Aftermath of POD

I think your best bet would be to write a second novel (if you haven't already) and find an agent for that one. Once you have an agent, you can then mention the first novel and if the agent likes it, he/she will sell that one as well.

Easier to start fresh looking for an agent, and work backwards.

Keep writing and keep submitting. As for your first book, do you think it's good enough to sell reprint rights? Most publishers are looking for first rights. Your book would have to be "hot" for them to pick it up, IMHO.

I second Maestro. I would concentrate on new work as that is the most likely to attract an agent. They want fresh, not previously pubbed work.

Happy writing!

Soccer Mom said:

I second Maestro. I would concentrate on new work as that is the most likely to attract an agent. They want fresh, not previously pubbed work.

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What about if you're writing a series and have gone the POD route for the first novel? When you're pitching subsequent novels to agents / publishers (assuming they like the premise and writing) would they be more or less inclined to pick up the rest of the series and/or re-publish the first book?

swvaughn said:

I think your best bet would be to write a second novel (if you haven't already) and find an agent for that one.

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I agree.

And don't rely on agent lists gotten from a single source. Do your own research in multiple sources. Jeff Herman's "Guide," AgentQuery.com, picking books like yours and trying to find out who agents them--all are good ways of identifying appropriate agents. No one source is going to list everyone who might be appropriate. It's really best you assemble your your own list, using multiple resources.

- Victoria

III said:

What about if you're writing a series and have gone the POD route for the first novel? When you're pitching subsequent novels to agents / publishers (assuming they like the premise and writing) would they be more or less inclined to pick up the rest of the series and/or re-publish the first book?

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That's gonna be difficult. It's very hard to sell an agent on the idea of a series when they're looking at the first book - unless you have an amazing track record of sales already. If you're shopping book #2 in a series, and asking them to also buy book #1's reprint rights - well, you've got a hard road to travel, there.

My opinion - start a brand new story, and shop it around.

Just my opinion, mind you.

SDB, yeah, it'd be best to start with a completely new idea, write it, sell it to a commercial publisher.

Then later, depending on the success of the new book, you may interest the publisher in the previous iuniverse book.

Just my opinion,

allen

maestrowork said:

Keep writing and keep submitting. As for your first book, do you think it's good enough to sell reprint rights? Most publishers are looking for first rights. Your book would have to be "hot" for them to pick it up, IMHO.

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A book that had been self-published is not doomed to remain nothing more than self-published forever just because it isn't "hot." A publisher can be convinced to regard it as unpublished (since it doesn't count as real publishing) in some cases.

However, switching a non-hot self-published book over to a legitimate publisher is very, very hard for an untried writer. Notice I said untried.

My advice would be to first attempt to get a wholly new book published the legitimate way. Then try to get a legitimate publisher interested in your self-published title. Hopefully, you'll have an agent too by that point, so that you can get good advice on how to proceed with this plan and the agent can schmooze the legitimate publisher in just the right way. Agents know a lot more about how to convince publishers that most of us writers do.

I'm in this same situation myself, and the advice I just gave you is what I'm attempting to put into practice. My self-published POD title had sold only about a thousand copies by the time I realized that all vanity presses are more or less scammy, that there is no new wave of POD self-publishing that is different from anything seen before. I decided to get out. I took my book out of print and got my rights back. Now, I'm trying to complete a new book, I plan to get an agent to sell that new book to a legitimate publisher, and I hope to get the self-published book placed at a traditional publisher shortly after that.

I'm not planning on trying to re-publish the self-published book until I've got a legitimate offer on the new book.

Why did I take the self-published book out of print when I could continue to make money on it? Three reasons:

1) It wasn't selling at a very good rate, so it wouldn't have been much money and I knew I'd already lost the chance for it to become "hot."

2) I was afraid that my rights could get tied up if, by chance, the self-publishing service provider went out of business.

3) The more copies it sold and the longer it remained in print, the more likely it was that a traditional publisher might have viewed it as already published and thus largely worthless to them.

I agree with those who said start a whole new book. POD, which can work very well for small niche non-fiction books if you already have a local readership in place, is not a good choice for fiction.

POD is fine if you expect to sell between 200-1,000 copies of your book. For fiction, you want to sell many thousands of copies.

You want your novel reviewed by major reviewers, distributed to bookstores, and placed on bookstore shelves. Ain't gonna happen with POD.

How about re-writing the first, and putting it in with the second, not a complete re-write, but maybe from a different angle, or adding a few chapters or something, then putting the two books together and starting the series again, that way they can get a sense of the first book, and the series would make sense to the new reader?

Might be totally off track here, but don't know, hope that helps?

SDBmania said:

So you would also agree with the above poster to start on a completely new book instead of the sequel I started writing?

If so, I do have some ideas for something different.

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Yep. Whole new book, outside the series. Unless the books in the series are so disconnected that they can stand alone like very few series books can, or unless book #2 in the series is actually a prequel, so that you could bring back the self-published book later, reincarnated as the "second" book.

One error I see over and over again:

Someone writes a novel and spends the next thirty years trying to sell that one (perhaps fatally flawed) book.

A better plan is to spend the next thirty years writing thirty more novels and sending them around. Perhaps the fifth one is the one that'll catch.

(Another common error is to write a series in which the first book hasn't sold.)

Great advice everyone. Thanks for your insight.

If you can, I would suggest making the second book stand alone as much as possible. If reading book two requires the reader to be familiar with book one, your odds of selling #2 diminish significantly...

The aftermath of POD is, I hope that Nu-Rock will be finally dead and we can move back to having real rock music on the airwaves.

(Lame. Sorry.)