Marketing helps for sure. Occasionally word of mouth will get a book moving. If you’re lucky then you’ll be the author that the publishing house chucks a major marketing budget at.
If you don’t score that, then being prepared to self-promote can help. I know of one author whose self-promotion goes beyond obnoxious (she drives me NUTS) but it is definitely paying off for her in terms of sales. Doing your self promotion professionally is a must – websites need to be proofread and look good FREX.
Getting shortlisted for an award is a really good idea if you can manage it ;). You don’t need to actually win it to get major spin-off benefits. Winning it is nice but not essential.
Worry about all this stuff after you find an agent and a publisher though.
Usually not with fiction unless there is some way to connect the two. If your a nuclear physicist and you write a hard science fiction novel about nuclear physicists, your background might get you a faster reading, but the book has to make it on its own.
Publishers have ideas about what might sell, but it’s still a crapshoot. Usually, aggressive marketing is a big help, and publishers usually aggressively market books they paid a lot to publish. So the size of the advance is a definite factor. Other than that, though, no one really knows.
Connections help. Knowing someone who knows an agent or publisher will occationally get you someone to read a few pages, and that helps. Also, if you have a buddy who is published and capable of selling books on his own, and he edits together a bunch of short stories - his to sell it and a few other published authors, and one of yours, that helps. And having shorter works published sometimes helps.
Otherwise, giving blow jobs to publishers…that doesn’t work.
I haven’t sent it out; it’s not done. I meant that it should be done in three to five more years. (I was also saying that three to five years ago.) ‘Utter lack of recognition’ isn’t entirely correct either; some people have read some of it, and their responses have been positive, sometimes enthusiastically so. Criticism has been mostly centered on my lonely battle to return the semicolon to its former grandeur. Currently I am receiving no recognition whatsoever, mostly because my potential audience is limited to a rather eccentric Tolkien fan who is kind of weird and thinks I’m boring.
The website idea is intriguing and probably worthwhile, but I barely have enough time to write as it is (and this message board doesn’t help). There’s a lot of supplemental material that wouldn’t be suitable for print but would be appropriate on a website. I’m concerned about security, though.
I’m sorry if I’ve kind of hijacked this thread. I normally only post in GQ but I could start a new thread in CS if that would be more appropriate.
Yes. I mailed my proposal to 5 agents. Four of them asked to see the entire manuscript, and the first one I sent it to called me and asked if she could have it exclusively, so I never sent it to the others.
The agent recommended a lot of corrections which she said were “mostly cosmetic.” They were cosmetic in the sense that an extreme makeover is cosmetic . . . but I made them. She then sold the book as the first in a series to Ballantine. (This happened in January of 1998, the same weekend as my local hometown footbal team won the Super Bowl. It was definitely a “pinch me” kind of weekend.)
Cicada: You do have to have a complete manuscript before you send proposals, right? My understanding is that you do, without exception, and that you can’t submit part of a long or serial work before the whole thing is finished. Sending an unfinished work to an agent or publisher seems too risky for both parties.
I had (what I thought was) a completed manuscript, absolutely finished. That’s usually the only way anybody’s going to sell their first one. After that I sold on proposals.
But now I’m working on something different, so my agent wants a much bigger piece.
Still, I know an author who had an agent representing her. She had a complete manuscript, which never sold, but her agent got her another deal, for three books, and that deal was based on a proposal for ONE book. It WAS kind of risky, but she delivered the manuscript, and the next two, and then got another deal for two more books.
Remember that the book’s perceived audience can be a major hindrance. A friend of mine has an amazing manuscript that she’s been shopping around for two years now. It’s incredibly well-written, engrossing, smart, hip, funny. In short, it’s something I’d pay money for if it were on the shelf in my local bookstore.
Her problem, however, is that while the book is entirely “literary” and really aimed at the MFA/McSweenys/Thomas Pynchon/Harper’s crowd, not a “genre fiction” book - it has purely contextual “horror” elements that cause every “literary” publisher to immediately discount it as a “horror novel.”
Yet, its decidedly smart, “literary” style cause the “genre” publishers to discount it as “not horror enough.”
A major component of the book’s appeal is that it perfectly straddles the realms of academic, highbrow fiction, while containing elemnents of modern horror unseen in “literary stuff” - yet this is the single reason it remains unpublished.
We got our New York agent by networking. An online acquaintance mentioned she had a friend who was one and I asked for contact details. It flowed from there.
Tonight we got an email from an editor who has been sitting on a book for a year. She wants it. She wants to see whatever else Mr P has in the way of unpublished manuscripts. Woot! It’s been a dry spell for him since we moved from NZ to Australia and he’s only sold 3 books. Even when you’ve been shortlisted for awards and received literary fellowships, it can be a challenge to keep on being published.
Now if the NY agent just comes through with some sales, my plans to be maintained in the style to which I would like to be accustomed may come off
Lot of good information here. I wonder how many unpublished writers we got here on the SDMB. Makes me want to get off the Internet and back to work on my alleged novel.
RealityChuck – I was wondering; is your sig line from the movie Hearts of the West?
