Selling your book - ideas.

I've just spoken to a number of classes in Narangba Valley High School. It was a great experiance. I've spoken to students at Tweed River High School and Port Macquarie High School with similar feelings. I'd recommend any writer of YA fiction or fantesy, to approach the Premier's Reading Challenge of all states to have your book included in their reading list. When you've got it into the list, contact all Australian libraries to buy a copy of the book.

One of the questions I was asked was about getting published. I've signed up on the website Absolute Writing Water Cooler and I find that authors overseas seem to put a lot of energy into being taken on by an agent. Looking Australian Literary Agents on the internet I find twelve companies listed with their national organisation. Eight are not accepting new authors. So it takes little time to query agents in Australia.

Of publishers, I've found there are three types (please correct me if I'm wrong). There are 'vanity' publishers. These people generally put your book together and give you the number of copies you ordered. Most don't seem to pay for professional editing or for distribution. Using a vanity publisher is the easiest way of having a couple of hundred copies of your family's history printed, for personal reasons only. This kind of publishing has a bad name but I believe it has a legitimate place in book production as long as the publisher makes his operation and its limits clear to the author.

The second type is the subsidy publisher. Some people warn against this type of publishing because, again, the author has to pay for the book to be published. I've experience with subsidy publishing. My book, The Gatekeeper, is published by Zeus Publications, a subsidy publisher. The difference I see between subsidy and vanity is that subsidy publishers charge an amount of money but then do virtually everything a traditional publisher would do. Zeus secures an ISDN, organises professional editing, organises the cover art, pblishes the books and makes sure all demand for the book is met for a period of three years. The subsidy publisher must be professionally interested in the quality of the book (and will reject substandard writing) because they make their profit in proportion to the success of the book in the bookshops.

The third type of book is the traditional publisher. In the USA authors suggest that a true publisher is one which gives the author an advance on royalties. I'm being published by a Canadian publisher, Lachesis, which doesn't give advances on royalties but doesn't charge in the way subsidy publishers do. Lachesis also has a very professional distribution service for its books through USA and Canada.

I was probably impatient when I first contacted major publishers. I looked on the internet for names of publishing houses - plenty of those. I looked at the individual websites of the publishers to make a list of those publishing my genre - fewer this time. Then I looked at this last group for ones which were open to submissions (even fewer) and of these the few which deal with the author direct.

Of this depleted list I looked into the website of the most prestigious company. They (like most of the rest) required exclusivity. I could only deal with them if I dealt with only them, no others at the same time. So I waited six months for a rejection slip. Same with the next one. At this rate I imagined being published posthumously, if at all. So I didn't contact more of the heavies and tried one of the smaller ones, and that was Zeus.

So I hope this is of use to any author starting on the road to getting published. Good luck.

My first book - The Gatekeeper

The Gatekeeper is available in Australia. As a first-time author it is not necessarily in your favourite bookstore, but they will get it in for you. The sequel, Rudigor's Revenge, will be published later this year in Australia and both books will be published in Canada and the USA next year.

The Gatekeeper was written as YA historical fiction but is being enjoyed by readers of all ages. I was a hopeless reader in my youth so I've written this story with as much action as I can pack into it. I really hope it will appeal to teenagers like I was. I also hated history as a subject. All those dates. All those countries bashing up other countries. And all those Kings and Queens getting their heads chopped off. There was a time when that was not a very safe profession at all. But once I started writing I found myself researching the lives of real, ordinary people. That's when the fun started.

Did you know that Stonehenge was restored dramatically in Victorian times? Google 'John Constable's painting of Stonehenge' and you'll see what it looked like in 1835. It was a real mess. So the Victorians 'put it right', even down to moving the location of the altar stones. But many people say they got it wrong. So when Jenny, a young student, visits the site on holidays she doesn't realise she's standing on the real site of the ancient Druid altar when the midsummer sun first strikes the ruins.

Jenny is flung through a time warp into the year 1347. Those were dangerous times. England had been at war with France for ten years of what would become the Hundred Years War. The Pope was in Avignon, not Rome. The country was in a shambles and the people who suffered most were the peasants. And it was into peasant society the young student landed. She was 19 and unmarried - girls those days were married by 15 or had to pay a tax. She had colour in her clothes. The Sumptuary Laws didn't allow peasants to wear colour, so she must be higher in class than them. And she was alone without bodyguards or family.

And when she exposes a Tax Collector as a fraud, she's really on the run. The fun really starts.

Anyway. The Gatekeeper has been accepted for the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge. So students in NSW - get to the bookstore and buy a copy. Alternatively, get your school library and council library to buy in copies.

And students in South Australia. Ask for the book to be added to your Premier's Challenge. It has been rejected because the committee which considers books say a book set outside Australia for some of the action is confusing for grades 6 -9. They don't know about Stonehenge, castles and battles in England. They don't like settings outside Australia - what about Harry Potter? That's not set in Adelaide, is it?

Anyway, support a new Australian author. Read The Gatekeeper and tell me what you think about it. If you can't get it in your nearest bookstore, order it on line from Zeus Publications