This seems to be the best board for this kind of question. I've been writing for ages now, released an ebook on Amazon, and have done a crapload of commissions for folks online. I have a full novel planned out and 110K words worth written out
I'd originally planned it as 3 books, and I'm a little over 1/3rd through the full story as I have it planned after about a year. Should I approach an agent with the first "book's" worth and keep working on the rest, or complete the full story and deliver it all at once and probably release it as either a 3-parter or one big book anthology?
doesn't matter, you're not going to get it published either way.
Jaxson Sanchez
duly noted
Nicholas Ramirez
One book at a time. Agents are often turned off by high page counts in general, let alone for an initial work.
Colton Gomez
Focus on self-publishing and marketing. Send your manuscripts to whatever traditional publishers you're interested in, but that will take a LONG time to get word back. Could take years before you're ever traditionally published, so focus on self-publishing. It'll make you money sooner, and if your book is as good as you hope it is, then word will spread naturally and you will continue to earn more and more sales.
Looks at it this way; you're hungry, you need food, but there's no stores or anything. You've spent time making this big elaborate trap that help you in catching BIG prey with lots of meat, but it might take a long time before the prey comes around to get caught. Do you sit there idly waiting? No, go fish, go forage, go hunt for smaller and easier prey. It'll take a lot of work, but it will sustain you until you start getting the BIG game. The BIG game is the traditional publishers. The fish, berries, squirrels, foxes, and so on and so forth are people in the HUGE market for self-published authors. The people who get books and ebooks on Amazon and Kindle.
Ideally, even when you get that BIG prey (traditionally published), you will eat well, but you can still do a bit of fishing, do a bit of hunting, pick a few berries. Especially the berries for vitamin C; don't want scurvy. The ideal situation for an author is to have traditional publishers selling physical copies (which is what they've specialized in for centuries) and to have Kindle/Amazon available for eBooks which they've been dominating in for over a decade now. It's the best of both worlds. So start getting your foot in the door for ebooks on Kindle. If you take off, traditional publishers will come to YOU, but getting manuscripts out there might make you lucky early on. I hear the common minimum of an advance for an author who has been accepted by a traditional publisher is $5000. Enjoy it if you get it! For now, work on self-publishing, some people make over $5000 a month with it. No joke.
Ian Fisher
This. Big books generally are harder to sell and don't make as much money as small books, and it's harder to sell an unknown name than a known one, so a fresh new and unknown author with a big book has a very low chance of being taken. Best to start small. You can try, but you'd have a much better chance with a small book instead of a big one. They also like if you have multiple books, because if they accept your stuff and publish your work, they may very well want more, especially if it sells well.
Zachary Gray
thanks, all. I'll suck things up and try to toss it out there for an agent. a friend of mine got a series of articles published for a book and he understood that they get the whole "don't make money until you make money." Also I read into some publishers and most of them won't even talk to a writer, only through agents who already have the connections
so would I be able to put it on the usual Amazon/Kindle stuff myself and look for the "big time?" Or just focus on striking out on my own and getting recognized via the various forums and such?
also in short, the story's of a girl in fantasy novel world who gets stranded among a tribe of amazons who take her in. big on culture shock, non-traditional families, and very personalized and visceral sensation adventure.
Owen Jones
Before you do anything post a one page length excerpt and I'll let you know if you should bother trying.
Connor Diaz
Yes, you can put it on Amazon/Kindle yourself. I personally use CreateSpace to make paperback available on Amazon, then once available on that, CreateSpace can help you transfer the files to Kindle. I advise contracting your book to KDP Select to. 3-month contracts, automatically renewed unless you cancel it, with KDP Select you can put your book for free for up to 5 days in every 3-month period (helps get the book out there and can aid in getting reviews) or make a Kindle Countdown discount for a week in the US and a week in the UK during these 3-month contract periods. Your book also automatically becomes available on Kindle Unlimited where people can read it for free but you get paid for every page read. About .42 of a US penny per page right now, so I guess about 240 page reads is a single US dollar.
You have full control of the pricing, to an extent. There is a minimum for paperback because of course it costs money for Amazon to print the book so even if YOU don't get any money, they still need money to manufacture the book. The more royalty you make, the bigger cut Amazon will take for their own profit, so if it costs, say, $4 to print the book, and you want $3 in royalty, the price si going to be more than just $7. As for eBook, $0.99 USD is the minimum, and you get 35% royalty then. If you set the book to $2.99 USD or higher then you get 70% royalty and there's where the REAL money is. $2.99 will give you about $2.05 royalty for just one sale. That's pretty huge, and you will not find such royalties via traditional publishing. Since your book is such an epic though, I think it would be understandable if you ratcheted it up to at least $3.99. I know a chick who self-published a fairly big book, and decided to jump straight into $4.99. Got quite a few sales, and so within a couple weeks got like $50 or more. That's VERY rare though, and you should not expect such instant success. Most self-published authors don't make $100 in their first YEAR, let alone $50 in just a couple weeks. Hell, my best so far has been $22 in a 2-day period, and my best month was April which earned me around $50. I've been a self-published author for a cunt-hair over 9 months. So I've been doing this for a decent amount of time, and also since I've already made over $100 and my first year isn't over I'm also doing better than the majority of self-published authors.
Nathan Sullivan
Yea, my first ebook I put out cheap and didn't make enough to get a payout until a year or so later. I gave it out pretty cheap though
