On Novel Writing X

Lately I find myself thinking more frequently about preparing my novel manuscript for submission to a publisher. When I began composing my anime-esque light novel last July, I did so with the primary intention of finally giving full expression to my ideas and granting my characters a complete opportunity to come to life. Actually publishing or publicly releasing the book, however, was only a distant secondary concern for me. At the end of last year and in early January I provided copies of my manuscript to ten people, asking them to read the book and give me feedback. So far, I’ve still only received thorough responses from four of those ten advance readers. One of the responses was unqualified positive. One of the responses was a very insightful, exhaustively comprehensive positive. The other two responses were mixed, skewing negatively. I’m very grateful for my two negative critiques, and I did make some revisions to my manuscript based on those responses. But I also think that those two readers that had questions and were confused by the manuscript approached my book either with skewed expectations in the first place or without the degree of considerate & deliberate reading that the book requires. I’m encouraged by the fact that one of my four readers was able to compose a 773 word psychological analysis of just my protagonist alone, strictly by interpreting clues, dialogue, and actions present in the manuscript, with no explanation or hints from me. So I’m confident that an insightful reader who reads my novel carefully can find satisfying and substantial literary depth in the work.

I’ve been patiently awaiting reactions from some of my remaining six advance readers, but now that several weeks have passed and I’ve had time to coolly and objectively examine the situation, I’ve found myself increasingly inclined to prepare a submission to my first choice publisher. If the book doesn’t get accepted, for reasons that could range from the publisher not liking the genre or audience demographic, or not liking the manuscript length, to the publisher not having confidence in the quality of the work, I may then decide to self-publish and release the book digitally. From the outset, when I began composing this novel last summer, I was okay with possibly never releasing it publicly. But lately I am beginning to feel a bit of an urge to get the book out there for readers to read.

Here’s a bit of what my most encouraging advance reader had to say upon reading the complete manuscript:

I’m anything but an avid reader these days, but I’m enjoying my time with this, and the only other books in recent memory I’ve enjoyed were Game of Thrones, Wicked City and Mogworld…

There are cycles I noticed and others that would have been lost on me without your notes [explanations of the novel’s literary themes that I provided to advance readers] – but there’s absolutely some good stuff that’ll be more obvious on a second read, and I like knowing that, even though I’ve just finished my first read through…

I’m sure I’ll have more to say after a bit of reflection/double checking, but what I’ve said up ’till now remains true; I like it. There’s a lot of texture and nuance here that I enjoy, and while the characterization is a little blunt (or “simple” or whatever the word I’m looking for is), there are both thematic and contextual reasons for it, and we have enough that motives are never especially unclear when all is said and done. I think any confusion or major questions I’ve had up until now have been settled, and while I don’t see any loose threads hanging, there’s enough left over that a sequel would be entirely justified.