Now that your book is written and ready to unleashed on the unsuspecting marketplace, you’ll need to make a few decisions and prepare a few necessary tools.
There are a couple of ways to get your work published.
The first, and easiest if you have some cash lying around, is to simply pay somebody to publish it for you. There are plenty of services around that will do this; some of them will even try to convince you that self-published works might somehow earn you some reasonable profits or attach some sort of legitimacy to your name, but don’t buy into it. There are a very, very few specific instances where self-publishing, vanity publishing, etc. makes sense, and if you’re at all serious about becoming a writer with any sort of mass-market appeal, steer clear of these. If you’ve already gone the self-publishing route and are trying to break into “real” publication, please, please, please, whatever else you do, don’t brag on your query letter that your previous work is available via PublishAmerica (aka PunishAmerica, one of the best known of these outfits).
The second way is direct-to-publisher submission. Some publishers – typically very small ones, but a few larger companies as well – accept direct queries from authors rather than requiring submissions to come from agents only. I went this route with The Sillymarillion by taking a chance with a well-timed informal e-mail to a publisher who had recently released several other Tolkien-related works. This is a worthwhile avenue to pursue, but there are some caveats to keep in mind. For one thing, publishers who accept unagented submissions often have a large backlog and can take a long time to respond to queries, and very likely give many of them a more cursory examination than they deserve, simply because of time constraints. Smaller publishers may not suffer as much from this effect, but they have their own inherent dangers. I’ve read a number of accounts of people who made a sale to a publisher only to have that company declare bankruptcy, going under and taking the author’s rights with it before a single book was even printed.
The biggest potential advantage to un-agented publication is, of course, the fact that there’s no entity waiting between you and the publisher to siphon away a percentage of your advance and royalties.
The third and most common first step down the path to getting your book into readers’ hands is submittal of your manuscript through an agent. An agent will skim off a percentage of your profit on the book, but a good agent (more on how to identify them in a future installment) should be well worth the cost.
First of all, unless you have a relative who works there, most big publishers simply won’t accept a book proposal that hasn’t been vetted by a literary agent. If a work hasn’t passed through the first stage of the weeding-out process, they assume, and most of the time rightly so, that said work isn’t worth taking the time to read.
Your agent should have connections in the industry and know specifically who needs to see your work and how best to present it. Furthermore, it is in your agent’s interest to find the best deal for you; to recognize what offers have the best potential for profit in both the short and long term, what will best preserve your rights as author of the work, etc.
In short, my recommendation is to try both options #2 and #3, while avoiding option #1 like the avian flu.
Before I can do that, there three tools I need to prepare:
- My manuscript, formatted properly
- A query letter
- A short synopsis and/or outline
Next time: Manuscript formatting.