This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files on 5/20/15.
Until last week, I hadn’t stopped to think about how often I’m advising authors about how to deal with the publishing business. I would imagine this is something that most of us in the industry find ourselves doing very frequently. There are, after all, a lot of aspiring authors in the world and when one’s a friend, or a friend of a friend, they ask. And you try to help them.
As I wrote in an April post, I had assumed until very recently that an author couldn’t do herself any harm by self-publishing her work on her way to finding an agent or a publisher. When an agent I know and respect told an author I’d sent to him that he really found it hard to sell publishers already self-published books, it stopped me short. I sent out a query to a long list of agents and the consensus opinion that came back was that publishers are really uncomfortable picking up a book that has already made an appearance in the marketplace. (A deeper look at the results of this canvassing will be the subject of a future post.)
Although we all know stories of self-published books that went on to have fabulous runs with a publisher (“50 Shades of Gray” being the obvious example), it seems that most agents think that most publishers see the previous publishing history as a challenge. If the book didn’t do well, they don’t attribute it to poor or non-existent marketing. And if it did well, they sometimes wonder if the audience has been exhausted.
Obviously, there are both agents and editors who don’t think that way, but I was really surprised to learn that so many of them apparently do.
I would never attempt to advise an author on the techniques for self-publishing. That’s not what I know and there are many people, starting with our friend Jane Friedman (not the one from Open Road), who specialize in that (although she knows about finding agents and regular publishing too). But I have long had a formulation of how to recruit an agent which I passed along when asked.
Read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.