Your own decision, then, is your own decision. You’ll have to make it yourself when the time comes. It may help you to know that almost all novels require some work after they’ve caught an editor’s eye, and a great many of them require considerable rewriting. While John O‘Hara might snarl that the only way to improve a story after you’ve written it is by telling an editor to go to hell, you probably won’t want to be quite that quick to suggest travel plans to the editor who asks you to make changes. And a look at O‘Hara’s correspondence shows that he wasn’t either — not until he was so well established that he could afford to.
But this is all cart-before-horse stuff, isn’t it? First you have to find a publisher who’s interested enough to want changes in the first place.
Which, conveniently enough, brings us to our next chapter.
Chapter 14
Getting Published
Difficulties facing the first novelist. Queries. Finding an agent, if you think you need one. Dealing with editors. Subsidy publishers
Once you’ve written your novel, you’re probably going to want to get it published.
It’s a curious fact about this whole business of writing that the preceding sentence almost goes without saying. The great majority of us write with the absolute intention of publishing what we have written.
This isn’t generally true with other artistic pursuits. The man who paints as a hobby doesn’t necessarily aspire to gallery showings. The woman who plays the cello once a week in an amateur string quartet doesn’t call herself a failure because she’s not on her way to Carnegie Hall.
The writer’s different. For him, publication is seen as part of the process that begins with an idea. His manuscript, unlike an artist’s finished canvas, is not in final form; his novel will only be in that condition when it has been set in type, printed, and bound.
This is unfortunate. While writing is unquestionably a profession, it is also a hobby, and functions very nicely in that capacity. Of those who write, I suspect it will always be the case that a relatively small percentage will be able to produce salable, publishable work, while the greater majority will be writing essentially for their own amusement. There’s nothing wrong with this; about the same ratio obtains in all artistic occupations. What’s tragic is that the amateur writer is so likely to consider himself a failure because of his inability to publish.
I elaborated on these thoughts a while ago in a Writer’s Digest column on Sunday writers, suggesting that we needn’t publish in order to consider ourselves successful writers. A heartening number of readers wrote to say they’d drawn encouragement from my observations. Suffice it to say now that I feel anyone who manages to complete the task of writing a novel ought to consider himself a success whatever its merits or publishability. If you’ve written a novel, you’re already a winner. Whether you try to publish it, whether you succeed or fail in your efforts, you’ve run a marathon and finished on your feet.
Congratulations.
That said, let’s suppose you’ve decided to make a few tries for the brass ring before stuffing your manuscript in a trunk. What are your chances of success? And what can you do to improve them?
Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not going to be ice cream and cake all the way. Like a dime-novel hero, you’re going to need luck and pluck — and plenty of both.
I might be tempted to offer the bromidic message that every novel will get published sooner or later if it’s good enough and if you work hard enough at the business of offering it to publishers. It’s the conventional wisdom, and it’s the sort of thing one likes to hear and would prefer to say.
I’m beginning to doubt that it’s true.
A case in point: In 1977 a fellow named Chuck Ross set out to establish the difficulties faced by new novelists. He submitted a novel to fourteen publishers and thirteen literary agents.
And the novel he submitted wasn’t one of his own but a freshly-typed copy of Jersy Kosinski’s Steps, the National Book Award winner for 1969.
No one recognized the manuscript, although one editor compared the author’s style to Kosinski. Neither did any publisher want to issue the book or any agent offer to represent it. Admittedly, Kosinski’s novel is an experimental work, and not the sort of item that has best seller written all over it when it comes in the guise of an unknown writer’s work. The experiment doesn’t prove that agents and publishers are all idiots, or that the emperor has no clothes, or anything of the sort.
But it should give you an idea of what you’re up against.
And just what am I up against? The wall? Is it safe to say that the new writer is facing impossible odds, that I’d be better off putting my book in a dresser drawer, or not writing it in the first place? Should I take up Sunday painting instead? Start taking cello lessons?
You can do any or all of those things if you want. I told you before that nobody ever said you had to write a novel. Nobody’s saying now that you have to publish one, or try to publish one. It’s your novel, for heaven’s sake. You can circulate copies among your friends, lock it away in a safe deposit box, or use it to insulate your attic. You can submit it to fourteen publishers and thirteen agents, and then, satisfied that you’ve made the effort, you can put it in the outhouse next to the Monkey Ward catalog, so that it won’t be wasted.
Or you can bundle it off to a fifteenth publisher or a fourteenth agent.
If you want something badly enough, Fredric Brown pointed out in The Screaming Mimi, you’ll get it. If you don’t get it, that only goes to show you didn’t want it badly enough.
This is no place for specific advice on marketing your novel. Market conditions change constantly. Annual editions of Writer’s Market and marketing columns in Writer’s Digest will keep you in touch with these changes as they occur. If you’re writing category fiction, your own day-by-day research at bookstores and newsstands will let you know just who’s publishing exactly what.
A few marketing observations, however, might be useful.
It’s been a trend of late for publishers to adopt a policy of declining to read unsolicited manuscripts. This doesn’t mean they’re all a bunch of flint-hearted old dogs. It simply means that more and more of them are finding that the cost of reading over-the-transom submissions is unaffordably high, given the infinitesimal number of such submissions that wind up getting published. By limiting their reading to agented manuscripts and others that have come recommended, publishers can save thousands of dollars a year.
What does this mean to you? First, let me say that it’s not as disastrous as it looks. It certainly doesn’t transform the business of novel writing into a closed shop. You don’t need a track record, or an agent, or even a membership card in Author’s League in order to have your novel considered for publication.
What you do need is permission to submit your novel, and what I would suggest is a query letter. Let’s suppose you’ve written that gothic novel of the windswept moors of Devon and your market research has led you to believe that it would have its best chance of acceptance at any of six paperback houses. You’ve checked Writer’s Market and learned the name of the editor at each house who’s likely to be in charge of gothics. Now you sit down and write each of the six editors a letter, something like this:
Dear Ms. Wimpole,
I have recently completed a gothic novel with the working title of Trefillian House. Its setting is Devon, its heroine a young American widow hired to appraise antique furniture in a creaky old mansion on the lonely windswept moors.