Agents and Publishers

[crufixisan88]

How do you attract agents and publishers on Tapas?

[darthmongoose]

Well... Tapas IS a publisher for starters, so to attract Tapas attention (a good idea for getting them to promote you and maybe getting a contract at some point), here's what I'd advise:

• Make a comic or novel that will appeal to the Tapas audience.The easiest way to do this is to make something that has a similar sort of vibe to novels or comics already popular on Tapas (they don't necessarily have to be premium titles, but it helps).
• If it's a comic, have something close to professional level art and presentation of things like panels and speech bubbles that read well even on a phone.
• If it's a novel, have chapters of roughly 5 minutes reading length or 1000 words, with English that's accessible for ESL readers, and have a cover that looks professional, ideally with a visual style that fits in with Tapas' vibe (illustrated covers in a manga or manhwa influenced artstyle tend to perform best, and commissioning an illustrator can really pay off here).
• Update regularly with a consistent schedule.
• Promote your work on the Tapas discord server (but don't spam).

For publishers and agents outside of Tapas, building an audience here is a good start for proving your work has audience appeal and is worth representing, though cross-posting to other sites like Radish and Wattpad doesn't hurt in terms of finding where your audience is. You will likely need to look for an agent yourself though unless your series really explodes in popularity. Looking for agents who represent similar writers and contacting them politely via email and social media can be a good idea for this.

[RobertBMarks]

How do you attract agents and publishers on Tapas?

Putting on my publisher hat for a moment...you can't. They will almost never come to you - you have to come to them. Literary agents and traditional publishers are already swamped with submissions - they're not going head-hunting for new authors on websites like Tapas.

For a series on Tapas, that's an even harder sell, as a publisher wants to be the first to publish a work - they want first publication rights, not reprint rights, and the threshold for getting a traditional publisher to reach out and pick up a self-published work is insanely high - as far as I know, Wool had already made its author a million dollars by the time he was contacted by a publisher wanting in on the action. So, if your series gets a million views, you might have a chance - otherwise, not happening.

(Now, Tapas does partner with publishers, but the form that takes is providing a venue for those publishers to publish their author's work. I don't know how their selection process works, but I could not get them to answer my emails.)

So, what you need as an author to get a publisher or agent is:

1. A completed novel that has not been published elsewhere that is REALLY good.

2. A professional demeanor.

3. For an agent, ideally, a publishing contract with a traditional publisher for them to negotiate.

And, I'm sorry, but it often does end up being a Catch-22. The best way to get a literary agent is to contact them with "I have this publishing contract and I need somebody to negotiate it for me" - that's how I got mine, back when I had one. And the sheer length of time I had to wait for replies as an agented author in the fantasy genre between 2002-2012 is what killed my fiction career and made me give up on traditional publishers for ever getting my work out (Re:Apotheosis is going to be published as a print and e-book, but through MY publishing company).

Now, you can certainly go looking for a publisher - I would actually recommend trying the smaller ones at this point, as the slush piles for the bigger ones were measured in years last I checked (which was, granted, about a decade ago). But, another option is to take the time to learn how to typeset a manuscript, use the software you need to do book covers, and start one of your own. You'll take all the risk, there will be a lot you need to learn, and you'll have a lot more work to do to get it out, but you'll also get to keep all the money the book earns its publisher.

[system]

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