#publishing reference

Written by a professional authors’ agent, this is an extremely useful guidebook for anyone considering pursuing trad publishing. If you’ve been querying agents and publishers and got nowhere - or worse, got only offers from vanity pubs - and are beginning to despair, you could do a lot worse than sit down with this book and work through Kracht’s recommendations.

I have to admit I’m not entirely sold on the alphabetical arrangement of the book. I think it’s been chosen because Kracht takes a holistic approach - the whole thing has to be right, so it doesn’t really matter what order you do things - but I think it could be arranged in a more linear and logical way. In particular, I think the advice pertaining to fiction and non-fiction needed to be separated out and grouped together better, because the alphabetical arrangement muddled it all up.

There is some superb advice here that’s not all about the actual writing - things like the necessity of therapy while writing difficult memoirs - and many more excellent nuggets of wisdom under the various topics. Kracht is a professional of many years experience who knows what makes a great read and, more importantly here, what will make publishers sit up and reach for their checkbooks. While there is no One True Formula for success, what there are is a bunch of largely unwritten rules you have to follow, or you’ve got no hope of landing an agent or a trad pub deal. Kracht has put in the effort to set out those rules here for you. Follow them and you’ll massively boost your chances.

Of course, if you don't want to follow the rules, you might well decide to pursue self-publishing, and you could do very well at it. In general, though, the principles of ‘write a story people want to read and make sure it’s well-edited’ are always going to stand you in good stead.

I would strongly recommend this to any author with their heart set on pursuing traditional publishing, who hasn’t managed to land an agent or a deal yet. Take the time to work through every section and you should find some steps you can take to improve your work or your pitch, and just maybe land that dream agent or deal.

Four stars, mainly because I don’t think the alphabetical arrangement was the best way to communicate the information, but it’s an extremely useful reference book.

The Author's Checklist is available now.

Oh goodness, thank you! Here’s what I wrote about fanfic v com fic:

So I'm doing this thing where I'm trying to toe both worlds here. I'm an established fanfic author, but I have a number of non-fanfic stories/novels in the works right now, and while I'm writing them, I'm doing research on the wide world of "publishable" content. Dozens of blogs, agents, editors, established writers; I'm combing through it all on the daily to figure out what the hell the difference is.

And, after spending the past, oh, three years reading pretty much exclusively fanfic or non-fiction biography/memoir (after having spent the prior decades reading commercial fiction), I see a very distinct comraderie, so to speak, between fanfic and modern biography/memoir in that both genres tend to be focused on the development of characters and character relationships, whereas commercial fiction is almost entirely plot-driven.

In other words, fanfic and memoir are both set up to be specifically (generally-speaking) about the growth of the main character. I'm having trouble getting into the commercial fiction I've been reading, though, because it's plot-laden and heavy. I find myself being unable to be tied to a given story because the lens to that story is flat and uninteresting.

But I also see a change occurring. Speculative fiction mags/publishers are *begging* for "character-driven" stories, with "relateable, dynamic characters." There's this constant push for good characters over complicated plots. Agents and editors are more and more frequently combing through fanfic because it's so much more engaging than a lot of the stories they get. It seems like the world of publishing is finicky about this kind of thing, but every question I see posed to every literary agent is usually answered with, "Just make me turn the page."

My point is that I'm seeing perhaps a shift in the world of publishing. The divides between the publishing industry, the indie publishing industry, self-publishing, and fanfic are growing thinner and thinner. And I find that very exciting.