The Publishing Biz - Episode 6

It's been a while since I've updated you all on my efforts to get a book deal. Admittedly, things are moving a bit slow these days. After spending months beating my head against a wall (also known as talking directly to acquiring editors at publishing companies), I am now 100% convinced that my only hope of getting the attention of serious literary agents is to demonstrate that I have built a grass-roots following for my ideas. In fact, this was a recommendation I got long ago from a guy at a big-time PR firm in New York. He said, "Look buddy, I love your work and I think you're a promotable kind of guy, but no one knows you and you have no credibility to write a self-help book. So, if you want this to happen, you'll have to prove that people will buy and read your stuff." OK, so it took my almost a year to believe him. Hey, I'm a skeptic and I do my homework. Anyway, this site is supposed to introduce the world to my way of thinking, and I have to say it's exceeding my expectations.

This site gets several hundred hits a day (especially since we started advertising on the Reason Magazine website, which happens to kick ass), and though many of them are from new visitors (as near as we can tell), there are quite a few folks who come back regularly. I also get a good bit of email (editor@enlightenedcaveman.com) - mostly good, some bad, and some plain weird. The big conundrum these days is column length. In the days when it was just me and my webmaster reading this thing, I had no concern for brevity. My goal was to establish sort of an ideological persona by weighing in on various issues. Over time, thought I, readers would come to really understand where I'm coming from. But now that traffic is really picking up, I'm thinking I may need to make some changes.

Some readers have recommended that I address more topics and just spend a little less time on each one - something like this. I like that idea but don't think I could do it consistently. This is mainly because I tend to dwell on concepts for a while and then belt out a column when I feel like things have become resolved in my mind, at least how I want to say them. I also want to avoid being another me-too blogger. When it comes to the enlightenedcaveman concept, I'm in a league all my own. Of that, I'm fairly certain. However, on political matters and pop culture matters, I don't see the point in echoing what you can hear or read in numerous other places. So, my plan is to do the multiple topics thing a couple of days a week. But this was supposed to be about the publishing business.

In short, see the movie Sideways. There's a part where the main character (a wannabe author) is talking to his agent. She's telling him that the publisher he'd been so optimistic about has decided to pass. Her explanation sums up my experiences thus far with the industry. Content matters last. But there's no cause for bitterness. This industry, like all others, can be cracked with the proper determination. So I'll be in California again this winter attending writer's conferences looking for representation. The education continues...

Do let me know if you have any recommendations on content length or topic number. Thx.