Hi all aspiring writers! Good on you all.
I have technically been published, I have a chapter in a family book and a short story in a University anthology collection, but nothing on my own steam yet. But I can share my own experience with publishers.
After I finished Uni I decided I needed a detox from serious writing and went straight into writing a children's book for 7-9 year olds. This is my experience so far with trying to get published.
I found a blog collecting all of the childrens' publishers in the UK who accept unsolicited manuscripts (a.k.a. writers with no agents) and the list gets smaller every year. This is the same for all publishers. The boom of self-publishing and e-books eats into sales. They don't want to risk new authors.
Because the list's getting smaller, the remaining publishers literally get thousands of manuscripts every week. Literally. Getting an agent will get a foot in the door for you, but getting an agent involves... sending them your manuscript until one says yes. Either way, you have to break that first stage.
But that's okay; you're not up against the thousands. A lot of those simply aren't well-written enough. At the same time, there are hundreds that are very good, and from there it's a matter of, well, what the publisher wants out of a book.
This is something I found hard to wrap my head around when I started getting rejection letters back. You can write a very good, even excellent book, and it will still not get chosen over an excellent book that is a safer buy-in.
Take young adult for example. Publishers do not want to take risks, and rightly so because they have mouths to feed and need to know what they pick will sell. To choose one from all the good options, they start a checklist of things they know succeed today: Is the main character a teen, and do they have a romance subplot? Is there a 'main trio' of friends like in Harry Potter and countless others? These are proven successes, and so books like that will be more likely to get published. Because at a certain point of quality, these are all that separates the stories, and so either you keep sending the manuscript out with your fingers crossed, or you change the story and what you loved about it heavily, which is a point most authors cannot cross. This is the luck element.
(An example: I had to rewrite my whole story because it felt 'old-fashioned', like a mediocre version of Roald Dahl or Winnie the Pooh; what I remember kids books as, instead of what they ARE today. So I bought some modern kids books like Astrosaurs, rewrote mine to be sharper and funnier, changed the 'goal' of the main character to be easier to relate to, that kinda thing. I personally like it more now, but it was hard to decide to do it.)
This whole post is one 'get ready for rejection, and don't worry about it, you're all aces'.
OP, for when you go to submit your manuscript, here's some advice I got from an industry insider (and you can find on blog posts all over the internet): =)
1. There is so much luck involved. Keep keep keep going. I am currently on year 2 for my kid's book and about 20+ publishers tried!
2. Try not to shotgun blast your submission to everyone. Find a book like yours, check who published it or the agent involved, and in your cover letter say you picked that publisher/agent because of that book. Be targeted. And every time you send out a manuscript, change details of it for that person so it doesn't look like a copy / paste job.
3. All publishers have submission guidelines on their site. Do every line exactly. Each publisher will have different quirks they want, and if you don't do one they'll ignore the whole thing. Like I said, thousands to get through!
4. Get feedback wherever you can. Most publishers do not have time. If a publisher does send you a line or two with some advice, consider it carefully. Some editors go that extra mile and will tell you if you should write another draft, or if they had to pass on it for reasons unrelated to quality. Make sure your book is good enough and ask people to read it. It's terrifying, but you will be amazed what you missed.
5. Don't be afraid or dismissive of self-publishing. It is always an option, it just requires a different skillset to do well. I could do a whole other post on that.
And most importantly:
6. Don't stop writing, and keep loving it. Because all that editing and sending out copies takes place over months and months (2-3 months for a response usually), in which time you should be on a new project. Make sure you don't forget what you loved about writing the book.
... Wow, what a block of a post. Hope this was interesting to someone!
