Take the First Step to Getting Published
Take the First Step to Getting Published
Notes On the Critical Early Phase of Publishing That So Many Writers Overlook
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Lao-Tzu
Little-known fact: I’ve been working in the publishing industry for quite a long time. Just kidding, that’s a lot-known fact. I remind you about that all the time.
My first publishing-adjacent job was in the 1990s but I’ve been doing this thing consistently for the last seventeen years without a break. It’s great and I love it. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing.
I’ve worked on all different kinds of publications. Magazines, journals, books. Textbooks for high school and college. Romance novels. Cookbooks. Self-help books. Narrative nonfiction. Continuing education resources for professionals. Coffee table books. Saucy retellings of regency-era classics with sex scenes woven in. No, I did not make that up. Medical journals. Humanities journals. Social science journals.
I’ve never published a zine. As a person who’s been doing this since the 1990s, never having published a zine is an embarrassment and a personal tragedy. I’d commit to publishing a zine right now if I didn’t know for a fact that if I commit to doing one more thing I’ll fall over dead.
When you work in publishing, people have a lot of publishing questions for you. I think this is probably like being a doctor. When you find out someone you know socially is a doctor in their professional life, your brain instantly reminds you of a medical concern that you haven’t gotten around to calling your own doctor about. Hopefully you forestall that comment before it falls out of your mouth. I think this is a universal experience because not only do I do it but all of my doctor friends and many of the doctors I work with say people do this to them all the time.
Doctors have it worse than publishing folks, I expect, because while many people—more than you think—have aspirations of publishing something in their lifetime, it’s still not everyone. It’s a large subset (n = wants to publish) of the everyone population (N = everyone) but it’s not at 100 percent. However, most of us probably have bodies.
No offense to my ghost readers, I appreciate you.
When someone asks me what I do for a living, most of the time I tell them, “I’m in publishing.” If I have somewhere I need to be and not a lot of time to get there, then I say “I’m tangentially involved in medical research” and their eyes glaze over and I can escape while they’re trying to change the subject. Most of the time I come right out with it because I love talking about what I do, which I’m sure is evident from this publication that you are reading right now.
When I say “I’m in publishing,” there’s a wide variety of responses I get but there’s one response that rules them all:
“Really? Because I have something I want to get published. Can you tell me how to do that?”
Reader, I can.
Today’s article is about how to take that very first step toward getting published. A lot of people have expressed to me over the years that they’re not quite sure what the first step is. For instance, is it:
Making a list of agents who represent stories like yours?
Looking up editors who are accepting unsolicited submissions?
Writing a killer query letter?
Choosing the publishing company that best fits your work?
Deciding whether to trad or self publish?
Finding some beta readers to give you pointers on your writing?
Practicing your elevator pitch?
Mocking up a cover for your future book?
Okay it’s definitely not mocking up a cover for your future book.
I’m sure no one reading is surprised that the answer is none of the above. When I am asked, “Can you tell me how to get my book published?” I will respond, “I can give some advice. Tell me about your manuscript.” And the response that comes back pretty much every single time is:
“Oh, I haven’t started writing it yet.”
Writing a manuscript is how you get published. You write something, a complete something, and then everything else proceeds from there. No publishing company, however good they are, can publish something that does not exist. The first step to publishing anything is to have anything to publish. Great job Catherine, short article today!
Just kidding, it’s never a short article.
If you don’t have even a completed first draft of your manuscript, then you are not ready to do any of the things listed above. You can’t write your query letter or finalize your elevator pitch until you know what happens in your book. You can’t approach an agent or editor about an idea you have—unless you’re already an established author, you need to be ready to show them a manuscript. If you’re mocking up your book’s cover, I admire your dedication to procrastination but stop doing that. The very first thing you need to do is bang out a first draft.
I can’t tell you how many times “How do I start writing my first manuscript?” and “How do I get my book published?” get asked in the same conversation, nay, even the same breath. That’s like asking “What ingredients do I need to make a pie?” followed by “What time should I put my pie in the oven to have it ready by dinner?” Yes, each of those questions is valid. To create a finished pie someone can eat at dinnertime, you need to know both things. Asked back to back, though, they indicate that you have skipped over every important step in the pie-making process.
The way these two questions are linked in many writers’ minds, and why, is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. But before I get to that—a quick note on nonfiction.
Not every type of manuscript needs to be completely finished before you can start shopping it around. When can you get started on the publishing process without having a finished manuscript?
When you are writing nonfiction, and
You can demonstrate that you’re writing on your subject from a position of authority, or
You have a track record of publishing this type of nonfiction before.
If you’re an authority on a subject (a known expert on a topic or a respected researcher or professor of an academic subject) or an established writer of this field (an investigative journalist writing a longform narrative nonfiction manuscript) then you will be able to shop your manuscript around from a proposal.
You’ll need to prepare a query letter and get an agent or editor interested in your proposal before you can submit it for consideration. And, like a fiction manuscript, you need to have your proposal complete before you start querying—if you get a positive response, you’ll need to submit the proposal. A nonfiction book proposal has an overview of the book you intend to write, the entire table of contents with as many levels of subheads as you have available, an overview of the market research you have done that demonstrates how your book will fit into the landscape of similar available offerings, a detailed about the author section illustrating the credentials that make you the best person to write this book, and then at least one (and perhaps as many as three) finished sample chapters.
So, while you don’t need to have a completed manuscript to start shopping most nonfiction work, you do need to put in a lot of work preparing your proposal. That proposal needs to contain at least a one finished chapter. If you haven’t picked up the pen yet, you’re not ready to start thinking about agents and publishers—even for a nonfiction project.
(Side note: If the nonfiction you’re writing is a memoir, you’re going to need the whole thing to shop it around—just as you would for a novel. Unless you’re famous, you probably can’t sell a memoir from a proposal or a pitch.)
Let’s assume that what you want to write is a novel, since that’s most of the people who ask me about this. (For your information, picture books, children’s chapter books, and magazine or journal articles are the other common responses.) Unless you already have a track record of selling books, or you’re famous in some other way, you’re not going to be able to sell a novel that you haven’t written. It doesn’t matter how marketable or original your idea is. Agents and editors will not respond to query letters about manuscripts that aren’t finished. If you represent your manuscript as finished, and get a response to your query from the agent or editor to submit your manuscript, and it doesn’t exist yet? Congratulations. You torpedoed your relationship with that agent or editor.
There’s a lot of writing in this world you can sell, unfinished, from a pitch. But a novel, if you’re a first-time author, is not that kind of writing.
As I mentioned above, many people link these two questions together in their mind:
How do I get started writing my book?
How do I sell my book to a publisher?
After consideration, I think I understand why these questions always go together. For many people, the sole reason they want to write a book is so they can publish it. Once they have an idea for a book, their first question is not:
Have I done the background research needed to sit down and begin writing this type of story?
Do I have a good sense of all the characters I’m going to need, their character arcs, their back stories, and all the information about them that I’ll use?
Have I decided what point of view I’m going to be writing from, who my narrator will be?
Do I know as much as it is possible to know about the setting of my story, whether that setting is real or fictional?
What are the major themes I’m going to explore in this story?
How many words do I need to write for this type of book? How many words are too many, or too few?
But instead:
Can I sell this manuscript if I write it?
People want to be published for a lot of reasons that are distinct from the reasons why people write. You might write because you enjoy the act of writing, you want to see where you can go with your story, you want to see if you can write a whole book, you have an idea that won’t leave you alone, you want to explore language and form; the reasons people write are infinite.
You might want to publish because you hope someone will make your idea into a movie, or you want to share your work with people so they can enjoy it, or you want to make a billion dollars like J.K. Rowling, or publishing books is how you want to earn your living for awhile or forever. The reasons people want to publish their writing, too, are infinite. There are lots of infinities. Subsets (n) of a greater infinity (N). Infinities all the way down. There aren’t good or bad reasons for writing or for wanting to publish. All the reasons are valid reasons.
But if the only reason you want to write is to publish, and you don’t want to go to the trouble—spend the time, invest the effort, put forth the emotional and mental labor it takes to write a book—unless you know for certain you’ll be able to sell that manuscript, then I have some bad news.
You’re not going to get that guarantee. You will not get an editor or an agent or a publisher to give you the thumbs-up, all-clear, greenlight to start writing your first novel so they can publish it as soon as it’s done. That’s not a reasonable expectation.
You might put the blood, sweat, and tears into writing your novel, revising it, getting feedback from beta readers, paying for a manuscript consultation, revising it some more, polishing it into a gem—and then not be able to sell it. You might take a loss on that time and work. That’s the risk most people take when they write a book. Stephen King in this year of our lord 2021? He’s not taking that risk. Whatever idea he has next, he can sell that. Guaranteed. Stephen King in 1965? That guy had to take a risk. If Kylie Jenner decides tomorrow to write a memoir or a business book, every major publishing house is going to bid for the opportunity to buy that manuscript from her before she ever puts a word down on paper.
The rest of us have to take a risk.
Want my advice on how to prepare to write that first draft? Or advice on how to sit down at your desk and make yourself actually knock it out? I have that advice. I’ve done those things and I’ve coached others through doing them. I can’t wait to share my thoughts on doing those things with you in future articles. I’ve got your back. But my advice to you today is this: Figure out which question you really want answered. If you’ve already got your manuscript written and you’re confident that it’s as good as you can possibly make it, then please strike up a conversation with me about how to go about publishing it. If you’re rambling around the idea stage, deciding whether you want to knuckle down and start writing—make sure you understand what a successful outcome would be for you and what you’re risking if you undertake this process and you don’t achieve that outcome.
Writing a novel is hard. Selling a finished manuscript is hard. Neither one of those things is “the hard part” in the context of the other one being “the easy part.” You don’t just knock out your manuscript, piece of cake, and then start the hard and scary process of selling it. You don’t slave away on your manuscript until you’re absolutely sure it’s perfect and then, with the real work behind you, send it off to an agent and kick back and relax. Neither of those scenarios is accurate.
I’m not going to tell you to write for “the right reason.” Writing to earn your living is just as right as writing because you love the craft or because you have a story begging you to tell it. Just know what you’re getting into and what you expect to get out of it. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Anyway Shelf Life will be back on Thursday unless the world ends between now and then which is actually a distinct possibility at this point. Just kidding, that’s a gross exaggeration. Society may collapse between now and Thursday morning at 9:00 AM but the world isn’t going anywhere. Assuming our civilization remains intact after tomorrow, then I will see you on Thursday. Be safe and take care till then.
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