by Chris Harris
It’s so rare that I can find a day where I just decide to devote it to strategy and planning my book. So, it was great to realise, after a very long morning, probably six hours of studiously investigating and plotting, I’d gone backwards!
I am just awaiting a couple more illustrations from Louise, and with the writing finished, it was time to put into action all of those hours I had spent over the last few months researching how to get a book published. The big question remained: should I self-publish or try to get it published by a proper publishing company, the obvious drawback being that, in all likelihood, there would not be one willing to rise to the challenge?
AI and Google had left me swinging either way, depending on how these great new-world engines worked, each telling me something different. So, I was none the wiser, other than I decided to first plot a strategy of trying to secure a proper publisher. Can’t be that difficult, surely? So, this was the day I would set out on the journey of finding one.
The Literary Agent Circus
The first call of action was to follow up on the recommendations from AI to get a literary agent. I wouldn’t get a manuscript looked at without one. Apparently.
I was given lots of platforms where literary agents punted for your book, and the number of them was jaw-dropping. I didn’t have a clue where to start, so I started with the A’s. I put a number of agents and firms into AI and it said it would pick out the three most commensurate with my type of writing. I went on their sites and it was just a labyrinth of hoops to jump through just to get them to look at the book, at which point AI told me that, yes, I really should persevere with this, the caveat being that many would not even look at it, and I certainly wouldn’t get a response from most of them.
The more I looked, the more it dawned on me just how vast the scale of the endeavour was, and how much work would have to be put in to find even an agent, just to send the book out to almost certainly be rejected by everyone.
Now, at this point, if I had nothing else to do with my life, and I had just spent the last six months solely writing a book, and my life revolved around it, I would have persevered. Instead, I have a full-time business, am writing a second novel and maintaining two blogs. Frankly, my book has been a project that I’ve done for myself that I simply decided I would try and get published, but I’m really not that bothered.
So, I find myself in a very fortuitous position: I don’t really have any burning ambition for it. And therefore, I’m one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to bother.
My curiosity and determination had been shredded by an absolute minefield of red tape and hurdles.
Submissions.
This turned out to be another wild goose chase. I already knew there were countless websites, competitions, and platforms supposedly dedicated to publishing short stories, so I began looking into them properly. But the deeper I dug, the less appealing they became. Very few were as straightforward as they first appeared. Many seemed tangled up in their own self-interest, dominated by a kind of generic, mainstream literary style that felt lifeless and formulaic to me.
Then there were the constant submission fees — a fiver here, another one there — all adding up surprisingly quickly. Before long, it began to feel less like a genuine attempt to discover and promote good writing, and more like a business model built around hopeful writers endlessly paying for the privilege of being ignored.
Shattered Dreams?
I had something to eat and watched a film. By this time, my frustration had dimmed and, as usual, I began to see a different side of it.
I reached out to my friend and editor, Louise, who simply said that lots of writers don’t even use agents anymore. Contradicting the AI edict.
After the film, I sat down and went back into ChatGPT and called it out, challenged it about the wild goose chase it had sent me on.
And it did its usual thing when it got it wrong. It came back with: “Oh, for the sort of things you’ve been writing, you really don’t need a literary agent. The best path for you would be to self-publish.” A 100% U-turn.
In fairness, everything it said from then forward made complete sense.
I Digress….
Throughout the writing process, I’d often referred my work to ChatGPT for guidance on strategy. The consistent message had been clear: the real strength of the collection lay in the fact that all twelve stories were rooted in the same place. Short stories, on their own, are not especially commercial, but this was something different—a hybrid of short story and novel, bound together by a single setting.
That meant the true selling point wasn’t any one plot, but Denham the village itself.
Earlier that day, I’d input all of the stories again and asked for the three strongest candidates. The three came back… and they were the three least based in the village.
Come on—go figure that one.
We Continue….
By late afternoon, everything had flipped. Instead of eschewing the village in favour of the bigger, more expansive stories with social media and global themes, Chat had gone completely the other way.
Now it was obvious: you don’t push the big themed stories—you build the village. The village creates the platform. Denham is your world stupid! Thanks for that.
We weighed up the pros and cons, throwing in legalities, the time chasing agents, etc., compared to marketing yourself and the fact that I already have a self-publishing route ‘sort of’ planned.
So we had gone from seeking a literary agent to self-publishing in a day, which, I have to say, was something I was always more comfortable with. And, in hindsight, completely right.
Determined to be positive, at that point, off my own back, I created a Wikipedia page for the village, getting Chat to include events from the stories I had input earlier. It did it imperfectly, but I will edit, it gave me a good framework.
I had started the day chasing literary agents and finished it creating a world—and deciding to just do this on my own.
And it makes complete sense.
The complete and utter soul-destroying act of maybe finding a publisher who might give a shit and publish a couple of thousand books is miserable. And when you remember there are tens of thousands of other people going through the same thing, all competing for some imagined readership, it really is a process I am happy to do on my own, at my own pace.
Louise will be doing the audiobooks, we’ll be doing podcasts, and, as Chat now says, these are absolute gold and the sweet spot for self-publishing, in fairness a route Louise and I had been planning from the start, before I was briefly bewitched by the idea of fame and fortune through a traditional publisher—which is probably what the other 10,000 writers are told as well.
But it’s a process you have to go through, or when you are going it alone, it gets tough, and you wish you’d tried to get a published, I can rule that out and I learnt a lot through all of my research.
Looking for a publisher was where I found myself in it for a few hours on a bank holiday Monday, where I learned enough not to bother and trust my instincts and not AI
