Visiting today is Abby Bardi, author of
The Secret Letters.
She's gracing us with a guest post about agented vs unagented submissions.
Take it away Abby.
Unagented Submissions
& The Secret Letters
I had been sitting on
my novel The Secret Letters for some time, pondering what the heck to do
with it, when my friend Gary, who is also a writer, gave me a suggestion. In
the little space for messages in one of our ongoing Facebook Scrabble games, he
wrote, “Why don’t you try sending to HarperCollins Australia? They take
unagented submissions on Wednesdays.” It was now Tuesday.
The next day, I sent a
partial to HCA through a form on their website. Several days later, they asked
for more. Several days after that, they said they wanted to publish my novel.
Easy, right?
Well, not exactly. This
particular overnight success was fifteen years in the making. I had started the
novel in the summer of 2000, just as my first novel The Book of Fred was
enmeshed in the lengthy process of being published in hardcover by an imprint
of Simon & Schuster. My then-agent wasn’t happy with my first draft of The
Secret Letters, so I rewrote it completely, but it still wasn’t quite
right.
Somewhere along the
line, 9/11 happened, and it seemed no one was interested in a heartwarming
family story. The Book of Fred’s pub date was actually on 9/11, and all
the books at the time were on the Taliban. I put my heartwarming family story
away. Every so often, I pulled it out again and worked on it, and I think I
sent one version to some agents about ten years ago. But the story was still
too “small.”
I kept working on it,
picking it up when I wasn’t working on some other heartwarming family story
that was too small, and finally this past June or so, HarperCollins Australia
gave me the thumbs up. Six weeks later, it was an ebook!
Of course, this is a
far different publishing climate than with The Book of Fred. I got a
nice advance for that, and the publisher assigned a publicist who did
mysterious things like “co-oping.” I was able to do some book signings, back
when there were bookstores, and I even did a little tour.
With The Secret
Letters, I had a really wonderful editor who left in midstream and then
another really wonderful editor (the same thing happened with my first book).
HCA also assigned a fantastic copy editor. There was no advance, just a
percentage of sales: 25% up to 10,000 books sold and then 50%. The publisher
sets the price, which started out at $2.99 and is currently 99 cents! If it had
been left up to me, I’d have charged more, but hey, they know more about this
than I do.
So maybe the unagented
digital route is not the most lucrative way to go, but what matters to me with
this book is that now people can read it and that my characters, who I grew to
love as if they were real people, can find their way out of my computer and
into people’s hearts, where they can warm them.
*****
Thank you, Abby, for sharing your journey.
Well folks what do you think?
Agented publication, unagented publication, or as some are finding even more lucrative self-publishing?
Now introducing - The Secret Letters
When thirty-seven-year-old
slacker-chef Julie Barlow's mother dies, her older sister Pam finds a cache of
old letters from someone who appears to be their mother's former lover. The
date stamped on the letters combined with a difficult relationship with her
father leads Julie to conclude that the letters' author was a Native American
man named J. Fallingwater who must have been her real father.
Inspired by her new
identity, Julie uses her small inheritance to make her dream come true: she
opens a restaurant called Falling Water that is an immediate success, and life
seems to be looking up. Her sister Norma is pressuring everyone to sell their
mother's house, and her brother Ricky is a loveable drunk who has yet to learn
responsibility, but the family seems to be turning a corner.
Then tragedy strikes, and
Julie and her siblings have to stick together more than ever before. With all
the secrets and setbacks, will Julie lose everything she has worked so hard
for?
Excerpt:
The casket was a double-wide, with painted flowers on
the side like a circus wagon. Pam said it looked like hippies had scrawled on
it with crayons while tripping.
“She’s at peace now,” one of our idiot cousins said to
someone I half-recognized from when my mother used to drag us to West Virginia,
where she was born. “Just a bunch of goddamn hillbillies in the Mountain State,”
she always said, like she was Martha Stewart.
“Shut up,” Pam muttered in the cousin’s general
direction, smiling like she was saying something nice. I hoped she planned to provide
snark during the funeral, since I didn’t know how I would make it through
otherwise. My other sister Norma was in the front pew sobbing. We were keeping
our distance from her, not because of anything in particular, but because we
always stayed out of her way if we could. It didn’t pay to try to comfort her,
since anything you said would be the wrong thing.
The casket was closed, thank God. Our mother had left
strict instructions about this and everything else when she was still
conscious. Even while dying, she was a control freak, and amazingly vain for
someone who weighed just shy of 400 pounds, even with terminal cancer. “You’re
beautiful,” we always said to her in a Hollywood voice, “don’t ever change.”
She knew we were just messing with her, but she always smiled and patted her
hair.
“That’s a hell of a casket,” I said.
“Sure is purty.” Pam’s eyes were red. I hadn’t looked
in a mirror since early morning when I’d slathered on eye makeup, but I’d been
crying all day, too, and probably looked like a slutty raccoon. “Is Timmy here
yet?”
“Haven’t seen him. It’s so crowded.” I scanned the
room.
“Did any of these weirdos actually know her?”
“I don’t know. I bet those fat guys were football
players at her high school.” I wiped my eyes, though I knew it was a bad idea,
smear-wise.
“Oh, there he is.” Pam pointed to the back of the room
and I spotted our older brother. He was wearing a dark suit that made him look
like a Mafia don, talking to some blond guy. She tried waving, but he didn’t notice.
His eyes were on the casket. He hadn’t seen our mother in almost a year, and I
was sure it was hard for him to believe she was gone. Tough shit for him, I
thought. He could have come here when it would have made a difference. Now it
didn’t matter to anyone what he did.
“Is The Asshole coming?” I asked, referring to our
father.
“No, he says he has a schedule conflict.”
“Probably golf. You’d think he could at least manage
to show up for this.”
“At least he’s clean and sober.”
“So he says. He’s probably still banging down Zombies
at strip clubs.”
“Try not to be bitter, Julie. It’s unattractive.”
“Bitter? You think I’m bitter?”
As the minister cut in and began to read the eulogy my
mother had probably written for him, my mind started wandering like I was in
grade school waiting for the bell to ring. I tried to concentrate, but I
couldn’t. Every so often I’d tune back in and hear things that weren’t true.
Her devotion to other people. Her service to the community. Her wonderful
family life—I could just about hear her voice coming out of the guy’s mouth. I
didn’t know where she found him, since she never went to church. I figured he
was an actor she hired to play a minister, and made a mental note to mention
this to Pam.
As he droned on in his phony actor voice, I closed my
eyes and imagined walking through the woods on the hill behind our house. Most
of it was gone now, bulldozed to make room for the townhouse development just
over the ridge. I made a path through the old trees, and the dogs ran in
circles around me. Ahead of me was the pond, though in real life it wasn’t
there any more either, except for the hints that sometimes bubbled up in
people’s driveways. I was going to dangle my bare feet in the water. I could hide
there all day, and no one would know where I was. Then I would run back through
the trees to our house, with the dogs behind me, and my mother would be there,
and Frank, and Donny.
When I opened my eyes the minister was gone, and some
cousin who hadn’t seen my mother in years was reading from a wrinkled piece of
paper. She was stumbling over the words, maybe because it was Mom’s loopy
handwriting, or maybe she couldn’t read. It was Mom’s life story minus all the
bad parts and made going to high school in East Baltimore, meeting The Asshole,
and having five children with him sound like an E! True Hollywood Story. Norma was born six months after the
wedding, and it didn’t take a mathematician to figure out the facts, but the
cousin glossed over that, and the ugly divorce, and finished with the happy
ending, my mother finding true love with Frank and then having little Ricky. Ricky,
on my left, burst into loud sobs. I put my arm around him and he cried onto my
shoulder. I could smell he’d been drinking again. I would have pulled him onto
my lap like I used to, but he was a big boy now. When I looked at him with his
tattoos, dreadlocks, and piercings, I still saw that cute little blond guy and
felt how much we had loved him. We still loved him that much, but it was
complicated.
Pam leaned across me and held his hand. “You’ll be
fine, sweetie,” she whispered to him, though we were pretty sure he wouldn’t.
*******
Abby
Bardi is the author of
THE BOOK OF FRED and
THE
SECRET LETTERS. She grew up in
Chicago,
went to college in
California,
then spent a decade teaching English in
Japan and
England. She
currently teaches at a college in
Maryland
and lives in historic
Ellicott City with her
husband and dog.
*****
CONGRATULATIONS ABBY!
Do you have an opinion on agents / non-agents, we'd love to hear it!
*****
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
