Two years ago I began working on this book about dreams and autism, which I first mentioned in my June 11/2024 post.
The book continues to be the reason why there are so few posts here. But it’s gone far beyond what I expected. Simply combining autism with dreams has sent it soaring into regions that were beyond my imagining.
But by this spring though, I could see the end approaching and began to think about its future.
Since my first novel, The Birdcatcher, (2006) I haven’t submitted anything to the traditional publishing industry. Neither The Shyness Guide or my SF novel Skol were seen by anyone in that business. But because Autism Dreaming was showing such potential, I decided that I owed it to the book, and to autistic people, to see if it can’t get access to a wider readership than I can provide.
So in June I submitted the book to 20 New York agents. I didn’t try the Canadian market because getting published in this country means, for most writers, getting accepted for government subsidies. That requires socializing with the writing community to a degree that has always been impossible for me.
When I got no response from the New York agents, I sent it to 17 agents in the UK. Back in 2010-2012, when indie writers still had affordable access to Google advertising, my books sold more copies in the UK than the rest of the world altogether. Then when we lost Google, and I lost access to the UK market. If Autism Dreaming could be published there, it would be interesting. But that didn’t happen either.
I once read that if you dedicate yourself to writing fiction, on average it takes 7 years to get published. I submitted my first short story to magazines in 1970, then continued for the next 35 years, adding non-fiction in the 1980s. In all that time, nothing of mine was published by anyone. So being rejected again was no surprise.
But this week I suddenly realized that I’ve been overlooking something- my age. The oldest author I know of who got published by the industry for the first time was Frank McCourt, who was sixty-six when his memoir Angela’s Ashes was published in 1996, and went on to win a Pulitzer prize.
I turned seventy-nine last month. Why would agents, who look for clients who are likely to will stay with them through multiple books, take on someone who they think is near the end of their writing career?
I feel profoundly naive, only waking up to this now.
Confronted by this though, I’m not as dismayed as you might think. I learned how to self-publish long ago, and I like being in full control of my books. I like owning my books.
Also, from time to time, I remind myself to be grateful that I was born late enough to encounter the internet. Think of all the writers who were unable to make money from their writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – William Blake, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Henry Thoreau, plus many more whose names are lost.
Then there is this – Autism Dreaming is 90% done. Instead of another year or so working its way through a commercial publisher’s system, it could be online by the end of this year.
Alan Conrad 