Researching the Next Step - or - The Wild and Woolly World of Publishing

While waiting for feedback from TJ (oh, the suspense!), and getting a good start on my new work in progress, I have been starting to research What Happens Next.

It began innocently enough:

I determined from a book on writing that the recommended practice was to query publishers. Now, first, this was a book from the 90's, and second, it didn't give an example of a good query - so of course I went to Google.

At this point I have learned the following:

• Querying publishers has only the slightest chance of working - it's much more standard practice to instead query agents.
• Querying agents is a black art.
• If you have a successful query, you are then expected to send a synopsis - also a black art - and partial manuscript.
• If this is also successful, you then send the full manuscript, and pray. Even if you're an atheist.
  
• If you are very lucky, they will sign you - and then they get to go out and try to pitch the project to publishers, which will probably result in quite a bit more rejection.

Oh, and my book is too long. It's currently at about 185K words; turns out that the standard is ~100K. There's some more wiggle room for Sci-Fi and Fantasty, but I'm still way over the limit of what is likely to get picked up. I might be able to slip by with 130K. Sigh.

In other words, I have learned that I'm peeking over the edge into a world about which I know nothing.
So I am now educating myself.
Fortunately there are lots of on-line resources. It'll probably just take me a couple . . . or a few . . . or several . . . months to sort everything out.

As I do so, I expect to be putting up posts on the nature of these various arcane steps.
Stay tuned!