I had the Mondrian cake on my Facebook page the other day, but here's a much fuller account by the cake's creator Caitlin Freeman of the art cake enterprise...
If you find yourself in Chelsea, make sure to go and see Julian Hoeber's amazing and truly queasiness-inducing gravitational mystery spot!
A charming link whose tab I haven't been able to bring myself to close. (Courtesy of B.)
Taught my first class yesterday, got another first class meeting on Monday and then things are really properly underway; in the meantime I've mostly just been having a pretty quiet week and gearing up mentally for Sunday's big race.
All I could persuade myself to do over the weekend, other than exercise, was reread the selected works of Lee Child!
I have read the early ones too many times already to revisit them again now, but a mere one or two previous reads leaves pleasure still to be leached, so I devoured Without Fail, The Enemy and Bad Luck and Trouble (I especially love the installments that fill in Reacherian backstory). Then I mourned the loss of Dick Francis and the fact that there is only a finite number of books in the Francis and Child canons, and new Reacher installments cannot come fast enough to sate the monster.
Then I read Charlie Stross's The Fuller Memorandum, which I felt was the book already on my Kindle most likely to scratch the Jack Reacher itch (it did, very enjoyably so - not that they are at all similar in tone or style, but Stross's Laundry books, like the Reacher novels, represent the pinnacle of light reading!).
Then I happily realized that Gwenda Bond's Blackwood, a modern-day YA novel about the occult history of the Roanoke disappearance, was now officially published; I loved it, and it was a particular pleasure to read a novel by someone whose blog I've been reading and enjoying since the very early days of literary blogging. It definitely had something of the feel of my favorite Margaret Mahy novel The Changeover; both main characters and geographical settings are especially well rendered.
It is possible that I will revisit the Reacher barrel and dig out a couple more that I can stand to reread....
Showing posts with label first novels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label first novels. Show all posts
Thursday, September 06, 2012
Friday, September 23, 2011
Advice to novelists
I got an email yesterday from a student of a former colleague of mine who is trying to get her first novel published and finding it difficult; she asked me if I'd look at it and give her some advice. This is just an email I wrote off the top of my head, I haven't done any footwork on small presses that will take unagented submissions or the current state of play on electronic self-publishing, but I thought I might post it here in case it is useful to others. If anyone has further advice or details re: any of these options, please feel free to contribute in the comments.
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I really don't have time to look at it, but can give some advice regardless!
There is no doubt it is a very, very hard thing to get a first novel published - I think it is the hardest thing I have ever done, much harder (for me at least) than getting a PhD and really distinctly harder even than getting a tenure-track job in academia, which is also pretty darn hard...
You really have 3 routes available to you, with the first being the most appealing, the second with its own advantages, the third with the least connection to traditional forms of publishing but also a legitimate route in many respects.
(1) Get an agent. Really almost all publishers, barring academic presses and a handful of good indies, want to see agented submissions and are using agents as gatekeepers. This is very difficult, though, when one has not already published! My recommendation: contact assistants of established agents, or young starting-out agents - I think that working with a well-known agent on a first novel is mostly a pipe dream, one would often be better off with their assistant anyway (more time to attend to one's business). In short, target agents under 30 who are building client lists. You should be able to focus your submissions rather than sending at large - acknowledgments pages or author blogs will usually let you make a list of agents who have represented books that you see as being in some important respect like yours (and if you write a cover letter that says "I loved book X, which I see you represented," and book X is a relatively underheralded book by a first-time novelist, it is my guess that this will also catch the young agent's attention and make them more likely to give your material a proper look).
(2) Make a direct approach to the small number of university presses that publish fiction and a select list of indies (again, think about what their lists really are like, don't bother unless there is a good fit between your style of book and what they have been publishing in the last few years).
(3) Explore some of the new forms of self-publishing or what I would call 'assisted self-publishing' that have sprung up in recent years. It really is a different world now: you can self-publish online for instance and build a readership and some online reviews and then use that to make another stab at getting representation and a traditional publishing deal. My friend Richard Nash's Cursor project would be one place to look, but there are a lot of ways to make a decent book (I'm not expert on this, I'm just vaguely recalling names, but Lulu, a couple options at Amazon, a new program called PressBooks, all sorts of other options). I do think that at this point a traditional deal is still more desirable than online self-publication unless you are an exceptionally gifted self-publicist with considerable time to spare - division of labor is a good thing! - and I caution you that if you are teaching full-time and perhaps writing another book, it will be difficult to find the energy to spare to get this one out into the world yourself. Often first books are in fact published second, after the author has written another, more obviously commercial book and gotten it published - which is to say, getting an agent to represent you is not only based on their sense of the quality of your work, it is strongly affected by their sense of what will sell, and that question might have a very different answer if you have already published something else that found a good readership.
Anyway, I hope this is useful, and I wish you all the best.
-----
I really don't have time to look at it, but can give some advice regardless!
There is no doubt it is a very, very hard thing to get a first novel published - I think it is the hardest thing I have ever done, much harder (for me at least) than getting a PhD and really distinctly harder even than getting a tenure-track job in academia, which is also pretty darn hard...
You really have 3 routes available to you, with the first being the most appealing, the second with its own advantages, the third with the least connection to traditional forms of publishing but also a legitimate route in many respects.
(1) Get an agent. Really almost all publishers, barring academic presses and a handful of good indies, want to see agented submissions and are using agents as gatekeepers. This is very difficult, though, when one has not already published! My recommendation: contact assistants of established agents, or young starting-out agents - I think that working with a well-known agent on a first novel is mostly a pipe dream, one would often be better off with their assistant anyway (more time to attend to one's business). In short, target agents under 30 who are building client lists. You should be able to focus your submissions rather than sending at large - acknowledgments pages or author blogs will usually let you make a list of agents who have represented books that you see as being in some important respect like yours (and if you write a cover letter that says "I loved book X, which I see you represented," and book X is a relatively underheralded book by a first-time novelist, it is my guess that this will also catch the young agent's attention and make them more likely to give your material a proper look).
(2) Make a direct approach to the small number of university presses that publish fiction and a select list of indies (again, think about what their lists really are like, don't bother unless there is a good fit between your style of book and what they have been publishing in the last few years).
(3) Explore some of the new forms of self-publishing or what I would call 'assisted self-publishing' that have sprung up in recent years. It really is a different world now: you can self-publish online for instance and build a readership and some online reviews and then use that to make another stab at getting representation and a traditional publishing deal. My friend Richard Nash's Cursor project would be one place to look, but there are a lot of ways to make a decent book (I'm not expert on this, I'm just vaguely recalling names, but Lulu, a couple options at Amazon, a new program called PressBooks, all sorts of other options). I do think that at this point a traditional deal is still more desirable than online self-publication unless you are an exceptionally gifted self-publicist with considerable time to spare - division of labor is a good thing! - and I caution you that if you are teaching full-time and perhaps writing another book, it will be difficult to find the energy to spare to get this one out into the world yourself. Often first books are in fact published second, after the author has written another, more obviously commercial book and gotten it published - which is to say, getting an agent to represent you is not only based on their sense of the quality of your work, it is strongly affected by their sense of what will sell, and that question might have a very different answer if you have already published something else that found a good readership.
Anyway, I hope this is useful, and I wish you all the best.
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