Friends, save yourself a bunch of time: days, months (in my case years!) of flailing in the direction of getting your novel published. Fogetabout what you read somewhere on the web, what your English professor claims, or what your friend who just got published said. This stuff is all wrong. Usually. Enough, already, of rumor and wandering around! Let’s get your bad self published.
You start by reading Larry Brooks’s brand new book called, yes, Get Your Bad Self Published. He’ll sit you down, metaphorically give you a nice cup of tea or a stiff drink depending on the time of day and say in a soothing voice, “You haven’t got a clue!” Then he’ll splash you in the face with the peculiar, unfair, illogical, and ultimately heartening way that you can get published.
I ain’t going to summarize it here, because the Brooks book is a summary: a clear, no-nonsense, cogently argued manifesto on how to get your writing up to par and hook an agent and then a publisher. It has lovely details in the appendix. The body of the book will quickly teach you what only insiders know — some of which I didn’t even know. (So I guess it isn’t enough to be an insider; you also, like Brooks, need to have seen the whole game from myriad marketing viewpoints, sold a bunch of novels based on pitches, combed the agent hierarchy, and gained insights from screenwriting, the premier skill of our media-mad age.)
Comments