One thing I get asked quite often is how to get a novel published.
All I can talk about is my personal experience, but here are my thoughts and advice on such things. The most important thing I can say is, there is no right way! Never, ever listen to writing advice that claims to tell you the “best” way to write and publish a novel. Every path is different. Every person’s writing process is different. Every person’s success will be different. In the end, read the advice, take the classes, but then trust your instincts and do whatever the hell feels right to you.
Before I talk about the technical steps, some general advice:
1. Be nice to everyone along the way. Publishing is a small world and you do not want to be known as a jerk.
2. Find a good community of writers. This took me a while but it made all the difference.
3. Trust your instincts but also keep learning. Listen to feedback and interrogate your own perspective on things.
4. Find your own process. Mess around. Take chances. Change things up. See what works best for you even if it’s totally weird.
5. Be true to yourself in your writing. What is it you want to say? Who are you and what is your story to tell?
6. Work your ass off and expect to fail…a lot. Failure is good because it helps you get better. Say that over and over to yourself as your ego is bruised by the many, many rejections you will receive.
7. Believe in yourself! This process sucks royally and a perhaps delusional belief in your own future success is essential.
Alright, onto the steps that worked for me!
Step 1: Write a great book. Sadly, there is no shortcut here, trust me I tried. When I first started writing seriously, I thought I was smart enough and had read enough that I could just write a great novel. I got about half-way into that first novel when I realized that my writing wasn’t very good. So, I decided to switch to writing short stories — mainly because short stories helped me work on story telling (creating engaging and complete narrative arcs, working on characterization, etc) without the immense time commitment of a novel. I wrote at least 2 short stories a month and experimented wildly with voice, tone, and genre. I did that for almost two years, submitting to professional level fiction magazines. At first I got nothing but form rejections, then lots of personal rejections with feedback from editors, and finally I started selling short stories. To be honest, I’m still learning the craft of writing every day.
That’s what worked for me, but learning how to write a good book might mean taking writing classes, or getting an MFA, or it could mean spending years working on your craft alone in a log cabin. Part of this process can be helped along by becoming part of a writer’s group. Getting regular feedback on your writing AND critiquing other people’s writing can be incredibly helpful!
Step 1A: Write the right book. I suspect that you really, really, really need a good elevator pitch for your book. The high level hook really should be something that you can tell your friends in a sentence or two and have them go, “ooooh, cool! I’d love to read that!” It’s annoying as hell that this matters, but as I meet other newly published authors at conferences and such, I’m increasingly convinced it’s true. Everyone I’ve met who has gotten a book deal had a hook like this. The reason is that your book has to be sold at every, single step along the way (I’m mostly talking about traditional publishing here).
First you have to sell the idea to your agent. I promise that the number one thing an agent is considering when they read your query letter is, “can I sell this to an editor?” Then the agent needs to query editors and sell it to them. Then the editor who loves your book has to sell the book to her acquisition and marketing teams in order to convince the publisher to make you an offer. And they all have to believe that the idea will eventually sell to readers. The more hooky your hook, the easier this entire process will be.
Step 2: Edit until you puke. This was the most difficult step for me. Some people suggest stepping away from your novel for many months to gain perspective. I couldn’t wait and dove right in.
I’ll be frank, it sucked tearing apart the thing I had just spent so much time creating. But I was merciless. From my first draft, I rearranged the entire middle 30,000 words, I cut two major characters (which meant a rewrite of the ENTIRE novel), and I completely tossed out and rewrote the last 10,000 words at least three times. One thing that really helped me during this process was writing a query letter and synopsis. The query letter forced me to clarify the central conflict and theme of my novel, and the synopsis showed me where things were too complex or convoluted.
Step 3: Let other people read it. You’ve got something you’re proud of, now let your friends/family/writer’s group read it and tear it to shreds. If they love you they will be merciless. They will tell you where they lost interest. They will tell you what seemed nonsensical. They will tell you if they hate your main character.
By this point, I was SO sick of my book. I could barely stand to go through it again, but I did. I listened to all the feedback and made changes based on my own instinct. Thing is, most of the comments made sense to me and so I realized that I still had a lot of work to do.
To be honest, I think a lot of people try to skip the pain of steps 2 and 3. I know I did. I queried a few agents after step 1 and, not shockingly, didn’t get any offers of representation.
Step 4: Decide how you want to publish. I’m not going to get into this debate because I think any choice you make here is perfectly viable. What do YOU want out of publishing? Do you want an advance, professional editor, marketing team, access to in-store distribution, glacial pace, and little or no say over many aspects of your career? Then traditional publishing is probably for you. Want complete control over everything involved from cover design to publishing schedule? Then go for self publishing. I hate marketing and wanted someone to do all that stuff for me, which is why I pursued traditional publishing. The fact that I got a six-figure advance made this choice right for me for sure!
Everything I’ll talk about from now on is for traditional publishing. I’m sorry I have no good advice about self-publishing! Also, there are many amazing small presses that accept un-agented manuscripts. If you want to find small presses that will accept your manuscript directly, I highly recommend searching on the Submission Grinder.
But, assuming you want to aim for one of the big publishing houses…you need an agent.
Step 5: Write a query letter. Here’s the step where your amazingly hooky elevator pitch will come into play. Writing a query letter was definitely not fun for me but I was glad I’d already spent time thinking about how to condense my novel into two paragraphs.
When writing your query, I’d suggest reading a million posts on queryshark, then craft something based on her advice, and then let as many people read it as possible. If you have a writing group, this will be a great use of their crit time. I also highly recommend checking out the query critique system at the forums at absolutewrite. In fact, absolutewrite is an amazing resource for any writer. The community is supportive and there is endless amazing advice on everything from writerly craft to querying agents.
Step 6: Query agents. I loved this step but I know for many others querying was a dreadful process. First thing to do, create a list of agents you want to query. Two amazing resources will help you. First, querytracker allows you to search agents according to genre and a bunch of other criteria. It’s a fantastic place to start and it’s free to search though I did end up paying the subscription fee so I could use their fantastic tracking system to keep record of my own queries. Second, I highly recommend getting a subscription to Publishers Marketplace. It’s expensive, but you can sign up for just a month to compile your query list. Publishers Marketplace allows you to search agents by actual sales so you can, for example, see who the top selling agents are in your specific genre. Not all agents announce all sales, but this will give you a decent sense of who the heavy hitters are in your genre.
Once you’ve got a list, stalk them on social media, search for them on absolutewrite and google, basically see if you can find people who you will work well with.
Now you can create a force-ranked list. In my opinion, this should be a huge list of 80+ agents. Once you’ve got this gigantic list (which you can organize in query tracker), start querying! I would suggest only sending out 5 at a time over a few weeks and target some quick responders in your first few waves. Early feedback will tell you if your query is working. The biggest querying mistake I see is people sending out 80 query letters in two days.
If you get no partial or full requests from your query letter, you need to rewrite the letter! But if you’ve already queried all the agents on your list, you are SOL and have possibly blown your chances to get an agent for that book you just worked so hard on.
Once you’re getting a decent request rate (somewhere over 30% would seem like a good for a request rate to me), then I’d send out 10 or more at a time. A lot of people suggest sending out a few waves of 5 at a time, and then just send a new letter every time you get a response (good or bad).
Once you get a bunch of full requests and have sent query letters out to your top tier agents, then all you can do is wait…and possibly drink. I might have had a glass of wine or three while anxiously waiting. Did I mention there’s a lot of waiting? If you get no bites on your top-tier list, it can’t hurt to send queries to your second tier, and maybe even your third tier. The best agent for you isn’t necessarily the highest selling agent in your genre!
Step 7: Pick your agent. Okay, you’ve gotten full requests. An agent has made an offer! You told all the other agents with fulls or partials and given them a deadline. If you have more than one offer of representation, I highly recommend going with your gut. This was an easy choice for me because I got along so well with my agent and I liked what she had to say about my book. I’m now completely convinced that having a bad agent would be worse than having no agent. And having a great agent (like I do, yay!) is worth more than any other aspect of publishing. So take your time, trust your instincts, and don’t feel desperate (easy for me to say, I know, but honestly, do NOT go with someone you don’t feel good about).
Step 8: Wait and then wait some more. The next steps have little to do with you. Your agent will send your novel out to editors. Some will say no. Others will hopefully love your book. The editors that love it will take it to their acquisition meeting where they then have to convince the publishing house to make you an offer. Your agent will negotiate. Maybe you’ll get multiple offers and you and your agent will pick which publisher to go with.
Step 9: PUBLISH! And that’s it. Now it will take about a year or more for your book to release. So now you start on your next book!
The bad news…at any step along this process, something might not work out. You might love your book but never get an agent. You might get an agent but never sell the book to a publisher. In fact, MOST traditionally published authors wrote more than one book before their debut. There is a great study at writability about this. The take away is that the average debut author (traditionally published) wrote 3 or more books before they got a book deal. Ugh.
That means you might have to do this entire process multiple times. But, the good news is that not selling your first, second, or even third book doesn’t mean you won’t ever succeed.
Good luck to everyone out there in the publishing trenches!