Hey, thanks for looking this over. I hope I put it in the right place.
Let me start off by saying I know giving advice is a frustrating thing. You can give good advice and they still don't take it, or you can advise well from the facts in hand and something can still happen to ruin things. And then you get blamed.
So let me preface this by saying I'm a reasonably mature adult, and I take responsibility for whatever decisions I make concerning publishing. This post is an effort to become more informed, because there’s a bewildering array of choices out there.
I went through a writing-in-a-cave phase. I wrote seven novels in eighteen months. It was incredible. I had all these stories saved up inside and it was like they exploded out. I knew nothing about publishing or marketing. I just wrote. It was glorious. But toward the end of it, I put my head up and thought I might look into selling some of this stuff. It was surprising how much there was to learn after I wrote books and thought I’d edited them.
None of the books are stand-alone. I re-told Hansel and Gretel in three novels, set in the Thirties in southern California. This series is the most finished, in terms of cutting for word count and being edited by beta readers who are also writers, although I’ve decided to do a major rewrite on the third book. But the first two are nearly there, and the first is possibly the strongest piece I’ve written thus far. It comes with the potential liability of strong religious elements, both positive and negative. It doesn’t seem to fit the standards for Christian publishing, though, because the elements all come out of who the characters are, as opposed to being a story organized around the subject of say, chastity. The book is really about being an abuse survivor. The first chapter of Hans and Greta has been posted on SYW, and I’ve received some valuable feedback which I applied to the rest of the novel. Betas have been super-helpful, too.
All three of these still end up in the 150k range.
Then I’ve got two novels which re-told Snow White, set in Civil War California gold country. First, told from POV of Snow White, went 180k, and I had to shelve it for a while because I’d just read the thing too many damn times trying to cut it. A very perceptive comment made when I was working on querying it was that my MC was too passive, so I’m looking at another rewrite there as well, which is fine, once it sits a few months. The second novel, told from the POV of Prince Charming, is fairly polished, tells some truly cool stuff about California’s crucial role in the Civil War (bet you thought it didn’t have one), and is only around 115k. But it’s the second book. There are far fewer religious references in these two, although the MCs were Christian, (as were most at that time and place), and it does influence their actions. Main themes are courage and responsibility.
Next two novels re-told Rose White and Rose Red, because I wanted to write about something other than surviving abuse, at least in the context of doing it within families. So I took a family who had survived the potato famine and were living hand-to-mouth in tenements in Chicago, and dumped them in Bleeding Kansas in 1856, which was arguably the true start of the Civil War. These novels were my most recent, and shortest. They were written in close third, instead of first, and the first story tells of the conditions of abolitionists during that period (MC was involved in the Underground Railroad, which had the death penalty in Kansas Territory at the time), and the second is the story of their escape/hunting down evil sorcerer along the California Trail. These two are shorter, 140k and 115k, and are basically at the semi-polished draft stage. (Corrected for errors in style and grammar and such, but not for plot.) They seem to lack the passion of my earlier books, perhaps because I wrote in close third instead of first. Perhaps plot tweaks and compressing will get it there. But I had trouble summarizing the first, which means something is wrong with it. Haven’t really tore into it yet to find out what. MC is Catholic, and it matters, but it’s more subdued than in the H&G books. The main themes are prejudice and slavery.
In addition to that, to stay sane while revising, because having started I now NEED to write (and I’m no longer doing it in a cave), I’ve been writing shorts and posting on SYW. I just recently crossed the line, sucked it up, and sent three of them on their (hopefully) merry way. I also hope the experience of writing shorts will help me to write more concisely in the future, and I took some Holly Lisle plotting courses to help with this as well.
All my novels read more like historical fiction than fantasy, although I seem to need some fantasy elements. But it’s very much a spice, rather than a food group.
So, I’m looking at all this, basically trying to figure out what to do. There are posts from people who’ve had their second or third book orphaned, and my understanding is that series are a harder sell for traditional trade publishing than stand-alones. But I’d rather not jump into the world of self-publishing, at least not at this point, because I would frankly love to spend the rest of my life writing, and marketing takes way too much time from that.
I’ve been working on revising my books, if for no other reason that I love the stories and believe in them, and I want to see them become all they can. I also want to take the lessons learned from this process into the next round of novel writing.
My shorts seem to do okay on SYW. (Too soon to know how they’ll do in the market.) I think I can write, in terms of quality, and I know I can in terms of quantity. So I could save everything I’ve written, and just write a couple ‘first’ novels. Already got a commercial fisherman and selkie sidekick story fluttering in the back of my head, along with a rewrite of the Bellerophon/Pegasus story. I’ve learned more about plotting (my method before was to have the summary written and the characters become real to me, and then pants my way through). So I could probably come in at around 100k for those, even though it seems like a disappointing length for a story. But I can probably get over that. Hard to say for sure, since I haven’t done it yet, but I’m reasonably competent and should be able to get it done. And it shouldn’t take me that long.
So there are a lot of things I could do. Like I said, I believe in the stories I’ve already written. But once a publisher rejects them, my understanding is that they’re done there. And their chances of being accepted go way up if I’ve published something else.
Having come full circle, I’m looking for advice on what I should do. There’s no point putting the QLH faeries through hell with me (because I frankly suck at queries, even after reading stickies multiple times), if I’m not going to query anything I have already written. Presumably, I would be able to get an agent off of novels written more with the market in mind, and then querying my older works would be unnecessary.
Or should I just say dammit I’ve got good books and put them out there? Or is this really an impossible sort of thing to give advice on at all?
Let me start off by saying I know giving advice is a frustrating thing. You can give good advice and they still don't take it, or you can advise well from the facts in hand and something can still happen to ruin things. And then you get blamed.
So let me preface this by saying I'm a reasonably mature adult, and I take responsibility for whatever decisions I make concerning publishing. This post is an effort to become more informed, because there’s a bewildering array of choices out there.
I went through a writing-in-a-cave phase. I wrote seven novels in eighteen months. It was incredible. I had all these stories saved up inside and it was like they exploded out. I knew nothing about publishing or marketing. I just wrote. It was glorious. But toward the end of it, I put my head up and thought I might look into selling some of this stuff. It was surprising how much there was to learn after I wrote books and thought I’d edited them.
None of the books are stand-alone. I re-told Hansel and Gretel in three novels, set in the Thirties in southern California. This series is the most finished, in terms of cutting for word count and being edited by beta readers who are also writers, although I’ve decided to do a major rewrite on the third book. But the first two are nearly there, and the first is possibly the strongest piece I’ve written thus far. It comes with the potential liability of strong religious elements, both positive and negative. It doesn’t seem to fit the standards for Christian publishing, though, because the elements all come out of who the characters are, as opposed to being a story organized around the subject of say, chastity. The book is really about being an abuse survivor. The first chapter of Hans and Greta has been posted on SYW, and I’ve received some valuable feedback which I applied to the rest of the novel. Betas have been super-helpful, too.
All three of these still end up in the 150k range.
Then I’ve got two novels which re-told Snow White, set in Civil War California gold country. First, told from POV of Snow White, went 180k, and I had to shelve it for a while because I’d just read the thing too many damn times trying to cut it. A very perceptive comment made when I was working on querying it was that my MC was too passive, so I’m looking at another rewrite there as well, which is fine, once it sits a few months. The second novel, told from the POV of Prince Charming, is fairly polished, tells some truly cool stuff about California’s crucial role in the Civil War (bet you thought it didn’t have one), and is only around 115k. But it’s the second book. There are far fewer religious references in these two, although the MCs were Christian, (as were most at that time and place), and it does influence their actions. Main themes are courage and responsibility.
Next two novels re-told Rose White and Rose Red, because I wanted to write about something other than surviving abuse, at least in the context of doing it within families. So I took a family who had survived the potato famine and were living hand-to-mouth in tenements in Chicago, and dumped them in Bleeding Kansas in 1856, which was arguably the true start of the Civil War. These novels were my most recent, and shortest. They were written in close third, instead of first, and the first story tells of the conditions of abolitionists during that period (MC was involved in the Underground Railroad, which had the death penalty in Kansas Territory at the time), and the second is the story of their escape/hunting down evil sorcerer along the California Trail. These two are shorter, 140k and 115k, and are basically at the semi-polished draft stage. (Corrected for errors in style and grammar and such, but not for plot.) They seem to lack the passion of my earlier books, perhaps because I wrote in close third instead of first. Perhaps plot tweaks and compressing will get it there. But I had trouble summarizing the first, which means something is wrong with it. Haven’t really tore into it yet to find out what. MC is Catholic, and it matters, but it’s more subdued than in the H&G books. The main themes are prejudice and slavery.
In addition to that, to stay sane while revising, because having started I now NEED to write (and I’m no longer doing it in a cave), I’ve been writing shorts and posting on SYW. I just recently crossed the line, sucked it up, and sent three of them on their (hopefully) merry way. I also hope the experience of writing shorts will help me to write more concisely in the future, and I took some Holly Lisle plotting courses to help with this as well.
All my novels read more like historical fiction than fantasy, although I seem to need some fantasy elements. But it’s very much a spice, rather than a food group.
So, I’m looking at all this, basically trying to figure out what to do. There are posts from people who’ve had their second or third book orphaned, and my understanding is that series are a harder sell for traditional trade publishing than stand-alones. But I’d rather not jump into the world of self-publishing, at least not at this point, because I would frankly love to spend the rest of my life writing, and marketing takes way too much time from that.
I’ve been working on revising my books, if for no other reason that I love the stories and believe in them, and I want to see them become all they can. I also want to take the lessons learned from this process into the next round of novel writing.
My shorts seem to do okay on SYW. (Too soon to know how they’ll do in the market.) I think I can write, in terms of quality, and I know I can in terms of quantity. So I could save everything I’ve written, and just write a couple ‘first’ novels. Already got a commercial fisherman and selkie sidekick story fluttering in the back of my head, along with a rewrite of the Bellerophon/Pegasus story. I’ve learned more about plotting (my method before was to have the summary written and the characters become real to me, and then pants my way through). So I could probably come in at around 100k for those, even though it seems like a disappointing length for a story. But I can probably get over that. Hard to say for sure, since I haven’t done it yet, but I’m reasonably competent and should be able to get it done. And it shouldn’t take me that long.
So there are a lot of things I could do. Like I said, I believe in the stories I’ve already written. But once a publisher rejects them, my understanding is that they’re done there. And their chances of being accepted go way up if I’ve published something else.
Having come full circle, I’m looking for advice on what I should do. There’s no point putting the QLH faeries through hell with me (because I frankly suck at queries, even after reading stickies multiple times), if I’m not going to query anything I have already written. Presumably, I would be able to get an agent off of novels written more with the market in mind, and then querying my older works would be unnecessary.
Or should I just say dammit I’ve got good books and put them out there? Or is this really an impossible sort of thing to give advice on at all?
