The Long Road to Publication

By Andy (Red)Smith


The end is nigh. The end of the long road to publication, that is. Breaking the Lore will be published on April 15th, and I will have reached my destination. I’m officially listed on Canelo’s website as one of their authors, I’ve seen the book on pre-order on Amazon, and I’m still pinching myself. So this is the last of these articles that I’ll be writing. (What do you mean “Hoorah!”?!)

Having got Breaking the Lore off to the publishers for them to do all their stuff (whatever that entails, as I said last time), I’ve spent the last few months writing a sequel at breakneck pace. I’m very grateful to have a great bunch of folks in South Manchester Writers’ Workshop who have offered comments and critiques, and generally helped to keep me on track. The sequel should be out in July (and might even have a name by then.) At the moment it is in the editing stage, prior to it going off to the publishers. Then I might have a break!

Getting to this point has been a long and sometimes rocky road. I’m very grateful to the WWJ team for their support along the way. If I could offer any advice to would-be authors travelling the same road it would be: Keep writing the novel that you want to write. Make it as good as you can. Hope for a bit of luck along the way. And, most of all, keep going. Writing a novel is big undertaking, even if you’re only doing it one word at a time. As the ancient Chinese proverb says: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Unless you go by car. And somebody carries you from your house to the car. And from your bed to the front door.” (Luckily enough, the ancient Chinese had a very good marketing team who refined the proverb a tad.)

So what next for me? Sell 14 million copies and retire to The Bahamas? Probably not. But you never know…..

Thanks for listening and best of luck in all of your endeavours.

Andy

(Breaking the Lore will be published on Kindle, Kobo, etc. from April 15^th. Under my pen-name Andy Redsmith. Available on Amazon for pre-order now!)

Message from the Words with JAM team: We couldn't be happier to see Andy's First Page Winner emerge as a complete novel, with a sequel in the pipeline. Love that cover! Many thanks to Andy for sharing his journey and we encourage everyone to discover Inspector Paris and Breaking the Lore. Good luck, Andy, and please come back once in a while to share your successes. Cheers! 

The Long Road to Publication: Part 7

by Andy Smith

SO: I’ve recovered from the shock of getting a publishing contract. What happens next? Two things.

Photo by Alex Loup on Unsplash

First, my completed novel ‘Breaking the Lore’ disappears into the publisher’s offices for copy editing, proof reading and various other processes. What these are, I don’t know. There seems to be lot involved in turning “finished manuscript” into “book ready for publication”, and I have no idea what mysterious practices go on to make that happen. (I’m sure the WWJ folks could explain it, if they wanted a suggestion for another article?) Anyway, all I know is it seems to take longer than you would imagine!

Now, being sensible and fair, I know there’s more to it than that. My book is just one of many being published by Canelo, and it has to be fitted into a suitable slot in the overall schedule. The time of the proofreaders, editors, cover designers, etc. has to be allocated to work on lots of different titles. I do know that, and I do appreciate that there are a lot of things which have to be done - but I still want to see it available! Unfortunately, I’ve got to wait until April.

Second, I need something to keep me occupied until then. As I said last time, I’ve signed a two-book contract with Canelo. The idea is that book 2 (with working title very subtly not mentioned) will be out next summer. Before that, however, I’ve got to write it. So I’m working what feels like 24X7 on doing so. I’d started on a sequel some time back, although very slowly. At the time I was more concerned with getting somebody to take on the first one. Now that they have done, I’ve got no more excuses. Crack on.
 

Photo by Wadi Lissa on Unsplash

So far it’s going reasonably well (I think), but the next few months will probably be a bit hectic. If I had to give myself some advice I would say: work on the assumption that the first book will (eventually) be taken on, and get moving on the second one earlier than I have done.

Fingers crossed that both books do well (I’ll hopefully confirm publication dates next time.) However, if they do, then book 3 will probably need to be written 25X7! For now though it’s time to have a break for Christmas.

Until next time, Merry Humbug.

The Long Road to Publication - Part 6

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By Andy Smith

Hello!

By Gum, it’s been a while since we had one of these, isn’t it? The good folks at WWJ have been running their creative writing workshops over the summer, so they asked me to hold off doing any more Long Road stuff until they’d finished. And I did. So what’s been happening since last time? Well, quite a lot actually…

Let’s rewind a bit. Back in April I was getting nowhere, with lots of letters out to agents and publishers and lots of ‘no thanks’ in reply. I was, to be honest, getting close to chucking the whole thing in. I’d also gone through the process of trying to work out if my entire submission was wrong, and had asked the WWJ Clinic to dissect my cover letter and synopsis. I got some great feedback from the Clinic (as discussed in LRTP part 5 in May.) I started looking at re-writing the cover letter and synopsis, based on this feedback. 

Then, out of the blue, I had three replies which weren’t ‘no thanks’. An agent and two independent publishers all said they’d enjoyed my submission and asked me to send the full manuscript. Next thing you know, I’m in discussions about who to sign up with. In other words: I GOT A PUBLISHING DEAL!!!!!

Congrats to Andy from the team at WWJ!

To be more precise, I signed a two-book contract with Canelo Digital Publishing (https://www.canelo.co/), for Breaking the Lore and the currently-in-progress sequel. I think the word I’m looking for (still) is “gobsmacked”. Breaking the Lore will be available in Spring 2019 and book 2 will follow in the Summer. 

 

You might remember from previous posts that I’ve talked about the need for a pseudonym, since ‘Andy Smith’ is not exactly a memorable name. Consequently, both books (and maybe more?) will come out under the name of ‘Andy Redsmith.’ (A redsmith is someone who works with copper, and I’m a Smith working with A copper - geddit?) You can find Andy Redsmith on Facebook, AndyRedsmith (no space) on Twitter and “his” website http://www.andyredsmith.com/. On all of them there’s a photo of me, but they’re not bad apart from that.

So what does all this mean in regards to what I’m writing here? Two things.

First: I’ve spoken in previous posts about how I thought my submission was OK, provided it got to people who were interested in the sort of thing I was writing, but I thought I’d missed my chance with all of them. Turns out I hadn’t. Perseverance paid off. So everyone: don’t give up. Keep going.

Second: the three replies who showed an interest all came before I’d had chance to rewrite my cover letter and synopsis, i.e. before I had chance to include the suggestions from the WWJ Clinic. The advice from the Clinic was very good and would doubtless have given me a better shot if I had to carry on submitting, but I didn’t need to use it. That, basically, is luck. BUT make sure your submission is as good as possible, so that when your lucky break comes around you are in the best possible position to make use of it.

If the WWJ folks will let me, I’ll keep posting things on here to keep you updated on release dates etc. The long road to publication has turned out to be a long and hard road, and we haven’t reached the end yet. But I’m on the way. I hope I’ll see you there!

Andy

Photo by Alasdair Elmes on Unsplash