Reversal of Fortune, featuring Julia Child and chickens
A careful reading of the signs of the times reveals that the fastest way to get a 3-novel contract with any publishing house is to put it in reverse. Reverse your way to the 1990s, or, ideally, even earlier than that, when publishing houses rested on rather firmer foundations. Once there, choose a dependable genre, such as Mystery, Romance, Historical Fiction, or Spies. Pitch with confidence, iterate at will.
If time travel in reverse remains elusive in your practice (and even John Dee required assistance in certain directions), John Dee advises abandoning the novel for the contracted, using the following simple recipe:
1. Become a celebrity.
2. Write brand a cookbook with your imprimatur and visage.
3. Deliver on any two of these supplemental variants: Brunch; Tailgates and BBQs; Holidays; Easy Low-Fat Meals in 15 Minutes!; Mixology.
Finally, if you abandon hope of contract, all is not lost. A more etheric reading outlines the fortuitous advent of self-published e-books, where Jupiter in Capricorn shows rising fortune as long as Supernatural Entities are invoked and Appeased. See also: Romance, Young Adult; Porphyria, Romanticism of; Elves. A corollary cookbook featuring mystical feasts would not be ill-advised.
In answer to thegibsongirl, who asked, “what’s the fastest way for me to get a 3-novel contract with Penguin?”
