Getting Published
Posted by Jacko | Filed under Jacko: Author
This is the follow-up to my article Writing’s Brilliant. The title of my last piece wasn’t devilishly clever or witty like this one, and that was the intention. Writing is simply fun, and if you write for the pure enjoyment of creativity, you will find it a fulfilling venture. I also alluded to the business of authoring and how making a living is a tough ol’ game, hence why I have a day job where I use not a single cell of my creative grey matter.
However, you can’t go from writing to authoring in one fell swoop. There’s quite a big hurdle in the way, and one that is probably the most frustrating of all: getting published. I’m hoping that this article doesn’t come across as “Oh, I’ve been published, don’t you know, and this is how you might be able to do it.” If it is, I’m a shitter writer than I thought. I’ve had one fiction book published, The Great Right Hope. Book 2 in the trilogy should be out next year, and the final part is being written when I’m not doing stuff like this or working, so I’m hardly an expert on the matter. I’ll just tell you what I think is the best course of action and how I managed it.
Make sure your story’s good.
“Of course it’s good, my mum thought it was mint!” I’m sure she did. You need an honest viewpoint from someone who is not afraid to kick you in the nuts and watch as you collapse to the ground waiting for Hell to swallow you up. That’s why I gave my first ever draft of my first ever story to the missus to read.
You must have seen the auditions on X-Factor or American Idol when tone deaf, scabby horrible scrotes scream the house down with bastardisations of Britney, Robbie, Madge, Whitney, etc, and, then, when the judges slate them, these delusional idiots are genuinely, and I mean genuinely, shocked.
The mother of the scrote usually kicks off and security is forced to interject. Every time I see it, and it happens at least ten times a series, I can never quite believe it. Surely they know they stink? Surely their parents’ rose-tinted glasses aren’t that rosy? My old man sees it as his God-given right to tell me that I am shit at everything, and he does this with gusto and twenty-nine years of practise (although, for some reason, he’s got it into his head that I excel at swimming????). I wouldn’t have it any other way.
But that’s human nature isn’t it? “Everyone is a hypocrite except for me.” It is hard to see your own flaws, and that’s why you need people who will read your work from a completely independent viewpoint. People as in plural, as opinions are like arseholes, and they’re often dirty (I think that’s the saying). It is vital that someone tells you if your novel needs more work, or there are flaws, holes or rubbish characters. Hopefully, they’ll give you some positive feedback, too. You need to give the manuscript the best chance possible when you submit it.
Do you remember the first time?
The art of writing is a little bit like sex. Remember the first time you had sex? The first draft of your first story is going to be similar, and unless your story is half a page long and the hero wakes up and it is all a dream, it probably isn’t what you were hoping for. Even though the thirty second roll in the sack was technically rubbish, you still enjoyed yourself and were immensely proud, but you knew that you needed to practise before trying something real freaky. It’s the same with writing. You have to practise and learn grammar, tenses, building atmosphere, etc, and anything outside your comfort zone before you take on the publishers. To put it another way, anyone can do the pretty ones.
If you can do that you can do anything!
What I’m trying to say is that you should hone your skills as a writer, so that when you eventually submit your novel you want the guy or gal reading your first chapter thinking you’re technically sound. Then, they can concentrate on the story. If the reviewer turns to page one and notices basic mistakes, they are going to assume that you can’t write, or tell a story…even if you can.
As you get better at your art, you’ll constantly see ways to improve what you have written. Sometimes it’s good to finish the draft and forget about it for a month, before having a look at it fresh. You’ll pick out mistakes that you skimmed over, a habit that is unavoidable. Finding mistakes in books from big publishing houses is not uncommon and those would have been edited and proofed countless times, certainly more times and more expertly done than my attempts, sitting at my computer with The Best Rock Album Ever volume XXII blasting in my ears.
First impressions are everything
So you’ve got a great story and you’ve got a well-written manuscript. Job done. Sadly not. You ain’t the only one.
When sending out a manuscript, there’s no point sending it somewhere where it’s doomed before it arrives through the post. I wrote a novel full of gratuitous violence, torturous vampires and a lots of attempted sex (yes - attempted sex), so it wasn’t worth me sending it to Christian publishers or publishers specialising in biographies, evem though my own history is chequered with impressive quantities of attempted sex. Contact publishers who deal with your sort of thang. Don’t take a scattergun approach. You’ll know what they publish from their website. Opposites don’t usually attract in the publishing world.
Sometimes they do. I’m conscious that my last two articles on writing have included pictures of weird animal sex.
You need to send the right submission. What do I mean by this? Each publisher will have a submission criteria on their website and it’s there for a reason. It shows them that we can follow instructions and are at least half-intelligent. It also presents our work in a way they want to review it, making it easier for them. The first way to get bypassed is to not follow these, usually simple, instructions. It can be a pain in the arse to write slightly different submissions every time, but that’s the way it is. Publishers are really good at supplying information about what they want. It’s in both parties’ best interest that you send a good submission as you don’t want to waste your own time and publishers have a pile of manuscripts that can be seen from space.
The covering letter is an important part of the submission and this needs to be as exciting as your opening chapter. The reviewer has to want to read the story, otherwise they probably won’t ever bother looking at it. Be confident, but not cocky.
Get knocked down, and then get up again
Was something Chumbawamba unfortunately told us in the 90s. You will have read the stories of J.K. Rowling being turned down eight hundred times, etc, and, most people can expect a number of disappointing emails and letters. Keep at it, making sure you’re sending it to the right places and just try, try again. The first place I ever submitted a manuscript to was MacMillan New Writing. They take on unsolicited manuscripts and is an instant ticket to the big time, so I thought I’d give it a go. My rejection letter, which was swiftly deleted in a raging keyboard battering, said that my work was not accepted because…it then listed every single possible reason under the sun, from my “manuscript may have been rejected because we aren’t taking submissions” to “it was shit.” I have no idea why it got rejected, and that’s often the way. It’s frustrating, but if you want it, you have to be persistent. Don’t take it personally.
How did I do it?
I’m only speaking from my own experiences, and it’s worth trawling the web for guidance from as many authors around the world as you can find. There are a hell of a lot of people out there who know a lot more than me…but they’re not as hunky. Other writers have got lucky first time with massive publishing houses; some have taken the e-book route (my publisher issued The Great Right Hope as an e-book, six months before releasing it as a paperback); some authors self-publish; some have signed up with agents, first; some, unfortunately, never get published, but remember, if you love writing, is that necessarily a bad thing? I love playing golf, but I’m not planning to win any Majors soon.
I tried about twenty-ish agents and publishers before I got lucky with LL-Publications. “Lucky”? Yes. You need a certain amount of luck. I can’t think of many occupations where success isn’t partially determined by being in the right place at the right time. Jim Brown at LL-Publications saw the potential in the story and the humour was all there, even if not all the correct punctuation was, so he gave me some advice on how to improve my manuscript. This turned out to be a complete re-write and a huge amount of work, but I got there, in the end. I wrote in Writing’s Brilliant that it doesn’t matter about the grammar and spelling and shit, and that is true when you start as I believe the important thing is to create. If you get held up with every other sentence, writing and re-writing, you are going to get sick of it, dead quickly. It would have been less work in the long run if I had learnt a bit more about commas and things, before starting, but it would have quelled my creative juices.
I built my blog and website after I was published, but this is something that is good to do before you try your luck. It gives publishers or agents a chance to find out about you and your style. You’ll need the content, such as the biography, for the covering letter, so you may as well stick it on a webpage.
I hope this was helpful. Best of bloody British getting published, and if you do, remember to plug my work if you make it big. Hope you do…but if you and I are competing for a Christmas number one spot, then let me tell you this, I will cut you. I will cut you up real bad.
Any questions or comments drop them on the bottom of the blog, or mail me at jackhammer@mark-jackman.com
Tags: advice, american idol, anyone can do the pretty ones, author, Britney, cats, dogs, fiction, Jacko, Jim Brown, LL-Publications, macmillan, Madge, manuscript, mark jackman, novel, published, Robbie, sarah jessica parker, submission, The Great Right Hope, virgin, Whitney, writer, x factor
