J. A. Lenay

oy, that's a lotta flags, babe. I'll do red, because it has an emoji.

🚩 they charge you money. whether it's a so-called "reading fee" or "editing fee" or whatever, it should not cost you money to have your query considered or to be repped by an agent. we get paid when we sell your book out of the money you earn from that book -- we don't get a thin dime before that! And publishers, same thing - some publishers have very low advances, or even NO advance, and maybe that's fine -- but if they are making YOU pay, that's a major red flag. (If you are going to pay to be published - why not just SELF-PUBLISH and keep all the profits! What are they doing for you that you couldn't do yourself?)

🚩 the head of the agency/publisher has no tangible experience in publishing. A new agent might just not have sales yet, and that's fine if they are at a good, reputable agency -- but if the head of the agency is inexperienced, it's the blind leading the blind! IMO, somebody without many years of experience either as an agent at a good agency, or at least as an editor or rights person or similar position at a good publisher, should not be starting an agency. Full stop. Same with publishers -- if some random person is starting their own publishing company, I would be very dubious unless they clearly have years (DECADES) of relevant experience. "I just really love books!" is not a business plan.

🚩Their website doesn't list books they have worked on, or all the books look like a third grader designed them. Real agents and publishers LOVE to brag about their authors and books. If somebody is saying they should represent you or you should let them publish your book, but you've never heard of any of the other books they've done, they aren't available in regular bookstores, they look like monstrosities, or you can't find evidence of them at all, that's a problem.

🚩They have reached out to you out of the blue, rather than your querying them. Now, IF you, say, have an amazing instagram account where you post beautiful artwork, it would not be weird for an agent to reach out to say that they admire it and to ask if you have an agent. IF you have a story published in The New Yorker or something like that, or some kind of awesome video go viral that would make a great book, or you just won an olympic gold medal and you have an awesome backstory, it would not be particularly weird for an agent or a publisher to reach out and want to chat about that. THAT is NOT out of the blue, that's contacting you for a reason!

HOWEVER. It's still a pretty slim chance that agents/publishers would reach out even then, and it's vanishingly unlikely that any agent or publisher would reach out to you WITHOUT a reason like that. We just don't sign new authors in that way!

There are a LOT of scam emails going around - I literally get them every day for some reason, and I know my clients do, too, so I am guessing authors who are querying get them just as often! Many of these letters purport to be from real publishers or agencies. HOWEVER, they are clearly AI generated, often full of weird effusive praise and strange turns of phrase, the person's name is often misspelled or is different from the email address, which is often just some random gmail address rather than the real domain of a company, the links don't go where they are supposed to go, ETC. These impersonators want to get money out of you, and I guess it must work some of the time, because they aren't stopping or even slowing down!

.... meanwhile,

Green flags would be like... not doing those things? You know, they are just normal? You look them up, they are real, they obviously work on great books that you have heard of and can buy in the bookstore? They have experience and sales and their website is fine and they don't misspell their own name? They don't ask for money, in fact, they want to give YOU money? THOSE ARE GREEN FLAGS.

They do not offer paperbacks or hardbacks at this time.

But their digital market has the same e-book and audio market reach as D2D/Ingram and allows for library lending. So if you are an indie author who was mostly using D2D for that library access, and for whom the maintenance fees would be prohibitive against your earnings, you can use Kobo for free.

I haven't used it, because I'm not affected by the D2D fees and I didn't want to mess up my market listings by having duplicates, but when I heard about the D2D fees, I started researching so I could hopefully find a free alternative with comparable market reach. And good old Kobo was there.

It allows for the same subscription model as KU, but doesn't enforce an exclusivity clause, so you can still mass sell through the global market and also be hosted in libraries.

I know it seems risky when KU is so established, but Kobo+ subscriptions are increasing quite a bit as even the most stalwart of Kindle fans get sick of Amazon, and my Kobo+ numbers are starting to eclipse Kindle, which is delightful.

The more we as authors push readers to Kobo+, the more freedom we'll have, so I think it's a worthwhile endeavor, for us and them.

I know copperbadge uses Lulu Printing, and while they do have some access to the global distribution market, I don't think it's as wide as either Ingram/D2D. (I also think the global pricing with Lulu is a bit bonkers in comparison, but I haven't looked at it in a while, so it might be different.) And before anyone suggests Lightning Source or whatever, they're owned by Ingram. A lot of print houses people recommend when this comes up are owned by Ingram. They have monopolized a huge chunk of the market, for better or worse. Usually worse.

If you want to get your ISBN's back from Ingram, you need to go through customer support to get your books de-listed. If they fight you over the ISBN's (like they did me) those ISBN's belong to you. You paid for them, they are yours. You are within your rights to use them with a different printer. You just need to get it decoupled from Ingram.

They are starting to limit how many books you can publish with them to combat AI slop.

The new max is 100, which I think includes ebook and paperback and hardback of the same book, so there goes three of your allowed books off the bat.

They do not offer paperbacks or hardbacks at this time.

But their digital market has the same e-book and audio market reach as D2D/Ingram and allows for library lending. So if you are an indie author who was mostly using D2D for that library access, and for whom the maintenance fees would be prohibitive against your earnings, you can use Kobo for free.

I haven't used it, because I'm not affected by the D2D fees and I didn't want to mess up my market listings by having duplicates, but when I heard about the D2D fees, I started researching so I could hopefully find a free alternative with comparable market reach. And good old Kobo was there.

It allows for the same subscription model as KU, but doesn't enforce an exclusivity clause, so you can still mass sell through the global market and also be hosted in libraries.

I know it seems risky when KU is so established, but Kobo+ subscriptions are increasing quite a bit as even the most stalwart of Kindle fans get sick of Amazon, and my Kobo+ numbers are starting to eclipse Kindle, which is delightful.

The more we as authors push readers to Kobo+, the more freedom we'll have, so I think it's a worthwhile endeavor, for us and them.

Sentence length can also be used to convey pacing and the narrator’s thoughts. Short sentences are good for speeding up the pacing and making it feel like everything is happening very quick, like the narrator barely has a moment to process what’s happening before the next thing occurs. Longer sentences, on the other hand, slow down the pacing, and are great for focusing on one particular moment. They’re also good for run-on thoughts, like if a character is spiralling or hyperfixated or trying to rush out as much information as possible without pausing for breath

(What I'm trying to say is, has your writing talent been lying dormant this whole time or was it just your first *professionally published* book?)

oh boy!

so when I was a kid, my favourite author was Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. she wrote her first professional novel at 14, and my thinking was, I needed to do that, because if my fourteenth birthday passed and I hadn't published a book, I'd be an irredeemable failure.

anyway. many years later, after many horrible unfinished novels, and many horrible short stories, and shelves full of books like YOUR FIRST DRAFT and 50 FIRST PAGES, I finally finished a manuscript. and managed to sell it!

I get how from an outside perspective it looks like I just wrote a book on a whim, but in actuality I am standing on a mountain of my own failures. it's just that the heap finally got tall enough for me to actually get anywhere

YES 100%

that's why I got so frustrated when I saw someone say "Greer's risographs are beautiful, but they suck at writing", because it's like....... my illustrations were shit for many, many years before I hit the skill level to illustrate professionally.

and at several points while I was learning how to paint and draw, I had PROFESSORS bluntly tell me "you're not good at this. you're not skilled enough. if people bought a book that included your illustrations, they'd be mad about the quality." and if I'd listened to any of them and stopped, I would've never have reached where I am today, where even the people who dislike me have to begrudgingly admit that I draw good.

black:

multi-colored:

This is because it is fundamentally local to your device. Everything is saved on your device. It CAN also be synced to the cloud (only with Dropbox) but a) these are not naked plaintext files, so they cannot be scraped and b) you still have a local copy so if the servers burn down or are shut down or whatever, you will still have a copy.

Its backups and redundancies are so robust that if I ever have a problem with them it is in the direction of having so many backups that it slows down file loading (fixable by manually deleting them).

When you buy it (for a small initial outlay), you own it. This is so unusual in today's software market that I think it bears explaining: you buy a licence to Scrivener once, and it is yours forever. No subscription. It's like buying a real paper notebook.

It's also purpose-built for longform writing and has a load of features of which I probably use 10%. You could use it exactly like a Word or GDoc if you wanted to. Previously the purpose built bit had been the big selling point for me but in today's environment it's being in complete control of my files.

There is no version of a live online document service that will not be subject to AI scraping in the current climate. If you are serious about writing at all, you should be keeping your files local and transferring them, as necessary, in ways that are at least not the equivalent of printing them in the newspaper.

it's not a stupid question at all! Self publishing and traditional publishing are two different routes towards a similar goal, they both have advantages and disadvantages and it really depends on the author for what they're going for.

Needlessly detailed breakdown of self pub vs trad pub under the cut:

If anything, I'd like to mention the two costs of self-publishing that they left out: 1) an editor and 2) cover art (although maybe they didn't mention this because if they selfpublished, they could do their own coverart lol).

Both of those were my highest costs to self-publish because they required hiring another person for hours of their time. you could just self edit only and use like sites like canva or whatever for the cover and still self-publish, but that wasn't the sort of book i wanted to put out there so i paid accordingly. I never intended to quit my office job or to really make a profit from my book, which is part of why i took the route that gave me the most freedom even if it came with the most costs. I also wanted to publish by the end of the year and self-publish has a much faster timeline.

I'll also confirm that DSM has sold less than a hundred copies because i hate marketing and am not good at it lol. also had to pay to make my little author website, which i definitely need to re-vamp/put more effort into.