Getting a Book Deal Is Like…
…incredibly frustrating.
I recently completed one of Kathy Ver Eecke’s GetABookDeal101.com courses. It was five days of instruction on crafting the perfect query letter in order to pitch your book to literary agents.
The course was both wildly informative and utterly demoralizing.
I learned, among other things, that my first novel is likely a romance!?!?!? Based on the comps I selected, it would seem All or Nothing Girl would be found in the stacks along with other “beach reads”.
I additionally learned that at 110,000 words, my novel is about 25,000 words too long. This was staggering news mainly because I worked on it (writing and editing) for the better part of four years, and I cannot even begin to imagine where I’d cleave that much content. In its current state, and me as a brand new author pitching, I’d never get a book deal. It would simply be too risky (expensive) to grant an unknown commodity that many printed pages per book.
This revelation sort of rocked my world.
And not in a good way.
To add to the dismal news, at 105,000 words, my current work in progress Finding Fidelity is already too long for the literary fiction category. Hilariously, I’m only 2/3 finished. It appears that I’m doomed to write bloated novels.
At this point in this lifetime, the plan it to finish book two and commence a third book to be written “on spec”, which I will subsequently pitch to agents. Maybe book three will land me that elusive book deal. This notion is both frustrating and exhausting. But as “they” say, “It’s the bit.”
Wish me luck…
Cheers!
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© 2022 – ∞ B. Charles Donley
Blake Charles Donley 
I do think that sometimes a writer writes several things before getting it right for public consumption. You’re getting these pieces of work done so you can move on to your big hit!
The sooner you get whichever manuscripts done that are standing between you and your best seller, the better!
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