The Quest

I spent the last weekend on the quest.  If you’re a struggling writer, you know the quest I mean: the quest for publication.

There are lots of websites to help, but there are even more writers than websites, and getting your voice heard is a matter of trash talk.  Can your work make money?  It doesn’t matter if it’s good (I know, because I read books!), it’s a matter of can it make money.

It used to be independent publishers, fondly called “indies” in the trade, would consider non-agented books.  Have you trawled the listing lately?  Indie after indie, overrun with submissions, now only accept agent queries.

So I ate up a weekend looking for agents again.  Problem is, how do you pitch a book that’s not meant to rake in the millions?  Mine is a fun novel, a provocative read.  It will make people laugh, and it will make people think.  It won’t make them open their bank account to bleed into the publisher’s bucket.

Agents, of course, take a percentage.  If they can’t see at least six figures, they won’t show any interest. It is, in the words of Cutler Beckett, “just good business.”

I suppose this is the fundamental, prototypical divide between the artist and the promoter.  We create because we must create.  What we make may only appeal to others like us.  Writers write for writers.

Readers can be tricked into buying books ghostwritten by famous people.  Authors who don’t write their own books.  Their agents are the ones with winning smiles.  Those who read the books are the losers.

If only the indies would give a good story a chance.  Instead, I’m spending another weekend wooing agents.  I’ve been writing since the Nixon administration.  You’d think that’d count for something.

Ah, but writing my mind has only distracted me from my quest.  If I wish to get more than a dozen readers, I’m going to need an agent.  Or a miracle.  And the two are hard to tell apart.