Getting Published
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The Truth About Publishing – 5
Lesson 4: What to do when you’re rejectedOnce you’ve done all that, and been rejected, send your work to another publisher right away. After all, it’s just one editor’s opinion and what one editor hates, another may love. If you’ve sent it to ten publishers and they’ve all rejected it, it’s time to rewrite it. If you’ve sent it to…
The Truth About Publishing – 4
Lesson 3: Skiing across the slush pileIn this country, the big publishers each receive 3-5,000 unsolicited fiction manuscripts a year. That’s around a hundred a week. The situation is much the same in the UK, Canada and the US – publishers receive an absolute deluge of manuscripts week in and out, even when they state that they’re not accepting unsolicited…
The Truth About Publishing – 3
Lesson 2: Anyone can do it, hah!There’s a widely held assumption that writing a book can’t be all that hard. After all, everyone can write, can’t they? We write stuff every day of our lives.At conventions and writing festivals I often meet people who assume writing is easy. They say, “I’m going to write a book one day when I…
The Truth About Publishing – 2
PART 1. GETTING THERE Lesson 1: Got expectations? Lower themFeel free to write the most beautiful, thought-provoking words in the English language. The public will feel equally free to ignore them.Here’s the sad truth: most people who write a book will never get it published, half the writers who are published won’t see a second book in print, and most…
The Truth About Publishing - 1
Many years ago I wrote a long, detailed article called The Truth About Publishing which set out to explain to beginning novelists how the business of writing and publishing works – basically, to answer all the questions I had when I began writing. The article is sadly out of date now, and publishing is changing at phenomenal speed, so over…