Congratulations on Selling Your Dystopian Fiction Manuscript!

It will be a hit.  Publishers will actually vie for your favor, coaxing you out with promising advances, solid royalty return plans.  The struggling market for publishing hard hitting works of fiction will be a mystery to you, prettiest girl at the literary dance.

All this for a book that you couldn’t sell earlier this year, when it was still about North Korea.

You could blame a number of factors.  Shortsighted publishers, a poor understanding of international politics, a shrinking non-fiction market.  But then, the market for fiction is perceived as ever-shrinking as well.  So how do you explain it?

You aren’t interested in trying.  You’re just interested in planning your sequel, where Space Jackson (you renamed your Korean peasant so that he’d be more palatable to North American audiences) stages an uprising against Kim Jong-Un (whose name you didn’t have to change for some reason).

Your prose is lackluster, and your original manuscript trades primarily on rendering in cold, exacting detail the struggle of daily life in North Korea.  The sequel will be a disaster, poorly written, irregularly plotted and hackneyed beyond belief where it won’t be weirdly jingoistic.  But what do you care?  You’ll have published a best-seller.  You’ll be owed a final book in the trilogy by merit of your contract, and thanks to your advance, you’ll be rich.

Congratulations on Selling Your Dystopian Fiction Manuscript!