In January of this year (2017), I completed the draft of IMAGINING VIOLET and counted up the words. Something I had not done before. It came to something like 280,000 words, which makes for an impossibly long work.
What to do? Break it into more manageable chunks, I thought, and set about finding a suitable cut-off spot. Sailing into the sunset was a good place to stop.
Dealing with 86,000 words was not so daunting, and I spent three months editing, correcting, tweaking, and putting two spaces at the end of every sentence. I discovered that I over-used words like "quite" and "really", and got rid of most of them. I asked friends and family to read the first 25 pages, and more, as I polished them up. Family, frankly, was a disappointment. They are all entirely too busy to read my stuff. Friends, on the other hand, were encouraging, and one in particular read through the whole thing and gave me numerous helpful notes on punctuation and language.
With 86,000 words and a story about a 16 year old, I had the idea that I might have a Young Adult novel on my hands, so put it out on FaceBook that I was looking for young readers of the first 25 pages. That was marginally successful. One 9 year old grand-daughter enjoyed it and asked some sensible questions. The 12 year old granddaughters .. not so much. Maybe this isn't YA after all.
As this first part of IMAGINING VIOLET is set in Leipzig and the UK I accepted that I have no idea of how to market it on an international scale. With my first two books, I had a niche market on which I could focus. With FRANK WELSMAN, CANADIAN CONDUCTOR I targeted music historians, music faculties, music libraries, municipal libraries, musical associations and similar. It's a book of Canadian music history and biography of little interest to the general public. With the ZASTROZZI book, it was even simpler. This one had a local audience in Victoria BC and on Salt Spring Island, and I did very well with self-publishing and selling it. VIOLET, however, deserved a bigger effort.
Accordingly, I began to dig around the world of literary agents, to read advice on how to find an agent, to develop a current list of publishers and weed out those which are irrelevant. With a little help from an editor friend, I worked up a query and synopsis, and sent off half a dozen submissions. It was made very clear that I should not expect a response for at least two months, and that the chances of being picked up by an agent were exceedingly slim.
More recently (early April) I discovered websites like AgentQuery.com which gave me a whole new insight into query writing. One may post one's query and two or three folks jump in and critique it. Hugely helpful. Queries to US agents are very different from queries to UK agents. Who knew? Well, now I do.
Then I joined a couple of Beta Groups, although I was not entirely sure what a Beta Reader is. One is through GoodReads and another on FB. Trolling those sites, I began to wonder if I was the only person over 50 who was writing. These sites are chock full of young people writing fantasy, paranormal, romance, thrillers and science fiction. Posts for epistolary historical fiction were rare indeed.
How do you promote a book that is not trendy, with no sex or violence, with no dramatic action or complex plot?
Still, I was learning lots along the way and at the moment (early May) I have six people reading some pages or the whole MS. Friends who have reported in have used language like "entrancing", but I need dispassionate, objective feedback. One Beta Reader is in India, and I am delighted that I will get feedback from her.
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