More Efforts at Self-Promotion

So I stated how I had contacted one agent and then another with the usual non-response. I read that 70% of literary agents are located in New York and suspecting that group is probably a bit clannish if not incestuous, I was going to try something different. I located an agent in Colorado, thinking he might be a little less vulnerable to groupthink.

The man's instructions were more detailed and more helpful than I expected them to be. Putting some thought into the pitch, it occurred to me that it might be better to market my completed "New Pandoria" trilogy than to plug the third in the series, "The Cult of Leftism Versus the Not-Left Coalition."

One reason I held back on this is that the first in the series, "Mississippi Sizzling" needs to be re-edited. I wrote three novels over a ten year period and as is sometimes the case, I was not consistent with recurring characters. If a character's son is 10 in the first novel and two years later, he is seven...There were more than a few of those things.

So I have started re-editing the 138,706 page, "Mississippi Sizzling." As this is being written, we are experiencing the safeguards surrounding Covid-19. I have a Kindle app on my phone and I read and highlight it there. Just part of the editing. I also want to run it through, Grammarly Pro while I am still subscribed to that crutch.

My grammar and syntax were not consistent when I wrote "MS." Surprisingly though, it reads better than I thought it would. I remember it as being good enough but coming across as a bit meandering. It was only my second novel and inexperienced writers tend to ramble and lose focus but all in all, I am satisfied with my work.

The week was less productive than I had hoped it would be. We had a freak spring snowstorm that caused a power outage and required me to shovel the driveway. And yes, Covid-19 is still an obstacle course. Still, I plodded on.

So today, I planned to complete the submission requirements as instructed by the previously-mentioned Colorado agent. For whatever reason, I decided to look up the word count for "Don't Cry for Me, B. F. Skinner," Shockingly, I could not find it on my hard drive.

From the mid-'90s till about 2010, I always had plenty of floor space. That changed and my organization skills have been challenged since then. I keep my old computers and thumb drives and DVDs wrapped in plastic but I have no idea how to access anything.My heart raced at the prospect of not being able to find DCFMBFS.

My heart returned to a normal rate after I found my Kindle version of DCFMBFS. I spent some time backing it up today but I lose format as I do so and it will be a job to put a non-Kindle version on my hard drive. In the process, I decided to promote DCFMBFS once more.

My strategy is to bypass agents, approach publishers with my DCFMBFS and if they decline, hit them with my "New Pandoria" spiel, and then my diet books. If I exhaust the American publishers, Should all of that fail, I will then shake the agent tree once more.

It took me longer than I care to admit composing the following letter:

“Don’t Cry for Me, B. F. Skinner” was completed in 2007. A tsunami of rejection letters followed (we still did the SASE thing at that otherwise advanced age) and the author fell into a deep depression, ceasing all promotional efforts.

Set in Indiana in 1974, the viewpoint character, B. F. Hughes, is a sixteen year old boy with a flimsy grip on reality. He faces normal and abnormal teenage challenges, and he believes that all of his problems can be mitigated by contacting his hero, the legendary behaviorist, B. F. Skinner.

The hero lurks in public places where he surreptitiously scouts unattended telephones. With great planning and effort, he is able to place long distance calls to B. F. Skinner’s house and office. Frustrated by his inability to talk at length with his hero, B. F. Hughes ultimately travels to Massachusetts in what some readers might regard as an exercise in stalking.

Thirteen years and many written words later, the author is once more promoting the publication of “Don’t Cry for Me, B. F. Skinner,” one of the funniest novels ever ignored.

Please refer to the link for the Kindle version. The author will gladly gift you a copy upon request.

Regards and all of that stuff.

Ray Kloose.

I hope to email several publishers tomorrow.

Shaking the Agent Tree Once More

Novel writing has humbled me.

It is one thing to have written a novel and watch it not get published and something else to watch four novels go unpublished.It is four times as bad (give me a calculator and I will prove it.) Despair? I'll have none of it.

After this writer finished a second novel and got the usual "I am too busy to read your email much less your synopsis and I am too important to respond to you, you pathetic loser" treatment from publishers and agents, he decided to start a blog. It was designed to explore conventional and guerilla tactics for getting one's novel published. It had been entertaining at times, but it has also been a flop.

Self-promotion has never been my forte. If I could successfully Barnum myself, I would be eating lunch with Teal Swan and Tai Lopez. Given my time constraints, I had to repeatedly choose if I was going to continue to write or if I was going to play the rejection game all over again. Each time, I chose to write.

I entertained the idea of getting rich after my first novel but there was a realistic streak as well. If I could just make enough money so that I could work limited hours as I wrote the second novel and then as a few dollars more would roll in after the second novel was completed...The plan failed.

Things happen. Novel #4 was going to take a few months to complete. It took 2.5 years. My bad health played a big part in that miscalculation. There were other factors that I will touch upon at a later time. Still, I completed #4 and I am proud of it. Will there be a #5? Only if I can get published. A lab rat will only press a lever so many times if cheese does not drop down the chute.

A web search followed the completion of #4. I found an article that profiled new agents seeking new writers. I chose Maximillan Ximenez and sent him an email introduction. I attached a query letter and three sample chapters.

True to his profession's code of ethics, Mr. Ximenez did not respond. Given the ease of implementing an autoreply that says something like, "Get lost, wannabe," it says something about this agent's commitment to his craft that he did not provide a response. I cannot access the state of other professions, but I can tell you that today's literary agents are as haughty as they have ever been.

After two weeks of silence, I found a second lit ag to submit my work. The lucky lady was Gail Fortune. I followed her submission guidelines to the detail and was greeted with two weeks of silence. Glad to see that Mr. Ximenez was not the only member of his profession to maintain high standards of arrogance. It can take as long as a minute to compose an autoreply. Ms. Fortune cannot be bothered.

After completing my first novel in 2007, I sent snail mail to dozens of publishers. Even with self-addressed stamped envelopes included, few of them actually bothered to say "Go away." I then contacted dozens of agents with similar results.

After completing my second novel in 2010, I joined an agent-contact service for a small monthly fee. Advised to submit sequentially, I soon piled up rejections. I doubt if even one agent or subordinate read my submissions but I did collect a handful of polite rejections. It was then that I started this blog.

In 2016, I completed #3, "The Fluffy Manifesto." More of the same. Now it is 2020 and here I am, hawking a fourth title. I am once more trying to find one agent who will actually read my work and respond to my introduction. Maybe that's too grandiose. Who has time to read? OK, I will settle for a response of any kind, polite or nasty.

Wish me well in my pursuits.