Surviving Rejections
– Ten key factors that will keep you sane while submitting your novel
by W.H. Matlack
Hooray! You’ve finished drafting and editing your first
novel. It’s been a stressful, uncertain, but immensely rewarding process.
Looking back, it seems that the hard work is finally over, and surely agents
will climb all over themselves for the privilege of taking your beautiful words
to eagerly awaiting publishers. Certainly in a couple of days, or weeks at the
most, a nice, fat contract from an important New York agent will show up in
your email. Perhaps a month or so after you sign that contract, your new agent
will call you with the good news that your book has been sold to a major
publisher, and guess what? A major motion picture studio wants to make a
feature film based on it, starring you in the lead, of course!
No, I’m not trying to make fun of new novelists. In fact,
right after I finished my first novel, most of those same thoughts rattled
around in my head. I remember a
website I visited that gave advice to new authors for finding agents. It even
had a section titled, “Things to do when you visit New York.” I imagined myself
getting off the elevator at my new agent’s office and being happily escorted by
an exuberant young assistant-to-the-assistant agent into a large conference
room filled with all the many people who would eagerly help make my new book a
best seller. They would all rise and give me a standing ovation.
I would be offered coffee, handed a plate full of expensive
croissants, introduced to everyone as their most exciting new author since
Hemingway. We would sign a generous (to me) contract and then all go have lunch
at Tavern on the Green. It would be a beautiful New York day, and everyone
would recognize me as “that author.”
No, I didn’t actually believe it would happen like that,
although…some authors have come close to it. Take John Grogan’s Marley and
Me. I saw him speak at the UCLA Book Fair. He said he
got up every morning at five and wrote until it was time to go to work. He
didn’t talk about the difficulties he had with his initial submission process,
but being a working journalist helped his credibility…a lot. Very soon, the
book was sold and became a New York Times best seller. It changed Grogan’s
whole life. The book was made into a hit movie, and Grogan was thrust into the
mega-spotlight of highly successful authors.
Bad dog makes good
novel
For a more realistic contrast to Grogan, look at JK
Rowling’s Harry Potter series. It took her seven years to finish the
first novel in the series. During that time she had to suffer the death of her
mother, divorce from her first husband and poverty. However, she believed in
her work, and when finally published it became the best-selling series in
history.
Keep at it
So, what will the submission process be like for you? Most
likely you will receive hundreds of rejections over what could amount to months
or even years. Just think of it. Hundreds of agents and publishers will all
tell you one thing over and over, “your work just doesn’t make the grade.” How
will you keep your self confidence, not to mention sanity, during this grueling
process? Well, below are ten guidelines that will help armor you for the
coming, negative onslaught.
Believe in your work
Is your novel good? Will other people who don’t know you
want to read it? Why? What will draw them in and keep them interested? You need
to take a very objective look at what you’ve done. It’s a hard thing to do, but
absolutely necessary. Consider joining a critique group or giving it to a few
friends to read. When you have objectively concluded that you’re product is
both good and competitive with what else is out there in your genre, don’t let
anyone shake that conclusion. Ever!
Believe in yourself
You’re an author
now. It doesn’t matter how successful (in terms of sales or reviews) your book
is. You’ve done something that most people just talk about doing. And it was
hard, exciting, rewarding…it was art. You’re an artist, and no one can ever
take that away from you. Even if no one else ever reads your work. Think of
Emily Dickinson. Alone in her room writing, writing, writing. Fewer than a
dozen of her poems were published during her lifetime, but she was a writer, a
major poet, and a great artist. You’re a writer, too. No, actually more than
that. You’re an author. A novelist. Even Emily wasn’t a novelist.
Not a novelist
Edit until you are
sick of it
Editing your work is like polishing a beautiful car. It
eliminates annoying little imperfections that are distracting to a reader. Good
editing makes your work shine. Don’t forget to do word reduction and delete
repeated words or phrases. Bad grammar, missing words and other little mistakes
can cause both agents and publishers to reject your work outright, and probably
with a snotty flair. The best way to do this is to put your work down for a
couple of weeks, and then carefully read it through three or four times. Yes,
you’ll get sick of it, but remember, “Wax on wax off” makes us and our stories
stronger. Have someone read it as your first-line editor. It’s very difficult
to find your own typos.
Develop a submission
plan
Submitting is a lot like fishing in a big lake. You need to
plan. First, whom are you targeting? Agents? Publishers? Both? Personally, I
think targeting agents is very difficult for a first-time writer. They get
hundreds of submissions each week, and if you are an unpublished writer you are
likely to get tossed into the rejection pile with just a cursory glance at your
pitch. (We’ll cover the pitch letter below). The only people who seem to
successfully beat this rap are those with some degree of fame. Take Marcia
Clark for example. She gained fame as an LA prosecutor on the O.J. Simpson
case. Sure, she lost the case, but so what? She got a great deal of on-screen
time during that trial, so when she decided to leave law and become a mystery
novelist, getting signed was no problem. In interviews she says she’d rather be
known as an author than as a failed prosecutor. She’s got three books out now,
and they are pretty good, so maybe that will happen someday.
Not a prosecutor. A
Novelist
I think, and it’s
only my opinion, it’s better to look for small, independent publishers who will
work directly with authors. It’s a faster track to publishing because the agent
is cut out of the process. Agents can take months or sometimes years trying to
sell books to publishers, and they never take first-time authors out to lunch
at Tavern on the Green. When your book is available on Amazon, does it really
matter if the publisher is a well-known New York publisher?
Make sure you have the
right bait
You’ve proven yourself as a writer, now you have to prove
that you can write a pitch that promotes your novel. The pitch is all important
because it’s likely to be the only thing that gets read. If they like it,
they’ll ask you to send them the first three chapters, or maybe the first ten
pages. That’s called a “partial” request. Next comes a manuscript request (the
whole book). You can still get either of those rejected, but it means you’ve
passed a barrier with at least one agent or publisher.
Getting the additional requests is the true measure of how
successful your pitch letter is. It’s the bait on the line, and even a partial
or manuscript rejection is okay. It means the fish are biting.
There are several good websites that offer a lot of help
drafting pitch letters. Take a look at several of them before beginning your
draft.
Know where the fish
are biting
Do a little research to find agents or publishers who are
buying work similar to yours. A very good website for finding agents (and some
publishers) is Querytracker.com. They list about 1,800 agents and 193
publishers. The program allows you to sort for agents or publishers based on
their genre. From the resulting report, you’ll be able to research all of them
individually. The report will tell you what kinds of quires they accept such as
email or regular mail. You’ll also see statistics on how many inquiries they
receive and what percentage they ask for additional submissions.
Each time you send them a query, you punch a little button
that adds your query to the database. Using the program continuously updates it
with data. There are a couple other sites like this one, too, so shop around a
bit.
Emphasize your ability
and willingness to market your work
Sadly, neither publishers nor agents will do much of the
marketing of your book. Your ability to market your “product” is almost as
important to them as your ability to write it. All the good “how to write a
pitch” sites will tell you to make sure to make a compelling argument for this
in your initial letter.
Be prepared to be
rejected
Oh, you’re going to get rejected, baby, and you’ve got to
develop a thick skin. Just be aware that it happens to every first-time
novelist. For example, I sent out 139 pitches to agents for my first novel.
Over a nine-month period, every one came back as a rejection with the same
verbiage, “Your story is crap, and no one will ever, ever publish it. Take up
plumbing or drywall instead of writing.” Well, that’s the way I read them,
anyway.
I was getting ready to self-publish (a perfectly viable
alternative). In fact, I had just gotten off the phone with a person who was
going to help me format for Amazon, when a new email flashed on my screen. I
said to my wife, “I’m not even going to open it. The last thing I need is
another rejection.” She said, “Open it. You never know.” I couldn’t believe my
eyes. There was a contract. My wife is always right.
|
The bottom line is: all you need is one. It’s just like
selling a house or a $50 glass of lemonade from a little stand on the sidewalk.
All you need is one, and they’re out there somewhere, but if you never try to
reach them, you never will.
All you need is one
sale
Everyone goes through
it
Except for those fortunate authors who are already famous, everyone goes through the same thing. I
don’t know what the percent of success to failure is, but bookstores and places
like Amazon are full of books – ebooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, there are thousands
of them. And almost every one of those authors went through the same process.
The difference between them and the invisible ones who gave up? That’s right.
They didn’t give up.
Start writing the next
one
So, here’s what happened with my second novel. I was about
half way into my submission process when I thought, “OK, you all don’t like
that one. I’ll just write a second one. Maybe you’ll like it better.” The
benefit of this thinking is that I had a follow up novel a few months after the
first one. Remember. Writing is what you do. Just keep doing it.
Who is W.H. Matlack?
He is a prolific writer of novels, short stories, graphic
stories and terse letters to city officials who are trying their best to
totally screw up his town. His latest novel for Solstice Horizons is titled, Noir
Town and is available at: http://amzn.to/1jwSMgq
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