When I started writing, I wasn’t really doing it with the hope or expectation of getting published. I honestly felt like I was starting too “late.” I mean, when I was younger, I had dreams of being a writer. I took novel writing classes and did workshops and tried (and failed) to be disciplined and actually write. Then life happened and kids happened, and the dream sort of got away from me…
But I still wanted to write, so I signed up for NaNoWriMo and I did just that. I wrote a book. (Actually, to be clear, I first signed up for NaNo and wrote 50,000 words of a book that wasn’t going anywhere—someday I might plot that one out better and try again. THEN, the next year, I wrote a book.)
For over a year, I did nothing with that book. I wrote it, but I had no idea how to even fathom getting it published, and I didn’t know if it was good enough to even think that way. After all, I wasn’t a real writer—I was just a mom who wrote a thing.
Then, on a whim, I bid on an auction and won a full-book edit from an editor at Penguin UK. I have no idea what possessed me to do this, but I won. I did some editing while the auction was going on and then I sent it off to her…
And she liked it.
She gave me some great input for edits, but she actually said she thought I could get an agent with the book the way it was. And she told me that if things didn’t pan out with this book, I should keep writing and try again because I had writing talent. I was sort of blown away. More than blown away. These words unlocked something inside me. Something that made me feel like a writer. Suddenly, I hadn’t just written a thing, I had authored a book.
But there was still SO MUCH I didn’t know about publishing. I was incredibly naive. Honestly, this is still true (but now I know a lot of what I don’t know … which is that crucial step). Still, I have learned a whole lot. I thought I’d share some of those revelations with you here.
(Some of the) Things I Didn’t Know About Publishing:
- The process of getting your book ready for querying after you’ve “finished” it is LONG. Probably at least a year (it was more for me, but I wasn’t working on it in earnest that whole time).
- Before you even submit to an agent, it’s expected that you will have already had the book critiqued (by multiple people) and polished and possibly even edited.
- I knew my manuscript wasn’t perfect, but I thought I would find an agent and they would help me with the editing process. This is true, to an extent, but I’ve learned in the past year that agents expect that you’ve already been through this process and have gone through several rounds of edits before you submit to them.
- Now, of course, an agent can’t know how much editing has gone into a book before they get it, but they expect it to be really polished. They will work with you on edits (sometimes extensive edits), but they want it to be in a state where it could practically be publishable as is.
- (I realized after my first publishing conference that when the editor told me I could probably get an agent with the book as it was, she was being optimistic—though she stressed that she wasn’t just saying it to be nice. Sure, I might have been able to get someone to work with me, but I learned that I’d up my chances immensely by editing. A lot.)
- The first ten pages of your manuscript are critical.
- You have to convince an agent within the first ten pages (really, the first page) that they want to read your book. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve edited my first chapter (it’s a lot).
- Some agents and editors have said they need to be hooked by that first paragraph. They want the very first sentence to tell us something critical about who the MC is and what they’re fighting for. (This is HARD, by the way.)
- Writing the perfect query is incredibly important. And also hard.
- Seriously, you spend countless hours writing this 250-word description of your book that will (hopefully) convince an agent that it’s worth reading.
- There are books and classes and websites all focused solely on writing a query.
- You need to research agents before you query them and tailor each query to that agent (try to address their specific wishlists or profiles to show that you have done your homework).
- Oh, and then you also have to write a one-page synopsis that tells the whole plot of your book and gets people excited about it. In one page.
- Twitter is a big deal in publishing.
- While you certainly don’t have to use Twitter to pitch, there are tons of pitching events and such on Twitter.
- #pitchwars #pitmad #authormentormatch #divpit #pit2pub (and lots more!)
- So you also need a Twitter pitch. You need to be able to convince people in 280 characters or less that they want to see your book.
- There are also lots of hashtags to help you learn more.
- #askanagent #manuscriptwishlist #MSWL #querytip #tenqueries (and lots more!)
- But, as visible as all these pitching contests on Twitter are, most people still get published by cold querying, not with Twitter pitches or contests.
- While you certainly don’t have to use Twitter to pitch, there are tons of pitching events and such on Twitter.
- You need to be prepared to talk coherently about your book in person too. At any moment. You never know when someone will ask for your pitch.
- You’ll get rejected. A lot. (I actually did know this, but I didn’t know exactly how it would feel. There’s just no preparing yourself for this.)
- You’ll have moments where you’re flying high because you’ve gotten fabulous feedback, and then moments where you think you’re crazy for thinking you could possibly do this. (But you can’t give up!!)
- Even if you manage to get published, there’s no guarantee that your next book will get published as well.
- Even established authors edit a lot. At a conference I went to, the editor there said that she asked her previously published authors to estimate how much of their books they end up changing in the editing process with her—the average was up to 70%!
- And even after learning all this, there’s still a ton of stuff you don’t know.
- But there are so many resources out there. You just have to do the work to find them.
Honestly, that probably isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. I could write a book about all the stuff I don’t know about publishing. But I’m learning. The process might be a little slower than I’d like, but that’s okay. I’m in this for the long haul.
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