Writing 101 -- "I'm Finished, So Now What?"
Edit: after ten years of trying to tell my mother what is involved in the process of submission, she has finally figured out that I'm not going to do it for her and wants to know how one goes about finding a publishing house. This is the screed she's going to get.
When you finally get to end of the line (or possibly the end of your rope), you will have before you a finished novel. Whether or not it’s any good is at the moment immaterial; take a few minutes to savor the feeling of accomplishment, reveling in a job that at the moment you have no idea is well-done or not, but at least thankfully for the moment, completely over. Save the groans of disgust for when you do the editing. Take it from someone who has been there and just trust me, you’ll need them.
All right, now the bleeding is done with. You’ve shown the book to multiple people, gotten their opinions, tried to incorporate the suggestions of people who didn’t seem to be completely off-based and smiled politely through the more lunatic thoughts. Your novel has been finished, edited, polished and you believe that now it’s ready to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
So what the hell do you do next?
It’s time to take a trip back down to the bookstore. You’ll need some scratch paper and a pen, so go ahead and bring those with you. Find the aisle of the store whose genre most closely corresponds with whatever it was you just wrote and take a slow trip down the middle. Look at the names of the publishers on the spine and write down the ones who either have published your favorite authors or ones that seem to keep popping up again and again. This is going to serve as your initial quick-reference list.
Guides to getting published are divided on the subject of small presses versus the large ones; each one has its own particular pluses and minuses, which I’m not going to get into too heavily here. I will state, however, that one of the most-overlooked negative aspects of small presses is the very size of their list. While the small publisher is often touted as the best place to try to get your book into print--as a house that does only half a dozen books a year is more apt to pay close attention to whatever project they are working on--what is conveniently left out is that with such a limited amount of openings, the competition for these slots is even fiercer than at Vintage, Doubleday or any of the other elephants of the business. To be brutally honest, the only edge a small house has over a large one when it comes to submitting is that a small house is less likely to require your submission to be done through an agent. Note how I said less likely and that I did not say they won’t require an agent, because they’re getting wise to that aspect of the gatekeeping business as well.
Before we go any further, it’s time to confront the ugly classic Catch-22 of the book business. About ninety-five percent of the publishing houses currently in business and actually accepting submissions are going to require you to meet one of two criteria; either you must have an agent, or you must have been previously published. Adding to the fun, most agents will require that you have been previously published in order to retain their services. If you feel the urge to maim and dismember in dozens of ugly ways rising inside your soul, welcome to the business, kid. “But how the hell can I get an agent when they want me to have been previously published,” you are no doubt shrieking, “and the odds on me getting published without an agent is so slanted against me that it seems like they’ve actually designed the fucking system so that it’s nigh impossible for a newbie to get their feet in the door?”
DING-DING-DING! Winner! That’s exactly the way it’s been designed, and the reason why is a very simple one: if the system was set up so that anybody could just submit to any house they wanted whenever they felt the urge to do so, every book publisher in existence would soon be buried in ten years’ worth of backreading to do on some of the most god-awful pulp that has ever shuddered its way down the line. It’s set up to be as difficult as possible so that only people who are really dedicated--or really insane--will stick with it for any period longer than a year or two. If you just start throwing pages at the wall to see if anything sticks without any kind of a master plan, you won’t last very long in the submission business.
After you’ve written down the likely targets on that piece of scratch paper, it’s time to start doing homework. Go to the aisle where they keep the current version of that hoary old tome, the Writer’s Market. It’s a hardcover book about a thousand pages long stocked to the gills with the information for publishing houses that are currently accepting submissions for that year, nonfiction outlets and small presses and magazines that may take speculative fiction or articles written for their markets.
Note that I did not follow up that statement with “and then go to the front desk and buy this book,” because if you’re going to do that, you might as well just set fire to that money you were going to use to buy it with. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the glacially long time it takes for a prospective publisher to respond to your inquiry assures you of only about three to six prospective submissions per calendar year, so buying this book is a waste of money. For the purposes of this process, you don’t need to buy it unless you want an expensive paperweight.
Adopt a comfortable sitting pose and break every rule of reading by immediately flipping to the end. In the back of this book is the mother lode; the listings of both literary agencies and publishing houses by genre, and in alphabetical order. It might seem like a very obvious statement, but I’ll go ahead and state for the record that not every publisher is going to be willing to check out any genre; almost all of them have areas that they specialize in. Trust me, stupid as this sounds, this was not such an elementary deduction when I stated doing this about seventeen years ago. Do not submit your science fiction novel to the gay and lesbian press, and by the same token, the Christian publishers are probably going to be none too interested in your heart of darkness guts-n-gore horror novel. Your first order of business is to separate the chaff from the wheat, and the index page is the perfect place to begin.
Start off with a little experiment; take the publisher names you wrote down and compare them to the Writer’s Market hit list. Anybody who does not appear on both sheets of paper should be immediately scratched off your scratch paper, because it means they’re not currently open for business. Either they’re getting ready to go under, they’re reorganizing their market reach or, most likely, they are already set for the upcoming year. This will probably get rid of all but about three names on your list, and now take a look at their listings in the Big Book of Pain. In all likelihood, each of them will say agented submissions only--unsolicited manuscripts will be returned unopened, so for each one that has this phrase in their listing, go ahead and scratch them off as well. You will now be left with a blank list, and this is where we begin.
I know this sounds amazingly depressing, and trust me when I say without a single lick of jocularity that it is. If you think this is a buzzkill, just imagine how you’ll feel when you submit to a likely prospect and they turn you down. Some fun, eh, kids?
Back to work. Starting with A, go through every publisher listed and look at their submission guidelines, what they will print in terms of genre, and average response times. This isn’t going to take as much time as you would think. In ninety percent of the cases, you’ll be able to fire them right away because of the unsolicited manuscript being rejected immediately bugaboo, or they will just say blatantly that they are not accepting new submissions at this time. If you are wondering “Then why the fuck are they even listed?”, hey, you’re getting more savvy in this business all the time! Cheers!
Once you have gone through all the listings, you will come up with about half a dozen likely candidates. What’s that, you say? That’s all? Yeah, that’s all. Although you’ve begin with a very large potential number, you’ve been multiplying by fractions right down the line, and that always results in a very small number in the end. To make matters even worse (he groaned), not all of these places are going to be created equal. One might specialize in action stories within the genre and another may be looking for properties that can be licensed for films, meaning your thoughtful, textured polemic on--whatever it’s on--has just been reduced further in terms of candidates. Unfortunately, and again, style matters. People who go for Stephen King-style horror rarely make exceptions for those heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. Not all genre is created the same.
Bear in mind, this process has to be repeated every year, as some places will go out of business and (hopefully) new ones will rise in their place. Not always, though. I remember one year I was down to two likely places for my book to land and although I’m not entirely sure, I may have taken most of that year off as a result.
Bear in mind, that’s just the research phase. You haven’t even put anything in the mail yet and that’s a whole other ugly kettle of fish we will get to another time. I think I’ve depressed us both for now.
When you finally get to end of the line (or possibly the end of your rope), you will have before you a finished novel. Whether or not it’s any good is at the moment immaterial; take a few minutes to savor the feeling of accomplishment, reveling in a job that at the moment you have no idea is well-done or not, but at least thankfully for the moment, completely over. Save the groans of disgust for when you do the editing. Take it from someone who has been there and just trust me, you’ll need them.
All right, now the bleeding is done with. You’ve shown the book to multiple people, gotten their opinions, tried to incorporate the suggestions of people who didn’t seem to be completely off-based and smiled politely through the more lunatic thoughts. Your novel has been finished, edited, polished and you believe that now it’s ready to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
So what the hell do you do next?
It’s time to take a trip back down to the bookstore. You’ll need some scratch paper and a pen, so go ahead and bring those with you. Find the aisle of the store whose genre most closely corresponds with whatever it was you just wrote and take a slow trip down the middle. Look at the names of the publishers on the spine and write down the ones who either have published your favorite authors or ones that seem to keep popping up again and again. This is going to serve as your initial quick-reference list.
Guides to getting published are divided on the subject of small presses versus the large ones; each one has its own particular pluses and minuses, which I’m not going to get into too heavily here. I will state, however, that one of the most-overlooked negative aspects of small presses is the very size of their list. While the small publisher is often touted as the best place to try to get your book into print--as a house that does only half a dozen books a year is more apt to pay close attention to whatever project they are working on--what is conveniently left out is that with such a limited amount of openings, the competition for these slots is even fiercer than at Vintage, Doubleday or any of the other elephants of the business. To be brutally honest, the only edge a small house has over a large one when it comes to submitting is that a small house is less likely to require your submission to be done through an agent. Note how I said less likely and that I did not say they won’t require an agent, because they’re getting wise to that aspect of the gatekeeping business as well.
Before we go any further, it’s time to confront the ugly classic Catch-22 of the book business. About ninety-five percent of the publishing houses currently in business and actually accepting submissions are going to require you to meet one of two criteria; either you must have an agent, or you must have been previously published. Adding to the fun, most agents will require that you have been previously published in order to retain their services. If you feel the urge to maim and dismember in dozens of ugly ways rising inside your soul, welcome to the business, kid. “But how the hell can I get an agent when they want me to have been previously published,” you are no doubt shrieking, “and the odds on me getting published without an agent is so slanted against me that it seems like they’ve actually designed the fucking system so that it’s nigh impossible for a newbie to get their feet in the door?”
DING-DING-DING! Winner! That’s exactly the way it’s been designed, and the reason why is a very simple one: if the system was set up so that anybody could just submit to any house they wanted whenever they felt the urge to do so, every book publisher in existence would soon be buried in ten years’ worth of backreading to do on some of the most god-awful pulp that has ever shuddered its way down the line. It’s set up to be as difficult as possible so that only people who are really dedicated--or really insane--will stick with it for any period longer than a year or two. If you just start throwing pages at the wall to see if anything sticks without any kind of a master plan, you won’t last very long in the submission business.
After you’ve written down the likely targets on that piece of scratch paper, it’s time to start doing homework. Go to the aisle where they keep the current version of that hoary old tome, the Writer’s Market. It’s a hardcover book about a thousand pages long stocked to the gills with the information for publishing houses that are currently accepting submissions for that year, nonfiction outlets and small presses and magazines that may take speculative fiction or articles written for their markets.
Note that I did not follow up that statement with “and then go to the front desk and buy this book,” because if you’re going to do that, you might as well just set fire to that money you were going to use to buy it with. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the glacially long time it takes for a prospective publisher to respond to your inquiry assures you of only about three to six prospective submissions per calendar year, so buying this book is a waste of money. For the purposes of this process, you don’t need to buy it unless you want an expensive paperweight.
Adopt a comfortable sitting pose and break every rule of reading by immediately flipping to the end. In the back of this book is the mother lode; the listings of both literary agencies and publishing houses by genre, and in alphabetical order. It might seem like a very obvious statement, but I’ll go ahead and state for the record that not every publisher is going to be willing to check out any genre; almost all of them have areas that they specialize in. Trust me, stupid as this sounds, this was not such an elementary deduction when I stated doing this about seventeen years ago. Do not submit your science fiction novel to the gay and lesbian press, and by the same token, the Christian publishers are probably going to be none too interested in your heart of darkness guts-n-gore horror novel. Your first order of business is to separate the chaff from the wheat, and the index page is the perfect place to begin.
Start off with a little experiment; take the publisher names you wrote down and compare them to the Writer’s Market hit list. Anybody who does not appear on both sheets of paper should be immediately scratched off your scratch paper, because it means they’re not currently open for business. Either they’re getting ready to go under, they’re reorganizing their market reach or, most likely, they are already set for the upcoming year. This will probably get rid of all but about three names on your list, and now take a look at their listings in the Big Book of Pain. In all likelihood, each of them will say agented submissions only--unsolicited manuscripts will be returned unopened, so for each one that has this phrase in their listing, go ahead and scratch them off as well. You will now be left with a blank list, and this is where we begin.
I know this sounds amazingly depressing, and trust me when I say without a single lick of jocularity that it is. If you think this is a buzzkill, just imagine how you’ll feel when you submit to a likely prospect and they turn you down. Some fun, eh, kids?
Back to work. Starting with A, go through every publisher listed and look at their submission guidelines, what they will print in terms of genre, and average response times. This isn’t going to take as much time as you would think. In ninety percent of the cases, you’ll be able to fire them right away because of the unsolicited manuscript being rejected immediately bugaboo, or they will just say blatantly that they are not accepting new submissions at this time. If you are wondering “Then why the fuck are they even listed?”, hey, you’re getting more savvy in this business all the time! Cheers!
Once you have gone through all the listings, you will come up with about half a dozen likely candidates. What’s that, you say? That’s all? Yeah, that’s all. Although you’ve begin with a very large potential number, you’ve been multiplying by fractions right down the line, and that always results in a very small number in the end. To make matters even worse (he groaned), not all of these places are going to be created equal. One might specialize in action stories within the genre and another may be looking for properties that can be licensed for films, meaning your thoughtful, textured polemic on--whatever it’s on--has just been reduced further in terms of candidates. Unfortunately, and again, style matters. People who go for Stephen King-style horror rarely make exceptions for those heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. Not all genre is created the same.
Bear in mind, this process has to be repeated every year, as some places will go out of business and (hopefully) new ones will rise in their place. Not always, though. I remember one year I was down to two likely places for my book to land and although I’m not entirely sure, I may have taken most of that year off as a result.
Bear in mind, that’s just the research phase. You haven’t even put anything in the mail yet and that’s a whole other ugly kettle of fish we will get to another time. I think I’ve depressed us both for now.