Would you buy a print edition of Faerie Blood?
| December 14, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood |
So, Carina Press has said no on Faerie Blood. This leaves before me the question of what to do with it next, and at this point, I have three problems with this novel when it comes to pitching it in the current market:
- There are already a whole lot of urban fantasy novels out there;
- I’m not romance-y enough for the paranormal romance end of the spectrum, read, I have no sex in this novel, and there’s barely any kissing;
- I’m also not dark/gritty/apocalyptic enough for the urban fantasy end of the spectrum. There’s not much actual violence in this book, and my heroine isn’t a badass, she’s a fiddle-playing geek who only just finds out about her fey heritage and the magic she’s inherited from her mother–she doesn’t have much time in the story to actually do anything seriously badassed with it.
Given these things, I am extremely dubious about my ability to pitch the novel to any further big pubs or agents. For one thing, I’ve already pitched it to most of the big pubs, with the exception of DAW, and the main reason I haven’t sent it to them at this point is my aforementioned wariness of the current urban fantasy market. For another thing, I’ve also already pitched it to the agents in which I’m actively interested. Part of me is still nagging that the couple dozen agents I’ve pitched it to isn’t enough work on pitching it–but on the other hand, a lot of the agents out there seem to have gotten slammed with so many queries now that their slush piles are crazytalk and their response times have accordingly increased dramatically. There are some agents whose response time has gotten to be over a year, and that’s assuming you get back a response at all.
So given all this, I’m seriously tempted to go the self-pub route with Faerie Blood and any further related stories, and focus other energies on newer things to be pitched to the big pubs.
My question for you therefore, O Internets, is this: if I were to do a limited run of print copies of Faerie Blood, would you buy one? I’m thinking about it because there are two Espresso book machines right here in Seattle, and one of them is right down the hill from my house at Third Place Books. I have two books (by other people) that are the output of this machine, and while it had trouble with the thicker one which is over 500 pages, the shorter one, which is comparable to Faerie Blood in length, is not badly assembled at all. If I were to get new, cover-quality art for the novel, it’s conceivable that I could therefore do a small set of print copies.
So I’m putting hard thought into this. I am looking at Third Place’s posted rates for their printing services, and pondering the possibility of doing a Kickstarter to raise the money.
Talk to me, Internets. Would you be interested? Because if I get enough people going hell yeah, I will move forward with this.
ETA: It has now been suggested to me on Google+ that I should consider a Kickstarter not for Faerie Blood specifically, but rather, for finishing Book 2, Bone Walker–and offering print copies of Faerie Blood as a potential incentive! I like this idea quite a bit and am going to be thinking about it very hard. If any of you out there would like this too, I really want to know about it!
Hi Angela,
From what I’ve heard, the most successful self-published authors are those that release a great deal of content for lower prices. So for example, instead of releasing one book for $7.99, the most successful authors have, say, five books, the first of which is priced at $0.99 and the remaining of which are $2.99 each. Note that I have no experience in the matter, nor have I looked into self-publishing a book – but it does sound like an interesting phenomenon.
One question – if you chose not to go the self-published route and instead focused on the larger publishing houses, would it be more difficult to publish a book that has been previously published? From what I understand about publishing, once your book is “out there” already (re: if you share it with the world in one way or another) it becomes much harder to publish. But I may be wrong about this?
All the best to you with your writing and publishing.
Well, here’s the thing: I have a few books I’m actively working on. One of them is Faerie Blood, the one that’s already been published. I can’t really effectively take it back to the big publishing houses–i.e., the ones that are capable of getting books into brick-and-mortar bookstores. I’ve already queried it to most of them, and they turned me down before. That was why I ultimately went with Drollerie to get the book at least electronically published and out there.
Now that Faerie Blood has already been out there, though, that does mean that it’s already been published. So yes, that would be a concern to many publishing houses, because they’re generally only interested in books that they can have first publishing rights to.
I’m also working on Faerie Blood‘s first sequel, Bone Walker, but it would be difficult to pitch that book to the big pubs because it’s Book 2 of a series–and again, they’ve already turned down Book 1. There could be exceptions to this, but they’d generally be only if I’d sold enough copies of Faerie Blood before to convince them that it’d be worth their time. And I didn’t. I had only a few hundred sales at most.
All of this is pretty much why I’m considering going self-pub with Faerie Blood and its two planned sequels.
But, and this is important: I’m only considering this for these specific books. This doesn’t mean I’m considering self-pub in general for everything I write, not yet. I’m also working on Lament of the Dove, and THAT has not been sold yet, nor has it been queried extensively to the big publishing houses. So it’s still a potential viable sale.