Progress Report: 7/12/2010

Success! Of a sort.

So, there is a small press publisher who reviewed Rose & Jade and was very impressed. In fact, he was so impressed that he informed me that he didn't feel he could do the book justice with his fairly limited distribution network. This is an agency that mostly publishes directly to Amazon and doesn't have much traction in the brick-and-mortar distribution networks.

The bottom line is that he would be willing to publish me, but thinks the book is good enough for a bigger, more mainstream launch than he could provide.

And that's pretty encouraging. It means back to the grind in looking for agents and publishers. On the other hand, if I can't make any headway, I do have someone I can go to that would publish the book on a more limited scale. With enough of a track record in a smaller market, it is possible to get noticed in more mainstream circles.

(The classic example that everyone likes to point to of this is John Grisham, who was rejected by every publisher and agent in this quadrant of the Milky Way, and printed up the book on a small press and sold it out of the trunk of his car. He sold so many that he was able to convince a publisher that yes, people are interested in reading his stories. And thus a star was born. It should be noted that for every John Grisham, there are plenty of other writers who don't end up with that kind of success, and there are ways that starting small can backfire on you. Still, the Grisham example shows that it can be done.)

All in all, it's pretty cool. I debated going with the small publisher and talked to a number of my friends and colleagues about it (I have the advantage of working at a publishing company, albeit one that does not publish fiction, so that gives me some valuable resources for getting advice). Ultimately, it seems like casting my line for an agent again is the way to go. It's nice to have a fallback option, though. It means that one way or another, this baby will see the light of day.