Solipsistic Meanderings

January 20, 2006

Directions

As I’ve indicated here previously, I’m trying to get my first novel "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" published. I’ve been trying agents but after querying about 60-70 agents, only 3 even responded with something like "let’s see your work". All the others either said that they weren’t interested without seeing one word of the novel itself or didn’t respond at all 🙂

I was thinking of the self-publishing route but then realized that I’d be spending a lot of money without actually knowing if my book was any good. (A few people have pointed out that it doesn’t cost much to publish through Lulu or Diggory but the fact is, to do things the way I want, it would cost at least $150 or more and while that is not a lot of money in the US, here, that’s Rs. 15,000 and some people don’t even earn that much in a month here!) Since Laurie was about the only person who’d read it all the way through, I decided to ask a few other people what they thought of the novel first, to figure out if it was even worth publishing.

My friend Nige, after reading it, responded that it was good but that it needed work and suggested that I get an editor. I looked around for editors and found that the good ones cost $850 upwards. That’s more than five times the cost I’d estimated for just publishing the book via PoD! So looks as if an editor is out of the question for the moment :p There are a few other people I’m waiting on to see what they say since so far, all I’ve gotten have been opinions of people who know me. I want the opinions of people who don’t know me 🙂 But while waiting for that, I decided to sit down and take stock of things and decide how I wanted to proceed.

I’ve often said that I don’t want to start on the next novel without first putting this one to bed. But then again, that’s mostly because I’m that kind of person :p I am very impatient and can’t sit still for something to happen – instead, I have to be up and doing stuff and making things happen and when I don’t see something happen, I get even more impatient. However, I also realize that the world doesn’t move at my pace or my whims (I don’t know why it doesn’t though, it should darn it! :p)

As I mentioned yesterday, I am looking into submitting to Baen Books and since their electronic submission process apparently takes about a year or more, if I were to sit around waiting for something to happen, I’d probably kill myself just for the sake of having something to do :p So, I decided to sit down and re-assess things and come up with a new plan of attack. Getting an editor was out of the question for the moment and while Nige gave me enough to do another edit, I didn’t want to start another edit till I’d gotten more feedback. However, I did want to go ahead with submitting to Baen books soon since it would take about a year for the process to complete. So, it seemed about the only thing I could do was to submit to Baen, wait for comments from the people who are critting the book at the moment and integrate their suggestions into the next edit but at the same time, start working on the next novel to stop myself from driving me crazy :p So, I started work on my next novel, "Basement of the Universe" last night … but more about that tomorrow since this post is getting way too long and I need to go do some writing 🙂