by Judy Bridges
Everywhere you turn, you hear bad news about the publishing business. You hear how the grand old publishing houses are closing their doors or consolidating; periodicals are going out of print; newspapers are folding; the only authors getting published are the top few, sure-fire money-makers; it’s all about who you know, and the little guy, the new author, doesn’t stand a chance.
Before you let the bad news get to you, take a walk in a bookstore. Look at the endless rows of books and periodicals filled with page after page of words. Writers filled those pages—men and women who bent over their keyboards, wrote, deleted, groaned, grinned, and bonked themselves on the head just the way you do. They worked hard at writing and at getting their work published. And there it is, in row after row. . . .
If you want to get your work published, you have to:
Write well
Study the markets
Understand the process
Be creative
1. Write Well
Non-writers often underestimate what it takes to become an author. I get calls from people asking me to put them in touch with an agent. Nine times out of ten these people haven’t written a thing, they just have an idea for a bestseller they think is going to earn them a million. When I ask about the writing, they say, “How hard can it be?”
These are not my favorite conversations.
People who take writing seriously know that it takes years of practice to learn how to write well, and another two to five years to author a book that’s worth the trouble of publishing. True, there are a few lucky stiffs who blurt out a winner and make it all look easy, but the rest of us mere mortals have to pay our dues. We study books like this one, practice, practice, practice, and finally figure out how to “write something good.”
Every agent/editor/publisher who has a space wants to fill it with something good. When you pay your dues, when your work is truly good, it stands out above the rest. You will be the tall guy in the line of basketball picks.
2. Study the Markets
The first place to look for markets is your own bookshelf. Look at the things you like to read. You know much more about those things than you think—length, tone, style. You almost naturally write in a manner that’s appealing to those markets. You know what people are looking for because that’s what you read.
Market guides such as the Writer’s Market series are also good starting points. The printed guides offer you the luxury of paging through well-organized listings in various categories. Make sure you do two things with the printed market guides:
Read the first chapters. You will find them filled with some of the best, most current information about the industry, as well as tips on such things as query preparation and rates to charge for various writing jobs.
Always double-check the details. When you find an attractive listing, go to that publication’s website to read current writer guidelines and check editors’ names and addresses.
Online market guides offer the advantage of targeted searches and more up-to-date information. Again, double-check what you learn by searching publisher websites. Take notes and set up a system to keep track of possibilities.
Markets for Shorter Work
General and targeted periodicals
Newspapers
Newsletters
Literary magazines
Anthologies
Contests
Internet publications
To focus your market search on possibilities for shorter works, reach beyond the guidebooks and your bookshelf. Search the Internet. Look around town, especially at whatever venue is the best source for periodicals. This might be a bookstore, but may also be a corner newsstand. In my area, it’s a hobby shop that carries more magazines than any place else in the city. On one visit, I counted 22 literary and 132 computer magazines. On another, I tested the topic “Victorian” and found six magazines I could look through to determine whether or not a piece I wanted to write was appropriate.
When you find publications that look like possibilities, study the cover copy and the ads—are they targeted to a particular age or education or interest group? Read the editor’s notes and letters to the editor. Look at sections to see if one might be more accessible than others. Editors often welcome new writers in smaller sections like “city lites” so they can get to know them before assigning full-length features. Read first and last lines of articles and stories. Check length, tone, style. Take notes.
Your writing group is a good resource for information about literary and academic publications. Almost every literary magazine today has an online presence. Also look in libraries and campus book stores. Be alert to submission schedules because many have long lead times. Pay may be skimpy, but what you lose in bucks you earn in cachet.
For newspapers, to the top dailies in town, add the smaller weeklies and special-interest publications. More than one good writer earned her stripes—and clips and discipline—writing for the weekly shopper.
Newsletters and in-house magazines designed for business and nonprofit organizations offer interesting, although less visible, opportunities. Business groups generally pay. They are easier to reach if you have a business background. For nonprofits, you may wish to start your market search by thinking of your interests and backtracking to groups related to those subjects. Do you belong to any special interest groups? Do they have small magazines or newsletters? Could they use a one-time story or article, or maybe a column? One of the first pieces I had published was a Mother’s Day story that found a home in a small association magazine called Health and Wealth. Pay: Twenty bucks, plus all the encouragement I needed to keep going.
Anthologies are perfect showcases for shorter works, especially short stories, creative nonfiction, personal essays, and inspirational writings. Look for anthologies in libraries and book stores. Calls for submission are listed online, in market guides, and in the writer magazines. Read guidelines carefully for the publication’s specific focus and requirements. Some showcase contest winners, or a selected “best of,” and are not open to general submissions. Others take nearly everything they get their hands on. Read the anthology. See if you will be proud of the company you’re keeping. Do not, however, pay to have your work included. You can check out publications online at sites dedicated to identifying predators, or do an online search for “[name] complaints” to protect yourself.
Internet publications of all genres welcome submissions. Most do not pay, but more and more are becoming highly respected. This can be a little tricky since the ’net is also full of poorly edited, poorly written pretenders and scam artists. The best guide is your own reading eye. Don’t believe what they say about themselves—take the time to read material on the site. If it’s up to your standard, it’s where you want to be.
Keep watch for fresh opportunities on the web and elsewhere. New things are happening all the time, and if you’re on top of it, you’ll be first in line.
Markets for Book-length Work
Agencies
Big houses/divisions
Mid-sized and small presses
Self-publishing, including Print on Demand (POD)
The first stop for most book writers is to look for agency representation. The agent represents the author to publishers, so the one you want—if you can get ’em—is the one who has had success with writers in your field, who knows key publishers well enough to contact them and get attention for your book. Your perfect agent will be excited about working with you, also smart and savvy enough to make good deals with the publishers.
You pay the agent out of royalties, which means she is not going to get rich until you do, which means she is very selective about which writers she takes on, which means that getting an agent isn’t easy. Some people have luck with the guide books. Others meet through friends, or at conferences, or through web searches. Wherever you get the names, research carefully to find names of writers they have represented (you want to know if you fall in that line or not) and whether or not they are welcoming n
ew clients. Avoid agents who charge for reading your work or who try to sell you on buying editing services from them.
Few of the big name publishers are willing to accept un-agented submissions. You need to know about the companies and their divisions, and know who publishes books of your type, but direct contact will be limited until after an agent has kindled the fires.
Mid-size and small presses tend to be more accessible. Writers often enjoy working with them because the contact is more personal and the writers have more say in the publishing process. The trade-off is that there is less status associated with a smaller press. Also, marketing budgets are generally limited. If you are comfortable with the fact that marketing budgets are limited for all but (and maybe including) big-name authors, this will seem less of a loss to you. Few publishers of any size are paying for fancy ad campaigns and book tours these days. The bulk of the marketing falls on the author, at the author’s expense.
Self-publishing used to be considered the last resort of authors who could not get their books published elsewhere. Today self-published books vary from dreadful to extremely well-written and respected. You can track the history of attitudes toward self-publishing by looking at the Council for Wisconsin Writers annual contest rules. For years, self-published books were not accepted in the competition. Then, in 2006, Paul Salsini submitted his World War II novel Cielo, and against stiff competition, won the Anne Powers Fiction Book Award. Clearly, whatever people thought about self-publishing in the old days, it’s a whole new ball game.
There are great reasons to self-publish. You can control the presentation of your book, collect a larger percentage of each sale, and have the book you want even if the market for it is quite small. Sales are up to you, so don’t do it unless you either can sell the book, or don’t care whether or not it sells.
Methods vary from having your book coil bound at the local copy center to having small or large runs produced by an online Print-on-Demand (POD) service, to publishing an e-book for distribution on the web or an e-reader, to having it professionally designed and printed in hard cover. The industry is changing every twenty minutes as new services come on the scene. The process can be fun and exciting and profitable, but before you invest in anything you are not 100 percent sure of, study guidebooks such as Dan Poynter’s The Self-Publishing Manual, and talk to authors who have self-published successfully.
3. Understand the Process
You need to learn about the business of publishing. Bah, you say. I’m a writer, not a business person. Well, sadly, no agent or publisher is going to creep into your studio at night and pull your perfect manuscript out of the file. You are going to have to figure out how to get it in front of the people who can do you some good. They might or might not buy it, but if you sit there with your feet up, waiting for someone else to do it for you, it is absolutely not going to happen.
Make it a habit to look at the world from the other side of the desk, from the point of view of the people you want in your corner. If you were the editor of a periodical, how would you respond to a writer who sends a full manuscript when you’ve asked for queries, who can’t seem to spell or punctuate, or who suggests stories that don’t belong in your publication? Are you going to assign another story to a writer who was late last time, or who called three times to complain about a paragraph you left out of his last too-long story?
In writers’ guidelines and market listings, gatekeepers tell us what they want to see. “Query only,” “First ten pages,” “No personal essays.” The best way to annoy the people you want on your side is to ignore their requests. Editors repeat, time after time, “Read the publication before you submit,” and yet they receive untold numbers of submissions that just don’t fit—sometimes from the same writers. One writer repeatedly sent erotic stories to a Christian literary magazine. After several form rejections, “Not for us” and a polite “Please. We are a Christian publisher,” the editor finally sent a boldly printed note: “Don’t you dare send any more of your stories!”
Mistakes happen to the best, most conscientious writers, but they make as few errors as possible for their sakes and the sake of fellow writers. Those who screw up ruin it for others. How long, for instance, do you think it will be before the editor of the aforementioned Christian publication says to the market guides, “Take me off your list! You wouldn’t believe the things they send me!”
Publishing is a complicated business, demanding on the people who are in it and those who are trying to get in. Agents, editors, and publishers all work hard, and they expect writers to work hard, too. They want to have something good to show for their hours of hard work, and regardless of the jokes, tormenting writers is not enough. You can complain all you want in private—that’s part of the game—but at the end of the day, you will have a better chance of getting published if you can see the business from their side of the desk.
The Two Paths to Publication
The marketing process gets confused in workshops when facilitators give instructions based on their own writing backgrounds. The person who writes fiction says to write the story first and then submit it; the person who writes nonfiction says you should always have a contract before you begin writing. The truth is, there are two different paths to publication, one for things you need to write first, and one for the things you can sell first. There is a summary of the two paths at the end of this chapter.
Things You (Generally) Write First Things You (Generally) Sell First
All stories, fiction and nonfiction Articles
Creative nonfiction Profiles
Historical fiction Biographies
Reminiscence Business
Memoirs Marketing
Personal essays Self-help
Humor How-to
Inspirational Histories
Poetry
Opinion
The Write-First Path to Publication
The “write-first” path to publication includes all of the stories you write—short and book length—whether they are fiction or nonfiction. In earlier chapters, we talked about how a story is a story is a story whether it’s fiction or fact. You use the same techniques to write your glorious novel as you do to write the saga of your grandmother’s march across the tundra. In both cases the agent, editor, publisher, or contest judge needs to see the actual writing in order to make a decision.
The write-first path is appropriate for all types of writing in which the phrasing matters most. You can say a piece is humorous, but an editor can’t tell whether it’s really funny without reading it. You need to actually read a personal essay, creative nonfiction, historical fiction, reminiscence, memoir, opinion, inspirational, or poem in order to appreciate it.
If you are as well known as, say, Stephen King, you can tip a glass with your publisher and say, “I’ll write a comedy,” and even if you’ve never written anything like it in your life, get the go-ahead. The rest of us have to write the funny stuff before it gets accepted.
The Write-First Path for Shorter Works
Finish writing the entire piece
Edit carefully
Check publication guidelines
Read publication guidelines on the publisher’s or agent’s website and follow them to the t. They rule.
Prepare a cover letter
(for a sample format, see Appendix B)
Some people think a cover letter is necessary; I think it’s optional. You certainly can’t hurt yourself by sending one. On the other hand, I think it looks a little silly if all it says is “Here is my manuscript.” I would send one if I wanted to remind the editor of a prior contact or mention that my work has appeared in other publications.
Prepare the manuscript
Follow publisher guidelines. For a standard manuscript format see Appendix A. Also check the latest edition of the Writer’s Digest book, Formatting & Submitting Your Manuscript.
Submit the full manuscript
Submit the full manuscript unless the publisher’s guidelines sa
y to do it another way. Follow directions for submitting online or by mail. Once upon a time, the rule was to never, ever submit a story to more than one place at a time. You sent the manuscript, waited for a response, then sent it to others one at a time. That wasn’t too bad when editors had time to turn things around quickly (even though it still seemed like forever). Now it really is forever and waiting several months for one-at-a-time turnarounds is ridiculous. I can’t imagine shopping for a car and having the sales rep say, “I’ll hold it ’til next year while you decide,” so why should a writer wait? Fortunately, more and more editors are accepting simultaneous submissions. Check the guidelines. If they say they want to know if this is a simultaneous submission, don’t play games—tell them.
Keep track of submissions
Online trackers are handy, but any system will do, even a paper clip on the top of a file folder. Just keep track of what you sent, where. If you can get a clue from the guidelines, note when you might expect a response.
Follow-up
It’s tough to figure out when to follow up and when to leave it alone. You can safely send an email a few weeks after the stated reading time. Ask if your submission arrived, if they’ve had a chance to look at it, and when a decision will be made. Most editors are gracious about responding—just remember that they are crazy busy and don’t have time to respond to a dozen questions. If you don’t get a response as promised, follow up again in a few weeks.
When you get a contract for print publication
If you get a contract that says, “all rights” or “pays on publication,” you have a decision to make. A popular anthology’s contract agrees to pay on publication, but adds that publication may take up to two years, is not guaranteed, and the writer may not submit the work elsewhere during that time. I don’t think I’d sign that one, but other writers do and have been very proud of publication when it happens.