Books Are Magic: Pet Peeves of the Publishing Industry?

Tuesday, 23 April 2013

Pet Peeves of the Publishing Industry?

- Guest Post by Daniel Black

Oh you have no idea, lol, where to begin.

Let’s see, well right off the bat what comes to mind is one of the basic submission guidelines you will find with almost any publishing house or agent. They have discovered through hours of research at least, that books that have an action sequence within the first twenty five pages sell better than books without an action sequence within the first twenty five pages. So they will not even consider submissions, unless they have an action sequence within the first twenty five pages. This results in such wonderful plot twists as say… a fight breaking out in a lunch line… or the scene I remember so well because of how little sense it made to the story, the gas line.

So next time you read a book, and think, “well that fight was random,” now you know, it was just there because an idiot in New York thought it should be.

What next… hmnnn…

Oh yes, the current method of finding a publisher or agent. You send off piles of submission letters, one at a time, to hundreds of different agents, waiting as much as three months between submissions. You thought the slow production of books was due to writers being lazy? Not even close. As an aside, you can send multiple submission letters off at the same time by simply mentioning the magic phrase, “multiple submissions,” that makes your manuscript disappear into a trash can upon opening.

What else…

The contracts! Writers read, we read a lot; in fact most of us got our start in writing by being compulsive readers. But these contracts! My goodness, you need a lawyer just to decipher the terms, and an author usually has a very good vocabulary, after all, words are our lifeblood.

So my response?

I am an independent eBook author, and I will remain so until an agent or publisher comes to me. This makes it so if I decide it is appropriate for my character to swear, he or she can swear without a publisher breathing down my neck about keeping it “PC.” If there is a spot in my book where I think it would make sense for a sex scene, it can be there; I have complete artistic freedom, and am thus able to write for my readers, what I hope to be a better book.