After finishing your first book, don’t immediately set off down the road looking for a publisher. Put the book aside for a few months and forget about it. When you read through it again later you will undoubtedly see changes that you wish to make.
Publishers as a rule don’t like meeting with people they don’t know, so get a list of suitable agents (specialising in your area of written work) and send them a brief précis of the book together with the first few chapters. If they like what you’ve written, they will send it out to publishers that are most likely to accept your work. If you’ve gotten this far, you have yourself an agent who will negotiate on your behalf; and hopefully a publisher.
It is very important not to give up hope. As I described earlier, it is like a musician trying to get established – there are a lot of ‘knock-backs’ in the early stages. If you are very unlucky (for whatever reason), you may even have to do a full or partial rewrite of your work.
In this age of the internet, the budding author can also choose to go it alone and publish his or her work online. Allowing the reader to download the first chapter of a novel for example and then pay to download the completed works, is a way for the author to be completely in control of his destiny. This obviously has it’s pro’s and con’s in that although you have access to a world-wide market, you have the additional task of creating your online presence and position in the writers world. It’s not much use to have your work online if nobody knows it’s there!!
Publishers as a rule don’t like meeting with people they don’t know, so get a list of suitable agents (specialising in your area of written work) and send them a brief précis of the book together with the first few chapters. If they like what you’ve written, they will send it out to publishers that are most likely to accept your work. If you’ve gotten this far, you have yourself an agent who will negotiate on your behalf; and hopefully a publisher.
It is very important not to give up hope. As I described earlier, it is like a musician trying to get established – there are a lot of ‘knock-backs’ in the early stages. If you are very unlucky (for whatever reason), you may even have to do a full or partial rewrite of your work.
In this age of the internet, the budding author can also choose to go it alone and publish his or her work online. Allowing the reader to download the first chapter of a novel for example and then pay to download the completed works, is a way for the author to be completely in control of his destiny. This obviously has it’s pro’s and con’s in that although you have access to a world-wide market, you have the additional task of creating your online presence and position in the writers world. It’s not much use to have your work online if nobody knows it’s there!!