Transition, powerful and sudden, a miraculous revelation that put me at one with the universe. But let's start with Cinco de Mayo. I wasn't aware that this holiday may or may not have been one of those times of the year when agents automatically delete queries sent to them, much in the same way I'd lamented my rookie mistake months ago (see "The Fourth and Fifth Rounds") by sending a batch off on Christmas Eve. I suppose it's still too early to tell, being that the Seventh Round went out a week ago, but I have to admit that the reception so far seems icy. But paired with some things that have crossed my mind quite a bit lately due to an illness that hit me in the beginning of March and ended with a surgery in mid-April, a span of two months that put me in an intense state of self-evaluation about my role if any in this world of publishing, it became apparent to me that maybe my patience is wearing a bit thin. So, take your time, prospective agents. As much as I wish one of you would latch on to my project and give it the representation that it deserves, I think I may be putting up that particular fishing pole for the time being. Well, at least I'm putting away the one with the kung fu grip in favor of multiple, lighter and less important ones. The plan is to send out a batch every month, to the few agents that are left all over the country and beyond. But in the meantime, I have been exploring self-publishing options in a turn of events that anyone following this blog probably didn't see coming. Things change, and the marriage of media and technology is no exception. To say that the world of self-publishing has changed since I did it last would be an understatement, but at the same time a lot of the same things still hold true. For instance, without the backing of a traditional publisher, for the most part marketing and publicity is still left completely up to the author. But that's okay, because hand-in-hand with the strides that technology has made in self-publishing, so has the means of getting the word out. And then I've heard through some confidants of mine on Team Torres that authors who self-publish now can actually earn a little bit of royalty that amounts to more than just a few cents here and there, something that in the past has always made me look forward to receiving my 1099 every year just for a good chuckle. As a musician, I still gig on the weekends and earn a little money here and there. But the way I see it, with pricing structures now in the hands of the authors, I can now count my books as things that actually make me some cash on the side. All the arrows are pointing in this direction, even now as I have the manuscript out to three different beta readers whom I don't actually think realize they are beta readers yet. I will follow up with them and initiate them officially, making then card-carrying members of the newly formed Team Torres. Yes, the process has begun. I'm still keeping one eye open to traditional publishing, because I do still plan to consistently chisel away at least once a month in both the agency and publisher markets. But I've already begun to imagine the cover design, and already have a member of Team Torres ready with his mighty Photoshop sword. There was always something special about the control of self-publishing, about the time leading up to and including the process, knowing that ultimately I would have a say on when and where my children were born. I have pelted the east coast with queries at this point, with the Sixth Round deployed on March 3, 2014 to ten carefully chosen agencies. Some have come back within a day with rejections, while others are still pending within the time frames dictated on their websites. These things take time, and these agents are swamped by writers of varying degrees of determination, and this is the glacier-like nature of the business. But it looks as though, at least for now, my attack on the east coast has ended. There seems to be no more agencies left that would be appropriate for my special brand of psychosocial thriller, which while falling under the classification of "genre fiction" is still a bit of a rare subdivision. More and more I'm thinking about re-entering the self-publishing trade, if for no other reason than it seems that the business has evolved exponentially from I when I first published The Petrified Christ and Scenes from the Blanket over the course of the past fifteen years. And so the next rounds will spread out into the rest of the country, hitting the smaller less selective agencies that may find great interest in the subject matter of my unpublished New Orleans-themed manuscript. They're out there, and I would think that it's a rarity that authors with aspirations such as myself ever really consider querying anywhere outside of Manhattan, while still thinking that they were accomplishing something. But I totally do, because there comes a time when fishing in the big pond that houses the fewer fish may not be the way to sustain the hope that we as writers need to keep going, and this is just where I am in the beginning of my 42nd year. I'd like to start off this post by first apologizing to the few literary agents that I queried over the holidays. Leave it to the rookie to foul-up the game by not knowing the rules. But I'll get to that soon. I sent the Fourth Round of queries out on October 6, 2013 after a lengthy revision process to both the manuscript and the query letter itself, making the whole package more accessible based entirely on what I'd learned from the first three rounds and from reading more books. That last part is important. I always feel the need to stress in this blog how I do indeed read in addition to write, but I suppose what I really mean is that I've read a variety of different books in different genres just to get a feel for flow and structure and so forth from one type of book to the next. The result was not only a more readable manuscript, but also a grabber of a query letter that managed to get ... and may I get a broken snare-drum roll here ... my first request for a partial! Sure, it's since been rejected, but damnit if I didn't frame that thing! In a way, it was the most important correspondence I've gotten to date! The months then went by as the rejections came in, as well as one more request for a partial that went unanswered. While waiting, and building on the idea that writers are always either submitting or writing new stuff, I continued to hammer out the first draft of a new book. In this area I'm back to my old self again, feeling that sense of peace that I mentioned in a previous blog, where nothing else quite compares. A writer is at their happiest when they're producing new pages. On Christmas Eve 2013, I sent out a round of resubmissions to agents who I hadn't heard from in a while (who didn't specify on their website the "no response=rejection" policy) in addition to a new, Fifth Round of queries. The latter was a huge mistake, as some came back with immediate auto-replies saying that their offices were closed, while one in particular said that my query would be deleted. It made me wonder how many of the few I sent out in Christmas Eve were actually going to be deleted, and so I now plan to send them out again strictly as a technicality on the first of next month, hoping that these agencies will grant me the Mulligan. In the meantime, the Sixth Round will be put together with an updated query letter. The lesson: there are bad times to send out query letters, one of which being the holidays. Some blogs disagree with this, but most simply explain the point by asking the prospective author to put themselves in the shoes of the agents and/or their assistants. Would you want to deal with anything at your job coming in when you should be heading out? Likewise, the first week of January automatically puts you in the "resolution pile" of authors who vowed at the beginning of the year to finally get those query letters out once and for all. This can be an insulting thing to consider if in fact you've been querying all year. But again, put yourself in the agent's and/or their assistant's shoes, and all is understood. And so it goes. I'm making progress in that the manuscript is floating around out there in some important hands, and maybe some not-so-important hands, and I can only assume that my name has been uttered by more than a few literary agents and/or their assistants. A new book is being written, and so far so good. |
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