Reclaiming my title as Queen of the Epic Posts!
Christine N. said:
The heart bleeds...
I wanted to snip this, but I just couldn't find a good place. He had honest crits and praise from real publishers, and chucked it out the window.
I saw that, and my jaw dropped. Then my forehead met my desktop. Repeatedly. If I pull my keyboard a bit further forward, it almost hides the still-smoking crater.
In that four or five year waiting period, he could have written two (maybe three) more books, sent them to his agent and had them published. Made a name for himself while his first ms. aged nicely. If he was wildly successful, those publishers wouldn't have cared about HP before publishing this book.
A little patience was all it would have taken. Sigh. Instead he's stuck with PA.
Exactly. In fact, if he was getting that kind of detailed criticism from editors with big publishers he probably could have found a smaller publisher to take it, Potter be damned.
Now, I'm not published. I have one completed novel that is good only for desk ballast, and a couple of half-completed ones that are dead in the water. However, I'm now writing another, and I believe I'm on the right track with it. I have ideas for several other novels that deal with similar themes, and for the first time in my writing life I really think I'm onto something.
Long before I sat down to work on this book, however, I started doing research on what it actually takes to get a novel published. I wanted to know if my long-cherished fantasy about being a novelist was at all realistic. Should I try for it?
I had no idea how the process worked--Where did agents fit in? How do you get one? What are publishers looking for? What kind of promotion are authors expected to do? What do editors do--after watching a very famous series of vampire books decline in quality due to a no-edit clause, I realized they must do quite a lot, but what?
I figured the best sources of information would not be my fellow unpubbed writers, but rather authors who were actually getting their books published, and the editors who bought those books. After just a few days of searching online, I had already discovered AW, Preditors and Editors, Making Light, Paperback Writer, Scrivener's Error, and John Scalzi's blog. I read AW for six months before signing up and making my first post--long enough to read this entire thread (yeah, I'm sick, but it's better than any soap opera), the Learn Writing with Uncle Jim thread, and much of Andy Zack's Ask the Agent thread. I followed recommended links, and read the books recommended by the folks who obviously knew what they were talking about.
Now, there's no way I can claim expertise in getting a book published, but after doing my homework and paying attention in class since last August, I have a pretty good idea how to go about submitting queries and MSS, to whom, and why they might accept or reject my work. I'm now aware of how much slush is out there, and how truly bad it is. I know that money flows toward the author, and I know how to spot a scam. I know that it's business, it's not personal, and ultimately it has to be about the reader, not the author's ego.
I already knew that most books are still sold off the shelves of bookstores and other retail outlets, not online, because I'm a reader and I'm well aware of why I buy the books that I do. I know I will reject an overpriced book, or one with low production values, and that a signed copy of a book by an unknown author means nothing to me. Since I've been a bookseller, I know how books get distributed and sold, but none of that is arcane knowledge.
So when I read that guy's post, and saw the level of constructive criticism he was getting from editors who
knew they couldn't buy his book, I knew what a Big Effing Deal that was. I saw what he was being handed--and how encouraging that should have been--but he didn't. He wanted his book in print, and he didn't want to wait, or write another book to sell in the meantime, so he's let PA have it. In his impatience--in his thinking solely from the creative end of producing books, not the business end--he's doomed his own book. The whole trilogy, in fact. And the saddest part is that it's probably really good.
Which all brings me back to the one big question I always have when I read things like this from the PA boards--doesn't anyone do any research at all? I honestly don't understand how anyone can spend so much time and effort writing a book and sending it out to publishers without first trying to understand the basics of how books get into print and onto bookstore shelves.
Seriously--things like advances, developmental editing as opposed to copy editing, the craft of layout and book design, and how a book gets national placement, promotion, and distribution are not difficult concepts to grasp. The information is all out there on the web, for anyone who is willing to take the time to go look for it--I found it, after all.
Some of the misconceptions I've seen on the PA boards are truly astounding, and I know these
aren't stupid people. They are smart and disciplined and determined enough to have written books, and they work like mad to get them out into the world despite all the impediments their publisher throws in their way. Yet I see the same errors repeated as fact over and over again--that POD is the way of the future, and that selling books from your website rather than bookstores is the way to go, is typical.
Every time I see another misconception get passed around as fact on the PA boards, I want to step in and explain how things really work--but I can't.
Obviously, some of the authors over there are hip to it, now, and it's always heartening to see them step in and correct some of the most glaring wrongs. I think the cross-pollination between here and the PA boards is having a positive effect. For instance, I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to give Jean Marie reputation points, lately. [laughs] I'm looking forward to the day she finally makes her appearance over here...