Traction Maybe...

My goal is to update this blog at least every month. It looks like I’ve failed. Then again, blogging isn’t where my writing focus should be anyway, right? I know the drought can be painstaking for all 5 of my fans, but I promise I’m still here, working away!

With travel and other distractions, I’ve taken a bit of  hiatus from working on The Great Republic. Instead, I’ve been polishing up The Beast of Rose Valley some more for another round of queries, hybrid publishing submissions, and soon — my first Writers’ Conference.

Currently, I have one full manuscript submission out, a couple of queries, and a call set up with a hybrid publisher for next week. All of this has been a whirlwind learning experience. It’s hard to sort through the legitimate publishing opportunities and the less savory ones.

Hybrid publishers are especially difficult. They stand in the middle ground between self-publishing and traditional publishing. They offer the opportunity to publish my book just like a traditional publisher would, but they also require me to shoulder some of the risk that is inherent with publishing a book. I’ve talked with numerous hybrid publishers now, and trying to calculate whether it’s an acceptable financial risk is really hard!

The industry seems predisposed to be suspicious of any arrangement where the author pays for part of the publishing, but based on my own research and my own feeling on the subject, I think that dismissing those opportunities outright is a mistake. Self-publishing also requires the author to front money, especially if the hope is to have a professionally designed cover, a well-edited book, and any kind of marketing push at all.

So, I continue to explore all of my options. It takes a long time to find a publisher, I’ve learned, and once I do that, it will still take at least a year before the book hits shelves (or websites, as the case may be). It’s the one thing I didn’t properly plan for. I knew I could write a book pretty quickly, but I didn’t expect it to take so long to see the light of day!

As for the Writers’ Conference, I am terrified! The parts where I sit in on panels and learn writery stuff is perfectly fine, but my bigger focus is that 10 minutes where I’ll sit down, face-to-face with an agent to pitch my book in person. Given my lack of experience, I expect it to be a complete disaster, but I’ll never learn how to do it if I don’t try. I hope I manage to come out of the conference with my ego still intact.

That’s it for now, but I will do my best to update more often in the future… but let’s just agree to not hold me to that.