We’ve arrived in Killarney safe and sound, all in one piece and enjoying our first evening in town. Killarney is the one place I wanted most to visit this trip to Ireland, and it’s all on account of Van Morrison’s song “Fair Play,” in which he so warmly describes Killarney’s lakes as so blue among other attributes. I can vouch for him — the lakes are blue.
But I’ll save all that waxing poetic for another post, after I’ve sorted through the photos. More photos, less talk. We shall see.
Instead, I’ll talk books, mostly mine and how my pitch went at the historical novel conference I attended last weekend in Maynooth, Ireland. I pitched to an acquiring agent of a small UK publisher. All during my pitch, he studiously wrote in his notebook, right up until I said, “It is complete at 120, 000 words.” He put his pen down and said ARE YOU KIDDING ME? or words to that effect. He pointed to the small display of his press’s books beside him. “The highest we go is 80,000.” He asked me to get in touch when/if I get my book down to 100K, but he knew that I knew that I was never going to be sending anything to him anytime soon.
Remember the cynic in me a couple of weeks ago, right here in these pages, when I was hoping against hope that 120K words was acceptable, worrying that when I arrived at the conference they’d say, “Just kidding! We meant 100K.”
Never once did I expect to hear 80,000. My book is never going to get down to 80,000 words. I wouldn’t want it to. But to be fair, his press doesn’t appear to take on substantial books, by which I mean substantial stories, so it would never have been a good fit. I wish his website said they want no more than 80,000-word manuscripts, then I would have pitched to a different agent or editor. But I sort of made up for it a little later by talking to other agents and editors at the conference. Three out of four of them said 120,000 words was fine, and the other said maybe but she’d prefer 100,000. All I can say to all that is I’ve jumped the first hurdle: 120K is good. On to the next thing.
That next thing is to write a query letter and a synopsis and also come up with a better one-sentence elevator pitch. There was a contest associated with this conference, wherein one submitted one’s first chapter to a panel of judges and the grand prize winner gets a good prize. When the MC read out the elevator pitch for the winning book, even I, the cynic with a very high bar, said, wow, that sounds good. I’d like to read that. And I determined right there that my elevator pitch has to be that good. So that’s next.
The main takeaway from the conference is what a mess the publishing industry is in right now: The Big 5 publishers are acting every part the dinosaurs and are so caught up in DEI, which they wholeheartedly approve of, that they are afraid of stepping on toes. Throw in AI, and it’s all a bit ugly. But they are still publishing lots of books and they still have the best distribution. After the conference, though, I felt more determined than ever that I want to go the small press route (the editor I pitched to notwithstanding). And that leads me to the very best news of this trip.
Two days ago we were in Cork, which is the hometown of Mercier Press, an independent Irish publisher. Downstairs is the bookstore with all their titles for sale, and upstairs is the publishing office. Before coming to Ireland, I knew this was the small press I want to publish my book. Whether they will want to is another story, but so far, we only have my story, and I’m sticking to it.
I knew that I couldn’t just show up and say I have a book you might be interested in. Everything is done by email these days, and they don’t want to see me, they want to see my book. But the bookstore is a different thing altogether. By all means, come in and buy our books. Well, it so happens that one of their books is set in 1846 Ireland, so there’s that similarity with mine. I wanted to see how big the book was, and I could only do that at the bookstore. It turns out it looks to be about the same size as mine would be. I start talking to the woman minding the store, and it turns out she’s helping in the store for a couple of minutes to fill in for the fellow who had to run out. So, she says, she’s not with the bookstore, she’s with the publisher upstairs, and in fact, she says, she’s the one who receives the manuscript submissions. We continue talking, she gives me her card, I give her my name, which she says will be easy to remember, and she awaits my submission. If I came into the bookstore ten minutes later, I’d never have met her. I take it as a sign.
So now I have to sit down and write the query letter, a synopsis and that spellbinding elevator pitch. But I have to tell you, I’m already fantasizing about the next time I come to Ireland on my book’s publicity tour (which goes swimmingly in my fantasy) and how I will rent a home for three months in the summer, not too far from where I am here in Killarney. Van might have prompted me to visit, but I wanted a taste of here to remind me why I want to come back.
I don’t have access to YouTube right now (mostly I don’t want to wake my roommate), so no song this week. Next time.