beware the one who names himself a rancher of men

February 6, 2014 Jonathan Moeller

A fairly prominent literary agent, perhaps accidentally, revealed his opinion of writers in a recent post. I will not link to it, but if you are sufficiently curious Google the phrase below, since it captures the crux of his post:

Better still, because some authors are now—voluntarily!—willing to bear the expense and undertake the effort of building an audience by themselves, print publishers have the luxury of culling the prize cattle from the herd.

If you want to be a writer and are just starting out, you are really infinitely better off self-publishing ebooks than attempting to query agents or publishers. Yes, you’ll make mistakes, or screw something up with the formatting or the cover, get a bad review or two, and (most likely) not sell many copies. But so what? You’ll learn from these mistakes and become better and stronger (and you will learn infinitely more from a paying reader’s bad review than a rejection letter from an agent that says the book “just didn’t work for me”). Perhaps you’ll decide writing is not for you, and that is fine, or you will double down and become a better writer. But either way is more productive than querying agents, which is a waste of time.

Now, you might argue I have an unfair advantage – I submitted my first story to a magazine in 2000 and DEMONSOULED was originally published in 2005, so by the time I discovered the Kindle and ebooks in 2011, I had something like ten unpublished novels ready to go. But if in some parallel universe the Kindle and the Nook and the iPad had been available in 2000, and if I had a time machine and the option to do it over again, I would definitely self-publish. Certainly I have put that advice into practice – everything I have written since 2011 has been geared toward self-publication, and I do not regret it in the slightest.

Besides, publishing is a business relationship, and you don’t want to get into a business relationship (or any kind of relationship, really) with someone who thinks you are the prize cattle from the herd. Because we all know what happens to prize cattle: