The Nobodies: Work’s Done… so Now What?

Well, the day’s finally arrived. After years of grueling work and revision, The Nobodies is at a point I feel I could comfortably say is the end of its pre-production journey.

No, the book has absolutely nothing to do with Marilyn Manson.
Though I do listen to the record on repeat sometimes while writing....

Thanks to the feedback of my morosely silent confidant extraordinaire and my own relentless edits, I’ve boiled the story down to its core and expanded the characterizations for a much fuller, more robust experience.

And I’m not joking here. To prove it, I thought it’d be fun to run through some Excel sheet numbers and share some statistics about this version of the draft compared to the last. (Hey, given my background as a publishing analyst and my predisposition to overly analyze every facet of information available, you HAD to have known this was coming, right?!? And, yes, I really do think this is fun, sadistically enough.)

So, after the heavy bout of revisions: 

• The story is now about 20,000 words shorter
• The longest section is now 36.8% of the book, down from 38.3%
• The longest chapter is now 6.9%, up from 6.6%
• The longest chapter segment is now 1.8%, up slightly from 1.7%
• And that’s just slightly smaller than the shortest chapter, now only 2.3%
• But doesn’t hold a candle to the shortest segment, less than 0.1%!
• The most a chapter was reduced was 27%. One segment was cut by more than half!
• One segment was removed entirely, but two were added overall

I could go on and on, but at a certain point the tease simply becomes frustrating. That, and all the number start to run into each other.

So, now that the work’s done, what am I to do now? Well, the easy answer is: work on my third book.

However, after some discussion on the matter, I’ve also decided to submit a query for The Nobodies to agents in the hope of gaining a wider audience and publication. While I’m still set on self-publishing next spring if all goes according to plan (and there are many plans afoot!), submitting queries during my hiatus from the book prior to production while I work on the next seems to just make perfect sense.

Thus, one of my goals for the next few days will be to draft a working query and scope out potential agents. While I basically go back to the drawing board. And take a firm step into the next phase of my writing.