Is it hard for a foreigner to publish in English?
I'm from Brazil and I plan to write my first book. I'm thinking about writing it in English, because then it could be published worldwide (I know, dreams). The problem is that I don't know if it would ever be published this way.
How, as a foreign writer, can I proceed to publish my novel in the US market? How difficult is this? Is it a realistic dream, or should I write it in Portuguese and wait (pray) for it have some success here and be translated?
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1 answer
It will make very little difference. The publishing industry is desperate for good stories. They don't much care where they come from. Anything interesting or exotic about the author's background can be exploited for marketing purposes, but really it is all about good stories.
I wish people would stop saying that it is hard to get published. It really isn't. It is hard -- very hard -- to write something worth publishing. But that is not the same thing at all. If you write something worth publishing, it will generally find a home. It is true that there are exceptions, work that caught the public's imagination that were rejected by a number of publishers before being accepted, but that is mostly about simply finding the right publisher.
The reason publishers have so many walls up to submissions is not because they are making it hard to get published but because they are inundated with a torrent of absolute drek. They have to develop strategies to separate the wheat from the chaff. Agents are the main mechanism they use. And agents are actively looking for new writers with good salable stories. They spend a lot of time reading and a lot of time on the road at writers conferences actively looking for writers with a story they can sell.
Getting published is not hard, if you have written a good story. You should not focus on barriers. They fall away if you write a good story. But writing a good story is hard. Many try, and most fail. Succeed at that, though, and the rest will come easily enough. You should focus your effort and your anxiety on creating the best story you can.
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