Hope for the best - Part 1

As you probably already know, the book is sitting with a publishing house at the moment, and with luck I will hear back later this month about whether they want to publish it. Given that, why all the contingency planning?

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

The best is if they pick the book up. The worst is if they pass.

If they say yes, then great. The book gets published by people who can make the most of it. My marketing and distribution (trivial compared to what a publishing hosue can do) are simply there as a base that they can take over or integrate with their own contacts.

If they say no, then the book is adrift. If I haven't planned ahead, then all the marketing and distribution I set up is lost. At that point, final galley or not, the book simply becomes another unpublished manuscript doing the rounds. Having got this close to seeing print, that seems like a waste, so I am planning for contingencies.

This doesn't mean I'm not hoping for the best.

(Continues Tomorrow in Part Two)

Why so nervous?

I had an interesting chat last night about getting published, from a friend trying to give me a pep talk. After all, he said, since the manuscript's already been through this once, why be so nervous? Surely it can make its way through the slush again, and at least we already know it is publishable.

Well, I definitely have good reason to be nervous, because the answer to the second question is both yes and no.

There is a brilliant analysis of the slushpile and what it takes to get out of it on Slushkiller by Teresa Nielson Hayden (scroll down to 3. The Context of Rejection)

Going through her fourteen point list, I don't need to worry about items one to ten (covering illiteracy, plagarism, and authors with "problems") which are the reasons for 95-99% of slush rejections.

This leaves three more reasons for rejection before reaching point 14 "Buy this book". All three are to do with the preferences of the publishing house. No matter how good the book is, if it isn't what they are looking for, they may not pick it up. Just because one publisher liked my work, it does not guarantee another publishing house will.

Editorial taste is the one thing that it all hinges on. Well, that and Royal Mail...

Publishing options

After getting a few questions on chat about how I intend to proceed, I will cover the details here.

The full manuscript is currently with a publishing house. If they pick the book up then release options and marketing will obviously change; and improve a great deal since they have significantly more options.

However, if they don't and I end up going with the local imprint, here are the pencilled in details (obviously subject to change):

• The book will be released in print and ebook formats, including Kindle, with a short-run printing rather than purely POD.
  
• Pre-orders will be taken online through established ecommerce partnerships.
  
• The release would be late Q3 prior to christmas, which gives a few months to release ARCs and galleys, and build buzz.
  

As mentioned, if I go with them I'd be doing a lot of the work myself as it isn't their usual area. Since they are only offering this option as fans of my previous work (thank you very much, on bended knee, gentlemen), none of this will be started until we hear back from the mainstream publishing house.

Obviously a mainstream publisher could do much more with the novel, due to experience, better distribution links and superior marketing.

To be honest, I'm not sure if the fallback option is calming my nerves or making them worse. I know that I have a lot of hard work coming up very soon, but I don't know the exact nature of it, how much support I can expect, or even whether I can actually sell a novel using existing connections.

Fingers crossed. They got it on June 25th, so just over two weeks before I hear back.

Board Migration

After an interesting technical issue with nabble, I have moved the forum to Proboards. The new forum is at:

• http://vhfolland.proboards.com

Unfortunately content and threads were lost due to the glitch. I have migrated the remaining content, but if you have a question or comment that has not made it across, please visit the new boards and repost.

The nabble forum will be deleted shortly to avoid confusion or misuse.

A brief interview

I've just done a brief interview at whohub:

• http://www.whohub.com/vhfolland

I'm also in the middle of an interview for solelyfictional.org about my self published writing from the nineties. I'm not sure how relevant my experiences back then (photocopiers and combbinders) still are in the age of Lulu and Createspace, but it is part of a series. Comparing notes with other writers is always interesting.

The current situation

Because things have moved very fast, I was looking back through the blog and realised this is the one place where I haven't covered what happened. To clarify the timeline of events, here is a quick summary:

I got a book deal from Bewrite at end of April/start of May
Firestorm went through the editing process to final galley in May and June.
I started marketing in June, getting requests for ARCs and galleys.
June 22nd the book was released by Bewrite, with the suggestion I should find a full print publisher, not P.O.D.
June 23rd Discussions occurred with a mainstream publishing house, resulting in a request for the full manuscript.
June 24th The manuscript was sent out, with a suggested response in four weeks.

Rather than put all my eggs in one basket, I also looked into self-publishing but found it easier to take advantage of an imprint that publishes some of my existing work in a different field. As this involves begging a favour from a friend to publish something well outside their field, it really is a last resort. It does mean that, one way or another, Firestorm will see print.

The reason for the summary is that most of this was listed on the forum, and due to an interesting technical glitch on nabble, we will be switching that to a new system, possibly proboards.

An anthology and still waiting.

Three weeks to wait until I hear back from the publisher, and not much else I can do on the novel itself until then.

Meanwhile I've started getting my short stories into an anthology. If I end up self publishing, I'll give it a limited release through the website on POD and e-book to accompany the novel. Done that way it won't cost very much, and it's a useful way to boost the novel.

However, this won't be released for a few weeks yet, since I've got to sort out cover art and either beg a favour from an artist or dive into iStockPhoto for raw materials. I'm also holding off for three weeks as I'm not sure whether releasing it would affect whether the publisher would be willing to pick up Firestorm.