The work on Snake River continues. In November I hired an editor to provide copyediting on the completed manuscript. We also discussed a few plot elements that needed to be changed to make the book more believable and enhance the mystery.

The copy edits were mostly to do with dialogue attribution, paragraph breaks, and usage of the past perfect verb tense in certain places. It cost a bit of money, but it was worth it and 100% necessary. The manuscript is now much stronger. At this point I would like to hire a proofreader to go over it one more time and catch any typos or other mistakes that there may be. I also feel the need to read through the whole thing myself one last time.

The story element changes were also necessary. For example, in one chapter the two RCMP investigators pick up two of the victim’s friends at school one morning and take them to the highland woods so the boys can show them something they found out there one day. Monroe, my protagonist, believes this thing they found out there could be connected with what happened to the victim.

At the end of the chapter they find a trail that leads to the back gate of the villain’s house. This was waaaaay too obvious and convenient, so I had to scrub that out of the story altogether. That meant removing the discovery of the trail, writing something else to end the chapter, and going through the rest of the book and removing any mention of the trail and making appropriate dialogue changes. The mystery is much stronger without that element, and the story unfolds just fine without it.

I wrote a 1-page synopsis of the book to include in a submission package, and I have sent queries to a dozen literary agents over the past 6 weeks. I’ve only received two responses so far; one was to say they were closing their agency, and another was a rejection.

Finding an agent is extremely difficult since there are so few to go around. I’m not depending on that to go forward but I want to at least try.

I’m also considering whether to go with traditional publishing, or self-publish on Amazon. After doing a bit of reading into the matter, it looks like I could be a good candidate for self publishing since I’m wring genre fiction and the book is part of a series. There will be a second Monroe Mystery which I already have a rough outline for, and a third one as well although I have not thought about what it might be yet. A fourth, even, is possible.

I’m still considering the traditional publishing route, but I do have some concerns about how long the publishing timeline is and what the industry is like these days. It seems the publishing world has, unfortunately, been captured by the same woke ideology that has taken over Hollywood.

The fact that I’m a straight white male, and my book involves indigenous people, is probably going to put up a lot of red flags with the publishers and agents of today even though I’ve done my homework and taken care to accurately depict the Mi’qmaq people. Self publishing may really be the ideal path for Snake River.

I’ve also come to realize that I will have to start promoting my book over social media long before it launches. This is especially important if I self publish. As much as I don’t like using social media and have had no success with getting followers, I’ll need to start posting content about my book, its themes, and the process I went through in writing it. That way when the book does launch, people will already know about it.

I know it’s hard to make a living as a novelist. I’ve known this all my life, but I don’t see it as hard or having low odds of success any more. I just see it as a matter of time, effort, and persistence. 2025 will be the year I publish my first novel.