Russell Hasan's Blog

I put the finishing touches on the two novels I blogged about recently, and I'm not a patient person and saw no reason to wait, so I pushed them. The links are: The Magical Glasses: A Vision Quest Firestorm: Death of Darkness Please take a look at them! The first one is my magical realism novel (it turned out not to fit the criteria Amazon has set for "YA", so I published it as just magical realism, not as YA magical realism), and the second one is dark fantasy/fantasy horror/epic fantasy with neurodiverse protagonists (like me!). They both came together with the editing process ending just this past weekend, so I pushed them both today.

Hello Readers, I've finally finished my YA magical realism fantasy novel. It ended up being unexpectedly long at 120,000 words. I considered submitting it to literary agents to try to get it tradpubed, but I did my research, and it is very much not what's considered "hot" in YA fantasy right now (i.e., YA fantasy romance), and it is basically so unique and original that it has no good "comps," so it has no real shot at getting tradpubed. And in all the literary agents guides to query letters, they all say "don't tell me your novel is so original it has no comps," and the question is, well, what if it is? And the answer is, if that's true, then they really don't want it, because the tradpub Big Five will only buy novels based on the comps. The amazing thing about tradpubworld is that, because it's all based on comps, it rewards conformity and punishes originality, which may explain why I am better suited to be an indie author than to...