with Adriann Ranta

Michael Lloyd Gray earned a MFA in English from Western Michigan University, a bachelor's from the University of Illinois, and has taught English full-time in upstate New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Texas, and recently accepted a position at Illinois Central College in East Peoria, Illinois. His work has appeared in Arkansas Review, Flash!Point (2nd prize in their fiction contest), Potomac Review, Viet Nam Generation, Black River Syllabary, and 1812. His story "Little Man" won the 2005 Alligator Juniper Fiction Prize. Gray has written two novels: Confederate Nation and December's Children.

AR: Did you have to hold another job/be supported by someone to be able to write your first novel? Your second?

MLG: When I first started writing I was still teaching at a college in upstate New York and have been teaching for the past 12 or 13 years. For me, the support system for writing has been teaching because they’re so compatible. Right now I teach online for several universities. I’m getting ready to start teaching a creative writing workshop online for a Florida university. Whether it’s face to face or online, for the past 12 years, the really serious writing years, have been supported by teaching.

AR: DECEMBER’S CHILDREN as well?

MLG: Yeah, that was written a little bit here and there.

AR: Why did you decide to self-publish CONFEDERATE NATION?

MLG: It’s my view that traditional publishing is pretty constipated, that’s my word for it. It tends to keep recycling the same writers and it’s very hard for new writers, young writers to break in. Once you become famous it becomes inevitable that you stay famous. Once you sell a book really big then you’re next book, even if it’s not as good, will at least get some serious consideration. I think I decided I was tired of soliciting people and just went ahead and did it. I don’t regret that I did it, but I wouldn’t do it again.

I published with iUniverse, one of the primary Publish On Demand companies along with Ex Libris, Stafford, and a couple others. When you do POD then the financial burden or obligation is shifted from a third party to the author. So that’s one of the drawbacks. One of the advantages is you have complete control over it. Basically these publishers like Ex Libris and Stafford read over your work and if it isn’t advocating Nazi-ism or serial killing then they’re probably going to publish it. You have control. They aren’t going to demand that you rewrite it.

With a traditional house in New York City, the first thing that’s going to happen once you get over the good news that a big house is wanting to publish your novel is that you’re now going to be saddled with an editor who may ask you to get rid of chapter three and rewrite chapter five.

That’s the trade off right off the bat, is that you have control but then the immediate drawback is that financial burden has been shifted from the third party publisher to the author. You have to be the one to get the book promoted, you have to approach stores. I got myself on TV locally to talk about DECEMBER’S CHILDREN, I had to approach Barnes and Noble even though my publisher has a relationship with them, Borders I’m finding is a lot more difficult to deal with. I have two new novels and a screenplay and I’m working now with an agent in Beverly Hills. Part of my answer is just practical: I hope I don’t have to do anything like that again. I’m hoping that she is able to sell them. Even if I didn’t have those things going on I think I would try to avoid POD as much as possible because it still represents a really small portion of total book sales. A great many of people that go POD mostly end up not making money or subsidizing the selling of their books. A few do make money, but it’s not that many.

AR: Can I ask how much you had to pay to POD versus how much you made?

MLG: I spent about $1000 to $1200 and it can be more depending on if you get all the frills and whistles and they did a good job, it has a good cover and everything, but I don’t want to do that again.

I think the royalty check I got was $26. You can’t make any money unless you can promote it. In order to be classified as someone the POD company will promote, you have to sell a minimum of 500 copies. So that’s another drawback.

AR: How was the publicity angle? Were you on your own? How would you compare it to the in house publicity strategy for DECEMBER’S CHILDREN?

MLG: You do have to do a lot on your own with Publish America [Gray’s publisher for December’s Children]. That publisher has a relationship with Borders and Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Nobel isn’t all that difficult, in fact the store here in town bought some copies the same day I walked in we’re setting up a signing this month in their store. The only drawback initially was that it hadn’t shown up in their database as a returnable item with a discount, but that has been changed. Borders is another story, they’re stickier to deal with, and I still have to do all of that work. The thing is with Barnes and Nobel is that you get that regional person to accept your book and that person covers a whole geographical region. Borders you have to approach one store at a time, and that sucks, unless you’re really famous. Publish America does make the book available in a variety of databases and does some promotion—they send out press releases to some selected markets and things like that. I certainly didn’t have to pay for it, so they paid for all the heavy lifting but I still have to get it in Barnes and Nobel. When they made it returnable and offered a discount that’s a very tangible effort on their part. Theoretically I could sell that sucker all over the country if I could get in contact with each store, but realistically I’ll probably contact about a dozen stores in the Midwest.

AR: Are you willing to say how much the advance was for DECEMBER’S CHILDREN?

MLG: $1. They don’t really do advances, that’s another thing that distinguishes them from other houses, and one of the ways they’re able to operate is they don’t give out big advances. I think you’re going to see traditional houses revise that system somewhat, they’re going to be much more reluctant to give those big advances to someone they don’t know.

It’s not going to make any money. It’s just another step in the process of getting known. It’s a stepping stone. It’s a much better novel than Confederate Nation and the structure is much better. Confederate Nation was basically me learning how to write a novel because I was a short story writer before that. When I was in the MFA program at Western Michigan that was my focus and I won some awards and I thought I’d never write a novel, then boom, I changed. So Confederate Nation was me learning on the job.

I found out about Publish America because an old English professor I had published one of his novels with them. The part about not spending any money really appealed to me.

AR: Are there any literary or marketing skills you possess that affected your advance amount?

MLG: I discovered that when you’re soliciting agents or soliciting editors that when you can send them a letter or email saying that I won this, or I won that that they pay more attention to you. It all adds up to a record so they can see I’m not a rookie, that I’ve been out there and done some things and they’re much more willing to listen to someone like that and even invest time and resources in someone that has proven that they can write. I was very fortunate to win some nice short story awards and that opened some doors. They don’t look at you as some wannabe, but as someone who’s done it.

AR: Do you have any complaints or compliments about the payment system for writers, especially debut authors?

MLG: My key complaint is that it’s nowhere near enough. I don’t think this country does a very good job of nurturing writers because the mainstream publishing industry is reluctant to develop new ones, they’re much happier to recycle the ones who have already gotten their names up there. For example, Norman Mailer has a new novel out this year and I went to the library and read the first 50 or 60 pages and it just became tedious and boring. It’s time for those publishers to spend a little of that money on new people. My feeling is that if you read most of the stuff on the bestseller lists that if you read the first sentence or first paragraph or first page that you’ll mostly put it back. It’s all boring recycled crap. I read that and think ‘I can do better than that.’

AR: Do you have anything else to add, words of encouragement to struggling writers?

MLG: Hemingway complained when he first starting writing that the only way he could get published was in a German literary magazine, then he went on to become Hemingway. Don’t ever give up.