The Polish Edit is Finished

Time for celebration? After years of writing, I have a novel that I feel comfortable sending to agents and / or publishers. It feels good to have a complete manuscript, though after years of writing and editing, now I have to do something new. Market. Oh boy.

I've been working on a query letter for some time now. A query letter is basically a one page blind sales pitch. You have 300 words to sell your 120,000 word novel. Go! I think I have a pretty firm handle on the letter. Now I'm going to work on translating my working outline (with choice quotes) into a synopsis. I'm not exactly sure what a synopsis is. There seems to be some ambiguity. I'm assuming its a synopsis (and not an outline or whatever).

I'm not starting from scratch on the synopsis, I have the outline to work from, but I have to distill a lot of information. Ugh. I've had to remind myself to focus. We'll see.

I have a list of potential agents - taken from Novel and Short Story Writer's Market. I'm going to look at their websites and narrow them down to a short list of five to send out the query letters to. Depending on the feedback I get, I'll rework the pitch and send out to others. It is exciting to think that I might have an agent in the near future.

thegiantbook.com

For more than a year, thegiantbook.com has been a blog site. As of Janruary 25th, 2009 it is a multi page site. Previously the blog/documentary looked very much like a blog that you might see anywhere.

I have found new software that allows me to customize the look of the blog to make it look less like I'm talking about my favorite movie stars or other nonsense. Hopefully this will lend a little more credibility to things and make it look a little more serious.

The website also allows people to read snippits from the book and maybe even add a little mystery to the book.

I want to add more to the site, namely artwork. I have some conceptual sketches that need some more work before they go up. I'd like to add some initial drafts of the work - a few select passages.

Once the book is published, I want to add a section for people that own the book, using a password taken from the book so they can access select information. Cool stuff, not sure what that would be yet.

More about myspace.com

I wrote in the previous post about myspace.com. You may be slightly confused reading the rest of this post, if you have not read the Myspace post.

While adding friends to my myspace account I have come across many authors, some, it seems, trying to do just what I am attempting. Clearly, nothing I am doing is original, and thus not as likely to succeed. If I was in the first group of people to use myspace as a marketing tool, I may have more success. But now there is so much there to overwhelm a person.

OR, if I was an established person, I could come onto myspace and promote myself with pretty good success. If Stephen King wrote his newest book and choose to promote it exclusively on myspace, he would undoubatly sell a large number of books.

The site is a big enough venue that word can spread quickly. But, if you’re like me, still hoping one day to rise up enough to be included in the masses of the also-rans, why would anyone talk about me or my project? My best hope is to enlist my myspace friends who know me in real life to distribute information to their friends - who would ideally be interested and send it on to their friends.

My other friends on myspace don’t know me in real life and would certainly be less compelled to read what I have to offer. I assume this because I do the same thing. I have quite a few author friends who send me notices of new projects. I’d like to check them out, but I rarely do (for a number of reasons). So how am I to convince near strangers to even take a look at a sample of the book? I’m not sure yet, but hope to have it figured out when this book starts to near a realized published state.

Myspace 2

I wrote in the previous post about the myspace.com. You may be slightly confused reading the rest of this post, if you have not read the Myspace post.

While adding friends to my myspace account I have come across many authors, some, it seems, trying to do just what I am attempting. Clearly, nothing I am doing is original, and thus not as likely to succeed. If I was in the first group of people to use myspace as a marketing tool, I may have more success.

OR, if I was an established person, I could come onto myspace and promote myself with pretty good success. If Stephen King wrote his newest book and choose to promote it exclusively on myspace, he would undoubatly sell a large number of books.

The site is a big enough venue that word can spread quickly on there. But, if you’re like me, still hoping one day to rise up enough to be included in the masses of the also-rans, why would anyone talk about me or my project?

Firstly, I must produce a quality product. Because, even if I convince some people to check out the GIANT, and it sucks, they’re certainly not going to spread any positive word.

After I have produced a quality work product I have to reach out to enough people with a creative message to convince them to give the book a shot.

In other words, I have to figure out how to do what so many people can not do. It’s certainly a long shot. Though, if I could get a complete stranger to say that they read the book and liked it? That would be great.

Myspace

Sometime last year I started a myspace account to get my name into the credits of movie. Myspace is a site where any person can make their own page to describe themselves. The page must fit into myspace’s general format, but there is room for creativity. Each person can view other’s pages, and request to be their friends. Upon approval, that other person becomes your internet friend.

Initially I added people I knew personally, along with the random famous person. But after a while, it occured to me that I could build a network of people who might be interested in purchasing the book. I started adding libraries and bookstores. I looked up publishing houses and other authors. Individual books have their own pages as well.

To search for potential readers, I did general searches. However, I found that when searching for “book” or “reader” I most often found people that claimed to “not be a big book reader”.

Fortunately there were people before me that had overcome this problem. Other authors, publishers, and their books. Now I just search out similar books in genre to the GIANT and look at their friends. I go to those people’s pages and if I think they might enjoy the GIANT, I request to add them as a friend.

Everyday I try to request 20 friends or so. Hopefully by the time of publishing I could have a few thousand. Then I could notify them that the book is coming out.

The notification will be in the form of a bulletin, which is distributed to all of my myspace friends. A certain percentage will read the bulletin. A percentage of those people will follow direction to this website (which in the future will be retooled to be a marketing machine). A percentage of those website visitors might be interested enough to purchase the book. At least, I hope the myspace thing might generate a little word of mouth.

The great thing about myspace is that it’s free. So when this book fails to sell more than a dozen copies, the bulk of the marketing will be free.

“What is the book about?”

was talking to a friend who asked me that question the other day. Here’s how I answered it:

Me: It’s a fiction book.

Her: About what?

Me: [hmm? what is it about?] It’s about the end of the world, and a couple people that try to save things.

Her: So, its a religious thing?

Me: No. [Clearly I’m not explaining this well] No. There’s some religious themes interwoven I guess, but nothing that is strictly religious.

I had previously started to sketch out the little blurbs and taglines, and I have written every word of the thing so far, but couldn’t come up with anything better than that. My first chance to get some buzz going (albeit a tiny little baby buzz) and I blew it.

The truth is, the book is still evolving somewhat. Every time I write another chunk or two of it, I get some new ideas about the thing. I think I’m pretty well set on the plot lines and major events, now I just need to figure out how to describe this thing–which I’m close to having a few sentences that aren’t the written equivalent of my first attempt at kissing a girl (read: awkward and life-scaring).

I do have a couple of good taglines though. I will save them until the book is a little closer to being published and distributed. Plus, I do need to be a solid two drafts into the thing to make sure that everything is solidified. I figure after the second draft is complete, there won’t be anymore major plot shifts.