To query, or not to query?
Dec. 2nd, 2016 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkOne thing that I've been wary of is the fact that some agents who are open to/looking for LGBTQ books...end up submitting those books to ebook imprints/small publishers that allow for unagented submissions anyway.
See, that's not a situation I want to end up in, because if I'm allowed to submit directly to a small/indie/ebook publisher, then I will, because I wouldn't want anything to minimize the royalty rate I'd get. (Admittedly, I don't know if agents in that situation would negotiate a contract so that the author still retains the same royalty rates, or what.)
The only benefit I can see is if, for example, I land an agent that could talk Riptide Publishing into taking my book, given Riptide's strange limitation on non-contemporary books to under 80k words (strange, because I'd think that spec fic novels are what really demand a higher word limit, given that worldbuilding tends to take up significant space. I'm a pretty concise spec fic writer who limits my world explanations to the bare minimum in favor of immersion, and yet my manuscript still broke 80k words).
But the thing is, when it comes to small/indie/ebook pubs, I'd just gun for whichever one tends to have the highest sales, and that's not something I can determine easily just from public information. For example, I see that Riptide tends to engage in fairly aggressive advertising, setting up blog tours for all of their new releases and getting Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus reviews, whereas Dreamspinner doesn't. But then again Dreamspinner is really well known, so maybe Dreamspinner books sell decently even without that kind of marketing campagin? Or does it all just come down to the quality of the book—Ninestar Press is fairly new and small, and yet Tal Bauer's Executive Office series seems to have done pretty well based largely on good reviews/word of mouth, I think??
And what about ebook-first imprints of traditional publishers? The ones I've seen recently are Carina Press (Harlequin), Lyrical Press (Kensington), and SMP Swerve (St. Martin's). They say they're LGBTQ friendly, but I still wonder how their sales are relative to DSP or Riptide, and some of them have small LGBTQ sections.
I think, in the end, I'll probably stick to submitting to Dreamspinner, just because they sell both e-books and paperbacks from their site (I really really want a physical copy of my book), and the option of audiobooks and foreign language translations if your book sells well, I think. (I'd really love an audiobook of my book, just because that's the only way my mom will ever find out what my book is about, ha.)
SIGH. Moral of the story is: it's hard to figure out what to do when you've written a genre-bending manuscript that you believe is good, but have no idea how to sell.
See, that's not a situation I want to end up in, because if I'm allowed to submit directly to a small/indie/ebook publisher, then I will, because I wouldn't want anything to minimize the royalty rate I'd get. (Admittedly, I don't know if agents in that situation would negotiate a contract so that the author still retains the same royalty rates, or what.)
The only benefit I can see is if, for example, I land an agent that could talk Riptide Publishing into taking my book, given Riptide's strange limitation on non-contemporary books to under 80k words (strange, because I'd think that spec fic novels are what really demand a higher word limit, given that worldbuilding tends to take up significant space. I'm a pretty concise spec fic writer who limits my world explanations to the bare minimum in favor of immersion, and yet my manuscript still broke 80k words).
But the thing is, when it comes to small/indie/ebook pubs, I'd just gun for whichever one tends to have the highest sales, and that's not something I can determine easily just from public information. For example, I see that Riptide tends to engage in fairly aggressive advertising, setting up blog tours for all of their new releases and getting Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus reviews, whereas Dreamspinner doesn't. But then again Dreamspinner is really well known, so maybe Dreamspinner books sell decently even without that kind of marketing campagin? Or does it all just come down to the quality of the book—Ninestar Press is fairly new and small, and yet Tal Bauer's Executive Office series seems to have done pretty well based largely on good reviews/word of mouth, I think??
And what about ebook-first imprints of traditional publishers? The ones I've seen recently are Carina Press (Harlequin), Lyrical Press (Kensington), and SMP Swerve (St. Martin's). They say they're LGBTQ friendly, but I still wonder how their sales are relative to DSP or Riptide, and some of them have small LGBTQ sections.
I think, in the end, I'll probably stick to submitting to Dreamspinner, just because they sell both e-books and paperbacks from their site (I really really want a physical copy of my book), and the option of audiobooks and foreign language translations if your book sells well, I think. (I'd really love an audiobook of my book, just because that's the only way my mom will ever find out what my book is about, ha.)
SIGH. Moral of the story is: it's hard to figure out what to do when you've written a genre-bending manuscript that you believe is good, but have no idea how to sell.
