Blogger: Rachelle Gardner
Speaks for itself, doesn’t it? I think it points to an interesting topic:
What’s frustrating you about publishing at this very moment?
Have fun. And be nice!
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A full-service literary agency that focuses on books for the Christian market.
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Finding my audience!!! There are soooo many books out there, I think people are overwhelmed by choice and less likely to take chances on a new voice. Plus, all the marketing I have to do as a writer really cuts into my time writing, which makes me resentful, and I think the marketing is srsly out of control!!!! I feel like I need an assistant just to handle PR.
So very true and funny.
Right now, having just signed a contract, nothing is frustrating. Give me a couple of months… 🙂
I have to agree that I’m frustrated with the marketing side of it. I’m an avid reader and a huge fan of certain writers, and I’ve never looked up a novelist on the Internet outside of going to Amazon to see if they have another book.
Yet we’re supposed to spend all sorts of time and money on websites and blogs. It feels like we’re mostly marketing to agents, editors and other writers. I think my time is better spent learning to be a better writer, but as a newly-contracted author, I have to take time away from my WIP to focus on marketing, most of which feels like a waste of time. Maybe I’ll feel differently once the book comes out–I don’t know. Right now, it’s frustrating.
So true! I’ve been looking at various author websites only to get an idea of what to build for my own; I’ve changed my design for it many times, so I thought, “eh, just be lazy and see what the basic template for author websites are and just build that and be done with it!”
And what did I find? Very few authors utilizing video, and even fewer offering an “expanding universe” model of their books, by which I mean added content which explores the characters and story more, or content which can be incorporated into social media.
In other words: what I wanted as a reader was more involvement with the worlds of the books, or to get some “behind the scenes” info from the authors about what went into creating their work, or at least a blog which dealt with the issues of the industry or issues raised by their books.
What I got?
Boredom…..
This post cracked me up because I had two agents today send personal responses to my query saying that it was a “great query” for x, y and z, but that they had to pass due to the high word count. It is so nice to get a personal response with feedback that I can work with rather than the “thanks but no thanks,” but it still is frustrating to get those rejections! That is my frustration at the moment!
My frustration is with editors who say they want to see a complete manuscript, then you hear nothing from them. At one conference I had 5 editors ask to see a number of manuscripts (some wanted to see 2 or 3). I had taken envelopes with me, so went to the facility’s copy place, made copies (a total of 35 altogether), and mailed them from the conference. Two I heard nothing from; one said they didn’t accept unsolicited manuscripts (even though I wrote on the envelope “requested manuscript, _______ conference,” and the date. One said they didn’t remember asking for it, and one (who asked to see 5 different ones) wrote that they had grown to the point that they could attract well-known authors and couldn’t take a chance on lesser-known ones. (At that point I had sold 20 books and over 700 other manuscripts, and taught at writers’ conferences.) It was very discouraging. Even though that was several years ago, I still find it happening. I have 6 different book manuscripts out now at different publishers who asked to see them several months ago.
I must have slipped up and prayed for patience at some point because it’s the good ole frustration with waiting!
Outside of the lack of authors utilizing technology to make more realized worlds for their fiction, I’d say what bothers me about the industry is the inability of the old-guard to adopt a new paradigm for a new publishing landscape.
After the closings, consolidations, mergings and meltdowns, will the old-guard of the industry realize they can no longer sustain the practice of paying content-creators roughly fifteen percent of revenue when the content-creators do much, much more than fifteen percent of the work?
To put it in the context of the national debate, writers are the job-creators of the industry. No writers means no books, which means all the ancillary jobs related to getting a book to a reader vanish. Yet this industry seems to be the only one where the job-creators are treated as greedy, selfish, and out-of-touch for demanding to partake in the fruit of their labors.
I understand that there must be genre, if only so that the bookstores know on what shelf to bury a book. But instead of serving as general categories, they seem to have become narrow and restrictive requiring square peg stories to be hammered into round genre holes.
Should a book be judged on how easily and neatly it can be categorized. I rather appreciate a book that challenges me by its complexity and breadth. I LOVE a book that seems to be a citizen of the world of literature, straddling genres and defying simple description. I want a story that sweeps freely across the literary landscape, going wherever the story carries it.
Naïve? Probably. But if I were king of the world there would be one more major genre – Damn Good Story.
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