I've been thinking about this for a while now. And I thought I would go ahead and blog about it, for those of you who are interested in following my journey through publishing.
I am sick of writing query letters. I haven't written a ton, not as many as most authors, by far. But it just isn't anything I enjoy doing. I don't mind the rejection letters, those are pretty easy to take. It is my understanding that you receive YEARS of rejection letters before you finally break through into traditional publishing. That's fine. But it's really not how I want to spend my time.
I want to spend my time creating new stories. Not trying to get an agent or publisher to look at my stories. I want to retain the rights to my written works, not split it with some unknown agent who may or may not really have my best interests at heart. If I'm going to split my work with someone, I want it to be someone I really trust, with my life and my words.
That is why I am abandoning the quest for a traditional publisher. There is so much involved in that world that I really don't want to have any part of. I don't want to sell the rights to a Hollywood production studio, just to have them mess it up the way so many books have been messed up by the movie production world. I want someone I trust to make the movies (if they ever get made... that's the LARGE-SCALE dream). :)
Instead, I am throwing my efforts and my books into the Production Studio (we're in the very early stages, it doesn't even have a name yet) that my family is creating. This production company is the brain-child of several members of my family, my brothers, my dad, my husband mostly, and they are beginning to work very hard at getting it up and running. The main purpose of this company at first will be to promote, market, and distribute: my books, my sister's CDs, and my sister-in-law's artwork. It will also be focused very much on targeting the audience we want, the audience that many traditional publishers, record labels, etc do not believe exists, but that we know exists in abundance: Families.
We are hoping, in the next few months, to have a website up and running, that has regular Friday web-casts featuring my books being read out-loud (like they used to do on the radio years ago with books and other stories) in installments each week, songs by Brittany Jean, and artwork by Angelina... along with interviews with the artists themselves. This would be step 1 of the marketing process. We might even migrate all our blogs over there... we'll see what the capabilities are.
Eventually, we hope to open this company to other authors, singers, artists, film-makers outside of our family. We hope to have our own film-studio (which is great, because Evan's about the only person I'd trust to make my books into good movies anyway)!
So that is our exciting on-the-horizon-news... and the reason you won't be seeing me make any more updates about query letters and rejection slips from now on. If you would be willing to join us in prayer about this endeavor (and that we would come up with a name that we all love and has the meaning we want to convey) that would be muchly appreciated!
