"Getting Out There"

I have been participating in a lot of conversations on my various lists and with my various writer friends about agents and publishers. As regular readers of this blog know, I hold pretty strong opinions about both. Many writers sign with crap publishers or marginal agents because of a mistaken belife that if they “can just get it out there…” that the rest will take care of itself.

I agree that the best thing that agents and publishers do for you is get your work out there, but a bad agent and publisher is not going to be able to do that for you.

Let’s talk about what this means.

For an agent: “getting it out there” means getting your work read by a variety of editors at a variety of publishing houses. Anyone can mail something in. It’s the guys that get your stuff read, that get it treated as something more than the latest addition to the slush pile, that get editors excited about it and taking it seriously and putting aside their mountains of other work to read it, read it now, that constitutes “getting it out there.”

When I talk to friends with bad agents, they tell me of 18 month wait times, or agents who have sent their books to one or two publishers and then give up. To me, that’s not getting it out there. If your work is being treated like every other slush pile manuscript, then you aren’t out there — not in any way that counts. Any fool can lick a stamp. An agent is the one that not only gets the package to the editor, but also gets the editor to read it.

And they do a billion other things, from finding the right editor for your book to discovering new opportunities for your writing to negotiating contract points to playing author advocate every time you and your publisher have different opinions…

Can your agent do this? Has he or she done it for a variety of writers at a variety of levels for a variety of publishers? has he or she done it in your genre? Do you know that he or she can? Do you know why ALL of these questions are important? Because if your agent is a one trick pony, who only sells to one house, or only has one selling writer, and you don’t fit into the demographics of that trick, you’re S.O.L. Great as the agent might be for that person, or for that publisher, he or she is no good for you.

Most people who spend any time in this business have heard the saying, “A bad agent is worse than no agent.” But have they really let it sink in? I have friends who have said this even as they have convinced themselves that their bad agent is good. They work themselves into an absolutely gorgeous state of denial whereby this maxim applies to everyone else but them and their agent. Sorry, kiddos, it doesn’t work like that.

For a publisher: getting it out there is pretty obvious. It means not only making your book into a pretty book form, but also getting it into readers’ hands. Now, most publishers get your books into readers’ hands through good distribution. I had no idea how important this was until I sold my first book. Maybe we, as writers, should stop talking about “getting published” and start talking about “getting distributed” — because this step is the tricky one.

9,999 times out of 10,000, if your book is not on bookstore shelves, it’s not going to sell to anyone other than your family and friends. Do you need to be with a large publisher to accomplish this? Well, it doesn’t hurt. But there are some fabulous small publishers who get amazing distribution, like Red Sage. I can’t remember the last time I was in a major bookstore and did not see a Red Sage book on the romance shelves. (And I always look.)

There are a few e-publishers who have made their own websites a major destination for their books. Branding is paramount in these cases. Just as online surfers go to Travelocity to book airline tickets, they go to Ellora’s Cave to purchase erotic romance e-books. (Now of course, EC IS doing major distribution in bookstores, and I see those trade sized EC books right next to the trade sized Red Sage books, right next to the Bravas…) But for years, when EC was mainly an electronic publisher, they did hella advertising to make their publisher website a DESTINATION for people wanting to read the kind of branded, hot, sexy “romantica” they published.

But, exceptions like popular online publishers aside, the name of the game is distribution. Are you on bookstore shelves? A LOT of bookstore shelves? Do you have prominent placement? Being “listed” on Amazon is not “getting out there” unless you’re on the front page. There are a million books on Amazon. It’s rare that anyone is going to stumble across you if you’re just “listed” there.

Update: I forgot to add that people ask if I’ll freak out when I see my book for the first time. I’m sure I will — the first time it’s on the shelf at my local bookstore. In a box in my apartment, I’ll be happy, but it’s real to me when any stranger can pick it up and read it. Distribution, baby. Distribution…

So next time you think about doing something just to “get out there” — ask yourself with brutal honesty what getting out there really means, and if the agent or publisher is someone who can really make that happen.