How Not to Get Published: A History

So, I'm posting a blog entry for the third week in a row. Great, what the hell do I talk about?

I mean I am close to actually being ready to send out some inquiries on a book, one that I was smart enough not to publish on Amazon first, so that's fairly exciting. It will be an interesting experience as this will be the first non-automatically disqualified book I have tried to sell to publishers in over a decade.

I've written 18 books, but a lot of those have come on recently, so my history in this area is a little suspect.

In 2003, I finished the book I had been working on in high school and college, and sent it out into the world, got some polite inquiries back on query letters, but no takers. In retrospect, I probably did not hit it out of the park with a piece of literary fiction as a high school student.

It was three years before I finished another book, my opening foray into my much beloved SF/F genre, one that is oversaturated then as it was now. I don't think my book stood out in any way, not to enough to garner more than minimal interest from literary agents.

I finished a book a year in the next two years, one a sprawling 500,000 fantasy epic that has still not been edited (I'm getting to it... slowly...) and a slightly less sprawling fantasy. This was 2008, and someone introduced me to Stephen King's On Writing, who pointed out that if you wanted to be taken seriously, you needed publication credits. So, rather than trying to find homes for my two new novels, I worked on getting other items published. From 2008 to present, I have had 34 paid publications, both poetry and short stories- not bad. Nothing major, of course, but I was proving that I could at least sell to some minor houses.

Fast forward to 2012, I finally finish a new novel, the first entry in a trilogy, and in 2013, I finish a short novel/novella, but I have become gun shy about trying to get novels published, telling myself that I don't have the time, that there's no real point, why go through rejection at the hands of others when I can self-reject. Besides, 2014 was looming around the corner, and two big things were about to happen, bordering on life-changing.

The first, strangely enough, was an episode of the TV show Castle. For the unfamiliar, Nate Fillion plays an author who solves mysteries, but he was a semi-infrequent poker game with other writers, including James Patterson. At one of these gatherings, Patterson takes a moment to chide Castle on his lack of prodigiousness- "Only one book a year?" At the moment I heard that, I realized had been writing novels since I was in 10th grade (1996) and had managed to produce only six in those eighteen years. I decided then I had to dedicate myself to writing as a full-time endeavor, even while having a job that was also technically a full-time endeavor. That commitment has worked too: four books done in 2014, three the next year, four again in 2016, and one already this year. But there was still a second thing to discover in 2014, and this one was going to kick me in the butt.

Self-publishing.

Cafe Press used to do vanity publishing, so I had tried self-publishing early on, just to have something neat to sit on the bookshelves. E-book publishing though was something completely different, something that was beginning to boom, and something that seemed quite alluring. Put your book out there, see if anyone likes it, maybe sell a few copies, gain some positive reviews, and then take it shopping. No one really ever bothered to tell me that the moment you clicked that Publish button on Amazon, that no standard publisher or literary agent would be interested in dealing with that book until you passed the 10,000 sale mark.

I killed the chances of publishing three different series by throwing books up on Amazon without understanding how foolish an idea that was. It did not stop me from wanting to write those books, and I continue to work on those series even though their only hope is to catch some sort of traction on Amazon.

So, I look at the 18 books I have written, and this is what I have.

1) Two early books already sent through the agent ringer without any luck.

2) One book desperately long and desperately in need of a lot of editing.

3) Nine books across three series that I self-sabotaged by throwing something up on Amazon before trying the traditional publishing market.

4) Four books that might have a chance (two of which I have already completed sequels for).

Even those four have some shots against them as one is over 200,000 words and one is a weird science-fiction religious book that runs a little on the short side.

So, there we have it. How to write 18 books and have no chance of publishing most of them. Don't do what I did. Or do what I did, if you want. It's your call.

Good luck.