I wrote a book about being genderqueer and I'm trying to get it published.

Those of you who've been reading my blog for awhile now are well aware of that, but I have recently joined several Facebook groups where I may not have mentioned that, and I'm now echoing my blog in more places in hopes of reaching a wider audience... and it's been awhile since I blogged about the book itself. Most of my recent posts have been about some aspect of gender or genderqueer experience.

Anyway, yeah, it's a memoir (nonfiction, my own story), a coming-of-age and coming-out story, about 97,000 words long (probably about 325 pages, give or take). And I've been querying literary agents since 2013 and small publishers (the sort that you can query directly) since 2015.

Here's where things are at at the moment:


THE REQUEST FOR A FULL


Every rare once in a while my queries to literary agents have resulted in a request to see and evaluate the full manuscript, an event known in the world of authors and author-aspirants as a "request for a full". It's akin to when sending in your resume results in an actual job interview. I've had six of those so far.

The most recent was from Lucinda Karter (or, more precisely, from her assistant Jadie Stillwell) of Jennifer Lyons Lit Agency, on November 17 of last year. I sent in the full manuscript and didn't hear a peep, so on December 8 I sent a follow-up inquiry, just asking for confirmation that they actually received it. They had; Stillwell apologized for being behind and said they hadn't had a chance to look at it but would get to it in due course.

At some point in the spring, I went back to querying lit agents, if only to distract myself from the waiting.

Eventually, the 8th of March rolled around, and it had now been three months since I'd heard anything from them and four months since I'd queried them, so I sent a follow-up email, inquiring if I had perhaps missed a critical piece of correspondence. On March 20th, still not hearing anything, I repeated that inquiry, and on March 30th I got a somewhat formletterish "thanks for the opportunity to read but unable to fully connect with the characters and will have to pass" rejection letter.


THE DOLDRUMS


One of the literary agents that I subsequently queried wrote back to say my proposal looks interesting but that they have a policy of only considering material submitted to them exclusively — so did anyone else have it? Of course they did. So in a back-and-forth exchange of emails we established that they'd be happy if I waited until any still-outstanding queries were rejected or else timed out with at least six weeks elapsing from the time I queried them, and then subsequently didn't send any other queries out until they'd had a chance to make their evaluation. That point will be on April the 12th, two days from now. I'll let them know on the 12th that they now have exlusivity and then an additional six weeks will tick by before their exclusivity-window expires.

It's a long shot but all inquiries to lit agents are long shots. I decided to go for it. But it's meant not doing anything as far as lit agents are concerned from week to week and (at this point) month to month.

It's hard to feel fired-up and like you're doing something towards getting a book published when you're just sitting around waiting for a calendar date to crawl by.

Meanwhile, with the publishers, I'm in the same damn situation: there was a publisher I wanted to query, one that was highly recommended on the queer / nonbinary / minority orientation and sexual orientation and intersex FaceBook groups as a good solid publisher for LGBTQIA titles. They, too, have a policy of exclusivity. So I had to wait until the previous publisher submission (to Kensington Books) expired from lack of activity and then sent them my query, which they've now had since January 23. They want 90 days to evaluate manuscripts, so they've got exclusivity until April 23, another thirteen days from now.

So I've been sitting on my thumb, metaphorically speaking, not sending anything to anyone and watching the damn calendar.


BROAD OVERVIEW / REVIEW OF THE SITUATION


I have twice had a publisher sign a contract with me to publish this book. Generally what happens when a publisher signs a contract with an author is that the book goes into print. In the first instance, the publisher, Ellora's Cave, went out of business and revoked all pending books. In the second instance, with NineStar Press, the editor wanted to cut the first third of the book entirely, and we were unable to establish a working relationship. (I experienced the editor as heavy-handed and insulting, and I gather that he found me arrogant and impossible to work with). So I asked them revert my rights back to me.

This is extremely frustrating, as you can probably imagine. The relief and excitement and joy of having a publisher pick up your book, the anticipation of seeing it listed on Amazon and perhaps on a book stand in a book store, the enthusiastic planning of promotional talks and book-signings and lecture tours and all that... ripped out from beneath me.

I was going to write that this isnt fun any more. That's misleading: it was never any fun, this process of trying to sell agents and publishers on the idea of publishing my book. I detest this entire process, just as I hate doing job searches. I have said in the past that trying to sell myself like this ranks right up there with cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue. So "isn't fun any more" isn't the applicable phrase here. What's changed, I think, is that I won't be able to feel any of that relief, excitement, anticipation or joy when I finally do once again have a publishing contract. At this point I don't think it will seem real until the damn thing's actually in print and I am holding a copy in my hands. Maybe not even then.

"Well", you may be thinking, "why don't you just self-publish?"

It's an easy enough process to create a print run of my book. I even have a routine that allows me to print the whole book onto 5.5 x 8.5 format, two pages to a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, double-sided, so it can be whacked neatly in two with an industrial sheet cutter and bound. I could get bids and go with the cheapest bid, and that's before I even look into companies specifically geared to help authors self-publish.

Electronic printing is even more effortless, and free. I can generate a PDF at will, and Amazon (among others) will readily help me convert it to other standard eBook formats for paid download.

None of that is at all difficult. Most of that is not relevant.

The difficult, and relevant, part of what makes publishing different than mere printing is distribution and publicity. Running off five thousand copies of my book (and/or generating an eBook for electronic distribution) doesn't get it into people's hands. It doesn't get it reviewed. There are human activites that successfully overcome those barriers, promotional activities. I'm not good at them. If I were good at them, this would be a very popular blog with hundreds or thousands of weekly readers. It isn't. I'm not.

I'll still have to gear up to plan and execute a promotional campaign even with a traditional-model publisher, unless I get a large publisher on-board (unlikely); but even a small publisher makes the book "authentic" to the world of reviewers and opens up opportunities for distribution and consideration. I'm particularly interested in seeing it picked up as reading material for gender studies, LGBTQ studies, feminist theory, and other related academic course work, and hopefully also to find shelf space in LGBT community centers and support group meeting spaces and whatnot.


READINGS


One thing I have been doing more of lately is attending authors' groups where people bring samples of their work-in-progress and read from them and get feedback from the others there. I've been attending the Long Island Writers' Guild and the Amateur Writers of Long Island in recent weeks. Of the two, I like the format used by the latter somewhat better, as they allow up to 1800 word samples to be read and spend more time discussing each selection before moving on to the next. I've enjoyed them both, though.

The feedback I've received is encouraging. The people say my writing in general is vivid and effective, the characters and their behaviors and dialog strongly drawn, the paragraphs and phrases well-constructed. That's not to say I haven't received useful criticism, of the sort "you could do more of this up here before he says that" and "I found it a bit confusing when it jumped to this next scene, is that supposed to be later the same week or what?" and so on. But the overall takeaway is very good: my writing does what I want it to do, it works. At least in 1800-word chunks. (I still yearn for more feedback on the entire book as a satisfying or less-than-satisfying whole).


STATS


total queries to Lit Agents (counting requeries): 1171

Rejections: 1092
Outstanding: 79

As Nonfiction, total: 944

Rejections: 866
Outstanding: 78

As Fiction, total: 227

Rejections: 226
Outstanding: 1

total queries to Publishers: 30

Rejections: 22
Outstanding: 1
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, went out of business: 1
Pub Contract Signed, rights reverted: 1

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It's been almost exactly a year since I made that announcement the first time around after receiving a letter from Ellora's Cave informing me that they'd like to offer me a contract.

Ellora's Cave went out of business last fall , and I was back where I started from.

This time the offer letter comes from NineStar Press, a fairly new publisher that focuses on LGBTQIA titles. My book fits in better with their lineup than it did with Ellora's Cave's array of steamy erotic romances, and they don't appear to have any skeletons in their closet the way EC did with their public and rancorous dispute with their authors.

I'm relieved; I feel more or less the way I do after a really long hike when I finally stumble into the train station to catch the ride back home. I'm tired of pitching and querying. I wasn't close to giving up or anything but I am happy to stop. I just went to the Rainbow Book Fair at John Jay College last weekend, trundling along a box of 3-page handouts and business cards, hoping to meet some new LGBTQIA publishers, and did, but most of the tables were authors selling their books and most of the publishers were fiction-centric or poetry-centric or were otherwise not interested in a memoir. It's so hard not to become jaded and I worry that I broadcast it, that they'll be able to read between the lines and sense that I don't expect them to want to publish me, you know? So good riddance to that portion of the endeavor, it's nice to put it aside for now (and hopefully for a long while to come, at least until the next book).

Speaking of next book, NineStar included an inquiry about anything else I may have, so (assuming of course that this all pans out) I'll be giving them first crack at That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class when I finally get it ready for the light of day.

I also feel excited, of course, but it's a cautious excited. I've been in this position before and I have no published books sitting on my bookshelf to show for it. In addition to the prospect of NineStar going belly-up after the fashion of Ellora's Cave, unlikely as that may be, it might transpire that NineStar's editors and I reach some kind of irreconcilable impasse or that something in the contractual specifics turns out to be a dealbreaker for me. Or I get a follow-up letter "Oops, we had a board meeting and unfortunately we are rescinding our offer of a contract to all authors not born under water signs". None of this is at all likely but I am wary, twice-burned already (back in 1982 an interested 'publisher' turned out to be an opportunistic vanity press that had somehow learned I was querying), and uninclined to fully count my unhatched chickens.

What else? Impatience for sure. I'm craving the beginning of the editing process and getting all the preliminaries and learning when my book will be coming out. And then gearing up for the promotional activities and trying to obtain book reviews. I wanna get this show on the road.


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