Emails to a young writer

[amieroserotruck]

One of my young beta testers for crafts on the Young Wizards Handbook has been emailing me and asking me for advice on publishing her fantasy novel. Thought other people might enjoy my side of the conversation, or have things to add

Comments

[nellorat]

An almost-universal about peer critique that I learned teaching for Gotham Writers' Workshop: unless they are specifically educated/skilled in editing/critique/teaching, people are generally much better at telling where something is wrong than what is wrong, and better at saying what is wrong than how to fix it. So don't despair if oen person says a paragraph is way too long, with too much detail, and someone else says it needs more detail, and someone else says it doesn't belong at all. You know one valuable thing: the paragraph doesn't work.

Self-publishing is a great option for a niche work that a major publisher might not be interested in but the author has marketing methods for. Women En Large is a great example; also, a book by a parapsychologist friend of mine that alienated both New Age and skeptical presses but he sells through various psi-investigation organizations and after his lectures. Print-on-demand publishers make this very feasible. None of this applies to a regular fantasy novel, but I am glad it happens & thought

[amieroserotruck]

Ooo, good advice re: peer critique.

Didn't mean to come down on self publishing; that mainly grew out of a question of how much money does it cost to get published and I wanted to make it clear to my beta tester that traditional publishing (the actual production of a book)really shouldn't cost you anything.

Seconding niche markets. A woman in my crit group self-published her middle-grade book about a boy with gender identity issues (while a YA publisher might pick that up, gender/sexuality issues aren't done a lot in MG at this time). But yes, it is a pain; my friend is glad she got the book out there (she's a psychologist and so knew what avenues to pursue to get the book into the hands of kids who needed it), but it was a LOT of aggravation.