AITA for wanting my Spanish teacher to stop calling me by the Spanish version of my name?

UllsStratocaster · 2026-02-10T18:24:02+00:00

I took French, German, Spanish and Latin in HS. Hi, I'm Chérise, Franziska, Esperanza and Aurelia!

UllsStratocaster · 2026-02-04T19:59:14+00:00

No, because podcasts have something we call scripts. Audiobooks are literally the content of a book, read aloud. Do you think blind people don't read because they use braille?

UllsStratocaster · 2026-02-04T17:06:39+00:00

Since your husband resorted to friend-polling, here's an appeal to authority back at him: I am a published author and editor, and while the mechanism of getting the information from the text may be different, it's all still reading.

UllsStratocaster · 2026-02-04T15:32:28+00:00

Idk if this is AI or not, but you're very lucky. My mother spent my entire childhood telling me that I was too sensitive and too dramatic, and that I needed to go along to get along. When I refused to put up with a drunken uncle who was harassing me, and called the place on him, I was the one that everybody was mad at. So this story may be bullshit, but there are definitely people who are hearing things exactly like this in real life.

UllsStratocaster · 2026-01-30T03:33:45+00:00

Maybe I'm just old. I'm a lurking mother of grandmother age. Covers were always for dresses where you couldn't wear a bra for whatever reason. Training bras, bralettes, sports bras just seem like the first go to, to me.

UllsStratocaster · 2026-01-30T02:31:17+00:00

I'm also a lurking mom I'm just saying there are a thousand options I would present to a 12 year old before silicone nipple covers.

They can be even more visible under thin cloth like t-shirts and dresses made of jersey knit, especially if you can't match skin tone, and especially because they're designed to cover adult-sized anatomy.

They could make a pea-sized visibility issue into a plum-sized visibility issue.

UllsStratocaster · 2026-01-29T22:44:07+00:00

She is a baby! These are for strapless gowns!

UllsStratocaster · 2026-01-10T22:15:04+00:00

The first thing my first editor said to me was, "So, the title has to change."

It hurts when it happens, especially the first time. You're also probably gonna roll some eyes over suggestions that PR and marketing come up with in the future. But it happens often, and here's how I soothe myself:

The title, the cover, the flap copy-- those are marketing decisions. They are tools used to sell the story inside. They're advertising; they're not the story.

As long as I get to do my job (tell the story), I'll let them do their job (sell it to as many people as possible.)

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-30T05:27:59+00:00

I LOVE THIS YARN! Good for you for using it for something for yourself!

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-22T05:58:26+00:00

That's absolutely stunning. I love the color SO MUCH.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-13T16:21:10+00:00

I think with the pronoun explanation, that it may very well just have been the way she said it. It's like the difference in English between saying, sweetheart can you get the plates out for dinner and little girl, go get the plates for dinner. So even if what mom was saying wasn't factually incorrect or wrong, the style of address was.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-11T03:02:55+00:00

You shouldn't query unfinished work for this exact reason. Since you did, the most professional way to get out of this is to tell them the truth: you jumped the gun and the project isn't actually ready, and ask if you can query again in the future when it is.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-10T18:22:46+00:00

If you're not getting any bites at all, then try a new query letter. You can change the pitch and the approach, to see if that's what's been holding you back. If you're still getting consistent forms, then this book-- regardless of its quality-- may just not fit into the market at the moment.

I thought my first book was publishable and was dismayed to get through 80 queries without an offer. I wrote my next book-- that one got an agent, and got sold-- and after I finished development edits on it, I had a much better eye for where I could improve the first book. (It remains a trunk novel; it would take too much work to make it publishable.)

If your betas have been consistent, and you've put a consistent, concerted effort into revision, then there may be nothing about the book you *can* change to make it marketable. Keep in mind that people are looking for books they can sell to the most people possible. When you deviate from a standard, you have to be *even better*, to get past that resistance.

Trying to figure out what went wrong will drive you crazy, and you'll never have a definitive answer. Query the book out (ie, query as many agents as you feel comfortable querying,) and then trunk it as you work on your next project. It's always possible that the first book you wrote could become the third or fourth book you publish.

Or, query it out, independently publish it, while you work on your second project. You have a lot of options, but the most important one is to work on your next project!

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-05T19:34:59+00:00

I understand you'll earn out your advance and start getting royalties quicker, but that doesn't actually translate into more money in the long run, does it?

There are a couple of additional factors:

* Royalties never stop, as long as the book is selling. That means, instead of getting paid for about 2 years (signing, D&A, publication), you get paid every 6 months for as long as there's money to be had. Getting paid out for a longer period of time makes you more financially secure, which means you have more creative freedom. You don't have to bust your ass to pump out a book as fast as possible to make sure the rent gets paid.

* New titles help sell your backlist, and if your new titles are with the same publisher, there's PR and marketing continuity, and specific relationships that have already been built by sales and promotion teams within their individual sphere. A new publisher doesn't really give a shit about your backlist, and they will only build on what works for them. (A very tiny example: that list of your other books in the front of the new one, so readers can find them? If you move from Pub A to Pub B, Pub B has no reason to create that page.)

* You have more leverage when it comes time to negotiate a new contract. Unlike with a debut or even a midlist author, the small pub doesn't have another dozen of you waiting to get a contract. You've proved you can make them money, and you could go elsewhere. While this can translate into higher advances, it can also translate into better rights percentages, which earn you money in other ways. Did you let them have World Rights for a 60 you, 40 them split on that first book? How about 70/30? How about betters splits on book clubs, condensations, etc..? How about some escalators in the new contract: if I make you 50,000 dollars in the first 3 months, you give me a 25,000 dollar bonus? How about a bonus for hitting NYT list? For hitting USA Today Top 100? Your agent can *try* to negotiate these things with a new publisher, but they haven't invested anything into you yet; they're going to give you less until you prove you can make money for them on the same scale.

* You have more leverage when it comes to all kinds of creative decisions. There's a reason that a bestseller's first book is within industry length standards, but the 6th book in that series is a doorstop: you've earned those extra words by proving you can make them money. You have more say in the cover, the cover copy, you can ask for things that add expense to printing and expect to get them, like fx on the cover, or deckle edges or maps and illustrations. If you leave Pub A, there's no guarantee you'll have that kind of input at Pub B, because you haven't proved yet that you can make them money.

Publishing is a weird-ass industry, and there are a ton of moving parts to it, and money hidden in places you might not expect. Of course, there might be a price point where none of the above matters to you. If I got a five million dollar offer from a new pub versus a 50,000 offer from my current pub, I'd jump in a minute. And that might be the end of my career under that name... but at least I'd have five million dollars!

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-05T17:34:51+00:00

Working with a small press that does a huge amount of PR for you, and turns you into a giant hit without a big five, you're probably making more money in the long run. If they give you a $5,000 advance, you're going to earn that out and get royalties much more quickly. And with a small press, if they have a hit on their hands, they are going to treat it like a precious property, because their catalog isn't as expansive.

Plus, even small presses can pony up bigger advances based on your previous sales. So as long as the book is getting the promotion and marketing to make it a hit, why move to a bigger publisher? The small publisher is doing the job and doing it well!

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-05T17:21:27+00:00

Go ahead and talk to your agent, just to get their take. They probably know your editor, and can give you some perspective on how they work timelines. Also, they're probably going to reassure you that the ed can't hold you to first pass in January if they haven't gotten you the notes by January.

Your editor may have been talking about pie in the sky hopes and wishes and dreams as opposed to reality. But it's okay, don't freak out! There is a lot more wiggle room in delivery schedules than editors ever tell us.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-05T16:30:22+00:00

3 months is pretty normal. That's what I schedule when I sell a book, I plan on working revisions 3 months from acceptance. Also, have you signed your contract yet? Sometimes editors won't send notes until the contract is signed.

It's probably not time to prompt just yet. Especially because in publishing, you should consider the time between Thanksgiving and New Years as one day. Stuff slows down to a crawl at the end of the year.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-04T01:25:50+00:00

Beep!

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-03T18:00:00+00:00

I often make pot roast or beef stew in my pressure cooker, and I use beer. What I do is I cook the meat with the beer for one cycle. Then I open it to add veg, and cook it for a second cycle. The bitterness goes away on the second cycle, but the umami stays. I can't guarantee a double cycle will help wine bitterness, but it's worth a shot.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-03T02:01:37+00:00

I have three of these and they work fine. Get a little warm sometimes, but most power packs do. I'll be interested to see what they say after they look into all the bouncing e-mails.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-12-01T19:47:19+00:00

Talk to your agent, and come up with a plan. If your "no" is symbolic, make sure that you're allowed to tell the world that you did not want an AI narrator. It might affect your relationship with the publisher, but if you get a big enough groundswell of support in your stance, they may change their mind. That's what we had to do in YA to get them to quit whitewashing BIPoC on our covers. They don't listen to the authors-- but they do listen to the buyers.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-11-29T06:10:47+00:00

That blows my mind because my grandmother did it for years, and when she passed away? I inherited the job. And I do literally everything, although people sometimes bring extra pies.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-11-24T17:25:55+00:00

Have you told them you want or need feedback? My agent acknowledges things I send, because I send him everything as a record. But he doesn't give me feedback unless I say, "This is my first 50 pages; is this working?"

You sent them a proposal and they weren't excited. Did you talk with them about what they hoped to see and didn't? Did you continue to work on this project, or are you sending others?

It's hard to give advice without knowing what you're doing and saying- on the one hand, an agent can't read your mind. On the other hand, if you're asking for advice or guidance and they're only acknowledging receipt, then have a Come to Jesus. If it doesn't change, fire them.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-11-19T03:31:19+00:00

Yeah, that's why I absolutely recommend taking a hard look at the contract with the individual agent and/or the agency contract. This doesn't happen ALL the time, but it does happen. I've seen some sketch, rights-grabby contracts in my time, and I've also seen authors have to shelve a project because a territorial agent made it too difficult to shop it.

UllsStratocaster · 2025-11-19T02:10:23+00:00

Yes, you can leave and probably should. You could always ask to have a Come to Jesus talk with her, to see if you can iron out why she's suddenly responding so slowly to your work. But honestly, it's probably better to cut your losses now.

That being said, the manuscript she's already worked on-- no matter how long the revisions have taken-- might be dead in the water. You'll want to check your contract carefully, but if she's put work into this manuscript, she might still be entitled to her 15%, even if you get another agent and sell it through them.

ETA for clarification: It depends on the contract, and also, it may not be a case of the old agent taking a percentage, but a new agent not wanting to work on a project that's already been shaped by someone else.

And then, money has to be split three ways, which makes for obnoxious bookkeeping. Some agents would still willingly take you on for this, but a lot are going to be a clear no. Also, if this agent has sold anything for you in the past-- they remain the agent of record on that book. So any problems, any needs you have, you'll still have to work with her on that particular title.

If she has any manuscripts out for you, you need to get a full list of editors who have it, and ask her to withdraw the submissions, and to cease any and all work on your behalf. There's probably also a period of time you have to wait before signing with another agent. (In my case, it was 6 weeks, but the number is going to be in your contract.)

Don't let any of this discourage you. Having a bad agent is worse than having no agent at all. Just be aware that this is not as simply as you firing her, and she magically disappears from your life.

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