No longer querying Yellow Tape and Coffee. Here's why.
I am no longer querying for my novel Yellow Tape and Coffee.
Querying, for those who haven’t been obsessed with publishing for the last five years, is the act of trying to find an agent. It is a long process involving sending various combinations of maybe your first few pages, a “query letter”, a synopsis, a blurb, a short list of similar books, or whatever is asked for -- every agent has a different list -- to a series of agents. Ideally, one of them eventually offers you representation. 100 seems to be about the right number to contact before one does.
Once you’ve chosen one to represent your book, they then sell it to the publisher, negotiate the contract, sell the TV rights to HBO and keep 15% of the millions of dollars they’ve gotten for you.
Well, ideally. I, however, am not doing that anymore.
No, this isn’t because I suck. This isn’t a bad thing. I’ve decided to stop pursuing traditional publishing and go the independent route and self-publish.
For those who haven’t been paying attention to the industry in the last 20 years, this is a thing now. It’s not the same thing as “vanity” publishing, which also still exists, is predatory and evil. Self-publishing just means you’ve eschewed the publishing companies and are, in effect, becoming the publisher yourself. It’s a lot more work, but I think it’s the only way forward for me for my first novel.
It’s not that my novel is bad. It’s not that I have failed and I suck. I made this decision after speaking to several agents, publishers, and published authors a couple of weeks ago at the San Francisco Writers Conference. Consensus was, it doesn’t matter how good the novel is, nobody’s going to buy a 212,000 word manuscript. I asked about Name of the Wind, one of my favorite books. That was a very rare and unique circumstance and it involved him having a super popular award winning short story in that world first. Also, the fact that everyone lists that one book when talking about a successful first book of great length shows how rare it really is. It also wasn’t urban fantasy like Yellow Tape and Coffee, but high fantasy, a genre which is more tolerant of longer books. 250,000 words is still pushing it, though.
But as one agent pointed out, it’s only publishers who won’t buy an epic urban fantasy. Readers love books that long. I love books that long. Kindle Unlimited pays more for longer books. Plenty of people have self-published books that long and done quite well.
What about making it into two, or even three books? I thought about that, too. I could do it, and I figured out where and how, and it would only be a couple of months of editing, which is far less work than self-publishing would be. I looked it over, though, and to do it, I would have to move a lot of material from book 1 to book 2 and resolve another plot line earlier, which I could do with a bit of simplification. The problem with that is I don’t want to simplify that much. If I did this, the first book would just be a straightforward search for a killer, where a reporter and a policeman team up to catch a serial killer. I’d have to move all the setup for what’s really going on to the next book.
The way it is now, and how I’ve decided to keep it, Yellow Tape and Coffee has four interwoven plot lines and I think it’s the interaction between them that makes it so special. I’d lose the very complexity that makes it stand out in a genre where things tend to be a bit more straightforward. There’s a reason you don’t hear “epic” associated with “urban fantasy” very often. I’m not dissing the greats of the field here. Simpler stories are not worse, they’re just different. Ironically, my second novel is significantly simpler. It has only one main character and hardly any huge conspiracies. Ironic, because instead of urban fantasy it’s science fiction, a field where huge sprawling stories are much more common.
I’ve actually been contemplating this for a while, and have spoken with a number of authors of all different levels, and have a fairly good idea of what’s involved, at least at a high level. So I’ve finally decided to stop going back and forth and fully commit to a single direction. Eventually there comes a time to stop weighing pros and cons and stop trying to account for every possible factor and just choose a direction and hope it goes somewhere. So, that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m soon to be joining the ranks of the independently published authors. Having written my novel is the first step along that path. Choosing to pursue independent publishing is the second.
Querying, for those who haven’t been obsessed with publishing for the last five years, is the act of trying to find an agent. It is a long process involving sending various combinations of maybe your first few pages, a “query letter”, a synopsis, a blurb, a short list of similar books, or whatever is asked for -- every agent has a different list -- to a series of agents. Ideally, one of them eventually offers you representation. 100 seems to be about the right number to contact before one does.
Once you’ve chosen one to represent your book, they then sell it to the publisher, negotiate the contract, sell the TV rights to HBO and keep 15% of the millions of dollars they’ve gotten for you.
Well, ideally. I, however, am not doing that anymore.
No, this isn’t because I suck. This isn’t a bad thing. I’ve decided to stop pursuing traditional publishing and go the independent route and self-publish.
For those who haven’t been paying attention to the industry in the last 20 years, this is a thing now. It’s not the same thing as “vanity” publishing, which also still exists, is predatory and evil. Self-publishing just means you’ve eschewed the publishing companies and are, in effect, becoming the publisher yourself. It’s a lot more work, but I think it’s the only way forward for me for my first novel.
It’s not that my novel is bad. It’s not that I have failed and I suck. I made this decision after speaking to several agents, publishers, and published authors a couple of weeks ago at the San Francisco Writers Conference. Consensus was, it doesn’t matter how good the novel is, nobody’s going to buy a 212,000 word manuscript. I asked about Name of the Wind, one of my favorite books. That was a very rare and unique circumstance and it involved him having a super popular award winning short story in that world first. Also, the fact that everyone lists that one book when talking about a successful first book of great length shows how rare it really is. It also wasn’t urban fantasy like Yellow Tape and Coffee, but high fantasy, a genre which is more tolerant of longer books. 250,000 words is still pushing it, though.
But as one agent pointed out, it’s only publishers who won’t buy an epic urban fantasy. Readers love books that long. I love books that long. Kindle Unlimited pays more for longer books. Plenty of people have self-published books that long and done quite well.
What about making it into two, or even three books? I thought about that, too. I could do it, and I figured out where and how, and it would only be a couple of months of editing, which is far less work than self-publishing would be. I looked it over, though, and to do it, I would have to move a lot of material from book 1 to book 2 and resolve another plot line earlier, which I could do with a bit of simplification. The problem with that is I don’t want to simplify that much. If I did this, the first book would just be a straightforward search for a killer, where a reporter and a policeman team up to catch a serial killer. I’d have to move all the setup for what’s really going on to the next book.
The way it is now, and how I’ve decided to keep it, Yellow Tape and Coffee has four interwoven plot lines and I think it’s the interaction between them that makes it so special. I’d lose the very complexity that makes it stand out in a genre where things tend to be a bit more straightforward. There’s a reason you don’t hear “epic” associated with “urban fantasy” very often. I’m not dissing the greats of the field here. Simpler stories are not worse, they’re just different. Ironically, my second novel is significantly simpler. It has only one main character and hardly any huge conspiracies. Ironic, because instead of urban fantasy it’s science fiction, a field where huge sprawling stories are much more common.
I’ve actually been contemplating this for a while, and have spoken with a number of authors of all different levels, and have a fairly good idea of what’s involved, at least at a high level. So I’ve finally decided to stop going back and forth and fully commit to a single direction. Eventually there comes a time to stop weighing pros and cons and stop trying to account for every possible factor and just choose a direction and hope it goes somewhere. So, that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m soon to be joining the ranks of the independently published authors. Having written my novel is the first step along that path. Choosing to pursue independent publishing is the second.