Thursday 27 October 2011

The 'Click' Moment

"Don't...don't you want me?" - Don't You Want Me - The Human League

So today I was reading the PW Daily e-mail from September 30th, because as a result of exciting things happening in my professional life, which hopefully I will able to share soon, I am almost a month behind on reading publishing trade news, and I refuse to just delete it and start over again, and I came across the following quote: "It’s such a distinct moment (for me, at least) that I can almost always pinpoint the moment—down to the page number—I felt it happen. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: page 94. Michael Lewis's Boomerang, out on Monday: page 6 (yes, really). Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: page 32 (see our interview with Touré below). Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories: still waiting."

The PW editor writing the article was discussing at what point he felt a book was really going to be a great one. What's most interesting for me is the point at which that happened in each book. Page 6. Page 32. Page 94. Page 6 an aspiring author might get from an agent or an editor, if their mechanics are sound. Page 32? Page 94? Not likely.

What to do with this information I'm not yet entirely sure. It seems to speak loudly in favor of not putting too much stock in the traditional publishing process, but traditional publishing has a lot more going for it than a lot of people think. As I exhaust my stock of friends and family readers for Soulwoven: Exodus, I'm discovering that there is, in fact, a point at which what I need is not so much people who can tell me "I don't like this," which I then translate into "This thing I was trying did not work for this person," but someone who can say "You're trying to do this, and it's not working. Here's why."

The only way I know to find such a person is the traditional submissions process, because it's the only time I'm aware of you can get a professional to read your entire manuscript without paying them for it ahead of time (sure, you pay them a lot afterwards, but by that time you should already have a pretty darn good idea of what exactly you're paying for, in the form of the "So, what direction do you see the book needing to move in?" conversation you ought to have before you sign anything).

Also, I've been writing short stories. I think they're turning out splendidly. They will be out on submission soon, which will likely mean the end of this blog and the inauguration of a new one. Sneak preview available at The Real Jeff Seymour. Check out that beard!