Publishing fiction: when do I start looking for an agent?
I am just about finished with the first draft of a novel I've been working on. I've been writing novels for about ten years and I've self-published a couple, but I'm looking to peek into the world of "real" publishing. I've been struggling to find resources about how this process should actually work. I didn't study anything related to creative writing or even writing at all in college (beyond my gen ed requirements) and my "normal" job isn't at all related -- this has just been a longtime passion/hobby of mine.
So, my question is: how much editing should I realistically do before I start sending in query letters? I know it would be helpful to have beta readers or anyone to give advice, but unfortunately no one I know has time for that! Supposing I finish my draft by the 15th I'll have written about 100k words in 2.5 months, so fairly quick but nothing crazy. I'm planning to do a full pass through after that, catch the smaller errors and also take detailed notes on the structure so I can tackle it more thoroughly moving forward.
But how many drafts should I get in before I start seeking advice for publication? My dilemma here is this: When I self-published, I was pretty lax about editing. I didn't want to put a ton of time and energy into a technically perfect piece when I was mainly just writing it for myself and a small audience (those projects weren't taken very seriously, but I'm still proud of them). I had some amateur friends give them a read, but for the most part it was all me.
I'd rather not spend a year of my free-time-life editing something and THEN get mountains upon mountains of rejection letters, if that makes sense. I'd rather know now if I have a chance of publishing professionally -- becoming a NYT bestselling author isn't the goal, just getting a book on the bookshelf and going through the process been a dream of mine since childhood -- but like I said, I have no clue how this process should work!
Basically, any guidance as to how I should approach my editing and promotion after finishing a first draft would be GREATLY appreciated.
Sorry if I was a bit rambly and disorganized with all that... I should really be asleep but I was up late writing. Again. Surprise! Anyway -- thanks, all, in advance!!
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/32508. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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No one WANTS to spend a year editing something and then get a mountain of rejection letters. But it's the people who tackle that head-on who tend to be successful, not the people who look for shortcuts around it. Believe me, I've spent more than enough of my own years looking for other ways to get there.
My best advice to you is to embrace the process. Instead of thinking of all this as the hoops you need jump through to get to your childhood dream, concentrate on creating the best --and best presented!-- work you can create. No matter how many drafts it takes to get there, or how many rejections it might potentially garner.
Let me be clear, this advice in no way matches my own inclinations. But I've observed successful people in the arts, and they are all process focused, not goal focused --committed to what they are creating rather than on getting to the finish line. Even a self-published book for a small audience should be the "best you" you can put out there. You'll be more proud of it that way.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38464. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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This is a Buyer's Market.
+1 'Friday Night in Frankfurt'. If you send query letters and they respond, you do not have long to send in a manuscript, you are going to leave yourself with about a week to edit, pack and ship before they become disinterested.
Metaphorically speaking my father would say, "you're not the pretty girl in this situation, you're the pimple-faced boy that would do anything for the pretty girl to just give him a kind word and notice he exists."
In other words the pretty girls are the publishers and have all the power, you are the supplicant that they can ignore without any consequence, dismiss you if you make one wrong step, and even if they do take you by the hand, will expect you to make changes to meet their expectations.
Get out of the mindset that you get to do things your way, that any publisher will deal with you like you were special: In their eyes you have a major deficit to begin with: You are unknown. You have no fan base that is going to buy your books in any significant number.
You don't get to be a prima donna. They are in this to make money, they have literally hundreds of suitors and, like that pretty girl, always twenty or fifty times as many as they could plausibly accept and publish, so they can be as selective as they like.
Suppose you worked for a publisher and you read query letters and sent in manuscripts. You know you will probably average one publication recommendation per month, out of hundreds of query letters, and perhaps ten requested manuscripts.
Then a good query letter intrigues you, and you request a manuscript be sent immediately. It is a week later than you expected. It seems good to start, but you get fifty pages in and it is filled with typos and grammatic errors and clichés, it seems written without care.
Then you [as a reviewer] don't care. Unlike other readers, they will not plow through and hope it gets better, they will cut their losses. The hour they put in was wasted. There are ten other manuscripts to start. They click the box on the screen for Rejection Letter #1, "Thanks but no thanks with no explanation" and put your manuscript in the "Forget it" box. They have work to do.
The solution.
Adopt Stephen King's attitude and advice: If you love to write and want to be an author, then write and be an author, whether published or not. But that will include all your editing and polishing.
Before he was ever published, King says what he wrote was edited, polished, and in his mind perfected and completely done and 'in the drawer' when he began to shop it, after doing the clerk work of query letters and submissions, he began writing the next thing from his mental shelf of ideas, a short story, a book, an article.
If you don't do that, you risk wasting all your work. Your story and plot and characters may very well be original and publishable. And that can suffice for you to overcome the deficit of being an unknown. But if your book, to a professional reader, keeps stopping them with typos, or misplaced quotes, or bad grammar or cliché, they won't finish it to find out.
One final metaphor: Consider your manuscript an application for a very high paying job (even though Kameron Hurley [an often published female scifi author] warns you it may not be). No matter what you want out of it, the publisher wants a best seller, something that earns them much more than the effort they put into it: They want what you want, hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour of work. This doesn't mean they aren't into the art and wonder of imagination and transportive entertainment, but they have to cover their losses (which are frequent) and they run a business that needs to make a profit. So from your point of view, don't go into this high-paying high-stakes high-prestige interview unkempt and unwashed in your threadbare bathrobe, and hope they see a diamond in the rough they can makeover into a star. Finish your manuscript until you truly think there is nothing left to do on it.
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