Post by account_disabled on Dec 30, 2023 6:03:22 GMT 2
Having a novel ready is a great achievement. Months, in my case years, of writing and rethinking, of revisions and corrections. But a written and finished novel is not a book, it is nothing yet, because it is only a manuscript. And a manuscript cannot be sold. The author must now look for a publishing house . He must select some of them and choose the one he deems most appropriate, "ideal", for his novel. I'm talking about publishing houses, because I have no intention, as I already wrote some time ago, of self-publishing. But in the end the medium changes little, the self-publishing author will still have to look for an editor and a graphic designer.
Sending a manuscript to a publishing house, we all know, does not guarantee publication. In 2012 I sent my first blogging manuscript to a couple of publishers, but they never Special Data responded. And that manuscript remained “gathering dust” on my hard drive. 350,000 words that I will probably never use. Publishing fiction is much more difficult than non-fiction. The biggest problem, I think, is managing to publish the first novel, but it doesn't mean that the road will be easier. If you change literary genre, in my opinion, you have to start all over again, also because you might be forced to change publisher and I'm not sure that previous novels make a CV. The new author, the author who presents himself to a publishing house, encounters a series of problems, one more difficult to solve than the other.
The “new author” label A new author represents a risk for a publisher. And if the new author decides to self-publish, it still represents a risk for the reader. If the publisher has to choose between an already published author (therefore already with his own target audience) and a new author, what will he do? He will bet on the safe side: on the author who has already published. That of "new author" is a difficult label to shake off. Nobody likes recruits. When Pinco Pallino's first novel comes out, the question comes out spontaneously: "And who is this?". It's not difficult for me to imagine a publisher asking that same question upon receiving (yet another) manuscript.
Sending a manuscript to a publishing house, we all know, does not guarantee publication. In 2012 I sent my first blogging manuscript to a couple of publishers, but they never Special Data responded. And that manuscript remained “gathering dust” on my hard drive. 350,000 words that I will probably never use. Publishing fiction is much more difficult than non-fiction. The biggest problem, I think, is managing to publish the first novel, but it doesn't mean that the road will be easier. If you change literary genre, in my opinion, you have to start all over again, also because you might be forced to change publisher and I'm not sure that previous novels make a CV. The new author, the author who presents himself to a publishing house, encounters a series of problems, one more difficult to solve than the other.
The “new author” label A new author represents a risk for a publisher. And if the new author decides to self-publish, it still represents a risk for the reader. If the publisher has to choose between an already published author (therefore already with his own target audience) and a new author, what will he do? He will bet on the safe side: on the author who has already published. That of "new author" is a difficult label to shake off. Nobody likes recruits. When Pinco Pallino's first novel comes out, the question comes out spontaneously: "And who is this?". It's not difficult for me to imagine a publisher asking that same question upon receiving (yet another) manuscript.