2008-01-02

List Your Manuscript For Sale?

This blog post, which talks about a writer listing her manuscript on Publisher's Marketplace, is quite interesting.

You should avoid YADS (Yet Another Display Site) like the plague, as no one worth their salt in the publishing world looks at them (usually the only ones who peruse them are bottom-feeding agents and the like). Publisher's Marketplace is a bit different, as it's used by a lot of legit agents to announce books they've sold.

It was optioned as a movie, BTW, but as of this date, it still hasn't been sold to a publisher. Methinks that might happen sometime soon. :-)

Would I go as far as this woman did in order to get her manuscript noticed by the Publishing and/or Movie Gods and Goddesses? If you're truly desperate or are just intrigued, the paying version of Publisher's Marketplace is only $20 a month (I get the free, lite version, Publisher's Lunch, delivered to my email daily).

Still not sure I'd do it, but maybe at some point, I'll consider it.

~Nancy Beck

2 comments:

April said...

Hmmmm...that is interesting. And good to know if it's successful. And I'm starting to feel utterly depressed and insecure about the quality of my writing since no one's biting yet. But I'm still goin...

Nancy Beck said...

April,

Sorry to hear that no one's picked up your ms. as yet. (And I know very well about being discouraged.)

It can take some time, especially since agents can afford to be picky (since there are so many writers out there with mss.).

Maybe your query needs a looking at? Sometimes queries are harder to write than the novel.

The Water Cooler's Share Your Work section has one for queries (you have to scroll down a bit to get to the queries thingy).

Might be something to investigate at some point.