Let’s kick off with a very potted bio. I’m a fifty-one-year-old Brit called David Imrie who lives on the Atlantic coast in northern Spain. After a couple of different careers I started working as a freelance editor (soon specialising in novels) in 2017. This work has been for a couple of small publishers, self-published authors and the Page Turner Awards, where I’m the in-house editor. My website is www.noveledit.net if you’re interested.
Pretty soon into this new career I got the itch to write. I hit on a concept and I added ideas to it. I wrote it, and I loved the experience. THIS was what I wanted to do in life.
Now all I had to do was send off my manuscript to my preferred agent and wait… I mean they all want new, raw talent to develop, right?
Of course I knew enough about my industry not to believe that, but at the same time I also wanted to believe it! You see, writing I like, marketing (especially myself) not so much.
Long story short, in 2023 I sent off The Lost Piece to a handful of agents, and I got precisely zero interest. Please believe me that I’m not bitter about this – the version I sent hadn’t had enough revision then, and a rather slow-burn novel from another middle-aged white guy (even J K Rowling can’t pull that off!) …well, it’s a business and I don’t delude myself.
I didn’t give up on the traditional publishing route at this point, but I did work more on my books (I had “Ghosts” in development by then too), and I did resolve that when I came back to submitting to agents I would do it more carefully.
Except those were my last submissions. Why? When I came back to researching agents I came up with my research method…and the clear conclusion from that is that I prefer to self-publish.
So what’s that method? It’s something I urge you to try yourself, using the step-by-step process described in this next post.