I’ve earned my living as a lawyer in Bulgaria for 11 years now. But that’s not what I like to do. Not in Bulgaria anyway and that’s the only country in the world I can practice my profession in. Occasionally I’ve contributed articles in the local press, but I don’t see any point to go on with this either. I’m a newbie here and – yes – English is not my mother tongue. In September I completed a non-fictional book about Bulgaria in English with the help of a retired American lawyer living in Sofia. I know, I know, my prospects are not great. Nobody gives a damn about a small country in Europe. Still, I won’t give up without a fight. I doubt that anyone here is interested in publishing in Bulgaria (I can’t imagine why anybody should be interested in). However, I thought that this might be interesting as a curiosity. The total print of most books in Bulgaria rarely exceeds 500. More, the books have to be exceedingly cheap or else no one will buy them. We are talking here about a country where the average wage is something like 200 dollars per month. Thus, the price of a book barely covers the cost of its printing. Most authors are happy if they don’t have to pay for the publication. So, no matter meagre is their pay, they are satisfied. In this situation it’s no wonder that payment rarely exceeds 300 dollars per book. There are people who call themselves literary agents. They, however, could not possibly survive acting as agents. For even if their fee is not 20, but a 100 percent, that will still not be enough to make a living. On top of it, an ‘agent’ here can’t realistically expect to sell more than a book per year, if that. For example there’s just one publishing house that (occasionally) publishes something else than textbooks, romance, cheap detective stories and the like. The last are usually pirated or bought for next to nothing from abroad and not domestically written. No wonder that the so called ‘agents’ usually have other professions and that their agenting consist of charging money for editing manuscripts and for other practices that, in the West, are called dishonest. I hope this answers why I'm interested in publishing in English although my English defeats my intentions.
welcome to the forums! are you actively seeking an agent in the US or the UK?... and/or querying US/UK publishers directly?
Welcome to Writing Forums, cabbage! I hope you find what you're looking for here, whatever your interests in writing. This forum aims to provide the best workshopping resources on the internet, and to that end we have a few rules which you should familiarise yourself with before you get stuck in. The main section of the site is the Writing Workshop, where members can post their writing in order to receive critique of their work. However, before we allow members to post their work, they must have met some basic requirements. Firstly, you must have been a member for fourteen days, and have made twenty posts on the forum overall (please note, posts in Word Games do not count towards this). This is so that members, when they post their work, have familiarised themselves with the forums and contributed to them (as well as hopefully learned something for themselves). Secondly, members must provide two constructive reviews of other people's work for each piece of their own that they wish to post. This is because we believe that the focus of workshopping should be equally upon giving reviews as receiving them, as they allow a writer to practice and improve their editing skills, which they can then apply to their own writing. Beyond the Writing Workshop, you will find that we have extensive forums for discussion of aspects of writing, as well as a community area for general discussion. We also run periodic short story and poetry contests, which are good for challenging yourself and expanding your skills. The requirements of the Writing Workshop don't apply to the contests, so new members are allowed (nay, encouraged!) to get stuck in and enter! If you have any questions or problems, then the moderators (myself, Lemex and Dante Dases) should be your first port of call. Any technical problems with the site itself should be directed to Daniel, the site administrator and owner. I would recommend you have a look over the rules so that you know what to expect, and what is expected. But aside from that, I hope you enjoy your time here. Banzai
Thanks for welcoming me. The name of my book is BULGARIA IN EU: A MATCH MADE IN HELL. Therefore, I guess I’ll look for an agent in UK. As for querying publishers directly, I’ve read that publishers rarely consider unsolicited books.
Perhaps I should have added that I published hundreds of articles in some of the biggest national newspapers like Trud Daily, Novinar Daily and Pari Weekly. Some of these are available on the web and may be found by googling my name in Cyrillic.
i don't know how it goes in the UK, but US publishers are generally open to unagented queries for non-fiction books... 'unsolicited' only means you have to query first with a well-written book proposal and wait for them to request the ms... it doesn't mean you can't send a query/proposal on your own, if you don't have an agent... do you have a standard book proposal ready to send out and a good query letter?
Thank you Trilby. Mammamaia, I still work on my proposal. It is so bad, everybody who hasn’t read the book has no clear idea what it is about.
