Last week I said I’d talk more about the publishing industry, and my experience with it. To be frank, I haven’t had a lot of it. I’ve queried two of my books to agents, and sent a few different short stories around for publication. Only one of those queries, of course, ended with success.
Oh, and I hired an editor once. I got a few more insights from that experience.
But some of you out there might be asking: query? Agent? What’s all this about? I thought you just had to send your book in to a publisher and they’d publish it. Isn’t that how it works?
Erm…no. For some of you who’ve already read older and better writers prattle on about the industry, this might be simple revision – if so, feel free to let your eyes and mind wander for a while – but for those who don’t know how a book gets published, or who only have a very vague idea (as I did when I started), let me fill you in.
The whole “send a publisher your manuscript and hope they say yes” process is still a thing, but it’s generally only small presses who do that these days. Small presses – or small-time publishers – are, by their nature, more likely to accept your work, but less likely to be able to widely distribute your books. If one of my books got published with a small press, you’d still be able to buy it, but you’d almost certainly have to go to either the publisher’s website or maybe to a big website like Amazon, where it’d compete with the absolute deluge of other small-press books and self-published books that pour down upon that site every year.
To get into the traditional bookstores like Chapters, though, you pretty much need to publish with one of the big boys. And the big boys – like Penguin Random House, for instance – have increasingly been swallowing up all the little minnows of the publishing world, digesting them and using their nutrients to grow ever fatter and hungrier. That’s just the way things are in the modern marketplace: more and more, if you want a real chance to make noise, you want to go with one of the big boys. As you can imagine, though, not even the big boys could possibly handle the combined incoming manuscripts of the millions upon millions of neophytes out there sending their manuscripts in to pad said boys’ slush piles. Basically none of the big boys take unsolicited submissions anymore (very occasionally, one of their imprints might, but that’s relatively rare).
(Also, just btw, I’m not picking on Penguin Random House specifically here. They’re just the first of the big boys I could name off the top of my head).
No, these days, if you want to get the big boys’ attention, you have to hire an agent. Or, more accurately, convince an agent that working for you will be worth their while.
What an agent essentially does is act as your salesman. If you successfully hire an agent, that agent will go around to the big boys (and the few remaining medium-sized boys that haven’t yet been consumed by the big boys) and try their best to convince them to buy the rights to publish your book. What do they get out of it? Well, if they can’t convince the big boys to take a chance on your book – and that does sometimes happen – they get jack diddly squat out of it. If they do convince those boys to take a chance, though, they more or less get a slice of whatever meager profits your book manages to make.
This, of course, incentivizes agents to be selective…and the main way they do that is by getting prospective clients to query them. Querying is a long and tedious process, and to be frank, I can’t stand doing it. It takes a completely different set of skills that I’m just now starting to maybe sort of get the hang of. But it’s a necessary evil, for it’s only through a query that you’ll maybe – maybe – get an agent’s attention. Now, every agent will ask for something slightly different, but for each query you generally need:
- A query letter (basically a business letter politely asking if they’d consider your work. Writing these is a pain in the ass, at least for me, but again, they’re a necessary evil).
- A synopsis (usually a short-form synopsis, but occasionally an agent will ask for a longer, chapter-by-chapter synopsis).
- Sometimes they’ll ask for a few sample chapters.
- Footage of you doing the super special secret boogie-woogie of the neophyte. Learning the steps to this took me years. I pulled a hamstring the first time I tried. But no agent will even consider you if you can’t do it.
…OK, I made that last one up.
But you get the point. There’s a lot of hoops you have to jump through before you start sending queries. And once you do…well, it can take agents a while to get back to you. This is understandable, of course. They’ve got lots of people interested in their services. And much of the time, the agent won’t respond to your query at all if they’re not interested…and if they do respond, it will almost certainly be with the dreaded form letter. Again, it’s completely understandable from the agent’s point of view: the busier among them have literally thousands of queries to go through per week, and there just isn’t enough time to personally reply to each and every one.
But from the writer’s perspective, there’s only so many times you can see some variant of:
Hello, and thank you for sending your query to WHATSHISFACE LITERARY AGENCY. We enjoyed the chance to read your work! Unfortunately, your book, THE MAN WHO STARED AT A BRICK WALL III: CATARACT CATASTROPHE, does not fit our needs at this time. We wish you all the best finding a home for your work.
Before you go insane.
I should emphasize here that I’m not writing all this to complain. Publishing is a cutthroat world: everyone in it is just doing what they can to stay alive. But it has to be said, especially for any aspiring writers who may read this one day: trying to break into this industry can be incredibly, unimaginably frustrating. Like, put your fist through the wall, hit your own head with a hammer, scream to the sky like a demented goat levels of frustrating.
But yeah. My main point here is that if you want your book traditionally published with one of the big boys, you pretty much have to have an agent. As I mentioned before, though, there are times when agents can’t sell your manuscript. Where all the big boys tell them ‘no, sorry, not interested,’ and the agent has to come crawling back to give you their response.
And here’s another thing you might not know: even if you do get a yes, it’s normally about a year between the initial extending of the offer and the actual publication. There are a lot of steps that happen in between: the publisher has to format the book, they have to hire a cover artist to make a cover for you (authors, especially neophytes but also the more experienced ones, rarely get much input in terms of their cover designs), and they’ll often ask authors to revise their manuscripts further, or at least look them over one more time before final submission. And that’s just off the top of my head: there are surely additional steps I’m forgetting here.
Of course, I haven’t really had to deal with much of that, since…well, I haven’t been published in book form yet. When Join was published, though, it did take about a year (just over a year, actually) from when I found out my story had been accepted – early 2016 – to when the anthology got published in the spring of 2017. That, of course, is mostly because my story was part of an anthology: short stories sent to magazines sometimes have a quicker turnaround time, but other times it can be just as long (it all depends on the magazine).
So…yeah. As you can imagine, the publishing industry is a tough place to break into. It’s a bit like a game of musical chairs, really, except instead of there being, I don’t know, 25 players but only 24 chairs, there’re maybe 500 players for every 1 chair. Or at least, that’s how it often feels. And that’s not even getting into the self-published market, which is arguably even harder to succeed in. But I might write about that – and why I myself will almost certainly never go the self-publishing route – in a later post. This one’s getting lengthy enough as it is.
And that’s pretty much my experience with the publishing industry. Most of what I’ve learned, you’ve now read here. Apart from when Join got accepted by The Story Plant, I’ve gotten rejection after rejection after rejection after rejection…which is really pretty typical for the vast majority of writers. Still, it gets tiresome after a while, especially when most of them either don’t reply or only send you a form rejection. I actually cherish the rejections that send specific feedback: these are the ones that help you grow and hone your craft. They’re also an indication that whoever read your story found it good enough to at least be noteworthy; not good enough for the blessed validation of publication, sure, but better than a lot of the other dredge on the sludge pile.
I always think that’s got to be worth something.
Next week will be my first proper writing update, perhaps paired with some other random musings (we’ll see how much material I can wring out of the update). For now, know that I continue to work on The 2nd Realm; I’ve started on that new ending for Nightmares Inc.; and I’ve been sporadically working on some short stories, too, which I hope to start submitting relatively soon after I finish them. Oh, and I’ve started editing some older short stories of mine, too; might as well salvage any tales I think can be salvaged from those days and see if I can find a home for them, right? It couldn’t hurt, at the very least.
So I’ll see you all next week. Until then, have fun, stay safe, and keep reading.
