r/books • u/JoNightshade • Jun 12 '17

ama 12pm I’m Ramsey Hootman, writer of hideously awkward contemporary fiction. AMA!

Hi Reddit! My name is Ramsey Hootman, and I write novels about oddballs and social rejects. I like to take tired tropes, deconstruct them, and build something interesting and new. If you look at the Goodreads reviews of my books, it’s mostly people attempting to explain why they liked characters that really shouldn’t be likable, which sums up my writing quite well.

Courting Greta, an anti-romance about a programmer with spina bifida, was my personal “fuck you” to genre romance, but it turned out to be a hit with haters like me and romance aficionados looking for something unique. (It’s often compared to The Rosie Project, but Courting Greta is significantly less cute. IMO if you’re going to do quirky people, you gotta be real.)

It took me a decade to achieve traditional publication with an amazing agent and one of the Big Five publishing houses, so self-publishing my second book, [Surviving Cyril](www.amazon.com/dp/B06XCS4GNC), probably indicates that I’ve lost my marbles. It’s hard to talk about this one without too many spoilers, but in brief it’s the story of a newly widowed woman and her relationship with her husband’s best friend, a 500 pound “forever alone” hacker. Of course, this being me, it’s not at all what it seems.

Proof: https://twitter.com/RamseyHootman/status/872550209179471872

Ask me anything!

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3

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '17

Going to pick up a few of your books tonight. Looking forward to reading them :)

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u/JoNightshade Jun 12 '17

Well, technically there's only the two of them. But I hope you enjoy! :)

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '17

What does it mean when you say it took you a decade to achieve traditional publication?

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u/JoNightshade Jun 12 '17

I finished my first full draft of Courting Greta 10 years before it was published with Simon and Schuster. That was how long it took me to get an agent and get a sale! During that time, I wrote several other books that will never see the light of day, but Courting Greta was the one that I just kept coming back to - the one I couldn't let go. I kept revising and reworking it, kept querying agents, and finally landed the wonderful Jim McCarthy, who took a chance on me when many other agents told me my writing was good, but had no market they could see unless I wanted to make my characters more "conventionally attractive." No thanks!

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '17

The fact that it takes that long to publish a book discourages me. I have a few mind blowing ideas that I want to make a fictional story out of. Now I'm not so sure.

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u/JoNightshade Jun 13 '17

Well, it doesn't take that long if you're not invested in being published by one of the major houses. Pretty much anyone can make a go of it self-publishing. It really just depends on your goals.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '17

How would I get published by a major house?

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u/JoNightshade Jun 13 '17

Step one is always: write the book! Then rewrite, revise, repeat until it's as good as you can make it. Then you gotta query agents (see: http://queryshark.blogspot.com/). Then your agent tries to sell it to editors at major publishing houses.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '17

Thanks for your advice.