by Gene Turnbow | Aug 11, 2025 | On Writing
There was a time when one typed up a manuscript and spent a stupid amount of postage to get it copyrighted, because everything had to be done on paper then. Then you would spend a stupid amount of money on postage again, each time you sent it to a new prospective publisher. Agents weren’t something a writer had, you just sent your query directly to the publisher, and hope that they asked to see more of it. Very frequently that request might hinge on how many short stories you had sold to major trade magazines.
Then you would send your book to the publisher, and hope for the best. Months might go by, during which time you were unable to send the book to anyone else. If you got a deal, you might get a nice advance that would allow you to keep the lights and phone connected and pay for food while you wrote the next one.
None of that is true anymore.
Now the periodicals are gone, and I mean gone gone. There are a few online still, but nothing on paper. It’s not like the old days of Analog, Galaxy, and Worlds of If, when everything was on paper, and people had bookshelves full of them in their homes, as I did. How I loved them! A friend of mine from high school gave me about a hundred or so of them, and I dearly loved each edition, and read them all cover to cover.
But now, there is no bellweather like periodicals to tell a publisher that you’re worth a nod. Well, there sort of is, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
Instead, there are agents, who do the slush pile reading that the publishers used to do. All new writers yearn for representation, because getting an agent is now pretty much the only way into being traditionally published, and the number of available writers compared to the number of agents is badly skewed against us. Getting an agent is roughly like winning the lottery, and it really doesn’t depend on how good you are as a writer.
What does matter is what’s trending right now in the fiction publishing marketplace, and there’s no way to write to the current trend unless you are (a) an insanely fast writer, and (b) can write well enough at that speed to be worth reading. Most people aren’t. Seanan Macquire, Kevin J. Anderson and John Scalzi all are. Alas, I am not John Scalzi, nor do I have his reputation, and in fact few have heard of me as an author or otherwise.
So what’s a newly minted writer to do?
If you decide to forego traditional publishing and just raw dog it, you suddenly find yourself responsible for:
- Designing your own cover, or finding someone who can. There’s no excuse for a bad one. There are people on Fiverr who can help you, at least do that much.
- Designing your own layout, or finding someone who can. There’s a learning curve, but it’s also an art, and the more attention you pay to this the nicer the experience will be for people who bought your book.
- Getting your book professionally edited. You are not getting your book press ready without at least a line editor, preferably a t least a copy editor as well, and sometimes a developmental editor. This typically costs thousands of dollars, so its little wonder that self published books frequently do without some or all of these levels of editing.
- Hitting social media like a spastic bongo player, on all channels, every single day. Every. Single. Day.
- Finding opportunities to promote your book to get review readers, on Goodreads, and StoryOrigin, and Bookfunnel, all of which costs money you probably haven’t got.
- Wading through hundreds of instant messages a week, trying to sort the genuinely interested from the ones trying to sell you author’s services (pro-tip, the radio is 8:1 against).
- Expanding your book’s universe by writing additional stories set in that world, so you can give them away as freebies to help hook people on the idea of buying your book.
And now, here’s the terrible secret
Except for the cover design, interior design and editing, you would have been responsible for everything else if you had been traditionally published anyway.
Only a very rare few are lucky enough to be able to self publish and have all the necessary skills to backfill all of these publishing tasks, plus all the marketing. I’m apparently one of them, and I am white-knuckling this whole process. I am so new that I have no clear idea what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes a video will go viral. Other times, TikTok will decide it simply does not like you.
I wish I could tell you some secret sauce that would make all this pain go away so that your book will sell thousands of copies a year. I can’t. Not only don’t I know how it works, apparently the path is a little different for every single author. The one common thread in every case study I’ve made is that the author had mad technical skills when it comes to making marketing content, and a sort of a bonzai, take no prisoners attitude.
Personally, I am going after this stuff with a warhammer. I just absolutely refuse to admit to myself that I could fail at this, and every day I push myself to see if I can find some new thing I ought to have known should have been working to fix months ago, but didn’t know anything about. It’s a good thing I’m retired, because this is turning out to be a full time job.
And yet, hope survives
And yet I am hopeful. Getting the word out has been ridiculously hard. I have no idea how other authors do it. Other fantasy authors have 60,000 reviews per title on Amazon, and I am not kidding about this at all. I have five, on Goodreads as I write this. But the five I do have are very good quality. What I lack in numbers, I have in sincerity. People who have actually read the book are genuinely happy to have read it, and say so.
There are glimmers of sunshine.
A significant Hollywood production company has requested a copy of the book. They make animated features. I can’t say which one, because I’d look pretty silly in public if it didn’t happen (and it probably won’t, the odds are not in my favor on this).
One Hugo and Nebula award nominated author loves my book, and has said so in public in his review of it. A Hugo grandmaster is reading it now. I’m hoping to get more of these sorts of endorsements.
Keep Moving Forward
And now, there’s nothing left but to keep moving forward.
I have new giveaways in the offing, and you’ll read about them here before I post about them anywhere else.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Gene Turnbow
by Gene Turnbow | Jul 6, 2025 | On Writing
Just a general rant here.
I have NO IDEA whether I know what I’m doing or not, but I think I’m getting a better handle on things.
Will my book succeed?
It just might. It’s a good fun read, at least, and has some heartfelt, poignant moments, the pacing is right, the characters and plot are internally consistent, and I’m told I have a certain lyrical quality to my writing style. The world has a foundation that feels solid.
If those were all that were required for a book to be a success, then hey, the success of Juniper Fairchild is a lock. But that’s not all there is to it. But at least I’m not doing the critically stupid stuff.
I have been reading comments on various author’s channels on YouTube, and you’d be amazed at the ridiculous stuff people say about why their own books aren’t selling.
One fellow wrote a light-hearted romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the massacre at Wounded Knee, threw a ghastly airbrushed cover on it that looked like he was desperately hoping you wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t actually a cover (I could sketch something better in three minutes flat), priced it like it was a Stephen King blockbuster, and then wondered why he was selling only one copy a month. He posted in all sincerity.
I think I have a slight edge.
I also have this radio station on which I can promote my book, and its social media. I think that’ll help too.
And lastly, I have an ad campaign in the works for Instagram, TikTok, BlueSky and Facebook. A lot of authors just don’t have that kind of wizardry in their kit. So, I’m guessing I’ll move the needle a little.
We’ll see.
by Gene Turnbow | May 15, 2025 | On Agents
I’ve started querying agents. This might take a while.
I keep reading about how long it takes to get an agent, and that much of the time “no” doesn’t mean your book is bad, it just means it doesn’t fit the flow of what they’re doing this year.
And, I have to assume that most people who query don’t even know what a query is supposed to look like but submit anyway, i.e., most people who think they’re writers don’t actually have any idea how the game works (and it is a game). That’s got to be skewing the numbers big time.
When I wanted to get into the FX industry, I just went ahead and did it and ignored the people who said how hard it was or that I would never pull it off. The same thing happened when I went into the game industry, and when I wanted to get into UCLA Film School, and when I wanted to work in feature animation. I did all of them. The lesson I learned is that all the horrible statistics take into account the most wildly stupid and self-destructive applicants in each pursuit who never get past the front door.
Screening applicants for positions at the feature animation studio taught me that for each successful hire, there would be 300-400 applicants, out of which perhaps a dozen might have the basic requirements for the job, and only two or three might actually have everything we were looking for.
That’s only about 3% that make the “I’m not an idiot” cut. And less than one in three of those got hired. Which is FASCINATING, because that’s the same ratio of would-be authors who start a book that go on to see their work published. It doesn’t prove correlation, but it suggests it really f-ing hard.
It also suggests that I’m probably a lot closer to getting published than I think I am. We’ll see.
by Gene Turnbow | May 14, 2025 | On Agents
I’ve finished the third draft, and still frankly doing little tweaks here and there. I’ve learned that most agents, if not all of them, request the first three chapters of the book to read when you submit a query, so I’ve been polishing. A word here, a phrase there, suddenly it all seems to have outsized importance. And then, of course, it makes me want to go through the entire book and do that to every chapter.
When I’m alone with my thoughts, when I’m writing the story, that’s the sweetest, most engaging part of the entire process, but now I’m faced with having to do the one thing I’ve never ever been good at, the one thing that terrifies me more than anything else I’ve ever done in my entire life that didn’t involve doing something like playing electric guitar and singing on stage, solo, in front of an auditorium filled with my high school peers and their parents (this was when I was 17), encountering a band of thieves in my own home, led by someone I thought was my best friend (this happened when I was nineteen), or diving in the driver’s side window of my mother’s borrowed car to grab the emergency brake as it was about to dive off a cliff off the end of a pier into the Pacific Ocean (this happened when I was twenty), or having to pull over to blow out an engine fire on my way to work and then get back in the car and drive the rest of the way to work (this happened when I was 40).
I have to sell an agent on the idea of representing my book to a publisher.
I’m terrible at salesmanship. Throughout my life, any time I’ve been confronted with having to do it, it’s always been a horrible experience and I’ve failed at it miserably. But this time I can’t afford to fail, because the rest of my career as a writer depends on my being able to pull just one more miracle out of that dark secret place in the back of my trousers where flying monkeys come from.
I’m doing all the things I think I’m supposed to. I’ve gotten myself an annual membership on QueryTracker, which is a web site meant to help you find agents and keep track of whom you’ve submitted to and what they said, or didn’t say, afterwards. I’m considering entering BookPipeline’s unpublished author’s contest. To be honest, though, I have no idea if that’s a good idea, or if it would help me in the slightest. They don’t even start judging until September, and that seems a very long time from now, and I’m impatient to get started pitching agents.
I’m told that I need to start working on my next book while I work on selling this one, because the publishing industry runs at the speed of books, which is to say, not very speedy at all. Even if I get an agent right away, which isn’t terribly likely, I might see my seventieth birthday before the book is published, assuming it ever gets there. This prospect does not fill me with confidence. I’m sixty-eight now. I don’t want my life to go by while I wait to see if I get to be a real writer. Frankly, the odds aren’t good.
I will tell you something, though. The reason most people fail at getting an agent is that their work isn’t finished before they submit their queries, or they query the wrong agents because they haven’t done any research, or they can’t follow simple instructions given them by the agents. Frequently they just have no idea how writing a novel works, and have written something unreadable, and their books are nowhere near where they need to be to submit. Your book doesn’t have to be in its final, polished, perfect form, but it needs to be as good as you can make it, and it should have been through the hands of a professional editor before you submit (mine now has). The odds of my getting an agent are probably far, far better than I believe they are, because most of the field is just self-disqualifiying.
Now that my manuscript is finished, the real adventure begins.
Wish me luck.
