Spalmorun (Karen Akhavein) explains the seven reasons literary
agents reject your book. I had my experience with agents in the 1990s.
First, “you don’t send books to publishers”. That sounds like an oxymoron. But you send books to literary agents.
It has to be the “right” agent, and you have to follow the
agent’s website instruction on how to do the pitch or query.
It shouldn’t be a “hard sell” for the market at the time.
But point (5) is the most interesting: your social media presence should present you
as having authority to write the book (and it isn’t so much a numbers game –
although YouTube’s and Facebook’s problems right now make all that iffy
anyway.) What she calls “authority” I
call “personal branding”
Point (6) has to do with the need to grab the reader’s
attention on the first page. In the
past, this hasn’t always been true. Irwing
Wallace wrote some spy novels about the Cold War and he used to take his time building
back stories for each major character in the early chapters (particularly with “The
Plot” that never became a movie).
At the end of the video, she does discuss self-publishing.
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