Hey there Brandon, thanks for doing another AMA!
Unpublished authors are often told that agents and publishers won’t even look at a debut novel longer than 150k words. Your debut, Elantris , was considerably longer than that. How did you get your foot in the door? Was it just a query letter, or did you pitch the novel to someone at a convention/conference? If the former, would you mind sharing that query synopsis with us?
I pitched it at a convention. (World Fantasy Convention, which was in Montreal that year.) WFC does still tend to be one of the best places to meet editors/agents if you’re interested in publishing with a mainstream publisher.
Elantris was 250k words, and I had a real rough time getting my foot in the door with it. The editor I met there let me pitch to him after we had a nice long conversation about the authors he was working on at the moment. Dan Wells, who was with me, also pitched and sent his book. His got read far more quickly than mine did. (His was far shorter.)
I waited eighteen months for a reply—so long, that I’d given up on the book. The editor said that every time he sat down to read slush, that enormous book intimidated him, so he picked something shorter to read. When he finally read Elantris, he only got two chapters in before he wanted to buy it—which is nice.
Editors have a love/hate relationship with huge books like this. The big ones do tend to drive the epic fantasy market, but they’re more expensive to produce than the short ones, and therefore more risky to take a chance on. I would never suggest writing your books shorter than you feel is the right length, but do realize that both readers and editors will cock an eyebrow at you if the length goes too long. They expect more payoff for the increased size.
Digital formats, fortunately, are helping change this perception. Size (either direction) is no longer as limiting as it once was.
Thanks for the reply! I was actually at WFC this past year and you gave me great advice about going to the room parties. It was definitely an experience.
I waited eighteen months for a reply—so long, that I’d given up on the book.
You have no idea how much a relief it is to hear you say that. Thank you. Currently playing the waiting game on a book I submitted, and I was getting worried. But knowing that it took so long for someone to get back to you and that the answer was in the positive put my mind at rest a little.
Thanks again, look forward to seeing you in Connecticut in July!
It’s perfectly acceptable to send a polite email to an editor if they’ve had your book for a long time. Just say that you’re curious if it’s still being considered, or if there’s a chance it has been lost. (Usually, six months is the time to send this.)
What does pitching a book look like? I’m familiar with how that would work in the movie business, but I’d never considered it in the publishing realm.
P.S. love all of your books.
Usually, this is the two or three sentence explanation of a book you’d put in a query letter. It focuses on one idea in the book, kind of the ‘concept.” Not that different from a Hollywood pitch, only a little less…uh…Hollywood.
For Elantris it was something like “The Prince of a kingdom catches a terrible magical disease, and is locked away in a prison city with everyone else who has the disease. He works to bring unity, hope, and perhaps a cure to the city.”
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.