PUBLISHING FISSURE
aka
CREVICE
There are more and more ways to publish a book these days. Even in the days when the most common way to publish was with a traditional publisher, which I'll get to in a minute, there were many famous authors who chose to self-publish. Among some of the most well-known are Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Stephen King, and Beatrix Potter. There are many reasons for self-publishing; maybe most salient is that the author who self-publishes has complete control over her book, including profits. Publishing Fissure: A Life Between Cultures here on my blog is a form of self-publishing.
Hybrid publishing is a relatively new option for an author. With hybrid publishing the costs involved are shared by the author and the publisher. The publisher then takes on the tasks involved in the process and pays royalties that are higher than the usual 10-15% paid by traditional publishers. Hybrid publishers are selective about what they choose to publish, unlike self-publishing services. My second book, To Drink from the Silver Cup, was published by a hybrid publisher, and I chose that route because of the length of time usually involved in scoring a traditional publisher. Because the Supreme Court had just decided in favor of same-sex marriage, and my book was about the intersectionality of religion and sexuality, I felt that the wait that could be involved in getting a traditional publisher would detract from the timeliness of the book.
My first book, Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living was published by Clarion, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin, a traditional publisher. Traditional publishers cover all the expenses of publishing, and, if you're lucky, some of the costs of marketing. They offer an advance on royalties, and when the advance has been met by sales, begin to send periodic royalty checks. By the time I received the very exciting acceptance phone call from my editor at Clarion, I had submitted forty query letters and a few proposals to literary agents and publishers of YA books. Forty queries and several proposals and the wait, can mount up to months or years before getting a publishing contract.
But back to Fissure, which I've renamed Crevice: A Life Between Worlds. I've considered many publishing options, including only blogging the book, as I've been doing, although I kept feeling that the book needs to reach a wider audience. To my surprise, it was the very popular novel, Lessons in Chemistry, that led me to the decision to go the traditional route. I was surprised because before I read it, most who touted the book described it as comedy. Lessons in Chemistry certainly had me laughing hard and often, but it is so much more than comedy. I was inspired by the main character who, despite multiple misogynistic obstacles and abuse, would not give up on her professional identity and goals as a chemist. She inspired the same in thousands of other women––not as chemists but in fulfilling their own dreams. As I neared the end of the book, I knew, although I hadn't been thinking about Crevice in this context until then, that I needed to value the book enough to go the traditional publishing route with it.
One way I've already been pursuing traditional publishing is by entering contests that can result in book publication. I have entered two and keep my eye out all the time for more. The other, much more time- and energy-consuming is to query publishers that don't require literary agents and whose publication interests fit with what Crevice is. That's the first part––identifying appropriate publishers. The next step is to develop and send a query letter––preferably just a single page to pique the interest of said publishers, so they want to see a proposal.
Sometimes the publishers have very specific things they want in a proposal. But there are also certain sections that are common to most. These include an overview or description of the book, an annotated table of contents, the author's unique qualifications to write the book and her publication history, the competition (books that are similar, thus showing that there is a market for your book, and why/how your book is also different, thus meeting an unmet need), the target audience, marketing strategies, how you already have a platform that supports those strategies, and sample pages/chapters. I haven't written these in any particular order here. You can probably see from this list why writing a book proposal is not a favorite task of mine, and there are some areas that comprise weaknesses, especially as I'm no longer on social media. Everything (in a nutshell) you never wanted to know about getting a book published.
My intention, with the online chapters of Crevice, as I've mentioned already, is to remove them from my website, once I start submitting the proposal, which could be in two to three weeks. So another reminder––if you have catching up to do, now is a good time to start doing so. After the proposal is in, it can take months or years to hear anything––positive or negative. Wish me well!