Goodreads asked Chris Pearce:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Chris Pearce I think the first thing I would say would be to write because you love it, not because you want to become rich and famous from it. In that regard, don’t give up your day job, even if you reckon you’ve written the best book ever. Very few people indeed make a living writing books. Make sure your book is the best you can make it. Go through the draft many times, rewriting, editing and proofreading.

I would still try about twenty or so literary agents. They don’t seem to be taking on much at all these days with the move from print to digital, and it can be a lottery, but you never know just what they are going to take on. Fiction is very subjective. You may just find an agent that loves your work. I came close with A Weaver’s Web a couple of times. One agent had it for ages and sent it to a reader, but then came back and said: “You are clearly a talented writer but, after much consideration, ...” Another agent compared it to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which appears in several lists of top 10 novels of the 20th century, but still the agent couldn’t take it. I guess this was the turning point for me away from literary agents and towards indie publishing.

With indie publishing, you have to be happy to spend quite a bit of time marketing your book and perhaps spending a bit of money too. I think it’s always good to get a professional cover done and for me it was good to get the conversions done professionally too. My publisher did all this and got the book onto Amazon (various countries), Kobo, Google Play and Apple iTunes. But it’s no good just sending your book to a few ebook sites and expecting it to sell. It won’t, unless you are already famous for writing or something else.

You’ve got to get your book and yourself known. To do this, you just have to keep plugging away; I don’t think there are any magic solutions. I’ve arranged quite a few reviews and have been lucky enough to get mainly five stars. I have actually requested well over a hundred, but reviewers get snowed under with numerous requests for reviews and can’t read every book they receive. I have also done about ten interviews with different sites. I’ve found sites where I can post the cover, a synopsis and perhaps an excerpt. Before I published the novel as an ebook, I posted a number of excerpts to a couple of writing sites I belong to: Helium and Bubblews, although Helium is closing at end of 2014.

Social media can be very useful, but you probably have to know a lot of people through Facebook, Twitter, etc. I would always recommend Goodreads as this is where vast numbers of readers congregate. It’s a ready-made market. I find the self-serve ads are useful and have had over 50 people add A Weaver’s Web to their shelf. There are various other good things here too.

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