True Story of a Six-Figure Advance

There seem to be many horror stories about traditional (legacy) publishing. Here’s the latest from Rotting Post:

“LISA33” and Me – The Harrowing True Story of a Six-Figure Advance

BYROTTINGPOSTONMAY 24, 2016•

This is the story of getting my novel published by a major New York publisher.It is a story of triumph over adversity. Followed by defeat at the hands of adversity. Let’s call it a 1-1 tie with adversity.

Really it is quite laugh-inducing – particularly after you have drowned yourself in a vat of wine, inhaled a zeppelin’s worth of nitrous oxide, and lit a bonfire of modern novels.

I will skip quickly through the early rejection letters. Suffice it to say that, in no time at all, I had accumulated a stack that covered the entire spectrum of conceivable reasons for turning down a manuscript – up to and including (this is true), that my writing was, somehow, “too sophisticated.”

What does one say to that? “How dare you! My writing is NOT sophisticated AT ALL!” Interestingly, another agent referred to the very same work as “too slapstick”. It would have been nice to get these agents together for a panel discussion on what was wrong with my manuscript.

For years I worked and reworked a serious novel under the guidance of an agent who expressed an interest in representing it. The novel metamorphosed into a variety of forms: One narrator. Two narrators. Six narrators and a chronicler. I told the story from the point of view of a nearby squirrel. Yet with each draft, so my agent told me, there was something undefinable that was not quite right. Perhaps the issue was not the narration after all. Perhaps it was the story itself. Or the protagonist. Or the font.

I eventually dropped this particular magnum opus and dashed off LISA33, a post-modern sex comedy set entirely on the internet. In a matter of three months, I had completed it and sent it off. I soon got a call back from Bill Clegg, who was then already a big name in literary representation.

Read the full post here.