Traditional Publishing
Some Hard Truths
- On average, new authors sell only 250 copies of a title including those to family and friends.
Statistics are difficult to ascertain, but Amazon.com has more than 23,000,000 trade paperback titles as of December 2024. They are publishing more than two million new titles each year.
Until the first sale, a title on Amazon has no rank placement. I recently KDP-published a novel for a client, and as a practice, I purchase one copy to prime-the-pump. His book ranked 2,061,429 after that one sale meaning more than 20,000,000 other titles haven’t sold a copy recently.
- Getting the attention of an agent is difficult.Only a few percent of requests for representation get noticed. Of those, a small proportion get a request for a manuscript. Of those only a few get a phone call from the agent to discuss representation.
The odds are fractions-of-a-percent because agents are inundated with queries. “Query” being the term d’art for the correspondence from a writer to an agent requesting representation.
- Publishing is a business. Your manuscript must have the potential to produce return-on-investment. Agents need to pay bills, too, and because they work on commission, the product you present them must have the promise to generate cash for everybody.
- Agents want to fall in love with your book. Those first lines, paragraphs and pages are critical.
Publishers and agents have but one limiting resource: Time. Neither can collaborate with you. What you offer must be as close to immediately publishable as possible, though it won’t be.
The quality time you spend working the Production process as laid out in these pages is a solid investment in moving your manuscript toward publication.
Does it sound like a lot of work? How bad do you want it?
Genre
You arrive in Australia in 1798 and see a platypus. It has a beak like a duck, a tail like a beaver, webbed feet a seal… and it bears it’s young with eggs! What is it?
Newer writers are convinced they’ve written a platypus. It has pieces of chick-lit, or is that women’s lit, and some thriller, and a bit of historical, and maybe some coming of age… and then there are the aliens. What is it?
Determining the genre of your story is important in the selection of an agent to query. Outside those whose work falls cleanly into a genre, we propose trying this, a compilation of the suggestions from several YouTube gurus:
Pick an age group:
- Middle grade: 8 to 12
- Young adult (YA): 12 to 18
- Adult
add a time:
- Historical: takes place in any real time and place in the past
- Contemporary
Market:
- Literary
- Commercial
and which MOST identifies your story:
- Mystery: Catch a criminal
- Thriller: Stop the villain
- Speculative Fiction: Fantasy, science fiction, dystopian, and apocalyptic
- Biuldungsroman: Coming of age
- Horror: ghost, monster, and slasher
- Self-qualifying: Western, Military
- Comedy: including dark comedy and parodies
- Female audience:
- Romance: A love story centering on a romantic relationship; may include erotica
- Women’s fiction: a story line with complex issues primarily addressing women’s experience
- Chick-Lit: lighter subjects targeted at young women
Clearly there are crossovers:
- Women’s fiction may pair with romance, but novels featuring strong women in military roles won’t, if the story is more about the military than the female character(s). It’s Military genre
- Cowboys and Aliens was a western/science fiction/graphic novel hybrid before it was a movie, but the cowboy aspect is a novelty, it’s science fiction.
- Jane Eyre is women’s fiction and bildungsroman with a touch of comedy… women’s historical.
The following topics are found on pages 46 – 51
• Preparing to Approach an Agent
•The Query Letter
• Finding an Agent
• Query Manager & Query Tracker
• The Long Wait