Publishing a Novel

I’ve decided to be very open with my latest project. I have a finished novel. I’ve tweaked it here and there. In fact, on the journal page of my website, you can read about all the iterations it went through and look at my weekly updates through last year. Now it’s go time.

My mission is to get the novel into publication without resorting to self-publishing. If I reach a point where I feel like I’ve exhausted all resources, the novel will be shelved, like so many short stories of mine in the past (and two cruddy novels that I shall not describe in this post).

My first stop on this grand tour is to find an agent. I admit that a couple of years ago, I proposed this novel to a few agents, and I only managed to get beyond the “front door” with one agent whom I met in person at World Fantasy. I’m not going to resend the proposal to any of those people, just as I wouldn’t resubmit a short story that’s been refined unless a magazine specifically asked me to. After doing some research, there are quite a few agents I want to approach with this newest proposal. I won’t get into the specifics of who I’ll be contacting, but I will probably give updates on the percentage I’ve heard back from, feedback, etc.

If I don’t find an agent willing to represent the work, I will start hitting publishers directly. I’m much more limited in who I can query directly without an agent, which is why this is my second step. No publisher has been queried for this novel in the past, so the field is wide open. As with agents, I won’t report specifics on who I’m querying, but I will give updates on the types of responses, speed of responses, etc.

I’ve gone down this road before with a cruddy novel, and even that was somewhat exciting (especially the returned manuscript that had a shoeprint on it). Now I’m going down the road with a much better novel (and more experience). Bring on the fun!