After spending a lot of time researching the traditional publishing industry, speaking with literary agents on and off of social media and seeing the various blog posts, YouTube videos and articles written by agents/publishers, I've found that there are quite a few strikes against me as far as getting traditionally published.
1. Portal fantasy.
Though my novels are fairly atypical in regard to the usual portal fantasy trope (for example, it has nothing to do with a character getting "sucked into" a fictional world through a book or a TV or movie screen, etc. "The Stobrimore Chronicles" is about a parallel world just as real as the one where Jack was born and throughout the series, he and others pass back and forth through the Worldgate portals when the story dictates it), many agents have made it abundantly clear that they dislike/hate/openly despise the entire sub-genre and won't even read the submission if they see it in a query letter. Take this particular Twitter post from a literary agent:
i really hate portal fantasies. i'm sorry, i grew up reading a lot of fan fic that had the set up with "and then the tv/book/whatever began to glow and i was suddenly pulled into this fantasy world." i just cant do it anymore :(
Other agents aren't so openly hostile in their objection. They simply say "I'm not a fan of Portal Fantasy stories." But, because of that, a lot of them give up before they even read the story.
2. It's a series.
Even though the first book in "The Stobrimore Chronicles" can serve as a standalone, the fact that I continued to write the series while I queried the first one makes it a major turnoff for many literary agents and publishers. Many of them don't even want to consider a series. For the ones who do, they want a standalone with "series potential". Not a series that has already been written. I didn't wait for book one to be picked up by an agent/publisher before continuing the series. I have stories that I want to tell, so I'm going to tell them. I'm not going to just sit on the ideas for them until an agent or publisher picks up book one, because, statistically speaking, the odds of getting a literary agent (for all genres) is roughly 1 in 6,000 and, once you get an agent, the odds of making it through the publishing process with any of the larger publishers and getting the book out to readers (it's a multi-step process involving several stages of editors, marketers and so on), are only roughly 1%-2%. And that's for one book. For a series, the odds are even lower.
3. Straight white male main character.
Outside of the romance genre and a select few others, many agents and publishers are currently looking for stories written by and about underrepresented/marginalized groups, especially in the fantasy genre, and the larger publishers are looking to promote minority authors (which is a good thing) through their DEI initiatives so a straight white middle-class male main character is seen as a bit of a turnoff. A number of agents and publishers claim that the fantasy genre is already "too saturated" with straight white male main characters. And, to be clear, this is not me complaining about diversity. As I've said in previous blog posts, diversity in literature is a good thing. It gives readers a wider range of perspectives and it gives authors who may not have had as much of an opportunity to get their books out to that audience in the past a chance to have their books seen. But in the methodology of increasing the diversity of literature for many of these agents and publishers, the trend seems to be, instead of just opening the doors to a wider range of diverse authors and characters, they're also increasingly closing the door for certain genres/authors who don't necessarily fit into the diversity boxes. This can be seen even in the manuscript wishlists of a number of literary agents. Take this one, for example:
MSWL:
[Agent Name Omitted] is exclusively looking for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific Islander voices with or without LGBTIQA+ intersectionality—basically anyone underrepresented and/or marginalized.
Promoting authors who are considered "underrepresented and/or marginalized" is fine, but doing that to the exclusion of authors who don't fit into that category is basically using the same exclusionary practices that they are attempting to rectify. Fighting discrimination by discriminating.
4. Social Media.
I don't have a pre-built "platform". Without an already established audience (AKA people already ready to buy the book/s before they're even out), as a debut novelist, I'm not as appealing to agents and publishers as someone who already has that platform in place. As much as I dislike social media, as a whole, and as much as I have resisted it since quitting Facebook back in 2020, I've recently joined Twitter because, whether I like it or not, in the modern market, social media is a necessity for things like marketing. But since I don't have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of followers across social media, I don't have that pre-built audience that agents and publishers are looking for. Publishers and many agents don't want to take the risk of an unknown author without an established following.
5. Self-publishing industry.
With increased acceptance of self-publishing, traditional publishers are now far more picky about what they will invest time and money in. Prior to the increasing popularity, legitimacy and acceptance of the self-publishing industry through places like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, many of the larger publishers had tiers of books that they would look to publish. There were the "big hit" bestseller books, usually the already established novelists, celebrities, famous/prominent non-fiction writers and the already well-known classics that they made most of their money on, and then there were the "mid-range" books that were higher risk. The "mid-range" books were generally from the debut authors who fit into whatever the trend was at the time of publishing. Some of them occasionally moved up to the "bestseller" category, but most of them earned the publishers some, but not a lot, of money, and they would invest less in them. As I said, some moved up to the "bestseller" category, some remained as "mid-range" and, unfortunately, some ended up in the "bargain books" category. Or even worse, a relative few ended up being dropped entirely. With self-publishing as a growing competitor, traditional publishers no longer have that exclusivity so they're more hesitant to make the investment in things like cover design, editing, marketing, distribution and so on. Somewhat ironically, that choice is only pushing more authors to the self-publishing option. The benefits of that include far more creative control in regard to things like cover design and editing. The downsides include marketing costs, distribution costs, design costs, freelance editing costs and so on that are now solely the responsibility of the author.
I started this off by saying that these are strikes against me, but many of these are true to many authors in this modern publishing landscape. Some apply more than others. But, that being the case with me, it likely means that the "Adventures in the Journey to Publishing" that I started writing about in September of last year will end in me pursuing self-publishing, as I did with my fun fact book and the nautical history book I co-wrote with my father back in 2018/2019. But that's the thing about adventures. They don't always take you to where you think you're going to go.
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