Hello,
Two years ago my debut novel (through trade publisher) was published. The publisher asked that I write a sequel due to it's success so I began working on one. Without going into too much detail, it was found out that the trade publisher was keeping royalties from all their authors and was facing a lawsuit. Since I didn't want to give another novel to a publisher (that wasn't paying me) and they owned the rights to my novel, I tweaked the sequel quite a bit to make the story it's own (changed character names, etc). Long story short, I got the rights back to my first novel and self-published it to try to get some money and it did well, in my opinion.
So, the "sequel" is finished and I want to query literary agents. I tweaked the "sequel" so much that it no longer makes sense to be a sequel to the first novel (and I had fallen in love with the characters and story so much I didn't want to change it back), but do I mention the first novel as publishing experience in the query letter, or do I act as if this is my first novel ever written? I am going to use a pen name moving forward (I used my legal name for the first novel).
In short, I guess my question is: If Richard Bachman wrote a novel about a girl who was telekinetic and went on a revenge-murder spree, and then Stephen King* wrote a novel about a telekinetic girl who goes on a revenge-murder spree, but all the names and motives were different, would that be acceptable to agents/readers? (*Or an author who does not have Stephen King's notoriety and couldn't get away with writing two novels with the same very basic plot)
Two years ago my debut novel (through trade publisher) was published. The publisher asked that I write a sequel due to it's success so I began working on one. Without going into too much detail, it was found out that the trade publisher was keeping royalties from all their authors and was facing a lawsuit. Since I didn't want to give another novel to a publisher (that wasn't paying me) and they owned the rights to my novel, I tweaked the sequel quite a bit to make the story it's own (changed character names, etc). Long story short, I got the rights back to my first novel and self-published it to try to get some money and it did well, in my opinion.
So, the "sequel" is finished and I want to query literary agents. I tweaked the "sequel" so much that it no longer makes sense to be a sequel to the first novel (and I had fallen in love with the characters and story so much I didn't want to change it back), but do I mention the first novel as publishing experience in the query letter, or do I act as if this is my first novel ever written? I am going to use a pen name moving forward (I used my legal name for the first novel).
In short, I guess my question is: If Richard Bachman wrote a novel about a girl who was telekinetic and went on a revenge-murder spree, and then Stephen King* wrote a novel about a telekinetic girl who goes on a revenge-murder spree, but all the names and motives were different, would that be acceptable to agents/readers? (*Or an author who does not have Stephen King's notoriety and couldn't get away with writing two novels with the same very basic plot)