The die is cast

[igenlode]

Well, I've done it; I've sent off my first 'query'. After a last-minute panic over exactly what people mean when they say 'the first 25 pages'; it turns out that they mean 'the first 25 pages when formatted as an A4 page in Microsoft Word in Times New Roman with one-inch margins', and as I don't have Microsoft Word or Times New Roman on my system and my manuscript is formatted to paperback book size and margins so that I could print and bind it for my own sample copy, that means that the 25 pages I had carefully exported and reformatted to be email-safe, one chapter at a time, were actually a considerably shorter extract than expected :-(
(If they gave a word count for their sample passage it would make life much easier.)

I went back and added in the rest of the scene that I had previously truncated in order to meet the page count. I couldn't be bothered to go through and change all the page templates for every chapter (the program the manuscript is currently in for printing purposes is not a DTP system that I know at all well, and doing so would be a non-trivial matter), so I don't know how far short it still is. Basically, they are looking for a demonstration of your ability to write, and possibly to structure your work, and I *think* that what I've got is a reasonable representative sample from that point of view. Putting a little bit more wouldn't significantly improve it.

If people start requiring me to submit in Microsoft Word Docx format, that is going to be another future problem; I can *import* and convert Word documents (but not in this DTP software!) but cannot generate them...

Comments

[watervole]

Best of luck. I've got another friend who went through it all and finally did get her book published.
It did well, and she's now working madly on book 3.

She writes Gothic horror, and attended a lot of events to meet publishers in person.

Don't think there's any equivalent event for your novel, though.

[igenlode]

I don't think I'd be any *good* at meeting publishers in person; I'm lousy at selling anything, most of all myself. (I'm quite good at fulfilling people's requirements if they know what they want and I can get it for them, but not at making people think they want something that they weren't previously interested in.)

And I can see the 'book 2' business being an issue, as well... As I understand it, most publishers want to sign prospective authors up to a multi-book deal, on the grounds that they don't have to go through the whole picking a needle out of the slushpile experience all over again from scratch, but can get a repeat product from a known quantity. (Which isn't the same thing as rocking up to a publisher as an unknown quantity and expecting them to take your seven-volume fantasy series on board!)

And I have neither the intention nor, I suspect, the ability to provide a steady stream of titles. Completing this one was exhausting enough, and I only have a limited supply of creative energy, which is currently being diverted into other pursuits -- I'm extremely unlikely to come up with another entire novel's worth of plot when it typically takes me months just to write a three- or four-chapter fanfic on an already existing premise.

Not that I think "I don't have anything else to sell" is likely to be the deal-breaker in this case, even if the standard advice to aspiring novelists is to sit down and write a second, better book while trying to hawk the first round the market :-p

The thing that I can see as being a much more immediate issue is that a lot of the submission guidelines I've glanced at seem to include a section where you have to talk about how you plan to promote your book in advance -- and I have *no* convincing ways of doing that. I have a website which receives no hits save for spammers, a blog which has an active audience of maybe half a dozen, and I can't even point to an enthusiastic online following for my fanfiction, because it has only ever had a very much minority interest at the best of times. I don't have the nerve to go round local bookshops (even assuming that there still were any) asking them to promote my work as being by "a local author", or to stage talks at the local library (what would one say, and who would want to come?), where I imagine one would be lucky to sell three or four copies as a result.

It isn't the sort of book that I would be comfortable promoting to the people I know in real life, even if I knew a sufficiently large number of them for that to be helpful; I did send a copy of the manuscript to one of them, who reads historical romances, and she was honest enough to tell me that she didn't like it, instead of just quietly failing to mention the subject. (Needs to start off with the location and date. Too many people with foreign names -- where is this supposed to be taking place again? The prose is too much like hard work to read.) Well, I never did think it would appeal to the historical romance market... but it has too many romantic elements to be marketable as, say, a rousing nautical adventure.

(As I said, promotion and salemanship is really *not* my strong point! All I can see is the difficulties... but this is at the very least a mandatory element that one is required to fill in before getting any hearing at all in a lot of cases.)

[watervole]

You're right about all the above. Kudos for doing the research.

Heather has a three book deal, and she had to be well into the second one before the publication date of the first one. And ditto for the third.

She had to start up a blog to draw in an audience and update it regularly. She has to review other books, etc. All of which takes more time, and is not something that comes naturally to her.

You're also right about the book launch. Heather did one in a local bookshop and invited all her friends. A think a mutual friend provided cakes. You need a good photo of the launch for the local paper.

And she has to travel to give talks...

All this, with two children and a full-time job.

[igenlode]

Research is one thing I *am* good at -- well, there are many things that I am good at, but self-publicising is unfortunately not one of them :-(

Fortunately I am not supporting children...

[paserbyp]

If people start requiring me to submit in Microsoft Word Docx format

What software you’re using to write?

[fred_mouse]

In case it is useful information: I write most of my documents in RStudio using Quarto, and can produce Word documents as one of the options. Both of these are open source; RStudio has been around for a long time, and is very robust. Quarto has been around long enough to be stable. It uses markdown as the base formatting, and can also have LaTeX. I have a set up that I can render to pdf (for my use) or word (for my supervisors) by selecting from the menu items. For me, the ability to read in data and then embed analysis results is why I started. The ability to do version control locally by setting a project up to use git means I do my document drafts in it even if they don't need data analysis.

For word documents to have a specific format, it needs a template file. Whether that is necessary for your purposes I don't know, but it takes very little time to create one if you can get short access to Word. Margins shouldn't need a template; specific font might.

Also: if you are code savvy, there are ways to get around the template aspect.

[igenlode]

Thanks, but I'm not in a position to compile 'open source' programs (and as evinced in the cases of Angband and gawk, just because the source code is nominally available, that doesn't mean it works 'out of the box' once the developer support for the port has been dropped...)

The main thing that people seem to be asking for in terms of manuscript formatting is one-inch margins (which looks *huge* to me, but presumably allows space for writing comments there?) and double line spacing, presumably for the same reason. I don't think fonts matter, except that you don't want to use a fancy font of any sort, obviously.
But so far I have been going for agents (all two of them!) who want submissions in plain text within an email rather than via Web form upload, so it's just a matter of converting all the non-ASCII characters for safety...

[fred_mouse]

RStudio installs really well with minimal tech, and is actively maintained. But I get where you are coming from. I'm intrigued that there has been a shift to plain text in email, which is much more accessible for a lot of people. Possibly the agents have also moved away from Microsoft and its predatory pricing model.