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How do you sell your first book?
My answer is simple: maybe you shouldn’t try to sell your first book. It also might not be the one to bring your breakthrough to success. I think the first book you write is your guinea pig. Let me tell you my own example; clearly there are people who write amazing novels the first time around (those people can skip reading this part): I started writing novels when I was in my teens, but naturally I got stuck several times. I didn’t have much practice yet and if I couldn’t find a solution, I just started a new novel. I had all these unfinished manuscripts before I was able to actually finish my first book at age eighteen. Like all authors, I immediately ran happily to a Hungarian publisher.
I was lucky, because an editor read it and called me up to say that it was full of mistakes due to my lack of practice, but that a novel competition had been announced not long ago, and that I had one more month before they closed the applications. He suggested that I write a new novel during that time. Since it was summer and I had time, I got right down to it. I managed to finish by hardly sleeping at all, sitting up and writing all the time. In the end, I placed second in the competition and went home with a contract in my pocket. I was very happy. Then, a few weeks later, the publishing house went bankrupt and they didn’t publish my novel. I’m glad now that they didn’t. If I re-read today – which I won’t – what I had written then, I’d be stunned. I’m sure I would discover plenty of mistakes. I’d see that it wasn’t a mature text, and that the story was obviously undeveloped. But it was a great lesson.
Then what happened? I wrote a novel that I felt was mature enough, that the story was well written, and that it was time to send it to a publisher. This book was Till Death Do Us Part, which I really did send to a publisher in Budapest in 1999. They immediately accepted it and published it! True, they only printed limited numbers, and they also suggested that I publish under a pseudonym. While writing this book, I already felt that this novel was destined to reach many people, but this didn’t happen back in 1999. They only printed 3,000 copies, though they did sell all of them. But the story isn’t over. When I founded my own publishing company in 2013, I thought, now is the time when my long lost first book can finally reach a much wider audience. So this was the first book my own publishing house printed last summer. I gave the book a new name, a symbolic name, Starting Now, asked a new editor to work with it, had a new cover designed, and sent it out into the world, this time, under my own name.
Now, at the start of 2014, I can safely say that this book, which barely reached readers under the name of Till Death Do Us Part, is finally starting to ‘fulfill its destiny.’ I always felt that the book had this potential, but it needed 14 years (and 11 books to follow it) in order to reach so many people. So I think that patience and timing are important. Also, make sure that you write only for yourself about things you yourself would like to read about. Don’t try and please your ‘imagined audience’ or try and live up to real or imagined expectations.
The most important thing is to enjoy writing and believe that each of your novels has its own fate. This way, writing will always stay entertaining and you won’t give up hope.
Bangkok: a sizzling, all-embracing, exotic city where the past and the present intertwine. It’s a place where anything can happen… and anything really does happen. The paths of seven people cross in this metropolis. Seven seekers, for whom this city might be a final destination. Or perhaps it is only the start of a new journey? A successful businessman; a celebrated supermodel; a man who is forever the outsider; a young mother who suddenly loses everything; a talented surgeon, who could not give the woman he loved all that she desired; a brothel’s madam; and a charming young woman adopted at birth. Why these seven? Why did they come to Bangkok now, at the same time? Do chance encounters truly exist?
Bangkok Transit is a Central European best-seller. The author, Eva Fejos, a Hungarian writer and journalist, is a regular contributor to women’s magazines and is often herself a featured personality. Bangkok Transit was her first best-seller, which sold more than 100,000 copies and is still selling. Following the initial publication of this novel in 2008, she went on to write twelve other best-sellers, thus becoming a publishing phenomena in Hungary According to accounts given by her readers, the author’s books are “therapeutic journeys,” full of flesh and blood characters who never give up on their dreams. Many readers have been inspired to change the course of their own lives after reading her books. “Take your life into your own hands,” is one of the important messages the author wishes to convey.
Try it for yourself, and let Eva Fejos whisk you off on one of her whirlwind journeys... that might lead deep into your own heart.
About Eva Fejos, the author of Bangkok Transit
- Eva Fejos is a Hungarian writer and journalist.
She:
- has had 13 best-selling novels published in Hungary so far.
- Bangkok Transit is her first best-seller, published in 2008.
- has won several awards as a journalist, and thanks to one of her articles, the legislation pertaining to human egg donation was modified, allowing couples in need to acquire donor eggs more easily.
- spends her winters in Bangkok.
- likes novels that have several storylines running parallel.
- visited all the places she’s written about.
- spent a few days at an elephant orphanage in Thailand; and has investigated the process of how Thai children are put up for adoption while visiting several orphanages.
- founded her own publishing company in Hungary last year, where she not only publishes her own books, but foreign books too, hand-picked by her.
- Her books published in Hungary thus far are:
Till Death Do Us Part (Holtodiglan) | Bangkok Transit | Hotel Bali | Chicks (Csajok) | Strawberries for Breakfast (Eper reggelire) | The Mexican (A mexikói) | Cuba Libre | Dalma | Hello, London | Christmas in New York (Karácsony New Yorkban) | Caribbean Summer (Karibi nyár) | Bangkok, I Love You (Szeretlek, Bangkok) | Starting Now – the new edition of Till Death Do Us Part (Most kezdődik) | Vacation in Naples – the English version will be published in summer, 2014 (Nápolyi vakáció)
To be published in spring of 2014: I Waited One Hundred Nights (Száz éjjel vártam)
Bangkok Transit (English version): http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HDIT4UY
Buy Now @ Amazon
Genre - Women's Fiction, Contemporary
Rating – PG-13
More details about the author
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