A blog post by Mark Coker CEO of Smashwords.
Mark has written a very interesting article on his blog about agents entering into the eBook world. You will find a link to the article on the right of this blog under the title MY BLOG LIST, Smashwords.
I might be shooting myself in the foot for the future by saying this, but I don’t have a very good opinion of the publishing industry. In fact I have written a free to download, from Smashwords, eBook on the subject:-
It is called Most New Authors get a raw deal from the Traditional Publishing Industry
I believe that unless you are an established author or so called “celebrity” you have very little or no chance of being selected for publication. Have a look at the interview with Alex Shaw, a number one kindle best seller with his novel Hetman. An interested party pulled the plug when the recession hit, not wanting to risk taking on a new writer despite his Kindle success.
After you have gone to the effort and expence of submitting three or four chapters of your work, a synopsis and a covering letter, I believe the least that an agent or publisher should do is spend two or three minutes with a very short critique of your work to perhaps lead you in the right direction, instead of sending out a standard reply, or worse still nothing at all.
Having said all that, if I was offered a good deal by someone from the publishing industry I probably would go for it. Hypocritical I know, but at least I’m an honest hypocrite, and as Mark Coker says “I know a lot of good writers, who’ve made bad business decisions.”
At the end of the day this is business!
No comments:
Post a Comment