Publisher Hunt: The Longer Short List

First off: I found another list of publishing houses that don’t care if you have an agent. And I immediately weeded out all of the ones who wouldn’t touch my material with a 40′ barge pole.

The bad news out of this is that it raises the short list to a count of eight.

First off on the list: 8th House Publishing.

I firkin love irony, don’t you?

Murphy also must love to play with me because the first effort at contacting them got me irritated and annoyed because my email server died and my compy needed a reboot. Which resulted in a blank email document that I couldn’t (a) edit (b) close, nor (c) send. Not that I wanted to send a blank document.

I did successfully delete it, but the window remains like a ghost, haunting my compy with its minimised presence.

I think I got all the high points in the second version.

The waiting game will only last a month, this time, because 8th House didn’t supply a timetable and I figure that that’s about long enough to get forgotten in someone’s inbox. I’ll leave some mandatory space for November through to February and thus avoid the glut of NaNo hopefuls who want to turn a 50K unedited idea into ten bajillion dollars by way of Netflix or HBO.

Not that that sort of goal isn’t bad… it’s just a bad idea to think your unedited ur-novel is going to be the next knockout success story. You need serious nepotism to get there, my friends, and I am not that connected.

For next-door-to-Joe-Nobody me, I have to work to get those levels of adoration. And probably be close to my own mortality via old age. It just works that way. Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in the 50’s and it’s only just now become the Netflix thing everyone talks about. Half a firkin century later. I have no idea how long George R. R. Martin was waiting before A Song of Ice and Fire got noticed as a property.

Odds evens I will not be an overnight success. I’m prepared for that.

Let’s count how many publishers and agents reject me before I get there.