So your manuscript has been through a number of drafts, been read by a few people in your writers club and fairly heavily critiqued.\u00a0 You\u2019re sure it\u2019s ready. What now?\u00a0 Well, you actually have a number of choices.<\/p>\n
\n- Send to a copy to a publishing house that\u2019s accepting unsolicited manuscripts. It\u2019s important to check their Web site for detailed instructions. They get so many unsolicited manuscripts they\u2019ll immediately reject incorrectly formatted submissions. This can result in a wait time of anywhere from a few days to a few months. Remember, unsolicited submissions go onto the \u201cslush pile\u201d to be reviewed (often very briefly) when they get around to it. There are also some other matters to consider. How long is the ms? I sent my novel to one publisher and the next day thought I had a good omen (writers can be a superstitious lot). As I was leaving a parking lot the car in front of me had a license plate that began with the 3-letter abbreviation for the name of the publisher I had just submitted to. A sign from the gods! I had a rejection letter a couple of days later. How was this possible? They didn\u2019t even have time to read the first chapter! Then it struck me. My ms. was 480,000 words long. I assume they saw that (you have to put it right at the top right-hand corner of the title page) and immediately sent the letter. If you\u2019ve not published previously, it\u2019s extremely rare for a publisher to accept anything over about 110,000 to 120,000 words. For a new author this is always a long-shot. The odds are you will get the classic \u201cThank you for sharing\u2026.\u201d rejection letter. The biggest problem is you don\u2019t have a clue what they didn\u2019t like about your ms. They rarely ever even give you a hint, but you can\u2019t blame them since they receive so many unsolicited manuscripts like yours. Remember, they\u2019re publishers, not writing schools, they have neither the time nor any reason to tell you what you\u2019ve done wrong. If you think about it, that\u2019s why Penguin allowed some of its folks to create Book Country.<\/li>\n
- You can self-publish, or post to Wattpad, or Smashwords. As I mentioned in an earlier post, if you do this you\u2019re in for a lot of work. You need to market your book aggressively since no one is going to do it for you. Don\u2019t get me wrong, it has been done, but the novel better be really good, or have a great hook that makes it really unique (think 50 Shades). You may even get a few reviews along the type you get on Goodreads. If you get some 5-star reviews you can then put those on your other social media pages and keep pushing. Just remember, you\u2019re one voice in a few million trying to get attention \u2013 so scream!<\/li>\n
- Finally, you can try a hybrid like Bookkus, but I\u2019ll go into that next time.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So your manuscript has been through a number of drafts, been read by a few people in your writers club and fairly heavily critiqued.\u00a0 You\u2019re sure it\u2019s ready. What now?\u00a0 Well, you actually have a number of choices. Send to a copy to a publishing house that\u2019s accepting unsolicited manuscripts. It\u2019s important to check their…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[24,7,8,9,26,12],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-photophoosk100","4":"post-258","6":"format-standard","7":"category-jotting-and-stray-thoughts","8":"category-musings","9":"post_tag-discussion","10":"post_tag-getting-published","11":"post_tag-novel","12":"post_tag-writers","13":"post_tag-writing-a-novel","14":"post_tag-writing-inspiration"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/259"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomwolosz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}