Suppose for the sake of argument that I have written a novel*. It could be a standard work of fiction, or any nonacademic work. What should I do next?
Assume that I have no knowledge or experience in the publishing world. How would I get this book published and what other actions should I take?
In short, how does a first time author get published?
I haven’t written anything, and probably never will. I was just discussing this with a friend the other day, and neither of us really had a clue as to how one should go about doing this.
Then, there are several paths. Nowadays, your best course would be to get an agent. If you can find a legitimate agent to take you on, it opens doors in the publishers and makes the job a bit easier. The agent will handle the marketing while you can work on your next.
Note I said a legitimate agent. There are many more scam artists out there who call themselves agents. Never, under any circumstances whatsover, pay money to an agent.
If you can’t find an agent, then you can look for publishers that accept unagented submissions. They are harder to find nowadays, but you’d send them an outline and sample chapters. If they like what you sent, they’ll ask for more, and if they like that, you’re in.
There’s also self-publishing. This isn’t usually a viable route for fiction, but nonfiction, especially that with a specialized audience, can have some small successes. The important thing to remember about it is that self publishing means you have control over everything; vanity presses try to fudge this essential distinction. You will have to do all the marketing yourself. Also, you will need to have hard copies of the books in order for bookstores to take them on. If so, you can ask them to sell them on consignment and be successful.
The bottom of the barrel is a vanity press (and nearly all POD publishers are vanity presses). This is similar to self-publishing, but you don’t have control. If you need extra copies for a reading, you’re dependant on the vanity press to get them to you. Regular vanity presses are outrageously expensive (you can usually print the books for less money if you shop around for book printers). POD vanity presses are cheaper, but the books are more expensive, and you have to pay extra to have copies to hand around. (BTW, despite their claims, there is nothing new about POD publishing other than the technology. Otherwise, the business model is identical with the traditional vanity press.) You are assured of failure this way.
Thanks for the search, Exapno Mapcase, I’ll look at those in just a bit.
Anyone: How is an unagented (or agented for that matter) author assured that, after the outline & samples have been approved, the publisher doesn’t just print the novel under a different name and ignore said author thereafter?
There’s an old saying in screenwriting: Step one is to write the perfect screenplay. Then put it in a bag, lock the bag in a chest, bury the chest under your house, then go upstairs and go to sleep. The next morning when you wake up there will be people from movie studios in your basement digging it up.
You mail a copy of it to yourself, sign the back of the envelope and never open it. That will hold up in court.
That’ll only prove that I had a copy before the book was published. What’s to keep the publisher from saying, "We had the finished manuscript a year prior to that, but we were unable to market it until we finalized negotioations with the (fraudulent) author, who then backs up that story. Being evil, the publisher comes up with a plausible explanation for my copy.
I’m not paranoid. Just curious…and a little paranoid.
And if that doesn’t satisfy you, think about this. If the author is good enough to write one manuscript worth stealing, then aren’t you just shooting yourself in the foot by shutting yourself off to all the future great manuscripts the author might be capable of?
As I say to everyone who posts this: please provide me with the citation of the court case in which this was held up.
Nobody has ever responded. If you want to be the first, I’ll be fascinated to read the details.
I did a web search and came up with with following (see below my name). Oh, by the way the self mailing of a book is known as the Poormans Copywrite.
Jim Mac Millan
Write to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and request a form PA. Fill it out and send it back with a check for $20.00, and a copy of your script without any bindings, as they will be microfilming it, then throwing it out. You’ll get the stamped form back in three or four months.
Editors don’t steal manuscripts because they have no reason to. What possible advantage does it give to them? If you can prove it, then they end up losing a lawsuit, and considerably more money than they would have paid for the manuscript legitimately. Not only that, but they’d probably lose their job and never work in publishing again.
I’ve been writing professionally for over 20 years, and in that time, there has never been a case of a manuscript being taken by an editor* and being published with anything other than the name or pen name of the actual author. See Copyrights and Meteorites
Exapno is right. Poor man’s copyright is proof of nothing, and it’s also irrelevant. It proves nothing – maybe you just mailed an empty envelope and put the manuscript in later. In addition, you have copies of the work and can easily prove (by drafts, cover letters, and other means) that it was yours. Registering the copyright would help, but in the remote chance that the publisher tries to steal your work, it wouldn’t be necessary, since this is less copyright violation than it is out and out theft.
So you could register the copyright if you wish, but it’s a waste of money. The publisher will pay to register your copyright when they publish your book.
*There is one case where an author stole another author’s book and put his name on it. AFAIK, that author has never had anything else published since the word got out.
Nine replies and no one has said anything depressing yet – this is good for a thread about publishing. Someone has even suggested that if one were to write a good manuscript, it might get published. The usual statement is that you have to be extremely lucky even if you are able to write a good manuscript. I’m not sure how true this really is. A very large number of books are published; therefore it must be possible to get a manuscript published.
The most depressing threads on this subject that I’ve yet read were on a message board for fantasy authors, a genre in which there are an inestimably vast number of utterly terrible manuscripts floating around. (It’s also a genre in which an inestimably vast number of utterly terrible manuscripts have been published.) There, I was told that there is really no hope whatever.
More mainstream sources follow the path that has already been stated: you find an agent, and the agent does the rest in exchange for 10 or 15% of your royalties. Listings of legitimate agents are easy to find; Writer’s Market, for example. This is the established route to publishing, though some smaller or genre publishers will accept manuscripts not submitted by agents. Anything else (self-publishing, vanity presses) is less likely to be successful, unless you’ve written a book about your family or local history, though there have been a very few successful books that were self-published.
One question I’ve always wanted to ask is this: What do you do if you have a manuscript that really is good? Presume that some unlikely mortal has labored for great lengths of time to produce a work that shows a distinctive, original style, a good command of the English language and its structure, detailed character development, and so on. Upon completion of this work, what can the aforementioned person do to ensure its success? I’m really not trying to be immodest here; the Individual In Question has spent a really long time and a considerable amount of effort on this work and thinks that three to five more years of utter lack of recognition would be enough. =)
I do know of a case where some manuscripts were stolen by a publishing house. A friend of ours was doing some appearance work in schools and she saw a line of early readers which were identical to some manuscripts she had had rejected by that publishing house. She’s a bigname kid’s writer and it was a big publishing house.
Given that these books were not released on the open market but were sold into schools, I guess the editor thought he could get away with it. She sued and won in court. I think the early reader market is one where an unscrupulous editor could possibly get away with it because most early readers are so simple that it could be argued that coincidence played a role.
But other than that, I’ve never heard anything else along those lines in 15 years of submitting and selling books.
Individual In Question, if it were me I’d go to conferences like Clarion and I’d try to get an agent. I don’t know what else to suggest. I think most people do the same as you and have similar beliefs about their work. I know that Mr P takes great umbrage at any suggestion that his work is less than perfect whether it be me, his editor or his agent saying what he doesn’t want to hear.
If a manuscript is truly outstanding, then with a bit of luck it will attract an agent. With an agent, it will sell with a bit of luck. I don’t know how manuscripts get out of the slushpile if it is unagented. I think that takes a cartload of luck. And networking. And luck.
I once had a long chat with a working author while I was caring for him in the recovery room after minor surgery. He told me he writes non-fiction books on topics desired by publishers and these books pay the rent.
He prefers to write fiction but the market is more competitive and more difficult to find pulishers for (God, I’ll never sell a book if I keep ending sentences in prepositions!).
However, his non-fiction work got him a decent agent and publishers are more receptive to his novels because he has so many published works due to his non-fiction writing.
I was asked to write a chapter on my specialty for a textbook on pharmacology. It was hard work for little pay, but, even that effort makes it easier for me to get manuscripts read.
I decided a long time ago, based on the advice of a children’s author, not to write as a profession. I decided to do something entirely different, and I’m doing something entirely different than that now. It does well more than pay the rent, and, from what I’ve heard, the money that most writers make wouldn’t pay the rent on a very inspiring place. (Unless you were in the style of Irvine Welsh or William S. Burroughs or maybe Chuck Palahniuk.) And I don’t believe I should be paid to write until the manuscript is done.
Of course it’s less than perfect. I am quite confident that it is good. From comparing the style to other published works, I think it is at least similar in quality to other things that have been published. I’m also fully willing to allow it to be edited. Editors know better than I do what would be necessary to make a book sell, and what would make it easier to read.
Now, about an agent who thinks it’s less than perfect, I now think that finding one that believes that it is perfect is probably the best thing I could do for the book. I see a lot of people talking about various creative works that really seem to believe in them. If I could find an agent that could push this manuscript (and get it in hardcover, and get it advertised) – in exchange for a much larger 15% – I think that would do more than anything else to ensure its success.
While it is true there is a vast number of utterly terrible manuscripts, it’s not a cause for depression. It means that if you write a manuscript that isn’t utterly terrible, you’re in good shape.
The usual estimate is that around 90% of manuscripts are unpublishable. However, just from reading your post, I can tell you’d be ahead of most of those. Remember, we’re talking about manuscripts that betray no knowledge of English, sentence structure, or storytelling. If you can put together a readable paragraph of prose, you’re ahead of many slush authors.
OK, Roches, you want depressing, I’ll give you depressing.
Chuck is right when he says that a literate manuscript puts you ahead of 90% of the competition. But there is still that other 10% to worry about.
Few publishing houses can afford to put out more than, say, 100 novels a year. The issue, therefore, is how many manuscripts are competing for those slots.
The reality is that there are at least 10,000 manuscripts coming in through the door. Knock off 90%, and that still leaves 1000 good, readable, potentially publishable books.
And you’re not really competing for even 100 slots. A good percentage of those are guaranteed to known authors who already have long-term contracts with the company. Maybe ten first-timers will be published that year.
So your odds are 100-1 against your publishable book being published.
How do you get around those odds? The biggest mistake beginning authors make is looking at the worst books being published and thinking that they can do better than that. They probably can. That’s not the point. The point is that there was something about those books that caught the eye of the right person at the right place at the right time, something that sparked their interest, something that made the editor say - people will buy this. They are often wrong, but that’s the hurdle you have to face. Your book can’t merely be good; it has to be special: special in that indefinable way that makes editors think that they can sell it. (And these days, that means first selling it to their internal marketing people, then selling it to the buyers for the major bookstore chains, and then selling it to their bosses before they can even think of selling it to the public.)
Being good is an all-important start. After that, it’s a crap shoot.
That’s not terribly depressing compared to a lot of the things I’ve heard, the things that start with ‘Unless your name is’. Unfortunately, I’ve gone too far already to abandon it, nor would I want to even if I knew that it really was hopeless.
I’ve heard that being published in other fields helps. I’m not sure if scientific journals count, but by the time my book is ready I should have at least a few published papers. Anyone know if that will mean anything?
And does anyone have any idea what makes a book sell? I think it’s primarily marketing now – so what would make a publisher decide to market a book aggressively? The book in question is technically fantasy but may have a broader interest base (all the characters are human and the supernatural element is more religious/mythological than magical). I’m not trying to be immodest or self-aggrandizing but I think there’s a small but finite probability it might be ‘special’. =)
