Why is it so hard to get my book published?

                                  Article based on panels attend at the 2008 Norwestcon

   Let us assume that you have written a fictional novel-size or short story-sized manuscript or a non-fictional piece of work and you have done a reasonable job of editing and proofreading it.  All of the usual spelling and grammatical errors have been fixed and you‘ve-read it several times.. Let us further assume that you think your story is good, and that you have some sense what a good story reads like. Further more, you have done your homework and figured out what publisher or publication would be interested in the genre or subject matter of your story.

     You are ready to send it off to a publisher and you want to know what your chances are for getting it published?.

   Answer: “Slim!” 

   Or as one writer mentioned, “Start pasting rejection letters on a wall. When your wall is almost covered, then you can expect to get a story published.”

     Or put another way as a joke by another author whom tells the story of the writer whom dies and wants to find out if Heaven or Hell is a better place to go. To the writer’s horror, both have writers strapped to chairs with task masters behind them cracking a whip. When he asked what is the difference? The writer was answered with, “In Heaven you get published!”

    For all of the integral points of the journey your story travels from idea through publication to the hands of a reader,  it becomes obvious that the industry is filled with overwhelmed editors with too many submissions and too little money to launch many titles each year.  Arbitraries and human considerations are huge barriers in the process of evaluating your manuscript.  You should completely understand that the industry is solidly subjective and not a science. What one likes, another may ad horror and if your manuscript is legible, with a good plot, you can still make no progress in the submission of your manuscript. 

   “Small presses” hope to publish any where from four to seven titles a year from stacks of thousands of submissions. The editors of small presses often hold down full time jobs beside running a small press.  They’re favorite joke is about how one can earn a small fortune in the small press arena .  The punch line is to start with a large fortune.

   POD (Print on demand) publishing has aided the small press owner to gain ground in the publishing field against a long time history of large “Madison Avenue” press operations using off-set presses which required larger runs of a title.

    When I  tried to reveal what criteria editors used to determine if a short story or novel would be acceptable, it was described as the story had to “grab them” or the story had to ‘suck them in” within the first paragraph or page.  But when I pressed them as to what “grabbed them“, one editor admitted that he ran by no standard at all. One editor admitted that editor’s were of the mind where they are looking for reasons to say no. He also admitted that even though he listed genres and subjects which his publication did not accept, that on occasion he broke his own guideline recommendations because he could not put down a particular manuscript.

  

    In a “large press” operation, another factor enters into the calculation of an editor and that is; “Can I sell this story to the bean counters.” This is probably the largest difference between the two type of publishing houses. Other than the fact that slush piles are often sorted through by some intern whom quickly realizes he won’t be getting through the avalanche of submissions by reading each one. Thus a manuscript may never even reach an editor of a large press before it is sent back with a standard form rejection letter. That is if they take submissions at all, as most now require an agent, which is really another filter between the writer and the publisher. 

   The accountants are making decisions in large press operations, artistic license and even a compelling story take a back seat to the countless biographies of famous people or known authors. Only with a small press can publishers make money if they sell 2,500 copies of a 5,000 book run.  Large Presses have to make substantially larger runs to break even. 

  

    If your book does get excepted, marketing and promotion become the difference in many cases between a successful book and the many whom go bust. When it comes to marketing a book, most small presses have no money left to use for a publicist or campaign which blankets national book chains. They rely on a sexy book cover, a non-generating website and the author to get the word of mouth out. Do not be naïve, books do not sell themselves! A sure barometer of a certain type of book reaching an end in popularity coincides with the event of many duplicates of that type of book on the market. 

    Even the book buyers of book stores cater to their own understanding of the type of books their audience and customers want, not what the industry purports as hot. They rarely read any books they purchase, only wanting to know what the author could be compared to. Was a story like this or was the author like that. The whole marketing plan boils down to how they can associate a book with something else which is considered popular. Sometimes it is carried to such an extreme that the cover, title, and summary of the story doesn’t reflect what the story is about.   

   An author’s purpose in writing a story, book or novel has much to do with the choices in the effort in pursuing the type of binding and the number of copies made. Most self-publishing is an important alternative when you are intending to send a few copies to family and friends.

   My advise for any new writer or otherwise unpublished author is that you have to love to write, because the thrill of creating a phrase or the telling of a story may be the entire joy that you will ever gain. If you enjoy the process, the rest is frosting on the cake. Besides as one editor told me, the odds of getting published is better than winning the lottery!