New Gold City

Somewhere in this photo is an envelope containing over 100 rejections. You will find below an actual query sent earlier this year to a book publisher for my novel Beyond the Will of God . I sent out over 200 query letters for this novel -- mostly in the early nawts. This is the very last one. I have an envelope, conveniently lost in my office now, with over 100 rejections of Beyond the Will stuffed into it. Yes, only about half the folks I reached out to actually made the effort to get back to me. That's the way it is. (So it goes). My manuscript was rejected outright by one agent because "I don't do religious fiction." Beyond the Will of God is not exactly a religious story (see the query below to learn where the title came from if you don't already know). Another publisher wrote that they felt the novel had potential and was well-written (aw), but they weren't publishing mysteries. A year later their catalog contained a mystery and crime section that is now...

I recently received two reader reviews on stories of mine available at Amazon's Kindle Store. Both reviewers were rather unhappy. That's fine. I know that fiction, like most everything else, is a matter of taste. Not everyone is going to like everything they encounter in life -- from movies to food to music. The experience of bad (sad?) reviews got me thinking about the Indie Author Experience and how different it is from the status quo, old school legacy publisher experience. As an indie writer I can edit and change my stories in a matter of a few hours and have them re-posted by the next day. Writers beholden to old school publishing houses (even small independent ones) are locked into their published content -- even electronically -- for a very long time. The process of bringing a novel or memoir or whatever to publication requires the extended efforts of many different people (a team, really) over a year to eighteen months...or more. Once a product is deemed complete, it g...