6/21/13

Alienated. Platforms and buzzword nonsense. Mr. Ex.

I finished my YA novel Alienated this month. Last week, actually. It's about 68,000 words.

So, that was good. But now I'm at a point where I would need HELP to actually do anything with it. I'm not a one man band. I need help to get it to the next level.

Yes, I could put it up on Kindle- like I tried doing with a few poems I wrote. But poems are different. Poems can't be WRONG. A novel is different. It needs to have grammar that makes sense and be polished to a certain degree. Yes, there is a ton of crap on kindle that ISN'T polished, but I do not want to try and sell crap to people. I want Alienated to be something I feel good about.

So ideally, the next step would be that I send query letters out to agents and hope that one of them likes Alienated and wants to be my agent. They give me some notes, I make some edits, and then they try and find someone to publish it.

The books that I like and that I read, this is what the authors did.

So, this is hard for me. I have a lot of self doubt. Maybe Alienated isn't any good. Maybe it's completely stupid and no one will ever want to read it. Etc.

And sending Alienated out to agents and knowing that they reject most things that are sent to them is not an encouraging thought. So I need to psych myself up to do it. Mentally prepare for the rejection and try not to let it stop me from trying. Etc.

But. Instead of psyching myself up to try... I went another route. Because I'm an idiot.

In facebook chat/email with someone, I mentioned that I want to find an agent.

Is this a person who is supportive of me? No.
Is this a person who is going to say- oh, cool, good luck with that? No.

Ugh. So why did I even bring it up?? I don't know.

It's like with my mom. I know my mom does not like a lot of my writing. Like Alethia As Pie. She is not a fan. She says things like- um, well honey, maybe that's just something you should write for YOU and not for anyone else... And so I KNOW she's probably just going to depress me if I show her something I've written, but I can't seem to help stupidly doing it anyway sometimes, because I would really LIKE her to be supportive.

Anyway. This facebook person is actually in book publishing. And he got all miffed that I was not asking him for advice because he is an EXPERT!

Now, he does have a claim to the title of "expert," but I already knew what his brand of advice was going to be and I knew it wasn't going to work for me at all.

Here's a sample of what Mr. Expert advised: 

A) kindle publish yoru books B) build out a blog C) build out your social media audience
I would systematically release 1 new ebook per quarter, split the book up into daily blog posts, then use social media to help build you a tribe audience
then when you ahve several ebooks selling even 10-20 copies per month and have a following you'll be able to utilize your collective work to get an agent

If I was a completely different person, that might work great. But I do not know how to go out and campaign for followers. Even if I did know how, I could not do it. That is not who I am. I'm an aspie girl. I'm not that kind of outgoing. It is hard for me to build relationships. Not just hard as in difficult for me to figure out, but hard like I have a LIMIT. There is only so much social hype and buzz and interaction I can physically handle.
So I got pretty mad because Mr. Expert told me that it's not hard to build a platform, it's just time consuming.
Do not tell me what is and isn't hard.
Jerk.
I hate arrogant people who act like I'm lazy and accuse me of wanting "instant gratification" because I work differently than they do.
F-- you, dude.
I went to this writer's conference last month. I got some advice from David Hale Smith about how to write a good query letter and what agents are looking for. David Hale Smith is a literary agent. Google him. He's legit.
People brought up all this platform crap and having followers in class. And David Hale Smith was like- it's perfectly ok to send queries to agents even if you do not have a twitter account yet. Don't freak out about it. If you have a big following, then, sure, you can mention that in your query letter as a selling point.
Mr. Expert thought I was stupid for listening to "some random hack" and obviously I should be listening to him and not some "yahoo".
WTF? He wasn't a hack.
And I should be listening to people who want to HELP me.
Mr. Ex does not seem to understand that giving me advice that I cannot do is not at all helpful.
I want an agent. I want someone in my corner. I want someone on my side, helping me navigate the whole of the red-taped system. I want someone who gets me, who gets my writing, who likes Alienated and who can help me make it even better.
What I do not want, or need, is someone telling me I'm not ready for that, I'm not good enough yet for that, I shouldn't even try yet.
I HAVE ENOUGH OF THE I SHOULD NOT TRY YET VOICE ALREADY IN MY HEAD!
I do not need any more.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Seriously there are plenty of "other ways" to do things. I say shoot for the moon. You don't "know" the end result of just sending in your book. You are amazing, your are BrillAnt! don't listen to haters carve out your own path.