Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Pitch or Publish?

So, I'm almost done reading my grandmother Goldie's manuscript for Eleanore Gray. And I'm not sure what to do with it. It's a lovely book, about 83,000 words. In book language, we call that 'single title.' Goldie captures the poetic beauty of the world in sentence form in ways that make me jealous. For example:


"The leaves that had ornamented the hillside with inspiring jewel colors faded and dropped to the ground, spent and weary from artistic labors."

Wow. That's just beautiful. This isn't really surprising--Goldie was a nationally recognized poet. Still, when I reach a sentence like that one, I'm floored by it.


The plot is a little slow to develop, and the characters don't have much internal monologue. My first question is, How much should I change it? Should I edit to make all point-of-views consistent? Should I try to speed up the plot developments? Should I get into each character's heads more during the emotional turning points?At what point do they stop being Goldie's words and start being mine? It's not a romance novel--if I start adding things, will it come out as overly-romantic, since that's my strength?


Regardless, it's a beautiful book, and I'm going to publish it. The next question is, How? Eleanore goes to the Ozark hill country and in her quiet, Christian way, works to save some of her neighbors. I don't know if I should take the time to pitch this to an inspirational, Christian publisher, like Barbour Publishers, or just go ahead and do it myself.


I'm open to suggestions here. What do you think?

1 comment:

lucylucia said...

so if you publish it yourself, would that mean that you will use a vanity press and just hand out copies to family and friends?So is the goal to contribute something lovely to your family or do you want it to reache a wider audience??