Unlike some writers who rely on family connections or college buddies to obtain book deals, Hoboken resident and Jersey City native Jeff Somers got published the old fashioned way – by mailing out hundreds of short stories and book proposals over the years, and overcoming lots of rejection to work his way into editors’ hearts.
Before Somers, 36, landed a deal last year with Warner Books for his futuristic novel, The Electric Church (Orbit Books, September 2007), he sold two novels to companies that eventually went out of business, wrote at least 12 short stories per year, and amassed scads of rejection slips.
Since graduating from Rutgers University in 1989, Somers has also published a “zine,” or small magazine, full of his personal rants and self-deprecating analysis. In the zine, “The Inner Swine” (www.innerswine.com), he often details his publishing foibles and victories.
But can you stay an outsider when you finally land deals for three novels from a major publishing company?
One writer’s beginnings
Somers often jokes that he got started in writing after suffering a head injury while a young boy in Jersey City Heights – but he said last week that there is some truth to this story.
“My brother and I were wrestling in the living room [at age 7 or 8] and he picked me up and tossed me across the room and I slammed my head against the edge of a chair,” Somers recounted recently. “So, off to the emergency room for a concussion and the promise of ice cream, but there was no ice cream. Resentment, anger, adolescence followed. Then, a few years later, they opened up the hydrant outside my house for the kids one hot day, and I went out in my bathing suit to frolic and this huge red-haired kid barreled into me … after this, I swear I changed a little. I lost a bit of hand-eye coordination and became a little more introspective, and shortly thereafter I started to write.”
At the age of 11, Somers turned his talents to book-writing by appropriating a typewriter and banging out a 30-page manuscript called “The War of the Gem,” which he attributed to the influence of “The Lord of the Rings.”
But it was at the age of 16 that he got some real encouragement.
He wrote a novel called “White Rabbit” about a galactic secret agent. “I bought Writer’s Market and sent out queries or the manuscript to any publisher foolish enough to take unsolicited manuscripts from teenagers,” he said, telling a tale that is familiar to any scribe who tried to get published during the pre-internet days.
A one-man publishing company called Andromeda Press offered Somers a contract. “I told everyone at school I was about to be rich and famous, and proceeded to stop doing my homework and ruined my academic career,” he noted. “Two and a half years later, after not hearing from him for some time, I got a letter from [the publisher] informing me that financial and health crises had forced him to abandon his publishing activities.”
It would not be the first time that Somers sold a book to a company that subsequently went out of business.
Rutgers
Somers graduated St. Peter’s Prep School in Jersey City in 1989 and enrolled at Rutgers University, majoring in English. “The most work I did in my whole college career was when a professor accused me of plagiarism because he didn’t believe I could write at the level he saw in the paper I’d handed in,” he said recently.
But when he proved he’d written it, the professor gave him only a B+.
After graduating, Somers moved back home to Jersey City, got a publishing job in Manhattan, met his true love, and moved to Hoboken in 2001 to be with her.
But he didn’t give up on his other true love – writing. In fact, he has written 384 short stories in his lifetime, by his estimate. “I write at least 12 a year. I force myself to write one a month in a notebook, longhand, just to keep things moving,” he said. “While most of the stories suck, I still think it’s useful to write them.”
Half the battle
As with any new writer, getting one’s work to the right people is half the battle. Somers earned $250 two years ago for a short story in the The Drexel [College] Online Journal, and also published a short story in a small magazine called Danger City. While Danger City only paid him in contributors’ copies, that story had the enviable fate of making it into the renowned annual volume Best American Mystery Stories in 2006.
Once Somers appeared in Best American, he got paid for the reprint rights and the international reprint rights.
Movin’ on up
In 1997, Somers wrote a novel that took place in Jersey City, about a young man who decides to rob his publishing company, with the help of two friends. The book filled a niche in gen-x stories from a small California publishing company called Creative Arts Books, which Somers found through Writers’ Market.
He received a small advance, and approximately 2,500 copies were published. As with many writers, Somers was forced to do most of his own publicity. However, he somehow landed a small writeup in the The New York Times Book Review’s “Books in Brief,” although he is still not sure how they got ahold of his book.
Not long afterward, Creative Arts followed a trend and went out of business. “I have about 900 copies of Lifers in my basement, if anyone wants one,” Somers said hopefully last week.
The big time
In 2004, Somers saw an ad on the Internet for a website that was soliciting fiction, chapter by chapter. He dusted off the first draft of a novel he’d started back in 1990, and began revising it. He had played with it a bit before, but no luck.
“The web site assigned me an editor – Lili Saintcrow – who started helping me improve the book immensely,” Somers said. “Lili had just sold some books to Warner Aspect, and she’d already had a bunch of titles published, so she knew what she was doing, and we worked really well together.”
Lili showed The Electric Church to her editor at Warner, and the editor quickly gobbled it up for Aspect. Then, that editor moved to Orbit Books, an international imprint of the Hachette Book Group, who brought it to over to Orbit.
Somers says that he still hasn’t met Lili Saintcrow.
“It all stemmed from a blind submission, and a willingness to get paid almost nothing,” Somers said. Because The Electric Church was one of the first American publications from Orbit, Somers received some extra publicity on the debut.
The Electric Church
Somers describes the paperback book, at 369 pages, as “hardboiled crime fiction, in a way, but in a hyper-real science fiction kind of way.” However, the book is described by Orbit as the story of a gunman for hire who is hired to assassinate the head of a mysterious church whose members seek eternal life.
Since the book was published, it has garnered positive reviews, like this one from Publisher’s Weekly: “Somers’s plot sprints along through the nicely detailed (if slightly unoriginal) world, but the characters are the real prize in this entertaining near-future noir.”
Orbit has already purchased two sequels to the novel. Somers is polishing up the first sequel right now.
To find out more
Chapter one of the book is on-line at: http://www.orbitbooks.net/the-electric-church-extract. Somers’ blog is at: http://www.jeffreysomers.com/blather/. Somers’ other writing can be found at: www.innerswine.com.
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