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Trying to find a publisher or literary agent
Fellhand
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My friend is a writer. He's Not very established, but he did succeed in wiritng a book and currently that book sells for $100 on amazon since it's out of print. He's currently trying to find a publisher or literary agent so he can publish another book he wants to do which deals with his wife's passing from cancer and other things. So far he's been given the generic rejection letter from 8 agents.
He actually is a very good writer and I see a lot of books out there that are total shit, so my question is how do these flapjacks end up getting book deals while someone that actually writes well can't catch a break?
He actually is a very good writer and I see a lot of books out there that are total shit, so my question is how do these flapjacks end up getting book deals while someone that actually writes well can't catch a break?
Fellhand on
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Mario Kart DS: 3320 6595 7026 5000
Marketability. Publishers don't usually care if you're a good writer so much as whether the stuff you write is sellable. They publish what will earn them money and unfortunately I'd bet that more people buy trashy spy and romance novels than difficult subjects like cancer. There are probably publishers that are willing to tackle that material though, I guess a thing to do would be to find novels that have a similar voice to his and see who publishes them.
Other than that, maybe look at a self publishing service like lulu.com, but that involves doing all your own marketing as well.
This is what I've heard as well. I heard Laurell K. Hamilton give a talk once, and she was quoting another author (Bradbury perhaps?) who said "when you can wallpaper a small bathroom with the rejection letters you've received, you're probably close to finding an agent/publisher."
Yes, it's also about marketability. Yes, it's also very much about luck and timing. Yes, it's also about networking. It's not like publishers are particulary hard-up for manuscripts. Your friend may or may not be a good writer, but he certainly isn't lonely in his predicament. How should literary agents or publishers weed through and distinguish among the literally hundreds of manuscripts they get every year?
Don't do this, unless you want to spend a lot of money on a lot of nothing. Selling a book is way more than just having text bound in an object, even if that text happens to be amazing. It's about marketing and output channels. If the novel is truly worth selling, then it's worth pursuing a deal with a publisher. Oh, it will take a long time - the professor of the creative writing program at my University is on her third novel, and it's taken her about 8 years to find a publisher for it - but in the end it means you'll get paid, it will be a professional production, and you won't have the industry death-words of 'self-published' on your bio.
Tell your mate to stick it out and always to have a submission circulated at any given time. And most of all make sure he doesn't stop writing in anticipation of publication of this novel. The manuscript won't vanish - in the time it takes to publish, if anything it will only get better. Tell him to keep working - it's a lot easier to get published if you've got three books doing the rounds rather than just one.