Pushing Publishing Boundaries.

Greeting, Again :)

I have been looking for a Literary agent for some time now and I think they have all tightened their belts in regards to new authors. Many of them are refusing to accept new manuscripts and when you find one accepting it is rarely in the area of publishing that is suited to your style and genre. I can only offer the comments that I recieved following a talk hosted by Legend Press' managing director Tom Chalmers. See their website for more details on submission.

http://www.legendpress.co.uk/

I think his comments are really useful in regards to the publishing industry and his company remain one of the few still accepting unsolicited manuscripts. He mentioned that Literary agents are becoming more like editors as during the recession the bigger publishers are cutting back editors positions whilst keeping sales staff.

This is an eye opener as it makes one wonder why we need literary agents in the first instance, they are just a rung on the ladder into the publishing industry. They don't edit as the publishing houses have editors on hand to do this... So then why do we need editors? Yes they are useful but if we are writers and writing is a passion for us then the quality of our prose is shown in the editing process and grammar and punctuation are second nature to writers.

So I seriously began to question the need of these elements in the industry.

Literary agents do have benefits, they have contacts in the industry and experience negotiating with the publishers enabling them to haggle for a better price however there is also an opportunity to be siezed in self publishing. I am not talking of Vanity publishers who will publish anything regardless of quality but of the e-book format.

Vanity publishing is a print on demand service which is purely financed by the author which is a costly process. Whereas the E-book revolution is taking the generation by storm with Kindle sales continuing to rise at a phenominal rate and this is already being utilized by other writers. I believe it to be a fairly cost effective way of publishing your own work and the profits are entirely your own. Minus a small percentage fee on the Market place.

I have read the Writers and Artists yearbook and the information it contains about self publishing is pursuasive to this mentioning famous writers who have self published in thier careers. I have emailed some prestigious institutions and important people in the Viking field. I hope they will provide some reviews I can use when marketing my e-book.

If you want to submit to publishers a Literary Agent is needed and the yearbook has a list of these. Also industry standards need to be adhered to.

When I asked Tom about e-book publishing his comments were that a good marketing head was needed and a consistent level of editing throughout. If any other writers are considering this then please let me know how your experience goes.

Thanks for reading

Stephen