The Good, the Bad and the Ugly!

As the one avid reader of this blog knows, I finished my new novel in May and ever since it has been out in the market. First batch of submissions to literary agents totalled 11, although this included a couple of publishers too, and I have this week received the final rejection. Unlike on previous occasions when I have gone through this process on completing other novels, I did receive some feed back.

The good:

• Brilliant premise

• Great hook to start a thriller

• Good plot

• Intriguing

• Lot of potential

• Strong flowing dialogue

The bad:

• Too many adjectives and overt description

• Not enough use of negative space

The ugly comes from something I have felt for a long time but has now been said in black and white. This is from one of the publishers I sent a submission to. It turns out they are hybrid publishers which means that they offer two kinds of contract. The traditional one where they pick up the publishing costs and pay the author a royalty and the author contribution route where the author has to pay to see the book published and allegedly receives a higher royalty in return. Not sure what the percentage is but it is akin to vanity publishing and I have been caught twice in this trap – never again. They had already requested the full manuscript and after six weeks came back with an author contribution offer which I declined. As they could offer both types of contract I asked why they could not offer a traditional contract. This is what they said:

“We do offer traditional agreements, you are correct, but to a smaller percentage of our authors – the ones who already have a ‘celebrity’ platform of sorts. Offering a contributory agreement is by no means an indictment on your writing, just a sign of the times. “

This is saying that the sign of the times is that you can get a traditional contract if you are a celebrity but not if you are an unknown. This is what I have been wondering about for some time. It seems like every celebrity under the sun is writing these days and they already have a name out there so it is an easy sell. There is a finite market – a fixed number of agents and publishers – so anyone without a name is immediately stymied. For every Richard Osman and David Walliams, how many lesser known people have written something notable that will never see the light of day unless they self publish with all that entails? This is not everyone’s cup of tea and  I can speak for that personally. I can think up a story and write it but I cannot create a book cover and have no marketing skills. That leaves the author contribution route and having been down this road twice I know it leaves the author way out of pocket.