The Dinosaur-Mouse Hybrid - Duncan

So, here I am in my first few days after agreeing to take on the task of managing my wife! Some might say that's a bad idea, but maybe that's a discussion for another time. So, in my spare time I'll be taking on some of the administrative tasks involved with getting her work noticed, and hopefully to the point where it sells. Having started to look into all the tasks that this will involve, I'm beginning to think this is going to be a lot of work. 

My first investigations have been into the whole process of how an author goes about getting published. 
I'm thinking of it along the lines of a start-up business, where we'll have to invest some time, energy, and most likely some money at the outset, but hopefully we'll get that breakthrough at some time down the road.

How long will that be? Will that day come? Who knows, but I've read lots of Alex's work, and I have confidence that she is a great story teller, who in my opinion writes things that are better than a lot of published books that I've read recently, so I'm happy to back her in this quest. 

Do I think her work is great just because I'm her husband? Its possible that I could fall into that trap, but I know I can be objective, as I'm quite happy to tell her when I think something she's written doesn't work for me. It happens, but not too often. 

Anyway, back to the main event, and it seems the first decision to be made is, do we go the traditional route, to try and find and agent to represent us, and then hope that they can pitch and sell our novel to a publisher, or do we go for the 21st century route, and join the self-publishing revolution? Up until a few years ago self-publshing was more often than not vanity publishing, and had a really bad press. However, now with the rise of the e-book, many self-published authors have made it onto the New York Times Best Sellers list. While these are still the outliers, and many self-published authors struggle to get more than a slow trickle of sales, it is definitely an avenue that we'll be actively investigating.

There seem to be pros and cons for each route.

The traditional route: 

Pros:

• Most of the authors anyone's really ever heard of have been published through this route.
  
• This feels like the more legitimate way to say "I'm a published author". 
  
• The publisher will make it into a professionally finished book.
• The book will be professionally edited.
• It gives some early validation  that your work is good enough for someone to be interested in.
  
• Your work will make it into bookshops, as well as e-book format.
  
• You'll have the benefit of a publishing house behind you (how much of a benefit that is remains to be seen).
  
• May get an advance once the book is accepted!

Self Publishing:

Cons:

• It's a long road to get a good, proactive agent, and then a good publisher, with no guarantee that anyone will pick up your work.
• It's therefore likely to be slower than self-publishing.
  
• The publishers leave most of the marketing to the author.
• The author only gets around 20% of the revenue, and an agent also takes a cut.

Pros:

• We retain complete control of the novel
• The author gets a bigger slice of the revenue (60-80%) - albeit on a lower selling price generally
• It'll be much quicker to get the book out there, and available to readers/customers.

Cons:

• There's a lot of self-published books out there - how will we get ours noticed. I see this as the biggest issue.
• Have to stump up the up-front costs for cover design, editing, finding proofreaders, etc.  

So, plenty to muse on there. I'm thinking that the way the timing is likely to go we might be able to hedge our bets. Alex has the first half of the first draft of her book written, and agents and publishers generally want the first three chapters plus a synopsis. Some expect a complete novel, but many don't.

So, maybe the best plan is to polish the early chapters and synopsis, and start sending to agents and publishers to see if we get a bite. With this fishing exercise underway, Alex can finish the first draft of the rest of the book, and the subsequent polishing, proofreading and editing.

In the meantime we can build awareness of the project through various marketing approaches, initially mainly internet based, and try to get a few of Alex's short stories published/entered into competitions/posted as free/low cost samples online. 

If we've had no interest from publishers by the time all this is complete, we'll be well positioned to enter the self-publishing fray, but if an agent and publisher has picked us up by then, we'll try the traditional route. Having read a few other writing blogs, I believe this hedging the bets approach is quite common, and often called the "hybrid" approach.

If you have any thoughts on the pros and cons of these two routes, or any alternative routes that we've not considered, please add comments of e.mail us directly. We're certainly keen to get as much advice as possible.