Writer's market

The hardest part about wanting to be a writer is finding the right agent and publisher for your work.  I invested in a copy of "Writer's Market."  The book is two major drawbacks: the publishing companies mentioned often go out of business before the year is up making the book outdated before it even hits the market and the descriptions on guidelines and what the publishers are looking for rarely match what is on the publishers website.

The valuable information I received from the aforementioned book is how little publishers actually publish material.  Most of the publishers listed publish one or two books a year.  And they receive thousands of manuscripts and even more queries.  The more famous publishers won't look at unsolicited manuscripts or queries.  Most want agented material.  And most agents won't represent authors who have not been previously published.

This leaves most writers unpublished or having to go through self-publishing.  Occasionally, writers'  make a successful career out of self-publishing.  The problem is when you have a job and bills to pay, you cannot invest countless hours marketing your books.  Reading the marketing strategies, most take place before the book comes out.  Finding a famous author to endorse your work.  Having the local newspaper write a piece on the authors up and coming book.  The ones after involve having websites list your book and hoping that people want to spend the money on a no-name author.  The problem is that most of those sites want books that have already been reviewed by at list 5 people on amazon.  If you've been published through amazon, only people who have bought your book through them can write a review.  And the problem with that, as I'm sure other people have seen, is that most of your friends and family wish to buy the book directly from the author (Usually requesting a signed book).  So if the author buys all the copies, only the author can write the review which no one would take seriously.

Making it in the writers world is a daunting task.  The Writer's Market book encouraged people to get a job writing for newspapers to grow their audience.  Newspapers are finding it difficult to hire anyone in todays economy, especially seeing how many people get their news online or via television.  I should know, I majored in journalism originally hoping that I could be a reporter.  When I transferred my major changed to communication studies with an emphasis on public relations.  PR is a lot of marketing.  That would imply that I should have a good marketing strategy for my books.  The only strategy I am aware of is mailing countless manuscripts and queries to agents, publishers and authors asking for endorsements.  But that requires both time and money which after paying for a four-year college, I don't have a lot of when I'm working for minimum wage.