Still here... still hungry!

It's been nearly a year since I made an update to this development blog, but now absolutely feels like the right time for a new one, so why wait? At the moment I am in the midst of other work commitments so querying Bunika has been understandably put on pause until the Autumn, but that isn't far away!

So what HAVE I been doing in the meantime since the last update? The answer to that is twofold – firstly, I have been querying Bunika [i.e. sending the manuscript to agents and publishers] and learning about the whole querying process, which, as I am sure anyone who knows anything about it will confirm, is pretty damn hard! There are a lot of agents and publishers out there, way more than you can shake one or a thousand sticks at, and they get many, many submissions each! There was one publisher who said they got thousands of submissions a year and could realistically accept less than ten... so even though these metrics change from place to place, the basic rule is the same – supply outweighs demand!

So... what does anyone do? Well, at this point I have queried close to fifty agents and got a similar amount of rejections, which, though it seems bad on the surface, is actually not only totally normal, it's to be expected. In fact, I predict to reach around double that figure before we see close to a 'catch'. As time goes on one refines one's querying process, one gets better at sending out letters and tailoring one's pitch, and above all knowing WHO to send things to. Less is more! When I recommence I will focus very much on finding the right agent and focusing on the relationship. For so many authors, there is a temptation to just GET THE WORK OUT THERE as soon as it is finished, but this is ironically not always the best thing to do, since it can lead to the urge to snap up bad offers [which I have had] and work with exploitative publishers. Of course there is always self-publishing but that is currently a speck on the horizon, if anything.

Now, before someone says, "you shouldn't mention exploitative publishers" I will wager that I totally should! To all those predatory publishers who get their authors to pay for their own publishing and then do their own promo [which the author is often not great at] while the house reaps most of the sales rewards – shame on you! These authors have poured their lives and souls into their works and to see the book get sucked into a black hole is absolutely heartbreaking. I am determined for Bunika, my labour of love, to not go the same way. It shan't! I look forward to a fair and nourishing relationship with an agent and publisher when the time comes, and I will put the work in for that to happen.

Now, I said there was a second part to this update and it's something I can't BELIEVE I haven't mentioned, which was back in February of this year I returned to Slovakia and also, for the first time, went to Hungary to research Bunika II. Yes, the sequel! And ideas are forming very well for it. At this point we are not at the drafting stage, but I would very much hope for that process to at least begin in the next 12 months. I won't go into any detail about what happens in the book or why, the only thing I will say is that it features Marika – that's about it on that for now!

This break from querying is actually quite healthy because it gives me an opportunity to reflect on and revamp [ahem] my querying process for when it does recommence, and I can't wait to get back into that soon. Before then, I should also mention that I was interviewed by the very great Mark Norman of The Folklore Podcast back in December, we went into some thorough detail on the book while the podcast was made available in February! If you haven't heard it yet, here it is. It was a very enjoyable experience and I am incredibly grateful to him!

Last but not least, I see more and more reputable authors turning to Google's impressive Notebook LM as an interactive tool by which readers can explore their work. I have input quite a few sources into mine, and you can access it here and ask it questions about the book and it will answer them as best it can – you don't necessarily have to read the sources themselves!

That is all for now! I will update this dev blog when the next round of querying is underway, and I look forward to what other occurrences surround the world of Bunika until then!