Possible publication

[igenlode]

Having seen the number of "Phantom of the Opera"-based novels being marketed to the fans, I've been very tentatively wondering if this new story might possibly be commercially saleable: "Blue Remembered Hills" would have worked as an SF retelling in its own right if it hadn't been for the explicit Blake's 7 content, and this 'Swedish' story is pure Leroux as well as being book-length.

But I don't think I could take the embarrassment and rejection of submitting it to a proper agent, and even if they could understand the 'based on an existing novel' concept (viz. Laurie King's Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell books), I don't think 'fanfic AU' is a mainstream concept; it's not a sequel to Leroux's "The Phantom of the Opera", it's not a retelling, it's a story that branches off towards the end of the original novel and contradicts its ending. And the opening chapter doesn't make any concessions at all to establish who the characters are and how they got there; it assumes you can make the deduction. Opening sentence: "Goodbye, Raoul," Christine said gently, holding out her hand...

I assume this sort of thing is self-published, although I find it incredible that prose like this apparently won an award for "best fiction book of 2010", even a little local one; it's not bad, but it's pretty clumping and pedestrian. (And there's a typo in the excerpt given :-p) But since my book isn't E/C and isn't Erik-centric, I'm afraid I don't think it would stand a chance on the self-published fan market, even if I had the talent for promotion and publicity required to get anyone to notice it in the first place.

Although intriguingly, The Phantom's Apprentice seems to be well rated by fans despite not being an E/C romance: Erik is a criminal lunatic, Raoul is "swoon-worthy" (so maybe not all that close to Leroux, then!), and Christine is rewritten as a young woman whose heart's desire is to earn her own living as a stage illusionist -- an interesting tie-in to the Phantom's undoubted talents in that direction, but something of a departure from the original character...

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

The Phantom's Apprentice actually looks like something I would be interested in reading. That's unusual in this fandom.

[igenlode]

Yes, that was my reaction. Though I'm a bit taken aback by the reviewers claiming it's the first retelling from Christine's point of view; certainly in fanfic that's quite common. (What is rare is Leroux's own approach of telling the story from the point of view of Raoul, the outsider!)

[butterflydreaming]

I was at a bookstore once where they had an entire table of PoTO related novels, and I would say from the quick perusal I did that over half of them were barely canon compliant. For one thing, there is a huge tone change in the popular novels; they aren't detective stories or thrillers, as I would consider Leroux's. I don't know how many follow Romance genre rules, but my impression was that the books on the table were mostly romance-centric.

The boundary between what's out there in fiction and fanfiction is completely blurry, now. But, I don't know how many readers of commercial novels venture into reading fanfiction, particularly if the are of interest isn't fandom with a current high popularity due to a new movie or show.

It's OK to drop readers right into a story, and then just stick in bits of exposition here and there to catch them up, so I think that you wouldn't have to add much how-they-got-there if you did want to go for it and self-publish. An interested reader would most likely be familiar with the stage show or the movie, and has probably at least taken a stab at reading Leroux.

[igenlode]

My main acquaintance with POTO novels comes from the Phantom Reviewing Project (I see Theodora Bruns features on that page; I thought the synopsis of her first novel sounded familiar). Judging by those reviews, the vast majority of 'Leroux-based' novels are in reality clearly movie-based -- presumably claiming otherwise for copyright evasion purposes? Otherwise they tend to be generic modern-day romances following a 'Beauty and the Beast' pattern, in which a Christine-analogue learns to see beyond the slight facial ugliness of an Erik-analogue with a HOTTT! body while ditching her generic insensitive boyfriend with a Raoul-analogue name of some kind (who may or may not persecute the two of them evilly as a result). And quite a few of the supposedly historical ones contain a foreword about how the author feels she is in contact with the spirit of Erik or is providing the real version of the story or similar...

I find it hard to envisage any readers of commercial fiction, even generic roamnces, seeking out self-published fan-fiction novels; I feel that that's territory reserved for fans who are desperate for anything to feed their particular fix.

I suspect that thanks to numerous adaptations the 'Phantom' story has attained the status of a generic modern legend, like "Dracula", and that a lot of people are familiar with its existence in vague outline without knowing or caring about minor plot/character details. (There seems to be a hazy idea in circulation that it involves the Phantom romancing Christine on the roof of the Paris Opera while wearing a swirly cape -- judging by casual pop-culture references and remarks from non-fans.) I know of at least one person who was thoroughly confused by reading my Perros-Guirec story This Mask of Death when his sole knowledge of POTO was derived from its Wikipedia article... where none of these Leroux-specific events get even a passing mention!

This particular Swedish story already starts in media res -- the first chapter consists almost entirely of flashback explaining how the characters arrived at the non-canon framing scene at the start of the story. I have to say I'm not sure it would make much sense to someone who has only seen the movie, or knows of the Phantom 'legend' in general; the whole business of Raoul eventually promising to help Christine find a hiding-place on the understanding that she will not be marrying him isn't a detail that normally makes it into any of the adaptations, since it's a narrative red herring that has no effect on the eventual climax of the plot. And working in enough detail to explain the entire backstory to that point to someone who hasn't read the original novel would be severely challenging, I feel :-(

[butterflydreaming]

If having a book out in the general market something that you want, then it can be possible to rework something that is a good fanfic but not a good stand alone, to that purpose. As you pointed out, though, its a lot of work to promote a book, with no guarantee of being a money maker for the effort.

[igenlode]

It is a lot of work to promote a book, and it's something for which I have no talent at all; I can't even get people to accept free leaflets if it's my job to hand them out in order to publicise well-known local events, never mind 'selling' things to people with no prior interest in buying them! My novel-length zines sold a hundred copies or so on the back of enthusiastic reviews on the Internet and active selling by the publisher at conventions etc. -- that had nothing whatsoever to do with me.

Which is why I feel the only viable approach in practice would be to get the book taken on by an agent for 'normal' publication, at which point it's the agent's job to try to place it with a publisher and the publisher's job to deal with formatting, cover design, copy-editing, publicity etc. If it's just one more in a sea of self-published Amazon works of dubious quality it's apt to disappear as thoroughly as the work I published on Wattpad -- I have enough trouble getting people to read stuff for free, never mind trying to get them to pay for it!

To be frank I'm not at all interested in making money by writing; I think it a highly improbable achievement. I'm more interested in the cachet of having my ability acknowledged, but sufficiently insecure to question whether the work is actually of commercial standard...

[butterflydreaming]

You certainly have talent as a storyteller and the writing skills to write a tale. Sadly, there are a lot of good writers with traditionally published books that it seems like no one has read. I've had so many "have you read"/"you should read" conversations with other bookworms where we only overlap on well know award winners or novels required in school.

But if it's OK for me to offer advice, it seems that the best way to have a published book is to write short fiction to the market, literally choosing the publisher first and writing something they want. Are you familiar with The Submission Grinder (https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/) and Duotrope? A lot of them don't pay anything, which works well with your realistic expectations about the profit. ^_^

Personally, I'm really lazy about writing to the markets. I'd rather break my head on the long-standing novels in progress and go the indie route. Still, Fiction on the Web included my story off the archive when they did a print anthology, and that has been a shiny validation token for me.

[igenlode]

Right now I think the important thing is actually to finish the story (still very much an uncertain issue, despite the amount of talking I've been doing about it in various places over the last six months).

Beyond that... it's not so much that I want to 'have a published book' (I've had short fiction published, in an anthology and in a magazine, and even been paid for it -- though the latter case was an acquaintance who wanted to commission a regular half-column as 'filler'). I suppose it's more a feeling that having put all this work into something that might conceivably be saleable for once -- after writing nothing but fanfic for the last ten years -- I actually have the possibility of making use of it.

But my gut suspicion is that it probably is too slow and self-indulgent and too fan-fictional to be able to stand on its own for an audience who aren't in quest of 'the feels' about characters in whom they're already invested. Of course the only way to test that is to show it to someone external...

At the moment I'm rather doubting whether any audience at all is going to be interested in Raoul's nautical misadventures, which have the drawback of being nothing more than a massive plot-hole patch ("how does Raoul end up a thousand miles north of where we last saw him?")

[igenlode]

I came across somebody's self-published book today (a stack of unsold copies in a charity shop), and it was reassuring to find that it wasn't that good; technically fine in spelling and grammar, but discernably amateurish, undirected and waffly and not particularly gripping. It's nice to know that publishing houses serve some useful function!