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January 16, 2008
Getting Published: There are a lot of stories about the first time famous authors got published. If my memory serves me right, Dr. Seuss sent his Daisy-Head Mayzie around to over 40 publishers before finding one who’d take it. Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time was rejected over 30 times and when it was finally published the house gave it little chance to succeed. The same was the case for Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind. Steven King submitted a number of manuscripts before he had one accepted – and Carrie was rejected 30 times. Robert M. Pirsig, the author of the philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had his manuscript rejected by121 publishing houses before it was published (and became a classic.) Even JK Rowling received 14 rejections before finding someone to print her book about a boy wizard. Shall I go on? You get the picture.
I know there’s a lot of advice on the web about how to get published. Since I’ve had fifteen books published, I have my own opinion. (Alas, none of them (yet) the success of Gone with the Wind.) All I can do is tell you a little of what worked for me. I became interested in writing while in graduate school. During breaks in the year I frequented a local library and started reading books about writing. I read just about every book on writing that the library owned – maybe fifteen or twenty books – it wasn’t that big a library. Frankly, I can’t remember the titles of any of them. (Subsequently, I’ve continued to read books on writing and I’ll share with you in a later blog about which ones I think are worth reading.)
With a bit of knowledge about writing in my mind I found an old used typewriter (yes, this was before home computers were within the reach of a college student.) I started out writing poems and short stories. Since my wife was an elementary school teacher, she always had a lot of children’s books around. I read what she had, then read some at the library. I will never tell you that writing a children’s book is easier because it is shorter – I learned quickly that every word and every phrase is very important in a short book.
Bouncing back and forth from articles to children’s stories, I wrote something almost every day for at least a year. From some book on writing I’d learned about how to send out a query letter. I purchased a binder of index cards and carefully cataloged every letter I sent, who it was to, and when I got a rejection letter. Yes, I got plenty of those. My first sale was a little piece to the Atlanta Magazine on the up and coming home computer craze (even if I didn’t own one.) Also, since coin collecting was a hobby, I wrote several articles and eventually got a couple printed – one in a coin magazine (I think it was called Coin Collector) and one in the Coin World newspaper. I did learn that I had the best luck writing about something that interested me (coins) or about some new up and coming topic (home computers) that was in the public’s interest. But, I wanted to have a book published.
I wrote several book manuscripts. One was about coin collecting. Quite a few were children’s stories. I learned that for non-fiction books you had to send a query letter, wait for a positive reply, and then send a proposal with one or more sample chapters. I made it to the sample chapter stage with the coin book, but never further. For children’s books (at least at that time) you could send the entire text of a picture book as part of your query to a publisher. Nowadays, you’d have to send it to an agent rather than directly to a publisher.
I’d never heard of a slush pile. But I learned quickly. It’s the pile of unsolicited manuscripts that builds up in every agent or editor’s office. As an unknown author you can only hope that somehow your work immediately stands out when someone opens your envelope and before they automatically put the photocopied rejection letter into the return envelope. Since I’d kept a count of how many times I’d sent something out (which consisted of several different book queries), I know that I was over 100 submissions (and rejections) before I got a positive response from William Morrow Junior books. My story (initially titled “On Sunday the Wind Whooshed”) was of interest to them. Over the next six months I worked with an editor to iron out all of the words. For example, I had used the phrase “A snowman and a snowmom.” This was unacceptable since “man” doesn’t imply parenthood whereas “mom” does. After several iterations we ended up with “snowmom and snowdad.” The title was changed to On Sunday the Wind Came. The publisher found an exceptional illustrator in Susan Bonners, and the book was finally published. The process from interest to publication took about a year.
It is an awesome feeling to get the first copy of your first book arrive in the mail. But the story of a writer rarely ends there. Most writers you’ve ever heard of (except maybe Margaret Mitchell) have to come up with a stream of books to make a living. If you are still waiting for your first publication I hope you will stay the course. Keep sending out queries and learn from each rejection letter.
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