Finding Your Voice

In today’s inbox:

“I’m an unpublished author getting ready to submit my book.  I’m writing a book in a genre I’m not sure how to define.  Can you give me some advice on agents or publishers to submit it to?”

This is a common question that I get asked many times each week in one form or another. 

Here’s what I always recommend.  First, I would start by approaching agents.  Major publishers do not look at unagented material, so the only way you’re going to get published by Simon & Schuster or HarperCollins is by having an agent. 

I have been published by every type of press in the universe – micro, small, midsize, ginormous – and I have to say that I’ve sold way more books and made a lot more money being published by midsize and ginormous publishers than I ever made working with small and micro publishers.  This is not to say I’m not grateful for the small publishers who publish some of my books.  For certain niche-oriented projects, they are the very best choice.  And I’m not saying the only reason to publish something is to make lots of money.  But if your options are “big publisher with excellent distribution and a way to get review copies into people’s hands” and “small publisher who can sometimes get a book into a distributor’s catalog,” you can see where I’m going with this.

So.  Start with agents.  If agents don’t bite, and you’re sure it’s because they simply can’t see the merit of your work, and not because your work needs work (so to speak), then you can certainly approach smaller publishers on your own.  You would query them the same way you would an agent (with a brief letter explaining what your book’s about, its genre and word length, and possibly a few sentences about yourself, if that has any bearing on the book – you’re a pastry chef, and the book is about pastry chefs, or you have won the Pulitzer prize, or you have had several other novels published by publishers people have heard of.)

Where to find out about agents: Agent Query is a good place to start; so is Preditors & Editors.  You will want to vet potential agents.  A good place to check out other writers’ experience is on the forums at www.absolutewrite.com, especially the Backgrounds and Bewares forum.

I do have an e-book for sale that goes over the basics of book publishing, including information on finding agents.

When you specify your book’s genre, don’t say, “It’s part-memoir, part-paranormal, part-contemporary romance with a little mystery thrown in.”  No one can sell that.  No one reads that genre.  Which is not to say no one would read a part-memoir, part-paranormal, part-contemporary romance with a little mystery thrown in. They just wouldn’t call it that, so neither should you.  Ask yourself, where would this book be shelved in the bookstore?  If you don’t know the answer, then just call it a novel.  Send your query about it to agents who represent novels.  Let them worry about what to call it.

One of the best tools any writer can possess is a healthy sense of cynicism.

I don’t mean skepticism, as in, “Yeah, and I bet you’ve got some ocean-front property in Arizona to go along with bridge you’re trying to sell me,” although skepticism is also a fine virtue for a writer.

I mean cynicism, as in being motivated by self interest, and understanding that other people are, too.

Wide-eyed enthusiasm is wonderful, and so is a passion for words, and ditto a desire to find things out, or at least to experience them.

But publishing is a tough game, and it’s toughest on the writers.  And you will be exploited if you don’t keep a very firm grasp on what your own self interest is.

So, when content mills make millions and billions of dollars selling content to third parties and they pay you five dollars to write an article, I have a hard time getting all bent out of shape over content mills doing what companies do in a capitalistic society.  (That is, make the most profit with the least amount of expense.)  What I do wish is that writers would look after their own self interest better.

If someone else is profiting off your labors, you need to be compensated for that, period.  And that compensation should not come in the form of abstractions like, “Good exposure.”

I do understand that writers need to get their work out there, to build an audience, to spread the word.  But what is happening is that writers are mistaking promotion for work.  I will write a blog post about my book (Simple Self Defense!  Makes a great gift!) for the purpose of promoting my book.  I’ll do an interview.  I may even write up a brief article for which I don’t expect much income.

But all of that is in support of the book.  I don’t mistake it for being the book or for serving any other purpose than to promote the book.

The minute someone wants me to blog, interview or write articles for their purposes, they need to pay me.  Simple enough, but a lot of writers fall down at this step.  “But,” they say.  But it’s my friend, but it’s a start up, but the opportunities are endless (the opportunities for working for free are always endless).

All the blog posts in the world won’t feed my daughter, unless they happen to sell a book, or get someone to enroll in one of my classes.  So when people crow about having a certain number of page views, or a certain number of followers, that’s all well and good, but the bottom line is, what does that put into your pocket?

Here’s the thing: once you start paying attention to your bottom line, then you realize that that’s what everyone else is doing, and that’s when you really get that it’s nothing personal.  It’s nothing personal that I don’t write for start-ups.  It’s nothing personal that I don’t write on spec. 

That makes it easier to understand that when people reject your work, it has nothing much to do with you.  They are just looking at their own interests.  And once you really get what that means, it’s easier to find ways to appeal to their self interest.  It becomes less about I wrote a book and hope you like it and more about I wrote a book and here are the reasons I know you’ll like it.  A much stronger position to be in, don’t you agree?