When you’ve been trying to get into the book trade, as I have over the past few years, and it feels like you’re really banging your head against the wall, it’s a much-appreciated different feeling to acquire some wonderful advice from an independent publisher. It helped, too, when I read the succinct column titled ‘How We Acquire New Books‘ at Salt Publishing, that I’d been ruminating along similar lines for several weeks.
Essentially, to get into the business, if you’re really serious about it all, not only do you have to write well. You also have to put yourself out a bit. Perhaps that will mean attending Book Festivals, for example, interacting with other writers and possibly agents and publishers’ representatives who may be lurking there. The interaction, the conscientious networking, is realistically the only way to attract attention to your idea. I write these things to remind myself, of course.
I’ve followed every suggestion I can, along the way, from my first foray into learning the craft at an Arvon Writers Retreat in 2019, through a variety of submissions, competitions, local writers groups with regular creative and critical stimuli, conscientious and dedicated effort on blogs, and on to online networks, self-publishing, and self-editing re-writes. Now I’m embarking again on what feels like a fruitless and soul-destroying exercise of honing that cover letter, finessing that synopsis, developing the first three chapters into something that sings and fizzles, and sending the package off to multiple agents.
But the kind folks at Salt Publishing have carefully identified the strategy I’ve been missing, and that is to get going on the networking, to learn to pitch my ideas quickly, enthusiastically, passionately, and thereby literally compel a possible agent to want to know more about my work. So it seems that Book Festivals are going to be a primary target for my diligent efforts, this coming year.
Besides availing myself of every possible opportunity to participate in writerly things, gatherings, discussions, interactions. Developing with other writers our shared interest in writing well, and sharing potentials, I’d imagine, as to market interest and possible likelihood for pitches.
I’m a natural hermit, at heart, and it’s not easy for me to push myself and my work forward. I’m really a diffident sort of soul, bashful and happier as a wall-flower than I am as a glad-hander. But I do want to be serious about this writing lark, and I do want to learn to let my light shine, or let the light of my effort shine.
I do believe, still, and very passionately, in Keep Me in Your Heart: The Lost Story. The fourth (plus) editing effort, now in my hands again as a privately printed book, feels like it reads along smoothly, inexorably drawing the reader in. I so want it to sing, and to be heard.
Biome NE47 