Deja Vu: Looks Like I May Have a Publisher

In My Humble Opinion
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It’s been almost exactly a year since I made that announcement the first time around after receiving a letter from Ellora’s Cave informing me that they’d like to offer me a contract.

Ellora’s Cave went out of business last fall, and I was back where I started from.

This time the offer letter comes from NineStar Press, a fairly new publisher that focuses on LGBTQIA titles. My book fits in better with their lineup than it did with Ellora’s Cave’s array of steamy erotic romances, and they don’t appear to have any skeletons in their closet the way EC did with their public and rancorous dispute with their authors.

I’m relieved; I feel more or less the way I do after a really long hike when I finally stumble into the train station to catch the ride back home. I’m tired of pitching and querying. I wasn’t close to giving up or anything but I am happy to stop. I just went to the Rainbow Book Fair at John Jay College last weekend, trundling along a box of 3-page handouts and business cards, hoping to meet some new LGBTQIA publishers, and did, but most of the tables were authors selling their books and most of the publishers were fiction-centric or poetry-centric or were otherwise not interested in a memoir. It’s so hard not to become jaded and I worry that I broadcast it, that they’ll be able to read between the lines and sense that I don’t expect them to want to publish me, you know? So good riddance to that portion of the endeavor, it’s nice to put it aside for now (and hopefully for a long while to come, at least until the next book).

Speaking of next book, NineStar included an inquiry about anything else I may have, so (assuming of course that this all pans out) I’ll be giving them first crack at That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class when I finally get it ready for the light of day.

I also feel excited, of course, but it’s a cautious excited. I’ve been in this position before and I have no published books sitting on my bookshelf to show for it. In addition to the prospect of NineStar going belly-up after the fashion of Ellora’s Cave, unlikely as that may be, it might transpire that NineStar’s editors and I reach some kind of irreconcilable impasse or that something in the contractual specifics turns out to be a dealbreaker for me. Or I get a follow-up letter “Oops, we had a board meeting and unfortunately we are rescinding our offer of a contract to all authors not born under water signs”. None of this is at all likely but I am wary, twice-burned already (back in 1982 an interested ‘publisher’ turned out to be an opportunistic vanity press that had somehow learned I was querying), and uninclined to fully count my unhatched chickens.

What else? Impatience for sure. I’m craving the beginning of the editing process and getting all the preliminaries and learning when my book will be coming out. And then gearing up for the promotional activities and trying to obtain book reviews. I wanna get this show on the road.
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This is a repost of a blog post. Cleared with the mods, etc

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Congratulations!!

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Congratulations, and good luck. May it all work out this time.
I sent out my one hundredth query letter for my new book last night. Thus far it’s exactly equal between outright rejections and “time outs” (when I don’t hear from them for over a month). It’s a frustrating game.

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Congrats!

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Congratulations. Looking forward to reading it.

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Wonderful!

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It’s starting to sink in :slight_smile:

Hang in there, and keep track of your queries. I use a database, although a spreadsheet would work fine.

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I do. In fact, I have a file for the statistics of how long it takes to get back to me (or not) and the proportions of each category. I find it helpful to keep my disappointment carefully organized.

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You know, a few authors have found success self publishing on Amazon. I’m just saying - I’m well aware that they are a vanishingly small percentage out of the total. But for example, the author of the Martian, Andy Weir, took that route. Because he wrote something exceptional, unique, and a taut thriller to nerds (and it’s just about the only well written science fiction book I have ever read, after reading them for decades, that tries to stick reasonably close to the science!), he found success. A few others. Yes, major publishers picked him up long after he’d already sold over a million copies on Amazon.

That seems to be where it’s going. Odds are that your book sucks. I’m being harsh, but statistically it’s true. But if it doesn’t suck - if it’s really something people want to read that fits some unmet market need - why not stick it up on Amazon? Once you have some real numbers proving people want to read whatever it is that you wrote, I’m sure finding a publisher would be straightforward.

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Nice thoughts, and maybe the market will change, but for now most publishers and agents wouldn’t think about touching a book that had already been self-published. Andy Weir was an exception.

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Then write another one after you prove you don’t suck as an author. Hell, publish some early stories on a fanfiction site and at least find out if you get an above average viewership. The magic of the printing press means that basically a few thousand people in the 7 billion people who live on Earth can write cream of the crop, best in class fiction, and the rest of us can read that stuff. It’s similar to actors in that regard, but even more viciously competitive - actors age, and their faces and bodies become no longer marketable, while authors can keep churning books until they are generally in their 80s.

The odds are dismal and it’s not because publishers are jerks.

The other option is to clone a winning formula. This has happened several times now - people have written successful variants on Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and other stories. Gotten film deals in some cases. You know what book hasn’t been cloned, like, at all? The Martian. For some reason, not a single additional author wants to do the proper research and write a plausible sci-fi survival story using stuff that could actually happen.

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Thanks for the advice, but I have compelling evidence that I don’t suck as an author – I have two books out through a major publisher, and fiction published in collections and magazines (as well as online venues).

As for “not a single additional author” writing a survival story using stuff that could actually happen, I suggest you might want to look into published science fiction some more.

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  1. That’s not “stuff that could actually happen”. Science fiction authors of that era had not a clue. Science fiction tends to have a very short shelf life because making reasonable predictions is tough, and the most realistic predictions - Charle’s Stross’s stuff - seem like fantasy.
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I would not assume that a book not picked up after 100 queries “sucks”.

The books that are snapped up most easily are those that are most conventionally genre, written by someone who already has a reputation or a following, and which utilize a plot element or two that is currently trending but not yet cliché.

A book that is quite good could require the author to spend many years before finding an agent or a publisher.

The best way to ascertain whether one’s book sucks or not is to get some beta readers who will give you feedback.

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We are definitely going to have to agree to disagree.

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Update: I’ve been put on the publication schedule for November 27.