How the FUCK does a first-time author get published?

How the FUCK does a first-time author get published?

Actually writing and editing comes naturally to me, but getting published without a record seems nearly impossible. Does the cover letter make or break that hard over the actual quality of work? Getting interviews with even agents is basically impossible once I'm cornered into saying 'Yeah, I haven't published anything before and I have no contacts in the industry whatsoever.' I honestly feel the stuff I've written can sell well and is publishing-quality, and I've had the couple people I've been working with on editing (a published author and two published academics) say that it's good work, so the quality isn't an issue, as far as I can tell.

Is it worth it to pony up the three-five hundred dollars to get into the 'conference' schmoozing?

Very little of the decision making involved in selecting a new author to publish has to do with the actual content of your work. Its all to do with how you position yourself and your work to make it appear marketable so that is the question that you have to ask yourself.
How do you sell yourself as part of the next new thing, how do you fit into what has come before and are you expected to follow that?

Its all about establishing that balance between following a legacy of what works and not just being more of the same, what are you in the dialectic of what your work is expressing?

Marketing-wise I've focused on selling it as upmarket fiction that's pop enough and done in the same style as GoT to appeal to entry-level, younger audiences, but still solidly and definitively literary, so that it appeals to core audiences as well.

It's far too late to actually change the content, since this is how it was actually written; and in practicality, it's either going to be adopted by intellectuals or lose any core credibility in mass appeal, a la LOTR. Should I drop the upmarket sell and focus on presenting it as solely a pop fiction work, or even trying to sell it as exclusive litfic? God, I wish self-publishing was halfway viable.

you're not an artist

Yeah I agree, you've been trying to sell it as fitting every bill and a publisher is going to see that as fitting none. Focus on a single solid angle is the way.
How to decide which angle will come down to yourself, if you feel comfortable being able to sell it as literary or pop they each have their own marketability and saturation

Yeah, I'm a writer. I wrote this book for three reasons: because I wanted to express ideals and philosophies, because I wanted to tell a powerful story, and because I want to not starve. If I can't get published, I can't do any of those. I'm willing to make superficial changes or write a new marketing strategy to accomplish these.

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. I suppose I can't really blame them for wanting narrow strategies, with all the terrible books that get produced. Still, it kind of hurts to switch out an honest strategy for a focused one.

you're pathetic and everything wrong with modern writing

is correct. You're pathetic if you twist your writing to make it 'appeal' to a certain audience so you can make money. What ever happened to art for arts sake

I write 'art for art's sake' for literary magazines. This is a novel, which I'm writing to be shown to as large of an audience as possible, both for it's sake and my own. Take the cock out of your ears and consider for a moment the reason why no major, powerful intellectual work has surfaced in a truly modern environment is because the promoters of 'actual art' are people like you. I intend to write a successful work, and I intend for it to be genuinely intellectual. The day I start whining about how mediocrity and failure is the only true style of art, or that you can only hold an intelligent ideology if it's completely unknown and uninformed is the day I fucking hang myself.

>he says posting an image of a sculpture which was specifically tailored to the demands of the artists patron

You're the sham, if you believe the boundaries of audience demand prohibit greatness then you're a mediocre hack

>I write 'art for art's sake' for literary magazines.
Didn't you JUST say you were unpublished?

Yes. Unpublished as in I have not published an individual work. I have written articles before, but I haven't put a full-length work in a literary magazine, if that's what you're asking. I'm considering writing up some ideas in that shorter format, though.

You're writing about dragons and swords, you have nothing to say.
No one is going to give a fuck about your uninspired, watered down philosophies, so you should just stick to writing a good story.
And what the fuck did you think packaging fantasy shit as 'literary'? Quite literally the worst move you could've made. Everyone knows it's not high art, except you, so not only do you come off as a snobby douche, but you also have no self-awareness, which would imply your book would be suffering from the same thing.

If you have published shit in a lit mag that counts on your CV, family

Are you retarded? I'm not writing fantasy. Do you seriously think all fiction is fantasy? What the hell do you think The Brothers Kazamarov is, you slack-jawed idiot?
Technicalities

Aha, excuse me, all i saw was GoT and LOTR and my mind went blank.
>Technicalities
It helps.

>an entire genre cannot be high art because I don't like it
>literary fiction can only be pseudointellectual postmodern emperor's clothes works that circlejerk about man's pointlessness
>a bunch of shitty authors making bad fantasy works means that it's literally impossible to include literary concepts in fantasy

kys

I stand by the first and third, yeah.

Yeah, I was talking about the stylistic appeal of GoT as an example of marketing for entry-level popfic readers, not as in 'GoT clone'. Vivid characters, wide cast, unafraid of taking drastic directive turns, 'thriller'-ish aspects. The piece isn't fantasy or fantastical.

Fantasy (read: genre fic) is plagued with cliches, and so inherently watered down.
And while it can have literary qualities, for example muh deconstructionism, it will never be literary. The second it frees itself from its cliches, it becomes original, and not genre fic.

So to be literary fiction a piece must be modernistic and free of all genre conventions? Does that mean that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is popfic? What about Dune? Hell, Candide?

That is not what i'm saying, but yes to all of those.

Minus candide, obviously

Candide follows genre convention practically to the letter and is a century and a half too early for modernism; it wasn't even modernistic for its own time, really. What makes it different from something like Dune? Hell, Dune actually is a modernistic piece, so it'd be closer to literary fiction than Candide.

Also, does that make foundational books like Lord of the Rings literary fiction, because they don't follow genre convention? Or since other books emulated their conventions to create genres, do they later become pop fiction from literary?

The foundation that tolkien laid is grossly exaggerated.
But the biggest problem is that they don't deal with the human condition. But obviously the foundemental works would be the most literary, if not actually literary fic.

What precludes fantasy works from speaking on the human condition? Who's to say even the cliched, basic hero's journey of an elf and dwarf going to fight a dragon isn't an exploration of the human experience being formed through struggle, and that ambition and self-improvement are the basis of what the human condition actually is? Or if you'd like an extra dollop of pretension, that the hoarding dragon is a greed-filled industrial class taking spoils from innocent villagers and the adventurers represent the will of the people?

Also, there is a big difference between following literary tradition and having a checklist of archetypes, tropes and cliches you have to go through to call it [genre]

Nothing is to say they can't do it, they just don't. Atleast not in any meaningful and/or artful way.

Then how could you dismiss a theoretical fantasy novel that claims to be literary fiction as meaningless pop fiction without reading it?

Because it was set up with GoT and LOTR, which means it's genre trash.

Why can't you write without cliches then

You dismissed the artful element btw

I'm not the OP of this thread but you made an assumption about that too when it wasn't even fantasy

No i would give a lit fic book with fantasy elements a shot, for sure.
It's just that generally with fantasy, there comes a whole slew of shit with it.

I thought that was what you were refering to, pardon me

writing for an audience is just a parameter. it doesnt prohibit you from producing art.

your mistake is believing that any productive endeavour is not about solving a problem. in the realm of artistic expression as a career, the problem being solved is an unmet demand for entertainment.

you have a really immature self centred approach to art and probably believe that your own writing hasnt been published simply because you're too good and nobody understands you.

>Yeah, I haven't published anything before and I have no contacts in the industry whatsoever
Why would you say that when it's not true? You refer in this very thread to published authors reading your work and to being published in literary magazines.

How many rejection letters from agents and publishers have you collected so far? Most publishers talk about a 1% acceptance rate, so by the time you are working on your 100th proposal, you are probably nearing success, if math is on your side.

>three-five hundred dollars to get into the 'conference' schmoozing?

I think PUA marketing is brilliant. The questions they start with are commedy gold to me. "Are you a sexually frustrated dude? Do you feel that you lacks the natural confidence and success required to be sexual attractive to attractive women?"

"Do you think your life should be more a porno where hot, tight, clean, semi-slut shows up at your fully-furnished, single-occupancy dwelling you bang that shit like a boss, despite this rarely or ever actually happening?"

"In our 3 day long seminar, we will get you in a room with a bunch of dudes who are fall into a few general categories: the generally unsuccessful, those with long work hours, and the physically and/or socially repulsive. All groups share vaguely misogynistic attitudes, and most importantly, paid us $375 to be in the company of to our experts (lmao)"

"Then, after listening to our one or two ramble on about their own philosophy of living, and attitudes toward approaching and having conversations with actual women, with the intention of getting better at scoring."

"Weekends over, you got nothing else done, good luck in your scoring."

Relatedly, you risk finding yourself in a room co-genger group of the these groups: underemployed because 'muh wratin'', barely able to write due to family and work obligations,
unpublished "aspiring" writers, bottom-feeding bloggers, those with unreadable ebooks ($.99* lol). These groups often overlap.

*Amazon, for example, takes .30%. leaving a potential author with $.69 per copy or 10,000 copies sold to clear $6,900 pre-tax.

an industry contact doesn't mean 'someone involved in or good at writing in any way' user

>I wish self-publishing was halfway viable

This is a meme of the the lazy and shills for big, antiquated publishing. Self publishing offers writers the largest margins, and the largest internet audience the writer can build. Big publisher's promise only one half of this deal, and are valued because they can be convinced to _loan_ a small portion of their substantial distribution base and marketing/promotional capital to the author, and grant an air of legitimacy to the author.

In the meantime, your name is not out there, no one is even reading your book, and you ain't getting paid. And you wait. And you wait. And you start to re-write. And then you over-wrote it. And then you start something new, and then you write another publisher submission, and no one is reading that either, and so on and so on. (sniffs)

Every anecdote of actual success by internet-published authors I have ever heard is awesome. Especially if you get a real editor and real artist and real graphic design for your goddamn cover. Then, after $1k or $5k in self-sales, who shows up on bended knee? Publishers.

Don't get in the way of your own success, bud.

How does one get self-published books into physical stores at all? Or into featured spots on e-publishing websites like Amazon?

>self-published books i
>physical stores

That is the crucial difference. Big media (take from that what you will) controls the book stores, although indy stores are more willing to work with self/indy publishing.

The goal of e-publishiung can be to gain contract with big store distribution, but that does require a deal with big distributer (often tied to big publishing, but not necessarily.)

a big part is about self promotion as well. there are bunch of self-published authors, one in particular atm I was looking at who wrote a whole book about bouncing a golfball. then there was some big lie about it making you smarter. but really the book is just, practice bouncing a golfball on the end of different things. he's been mentioned across a number of different websites, loads of youtube videos from satisfied customers who have also learnt to bounce balls.

I agree 100%
>the largest internet audience the writer can build
was a little oblique.

>featured spots
you pay money. its that simple. you pay someone in the business, whos job is to have loads of contacts to promote you. you can pay for fake articles at reputable news outlets like the guardian which are "sponsored" articles ie ads disguised as news. you can pay for google ad rankings, you can pay for ebay ad rankings, you pay extra to have your shit at the top of the search results.

Without contacts, who the hell do you pay? And where am I supposed to get this money from?

there are companies who specialize in marketting. the whole point of a marketting company is that you can just walk in the door and they set up an advertising plan for you and you just pay the money. send an email to google adsense to ask them how much to place ads and adjust the search ranking of your book. the way it works is that say someone searches for a science fiction novel set on uranus, they will be looking for something in particular but your book keeps popping up in their results so they get interested, mistakenly believing that they have discovered something good when its just guerilla marketting and search manipulation.

I make art for red bubble and it blows my mind that people buy my shit, i just wanted a shirt for myself and it was the cheapest way to print an image with transparencies but i make 5 bux a week just by people searching for a t-shirt. so in that sense, you can publish your own stuff quite easily and get the marketting bundled with the self-publishing.

>book keeps popping up in their results so they get interested, mistakenly believing that they have discovered something good when its just guerilla marketting and search manipulation.

Pretty much this. Actual reviews are a different story, but these are largely determined by actual eyes in books. WIth is determined by exposure through regular marketing and word of mouth.

most people cant tell the difference between fake and real reviews anyway. the fake reviews are cleverly crafted to check off boxes in peoples heads.

it relies on the economy of decision making. people arnt going to spend hours deconstructing reviews for a 5$ book. they're just going to see a couple of 5 star reviews and accept it.

Write better books.