by Gene Turnbow | May 14, 2025 | Books, Business, Writing
I’ve finished the third draft, and still frankly doing little tweaks here and there. I’ve learned that most agents, if not all of them, request the first three chapters of the book to read when you submit a query, so I’ve been polishing. A word here, a phrase there, suddenly it all seems to have outsized importance. And then, of course, it makes me want to go through the entire book and do that to every chapter.
When I’m alone with my thoughts, when I’m writing the story, that’s the sweetest, most engaging part of the entire process, but now I’m faced with having to do the one thing I’ve never ever been good at, the one thing that terrifies me more than anything else I’ve ever done in my entire life that didn’t involve doing something like playing electric guitar and singing on stage, solo, in front of an auditorium filled with my high school peers and their parents (this was when I was 17), encountering a band of thieves in my own home, led by someone I thought was my best friend (this happened when I was nineteen), or diving in the driver’s side window of my mother’s borrowed car to grab the emergency brake as it was about to dive off a cliff off the end of a pier into the Pacific Ocean (this happened when I was twenty), or having to pull over to blow out an engine fire on my way to work and then get back in the car and drive the rest of the way to work (this happened when I was 40).
I have to sell an agent on the idea of representing my book to a publisher.
I’m terrible at salesmanship. Throughout my life, any time I’ve been confronted with having to do it, it’s always been a horrible experience and I’ve failed at it miserably. But this time I can’t afford to fail, because the rest of my career as a writer depends on my being able to pull just one more miracle out of that dark secret place in the back of my trousers where flying monkeys come from.
I’m doing all the things I think I’m supposed to. I’ve gotten myself an annual membership on QueryTracker, which is a web site meant to help you find agents and keep track of whom you’ve submitted to and what they said, or didn’t say, afterwards. I’m considering entering BookPipeline’s unpublished author’s contest. To be honest, though, I have no idea if that’s a good idea, or if it would help me in the slightest. They don’t even start judging until September, and that seems a very long time from now, and I’m impatient to get started pitching agents.
I’m told that I need to start working on my next book while I work on selling this one, because the publishing industry runs at the speed of books, which is to say, not very speedy at all. Even if I get an agent right away, which isn’t terribly likely, I might see my seventieth birthday before the book is published, assuming it ever gets there. This prospect does not fill me with confidence. I’m sixty-eight now. I don’t want my life to go by while I wait to see if I get to be a real writer. Frankly, the odds aren’t good.
I will tell you something, though. The reason most people fail at getting an agent is that their work isn’t finished before they submit their queries, or they query the wrong agents because they haven’t done any research, or they can’t follow simple instructions given them by the agents. Frequently they just have no idea how writing a novel works, and have written something unreadable, and their books are nowhere near where they need to be to submit. Your book doesn’t have to be in its final, polished, perfect form, but it needs to be as good as you can make it, and it should have been through the hands of a professional editor before you submit (mine now has). The odds of my getting an agent are probably far, far better than I believe they are, because most of the field is just self-disqualifiying.
Now that my manuscript is finished, the real adventure begins.
Wish me luck.
by Gene Turnbow | Apr 26, 2025 | Books, Writing
Now that I’ve gone through the whole book, replaced a chapter I shouldn’t have yanked, and found a bit over 1600 instances of filler phrases and useless sentences to either edit or remove entirely, now the manuscript is in the hands of my editor Lori Alden Holuta.
And I am starting to be faced with the questions of how do I pitch this thing, to whom to I pitch it, and how does the publishing industry work from this point forward. One important web site turns out to be QueryTracker, which is the natural evolution of an industry that is so swamped with people who dearly wish to be writers but don’t quite reach top tier who are looking for agents that there needs to be a service to help agents coordinate it all.
Gone are the days when you could go to a publisher’s office and throw the manuscript into the office over the transom and expect that it might get read someday. The publishing industry is now far far busier than that, and even just the fantasy genre by itself has grown over 40% in the past three years. It’s not just a river of submissions now. It’s a tsunami, made all the worse for people thinking that A.I. can write their books for them. I know publishers who have had to close their submission pipeline entirely while they wade through the sudden oceans of crap that weren’t in the pipeline just three years ago. It’s disheartening.
At the same time, it’s uplifting. Because while it’s harder to stand out than it was, when somebody does actually stumble across my manuscript, it will shine all the brighter. I might actually have a shot at getting agented, and if that happens, I could be published by TOR, or Baen, or DAW, or Dell.
I’m impatient. If this isn’t going to work, I want to know sooner rather than later. That isn’t how the publishing industry works, though. It might take two or three years to learn the fate of my first book, and that means that if I want a career as a published author, I have to start writing the next one whether or not I know that the first one will ever sell. That’s going to be a leap of absolute faith, or hubris, I’m not sure which.
But I’m not giving up, or stopping, or even slowing down, because the only option is to Keep Moving Forward. It might be a long shot, but it’s still my best possible future, and my best possible bet.
I’m taking it.
— Gene
by Gene Turnbow | Apr 10, 2025 | Books
It’s easy to say, “I’m writing a book.” Lots of people say that at parties. It’s hard to actually sit down and write one. This is why people treat the news that you’re working on a book with as much enthusiasm as they do a fart in an airlock, because the world is full of pretenders. And I mean full of them. A great many people want to be a writer, but don’t want to actually write.
And then when you say, “My first draft is finished,” now it’s a matter of both pride and fear. So many people never get that far. I’ve heard estimates that as few as 3% of people who start a book actually finish a first draft.
So, as you might have guessed, I have now finished my first draft, and it’s in the hands of the beta readers. And all I can do now is wait for their feedback, and I hate waiting, of course. And then too, some of the advice I’ll get back will be useful, or even vital, and some of it won’t be. And after I’ve gone through and polished the manuscript based on their recommendations and some of my own revelations, it will be time to either look for an agent, or prep it for publishing via a smaller publishing company that wouldn’t necessarily require me to use one, or self publish.
There are parts of the book, by the way, that ended up being cut because they don’t fit the story, but that will make wonderful short stories or novelettes. They might get included when the book publishes, and they might appear here first as a thank you for your continued support.
Running the radio station while I do this has been an experience as well, and I want to thank you for staying with me while I do all of this, and being with my team as we keep all the little wheels and gears from falling off. The station means a lot to a lot of people, and I don’t know if you’ve checked lately, but we are now the only science fiction themed radio station in the world, and have been for a while. You have earned the right to polish that particular apple, because it’s you and your contributions that make it all possible.
Second draft, here we come.
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