Anyone with connections, please do inquire:
I want to produce a mass market book summarizing the conclusions and findings of On the Historicity of Jesus, with a major publisher, one that works often with expanding into foreign language markets. I have been asked by fans throughout Spanish speaking countries especially. But it’s impossible to get a Spanish language publisher on board with something as enormous and footnotey as OHJ. A shorter, popular market book, however, would definitely appeal (I already have translators lined up). And if it meets with success in the English language market, then we can indeed push for a Spanish edition, and maybe others.
But major publishers will only field queries submitted by literary agents.
So if this is to happen, I need a literary agent.
Know any? Who’d be interested? Send them my way.
In case it needs to be said, I do quite well by myself, in my niche market. I have a decent bio and cv. I have published with a mainstream publishing company (one title of my own with Prometheus books, plus several anthologies; they distribute through Random House), another with a major academic publisher (at the University of Sheffield), and have also successfully sold over twenty thousand books entirely on my own (through AuthorHouse, Lulu, and CreateSpace). I have sold all my titles (six so far) successfully as well in Kindle format, and Audio format (through Pitchstone). I’m an accomplished and capable writer. I can produce a good, entertaining popular market abridgement of OHJ without difficulty. I just need a reason to.
OHJ itself, BTW, has already sold over 4000 copies in just a single year. And that’s a 700 page academic monstrosity dense with footnotes. Imagine the potential of a shorter, tighter, mass market edition!
If I can’t find an agent, this idea will simply remain shelved until I do, since I can’t justify the expense in time working on it without that step at least in the works. This is due to how the publishing industry works, sadly. I have other projects I’ll devote my time to instead. But this dream of mine I’ll keep alive until someone comes along who wants to take a chance on it.
Initial business inquiries should be made by email. This includes emailing me the contact info of literary agents whom you think might be interested in this, and thus to whom I could send a query letter. But it can’t just be random agents you picked out of a guide. There has to be noticeable reason they would take on an unusual project like this.
James McGrath should appreciate this. It would appear that he doesn’t know how to read footnotes.
Or read at all, really:
I’m not surprised.
I will blog about that soon. I’ve been too overwhelmed at DragonCon this weekend.
Richard,
I would love to see your list when you are done. I pitched to agents at the Willamette Writers Conference, but it’s hard to identify ones interested in atheist works. Here are three that I pitched to online because they had represented other atheist writers. Good luck!
Karen
Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency – Phil Zuckerman’s – Living the Secular Life
Levine Greenburg – Rostan Literary Agency – The Atheists’ Bible
Tessler Literary Agent – Waal’s Bonobo and the Atheist
I can’t believe what I just read. So you think that Spanish speaking people are incapable of reading a lengthy book with footnotes? That sounds like something a racist idiot like Donald Trump would say. I was actually considering buying the English language version of your book (some of us even speak English, too, amazing, right?) but I think I will pass. I’m sure you feel that someone like me couldn’t possibly read such a long and complicated book anyway. Perhaps you can publish an all picture version of OHJ for all of us uneducated Spanish speakers.
I’m not the one who thinks that. Publishers are. That’s the problem I’m trying to get around.
You seem to have not read carefully the post you are commenting on.
This is comment is more on the lines of cheerleading than practical help, but I bought the Audible Version and I found it to be very accessible and engaging. I am sure that you would not have to devote too much time to make it appropriate for mass market publication.
I very much hope that you will be able to find a publisher. This is a piece of scholarship that would really benefit anyone who is questing for the truth behind historicity of Jesus.
I’ve been thinking a reader’s digest version of “Historicity” would be a good idea. Be sure and include the syllogism about the author of Hebrews and where he thought Jesus was crucified (or maybe a paragraph explaining the same):
http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/6454#hebrews
Hi Richard,
we exchanged a couple of emails a few weeks ago. I am out here in Madrid and follow your work on YouTube regularily. You mentioned during one of your lectures about the buried library of ancient scrolls at Herculeum. I was wondering if there has been any progress on excavating it since your lecture?
Thanks,
Jonathan
Not to my knowledge. There seems to be funding, but misguided opposition. See Wikipedia and Forbes.
So it is the publishers that think that Spanish speaking people can’t understand long, foot-noted books? Who is your publisher, Sarah Palin? You know, you do always have the option of going to a nompredjudiced publisher. Of course your dismissive remark about the previous commenter’s reading comprehension makes me think you agree with your publisher.
Not can’t read. Won’t buy.
This is a universal fact of publishing: publishers won’t publish lengthy academic monographs with footnotes because no one (they think) will buy them. This is not a bias against Spanish readers. They think this about everyone. No such books get published by mainstream publishers. Period.
This is why academic presses have to field those books, creating a whole other problem, because they lack the budgets to mass market and to foreign market, and they have a screwed up pricing scheme that is targeted at libraries and not regular readers, and they won’t copy a book already published elsewhere (so I can’t reproduce my book through a Spanish university press).
You need to get with the program of how the real world of corporate publishing works, and stop obsessing with ignorant pronouncements.
Motilal Banarsidass republishes most academic books for the Indian market.
In English, my books are already available in India through kindle. I’d be interested in print distribution, though, so I’ll look into that. I would need a translator to produce a local language edition, and that could be daunting given the number of languages in India. So I’m not optimistic about that, but it’s also worth a look.
It appears that publisher doesn’t take books about Western religion. Is that mistaken?
Hi, I know this is old. Did you ever find a lit agent? I want to publish fiction themed mostly around atheist challenges such as indoctrination, and emotional hijacking. I am in the process of querying, but was wondering if there were any names I could add to my list. Thanks.
L.J. Ferguson
I found a publisher without one. But that rode on my established bonafides and sales and the like.
This query was ten years ago so it’s expired by now. But no, I didn’t locate any viables. But I didn’t look too hard either.
In general, you have to search anew, because the industry has completely changed since then. What agents and publishers want has wildly changed. And how you get into either contract has also changed. And I am no longer in that loop. So you’ll have to do what every author does: do a critical search online for advice and lists and approaches to secure an agent.
However, be aware, this may never succeed because books like you propose are “losers” to the industry because they cannot sell. And it’s all about making money. What sells now is an extremely narrow field, because the “physical book” market is declining and there is no moneymaking “e-only” book market. So agents are unlikely to be interested in what you are selling unless you can back it with some kind of massive celebrity (you have to bring a large pre-built audience).
Even approaching as an academic (no celebrity but a relevant PhD) is doomed without previous proof that your name sells books or would do. With no name you can go for academic presses, but they have high standards (requiring a lot of exacting and exhausting work from you to make the book acceptable) and they won’t make you any money (their contracts are terrible and their books are overpriced because they are drafting on university publish-or-perish policies to subsidize their authors, and have no intention of marketing them to the public but are instead extorting the college library market and thus contributing to rising college tuitions).
Basically, the market as-was in the early 2000s no longer exists. There is practically no market for nonfiction books anymore, and corporate America has moved on to prestige publication as their only remaining vestige of profits. The pipeline to getting published requires a fame engine (become a massive YouTube or TikTok star, get expert pundit placement on national news shows, run for office, do or suffer something that puts your name in national news, etc.) which is chicken-and-egg (or Catch-22, whichever you prefer) because you need the fame to sell books but need to sell books to get the fame. The latter model no longer exists. So the former model is all that remains. And that basically shuts nearly every author out of the market.
And that’s just that.
It’s sad, but alas.
Things were different in the early 2000s. But those days are gone.
People like me are lucky fringe cases. My career path is no longer replicable. It depended on historical moments (the nature of the internet in the late 1990s and the New Atheism splash of the early 2000s) that no longer exist (to the industry atheism is “boring” now and the internet is saturated, making standing out, or even being noticed at all, next to impossible).
That said, you don’t have to adopt by doomerism. Research agents suitable to your subject (avoiding scams—e.g. no real agent asks for money, just a cut), research how best to win over an agent with a prospect package today (what they want to see, and keep initial materials brief and few, etc.), and do the grind (build and send a zillion packages and see if any bite; though I recommend starting in small batches, as you might get feedback that you can use to improve subsequent packages).
I don’t think that will go well (per above). But in the immortal words of Jack Burton, “You never know until you try.”