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
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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