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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   751 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for January 27, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Since November, I've been sending out query letters for my novel (which originated as a project for NaNoWriMo 2024), and have yet to receive any requests from agents to see the full manuscript. Therefore, it sucks and I quit.

/s No way am I going to give up that easily. However, I do think my query letter is letting me down, and needs to be heavily reworked. Additionally, the feedback I've been getting over on /r/PubTips is that it's practically unheard of for a literary agent to take a chance on a debut novel significantly in excess of 100k words, and in my query letter I mention up front that my novel is 112k (rounding down).

This is not quite as precious and self-indulgent as it sounds: the first draft was 133k, and removing over 15% of that was no mean feat. But I'm coming round to the idea that if I want to get this thing published, I'll have to meet the agents halfway. To that end, I've commenced work on a fourth draft with the explicit goal of cutting ~12k words (more, if possible), or 11.4%. Having edited the first four chapters, I've reduced their word count by 10.6% without, I think, losing anything significant, so I think I'm on the right track. Hope I won't have to kill too many darlings.

I have made no progress on mastering "Phobophile" on the guitar. The last few days I've just been practising two-octave scales (major, harmonic minor, natural minor, Mixolydian).

After getting an offer, I elected to go the self pub route with my first story (A different story than I got the offer on actually, because I didn't feel confident finishing that series). I got what was apparently pretty decent numbers on my offer (I can look up the breakdown by medium if you want em), but even then the percentiles are kinda brutal. I think the highest was ebooks at 30 or 35 percent after platform fees. I know the sales and marketing efforts of publishing houses are supposed to be better than what most authors manage on their own, but I really did not feel comfortable signing away very fixed and definite rights and shares of profit in exchange for marketing efforts that were highly subjective and discretionary. Obviously the publisher is suppose to be aligned with your interests, because every sale benefits them even more than it does you, but I just don't love the model in this day and age where up-front printing costs have gone from 5-6 figures to basically zero. Even with audiobook production being included and a small advance (5k per book), it didn't feel worth it to me. So, I'll be self publishing my first novel in June. I wish you the best with your submissions though, it's a harsh game if you're not one of the big genres that they're currently pushing.

Thanks a lot. What platform are you using for self-publishing?

Amazon. I currently post on Royal Road/Patreon/other forum sites, but Amazon and Audible are pretty much the only games in town for self publishing unless you go full indie and sell ebooks off your own website. There are other options, but they generally don't have a fraction of the reach.

I wonder how this process actually works? It does not feel scalable. It would take a person likely a couple of days at least to go through 100k+ page text, especially if they want to pay proper attention. From what I read online, agents receive thousands submissions per year. Clearly, there must be some filters. I can guess "previously famous author" and "the guy I know or that somebody I know vouched for" are the obvious ones, but what comes next?

Most literary agencies accepting unsolicited submissions request a query letter, a synopsis (of three to five hundred words) and an excerpt. The excerpt is typically the first three chapters, first 5,000 words, first 10,000 words or similar. I have little doubt that many agents reject a work without even looking at the excerpt, because the query letter and synopsis don't strike them as compelling.

Hence, there are several filters a prospective author must pass through:

  1. The query letter. If the query letter doesn't make the book sound compelling, or doesn't make a persuasive business case that the book will be a commercial success, or makes it sound like it would be difficult to sell to a publisher (e.g. too long, too short, uncertain genre and audience), it's an automatic reject.
  2. The synopsis. If the agent is intrigued by the query letter, but the synopsis is confusing and disorganised without a clear sense of narrative progression or story structure, it's a reject.
  3. The excerpt. If the query letter tickles the agent's fancy and the synopsis sounds logical and engaging, but the first three chapters are poorly written, it's a reject.
  4. The full manuscript. If the query letter, synopsis and first three chapters are solid, the agent will request the full manuscript. But having read the full thing, they might decide it's not up to standard and pass on it.

So it's not the case that an agent has to read hundreds of full manuscripts every year, adding up to several million words. If an agent receives 500 submissions, he might only bother reading the excerpts of 50 of them (5,000 words x 50 = 250,000 words), with the rest getting rejected on the basis of a weak query or synopsis. Of the 50 excerpts he reads, he might only request 10 full manuscripts (10 x 75,000 = 750,000 words). So at most he's only reading a million words of prose a year (and he might well decide to pass halfway through the excerpt or the full manuscript). A million words of prose in one year is very doable: assuming 261 business days in a year, that's 3,831 words a day, or roughly 15 pages. Last year I read at least 9,164 pages: assuming ~250 words a page, that's 2.3 million words, and that was for pleasure, not my day job.

To add to this, most people underestimate how truly terrible most submissions are. I don't mean "Not a particularly good or interesting book," I mean "So bad that the agent can tell within the first few paragraphs that this writer is hopeless." If you get them to read three entire chapters you're ahead of the pack.

That reminds me of a time about a decade ago when a friend of mine gave me something to read. Apparently a friend of his was taking a creative writing class at a community college and asked him to read a story she wrote for an assignment, and he had no clue where to even begin so he gave it to me. I think he was expecting that I'd just proofread it or maybe give a few succinct ideas but the thing was so bad that merely marking it with a red pen would have been impossible; the whole thing required an extensive rewrite of the sort that necessitated a serious discussion with the author. I had no desire to get that involved, especially since I have no special qualifications to have such a conversation with a stranger, so I basically passed on the whole thing and never heard about it again. It was the kind of adjective-heavy creative writing that sounded like it was written in a seventh grade English class where they're specifically asked to do things like this.

I often wonder how much the "rules" of writing in an academic setting are actually making people worse writers. It always stuck me as a bit strange that none of the professional writing I read in my spare time followed the rules that English teachers insisted upon, though I never thought to question why. I understand that certain devices are the mark of immature writers, such as children, and that the first thing that needs to be done is to beat these habits out of them to at least create something presentable, but I think the teachers should at least make it clear that at a certain point the student will have a good enough command of the language to use their own judgment about certain things. I remember writing a paper for a music history class in college that was small enough that the professor met each student individually to go over the rough draft, and he asked me several times "What are you trying to say here?", and when I told him, his response was "Why didn't you just say that?"

Strunk & White's Elements of Style gets a very bad rap for this. It's considered the "bible" of proper writing by many English teachers, but they forgot that S&W were addressing college students who were absolutely hopeless at writing essays. So it beats proper grammar, punctuation, and communicative style into you, but it was never meant for creative writing.

(Knowing your S&W is good for fiction writers too, but if you treat it like a bible you'll write correctly but boringly.)

I've heard that January is a bad time to query, precisely because agents know a lot of people have just finished polishing up their NaNoWriMo novels and are sending them out. Don't know how true that is.

One of these days I will finish one of my other manuscripts. The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.

I can't imagine I'll be done with my fourth draft for at least another fortnight.

The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.

How long was it, if you don't mind my asking?

About 83,000 words.

I'm not much of a fantasy head, but are you looking for a beta reader? Or have you given up this particular project?

It's SF, actually.

Honestly, I've given up trying to find an agent or publisher with this particular book. I might try the indie publishing route someday, but I'd want more books in the pipeline to do that.

Anecdote:

  • GURPS Vehicles First Edition and Second Edition, for GURPS Third Edition, are sharply divisive books, with their complexity alienating some but appreciated by others.

  • When GURPS Fourth Edition is published, fans clamor for GURPS Vehicles Third Edition.

  • After twenty years of radio silence, the editor of GURPS finally explains that (1) GURPS Vehicles Third Edition is basically complete, but (2) the publisher has decided that the final editing of such a complicated book with such a shaky audience would not be worth the expense, so (3) the publisher has canceled the contract and returned the rights to the author, so that if he wants to he can excise the GURPS-specific material and publish it himself as a systemless vehicle-design supplement.

  • GURPS Vehicles fans ask the author about crowdfunding. He responds that he probably could get the book edited and published for 6 k$.

  • Astonished at the lowness of the price tag, various fans quickly offer a few kilodollars to the author. He responds that he is busy with another project at the moment, but in a few months he will put together a concrete plan for accepting money and finishing Definitely Not GURPS Vehicles Third Edition.

The point of this anecdote is, it would be pretty funny if this website contained enough fans of your commenting and moderation style that you could milk them for a few hundred dollars (not as months of Patreon/SubscribeStar donations, but as a lump sum) on the promise of a book from you.

Hah - it's flattering to think I have fans here, but even if so, I don't think my posts give much of a sense of how I write fiction.

Ironically enough, my only actual professional writing credits are with Steve Jackson Games. It's amazing to me they have survived all of Steve's really bad decisions. I guess Munchkin keeps them afloat.

...All responses coming to mind sound too much like glazing. I guess I'll say that I think that's extremely cool, and leave it at that.

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