This blog was featured on 07/24/2016
Self-Publishing While Looking for an Agent
Contributor

Hello Everyone!

I'm curious if anyone self-published on Kindle while shopping for an agent. I imagined that it would take quite a bit of time to find an agent willing to take a chance on my specific book, so I uploaded it to Kindle. There are so many books out there, I doubt I will come up in the search.

I'm more of a reclusive writer than marketer (though I've learned a lot lately), and my audience is probably pretty specific to women who like literary erotica or more explicit literature in general. I like Anais Nin and had problems with the believability of the characters in Fifty Shades of Grey, so I created erotic shorts based on the voices of realistic men and women who talk about their sex lives and desires, sort of like in-depth, highly descriptive dating profiles. I hope my erotica fall more under the sexual healing movement instead of the "write a book of erotica about a billionaire" similar to Fifty Shades.     

Anyway, I would love to hear your journeys with agents and self-publishing.

Thanks in advance for any comments.  

Lindsay C. Lightfoot

 

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Comments
  • Karoline Barrett

    I didn't want to go the self-publishing route, so I queried for an agent, and finally signed with one. At that time, I only had one novel finished and I did not put it on Kindle while I was shopping for an agent, to me, that would defeat the purpose of looking for an agent. I then began a cozy mystery series, which my agent sold to Penguin/Random House. My agent did not look at whether or not I had sales from being self-published-it was a non-issue for her.

  • Joanne Barney

    I've written three novels, not erotica, which did not find an agent after months of querying.  I put each, one at a time, on Kindle and Nook, and published them as paperbacks as well.  They have sold modestly, with marketing becoming a big part of my writing life, as it also would have had I found a publisher.  The disadvantage of self-published e books is that thousands are published every month and the competition for readers' attentions is huge. The other disadvantage is that possible agents and other publishers will look at your online sales before they consider taking your book on. Only the Shades and a few other very popular titles have gotten  into book stores, libraries, and out to critics and reviewers, all of  which are very important for sales. Bookstores and newspapers  and some agents will often not deal with self-published novels. Do a little research about your genre and its sales, and the agents that will handle it before you self-publish.  Good luck! 

  • Karen K. Hugg

    I haven't done this but have considered writing a different novel and throwing it on Amazon just to see what the response would be. I'm also interested to hear others' experiences in doing this.
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