Shadows of the Apt

With that suitably insect-bound quote, on to pillage: The perils of publishing parasites (2)   This is actually a serious bit, somewhat more suited to arousing anger than cavalier treatment of arthropods by the BBC or genre snobbery. Basically: be warned.   You have sent out your book chapters to all and sundry. The road has […]

You can submit direct to publishers, it’s true. In fact publishers may at first seem the more approachable. There are generally more of them, and they are more likely to be open for business as far as unsolicited manuscripts go. A lot of agents you talk to will tell you that they are, at that time, […]

This is probably well known, almost certainly self-evident, but nonetheless…   Do not send the entire manuscript to people unless they’ve asked for it.   After all, the people who form the first line of defence against unsolicited authors, the publishing industry’s immune system, are busy. They have an awful lot of stuff come in to […]

There are a lot of people out there who come under the general umbrella of publishing. Most of them will, be you the greatest writer in the world, have no interest whatsoever in your book. This may sound obvious. When you send off to Pig-focused Publishing Ltd and they write back saying, “Thank you for your epic […]

A lot of people submit books to publishers. A lot of people (albeit, I suspect, a smaller number) submit books to agents. There are a lot of us monkeys in the world, and a surprising number have typewriters. Many of the manuscripts that arrive, still sticky with the residue of bananas, are, in various definitions of the word, unprintable (1). […]

So, you write your book. In fact I wrote my first a considerable amount of time ago, while at school, and it was, frankly, not up to snuff. This is not something you tell a teenager who has just come into that idealistic and self-righteous phase that breeds brief generations of hippies, Marxists and environmentalists, whose ideas, fiercely-held […]