January 19, 2006

Mosey on up to the bar

Since I was considering self-publishing and I still had no clear idea how good the story was, I decided to get the opinions of some people who enjoyed the type of story I wanted to tell. So, a couple of days ago, I went over the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup and posted there asking if there were any volunteers to read the first few chapters of my story 🙂 Of course, this is something that I should have done a long time ago. It’s just that I’ve never had much luck getting most of my friends to read a word and so I decided not to bother and go straight to submitting to agents. I had hoped that they’d tell me if the story was no good but that was before I learnt the sad truth – most agents rejected my novel without even reading it :p The few who did read it (three) said nothing bad about the novel itself but rather that they weren’t the right person to represent it.

Laurie says that agents are going to be honest with you and so will not try to be considerate about your feelings or about dashing your hopes and dreams :p So, I was kind of thinking that perhaps my writing wasn’t utterly awful but I still had no idea if it would sell. Now, I’m not out to make a million bucks (wouldn’t say if I did mind you :p) but I do want to have enough people interested in the novel if I’m going to write a second one. Otherwise, why bother? The story is in my head already and I could do infinite variations on it for ever enjoying how it all unfolds :p But I digress ..

I posted to alt.fan.pratchett (AFP) and the people over there were very kind 🙂 Some wanted to read the novel and some pointed out that perhaps I should be trying publishers instead of agents. I had not tried publishers mostly because I didn’t think anybody wanted submissions via e-mail. Sending out three chapters (which comes to about 50 pages in my case) via the post comes to a pretty hefty fee over here and I didn’t actually want to go to all that expense on mere speculation :p But kind person in AFP told me that I should submit to Baen Books and pointed me in the direction of their website. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only did Baen Books accept electronics submissions, they actually encouraged it! Then I discovered Baen’s Bar and my happiness was complete 🙂 Here was a web forum where a lot of my favourite authors appeared to hang out and they also had a nice and friendly atmosphere where you could discuss books, what more could you want? So, looks as if I’ll be hanging out at the bar a bit and if you are of a mind, you should come on over too – it’s a friendly place and they don’t bite .. except for the bears at the bar :p

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Posted by Fahim at 8:48 am  |  No Comments