Take a Deep Breath...

I looked through the Bookseller's Buyers Guide for 2008 (what seems like a fairly comprehensive list of titles being published by the major houses in the UK) during some downtime at work today. Naturally, I flipped to the section on Sci-fi and Fantasy.

At first I was encouraged. There were a lot of titles. Not as many as "General Fiction" or even "Sagas, Historical, and Romance," but enough to reassure me that the market was still buying. There were even more "Tolkienesque," and "epic" fantasies than "urban" or "dark" fantasies. I was feeling pretty good.

Then I started looking for titles by new writers.

There are three coming out in hardcover and three coming out in paperback---and that's a generous estimate. The paperbacks may just be new editions of previously published debut hardbacks and one of the hardcover books may not actually be from a new writer.

All of a sudden I wasn't feeling so good. Six titles in a year, at best. Six slots, more or less, to compete for with however many thousand other writers. So I took a deep breath...

And reminded myself that if I can't even produce one of the six best fantasy manuscripts in a year I'm nowhere near good enough to publish my novel anyway, and to do so would be a quick end to a long-awaited career.

Yes, the odds are bad, but if you think about the number of people trying to get published (in the thousands, probably) the difference between six new writers being published and something like ten or twenty (which would have been a huge proportion) is still miniscule statistically. Like <1%. So really the odds aren't any worse than I thought they were, they just look like it ;-p.

In other news, I met with my boss today to talk about publishing, and on Friday I'm going to talk to an assistant editor who recently got an agent for his first novel about how that process worked for him. After some consideration I think I'll lump the wisdom I get from both of them together for one uber-wise blog post. Stay tuned. :-)