We’re at the end of our Season Ten Master Class, and if you’ve been diligent about the homework, you may very well have a finished manuscript in your hands. What do you do with it?
Daniel José Older joins us for a bit of reminiscence. We talk about some of our first submissions, and what we did right, wrong, and weirdly. We cover our criteria for selecting publishers to whom we’d like to send our stuff, and we include the shiny intangibles in that list.
This episode was engineered aboard The Independence of the Seas by Bert Grimm, and mastered in an abandoned missile silo by Alex Jackson.
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Research the market for that thing you’ve written. Find things that are similar to what you wrote, and read up on who published them. Find out who the editors were. Then make a list of places where you’d like to submit your work.
Half-Resurrection Blues: Bone Street Rumba, Book 1, written and narrated by Daniel José Older.
Nothing about self-publishing?
@Ephemerality: No, nothing about self publishing here. That particular can of worms wouldn’t fit in the episode, and is a *completely* different set of activities. The difference between the conventional route to publication and self publication is like the difference between going out to eat and opening a restaurant.
Opening your own restaurant is a perfectly valid business decision, and for the folks who have the chops to pull it off it can be exceedingly profitable, and delicious. It’s an enormous project, however. Attempting to cover self publishing in a single Writing Excuses episode, let alone 1/3rd of an episode, would do our listeners a disservice. Self publishing is *hard* and *complicated.*
Brandon and I have projects that use the self publication model. My own business is completely dependent upon it. We didn’t mention it here because it wasn’t on topic, and we didn’t have time to cover it properly.
What do you mean, I have to submit it? I wrote it, isn’t that enough? Nope, now you expect me to figure out who to send it to, and do the rest of the steps to get it published? Oh…
Read all about it in our transcript de jour! Agents and editors and slushpiles, oh, my… in the archives, or over here:
http://wetranscripts.livejournal.com/109874.html