Postcards From Across the Pond

As the new year rolls in, I am keen to adopt my new persona (this is NOT a New Year’s Resolution!) as a non-smoker with his self-publishing habit behind him. But it’s getting off to a rocky start.

First off, as you know, I am still smoking and shall continue to do so until my current supply is gone. While I briefly considered giving the cigars away, I realized that putting them aside for health reasons, then foisting them onto someone else so they could ruin their health, would not be considered a kindness. And, of course, dumping them would be wasteful, so there is nothing for it but to smoke them all and quit once they’re gone. It’s not that I want to, but I have no choice.

It’s the same with my self-publishing habit. While I can easily quit slapping my books up on Amazon, I have a grandson who really likes to see his work in print, so having finally finished The Exodus Connection, I was able to devote some time to his latest work and get it up on Amazon for him.

But then I set about trying to find a publisher or agent for Finding Rachel Davenport. Having touched on this activity for The Talisman, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. If you compiled a list of ten publishers, seven would be vanity presses passing themselves off as legitimate publishers, so I spent an inordinate amount of time distilling a list of 100 bona fide publishers.

I had fewer difficulties distilling a list of possible agents because I have never seen a vanity press agent trying to pass for a real agent. On the other hand, I have yet to find an agent who did me any good. I have, believe it or not, had three agents over the course of my career, and not one of them did me a blind bit of good.

My first publication was down to my Internet (and now real) friend, Toni Hargis, who gave me a tip about a likely publisher. My second publication was down to a conversation with world-renowned keynote speaker, business strategist, and author (thanks Wikipedia) Felix Riley, who told me to ditch my current agent, who was doing nothing but avoiding answering my emails, and take hold of my own career. And my most recent (hopeful) publication was due to my son inviting me to ComiCon in NYC. (In any number of parallel universes, the odds of finding me in NYC at ComiCon are very low indeed, yet there I was, and there was a publisher interested in my series. Go figure.)

I therefore did not expect my next publication adventure to be any less convoluted. However, from the list of 100 possible publishers I distilled:

• 30 would not accept un-agented submissions
• 7 published only Art and/or Architecture
• 9 were YA publishers
• 2 published cookbooks
• 1 published only environmental fiction, whatever that is
• 15 published non-fiction
• 5 published literary (READ: highbrow) and LGBTQ+ (READ: not me) fiction
• 1 published poetry
• 4 were religious publications
• 2 were romance publishers
• 4 published only SciFi and/or Horror and/or erotica
• 2 were so bizarre I couldn’t figure out WTF they wanted
• And 18 were viable prospects

Of those:

• 3 had invalid URLs
• 2, after further investigation, turned out to be irrelevant
• 9 had stopped accepting submissions (And of those, one put me through hoops, asking for a bio, pitch, synopsis, and a cover letter, which took hours to prepare, only to raise an error when I clicked SUBMIT telling me they were no longer accepting submissions.)
• 1 only accepted agented submissions despite saying they had open submissions
• And 3 accepted my manuscript

Time to get comfy and wait, for up to six months, for responses.

I’m not going to pretend I accepted this with any sort of equanimity. It took days, and generated a great deal of frustration, but now that it’s over I realize I couldn’t have expected anything less.

Now it’s on to the agents. I don’t expect that to be as soul-destroying, having every reason to believe I will end up with a positive response. I do not, however, expect that to do me a lot of good.

So, roll on 2026; the adventure continues.