Does anyone here know anyone (who knows anyone) in the publishing industry, who could explain exactly why a certain 220,000-and-counting-word RationalFic manuscript is unpublishable through the traditional process?
I’m fairly well-informed on this subject- I’ve had one published science fiction author as a housemate, another as a good friend, and I’m on a first-name basis with multiple editors at Tor.
You will find it very challenging to get direct feedback from any professionals in the industry at this stage, short of relationships like personal friendship. This is because at any given time, there are tens of thousands of unpromising authors making exactly that request.
If this is your first novel, or even your third, don’t expect too much. The bar for minimum quality is extremely high, and author skill does not peak at a young age. If you’re still early in the process, and you’re still enjoying the practice, keep writing your second and third and eighth books while you look around for your first to be published. As a general rule of thumb, if you don’t have a novel that’s now vaguely embarrassing to you, then you probably aren’t good enough yet. Do not put all your eggs in one basket by writing one very long series; try out a variety of settings, and experiment with your craft.
Often, it is heard that writing short stories to build up a reputation first is a good way to break in to the industry. This is false.
Be aware that no matter which route you take, multiple years will pass before your book is accepted. Be aware that when your first book is published, you will not be paid enough to live on.
Rather than chasing publishers immediately, the first thing you need (need) is a good agent. Being accepted by an agent is a kind of ‘slush pile lite’ challenge- agents usually have their own slush piles and their own interns to read through them, but their overall volume and turnaround time is much more manageable. You’re also much more likely to get real feedback from an agent, explaining any potential problems that they see with your work. Another advantage of having multiple novels written is that you can send a particular novel to a particular agent, depending on their stated preferences. These can be quite specialized- gay and lesbian characters in fantasy settings, hard sf alternate history military adventures- depending on the goals of the agent in question, and it helps to maximize the number of niches that you accidentally fall in to by writing a variety of stories. Make sure that you are aware of your chosen agent’s reputation, since there are predatory impostors. Once you have this agent, you will be able to bypass the publisher’s slush pile entirely, and your chances improve dramatically.
I wonder if a novel-length piece of fanfiction starring a bovine secret agent counts…
a good agent
I know even less about agents than I do about slush piles—I don’t know where to even begin looking for a list of them, whether there are agent-focused online forums or subreddits, agent review sites, or what-have-you. Where might I start looking to discover agents’ reputations?
This resource seems quite good. It gives a few websites that compile lists, but your first step is going to be a bookstore- go find books that are likely to appeal to the same sorts of people as your own, and look inside them. Agents aren’t usually listed in the title pages or published information, but it’s good form to mention them in the acknowledgments, so that’s where you’ll get your initial list of names.
I wonder if a novel-length piece of fanfiction starring a bovine secret agent counts…
Ha! Possibly. Are you now skilled enough to rewrite it, better, in 30,000 words without losing anything?
One of the most common signs of an author that has yet to mature is a conspicuously low density of language (especially so in fan fiction). I actually wouldn’t be surprised if you could cut it to a ninth, although I suppose a third would be a bit more realistic without my having actually seen it. If you want to try this out without taking on an unreasonably large project, try cutting your old blog posts in half. Just as an example, I pulled a random paragraph from S.I. (which I might have mangled due to a lack of context):
“I never actually caught sight of Charles—he seemed to either be running errands, or hanging out with a few other guys aiming to create some sort of “Last of the Summer Wine” pastiche. After the second ladder crash, I suspected he married into the House household simply to have ready access to medical care.”
“Charles was nowhere, probably off playing ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ with his buddies. No surprise- after the latest ladder crash, I’d bet he married a House for the insurance.”
All this is just a heuristic, of course. The ability to compress language doesn’t make you a good author, it’s just something that most good authors can do.
If I was given a goal of cutting my verbiage in half, I think I can do that reasonably well. The question is, what’s the meta-heuristic here? When should an authour go to the effort of aiming for shortened prose as opposed to longer text?
The reason that you want to be able to compress language is, in a broader sense, to be able to use words with extreme precision. An author that can do this is in a good position to decide whether they should, but someone that defaults to the more expansive writing is probably not using individual words conscientiously.
is probably not using individual words conscientiously.
I would go further: an author who has not edited down their prose to something tighter and with more bang for the buck is probably too in love with their writing to have carefully edited or considered all the other aspects of their story, such as the plot, pacing, content, or character voices.
It’s a yearly publication. You can probably find the latest copy in the nearest library of any size. If not, they can certainly loan it from another library.
It lists publishing houses, agents, online markets, magazines, everything useful to a writer looking to get published.
I would suggest grabbing a copy and just surfing through it. It’s a great start.
May I suggest talking to scifi/fantasy author community (they know quite a bit about this, and often struggle to publish). Like piloting and academia, demand for these sorts of jobs far outstrips supply, so most people will struggle and make a poor living.
There isn’t a single author community, but Making Light has both editors and authors as hosts and commenters.
If you want to make some personal connections, it’s a good place if your personality is a good fit for the community. (Translation: I’d call the community informally rationalist, with a high tolerance for religion. Courtesy is highly valued.)
I looked at the beginning of your novel, and the prose is engaging—I think it would appeal to people who like Heinlein.
Do you have any particular locations for this ‘scifi/fantasy author community’?
most people will struggle and make a poor living.
I don’t expect to make a single cent out of this story; in that sense, I’m writing it to improve my skills for whatever I write next. (Tsuyoku naritai!) But I’m writing it even more because I just want to write it.
I don’t expect to make a single cent out of this story...
… because I don’t even have the generic mailing address to a minor publishing house’s slush pile, let alone the social network and connections that would let me sidestep the ordinary process and get in touch with a human willing to spend more than thirty seconds glancing at yet another novel.
I may not be able to get /this/ novel published; but the skills I develop as I work on it, and the various lessons I learn in the process, seem likely to be useful for /future/ stories.
What made me start thinking in terms of paper publishing at all was this comment.
Is there a good reason to go through a publisher these days? At least assuming that you’re not certain you’ll get a big publisher who’s really enthusiastic about marketing you?
Yes, if you manage to find a publisher they’ll get your book in bookstores and maybe do some marketing for you if you’re lucky, but as others in the thread have indicated, getting through the process and into print may take years—and unless you manage to get a big publisher who’s really invested in your book, the amount of extra publicity you’re likely to get that way will be quite limited.
Instead you could put your books up on Amazon as Kindle and CreateSpace versions: one author reports that on a per-unit basis, he makes three times more money from a directly published ebook priced at $2.99 than he would from a $7.99 paperback sold through a publisher, and almost as much as he would from a $25 hardcover. When you also take into account the fact that it’s a lot easier to get people to buy a $3 book than a $25 or even a $8 book, his total income will be much higher. As a bonus, he gets to keep full rights to his work and do whatever he wants with them. Also they can be on sale for the whole time that one would otherwise have spent looking for a publisher.
One fun blog post speculates that the first book to earn its author a billion dollars will be self-published ebook. Of course you’re not very likely to earn a billion dollars, but the same principles apply for why it’s useful to publish one’s work that way in general:
Prediction #1: The first B-book will be an e-book.
The reason is that you can’t have great sales without great distribution. There are roughly a billion computers on the planet connected to the internet and all of them can read e-books in numerous formats using free software. There are roughly four billion mobile devices, and most of those will soon be able to read e-books.
The sales channel for e-books is growing rapidly and has global reach. That’s why the first B-book will be in e-format. [...]
Prediction #2: The first B-book will be self-published.
Self-publishing is the best way to get the royalty rate high enough and the retail price low enough to make the B-book a reality.
The fact is that most publishers aren’t going to price your e-book at $2.99 or $3.99. They’ll want it at $9.99 or $12.99, which is probably too high for the market. And they’ll pay you only 25% royalties on the wholesale price, which is too low. If you want an aggressively priced e-book and a high royalty rate, you’ll almost certainly need to publish it yourself.
I feel like if you want money, you should go for self-publishing. If you’re more interested in getting a lot of readers, you should again go for self-publishing. Of course the most likely outcome for any book is that you won’t get much of either, but at least self-publishing gives you better odds than a traditional publisher. (Again, with a possible exception for the case where you get a big publisher to put up a massive marketing campaign for you.)
I don’t have links handy, but I’ve seen essays by authors which say that self-publishing and using a publisher both have advantages and drawbacks, and those authors are using both methods.
Book stores do have professional editors most self published books don’t have editors. It seems like the post that motivated DataPacRat to start this thread was partly about editoring.
Basically because no one that you showed the manuscript thinks he can make money with it.
Manuscripts often get rejected by a bunch of publishers till one wants to publish it. On the other hand few publisher have an idea that they want to publish a RationalFic.
A publisher may reject a manuscript based on some ideological or cultural qualm, but at the end of the day, the publisher’s main question is going to be “Can I sell this?” If you want to get a manuscript published, you have to do two (overly simplified things): make it worth publishing and find someone whose market would be interested in the ideas expressed there in. IlyaShpitser’s suggestion of looking into scifi/fantasy is a good one.
Also a quick couple of notes. First off, I don’t know if this is true of every publisher, but you probably would do better if you knocked off that “-and-counting” portion of the length. Believe me, publishers receives gobs of letters about manuscripts that are unfinished “but will be masterpieces.” Have a product. Show them the product. You need to have leverage with a publisher and being able to slam a finished story down and say, “This is what I have for you. This is good. This is what you need. You can buy it now or I will look elsewhere.” That is powerful. Though I would not suggest actual engaging in the hyperbole I just used. That was example only. The point is, have a product, not an idea.
Second, I would not try to sell it as a RationalFic. Sell it as a story. Again, you can also sell it as scifi/fantasy, but mainly do so within those communities/publishing houses that cater to that. Coming to a non-genre publisher and saying, “I have a rational fiction story about the singularity” will not set off their “50,000 advance copies” antennae. Instead, give them a summary of the story. I don’t necessarily mean a dry summary. Just some idea of what you have, why it would be interesting to readers, and, subtly, how it would make the publisher cash.
Remember, publishing is not an art form or an intellectual process. It’s not academia. It’s a business. In publishing, you don’t talk about artistic merits or themes or prescient issues unless that’s what the publisher wants to hear. Talk about business, talk about what interests the publisher, talk about how you (and you alone) meet those interests. It may feel like you are cheapening the intended impact of your work, but getting published is modern day patronage. You have to approach it as business.
Good luck! Keep at it. Remember: Stephen King got so many rejection letters that they eventually weighed down the nail he stuck them on and tore it from the wall. So don’t let one rejection get you down.
if you knocked off that “-and-counting” portion of the length.
No worries; I’m not expecting I’ll have the opportunity to even try to submit it to an editor before I finish.
I would not try to sell it as a RationalFic. Sell it as a story.
Again, no worries; I only mentioned it being a RatFic to tailor my post to the audience of this particular community, and would similarly tailor it as, say, “SF” or “hard SF” to people who are more familiar with those terms.
a summary of the story.
Initial thought on a generic pitch: “Present-day guy wakes up in the future, gets turned into a talking rabbit, and tries to figure out what the bleep happened to the world while he was out.”
Good luck!
Thank you kindly. :)
Keep at it.
No worries on that score—I’m already writing a novel even when I have no measurable hope of getting it on paper, and my related skills are only going to improve from here. (At least until /I/ get hit by a truck and cryo-preserved, but that’s another matter… ;) )
a summary of the story.
Initial thought on a generic pitch: “Present-day guy wakes up in the future, gets turned into a talking rabbit, and tries to figure out what the bleep happened to the world while he was out.”
You might already know this, but just to be sure: that there is a synopsis, not a summary.
Does anyone here know anyone (who knows anyone) in the publishing industry, who could explain exactly why a certain 220,000-and-counting-word RationalFic manuscript is unpublishable through the traditional process?
I’m fairly well-informed on this subject- I’ve had one published science fiction author as a housemate, another as a good friend, and I’m on a first-name basis with multiple editors at Tor.
You will find it very challenging to get direct feedback from any professionals in the industry at this stage, short of relationships like personal friendship. This is because at any given time, there are tens of thousands of unpromising authors making exactly that request.
If this is your first novel, or even your third, don’t expect too much. The bar for minimum quality is extremely high, and author skill does not peak at a young age. If you’re still early in the process, and you’re still enjoying the practice, keep writing your second and third and eighth books while you look around for your first to be published. As a general rule of thumb, if you don’t have a novel that’s now vaguely embarrassing to you, then you probably aren’t good enough yet. Do not put all your eggs in one basket by writing one very long series; try out a variety of settings, and experiment with your craft.
Often, it is heard that writing short stories to build up a reputation first is a good way to break in to the industry. This is false.
Be aware that no matter which route you take, multiple years will pass before your book is accepted. Be aware that when your first book is published, you will not be paid enough to live on.
Rather than chasing publishers immediately, the first thing you need (need) is a good agent. Being accepted by an agent is a kind of ‘slush pile lite’ challenge- agents usually have their own slush piles and their own interns to read through them, but their overall volume and turnaround time is much more manageable. You’re also much more likely to get real feedback from an agent, explaining any potential problems that they see with your work. Another advantage of having multiple novels written is that you can send a particular novel to a particular agent, depending on their stated preferences. These can be quite specialized- gay and lesbian characters in fantasy settings, hard sf alternate history military adventures- depending on the goals of the agent in question, and it helps to maximize the number of niches that you accidentally fall in to by writing a variety of stories. Make sure that you are aware of your chosen agent’s reputation, since there are predatory impostors. Once you have this agent, you will be able to bypass the publisher’s slush pile entirely, and your chances improve dramatically.
I wonder if a novel-length piece of fanfiction starring a bovine secret agent counts…
I know even less about agents than I do about slush piles—I don’t know where to even begin looking for a list of them, whether there are agent-focused online forums or subreddits, agent review sites, or what-have-you. Where might I start looking to discover agents’ reputations?
This resource seems quite good. It gives a few websites that compile lists, but your first step is going to be a bookstore- go find books that are likely to appeal to the same sorts of people as your own, and look inside them. Agents aren’t usually listed in the title pages or published information, but it’s good form to mention them in the acknowledgments, so that’s where you’ll get your initial list of names.
Ha! Possibly. Are you now skilled enough to rewrite it, better, in 30,000 words without losing anything?
If I had a reason to, yep.
I think I could manage that.
… tricky.
I don’t think I can shrink it by a factor of 9 without losing quite a lot—even summarizing just the best bits might take more than that.
One of the most common signs of an author that has yet to mature is a conspicuously low density of language (especially so in fan fiction). I actually wouldn’t be surprised if you could cut it to a ninth, although I suppose a third would be a bit more realistic without my having actually seen it. If you want to try this out without taking on an unreasonably large project, try cutting your old blog posts in half. Just as an example, I pulled a random paragraph from S.I. (which I might have mangled due to a lack of context):
“I never actually caught sight of Charles—he seemed to either be running errands, or hanging out with a few other guys aiming to create some sort of “Last of the Summer Wine” pastiche. After the second ladder crash, I suspected he married into the House household simply to have ready access to medical care.”
“Charles was nowhere, probably off playing ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ with his buddies. No surprise- after the latest ladder crash, I’d bet he married a House for the insurance.”
All this is just a heuristic, of course. The ability to compress language doesn’t make you a good author, it’s just something that most good authors can do.
If I was given a goal of cutting my verbiage in half, I think I can do that reasonably well. The question is, what’s the meta-heuristic here? When should an authour go to the effort of aiming for shortened prose as opposed to longer text?
The reason that you want to be able to compress language is, in a broader sense, to be able to use words with extreme precision. An author that can do this is in a good position to decide whether they should, but someone that defaults to the more expansive writing is probably not using individual words conscientiously.
I would go further: an author who has not edited down their prose to something tighter and with more bang for the buck is probably too in love with their writing to have carefully edited or considered all the other aspects of their story, such as the plot, pacing, content, or character voices.
Any thoughts or resources about the right amount of redundancy?
As a reader, it’s less work for more reward.
Writer’s Market.
It’s a yearly publication. You can probably find the latest copy in the nearest library of any size. If not, they can certainly loan it from another library.
It lists publishing houses, agents, online markets, magazines, everything useful to a writer looking to get published.
I would suggest grabbing a copy and just surfing through it. It’s a great start.
May I suggest talking to scifi/fantasy author community (they know quite a bit about this, and often struggle to publish). Like piloting and academia, demand for these sorts of jobs far outstrips supply, so most people will struggle and make a poor living.
There isn’t a single author community, but Making Light has both editors and authors as hosts and commenters.
If you want to make some personal connections, it’s a good place if your personality is a good fit for the community. (Translation: I’d call the community informally rationalist, with a high tolerance for religion. Courtesy is highly valued.)
I looked at the beginning of your novel, and the prose is engaging—I think it would appeal to people who like Heinlein.
Do you have any particular locations for this ‘scifi/fantasy author community’?
I don’t expect to make a single cent out of this story; in that sense, I’m writing it to improve my skills for whatever I write next. (Tsuyoku naritai!) But I’m writing it even more because I just want to write it.
Then why should anybody expect to make a single cent out of publishing your story? If you don’t believe why should others?
I don’t expect to make a single cent out of this story...
… because I don’t even have the generic mailing address to a minor publishing house’s slush pile, let alone the social network and connections that would let me sidestep the ordinary process and get in touch with a human willing to spend more than thirty seconds glancing at yet another novel.
Why do you choose that route over going to fanfiction.org if you think you have low chances of getting published?
I may not be able to get /this/ novel published; but the skills I develop as I work on it, and the various lessons I learn in the process, seem likely to be useful for /future/ stories.
What made me start thinking in terms of paper publishing at all was this comment.
If you haven’t yet, read http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html by Charles Stross.Quite a good description of how book publishing works.
Is there a good reason to go through a publisher these days? At least assuming that you’re not certain you’ll get a big publisher who’s really enthusiastic about marketing you?
Yes, if you manage to find a publisher they’ll get your book in bookstores and maybe do some marketing for you if you’re lucky, but as others in the thread have indicated, getting through the process and into print may take years—and unless you manage to get a big publisher who’s really invested in your book, the amount of extra publicity you’re likely to get that way will be quite limited.
Instead you could put your books up on Amazon as Kindle and CreateSpace versions: one author reports that on a per-unit basis, he makes three times more money from a directly published ebook priced at $2.99 than he would from a $7.99 paperback sold through a publisher, and almost as much as he would from a $25 hardcover. When you also take into account the fact that it’s a lot easier to get people to buy a $3 book than a $25 or even a $8 book, his total income will be much higher. As a bonus, he gets to keep full rights to his work and do whatever he wants with them. Also they can be on sale for the whole time that one would otherwise have spent looking for a publisher.
One fun blog post speculates that the first book to earn its author a billion dollars will be self-published ebook. Of course you’re not very likely to earn a billion dollars, but the same principles apply for why it’s useful to publish one’s work that way in general:
I feel like if you want money, you should go for self-publishing. If you’re more interested in getting a lot of readers, you should again go for self-publishing. Of course the most likely outcome for any book is that you won’t get much of either, but at least self-publishing gives you better odds than a traditional publisher. (Again, with a possible exception for the case where you get a big publisher to put up a massive marketing campaign for you.)
I don’t have links handy, but I’ve seen essays by authors which say that self-publishing and using a publisher both have advantages and drawbacks, and those authors are using both methods.
Smashwords is pretty nice; it lets you quickly spray your self-published book to various digital ebook stores all over the internet.
Book stores do have professional editors most self published books don’t have editors. It seems like the post that motivated DataPacRat to start this thread was partly about editoring.
You can always purchase editing services separately.
The first question a publisher asks is “what shelf would it go on in the book store?”
In this particular case: “Science Fiction”. I don’t know of many stores that subdivide SF&F more than that.
Then you need to be pitching it to publishers as science fiction not RationalFic.
Agreed. It’s generally just to the crowd here that I pitch it as RatFic.
Basically because no one that you showed the manuscript thinks he can make money with it.
Manuscripts often get rejected by a bunch of publishers till one wants to publish it. On the other hand few publisher have an idea that they want to publish a RationalFic.
^^^ There is your answer.
A publisher may reject a manuscript based on some ideological or cultural qualm, but at the end of the day, the publisher’s main question is going to be “Can I sell this?” If you want to get a manuscript published, you have to do two (overly simplified things): make it worth publishing and find someone whose market would be interested in the ideas expressed there in. IlyaShpitser’s suggestion of looking into scifi/fantasy is a good one.
Also a quick couple of notes. First off, I don’t know if this is true of every publisher, but you probably would do better if you knocked off that “-and-counting” portion of the length. Believe me, publishers receives gobs of letters about manuscripts that are unfinished “but will be masterpieces.” Have a product. Show them the product. You need to have leverage with a publisher and being able to slam a finished story down and say, “This is what I have for you. This is good. This is what you need. You can buy it now or I will look elsewhere.” That is powerful. Though I would not suggest actual engaging in the hyperbole I just used. That was example only. The point is, have a product, not an idea.
Second, I would not try to sell it as a RationalFic. Sell it as a story. Again, you can also sell it as scifi/fantasy, but mainly do so within those communities/publishing houses that cater to that. Coming to a non-genre publisher and saying, “I have a rational fiction story about the singularity” will not set off their “50,000 advance copies” antennae. Instead, give them a summary of the story. I don’t necessarily mean a dry summary. Just some idea of what you have, why it would be interesting to readers, and, subtly, how it would make the publisher cash.
Remember, publishing is not an art form or an intellectual process. It’s not academia. It’s a business. In publishing, you don’t talk about artistic merits or themes or prescient issues unless that’s what the publisher wants to hear. Talk about business, talk about what interests the publisher, talk about how you (and you alone) meet those interests. It may feel like you are cheapening the intended impact of your work, but getting published is modern day patronage. You have to approach it as business.
Good luck! Keep at it. Remember: Stephen King got so many rejection letters that they eventually weighed down the nail he stuck them on and tore it from the wall. So don’t let one rejection get you down.
No worries; I’m not expecting I’ll have the opportunity to even try to submit it to an editor before I finish.
Again, no worries; I only mentioned it being a RatFic to tailor my post to the audience of this particular community, and would similarly tailor it as, say, “SF” or “hard SF” to people who are more familiar with those terms.
Initial thought on a generic pitch: “Present-day guy wakes up in the future, gets turned into a talking rabbit, and tries to figure out what the bleep happened to the world while he was out.”
Thank you kindly. :)
No worries on that score—I’m already writing a novel even when I have no measurable hope of getting it on paper, and my related skills are only going to improve from here. (At least until /I/ get hit by a truck and cryo-preserved, but that’s another matter… ;) )
You might already know this, but just to be sure: that there is a synopsis, not a summary.
Um—which one, precisely? I might want to read it.
S.I., which can be read and commented on starting at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AU8o3wSAiufh-Eg1FtL-6656dNvbCFILCi2GbeESsb4/edit . (I plan on eventually giving it a permanent home at http://www.datapacrat.com/SI/ , but I’m currently focusing on writing the thing.)