HI there,
I've been trying to place an experimental work of sorts for about a year now, and everything I've been told and read tells me, forget it, there's no way we're accepting something like that. It doesn't fit the very constrained pattern of what we think works. That's usually some pre-existing format meeting extremely specific genre expectations publishers don't seem to want to wander very far away from.
What I'm doing on the other hand is a reality TV elimination format in metafictional form, featuring forty characters slowly being eliminated trying out 30 different genres in a single work. I finally got so tired of the same rejections, I decided to abandon thinking of it as a book and establish it as an Internet event instead, publishing one Episode a week like the regular TV concept it's based on.
The fun starts on November 2nd, but the preliminaries are interesting I hope too. I won't make any money, but at least this way people get to read it. Check out the lead-up and the event itself at realficone.blogspot.ca.
Is this crazy, desperate, or perfectly reasonable given the current state of publishing?
I've been trying to place an experimental work of sorts for about a year now, and everything I've been told and read tells me, forget it, there's no way we're accepting something like that. It doesn't fit the very constrained pattern of what we think works. That's usually some pre-existing format meeting extremely specific genre expectations publishers don't seem to want to wander very far away from.
What I'm doing on the other hand is a reality TV elimination format in metafictional form, featuring forty characters slowly being eliminated trying out 30 different genres in a single work. I finally got so tired of the same rejections, I decided to abandon thinking of it as a book and establish it as an Internet event instead, publishing one Episode a week like the regular TV concept it's based on.
The fun starts on November 2nd, but the preliminaries are interesting I hope too. I won't make any money, but at least this way people get to read it. Check out the lead-up and the event itself at realficone.blogspot.ca.
Is this crazy, desperate, or perfectly reasonable given the current state of publishing?
