This writing business got serious.

This is mostly an update for those of my friends - specially those who live overseas, who still have faith in my writing and may want to know how things are going for me. One of my 2013 resolutions remains finishing my novel, so here we go step by step.

First of all, I'm out of the writer's closet. I mean, I am a writer, and there's no turning back. The first question people will throw to you to is "have you published someting?" No, no, I haven't. That doesn't make me any less of a writer. That only makes me an unpublished author -- which is not terrible for my age. I'll come back to the publishing issue later.

So yeah, by making it public on my first facebook cover of the year, people have become interested. The most unexpected people want to know what I am writing and when I am planning on publishing. Whenever I say the strongest project at the moment is a fantasy novel, half of the people lose interest, but that's ok as the fantasy market has never been for everyone. It is surprising though when people want to hear more about the anthology of queer stories I've been writing -- just today I baptized it "Pride Disguised as Shame: Queer Stories of the Western World". Some people even advised to make it available through Amazon for Kindle in order to reach more effectively an audience interested in these topics. Why not, why not? I'll get the whole world trashing my Mathieu character in "Ne Suis Pas" and maybe the real one will hear about it.
Let's say I finish a work. That's roughly a little more than being half way to get the paperback copy. In Costa Rica, if you want to publish, you need to submit your work to a philologist so that they can check the language, fix coherence and similar. They charge about $1-$2 dollars PER PAGE. That's like a lot of money for a 500 page novel. Then you need to choose a publishing house. I took a workshop on this subject with Evelyn Ugalde, mostly a children's stories author who knows the local publishing business from deep inside, and she practically discouraged all the participants from publishing by subsided state publishing house. When she told us they cover the expenses but keep the 90% of each book sold for a five to six year contract, the whole thing sounded awfully unatractive. My interest in going for a big publishing house fell even lower when she said people had waited for 2 to 3 years just to hear from the editors on whether they are interested in publishing the book or not.
The option left for me is going for a private publising house, where you have to submit your work for approval and on top of that you have to self finance the design and the printing. In average, publishing  500 copies of my 500 page novel would cost me no less than $3000 with 70% to a 100% percent of royalties for each book sold (some bookstores keep up to 40% of the cost of the book) and an estimated overall revenue of $3500-- not that money matters that much to me, but something has to pay the investment and future projects.

As it turns out, writing and having good material is not enough, not in this country. While I find out about other opportunities in Mexico or Argentina for my novel in Spanish, I guess I'll just keep on writing and saving as this whole book project is yet another trip I'm taking. Evelyn said something encouraging though. She said "would you put a price to having your baby, your novel, in your hands and have other people reading it on the bus?" I get goosebumps just to think of the idea, and of course, the pleasure of sharing my world with other people comes very cheaply if I can get it for around $4000.

That's it for today, but I'll definitely elaborate more on the writing process in future posts. Thanks for supporting this dream.

Picture: Map of El Valle Negro or Black Valley. Setting of the first 8 chapters of my fantasy novel.