The Girl on the Kerb

 

I thought I’d do a quick update on the novel I have out for submission and am looking for an agent to represent it. I emailed out query letters, as they’re called, on the first of July to four agents, and four more on the first of August. To date, I’ve received one rejection email from the July batch. I’ve not heard from the other three, however, not hearing from agents is a common way of signaling rejection. It is a little bit early to expect anything from the four August agents. In short, no surprises here.

What is new, is that I’ve decided to change the title of the novel, from The Road to Eura to The Girl on the Kerb. This may strike you as a big change, and in a way it is. Not that the book changes any, but the way I’m going to market it going forward changes. And perhaps in the way I’m looking at.

Right off the bat, I have to say that I know that “The Girl….” has been a big thing in publishing for years, and adopting the formula, this late it that game, can be seen as either naive, desperate, or cynical. However, I’m doing it because, a) it actually is as descriptive of a story as the old title was, and b) I am poking a little fun at the publishing business, with this copy-cat title. Not that they’ll get it, of course, but I’m telling you that I’m well aware of how unoriginal it is, so it’s our inside joke.

However, we have to keep in mind that I’m trying to sell this story. To sell a book, you have to write a story that agents and editors believe will sell. For many writers this means looking at the books that are being published now, but which were actually purchased a year or two before. Editors may be still buying those types of stories, or they may have moved on. If you have an agent, you can probably get a good idea where the market is going, but if you don’t, it a crap shot. A crap shot I didn’t bother to roll when I wrote this story. As always, I wrote the story I felt like writing, the way I felt like writing it. Which makes it an almost impossible story to sell, because I know that I don’t write stories the way they write, and sell them, today. Heck, that's why I started writing my own stories. My only hope of selling The Girl on the Kerb is to present it as one of those outliers, a unique book that could strike it big. Or not. That, anyway is my approach going forward. And the title, The Girl on the Kerb, represents this new approach to marketing the story.

While the story is set on Earth in the distant future, that is about the extent of its science fiction-ness. I often use science fiction settings merely as an excuse to write an old-time adventure story that allows me to have a free hand to create the world and the way it works, without having to fit it into our known history. Or do the necessary research to fit it into our known world. This novel is no different. The technology in use is little more than what we are using today, and society is very much pre-1950. I have described it as speculative fiction, but I might even drop that classification in the future, and consider it just a lighthearted novel.