K. Marvin Bruce

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 co...

Both in my position as erstwhile professor and in my true vocation as a writer, I have come to realize that understanding the publishing world is essential to becoming a published writer.  Those of us write because we “can do no other,” but if we want to be read we have to play the game. There are hundreds of publishers out there.  The internet has led to a proliferation of presses, mostly small and of limited distribution.  They can easily get your book on Amazon, but with millions of books already there, getting it noticed is difficult. Once upon a time there were a couple dozen major publishers.  They have been bought out by one another until now there are only the “Big Five,” until recently the “Big Six”: Random House (which recently acquired Penguin, one of the six), Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon and Schuster.  You cannot get published by any of the big five without an agent. Smaller, independent publishing houses (Indies) will ...