How is your writing going so far in 2009? Have you been productive? Have you been sending out query letters?
This past Sunday, I travelled down to Wilmington, North Carolina to lead a discussion at Pomegranate Books titled "To Self Publish or Not to Self Publish, and the State of Book Publishing in 2009." In essence, I tried to sum up all of my thoughts on book publishing in one 60-minute discussion and Q&A. As you might imagine, this is not an easy thing to do.
In the following video (taken from the event), I make several claims regarding the state of book publishing in 2009, self publishing, and the pathway for new writers entering the profession.
The biggest change over the past year regards how I query literary agents. In 2008, I queried agents regarding my books by sending an actual printed letter in an envelope to the literary agents' postal address. Generally, I start by contacting the handful of agents I've met or who have requested material from me via writers' conferences.
This usually is less than ten literary agents. If all ten say they are not interested, I generally start querying agents with a standard one-page query letter. For The Colorado Sequence, for example, I queried over 450 agents before deciding to self publish. With CLAWS, I found an agent after querying about 70, but she was unable to sell the novel to a major publisher. Subsequently, I queried an additional 300 literary agents and about 75 book editors. After everyone responded negatively, I decided to self publish.
In 2009, I have begun querying for a new novel of mine titled THE PROFILER'S WIFE. For this novel, I have only sent out email queries. So far, the response rate has been significantly positive with nearly 80% of the agents requesting sample chapters.
By email querying, I save on postage and time, and only one of the agents has requested the material be sent to her by mail. The remainder simply asked to see my book via email attachment.
It's important to note that I don't send sample material unless asked by the literary agent. I simply send a one-page query letter, written first in Word, and copy-and-pasted into the body of the email. I've found the literary agents' email addresses via agentquery.com
In Wilmington on Sunday, I discussed this process and handed out sample query letters. Following this, I really dug into talking about how to publish a book, self publishing, and recent trends that I've seen developing while both working for a traditional publisher (Bedford) and a non-traditional self publisher (Lulu.com).
Basically, I posit that book publishing is moving increasingly toward digitization. Furthermore, I encourage aspiring writers (myself very much included) to embrace digital technologies like YouTube, Podiobooks.com, Social Networking sites like FaceBook and Meetup.com in an entrepenuerial spirit.
No longer can we as writers afford to simply write books and expect them to publish and sell on their own. In fact, I'd say the more assertive you are the better. You really have to take control of your own career and make people take notice.
This is best done when built from a knowledge base of how to publish a book and how book publishing actually works.
Finally, I make a claim towards the end of the discussion that authors in 2009 would be well advised to embrace self publishing as a way to build a base of knowledge. The truth is that we may very well have a book or story that is good enough or better than books or novels that are currently being published by a major book publisher, but if we don't understand how book publishing, marketing, distribution, and sales works, the publisher would be at a disadvantage in publishing us.
That said, I encourage all aspiring writers to develop a solid base of knowledge regarding how to publish a book, how to market a book, how books are bought, sold, and distributed, and how to position yourself in the marketplace and how to create name recognition in the public at large before wading into the waters of major traditional publishing.
Enjoy the video, and feel free to send me your thoughts and comments via the "Contact Us" page.
Take care, folks, and thanks so much for visiting the site.
Stacey
