Monday, April 11, 2011

Torn

I'm conflicted. I'm getting to the 1/2 way point in my novel Out of the Shadows, and I'm torn on what to do with it when it's done. How do I want to release it? There's the classic method, send it off to agents, cross your fingers, have them send it off to publishers, cross your fingers, then wait, and wait, and wait. Or there's the kindle self-pub method, stick it online, market, market, market, and cross your fingers.

People tend to be in one camp or the other. Either they think self-pubbing is for the desperate and untalented, OR they think that letting a publishing house control and profit off of your work is stupid. I don't know where I stand.

I believe that some of the traditional publishing methods are inefficient. They could definitely stand to have their entire business completely remodeled. Just because a business is running in the black, doesn't mean that it couldn't be streamlined. It also takes forever to start seeing any actual money.

When it comes to kindle publishing, I  believe that making a self-pubbed kindle book profitable over the long term would be hard. Marketing, networking and the like is fantastic if you're a likable person with interesting opinions, but what if you aren't? What if you can tell a story like nobody's business, but are otherwise an enormously boring person? What if you can't get anyone to even check out your book on Amazon?

When I ask myself which is more important, the thrill of having my book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, or the possibility of making a steady monthly paycheck with my writing, I'm lost. But, if I look at it from a failure stand point, my options do start to come a little clearer.

What if I submit to 100 agents and no one wants to rep me? What if I publish on kindle and make $2 a month? What if I publish traditionally, DO manage to sell my novel to a publisher, get the standard $5-7k, the book doesn't earn out, and they kick me to the curb? What do my options become then?

So, I've decided on a middle of the road compromise. Instead of choosing one over the other I'm going to hedge my bets. I'm setting a time limit. From the day I send out my first bunch of queries, I'll wait 3 months. If I haven't gotten a positive response back from an agent within that time frame, I will post my work up on kindle. This will give me time to further polish my novel, format it, design cover art, release a second teaser chapter,  do some market research, create an irresistible product description, immerse myself more fully into message boards, blogs, and get my name out to more people.

What does everyone else think? Which is the more appealing choice? If three years ago, this choice didn't even exist, and now it's this hard to chose to between them, what will the state of publishing be in another 3 years?

3 comments:

Nicholas La Salla said...

Hi Jimmie,

Took me a while to find this post for some reason, but I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in there. I sold my first novel to Wizards of the Coast, so I have a small amount of knowledge in this area and an equally small concept of self publishing. Here goes.

I never would have self published anything more than likely if I had never sold One More Day. It let me know that I was good enough for someone to pay real money for my writing. It's not right that getting paid should be a validation, and certainly it's not a requirement for success self publishing, but that's how my mind worked at the time.

It was a huge ego boost and I started thinking, "Hey, maybe I could do this after all."

I was extremely lucky in that WotC was the first query I sent, and that I had no agent to get me in the door. I was discovered via the slush pile. It still took almost a year for them to get back to me.

If you're looking for agents, you can expect response times of around two or three weeks. If you're shopping it to publishers though you're looking at anywhere from 3 months to literally a year before you get a response.

Meanwhile, many won't accept simultaneous submissions. Of course you have to submit to several places simultaneously anyway -- if you didn't, it is quite possible you'd be sending in your final few queries from the nursing home.

If you want to give traditional publishing a try, which I completely understand, then you're going to have to allow for more time, at least a year of shopping it to different places.

The number of agents you can submit to alone is mind boggling. I suggest Agent Query, a great resource for finding relevant agents to whom you can send. Ralan's Webstravaganza is a great place for fantasy publishers and has plenty of options.

I hope this helps you make your decision. Do whatever feels right for you -- there is no race, and writing should be a lifelong process.

Best,

Nick
One More Day: A Modern Ghost Story

Jimmie Hammel said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jimmie Hammel said...

Typos galore... let's try again.

WotC rocks btw... love their games.

I agree, three months is not enough time. There's a reason for that. I honestly don't believe that these novels will sell traditionally. Agents and publishers are being barraged with vampire novels. The Lythian stories are more Battlestar Galactica than Vampire Diaries, and that's another problem. They're cross genre. Futuristic sci-fi + vampires = something impossible to classify. I just can't see a publishing house taking a chance on them.

Because I am not a publisher, and I could be wrong, I want to give them a chance, and if one of the 5 agents I choose does decide to rep them, I'll hold off on kindle pubbing, but I don't want to wait two years to get her out there.

I have other, more mainstream ideas that I'll get to once I'm done with the first three LK books and I'll probably try shopping those around eventually.