Andrew Seiple's Blog: Transmissions From the Teslaverse - Posts Tagged "agents"

The title of this post will require some explanation:

So, I'm a cautious person, prone to overthinking and analyzing. As such, I suffer a condition called buyer's remorse. This is what you feel after you buy something, and then you come to think that maybe you made the wrong choice. Buyer's remorse can hit regardless of whether or not you DID make the wrong choice. It's mostly a form of anxiety.

In this case, every so often, I sit down and ask myself if self-publishing was really the right choice. If I'd have been better off sticking it out, and sending queries out to agents and major presses. Usually my answer ends up being "Nah, self-publishing is awesome," but sometimes I wonder.

Then I saw this:
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/boo...

Long story short, an Irish publishing house (not even a very big publishing house) has started charging authors 100 Euros for unagented submissions.

What this basically means, is that authors who don't have an agent must send them 100 Euros (about $75) for the privilege of emailing them a manuscript. The publishing house then can reject it at its leisure and keep the 100 smackers.

100 Euros to give your manuscript to a guy who's 99.9 percent likely to throw it out the window without looking at it. Seriously, they're not even obligated to send you a response!

So instead of suffering from buyer's remorse, I'm now basking in buyer's satisfaction. I KNOW I made the right choice by self-publishing.

I pity the poor souls that gave this exploitative jerk free money. I pity the folks still stuck in a query-rejection cycle that never ends. And I move on, self-publishing with confidence, knowing that I will never have to depend on a flawed business cycle that allows such abuse of the writer.

Life is good. Life is better when you're not dependent on the validation of arrogant gatekeepers.