Recognizing when you ARE the exception

Dear Shark,
I am an author who has been querying my second novel for two years now. I have one published novel (originally self-published in 2014 but then miraculously republished by a press in Montreal) which has not sold much, alas, but has received great reviews and even an endorsement from Margaret Atwood.

My question is: Do I not even mention this in my query? Is this book, which I am proud of even if it didn`t sell much, hurting me? Some agents seem to indicate that past failures (in a sales sense if not an artistic sense) hurt you if you mention them, and you may be better off with a pseudonym or otherwise divorcing yourself from them.

Any advice you might have would be greatly appreciated.

Dear Chum,

What you don't realize is that a quote from Margaret Atwood trumps all.

And I don't think you realize that a publisher taking on a previously self-published book is quite rare. More rare than a Margaret Atwood blurb.

What you've got here is something a savvy agent is going to recognize as an opportunity.

Yes, you mention this. Almost exactly the way you did here:

I have one published novel (originally self-published in 2014 but then miraculously republished by a press in Montreal) which has not sold much, alas, but has received great reviews and even an endorsement from Margaret Atwood.

Any questions?

the why of it

Good Morning Ms. Reid—

I read in The New York Times this morning about Filippo Bernardini, an employee of Simon & Schuster UK who electronically “stole” hundreds of unpublished manuscripts over the last few years. This theft impacted famous authors such as Margaret Atwood as well as hundreds of unpublished writers. The article explains what he did, but not why he did it. I was hoping you might devote a blog post to explaining the why of these thefts.

Good morning Chum,

I can explain how a reserves for returns clause works.
I can explain why you need comps in a query.
I can even explain why I think personalization is a waste of everyone's time.

But this?
This is beyond me because I am NOT a novelist.

This is why we need novelists in fact: to explain things that seem unhinged.

I will tell you this: I've spent more than a few hours thinking about this problem because I worked at an agency where colleagues were affected by this more than once.

It created a very worrisome situation, particularly with books that were embargoed (I can explain embargos too, if you want!)

We couldn't figure out the why, even as we valiantly prevented the what.

So, novelists out there...

Why?