
Joint accounting, also basket accounting. What is joint accounting? I don’t have a definition but I can give an example. Suppose you have a two-book contract that includes an advance for the first book and an advance for the second book. In joint accounting, you have to earn back the money for both books before you get any more money. Let’s say you get $10,000 for the first book and $20,000 for the second book, a total of $30,000.
Typically, you’d get half of the first advance ($5000) and half of the second ($10,000), a total of $15,000, upon signing the contract. When you turn in book one and it’s accepted, you get the second half of the first advance ($5000), for a total of $20,000 in advance received. When the second book is turned in, you get the second half of the second advance ($10,000), for a total of $30,000 in advance received.
In joint accounting, you don’t get another dime from the publisher until you earn back the full $30,000. Suppose your first book earns $25,000 the first year? You don’t get any money because you still owe the publisher $5000 under joint accounting. Without joint accounting, you would have received royalties of $15,000 on the first book ($25,000 - $10,ooo advance already received). Of course, you wouldn’t get any money on book 2 until you had earned back the $20,000 advance paid for book 2.
So, in joint accounting the payments for the books are lumped together, as opposed to each book standing on its own. Of course, if you’re getting $100,000 for the first book and $200,000 for the second book, you may not mind joint accounting. You really have to look at all the terms of the contract.
Reduced royalties on books sold at a discount. Typically, bookstores buy books from publisers at 60% of the cover price. On a hard cover book, the standard royalty rate (the rate the author is paid) is 10% of the cover price for the first 5000 copies sold, 12.5% for the next 5000, and 15% for anything over 10,000. If you sell 1-5000 copies of a book that has a cover price of $22 dollars, you get $2.20/book.
The reduced royalties on discounted books means you’d get 10% of the net receipts of the book, rather than 10% of the cover price. So, if the publisher sells the book to the bookstore at a 50% discount, you 10% of the discounted price. If the book is $22, you get 10% of $11 or $1.10/book. You’ll notice that this is half of what you’d get under normal royalties. [To be fair, I think 55% is the deep discount point for most publishers, but 50% was an easier number to work with in the example.]
These two clauses are enough reasons to get an agent to negotiate on your behalf. Your agent may not always be able to get them out, but she can advise you on ways to minimize their impact on your bottom line. Have a good one!
A while back when we were talking about What makes IT Christian? I promised to write a post about the writing of The Amen Sisters. Well, this is that post!
Because of the subject matter of the book, I was determined not to sensationalize it. That meant The Amen Sisters was not going to be about the acts of a pastor gone wild. I was determined not to focus on the misdeeds of the pastor but the impact of his actions on those around him. For me, that was a more complex story, a more interesting story. I bet you can imagine the drama showing the pastor’s unpastoral actions would have brought to the book, but that was not my book to write.
I want to make another point about a choice that I made with The Amen Sisters but it gives away some of the book, so I’m going to put it on the next page. Don’t select “Read the rest of this entry” at the end of this post if you don’t want to know.
Every author makes choices with the stories he or she chooses to write. Our stories reflect our perspective. Some writers say their stories represent a “Christian worldview.” I’d probably go along with that as long as it’s understood that my stories represent “a” Christian worldview, not “the” Christian worldview.” I make this distinction because even though we are Christians our individual views are colored by our personal experiences of Christ.
That’s it for tonight. Don’t forget that selecting “Read the rest of this entry” below will tell you something about The Amen Sisters that you may not want to know before you read it.
This question has been rolling around in my mind for quite a while now. Just to be clear, the IT is Christian fiction. So, what makes Christian fiction Christian?
I started writing Christian fiction back around 1999. At that time, the books were being sold primarily in CBA (Christian Bookseller Association) bookstores and published by publishers who served those bookstores, called CBA publishers. Yourgeneral bookstores, chain (Border’s, Amazon, etc) or independent (Black Images Book Bazaar in Dallas, Karibou in DC/Maryland), are called ABA (or, BEA) bookstores. You’ll find Christian fiction sections of varying sizes in ABA stores. Industry reports suggest that Christian fiction is one of the fastest growing markets. But I’m getting off track . . .
One of the things that surprised me when I entered CBA publishing was the complaint of some CBA authors (authors I’d read and enjoyed) that CBA publishing guidelines contrained them in their writing and didn’t allow them to tell the stories they really wanted to tell. The authors seemed to feel constrained from telling “real” stories.
That wanting to write real stories about real people refrain is one that is still heard among Christian authors and, to be honest, I’ve said it myself. Only recently have I begun to ask myself exactly what the refrain means. I’ve heard that the characters in some Christian fiction were/are unrealistic because the people were/are too perfect. More recently, there’s the refrain among African-American authors and readers of Christian fiction that CBA Christian fiction does not speak to the reality of their lives. So now we have CBA fiction, where CBA has somehow become code for “white” and gospel fiction, code for “black.” [Okay, Dee, kick me if I’m misusing your term.]
I think the two aforementioned reasons are why we have the real refrain from Christian authors and readers. Unfortunately, the fallout I’m seeing from this is that in some (and I do say “some”) books it’s difficult to distinguish the Christian characters from the non-Christian characters. This is the problem that gets me back to the initial question in this post, What makes IT Christian? What makes Christian fiction Christian?
The conclusion I’ve come to is that “real” Christian fiction doesn’t seek to show how weak Christians are, but rather to show people of faith in situations where they’re challenged to live their faith. Sometimes they’ll meet the challenge and, at others, they won’t. But in the course of the challenges, we see a growing relationship with God through Christ.
I’ve concluded that the challenge of writing Christian fiction is not in showing how far Christians can fall, but in showing, through words and story, what it means to love God, to be in relationship with Him. I think this is reality for Christians.
So how do I show this reality in my stories? How do I write a compelling story about a person who loves God? How do I show a relationship with an invisible God on the very visible pages of a book? Now that’s a challenge.
In next week’s post, I’ll reflect on how I wrote The Amen Sisters as a way of looking more closely at these questions. Please note that I’m not saying that I have the answers, just that I want to explore the questions more.
Okay, those are my thoughts. What do you think?
The other day I was thinking about characters and the power we as authors have in our creation of them. We have goals for our characters and in our execution of those goals we take our readers into a land we created and ask them to join in with us. Some enter and decide to stay with us, while others decide our land is not the place for them. That’s the truth that authors have to embrace: Everybody is not going to like your book. That’s hard to hear, but I deal with it by telling myself that if everybody who reads my books likes them, then I didn’t have very good distribution. You see, I’m good at turning lemons into lemonade.
I remember the first time I wanted to write to an author. That author was Julie Garwood. Yes, Julie Garwood, the then historical romance author. Okay, the then NYTimes bestselling historical romance author. In the 90’s, she wrote For the Roses. That book had me boo-hooing. Not because I was sad, but because I was touched. You see, For the Roses had a black male character as a member of Rose family, four orphans who banded together because no one wanted them. Three white men, one white woman (a baby when the teen-aged boys formed their family) and Adam.
In For the Roses, Julie Garwood took me into a world I had never entered. In Julie Garwood’s world, Adam’s “brothers” didn’t take rooms in the fancy hotel while Adam stayed in the livery. They didn’t ride in the comfortable passenger cars and leave Adam alone in a cattle car. In Julie Garwood’s world, Adam’s brothers loved him and showed that love by the way they treated him. In her world, Adam was the wise older brother, whose love and care for his family was returned in full measure.
Later, I read somewhere that For the Roses was among Julie Garwood’s worst-selling books. Still, a bestseller, but not as much so as her other titles. I hope that’s not true. I also remember reading one reader characterizing the book as unrealistic. I’m not sure what she meant, but I wonder if what I found touching in For the Roses, other readers found unrealistic. You see, in most books set in that time period, good ole Adam would have been left alone in the livery and the cattle car with a smile and a “take care.” But in Julie’s world, love worked differently.
I think now that I should have written to Julie Garwood and thanked her for writing For the Roses. From her, I learned the power that we as authors have. We choose the reality of our stories. We write fiction; we make up stories. We decide what to show and what to leave to the imagination. We decide what’s important and what’s not important in the worlds we create. And, in doing so, we hope to present the reader the truth that is reality. Now that’s a hard job. Some might even think of it as a calling.
My hat is off and my heart is open to my brother and sister authors who attempt to do this everyday with Christian fiction. We’re not going to please every reader every time, and sometimes we’re not going to please each other, but what we can do is give each other the space to tell the stories that God gives us. What may not work for me, could be life-saving for somebody else. Now that is reality.
Have a great day, everybody.
I’ve been getting quite a few messages from new writers lately and I thought I’d make you all aware of the writing resources on this web site. If you look down the right panel, you’ll see a section with the heading Writing Resources with two links listed. The first link takes you to some my personal writing tips, which I encourage you to browse.
Also, if you’re in the NYC area on April 22, you might want to check out the Faith and Fiction Function being hosted by Kingdom Baptist Church in Yonkers, NY. I’ll be there, along with Tiffany Warren and LaTonya Mason. We’ll have a time of praise, prayer, fellowship and sharing what we know about publishing in the Christian fiction arena as well as in the general market.
Don’t forget the Faith Based Arts Conference. At lot of your favorite Chrsitian authors will be in attendance. I’m teaching a Writer’s Workshop. It’ll be a great time! Oh, yes, and for $75 you can get a professional critique of the synopsis and first chapter of your manuscript.
In the new few weeks, we’ll be wrapping up the Taking Back the Past series. Any ideas for publishing topics that we can tackle then?
If you’re looking for a conference, here are two that I’m attending that you might want to consider:
March 9-12, 2006
Romance Slam Jam
Shreveport, LA
The Romance Slam Jam was started by Emma Rodgers and Ashira Tosihwe, owners of Black Images Book Bazaar in Dallas, to celebrate African-American romance writers. The first conference was held in 1995 in Dallas. I was in attendance at the first one and I’ve attended a few over the years. I enjoy seeing the writers who started in this business when I did. It’s also good to meet new people. I’ll be presenting a workshop on writing inspirational fiction on Saturday, March 11. The Saturday booksigning is open to the public.
UPDATE: I am unable to make the Romance Slam Jam event, after all. My apologies to those of you who expected to see me.
Jacquelin Thomas sponsors this conference. The first one was held two years ago in Raleigh and we had a great time. Here you’ll get to meet some of your favorite authors of Christian fiction. I’ll be teaching a pre-conference writing workshop for beginning writers.
