But Is It Marketable? Why I Gave Up on Traditional Publishing

The Rippled Pond

I always dreamed of becoming a novelist. So back in my undergrad, I took a few creative writing courses but, after squeezing out a few mediocre short stories, ultimately decided that I wasn’t yet ready to write a novel. Then, when I turned thirty, I finally got to work. The result was a YA fantasy manuscript called The Rippled Pond, which falls heavily into the “portal fantasy” trope that so many agents and publishers disdain. Of course, at the time, I had no idea.

After giving my manuscript one brisk proofreading, I decided I was ready for the big leagues, so I started querying. The result was plenty of rejections, no surprise, but one kind agent gave me some good advice: my manuscript was about twenty thousand words too long, and I had spent far too much time setting up the world and story. The reality was clear: I needed to do a ground-up rewrite.

But rather than get to work, I shelved the project. Fast forward six years. After being accepted into the MFA program at UBC, I decided to resurrect The Rippled Pond and rewrite it from scratch—not one sentence preserved—for my thesis. I had feedback from veteran authors like Annabel Lyon and Maggie de Vries. Developmental edits. Line edits. Final reader feedback. In my “thesis defense” (it was more of a friendly conversation), I asked the panel if they thought I was ready to query agents.

Yes indeed, I was told. Give it your best shot.

Did they really believe I was ready? I’m not sure. Maybe they were just pumping my tires. But no one told me that I still had gaping plot holes or cringeworthy flaws to deal with. My project and degree were given the green light.

So… into the query trenches I went! I must have queried over a hundred agents. And… nothing. Not even a scrap of kind advice about whatever it was they didn’t like.

Sky to Sea

Before I got accepted into the MFA program, I set out on a travel adventure in which I hitchhiked across Canada, housesat in the jungle in Panama, and then crewed on sailboats for six months, from Panama to Samoa. As you can imagine, I ended the trip with plenty of ideas brewing.

The Rippled Pond begins in a sci-fi world called Darrosh, but soon the protagonist travels to a world of magic and enchantment called Izkier. I decided to set Izkier to the side and write a different novel focussed on Darrosh. I fictionalized some of my sailing experiences and wrote a story about a teenage girl named Mariana who escapes her overbearing father, the commander of a lunar prison, and sets out on a coming-of-age adventure.

Sky to Sea was also widely rejected, but then I finally had my breakthrough. Valerie Noble from the Donaghy Literary Agency took a chance on me. We did a couple rounds of edits, and then my manuscript went out on submission.

But as it turns out, landing an agent does not guarantee publication. The acquisitions editors that Valerie submitted to all refused, and many without feedback. We did get to second readers with two publishers, but alas, it was not meant to be. And the notes we received were vague. The most common: we just can’t quite imagine a market for this.

Valerie kept encouraging me, so I got back to work.

The Sparrow War

Mariana from Sky to Sea is one of three POV characters in a four-book series set in the Darroshen equivalent of North Korea. It’s an ambitious story and was a lot of fun to write. When I sent it to Valerie, she claimed that I’d “leveled up” and we were certain to find a home for the manuscript.

Except we didn’t. We got close with a few imprints, even passed second readers with one, only to be told that the publisher “has gone off science fiction.” Again came the familiar refrain: we just can’t quite imagine a market for this.

But what did that mean? Was I incorporating all the wrong themes? Had I not included enough shootouts or chase scenes? Had I failed on the romance front? No idea. Valerie’s best guess was that my prose “leans literary” and most of the YA novels coming out were simpler and more emotional. Maybe that was it—emotionality. This is feedback I’ve received before, after all—that I need to include more agonized interiority, that I’m leaving too much of the emotion for readers to infer. Another possible issue was that my characters were on the older end of teen, and maybe publishers wanted protagonists who could grow with the audience.

Again, no idea. At this point I decided to try writing an adult manuscript, and meanwhile Valerie and I parted ways so that I could take a crack at small presses or even go indie.

Sleeping Cutie and the Destruction of Southgate Mall

For my next project, I went a bit autobiographical but also deeply speculative. Sleeping Cutie is about a young man named Manny Gidden who works in a call centre and is trying to come to terms with the deaths of his brother and best friend. What starts as a quest for friendship evolves into a war with the call centre administration, culminating in a heist to steal and destroy employment contracts so that the staff can all jump ship for a new call centre up the street. Part of the novel takes place in an imagined past, part inside a “massively multiplayer roleplaying game” called the Realm of Rawcraft. The entire saga is narrated by Manny’s cat, Doom.

I received a New Artist grant for this manuscript from the Canada Council of the Arts in 2022. After countless rounds of editing and beta feedback, I decided it was finally time to query.

Can you guess what the rejections have said? Yup: we can’t quite imagine a market for this.

Again, I got close—not with agents, but with a few mid-tier and small press publishers. One even asked me for exclusivity for thirty days so their managing editor could read it… and then ghosted me for six months.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Slush Pile

Fifteen years and counting. I could have gone indie with Sky to Sea after it didn’t land me a contract. But instead, I decided it was better in my back pocket, believing that eventually I would land a trad deal, and then suddenly agents would be interested in my growing collection of marketless manuscripts.

But over at DarlingAxe.com, I’ve interviewed over a hundred agents for my Book Broker series, and I’ve also talked to a number of successful indie authors. More and more I’m hearing that the path to trad gets narrower by the day, especially for debut authors. If you can prove yourself, if you can demonstrate that a market exists for your work, then they might be willing to take a chance on you.

So I kept revising. I assembled my own team of editors, beta readers, proofreaders. I built a website and studied the basics of book marketing (and am studying still). And I decided to forge my own path.

Sky to Sea, it turned out, needed a new title. When the first proof arrived for my cover art, I realized immediately that it needed… something more. In thinking about the story as a coming-of-age, and of young Marix tumbling down from the Darroshen moon—Mariana has undergone some changes—the nursery rhyme line and when the bough breaks popped into my head.

And that’s the story of why I finally decided to go indie with my debut novel: When the Sky Breaks.

Now available on Amazon 😊