Please, published authors

Seriously? Nothing?

>>9186132
You post every day, we know your book is shit.

>>9186786
Honestly this is the first time I've ever made a thread about this. I've asked the same question in other threads and never had a response, so this time I wanted to make it centre stage.

I've also lurked a lot and never seen this particular question answered ever. It's always generic advice about how to write short shit and bottom-line bullshit about what publishers want in the current market blah blah blah... rather than actual strategies about what you would do to actually get a mammoth pomo book out as a new author (e.g., if you were DFW trying to push IJ as your first novel).

But it seems like /lit just can't answer this hypothetical question (i.e., assuming the criteria in the OP is true).

You'll want to find an agent not go to a publisher. Look for similar books to yours and find out which agent/agency published them, then target those agents/agencies.

You're going to want to write a very good query.

No one is going to steal your idea. No one.

>>9186842

You don't publish your magnum opus right away. You publish short stories and magazine articles and make a name for yourself. Then you publish a short novel. You teach creative writing at some college in the middle of nowhere for years. If your publisher hasn't given up on you then you can shit out the big one.

Other than that just be really lucky, or be some Jew's cousin from Yale.

>>9186132
What is your book like? Any chance you might want to combine our books to make a Super Book, to hopefully increase its power/value and chance of getting picked up?

Thanks for the responses, guys.

>>9186861
>>9186857
This seems to be totally contradictory advice. Is the short story/article route advised because of writing practice or for a portfolio? Assume the writing practice had taken place and you had written a really decent book, would you want to sit on it while you churn out shit for the sake of it?

>>9186854
Thanks anon. Can you tell me more about queries? By good do you mean professional like a solid business proposal, or do you mean in a way that shows off the writing style of the author (which for a pomo book could come across as eccentricity).

How do you have no paranoia about theft, especially if the publishing process can take so long?

>>9186861
Also, as much as I would love to make the next Illuminatus with you, Trippy, I could never make myself vulnerable to anyone from this vicious den of tall-poppy sin drones.

>>9186879

Both for practice and the portfolio.

You'll also have to get used to editors having their way with your work.

>>9186888
If you genuinely believed you had a great piece of work, how would you handle that lack of portfolio in seeking an agent/publisher?

>>9186879
the heart of your query is a one paragraph summary of your book with the aim of generating interest in the plot/characters/whatever makes your novel stand out. do not get fancy with your prose in the query letter, save it for the manuscript.

ideas are cheap. everyone has an idea for a great movie/book/videogame. what really matters is the execution--the skill and creativity you bring to the development of the idea and the work ethic to actually finish the damn thing.

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>>9186991
Thanks anon.

I suppose the main problems I can foresee are that, first in the query, if you had a novel similar to the meme trilogy then it would be difficult to argue for its good points without coming across as a deluded pseud who has had one too many sniffs of the snuffbox.

And second, in the manuscript, in conveying some of the large-scale literary attempts... One of my favourite things about the work of Wilson and Pynchon, for example, is the way that characters and concepts can be drawn out and layered, so that the whole piece winds up being more than the sum of its parts. That is, the driving force of the work is neither story, nor prose, but a way of presenting elements of both in interesting combinations and unusual patterns, yes within the short-term sentences and paragraphs, but more importantly across enormous stretches of seemingly disconnected scenes. It just seems like the sort of thing I cannot imagine an agent/publisher being able to appreciate in a quick excerpt on a pile of 500 submissions. How do you deliver a sense of "more than the sum of its parts" when they only want to see a part?

>>9187181
Maybe seek presses that specialize in non 'cookie cutter pulp' for the masses

Indie presses, smaller, experimental, google: Independent Novel/fiction/book presses