So there’s good news and there’s bad news.
The good news is, all that querying attracted some attention after all, literary agents do like Blind the Eyes, and the full manuscript has been requested. It’s not a publishing deal (yet, lol), but it’s actually pretty rare to get that far and it took less than 50 queries (many books take over 100 to even get that sort of response), so it’s definitely cause for celebration!
…The bad news is, now I can’t publish BTE in November like I was hinting at, which is super sad because my proofreader did an amazing job AND turned the project around in half the time I’d had scheduled, so it should have been right on target for a pre-holidays release.
Back to good news: this means I can (ahem, should) get the sequel(s) plotted out and written for fast, consecutive releases when BTE does come out. But, yet again, sorry to make you all wait longer and thanks for your patience!
While I’m at it, huge shout out to my awesome team:
- Lisa Poisso did a spectacular job helping me work through the multiple rounds of develoid a pmental and line editing to make BTE a book worth reading
- Catherine Milos caught the embarassingly obvious logic errors, typos and generally polished everything to a shine
- Regina Wamba of MaeIDesign crafted a gorgeously artistic and iconic cover design (that one of these days I will finally get the chance to unveil, I hope!)
I highly recommend these guys if any of you are looking to form a publishing team of your own!
So what comes next? Well, there’s a lot of waiting. The waiting period for the querying stage wouldn’t have closed until this December (yeah, I was jumping the gun with a November release no matter how you sliced it) and, for a full mansucript request, you normally add at least six months. If an agent offers representation, that’s another week or so to alert any outstanding queried agents that they need to throw their hats in the ring, then paperwork to hire the agent, then they go to work selling the manuscript to editors. So, more waiting. Years of waiting. And at any point in that, potentially more edits and rewrites.
But, as I’ve said all along, traditional publishing isn’t right for every book and every author, so while it’s very exciting to see a positive response from the establishment, given the current market and opportunities, BTE may do better as an indie book, and as new information comes to light, I’ll be making a judgment call on whether to release it sooner. Again, all the pieces are in place except for final layout design, and I’ll probably book that and get it ready in the coming month or so too, so an independent release could happen fast.
For those of you book bloggers/reviewers who’ve gotten in touch, and those who are thinking about it, feel free to keep signing up, just know the timeline’s been pushed out to next year. I’m keeping a database of everyone who’s shown interest for when the ARCs are ready to go.
Until next time, K.