So, here’s the third in my collection of posts on how to get published. Please bear in mind what I said in the first of these and go and do more research. I’m not an authority on the subject. One thing you should do if you honestly hope to get a book published is go and read advice of people more knowledgeable than am I and accept there advice.
If you’ve done that, my third piece of advice is to make your own luck. Just about every agent or editor (or every one that I’ve heard of) will be swamped with submissions. I’ve received plenty of rejection letters apologising that more time couldn’t be spent on my submission because of the sheer volume they have to deal with. I mentioned Snowbooks, who received three books a day. When you consider that they’re relatively unknown, it should give you a clue about how many submissions the bigger publishing houses will receive.
If this was just a case of luck, you might as well try winning the lottery!
So how do you improve your odds a bit? Well, think about what I said in the first two of these posts. A lot of people send off manuscripts without really checking they’re sending them somewhere suitable. If people are sending thrillers to children’s publishers and crime novels to places that prints romances, there are bound to be a hundred manuscripts on the pile that are completely irrelevant to the company. If you send the submission to the right publishers, your odds are looking better already.
Some submissions will be, let’s face it, pretty terrible. I wrote a novel when I was about twelve. A twelve year old who’d never had a boyfriend should not have been trying to write about true love separated between mystical worlds. It was awful. I sent off the first chapters and synopsis to three different publishers. Two sent back polite rejections. One didn’t even do that.
I briefly dated a guy who wanted to be a writer. He wouldn’t accept criticism regarding his book. If I couldn’t bring myself to read more than two chapters while I was dating him, I don’t think he’ll have much success with publishers.
The fact is that there are some people out there submitting some really bad writing. So long as you’re not one of them, you just got a bit more likely to succeed.
Still, you’ll need your manuscript to hit the desk of the right person just as a gap is opening up in their market for the sort of book you’ve written. It won’t matter if you’ve written a great book, if the publisher has just signed a contract with a different author for something very similar. You need to get the timing just right and there’s no easy trick to doing that.
So keep trying. If the odds are a hundred to one, send out a hundred copies.
This time, when I submitted my novel, I sent it to over thirty places. Some were publishers, some were agents, most replied quickly with standard rejections. Keep trying.
If you try out every publisher who works with your particular genre, redraft the opening chapters and send it out again under a different name. Or put it on the shelf and work on the next book; that novel will make a good second book one day.
If you send out enough submissions, eventually the odds will be in your favour.
