Clary I had a read of some of your novel and it seems really good.
I would be interested to know about your failure to get it published. Did you get an MNW rejection? Did you enter Susan Hill's competition?
And what about all those reviews? Did I miss something there? I guess you were taking a perverse pleasure in the critisism of your book, presumably because your independently minded enough to believe that it's good.
As for your mothers review: All parents say exactly that. It could be any parent throughout history speaking about their childs work.
Yet i cant understand why you are going down the self-pub route? You know I would have thought that with a book like yours -- in blog form -- it would be a good idea to try and serialise it, for free, on the internet, and that way try and drum up some support.
Just read your reading guidelines for aliens -- ha! your quite a Chekovian, cynical kind of person. This is all up my street.
You know I've come to realise over the past few years that man is clearly nothing but an accidental form of monkey.
And i dont mean this in a scientific way; I mean i know it from the perspective of experience.
And yet i think the majority of the human race, don't really believe that man is just a monkey, and actually, despite what they may say, they believe in God.
Even though it must be at least some few centuries -- I cant remember how long -- since Darwin wrote origin of the species, no one really appears to have come round to the very obvious realisation that the human race is nothing special -- it's just a monkey variant.
I'm not sure if I got a proper MNW rejection or simply no reply. Amounts to the same, doesn't it? Susan Hill's first novel competition wasn't accepting any submissions at the time I was still desperately trying to get through to some publisher.
In any case, after countless submissions and rejections (actually, many agents/publishers never even bothered to acknowledge my existence with an automatic rejection), I stumbled upon Grumpy Old Bookman, i.e., Michael Allen and his wise advice in "On the survival of rats in the slushpile", which you can downlad for free from his website. It's a brilliant analysis of the world of publishing - and also an eye-opener. It convinced me to drop this whole begging-to-be-published business and go for the good old do-it-yourself thing. Power to the writer wannabe!
To tell you the truth, I wasn't very keen on putting up with an editor/publisher's opinions and impositions. Here was the possibility to do things my way, for a relatively small amount of money: publishing my book with Booksurge, plus purchasing and sending a few sample copies will cost me no more than $1200.
Soon the book will be out and then people can decide for themselves if they want to buy it, based on the available online sample(s). I myself prefer reading books instead of sitting in front of a computer screen. Maybe serializing it on the net would have been an option, as you say, but I'm a bit of a luddite myself and would have probably lost patience before long.
Michael Allen's greatest advice, I think, is that we should be quite realistic (some might call it pessimistic) about what we're getting ourselves into. To get a book to sell requires lots and lots of luck (i.e., randomness) and has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of one's writing. So humility and humour seem like a good antidote. Expect the worst. When you're a rat in the slush pile, what have you got to lose, anyway?
By the way, comparing humans to monkeys might be offensive to the poor monkeys.
Author of FAMILY BLOG, a satirical novel about a typically (dys)functional family. You can read a sample and some advance reviews on this blog, and also find out more about it (and other trivialities) on my website:
www.literature-for-aliens.net
3 comments:
Clary I had a read of some of your novel and it seems really good.
I would be interested to know about your failure to get it published. Did you get an MNW rejection? Did you enter Susan Hill's competition?
And what about all those reviews? Did I miss something there? I guess you were taking a perverse pleasure in the critisism of your book, presumably because your independently minded enough to believe that it's good.
As for your mothers review: All parents say exactly that. It could be any parent throughout history speaking about their childs work.
Yet i cant understand why you are going down the self-pub route? You know I would have thought that with a book like yours -- in blog form -- it would be a good idea to try and serialise it, for free, on the internet, and that way try and drum up some support.
Just read your reading guidelines for aliens -- ha! your quite a Chekovian, cynical kind of person. This is all up my street.
You know I've come to realise over the past few years that man is clearly nothing but an accidental form of monkey.
And i dont mean this in a scientific way; I mean i know it from the perspective of experience.
And yet i think the majority of the human race, don't really believe that man is just a monkey, and actually, despite what they may say, they believe in God.
Even though it must be at least some few centuries -- I cant remember how long -- since Darwin wrote origin of the species, no one really appears to have come round to the very obvious realisation that the human race is nothing special -- it's just a monkey variant.
mnw reject,
Thanks for the kind words.
I'm not sure if I got a proper MNW rejection or simply no reply. Amounts to the same, doesn't it? Susan Hill's first novel competition wasn't accepting any submissions at the time I was still desperately trying to get through to some publisher.
In any case, after countless submissions and rejections (actually, many agents/publishers never even bothered to acknowledge my existence with an automatic rejection), I stumbled upon Grumpy Old Bookman, i.e., Michael Allen and his wise advice in "On the survival of rats in the slushpile", which you can downlad for free from his website. It's a brilliant analysis of the world of publishing - and also an eye-opener. It convinced me to drop this whole begging-to-be-published business and go for the good old do-it-yourself thing. Power to the writer wannabe!
To tell you the truth, I wasn't very keen on putting up with an editor/publisher's opinions and impositions. Here was the possibility to do things my way, for a relatively small amount of money: publishing my book with Booksurge, plus purchasing and sending a few sample copies will cost me no more than $1200.
Soon the book will be out and then people can decide for themselves if they want to buy it, based on the available online sample(s). I myself prefer reading books instead of sitting in front of a computer screen. Maybe serializing it on the net would have been an option, as you say, but I'm a bit of a luddite myself and would have probably lost patience before long.
Michael Allen's greatest advice, I think, is that we should be quite realistic (some might call it pessimistic) about what we're getting ourselves into. To get a book to sell requires lots and lots of luck (i.e., randomness) and has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of one's writing. So humility and humour seem like a good antidote. Expect the worst. When you're a rat in the slush pile, what have you got to lose, anyway?
By the way, comparing humans to monkeys might be offensive to the poor monkeys.
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