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?