Would this put an agent or publisher off?

CTSinclair said:

Now, I have heard that agents and publishers tend to be weary of unknown authors because they are not sure if they will sell well.

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Myth. Agents and publishers LOVE debut authors. They want to be the one who discovers The Next Big Thing.

Self-pubbing stuff in advance is, as I understand it, a risky proposition. But I'll leave the details of that to others who are better acquainted with the issues.

Had no credits to my name when I got an agent and I know a ton of authors who were the same. Be professional, do your research and write an awesome book!

What they said. The idea that agents and publishers don't want unpublished authors is a total myth perpetuated by, well, I'll let you work that out.

If they didn't, before the past five years or so, where would they have gotten new authors?

Ditto what Toothpaste posted. I was completely unknown. I never entered any contests, didn't have any connections, wasn't even a member of any professional writing groups and yet, found an agent via query letter and later received four offers for my debut.

Write a great book and then another and another and another. Then, hopefully, everyone will know your name.

Ditto everything that's been said. Agents are excited about unknown writers.

However, if you do want to build your credentials, I'd caution against going the self-publishing novellas route. You're better off trying to get short stories and things like that into reputable magazines and contests in your genre.

I had some short story sales under my belt when I landed an agent, but I know several folks who had no publishing credentials - just a good MS. The book you want them to rep (or publish) is always the most important thing. Not a book that's already been published. Not the one that will be published after this one.

You're more likely to get an agent/editor as an unknown these days. in fact, if you ARE known, and you arent making heaps of money with your book sales, its reccomended that you get yourself a name-change and re-debut..

CTSinclair said:

Well thank you everybody for the replies! So obviously I should either use a pen name for e books or just completely scrap the idea all together.

It is good to know that they want unknowns rather than what I have heard Makes me feel better.

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This is reassuring for me, too. I'm going to complete my novel by the end of this year (hopefully), and I want to spend the first couple months editing / writing the second installment. I don't think I'd send a MS until I at least know where I want the series to go and how many books there will be.

if your novellas sold REALLY well they could be a springboard, but you have to be honest with yourself:

self-publishing is work, the folks who get large sales don't do it by just tossing stuff out there to be found. So, do you feel that (massive sales) is likely, especially given you appear to be thinking of them as a sort of second-tier project? Do you WANT to put that kind of time and effort into trying to launch the novellas, at the expense of your other writing?

Now the flip side of that is if an agent gets curious and possibly googles "Eldwyrm" or whatever, and finds a lackluster novella or 3 that all seem to feature your world but under a different name, that might lead to some negative impressions ranging from you borrowing another author's world to just realizing you use a pen name to put less-than-stellar work out there. None of those would be an asset, and suppose in time you DO hit it big.....Stephen King went back to several manuscripts and bits and pieces that got fleshed out into novels after he published Carrie and I'm sure he's not the only person to do so. But unless you're a very big author, I suspect it is much harder for a midlist or lower author to go back and re-publish stuff they already put out electronically. So whatever ideas you had that you felt could be novellas you would quite possibly be throwing away forever; you couldn't expand them into print, combine them in print, etc., you may very well have burned each of those stories.

Given most self-pubs that don't have a very dedicated businessperson/author pushing them and building series momentum and stuff make enough money for a nice dinner for one (or less) I don't see a significant gain to working towards these novellas unless you're actually going for a real try at self-publishing itself.

CTSinclair said:

... but I have recently been told that self-pubing a few novellas might actually put agents off since I would no longer be a clean slate.

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Double edged sword. If your self-published books sell nine copies in six months on Amazon, nobody will risk you. If they sell 60,000 in the same period, you could get in a bidding war.

Every agent deals with debut authors at some point. It's your query, synopsis and manuscript that determine your potential value. For what it's worth, every publisher has failures with debut authors too. Doesn't stop them from risking the next one.

Jeff

Treehouseman said:

You're more likely to get an agent/editor as an unknown these days. in fact, if you ARE known, and you arent making heaps of money with your book sales, its reccomended that you get yourself a name-change and re-debut..

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If you do that you HAVE to tell your agent and/or publisher about those earlier books. Don't try to hide that from them: it will come out sooner or later, and the break in trust between you all is likely to sour any potential for future books.

CTSinclair said:

Well thank you everybody for the replies! So obviously I should either use a pen name for e books or just completely scrap the idea all together.

It is good to know that they want unknowns rather than what I have heard Makes me feel better.

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You're confusing e-books (a format, like paperbacks, hardbacks, audio books and so on) with self publishing (a business model, like trade publishing or vanity publishing). I know it's confusing at first, and that I am being all nit-picky: but it really does help to be absolutely clear in the terminology you use.

WeaselFire said:

Double edged sword. If your self-published books sell nine copies in six months on Amazon, nobody will risk you. If they sell 60,000 in the same period, you could get in a bidding war.

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From what I've read, this is about right (I'd seen 20,000/year as the figure - I've got nothing to back that up but the odd blog post from strangers, but basically Really Good Sales For Your Genre are required). I think part of the problem is that there are authors who don't understand how unusual that is, especially in some genres. You can have a smashing, brilliant, well-reviewed trade published book and not hit numbers like that.

Here's an interesting post about SFF bestselling authors. I can't vouch for its accuracy, but based on my personal knowledge, there's nothing there that leaps out as implausible.

CTSinclair said:

Should I go ahead with my idea to try and get my name known, or should I stop and hope that my MS will be enough to convince the agent?

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Really, this is the thing to keep in mind. If you've got the talent and drive to self-market and 'get your name known' by writing good stories that draw readers... then you've probably got something that is also going to catch an agent's eye.