Fern Reiss

Fern Reiss, CEO of PublishingGame.com and Expertizing.com, is the author of The Publishing Game: Bestseller in 30 Days ( about book promotion), The Publishing Game: Find an Agent in 30 Days (two versions: traditional and self-publishing). She offers a free Expertizing email newsletter on one of her websites. In a newsletter from publishingbasics.com she revealed Five Things Your Publisher Won't Tell You (about traditional book publishing). In essence, the tips are:

* publishers do little publicity
* a book must sell in four months
* only 5% of books earn their advances
* traditional publishing is sloooooow
* first book flops--you're dead

I think these characteristics are more the novelists' experiences than those of the authors of nonfiction books. Selling a novel, to agents and publishers and at retail, is so very difficult, you might have better luck launching your writing career by starting with a nonfiction endeavor. It has a much better chance of selling (you might be able to skip the agency part), would establish a publishing platform for you, and the experiences you'd gain would be priceless.