Writing Decisions
So I’ve made a decision. After studying the market a bit, I think that the new project I’m working on, The Immortals, will probably be a lot more marketable than Dawn’s Rise. Therefore, I’ve decided to concentrate on Dawn’s Rise through the end of this month, get the query letter, synopsis, and partial in as many hands as I can, and then come June, focus all my efforts on banging out a first draft of The Immortals. Even though The Immortals is actually a SF novel, it contains enough fantasy-type elements to put in more in that genre. No dragons but lots of other stuff.
This weekend I went to my first (not including NaNoWriMo write-ins) writer’s group meetup, and met a few local authors. I sent my partial to a couple people who were interested in critiquing it. There are a couple other meetup groups I may attend over the next few weeks. I’m trying to see which groups best fit my current state of development. The one I attended was a Speculative Fiction group, which they assured me was definitely NOT Science Fiction. I’ve posted in the past how I feel that Sci-Fi is dead, although I’ve found a few authors lately that may change my opinion of that. Stay tuned.
In other news, I had a pretty interesting weekend. Saturday was our 10th Anniversary. Since my lack of income at the moment, we decided against doing anything grand except for a fancy-schmancy dinner. It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years. We had the same weather we had for our wedding: torrential rain and wind. And we had an outdoor ceremony! Fortunately they put up a tent. Yesterday I went to a Mariners game that lasted 15 innings/5 hours. The exciting part (aside from the 15th inning bloop RBI single) was that for the first time in about 15 years of going to games, I caught a fly ball! I’ve had plenty of chances over the years, and yesterday all that patience paid off. Noah wants to go play with the ball at a park but I’m like—no way.
So this week I’m focused on getting feedback and preparing to send stuff to agents. I’m going to run through the rest of Dawn’s Rise and try to reduce the word count by at least 20K words, going from 145K to 125K. I think it will sell much better as a smaller work. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Let me know if you’re interested in doing a critique, I’d love all the feedback I can get right now!
Isn't it great when you have a new idea you can't wait to put down on paper?? (or a hard drive at least...hehe)
ReplyDeleteGlad you are already on to the next novel!
I have been worried about SciFi too. It seems most of the SciFi's are being sold through smaller companies and I've been hard pressed finding an agent that actually sells SciFi (sure they "represent" it, but I haven't seen a lot of sells that to me scream "success"). I'm being optimistic though! It's funny...I actually think Fantasy does better than SciFi. ;) But that is just one laywoman's opinion.
One thing we discussed at the writers meetup was that SciFi has pretty much been mainstreamed into Action/Adventure or high-tech Thriller. I think there's still a market for it. Of course, not much of *any* genre is selling well right now except for well-established authors. I agree with your assessment that the small publishers are probably the way to go.
ReplyDeleteI was reading Jenny Rappaport's blog because she sells SciFi right up my alley. But the deals she was getting were "Nice Deals" according to Publisher's Marketplace for several books. A "Nice Deal" is anything from $1 to $49,999.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong I would LOVE to have a book deal for $30k. But if that is for a whole series AND she's a well established agent, it makes me worried that I would get no where NEAR that. Plus after taxes and marketing/PR there would probably be nothing left to pay bills...lol.
What kind of deal do you get for a dollar?? I'd rather just post my stuff up here...
ReplyDeleteTeehehe. Not a very good one.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, I sent you an email and also posted a comment on my blog which then I deleted (after sendin the email). My sister still responded to the original comment.
Well it's all confusing but read the email first and then you'll get it. lol. My sister's comment is correct though.
Have you thought about putting Dawn's Rise up on Authonomy? That would give you a pool of potential critiquers. And supposedly the editors from Harper Collins look at the books. I'd do it, but I don't have any works that aren't contracted at the moment.
ReplyDeleteGMTA :)
ReplyDeleteI just posted it up on Authonomy.
I was going to mention that in my next blog. That site seems like like a giant ass-kissing arena that I'm not sure I have the time to deal with. I'm registered as Iapetus999 (that's with an i, NOT Lapetus999)
You can see Dawn's Rise here:
http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=8708
It's only the first 40 pages or so. I'll post more about it on Friday.