Looking for advice on pitching to an agent. I published my first crime fiction novel in May 2022 on KDP. Pleasantly surprised by the response and got about 600 downloads and have 4.2* average ratings. (No, not friends and family!). I have completed the follow-up and now want to investigate the traditional publishing route so I am going to pitch to some agents with a track record in crime fiction. My question is how to go about it. Do I unpublish the first book on Amazon then pitch it to the agent making it clear that a second book is also complete? Or do I leave the first book published and pitch the second one to the agents. Any advice would be appreciated.
Pitch the second one, first rights on the first one are gone even if you unpublished it tbh though second in series will be a hard sell unless you had massive sales with the first so you might be better self publishing the second one also and writing an unrelated work to pitch to agents
Thanks both for your replies. It would be difficult to rewrite the second book to stand as a first in a series as there is a B plot running through the series of three books. I will give it some more thought if indeed I cannot publish the first again with a traditional publisher. Big Soft Moose: Amazon state that authors can publish through other publishers as well as KDP. You do not have to unpublish it but must transfer the book out of Kindle Select which does require exclusivity. I therefore assumed I could publish via a traditional route. Am I wrong in making that assumption? Sorry, I am a bit of a newbie to the world of publishing.
You can but the point is that a trad publisher will only be interested in work that hasn’t been published before regardless of whether it is then unpublished the only exception is when it’s a massive commercial success
Look at Scott Sigler's career for an example of this. He started self publishing on podio books, then got picked up by trad publishing.
We’ll yes or hugh howey or Mike Reilly , or Christopher Paoloni but the common factor is that they had a massive success first… you don’t get that sort of deal by selling a few hundred ( or even a few thousand) copies the other thing is that if you do have massive success you might be better off self pub anyway. Vis Adam Croft got a Thomas and mercer deal after the success of her last tomorrow. A year later he got the rights back and went back to self pub
