Untraditional: First-Time Author Keith Van Allen
Keith Van Allen’s “Ezekiel Saw a Wheel” started with a vision he had: He’s in the yard of his boyhood home in Fluvanna County, “and I look up and there are what look like these two planets ready to collide, one with a ring like Saturn, the other a primordial magenta moon.”
The animator painted this vision, and from there, turned it into a novel.
The plot revolves around a traveling animator named Zeke Landover, who sets out to explore the notion that aliens abducted his family at some point.
Family is central to the book’s creation. When Van Allen’s parents fell ill in 2013, he came back to Richmond to help. “My life became constricted by taking care of Mother and my diabetes,” he says.
“I was so tied down and constrained, I yearned for adventure, so I wrote this novel.”
After unsuccessful attempts at traditional publishing, he considered printing it himself, but the cost made him turn to Amazon. “As long as they can accept your files, they print it for free [on demand],” he explains, though “the promotion is up to you.”
Regardless of what happens with the book, he says, “it was the surreal journey I needed to take.”
>> Read more about self-publishing
Traditional: First-Time Author Alex McGlothlin
A novel about art, business and love, and set right here in Richmond?
Sounds good to us.
But alas, Alex McGlothlin is still looking for an agent, so it may be a year or two or three before we’re able to dive in.
McGlothlin, who has degrees in both business and law, says he wrote a dozen “apprentice” novels, all high-concept and literary, all unpublished. Then came reading books on the craft of writing, and it was out of that experience that he wrote “The Medium of Desire."
The first draft took him three months, after which he revised it five times and submitted it to freelance editors, including Joni Albrecht (see right).
“When you want to move from writing as a hobby, you have to open yourself up to objective criticism,” he says. “You want to take a good product to the market.”
Now, he’s querying agents, a process he likens to a perpetual job interview: “You have to show you’re willing to sell the book; you have to put a professional spin on it without being too cocky about it.”
>> Editor: Joni Albrecht
Working with an editor at a publishing house is the last step an author takes in the life of a manuscript. So sometimes, to be extra sure, an author needs an editor before working with the actual editor.
In that case, he or she might reach out to someone like Joni Albrecht.
A freelance editor, she charges $75 an hour for either a structural edit, concentrating on story arc and character development, or an edit for grammar and clarity. Currently, she is at work on two books, including a medical thriller with Richmond writer Dick Wenzel, a renowned researcher and epidemiologist. “Dick’s plot was wild and transfixing, and now after two edits, so is his dialogue.”
Albrecht wants writers to understand that editing is about “solving problems,” not holding hands. Some of her best work has been in refining narrative structure even before the writing has started. “Creating the rails of the story, so that the plot moves smoothly through the climbs, drops and curves, allows the reader to sit back and enjoy the ride.”
>> Agent: Paige Wheeler
Paige Wheeler’s Creative Media Agency boasts more than 200 clients, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Gregg Allman, with an office in New York City, the seat of the publishing world. But Wheeler herself lives in Richmond. She says that with email, text and phone she can live anywhere and still represent her clients.
It’s a new day in more ways than one. “There are more variables [than ever] today and a different publishing philosophy,” says the Bon Air native, adding that it’s important for all writers, not just self-loving celebrities, to have an agent who understands intellectual property rights, foreign distribution, film and merchandising. “It’s just difficult for an individual to learn that on their own,” she says.
Agents don’t get their 15 percent unless they sell the author’s work to a publishing house, so first-time authors can rest assured that that very busy person who does your bidding but whom you hardly ever hear from is, in fact, working.
Every writer, first-time author or old pro, she says, “needs a champion.”
>> Publisher: Ward Tefft
Ward Tefft makes no pretense that he has any idea what he’s doing as a book publisher. “We haven’t begun the curve in our learning,” he says, with no small amount of weary humor.
The owner of Chop Suey bookstore and accidental publisher, if you will, has put together a nice run over the past five years, from artist Noah Scalin’s “Skull-A-Day” to “The House of Life,” Shelley Briggs Callahan’s account of Dick and Barb Hammond’s humanitarian work in Haiti and “Nine Lives,” a compilation of stories written in 10 minutes, edited by Sarah Allen-Short and Valley Haggard.
Setbacks are a way of life — “Skull-A-Day” suffered a printing defect that held up stock for three months. With “Nine Lives” and “River City Secrets,” a short story collection for young adults, Tefft collaborated with Richmond-based Carter Printing.
There isn’t a mission, as such, Tefft says, just a love of books and a desire to be a part of the conversation: “When the right thing comes along and it makes sense for us to do it, we’ll jump in.”
Congrats! You published a book!
