Poets & Writers

How to Get Paid

LAST year James Wolf, a retired insurance agent making his first foray into literary fiction, sent portions of his unpublished novel, “No Good Day to Die,” to a handful of agents and publishers. In their responses the industry experts all told Wolf essentially the same thing: that his novel, an eight-hundred-page fictional recounting of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn and its aftermath, had promise but that it needed a lot of work before it could be published.

One publishing professional, however, went one step further. Kathy Springmeyer of Sweetgrass Books, the self-publishing arm of Farcountry Press in Helena, Montana, referred Wolf to novelist Russell Rowland, who has long maintained a sideline as a freelance editor for aspiring authors. When the two men met, they quickly hit it off, and Wolf agreed to pay Rowland $4,000 to edit his manuscript.

“If I’m going to make my book substantially better, my position was I needed help,” Wolf says of his decision to hire an editor. “I’m a first-time author and never had anything published before. When I started this, one of the questions I had for myself was, ‘What the hell do I know about writing a book?’”

Wolf is hardly alone in asking this question. Spurred by innovations in e-book and print-on-demand technology, American authors self-published more than a million books in 2017, an increase of more than 150 percent since 2012, according to a report by Bowker, an affiliate of the database firm ProQuest. At the same time, the traditional publishing industry is shrinking at an alarming rate,

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Poets & Writers

Poets & Writers2 min read
Small Press Points
Size matters to Bull City Press (bullcitypress.com). The publisher in Durham, North Carolina, has managed to keep what executive director Ross White calls its “commitment to compression” for nearly twenty years. Initially founded in 2006 to publish I
Poets & Writers3 min read
Reactions
Poets & Writers Magazine welcomes feedback from its readers. Please post a comment on select articles at pw.org, e-mail editor@pw.org, or write to Editor, Poets & Writers Magazine, 90 Broad Street, Suite 2100, New York, NY 10004. Letters accepted for
Poets & Writers10 min read
Ghosted
IN OCTOBER 2020, I received an e-mail from a literary agent named A. who I believed would transform my life as a writer. Her message arrived after I’d spent two months querying literary agents regarding an autobiographical middle-grade novel about a

Related Books & Audiobooks