So, this is actually for my partner, who doesn’t use social media at all, but she’s written a book, and is working on more, but is really struggling getting anything at all from publishing companies. Rare to even get a ‘no’ response, mostly just ghosting.
Not sure if anyone has any kind of advice; she did set up a website, and has some of the first few chapters posted, and is perhaps considering giving the webserial format a try. But in general, struggling with mental health of having accomplished a cool thing, and now doing the ‘business’ side of it, and realizing how soulcrushing it all is.
A loooot of the authors we’ve seen talk about getting their start either knew a publisher already, or had a family connection, and its pretty hard to not feel cynical, even if the authors are genuinely good writers.
FWIW, genre is basically YA fantasy, but gayer.
Publishing is indeed soul-crushing no matter how you do it. Traditional publishing is probably not the way to go here, because as you observed, it’s not a particularly fair system and it requires going through a lot of rejections, and even when you get accepted, you don’t get to keep most of what your story earns.
Self-publishing directly on Amazon via KDP is an option, but if an agent already told her that the work needs to be edited, it probably does. The numbers you quoted sound high to me (used to be a copy-editor and I sure wasn’t making that kind of money) unless her manuscript is super long, but at a minimum, it needs to be proofread, even if just by a smart nitpicky friend. Paying for a professionally-designed cover is also important, but those run from $50-200.
She should probably look in at the Indie Authors Ascending discord server because they’re good at giving no-nonsense critiques and feedback: https://discord.gg/V3dBmfYmQj
Editing numbers were non specifically to her work, it was looking up some places and seeing what they charge by the word, not sure if it was really correct tbh.
She’s had me and two friends proofread it, and fix errors and give feedback.
Thanks for the discord link, worth getting some advice from other authors.
