You’ve written your first fantasy novel. You’ve gone over it a hundred times, checked spelling, grammar and done all manner of editing tweaks with every fine toothcomb you can find. It is perfect. Ready to print, in your opinion. It’s practically burning a hole in the table, the magic is so hot.
But you’re a step ahead of the game. You know you don’t want a pile of books under the staircase, or another POD book in the sparkling obscurity of a bottomless online catalogue … you want to be in print and on the bestseller lists. For that, you probably need a fantasy publisher. So how do you find one?
1. First, write up a synopsis (a summary in 2 pages), a query letter including what subgenre your novel is, like high fantasy or steampunk and a totally intriguing ‘blurb’.
2. Try to find a publisher in your own country that specialises in that kind of book and approach them. You have a much greater chance because you are a local fantasy author and can be promoted as such. Each country has a publishers’ association with a list of publishers. For instance, in South Africa, look on www.publishsa.co.za. To give you a starting point, find a book that is similar to yours on the bookshelf of your local bookstore, or online retailer. See who published that.
In smaller markets, the problem is that most of the fantasy on the bookshelves is published by UK or US based publishers. This is because of economies of scale – big markets support big publishers with big print runs leading to the cheapest end product which can be exported to small markets cheaper than any competing local products which are produced in small runs.
