As it turns out, that poetic obstacle I mentioned a while back was less a roadblock than a speedbump. After a brief period spent staring blankly at the screen, I put a couple of words together that managed to capture exactly the feel and rhythm I wanted to achieve, and the whole damned song just flowed into the keyboard from there, words and structure and all. It’s not Shakespeare and it’s not perfect, but overall I’m very happy with the way it worked out and how it fits into the story.
In weeks since then, I’ve managed to finish the manuscript for what I initially intended to be book 2 of a 2-part series, and even got through an initial round of editing and rewrites. Now, even as I rewrite and refine the text of both books, I have some decisions to make. Each volume is just slightly on the short side for what is considered appropriate for a novel these days – at 66-68,000 words, they’re just a tad below the oft-quoted “70,000-100,000” mark. Of course, fantasy books these days tend to run 500+ pages, even some I’ve seen from first-time authors.
So my choices, as I see it, are as follows:
- Market the books as is, and just hope it’s true that size doesn’t matter.
- Add more material to the story, running the risk of disturbing the pacing, introducing redundancies or continuity problems late in the game
- Tack on a couple of appendices containing information about the history, languages, etc of the world I’ve created, running the risk of inducing excruciating boredom in most readers.
- Combine them into a single volume. This probably makes the most sense and is likely the direction I’ll go, but it means a bit of rethinking over the title and structure of the work.
Now, as to “doing this the hard way”:
I contacted the publisher of my previous book to tell him that the project I had mentioned to him something like two years ago – which he had expressed interest in seeing – was finally ready for someone to take a look at it. His reply was that, for reasons I won’t go into here, his company was dropping its fantasy line altogether, at least for the present.
So much for the easy route! What that means is that I now have to go the route of writing query letters and synopses to send to long lists of agents to find one to represent me to publishers, following each separate agency’s submission guidelines and then, assuming one of them decides to represent me, following the same procedure with the publishers themselves.
First, though, I need to polish that manuscript. There’s a difference between sending a book to someone you’ve already worked with and saying, “Hey, here’s the draft – see what you think,” vs. the “Here’s an example of my best work – please send money!” objective I’ll be dealing with.
I hope to chronicle my efforts here, up to and including publishing any interesting rejection letters I accumulate. So if any of you search engine bots who read this have ever been curious about the process of trying to sell a book once it’s been written, you might want to watch this space in the coming weeks.