Virgin Author Ch 5 She's As Good As I Can Get Her! Now What?

Chapter Five:

She's as good as I can get her!

Now what?

At the time of this writing, despite all my tawdry banter, I’ve actually had the inestimable pleasure of officiating two weddings. Messing around is fun and all, don’t get me wrong, but you can find the right one eventually. Things… click. They work. You find something in someone. Something you never quite could name, but oh how they drive you crazy in all the best ways. There’s something there, and continuing to only date them won't cut it. If you know what I’m talking about, then you can appreciate the analogy. If not, well… you’ll get your day in the sun. Don’t you worry. (I said, don’t worry!) I bring up weddings because they take a lot A LOT of planning. Even if you elope, you still gotta plan the sucker. Even Vegas weddings take some sort of tacit agreement and a trip to a 24-hour chapel. But one way or another, you find yourself at the altar, standing next to your love. The person that makes you glow. The completion of you as a person. The ying to your yang… etc etc ad naseum. You got to where you’re standing at the wedding because your relationship has gotten as good as it can through dating/courtship/arranged marriage alliance. Likewise, with your story, through editing and beta reading and all that other sexy stuff we talked about for two whole stinking chapters, you eventually get to the point where you’re ready. As ready as you can be. What’s next? You propose, of course, dummy. – And then you say I Do (and really mean it, like with witnesses and your mom crying and matching tuxes and everything). Even as I write this, the writing industry is changing. By the time this sits before your eyes, it’ll probably already be slightly outdated (ah hell, let’s be honest, it’s probably already outdated… but it’s something!). Ever since the introduction and rise of self/indie publishing, Amazon, and things like print on demand, the game has irrevocably changed. Once upon a time, there were 10+ Big Publishers. They were the only legitimate way to go big with your book and they knew it. Then, a vicious free-for-all happened: they started buying each other out. When the dust settled, there were basically only 5 left standing. Today, they’re known as “The Big Five” publishers. But there’s good news for you! They’re not your only hope any more, Obi-wan Kenobi. Let me explain… Author Marketing, Choosing Your Own Publishing Route, and Illustrators, Oh My! There’s three major ways to do this thing now. Publish that is. Let’s count them together, shall we? ONE: Traditional

While the Big Five aren’t your only hope, they’re still, you know… kinda a big deal. They’re still the proverbial literary king-makers of the industry. They have deep pockets and a global reach. They have pro marketing teams, they have Hollywood connections, they have fancy high-rises in the sky. Gold and glory await! … but at a price. It’s dangerous to go alone, too. The kitch is that they don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. AKA, if you don’t have a literary agent, take your anonymous ass home. (Don’t worry, we’ll talk more on getting agented later, if this is the route you’d like to go) Attracting an offer from the Big Five is also slow. I mean YEARS in the making. While this is honestly depressing, that’s just how things work when they only take half the year to focus on hundreds of thousands of submitted manuscripts. If your heart is set on this route, you have to keep writing. Keep writing until you have multiple manuscripts in the pipeline. Stephen King said, ‘your best PR is your next book,’ – and let me tell you, from experience just how true it is. Regardless of which publishing path you choose (and you can choose more than one over time – that’s called being a Hybrid Author), keep writing. Unless you wrote To Kill a Mocking Bird (and I’m fairly sure you didn’t, ok), keep writing. Write because you love your story. Write because it’s who you are and it’s what you’d be doing on a cold Tuesday morning in March anyways. TWO: Hybrid

Barring the Big Five, there are plenty of other guys out there with muscle. Plenty of other delicious ladies. Publishers. Publishers, I mean. The biggest thing to watch out for are skeevy vanity presses. Look, you don’t want someone to just tell you Yes, I’ll publish you – but first you gotta pay me a bunch of money. That