Chapter Two | Publishing
You’ve written your book, now sit back, relax, have a coffee and wait for the agents and publishers to come knocking at the door...There is a lot of advice and information out there from much more experienced writers than me so do your research on how to publish. But I would like to share what I have learnt so far.
Literary Agents – If you want to go through a publisher then you need, these days, to get a literary agent. There are a lot of them and they all have existing clients and thousands more (like me) who want to be one of their clients. Most of them encourage new authors to submit to them, with that health warning that they receive a lot of submissions. They all give guidance on their sites about what you need to do. This is normally done via email and they ask for the following;
a covering letter in the body of the email
a synopsis attached which has to say everything that happens (tricky exercise trying to condense 90000 words down to 5 or 600!)
and the first 3 chapters or 5000 – 10000 words of your book.
The trick is to try to get them to open the attachments so your covering letter has to be well thought out and able to sell your concept. Then it is a question of whether they like what they read and whether it is something that is on their wish-list. Remember: they are taking the risk on you that your book will sell. There will not be any upfront costs for you – they and the publishers have to be willing to take the chance by investing in you (they will take their cut from sales). That is why your book has got to be a good fit for them.
Do your research into the agencies first to make sure they might be interested in your type of book and then look at the agent profiles to see which agent within the agency specifically might be attracted to it. If I had a magic tip on how to get them to read your work and take it on, I would give it. It’s hard and there is some luck involved, I suspect. But mainly your writing must be good and what they want at the time. Make sure your covering letter is professional (no spilling mistacks and it sense makes) and catches their attention. Most of all, be resilient – there will be rejections (and non-replies).
Self Publishing – There are two main routes: to pay for someone to do it for you or to publish online. You’ve written your book, now sit back, relax, have a coffee and wait for the agents and publishers to come knocking at the door...
Paying – Some companies will publish your book and then want to charge you for it. There is nothing wrong with that if that is a route you want to go down (some people call these companies ‘Vanity Publishers’, rather disparagingly, I feel, as for some people it might be a good choice). Some charge quite a lot and promise much so do your research to make sure it is what you want and are prepared to pay. I got a positive E-mail from one of these companies early on for my first book. I got very excited (naively) and told some of my family and friends I had a publisher. I was badly let down the following day when I found out they wanted to charge £2500. I felt cheated; it took away that first feeling I hope to get when I do get an offer from an agent or publisher who are prepared to take my book because they think it is good, can be successful and are prepared to take the risk.
Publishing online – This is what I’m doing with the first book I wrote – Quarton: The Bridge. Of course, I would love you to buy it, read it and enjoy it (and you can if you go to the go to the link on the home page). But it is far more involved than just simply inserting a link into a website and hope that people buy it, although that is one of the outlets (have you clicked on the link yet...?!) If you get an agent, publicity is one of the things they will do for you. If you are going down this route without one, then you effectively have to learn how to do two jobs: how to write something good and how to market and sell it. That is a disadvantage. The big advantage is that you get the bulk of the money from sales (less a small fee from Kindle or Amazon). There is a lot of advice out there. I will not provide you with loads of links because it is better to type ‘self publish on-line’ or similar into a search engine and then you can decide what links help you the most. Social media is the key here. For me, being in my fifties and not as comfortable with social media as some might be, it has been hard work. I did not use Facebook much, nor Twitter or Instagram (at all!). The world of sharing, likes, boosting, tagging is something alien. Setting up this website was a new experience. I suspect it can be done better and I hope will evolve and improve. But you need to do all this to get your book out there, as well as finding out which keywords to type in so that when someone buys a book on Kindle or similar, your book pops up. I suspect I have read a lot of books downloaded on Kindle based on this which are E-books and have never been in print. That shows it can be done but you need to research and find out how to do it (Ian Hornett – take note). What I would say is, just as you might ask family and friends to support you with your writing, do the same with e-publishing: ask for help. My daughter set up a public figure page www.facebook.com/ianmichaelhornett linked to my largely (then) unused personal Facebook account and a new email address Ianhornettofficial@gmail.com in less than 10 minutes. I didn’t even know there was such as thing as a public figure page! Then there is blogging. Lots of people do it and it’s another way to get your profile out there. I do have a major tip here though if you self publish without getting a professional edit: make sure it is grammatically correct and the punctuation is good. I am a teacher and errors jump out at me on other people’s work. It is harder sometimes to see it on your own, particularly if there are 90000 plus words. Which brings me nicely onto editing...