Edward Ashton's Blog, page 11
September 16, 2016
September 6, 2016
Daily Science Fiction :: An Open Letter to the Rulers of Erathon From Xagaz Widowbane, Eater-of-the-World, Arch-Hypnocrat, Despoiler Magnus, Empress of Weeping Skulls, Defender of Filth, Defenestrator General, and so forth by Evan Dicken
August 26, 2016
New release from Beth Cato. If you like smart writing and...
New release from Beth Cato. If you like smart writing and steampunk, you need to check this out.
August 24, 2016
August 20, 2016
Check out the snazzy cover art for “Midnight in Absheron.” Just...
Check out the snazzy cover art for “Midnight in Absheron.” Just went live on Digital Science Fiction this morning:
August 16, 2016
Daily Science Fiction :: My Son, the Shapeshifter by Shane D. Rhinewald
DSF has been a bit off their game lately, but this one got me good.
August 15, 2016
The Wombly, by K.L. Morris | Shimmer
Classic Shimmer - weirdly beautiful, beautifully weird.
August 3, 2016
Fun Science Fact #32: Writing a book is easy. Getting it published is hard.
I started work on my first novel in April, 2013. I finished the first draft six months later. It was at that point that I realized that I’d given exactly zero thought to getting the book published. So, I did a little digging, and quickly came to the conclusion that submitting a manuscript directly to publishers is an agonizingly slow and painful process at best, and in most cases a complete waste of time. Most major publishers will not review a book unless it comes from an agent. Those that will generally require you to submit exclusively, and they take anywhere from six months to two years to get an answer back to you - that is, if they ever do at all.
So, I skipped that step entirely, and started querying agents.
The process of trying to find someone to represent your work is painful in its own way, in that you wind up collecting a lot of rejection letters, but it’s a much more streamlined experience than direct submission to publishers. The vast majority of agents permit simultaneous submissions, so you can query several of them at once, and their response times tend more toward days or weeks rather than months or years.
The process for querying is pretty simple. You write a query letter, which is basically the copy you’d see on the back of a paperback at the bookstore, with a bit of boilerplate around it, and a synopsis, which is a two page document summarizing every character and plot point in your four hundred page book. Then, you send them out in whatever format each particular agent requires, and you wait for a response.
There are a number of print and online databases that will help you find agents who are willing to take on new authors, and who work in whatever genre you prefer. I used AgentQuery.com, as well as Writer’s Market. I sent queries to what I thought were six reasonable agents. I also made a prioritized list of which agencies I would reach out to next, and as each rejection came in, I sent a fresh query to whoever was at the top of the list.
After ten rejections, I re-tooled my query letter. After ten more, I re-tooled it again. The first one, I would describe as workmanlike. With the second, I tried to be a bit more creative. The third one was just sassy. That’s the one that got results. I queried ten agencies with letter #3. Of those, I got five form rejections, three personal rejections, two requests to read the full manuscript, and finally, in September of 2014, an offer of representation.
From there, needless to say, everything was smooth sailing. My new agent had me re-write a major chunk of the book before he’d even show it to publishers. It then took four months for him to land an offer from HarperCollins–an offer that came with the requirement to cut an entire POV character and almost thirty thousand words of text, and re-distribute all those words (and all the critical plot information those words conveyed) among the remaining characters. Then there were structural edits and line edits, cover designs and jacket copy, blog posts and interviews and a lengthy lecture from my new publicist about establishing an online presence (still working on that one). At the end of the day, it took just about four times as long to get from finished first draft to book release as it did to get from first word to first draft.
Does it get easier? Well, I just turned my second book in to my agent a few weeks ago. I guess I’m about to find out.
July 30, 2016
July 27, 2016
EP535: Bluejay : Escape Pod
My latest piece is up on Escape Pod this morning. Give it a listen if you have a chance.
