but not until August.

I don’t think you’ll find a whole of the professional writers here who would say give up on a piece and go write something else. You will however probably find near one hundred percent agreement that you should get the finished piece out the door and out looking for a home and…go write something else.

Even if your first book is truly a work of incredible genius that will someday be considered one of the great classics of the field, you still have to write the next book, and the one after that, and so on.

And, if you haven’t sold the first book and you really want to build a career in the field, your second book should almost certainly not be a sequel to the first. SFNovelists’ own Mindy Klasky had a great post on this subject a little while back at her LJ:
http://mindyklasky.livejournal.com/143140.html

I wonder what would happen if you tried to pseudonym route for this book, so as - as you say - to distinguish it from the work you are known for. It might be because it -isn’t - the epic fantasy expected from you.

Have you tried beta readers, just to get further impressions from *ahem* interested parties?

Rob has a fantasy novel he’s been trying to sell for more than 20 years. Its been accepted for publication 3 times and three times the (various and reputable) publishers have changed their minds before the presses started to roll. I consider his book to be cursed.

It’s possible to love a book so much that you neglect other work. Whether or not you think that’s “too much” is your call.

*Could it be that in making the book so special to me, I’ve made it less attractive to others?*

It’s certainly possible - especially if by ‘others’, you mean ‘publishers’ - and for various reasons.

D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, among others, could have bowdlerized their own work to get it past the censors; they didn’t. C.S. Lewis hated Tolkien’s elves, but Tolkien ignored this. Stephen Donaldson refused to change Thomas Covenant from a leper to a diabetic at an editor’s request.

I remember Steve Barnes, on a panel at Worldcon, talking about the arguments he’d had with publishers about the heroes of his novels being black. They said that while they didn’t have a problem with this per se, putting a black man on the cover might reduce sales, but they let him decide. He finally decided that he didn’t want to accept money from anyone who wouldn’t knowingly buy a book that had a black hero, and went with depicting the hero as black on the cover as well as in the text.

If what’s important to you is that you love the book or are proud of it, rather than the money, then I have no argument with that.

*When do I give up and accept that those editors who have rejected it know better than I what’s good and what’s not?*

Never. If need be, wait for new editors, new markets, a change in public taste and/or reading habits.

*Have any of you faced similar issues in your own work?*

Yes.

I also appreciate all the comments so far, in that there’s an unfortunate attitude out there that if your work doesn’t sell in the current market then you should give up on it and write something else that *will* sell. What said attitude betrays is both a lack of belief in one’s own work, and the ridiculous notion that we should let a consumerist system/industry decide the quality of our work. My response to that is: bullshit! Sure, there are a lot of writers out there who aren’t as good as they think they are, but what about the novel that actually *is* top quality but doesn’t sell to the current group of agents/editors?

I could go on and on about this issue, but what I will say is that, as Matthew rightly pointed out, we’re entering a time when an author can bypass that system and let the reading public decide for itself. Are we there yet? No. But, once digital content becomes truly viable, we will be. I don’t think that time is too far off. We, and our work, no longer have to be defeated by a system/industry more concerned about profit than quality material.

So, yes, if you trust your taste, and believe in the novel, then why should you ever give up on it? Seriously, once e-readers are ubiquitous, you can put it out yourself.

Well, here are my two cents. You’ve been around the block with your books enough to know that you probably aren’t deluding yourself (even though you might be starting to believe it). If you love this book, you have to persevere. You just have to. Sooner or later it will find its home. I wonder if a more mainstream publisher might take it on. From what I remember of how you described it, I think it’s a possibility.