I understand—I wanted to write one, too. Every fiction writer (and many poets) would like to publish a novel. It’s one thing to publish stories and/or poetry in small literary magazines. It’s quite another to have a novel, with your name on the spine, sitting proudly on your shelf.
My first novel was drafted during the late, great NaNoWriMo, way back in 2016, immediately after Trump was elected for the first time. (The two events are not unrelated.) Many, many rewrites and workshops followed.
Then, last month, that novel was accepted for publication. I’ll tell you more about that in a future post. For now, I’d like to address the process of writing for book publication. With luck, this post and the ones that follow will be of some help to my fellow writers.
I’ll begin with a disclaimer: this is a very fraught time to try to publish a novel, especially if it’s your first book.
Presumably, if you’re working on a book and would like to be published, you have a least a rough overview of what’s involved. The problem is, that overview is constantly changing. Several changes, most of them harmful to your prospects, have already occurred in recent years. And even more changes, potentially more disastrous still, loom on the horizon.
Want an exceedingly bleak view of the prospective obstacles to your book? Then head over to the Substack newsletter of one Michael O. Church (”72 Degrees North”), who takes a grim view of traditional publishing indeed. One of his top bugbears is trad publishing’s agent system, in which you must sent a pitch letter and five pages of your 250-page manuscript to someone you hope will represent you and your work to the Big Five publishers. Fat chance, Church says. The odds are excellent that your five pages will not even be read, and you will be fortunate to receive a two-or three-line form letter rejection, if you receive any response at all.
Why must you go through this? Because Big Five publishers will not accept direct submissions from writers. Agents represent the publishers’ farm teams, whose job it is to find publishable work (not good work, necessarily) so publishers needn’t dirty their hands in the slush pile. The problem with this system is that they very seldom choose said work from writers’ submissions. (I can confirm this myself—the agent-publisher arrangement is a conspicuously unresponsive and inefficient system.)
Instead, agents mostly choose work that has been recommended to them—chiefly by MFA instructors and friends they may have in the large publishing houses. As a novel workshop leader (two midlist titles at Random House) said to me not long ago, “no matter how talented you are, you’re not going anywhere without connections.” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea.
There are always exceptions, of course. And there are some worthwhile agents out there, difficult though they may be to find. Sometimes one of these agents will come across a breakthrough manuscript from a really talented new writer, then help shepherd the writer and the manuscript through the publishing process. This remains the ideal.
In addition, Michael O. Church undermines many of his legitimate observations about publishing by sometimes proselytizing for self-publishing, a complete different (and inferior, I would argue, despite the bleak facts of trad publishing outlined above) process altogether.
The paradigm is this: you are a talented writer (maybe even a genius!) but you can’t break through traditional publishing’s gatekeepers (agents and recent grads hired to skim the slush pile). So you decide to do it all yourself: you write a brilliant book, edit it, design a cover for it, collect some blurbs, then pay* to have your book published under your own imprint. And voila—your book is recognized for the masterpiece it is, it generates tremendous word of mouth and growing sales, and is then picked up by a trad publisher (and made into a prize-winning film as well!).
You do realize it does not work that way.
Thankfully, I believe, self-publishing still carries a stigma. And it should: most of it is just not very good. What’s more, I’d argue that the whole self-publishing phenomenon has been damaging to publishing overall: it has flooded the market with poorly written books, and it has probably led to a lowering of standards everywhere.
There has to be a better way, right? There is, and we’ll take a look at it in the next couple of posts.
* Your cost will vary, but can easily spin into five figures.
