Change In The Air

I sent off a few queries over the weekend, and would have submitted one to Nathan Bransford but he's quit the business.

This time, it wasn't me who sent him packing.

Thinking that Janet Reid at FinePrint Literary Management might be interested, I checked her website for query preferences and was reminded that she once had her own agency. A one-woman operation couldn't make it in today's publishing climate and she joined forces with a bigger firm so that she could survive.

New agents at old agencies are always good for querying, and I sent one off to Bernadette Baker-Baughman. She used to have her own agency as well, but now she's toiling under the auspices of Victoria Sanders.

There are many, many single-agent shops that have merged into larger firms. The overhead is high and one agent can't easily bring in enough revenue to cover the little things like office rent, utility expenses and the like. Even if they work from home, there's always rent to be paid and the phone bill doesn't pay itself.

It could be that all the gloom and doom talk about publishing going the way of the dinosaur (evolving into birds) has me feeling that my chances of getting published have flown out the window. Fewer agents to query, fewer manuscripts being accepted, and fewer published novels appealing to my reading interests.

Time and business adjustments have left me behind.

What more can I do than keep trying? Write another manuscript on a different subject, and hope that the publishers catch up to me at some point?

Giving up doesn't feel right for me. Like the small mammals who scurried around under foot before the mighty beasts were wiped out by their own mass and inefficiency, I can maintain an existence and then burst on the scene when the dust settles, manuscript in hand. And about six others under the bed, waiting to be dusted off.