It’s true, though, that some publishers are more reputable than others. While all the major houses play it straight, you might wind up breaking into the business writing for some graduate of the Ring Around The Collar School of Business Ethics. You may be assured that you don’t need an agent, that the publisher’s more comfortable not dealing through agents, and you may be given the impression that insisting on an agent may blow the whole deal.
If that costs you the deal, you’re better off without it.
Where do I find an agent — assuming 1 don’t have an editor to recommend one?
There’s a list of them in Writer’s Market. That’s one sensible place to start.
If you know anybody who knows an agent, so much the better. The agents I’ve known have always gotten a large number of new clients through referrals from other clients. Any third party whose name you can conveniently use can make it easier for you to get a positive reply to your query — and that’s all connections can ever do for you. After that, the book has to sell itself.
What about reading fees?
Forget about reading fees.
Some agents charge prospective clients a fee to cover the cost of reading and evaluating their work. The rationale here is that the agent has to be compensated for his time, but more often than not the tail winds up wagging the dog. The great majority of agents who solicit reading fees barely have a professional client list worthy of the name; without reading fees, they’d have trouble swinging the monthly light bill.
As a result, you wind up paying a fee in the hope that you’ll be represented by a man who, if anything, has negative clout with the publishing industry. Furthermore, the criticism he gives you can’t be trusted, because he has a vested interest in encouraging you to keep on writing — and to keep on sending in manuscripts with checks attached.
In some instances, the fee agent is in the editing business as well. The fee’s not all he wants from you. He’ll also offer to rewrite the manuscript, for a price.
Not all agents who charge fees are quite so venal about it, and I suppose there are a few who are really just trying to cover the overhead while assembling a list of professional clients. Even so, why pay an agent when you can find another agent to perform the same task for free?
The fee agent, of course, is a sure bet. You won’t have to write him a query letter and wait with bated breath for his reply. And, after he’s read your book, you can be fairly sure of a courteous letter praising various aspects of your writing. An agent who reads your work at no charge may send it back with a brief not-for-us note.
Think about it. Do you want to pay fifty or a hundred bucks so someone’ll write you a nice letter? We’re supposed to get paid for what we write, not to pay for what other people write to us. Remember?
I suppose you feel the same way about subsidy publishers?
You bet.
There is some justification for paying to have your work published if you are a poet or a writer of nonfiction. For most poets, that’s the only available avenue for publication. And, since poetry doesn’t make money anyway, there’s no particular stigma attached to paying for publication.
Some nonfiction deserves publication and can be commercially viable, but it may be too highly specialized to interest a commercial publisher. This is particularly likely with regional material.
In such cases, there’s no reason why an author would be ill advised to underwrite the cost of publishing his book. I personally believe that self-publishing is a much better plan than paying a subsidy publisher to do the job for you, but that’s by the way. We’re talking about novels, and it just doesn’t make sense for a novelist to pay for publication of his book. The only possible reason for it is vanity.
The novel you publish with a subsidy publisher will not do much of anything but cost you money. It will not get reviewed in any significant media. It will not be handled by stores. It will not sell enough copies to amount to anything. It will not even do much for your vanity, really, because knowledgeable people will look at the book, note the subsidy house’s imprint, recognize it for what it is, and know that your novel is one you had to pay to have published.
You can avoid the last pitfall by publishing the book yourself, using some ad hoc imprint. And, if you want to have a small edition of books made up in this fashion so that you can pass out copies to friends, there’s really nothing wrong with that. Writing’s a fine hobby, and if the novel you produce turns out not to be commercial, there’s no reason why you can’t indulge yourself a little and see your work in print. You’ll still spend considerably less annually than an amateur photographer, say, would part with for equipment and film.
Self-publication’s okay, then, if you can afford it. And if you know that it’s not the road to wealth, fame or professional status.
And what is the road to all those good things?
You just keep punching. You must submit your manuscript relentlessly, shrugging off rejection and sending it on to another publisher the day it comes back. You simply cannot let rejection get you down, whether it comes in the form of a printed slip, a personal note, or a refusal to read your book in the first place. You can remind yourself that all a rejection means is that one particular person decided against publishing your book. It doesn’t mean your book stinks. It doesn’t even mean that particular editor thinks it stinks. And it certainly doesn’t mean you stink.
You can remind yourself, too, that most novels have taken awhile to find a publisher, that many smash best sellers were turned down by ten or twenty or thirty publishers before someone recognized their potential. And you can tell yourself that success doesn’t hinge upon merit alone, that the determination to keep marketing your book is equally essential if you’re going to get anywhere.
You already showed you’ve got determination. It takes plenty of it to get a novel written from the first page to the last. You’re not going to quit now, are you?
No trick, then? No handy household hints to make it easier?
One trick.
One way of taking your mind off rejection.
Get busy on another book. Get deeply involved in another book, so much so that the rejections the first one piles up won’t hurt nearly as much. You’ll be amazed, I think, by how much easier the second book is to write — and by how much you’ve grown as a result of the work that went into the first one.
One of the functions of an agent is to spare you the hassle of marketing your own work, not only because he’s better at it than you are but so that you don’t have to concentrate on two things at once. Until you acquire an agent, you’ll be wearing two hats, an agent’s peaked cap and a writer’s pith helmet. To keep the marketing process from taking your mind off your writing, make the business of getting your manuscript in the mail as automatic as possible. And, to take the sting out of the rejections your novel accumulates along the way, throw yourself into your second novel as completely as you can.
Chapter 15
Doing It Again
Moving on to the next book. Special aspects of sequels and series books
It’s a lot easier to begin work on a second book if some eager publisher snapped up the first one ten minutes after it left your typewriter. But it doesn’t happen that way very often. As I suggested earlier, a great many of us write first novels that turn out to be unsalable. And many who do go on to produce salable second novels — but that only happens if we get that second novel written.
There’s no reason to assume that your first novel will turn out to be unpublishable. But there’s every reason in the world to expect that it will take a long time finding its way into a publisher’s heart and onto his spring list. That time will pass much faster and be put to far better use if you spend it writing your next book.