Interview with Graham Parke on ‘No Hope for Gomez!’

Graham Parke lives in the Netherlands with his wife and son. He’s responsible for a number of technical publications and has recently patented a self-folding map. He has been described as both a humanitarian and a pathological liar. Convincing evidence to support either allegation has yet to be produced.

His latest book is No Hope for Gomez! (Outskirts Press).

You can visit his website at www.grahamparke.com.

Welcome to Beyond the Books, Graham. Can you start out by telling us whether you are published for the first time or whether you are multi-published?

[Graham] I’ve been published under a number of different pseudonyms.

What was the name of your very first book, regardless of whether it was published or not and, if not published, why?

[Graham] My first published book was actually not a work of fiction. It was a huge technical tome published my Macmillan USA. I wrote it together with a friend. It didn’t do very well, and as I was happier writing fiction, we didn’t pursue any further technical writing careers.

For your first published book, how many rejections did you go through before you either found a mainstream publisher, self-published it, or paid a vanity press to publish it?

[Graham] Not that many. Maybe one or two. Which is a far cry from my fiction writing. For some fiction novels I racked up over a hundred friendly and non-informative rejections. You’ve got to realize, though, that the average fiction agent needs to reject at least a hundred manuscripts a day just to keep the slush pile from tipping over and killing them. I’m always more than happy to help by writing an unintelligible query.

How did the rejections make you feel and what did you do to overcome the blows?

[Graham] Well, by the time you receive a rejection, five more queries need to be out the door. And, as each query is obviously more brilliant than the last, carrying with it much more of that unrejectable quality that you’ve been developing, your hopes are set on those. The actual rejections, well, those were just practice queries. If you’re lucky, you get a personalized rejection. These will help you fine-tune new query letters, or even, if necessary, the novel itself.

I always keep track of responses to different query letters. Pretty soon a pattern emerges that tells you which bits of the queries pique agents’ interests and which leave them nice and frosty towards your plans for literary domination.

When your first book was published, who published it and why did you choose them?

[Graham] Macmillan USA, because they were smart enough to want to publish it.

How did it make you feel to become published for the first time and how did you celebrate?

[Graham] Getting published is a long and arduous process of sending out letters, communicating with agents and publishers, revising manuscripts and contracts. By the time it is all done, you’re just happy to take a break. There really is no one instance that suddenly makes you feel like a published author.

What was the first thing you did as for as promotion when you were published for the first time?

[Graham] I did very little by the way of promotion for my first publication, which, hindsight has taught me, is an incredibly powerful way to actually rack up no sales. Promotion by the author is definitely needed. Especially these days.

Looking back since the early days when you were trying to get published, what do you think you could have done differently to speed things up?  What kind of mistakes could you have avoided?

[Graham] It really helps to create targeted queries. You can spend a month writing a killer query letter, but sending this out to ten agents won’t do you as much good as sending out a single letter, addressed to a specifically chosen agent (perhaps because he represents similar, but sufficiently different, authors already) tailored specifically to his interests and his query letter requirements. You need to create an entirely new and mostly unique letter for each agent.

What has been the biggest accomplishment you have achieved since becoming published?

[Graham] I’m incredibly proud of the reviews I’ve been receiving for ‘No Hope for Gomez!’ Although it’s a strange little novel at best, one which I wrote purely for fun, I’ve received nothing but glowing reviews from readers and professional reviewers alike. These are young and older people, of both genders. I’m still struggling to explain this. I’d assumed No Hope would only appeal to people as weird as myself. I guess there are more of us than I realized.

You can pick up your copy of Graham’s book, No Hope for Gomez!, at Amazon for only $10.95 by clicking here!