I have been writing fiction for a long time, and in that time I have on various occasions forwarded my work to literary agents. I never expected to get anywhere doing this, but I was motivated to do it because I felt it was too much of a loose end not having done it.
It's not something I have done very much, and I never sent Razed to anyone - that went straight to Amazon. On the few occasions when I sent work off the routine was always the same, and back in those days it was all paper and ink, of course. For people unfamiliar with how it used to work, it went like this: you wrote your novel, which could take anything from two to six months, then you would edit and proof-read (more on proof-reading in another post) the thing and print off the first three chapters. With these you would include a cover note and a brief synopsis of the work, and then the whole package was posted away to a relevant literary agent.
After a cursory glance it would be arbitrarily rejected and posted back to you. Sometimes you got a note, sometimes not. In all my cases the literary agents were professional and polite, and I got encouraging notes from all of them. These days it's basically the same routine but you save on paper costs because you email them, and they send their auto-rejection back by email as well. (To literary agents who refuse to accept electronic submissions: this is 2013, not 1913).
Now, I make it my business to keep up with new published authors and I always look into their background, and I started to get pretty tired of the number of new writers who had "previously worked in the publishing industry". OK, we get it - they have contacts in the industry and this world isn't modelled on Little House on the Prairie so the nepotists win. Recently I read about a writer (who shall remain anonymous) over whom an inordinate amount of fuss was being made. A little bit of research revealed to me that an immediate relative of the new writer in question just happened to be one of the biggest literary agents around, and it was that very agent who signed the writer.
The word nepotism derived from the Latin nepos, which means "nephew" and of course alludes to helping family into choice jobs, etc., irrespective of ability. I'm not using this post to tell the world that there is nepotism in publishing, because we all know that; it is no different from any other industry. What I'm meandering to is that these days Amazon makes all of that much less relevant. These days anyone can self-publish and actually be read. Thousands of people have read my books and stories thanks to Amazon Direct to Kindle and Kindle Select.
The problem we have now is that Amazon is essentially a monopoly in the ebook business, and most independent writers will tell you that they sell far more on Amazon than on all the other platforms put together, and the worry with that is that what they can give to indie writers on one day, they can take away on another. Even this precarious situation is better than wasting your time emailing material to literary agents, and as others have pointed out - an ebook is for life. The rights on that book is yours for life, and you can slowly add to your titles over the years.
The danger now though is that the market is being flooded by self-published writers and when you put a book out there it's just swallowed up in the white noise. One of the most common questions asked by new indie writers is "how can I get my book noticed?" I have a few thoughts on this, but they are for another day. I have made this post "Self-Publishing Vs Traditional Publishing I" because I'm sure there will be more.
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