About Finding A Publisher

When you say 'review' do you mean you want to submit your manuscript, or are you looking for someone to actually review your work and give you feedback? Publishers do not do the latter.

You need to look into agents and publishers in your genre. If you're looking for feedback the SYW forums here on AW might be helpful and if you decide to query agents there's a special SYW forum for query letters. Just randomly sending it to Penguin Random House or A.N.Other famous publishing house is a waste of their time and yours.

Look at the websites of your favourite fantasy authors - who's their agent? who publishes them? That's a start. There are lists of agents and publishers both online and in book format (The Writer's & Artists Yearbook is one), go through highlighting all the agents that represent writers in your genre and then query those agents. Look at agents' websites to see who might suit you best and which of them are most likely to find your work appealing.

Finding the right agent for you is a lot of work. Settle in for the long haul, it might take you a month to build a list to query and a few more to write a query.

Writer's Digest has some useful articles, but be mindful they might be out of date. Use agent names as a starting point. Look at their website. Look at their Twitter pages. See how they interact with people. Look up the Writer Beware threads here. The website QueryTracker has some information on agent response rates and turn around times, but some of it requires a subscription. Publisher's Marketplace has information (not always super up to date, but useful) on their recent sales. You can find a great editorial agent, good personality fit, loves you, loves the genre... and can't sell a book.

So yeah, settle in for the long haul. Make a Twitter acount. Follow the agents you're interested in (and do NOT unfollow after a rejection). Start building a list of 50 (or so) agents. It's gonna take some serious research we can't do for you. We're not you and didn't write your book.

www.querytracker.com and www.agentquery.com are great sites for researching agents and what they represent, as is www.manuscriptwishlist.com

But really, no one but you can do your research into what agent and/or publisher might be a good fit for your work.

Depends on your contract, but the standard is a 15% cut.

Most publishers won't look at your manuscript without an agent. But a good agent's worth the money.

It's also crucial that before you begin querying agents, you make sure your manuscript is in the best, most polished form it can be. (This goes for your query letter too.) You get one shot with agents, and you don't want to burn through them and query before you are ready.

Have you had any beta reader feedback on your MS?

(I'm just saying this because I've seen people query before they were ready, and regret it later.)

tammons said:

Exactly, how do agents get paid?

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Agents get paid when they sell their clients' books--the standard is 15% of advances and royalties, with (usually) 20% for overseas sales when a foreign co-agent is involved.

tammons said:

Exactly, how do agents get paid?

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They sell your work on commission, usually 15%.

If you sell for $10,000 (to make it easy math), the agent would get $1500, and you'd get $8500. The publisher sends the advance to the agent, they take out their commission, and send you the rest.

Moving this thread from Basic Writing to General Publishing Questions, where it fits better.

Please hang on the to the safety rails while thread is in motion.