Getting Published

So, one of the assets I have at my disposal, as I mentioned in my last post, is: I am an amateur novelist (I've written two unpublished novels).

Finally, after many years of simply sitting on my manuscripts and not doing much of anything with them, I made the decision to get them published. One way or the other. What prompted this decision? A number of factors really.

First off, my dear wife Rachel finally finished reading my second novel, a fantasy entitled The Stars of Areon (it only took her around four years to get around to it), and told me that the entire first chapter was incredibly dull, slow, uninteresting, pick-your-own-word, but once you finally plow through to chapter two it really hits the gas and that the sum total of it was that the book was great. (Minus the first chapter, of course, which will henceforth be known as “Prolog”.)

Now, for some men this might not mean much. My wife, however, is rarely impressed with anything I do. Don't get me wrong, she loves me very much and is very willing to bear me a new child every couple of years or so, she's just not overly impressed with my work on the whole. For instance, if I were to give her the moon she would likely say something like: “Couldn't move it any closer to the Earth eh? Oh well, I guess we'll just have to spend a week in a tiny little space capsule if we ever want to visit it. Still, chin up, you did your best...” (← That's an exaggeration... not a huge one... but it is an exaggeration...)

So, when she used the word “great” and told me that she “loved” my characters I knew I had something. Many of my friends and family had already told me the same, but when I knew that Rachel was sold on it I really knew I had written a book worth reading.

The second reason for setting my sights on getting published is the fact that financially I've reached a very low ebb. In point of fact, it might be the lowest ebb I've ever reached since Rachel and I got married. In my last post I mentioned that I had always been working to get rich. I also made it clear that I was now working to make a living. Why the change? Well, getting rich simply wasn't working and lately it's made even making a living difficult. I'll go into more about my business failures later, but for now it's enough to know that I'm “skint”. Because of this, even a rather small amount of money from a published book would be very welcome.

My third reason is that self publishing has become much easier and it puts the author in the driver's seat. My video game (Worlds of Magic) was published on Steam after going through the “greenlite” process. It was effectively “self-published” and, in spite of a disastrous launch, has sold around 13k copies since we put it up for sale. Now, for a video game on the scale of WoM that is a failure. However, if I sold even 10k of my first novel I would be very happy at this point. I feel certain that publishing the book on Amazon.com for $0.99 would get me that many sales. So, I can publish myself if I want to and see what happens.

That having been said, on Rachel's recommendation, I am currently looking for an agent. I bought the 2015 Novel & Short Stories Writer's Market from Amazon.com and dug through it looking for agents that might be interested in my book. I contacted seventeen different agents. Most of them will get back with you in two to six weeks. So, by the end of September I should know whether or not I'm going to get an agent. If I don't I plan to self-publish. Whichever way it falls out I should have something interesting to share.

Now, I'm certainly not counting on a single self-published novel to pull me out of the financial mess I'm in. I have a lot more irons in the fire and some of them are nice and hot. I just decided to go ahead and mention the book because I've already sent query letters to so many agents.

In the coming posts I'll discuss some of the other things I'm doing with my current assets and exactly what the results have been.