I remember when I had actually made the decision to go traditional a few years ago. Yes, the prospect of dealing with rejections from literary agents and then publishers was not something I looked forward to, but I honestly did not see a future in self-publishing if novel writing was what I wanted as a career.
But then, as I was prepping my query letters to start sending out to agents again, I was feeling excited. I knew I had a quality story and I felt my letter was much tighter and to the point compared to my last attempt at this. But then I remembered one big issue that would turn off any potential publisher or agent, no matter the caliber of my manuscript. My word count was way too high.
That deflated me quite a bit. Now I decided to re-edit my first novel to trim it down, but my fear was that if my first novel was cut down to meet the traditional world’s stringent word count limit, that would totally gut my novel. Not only that, they’d probably only accept my work if i sold them the rights. Which will NEVER happen.
But now that I am going the self-publishing route again through e-books primarily, it made me excited again for the possibilities of doing what I love full-time. I honestly cannot wait to share my novels with readers through this new format, but at the same time know that I am not compromising the vision I have for my work in any way just to get published.
I read about what happened to the writer of “The Vampire Diaries” novels and I am appalled. But I also see it as a cautionary tale for any aspiring author who would do anything to get published, which includes giving up the rights to their work.
Anyway, I’ve just finished the first two chapters of the new project I’m working on. Now that I’m really into it, it should be interesting to see how quickly I can complete the project with the word count constraint I’ve placed on it!
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