Tag Archives: Pyr books

A “Pyr”less Effort

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Well, the bad news just keeps on rolling.

Got a rejection e-mail, this time from publisher Pyr.  I’m only waiting on a pass from Ace to officially declare I’m batting .000.

Yes, I’m still on hold from Baen, and no, I have not yet submitted to any small indie markets yet, but once this final, delayed rejection comes in, it puts a cork in my fantasy of being pro-published the traditional way right out the gate.  As for the agent hunt, I’ve submitted to 6 major agencies, targeting their newly listed agents who are actively searching for clients.  So far, I’m 0 for 6.

I’m still engaged in writing, working on Echomancer, “Bumped”, and “ILYAMY” intermittently, but I really had high hopes for A Sword Into Darkness.  I even re-read it this last week and sent it off to another reader who had expressed a fascination with the book.  I think it’s good.  What could be the factor turning editors off about it?  What could I tweak or re-write to make it past those initial gate-keepers?

Ah, well.  I’ve pulled down “Bumped” this week and I’m finishing off a re-write now.  It’ll go off into the aether this weekend, along with “ILYAMY”. Maybe I can put my count of pro-published shorts to 3 or 4.

Any advice from the internets?

 

All “Tor”n Up

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The Wife has now experienced the momentary confusion of the thin, self-addressed, stamped envelope.

A new SASE arrived yesterday with the anticipated-but-not-desired rejection form letter, this time from TOR/FORGE, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC. She apologized when she handed me the thin envelope, already torn open. She had no idea why I’d be mailing myself a letter and had ripped it open without remembering the submissions, much like I had last time with the rejection from DAW. It was fine though. Like last time, I figured publishing contracts would probably take up more than a page.

That brings the current rejection/acceptance tally to 2 against (TOR/FORGE and DAW (or is that 3 against?)), and 0 for, with Baen Books/Simon & Schuster (on hold for well over a year), Ace/Penguin, and Pyr/Prometheus still yet to report out of the “Big Six” publishers I submitted to. I don’t recall if I mentioned it before, but Random House (Bantam, Del Rey, Ballantine, and Spectra), Harper Collins (Eos/Prism, Voyager), and Hachette (Orbit) don’t accept unsolicited submissions without a literary agent — and a literary agent is pretty much just as hard to get without a contract in hand as a book publisher.

Ah well. At least I won’t be getting any more thin SASEs. All my remaining submissions were electronic. The time is ticking for the obligatory rejection form e-mails, however.

Sorry. I hate to be a downer. If any of the remaining three say “yes”, it’ll be amazing, but if all say no, it won’t stop A Sword Into Darkness. Assuming that happens, I’ll either re-submit to smaller publishers, finally get a pickup from a literary agent, or I’ll just publish it myself on Amazon/Apple/Barnes&Noble and hope it picks up on its own. And separate from all that, I still have a number of projects in the works.

As Dory said, just keep swimming!

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Well, “DAW”n It. :(

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After a great weekend working on la casa, having a patio and porch put in, and then painting and decorating my office/writer’s sanctuary (a future post with pics, to be sure), I both returned to The Job and snuck in a little writing.

Things are progressing well at The Job, in that I am learning the ropes and becoming more of a solver than one whom relies upon others for solutions, but so much of the work there consists of us being a clearinghouse for negativity. And in other locales which report to us at The Job, there was a great deal to feel negative about. This weekend, people were uniformly awful to one another, with many a heinous crime committed upon one another, and we get all the dirty (both literally and figuratively dirty) details.

So, needing a pick-me-up, I turned to fiction, specifically creating my own. I was able to chop quite a few more pages into the re-write of “ILYAMY” and I finally broke ground on the new “Strategic Deployment” script. I’m buoyed by both projects and hope to be able to show something here soon.

Refreshed and optimistic once more, I got home and checked the snail-mail out front.

Yep. Mistake.

I saw my own handwriting on a letter, the self-addressed, stamped envelopes from one of my ASID submissions. That’s never good. I’m pretty sure publishing contracts don’t come in slender business envelopes. Dreading the obvious, I opened it to reveal a lovely form rejection letter from Peter Stampfel of DAW books.

He thanked me for the contribution, it’s very hard for a new writer to get picked up and be successful these days, we don’t feel your manuscript would be a commercial success at the present, but we’ve rejected gold before, so don’t stop trying and remember us when it comes time to submit your next un-sell-able manuscript.

On the good side, that’s a pretty quick turnaround. I submitted the full manuscript to DAW by the regular post on May 1st. Give it a week for mail routing, a ten days to languish in a slushpile, 15 seconds to hate everything about all 116,000 words (or as far into the first page they’re willing to give it), a day to process the rejection letter, and then two to three days for it to show up in my box, then you can obviously see they gave it their full consideration.

Who’s next on the rejection train? Ace? Baen? Pyr? C’mon, I’m ready for it!