mathewferguson
Banned
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2009
- Messages
- 170
- Reaction score
- 14
- Location
- Melbourne
- Website
- www.mathewferguson.com.au
Wow, did I ever spend several hours reading this thread. Clearly, I am the procrastination queen.
So, after all that, I just wanted to say one thing to Mathew. Okay, two things.
1) I actually agree with a lot of what you have said especially about marketing. It is important people! However, I think for new writers, it is a very time-consuming, no short-cuts thing. For me, I've been able to build a bit of an audience for my writing by being wise to youtube, myspace, twitter, my website, blogs etc. Yes, it EATS up my time, and I don't think it will help me much to get from here to published. What I do see is the incredible word-of-mouth thing going on. This may be just for my genre and target age group, but at least for YA fantasy, I've had a great response. What this means for me is 500 friends who all have 500-1000 friends each all know me personally and would like to read my work in the future. Yay internet!
2) You spoke a lot of the deals you've made without getting paid for them. You allude to a lot of impressive work. Perhaps being more specific about which books could help you out at this stage. I'm just throwing it out there. :/
You do speak about it on that site, but perhaps here you can talk about the uncredited work?
I do allude to uncredited agent work but I am hesitant to talk at length about it for two reasons.
The first is that I don't actually think it is very important. I have a perfectly acceptable publishing background where I did everything an agent does. Things are covered by confidentiality clauses but I can talk in some detail about various deals and what I had to do to get it done.
The second is that this uncredited, unpaid work I consider as favours and I don't feel particularly comfortable saying on the web "Hey I got XXXX XXXX a $10,000 job" (never mind she is meant to be a fully capable freelance writer) or "Hey, I helped this artist negotiate her employment contract so she kept rights" (part of her job was being able to negotiate). These people are either friends of mine or friends of friends and to me it feels like if I use their names without any permission (I always assume confidentiality) then perhaps I was only doing that work or giving that advice for my own benefit. Do you see what I mean?
If you check out my about page http://www.mathewferguson.com.au/about.html you can see I worked as an editor for Funtastic Publishing and I talk a bit about what I did there. You can probably see that it wasn't the standard editorial position, given the breadth of the work. You can also see the other places I worked and other things I've done.
I suppose I'll add a third reason I don't feel much like talking in detail any more: it doesn't seem to matter. If controlling $10 million of books for two years isn't enough for a writer to decide to send a manuscript to me ... then what will be? If working as a freelance writer and editor for four years isn't enough ... then what will be? If having a publishing footprint that is somewhat verifiable via web-searching isn't enough ... then what will be?
It's pretty easy I suppose: if you think I'm telling you the truth about my background and think I could be right for you then submit a manuscript. If you think I'm not telling the truth then don't.