This is honestly not me shitting on the dude, but is it that difficult to get a real publishing house to pick up your book? I mean, the guy just worked on Star Wars.
If it's your first book, yes.
Yes, it is. It sounds like this is a fantasy/monster book. Not a huge market for those, and publishers want sure fired hits these days. Especially if it's a first time novelist, regardless of their background.
First-time writers are actually preferred these days. The legacy publishing industry is borne on the backs of a few mega-best-selling writers. If you are not a King, Brown, GRRM, Rowling, etc., it's better to be a debut writer than one who has "failed" before. Mid-list authors are better off going self-publishing. Fantasy is a tough genre to break into, though.
Any hack in this day and age can be a "novelist."
BTW, I love that your link contains the word "abomination" because that fits his career oh so perfectly.
No, you need to start and finish writing a novel to be called a novelist, which 99% of people can't do; I suspect you haven't, either. I'm a legacy-published novelist. I don't recommend it as a career.
Gary wrote movies starring Denzel Washington and Will Smith, worked on the Akira adaptation, has a project with Kurt Russell, was chosen to write the first of the new Star Wars films. Yeah, quite the "abominable" career. Who do I have to kill to have one like it?
I hope he gets a good editor because if that first chapter is any indication, he has some issues with commas and the flow of his sentences.
The first thing legacy publishing cut was editing. That's the bad part about the rise of self-publishing, nobody is edited any more (particularly those big authors, it's why their books are often so bloated and poorly-written these days).
"Alfred was tired. It had been a long, hard war..."
Not the most imaginary prose, I must say. None of his descriptors seem to rise above a 5th grade reading level.
That doesn't really mean anything, from
here:
Most writing isn't "hard to get." Now, there are a lot of problems with Gary's first excerpt. There's no description of place or characters, there are no
sense descriptions, the first nine paragraphs are superfluous. It reads like a screenwriter's first novel. He's left out the parts that are typically somebody else's job (set design, costume, etc.).