How to Get Published, Part II

Or, How to Keep an Editor from Tossing Your Book in the Trash before She Even Reads the Title.

This is another post in a series about how to get published. You can find the first one here.

Okay. So, when last I left you, dear readers, we had covered Step 1: Buy or borrow Writer's Market. That already puts you most of the way there, because as I said, that thing is full of advice about how to submit and where to submit and what your MS should look like when it gets there. This brings us to:

Step 2:

What to submit.

There are a couple of things to know here. First, if you are writing non-fiction, DO NOT WRITE THE ENTIRE BOOK. This is very important. What you want to do is write a proposal, not the actual book itself. (Fiction submissions are a bit different, and I'll discuss them at the end, but most of this advice applies to those as well.) A proposal generally consists of a pitch, a detailed outline, and a couple of sample chapters.

The Pitch
A pitch is, just like it sounds, an argument for why your book is the coolest book ever on that particular subject. You need to convince an editor, and then an acquisitions committee, that your book is worth all the work that the publishing house will have to do to get it to the bookstore. This means you need to do market research. Go to Amazon. Go to the bookstore. Go to the library. Look for books that are like yours, and then figure out why your book would be better, or different, or have a specific spot in the market. Publishing is a business like any other, and in order to stay afloat a publisher needs to know that it can make money off a particular book. We are not altruists. We are not here to spread knowledge for the good of all mankind at no cost. We have to make money in order to keep operating, and I hate to break it to you, but most publishers are also here to make a buck. Scholastic did not print 18 gazillion copies of the Harry Potter series simply to make sure every boy and girl got their very own book to hug at night. So your pitch has to be well-thought-out, well-reasoned, and well-researched.

The Detailed Outline
Again, just what it sounds like. Break it all down for us. Tell us what you want to write about and how you're going to organize it. The detailed outline is important because it shows an editor that you've thought about your book and how you want to write it. It also shows us that if you can organize an outline, you just might be able to write a book. I bet when you were in college you thought, "Outline, schmoutline. I'm going to just start and see where it takes me, and I'll let my creativity show me the way." Yeah, I did that too. You know what? Not the best way to write a book. Not even a fiction book. You have to know where you're going when you start or you're going to get bogged down in some detour, start freaking out that you'll never finish, call your editor ten times a day for inspiration, and eventually alienate the entire editing department and become known as That Idiot Who Thinks He Has Writer's Block When Really He Just Needs a Good Kick in the Ass and We Will Be More Than Happy to Do That for Him.

Sample Chapters
One more time, just like it sounds (see how easy this is?). Write two or three chapters of your book to prove to us you can put a sentence together and have some idea of where you're going (which you should have since you wrote that detailed outline, right?). We don't want you to write the whole book because we may want to take your idea in a different direction--a broader, or more focused, or more marketable direction--and we'd hate for you to waste all that work.

And that's all there is to it. Pitch, Detailed Outline, Sample Chapters.

HOWEVER.

Avoid these things:

Like I said in my first post, don't send in illustrated or designed or otherwise-formatted things. We have our own designers and illustrators and layout artists, and we are professionals at it. Anything you format, we have to un-format, and that takes freaking forever and annoys the hell out of whoever has to do it. Have you ever had to go through a 230-page Word document and remove the seven extra spaces at the beginning of every single paragraph because an author decided to use the space bar instead of tabs to indent something? I have. It ain't pretty. And that's just when an author has Word. God help you if you try to get fancy with Quark or InDesign. Unless you are a professional book designer, don't mess with it. And if you are a professional book designer, then you know better than to do it in the first place, in which case God bless you.

And I know the big craze these days is to get self-published through one of the big Internet publish-your-own-book companies, but I'm telling you right now, if you ever want to get your book published with an actual publishing house, you will stay far away from the self-publishing companies. If you self-publish through one of these businesses, then that says to any reputable publishing house that your book wasn't good enough to sell on its own, and you had to spend a lot of money yourself to get it in print.

And these places are pretty much scams anyway. They don't offer any real exposure to the market (putting you up on Amazon does not count), they don't have any reasonable kind of royalty or advance structure, and, most importantly, they charge you for publishing your book. That is completely ass-backwards. If your book is good, then a publisher should be paying you, not the other way around. And if you say at this point, "But, but...I keep sending it in and nobody is biting," then maybe you want to take another look at your proposal, or get some honest feedback from friends, and figure out what's not working, and try again.

Oh, and that reminds me. Don't hire someone to edit your book for you before you send it in. We do that. All you're doing is spending unnecessary money. Sure, if your spelling is awful and you want someone to proof it for you, go ahead, but otherwise just send us your raw material. We want to see what your writing is like unvarnished.

A note about fiction:

I've worked mainly with non-fiction in my career, so most of this advice speaks to that. I did occasionally go through the slush pile for our fiction department in my last job, so I did see a lot of submissions there, and the majority of this advice still stands. The only difference is that, for a fiction submission, it's more acceptable to write the whole book before you send it in. You can still submit with the pitch, outline, and sample chapter method, but that's generally with the understanding that you have the entire book at home for the editor to look at if she's interested in the proposal.

Oh--and I never did address the question of sending in the only copy of your hand-illustrated, gold-leafed, block-lettered masterpiece without also including proper return postage. I'll get to that next time.