So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  In the back of Poets & Writers magazine, there are listings of new journals and what they are looking for, contests you can enter, anthologies actively soliciting material. Often these anthologies are precise in their interests. They may want poems and personal narratives about people with disabilities and their interactions with animals. They might want the stories of lesbian nurses. They might want only writers who live in or grew up in Kalamazoo. If you have something that fits into that particular niche, you have a good chance of getting accepted and into print. Poets & Writers publishes some craft articles and interviews, but many writers buy it primarily for the back of the book, all those up-to-date listings and ads and information about possible markets, contests, workshops.

  Another important resource is the National Writers Union (113 University Pl. 6th Fl., New York, NY 10003 or www.nwu.org). This is a labor union affiliated with the UAW. The union understands that publication credits do not define a writer and thus they are not criteria for membership, but you must be actively writing and attempting to get published and you must pay dues. The union has locals around the country, which hold conferences with useful talks and panels. Often there are local groups of writers specializing in various genres. Other than a literary agent, it’s the only chance you have at finding out whether the deal offered you is the going rate. There are online chats and excellent information about agents available to members. You can get group health insurance and credit cards. If you are mistreated by a book or magazine publisher, the union has a grievance procedure available to you. If you begin to be published, it is highly likely, if not inevitable, that you will have trouble getting paid by somebody sometime, and it’s great to have the union in your corner. The union has brought court cases against large and powerful entities such as The New York Times, and won. It has picketed publishers who were abusing writers (and publicizes complaints about publishers on their website). Other unions respect its picket lines. The Writers Union is a real and increasingly more valuable resource, and if you begin to publish, you will use it.

  Another resource you need to know about is the Dustbooks (P.O. Box 100, Paradise, California 95969 or www.dustbooks.com) line of directories and other works useful to writers. The most important of these is the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses. It lists and updates the 4,000 book and zine publishers of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in every conceivable genre. It gives you the names and addresses of editors and what they are looking for. It’s always best and will save you a lot of time if you can find a copy of the publication you are considering submitting to. Sometimes you can’t find a copy and the Directory will suffice to give you some idea of what a publication will and won’t consider. You can supplement this indispensable directory with other resources, such as Literary Marketplace (www.literary-marketplace. com) featuring listings on 30,000 entities associated with the book trade including publishers, agents, awards, distributors, etc. and the useful line of books published by Writer’s Digest Books (www.writersdigest.com), including Poet’s Market and Novel and Short Story Writers Market.

  Always put a copyright slug at the end of whatever you send out. This gives you some legal protection. To register a copyright, you must ask for forms from the Copyright Office in Washington (www.copyright.gov) and pay a fee. When you are published in a zine or in book form, the publisher takes care of copyright registration for that issue or for your book.

  Sometimes it is worthwhile to submit short pieces in Great Britain, even if they have been published in the U.S. first. You do not include a SASE but a self-addressed envelope with International Reply Coupons included, available at any post office. If you have any contacts in Australia or New Zealand, the same goes. Canadian publication cannot duplicate publication in the U.S. The rights you give for first publication are generally phrased as “North American first serial rights.” That, naturally, includes Canada, and vice versa. If something is published first in a Canadian journal, do not then submit it in the U.S.

  Publishing online is another way to get your work out, immediate but largely unprotected. You have to consider the pros and cons yourself. For both of us, our web sites are important and we put effort into them constantly. As often as time allows we post samples of our work, figuring that the offers for readings, workshops and lectures that come in, or the ability to reach a new reader, balance the risk of someone not bothering to buy books because they can get the work free online. At least one large conglomerate-owned publisher found many of its titles illegally duplicated in electronic form and for sale on eBay. It is aggressively pursuing the matter in court. But the online booksellers now allow you to read the first chapters of many thousands of books and the Google Print feature is paving the way for Internet searches to include content of all titles in print. It’s a frightening world for writers.

  Since the first edition of So You Want to Write, The New York Times has reported that the number of electronic books sold has risen significantly, surprising a lot of people who gloated over the immortality of “dead tree books” and the cot death of the infant e-book. The resurrection is largely due to the popularity of cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, notebook and pocket PCs, even global positioning devices, all capable of content storage. Apple’s iPods have eased consumers into purchasing purely digital content but even stodgy old libraries are getting into the act—although the old favorites die hard: The New York Public Library initially reported that the Kama Sutra was its most popular e-title. The e-book’s economic impact is yet to be felt for large publishers, independent presses and self-published authors alike. Although in 2004 the U.S. saw sales of 1.4 million downloadable books versus 2.2 billion traditional books, new technologies such as electronic ink are replacing those clunky old electronic readers and promising a brave new world of e-reading experience. For now, if your work is online, or published in e-book format, getting the word out is still the key. If you are serious about building a name for yourself, you have to put effort into attracting readers. What that means is advertising the availability of your work everyplace you can think of, from the return address on your envelopes to the signature on your e-mail. There is little point here listing all the places to which you can submit your poems or stories; no print publication can ever keep up with a search engine. As writers we have to be interested in putting out the best work we can, writing what is meaningful to readers, no matter what technology we use. The most important thing we can say to writers about the Internet is that they will lose out if they are not online savvy.

  Most communications with editors are carried out via e-mail. An editor certainly wouldn’t reject you if you weren’t online, but should your work be accepted, you’d miss out on an intimacy with your editor born of hundreds of small decisions that take place in the publishing process.

  I should repeat that most zines and small presses take far longer to read manuscripts than you would like to believe possible. Three to six months is not uncommon. Agents and editors at large publishing houses are not much faster. The submissions outnumber the people who read them by an exponential factor. When I submit poems or stories and they come back, I reread them before sending them out again to see whether I can make them stronger. However, I know that some of my best work was rejected again and again before it saw the light of print or electronic publication. If I believe in the work, I continue to believe in it whether the first ten places rejected it or not.

  As a writer, the tendency is to see the publisher as someone who passes judgment on you. A more realistic image of small press editors as well as many agents and editors at large publishing houses is of an overburdened office worker desperately looking for a project they can love and champion, live with night and day for a year. They hope to find a work that come commercial or critical disappointment, they can be proud of. Think how many books you read in a year that you unreservedly love. Probably not many. When you read a book, especially if you’ve purchased it, you want to like it, but often you don’t. So why ima
gine that an editor is any different? There are always issues of social class, sexism, age and race: Book editors by and large are not representative of the population. There are always economic issues. Even not-for-profit small presses hope to publish books that will find a market. You may be rejected because the editor simply has no ability to empathize with the world or the characters you are writing about, but none of these issues is about you, the author. Editors do not know you, no matter how much of yourself you may have put into the work. Once a manuscript leaves your desk it has to make its own way. The editor who does not want to publish your book does not think of him or herself as superior to you any more than you think yourself superior to the author of some novel you read and did not like. If you can’t grasp that, writing is always going to be fraught with disappointment. The writer’s ability to accept rejection is as much a part of a writer’s job as a quarterback’s ability to withstand being knocked down. Sending the manuscript out again and again is as important as the writing itself. If you don’t write it, it can’t get published; but neither can it get published if it is not continually placed in front of as many editors as possible.

  When you are sending around a manuscript and editors give you suggestions to revise it (but are not offering to buy it), take their comments seriously but with a grain of salt. Hardly any editor ever has the time to write a complete and well thought-out critique. They may point out something that gave them pause, which may be the opposite of what another editor tells you. Or, it may be something they simply latch on to which gives them an excuse to reject you. A wise independent press editor once put it this way: The acquisitions function of an editor is not the same as the editorial function; even if it is the same editor. When reading for possible acquisition, an editor does not pay attention to fine details; it is possible, too, that if they did not accept it, they never read the whole book. Better to collect the comments of many editors before altering your vision. If four different editors tell you that Jim, the husband of your protagonist, comes off as a wooden stereotype, you may have work to do. If only one editor mentions it, it may be him, not Jim. I once destroyed a novel that kept almost making it with publishers. I would revise it after every rejection to please the last editor, and the next editor would want something entirely different. Finally my vision was lost and I had to put the novel aside for ten years before I could tackle it and do what I intended, and not what sixteen editors had said off the top of their heads while deciding not to take a chance on an unknown writer. The most honest rejection slip I ever received was from a West Coast poetry zine. The editor wrote, “I like your poems, but I started this journal in order to publish my friends, and I don’t publish people I don’t know.” I never forgot it and never held it against the editor—I often teach one of his poems in my poetry workshops.

  Whether the editor took the trouble to write a critique of your work or not, it is rankly amateurish to reply—to argue, to denounce, to plead. You do NOT answer a rejection letter. You may kick the wall or yourself or stick pins in a clay doll, but you do not call up or write an answer.

  Finally, what do you do if no one wants to publish your manuscript ? There is probably not a writer you can name who does not have at least one book that never made it into print. Then there is the writer who suddenly bursts on the scene to spectacular reviews and a flood of books in print. The medievalist professor John Gardner waited years and years for the acceptance of his first novel, and when it was accepted, they accepted all his rejected books, too.

  Often, the work that is most like last year’s big hit finds its way into print, but the work that is most original is rejected time and again. Still, the question nags, how do I know it’s good? How do I know I’m not crazy? Some people believe that everything they’ve written is a work of brilliance; some never have confidence in themselves. Many writers are blind to both their strengths and weaknesses. How do you know you’re not crazy, that if no publishing company bites, the book is good enough to be published?

  Libraries are full of books that some readers love and others despise. If you’re serious about your work, if you’ve studied enough writing to feel that yours stands up, if your readers’ opinions are opposite those of your rejection letters, if when you perform excerpts of the work your audiences seem truly moved, you may not want to wait for the publishing world to discover you. The cost of believing in your work is neither as expensive as a used car nor more vain than backing a business idea. Here’s a list of famous authors who first published themselves: Leo Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, Stephan Crane, George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, L. Ron Hubbard, Irma Rombauer, Richard Paul Evans, James Redfield, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Barrett, Rudyard Kipling, e.e. cummings, Deepak Chopra, Thomas Paine, Carl Sandberg, D.H. Lawrence, Upton Sinclair, Beatrix Potter. If you believe it is vanity to publish yourself, then you probably believe that no one should go to college unless they get a scholarship. Or that it is vain for Stephen Spielberg to produce his own movies. Self-publishing involves a tremendous amount of work but there are many resources to help you. There’s an entire subculture of one and two-book publishers who are passionate about the subject and more than willing to act as mentors. Moreover, there are many choices. You don’t have to print thousands of books on a web press, you can print a fraction of that number using print-on-demand technology, or print an e-book or offer it in PDF format on your website. No, you certainly do not want to fall victim to a vanity or subsidy publisher who will overcharge you for more books than you can ever hope to sell and will never get you reviewed. But there are alternatives. The Publishers Marketing Association, with close to 4000 members, is the largest book publishing trade association in the world. It offers invaluable information on printing and marketing to its members, both online and through annual seminars they call Publishing University. On its website (www.pma-online.org) you can access more up-to-date information about the practical aspects of seeing your work through to print and distribution than we can even begin to mention in this book. If you believe in your work, there are more ways of getting it out to the world than at any time in history.

  The old paradigm of the pained, solitary genius writing in seclusion and posting her book off to a gentleman publisher is dead. The writer today is an entrepreneur, a person who believes in herself and backs up that belief by publicizing, marketing and if necessary financing the work. Some of today’s best selling writers are on the road with every book (and have made themselves best selling writers by doing so). While there are those who are too timid to read to an audience, too busy to tour, too proud to bother with the mundane questions of interviewers, they demur at their own risk. The field is too crowded. There are well over one hundred thousand titles published every year. The writer who holds back is the writer who is forgotten. There are important people to meet when you hit the trail to push your work: other writers who will trade battle stories and connections, bookstore owners and librarians who may stock your work, fans who will remember you the next time around. Seeking the information to publish yourself opens you to an online world of thousands of other writers whose experiences may be similar to your own. Marketing develops community. Once again, there are more ways of getting your work out to the world than at any time in history, and more identifiable niches of readers interested in specific topics, but you must change your notion of the writer as a solitary creator to that of a creative entrepreneur. Once the work is out there, all writers, the famous and the unknown, the highly paid and the self-published, have the same job, and that is to draw people to their work.

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  Frequently Answered Questions

  At the end of every workshop, we invite questions. Sometimes the same questions are asked again and again in slightly different form by many people, which leads us to believe that either they didn’t like the answers the first time, or that these were the questions they really came to the wor
kshop to get answered. It doesn’t surprise us that we are told that other writers give different answers to the same questions. Writers, like critics, are full of prejudices. We freely admit that these are our opinions. Sometimes we don’t even agree with each other.

  Do I Need An Agent?

  You will if you have a finished novel to sell or a non-fiction proposal and you want to be published by a large mainstream publishing company. Some writers who publish articles with large circulation magazines use an agent; some well-known poets who are negotiating book deals do, too. But if you are placing poems and short stories in magazines and do not have a collection to sell, or if you are primarily dealing with a small independent or university press, it’s not necessary to have an agent.

  Good agents know who is open to publishing what kinds of work; who at the large companies have the power to make decisions ; which editors are “hot” and therefore have clout and can garner more marketing resources for your book. Good agents make it their business to keep their ears open to changes in the publishing business and to make connections with editors. Editors are extremely busy, more so as bottom line demands have cut staffing and they are responsible for additional tasks. Many editors today rely on agents to cull through literary magazines, visit writers’ conferences and keep abreast of cultural trends. Some agents make it their business to “beat the bushes” of the literary world, to discover talent and cultivate it; some agents are excellent hands-on editors.

  We’ve known unrepresented writers who have gotten their work read by editors at the large publishing houses as a result of some connection (an established writer or a relative) but when the editors were ready to make an offer, they advised these writers to engage a literary agent (who, with a contract pending, was obviously interested in talking with them). Publishing contracts with large publishing houses, and increasingly with independent and university publishers, can be complex, involving the distribution of reprint, foreign, translation, theatrical, and electronic rights and many other provisions including warranties, indemnities, royalties and accounting, discontinuance of publication, and other issues. Some agents are open to submitting to independent and university publishers once they believe they have exhausted their possibilities with the large houses, some are not. When Ira could not get The Kitchen Man published, he sent it to independent presses himself—and suffered a standard but not very good contract. When his next novel, Going Public, was rejected by the conglomerate-owned presses but accepted by an independent, his new agent at one of New York’s most prestigious literary agencies continued to represent the book because, even though no real money was forthcoming from the hard cover sale, she understood that once in print, she would negotiate paperback, foreign, and theatrical rights. It is possible to pay an agent or a lawyer a fee to look over your contract if you don’t have an agent representing you. There are also some excellent books on the market that address publishing contracts. Negotiating a Book Contract by Mark L. Levine (Moyer Bell) is clear and concise. But while most independent presses will read work that is submitted directly by the writer, it is much more difficult to get a serious reading with a New York editor. One last thing worth mentioning is that some inexperienced writers feel that once they have an agent, a famous agent who represents big-name talents, the road to success is paved. Unfortunately, while an attachment to such an agent may initially give your work some cachet, get it into the hands of editors higher up on the food chain, and get you a quicker reading, it is ultimately the work that counts. A less glitzy agent who believes in your talent and will encourage you through the ups and downs of a publishing career might be a better bet. However, if you are writing poetry or literary fiction, you may want to go to a small press. In that case, an agent is of no advantage in getting published.