![]() For that reason, it’s important that an agent isn’t the first person (other than you) to read your manuscript.īefore you start looking for representation, consider working with beta readers: people with an interest in your genre who can offer you feedback from a third party perspective. It doesn’t need to be the finest novel ever written, but it must be something its target audience will enjoy. This entire article relies on your book actually being good. ![]() Finish your book and get feedback from editors (We'll talk more about these genre trends, and about why Big 5 publishers love them, in step 5.) 2. These are the trends to be aware of, rather than trends related to specific subject matter or character types. That said, there are definitely certain genres for which readers seem to have endless appetites. But by the time that your book finally hits the shelves (it can take years, even after you sign a deal), that trend might be over - something that acquiring editors are acutely aware of. That will give you an idea of the books that publishers are looking to acquire and how YOUR book will fit into that space.Ī note on trends: it might sound like a good idea to write a book that capitalizes on a current trend (sexy vampires, hardened female heroines, etc.). It only takes a minute!Īs an author, you should not only be learning from your contemporaries (and the all-time greats), but you should also know what kinds of books people are buying. This may be the only book you have ever read that fully gets the enormity of the crises facing us, yet responds neither with despair nor with fantasy suggestions about what “we” should do about it.Find out which genre your book belongs to. “We” is often disempowering too, because it leads us to wish, “Oh if only everyone would get it, then we would have a better government, better laws, and stop being so greedy.” But they don’t-how could I make them?-and the despair comes back. Wait, did I say “we”? I mean actually “you” and “I”. The ideology that has created the human realm we know is the same ideology that has us despair we can ever change it. It invalidates the logic of despair that so many activists have felt, that arises inescapably from the conception of ourselves as discrete and separate subjects in a world of other. This book offers an entirely different approach that begins with the reconception of our very selves. What are these tiny individual actions against the juggernaut of destruction that consumes oceans, trees, soil, and culture? Recycle your bottles and turn off the faucet when you brush your teeth. I have long found most prescriptions for “what you can do” to reverse humanity’s trajectory of ruin quite empty. More than anything, The Ascent of Humanity is about how to create the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. What is the purpose of the grandeur and the ruin we have wrought? If civilization is to collapse, Why? and What for? Will we then go back to the Stone Age, or will we be born into something entirely new? This book draws from mythological sources, as well as natural processes of birth and transformation, to offer a narrative framework for the majesty and madness of human civilization. The Ascent of Humanity is about Separation: its origins, its evolution, its ideology, its effects, its consummation and resolution, and its cosmic purpose. And this collapse is setting the stage for a revolution in human beingness whose stirrings we already begin to feel. The gathering crises of our age demonstrate that this way of being is on the verge of collapse. This book describes how all the expressions of our civilization-its miraculous technology as well as the pillage of earth, culture, goodness, and beauty-arise from our identity, our way of being, “the discrete and separate self”. The Ascent of Humanity is about the history and future of civilization from a unique perspective: the evolution of the human sense of self.
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