Will I Get Published Any Other Way?

A few weeks ago I corresponded with a frustrated writer who was considering vanity publication. When I advised her against it she replied with words to this effect:

“I can see why you don’t like it. But I can’t get my book published any other way. There are millions of writers out there, and only a few of them get a publishing deal. It’s luck more than talent these days.”

It saddened me that she considered publication some sort of lottery, rather than the meritocracy it really (mostly) is. It also saddened me to think that she valued her work so little that not only was she prepared to give it away, she was also prepared to pay someone to take it off her hands. This has to be wrong: we all work hard at our writing, and we should recognise its true worth. Even if our work is not appropriate for mainstream publication it still has value, which can be measured by the efforts we’ve put into it and the satisfaction we’ve derived from writing it: why hand it over to a company which is only interested in how much money you give it, and not how well your book reads, looks or sells?

There will always be books which are not appropriate for mainstream publication, because of their subject matter or their writer’s lack of experience or talent. I would never recommend that the authors of these books use a vanity press: such presses are almost always exploitative, costly and ineffectual when it comes down to producing a high-quality book and then selling those books to anyone but their authors. So what alternatives are out there for writers who are desperate for publication, but who are not likely to attract the attentions of the mainstream press?

This is where self-publication comes into its own. It is available to everyone and needn’t cost a penny if you choose a POD provider like Lulu, CreateSpace or Lightning Source (and yes, I’m well aware that there are other options out there and I hope you’ll suggest a few which aren't vanity publishers in disguise). POD providers allow you to download your text into a book template and add your own cover art or image (or they provide you with stock images which are copyright-cleared). The book will be available for sale through the POD provider’s website, and if you pay for an ISBN to add to the package you can also get it listed on Amazon and other online retailers. You’ll be able to correct or amend the book at any time, without paying any extra cost (although substantial alterations require a new ISBN, which you will have to pay for). But doing that will give you everything that a vanity publisher will give you, at a far lower cost.

Why We Have Gatekeepers

In fiction and in life there are often gatekeepers who guard the entrance to the castle or the enchanted kingdom. Consider St Peter, standing guard at the pearly gates, or those big blokes in dark glasses and wash ’n’ wear suits who stand outside the nightclubs and only let the pretty girls in. In both cases there are good reasons for them to be there: the big blokes are fulfilling a health and safety function by ensuring their nightclubs don't get overcrowded, and a public relations function by only allowing the prettiest admission (thereby establishing their club’s reputation for being a hot totty spot); while St Peter makes sure that heaven doesn't get filled up with non-believers and troublemakers, and therefore remains heavenly.

These gatekeepers do an unpopular but necessary job. So when people complain that literary agents are no more than self-appointed gatekeepers who are preventing writers from reaching editors they fail to consider what would be the result—to writers, publishers and readers—if agents stopped carrying out their literary gatekeeping role.

Editors are very overworked. A lot of their time is taken up by reading, and close reading at that. In order to do their job well they cannot skimp on this: editors were already horribly overstretched year ago; in the last year many have lost their jobs, and the books that they were responsible for have been handed over to the editors who remain employed, adding to their already too-heavy workload. This lack of time is nothing new: but it has been compounded recently, to a horrible degree.

No wonder, then, that editors prefer to work with agents. Doing so frees editors from the tyranny of the slush-pile; and they know that anything an agent submits is likely to be both publishable, and appropriate for their lists. It gives those editors time to work more closely with their writers, and to do their best to ensure that their books are the best that they can be. This means that we, as readers, have better books to read; and also that we, as writers, are displayed to our very best advantage.

There is a cost to the publisher: the contracts that agents negotiate are usually far more beneficial to the writers who sign them than a standard publisher’s contract, and so the publishers’ shares of income is cut: but the advantages of not having to deal with the mountain of slush outweigh this by a significant degree.

How I Got Published (Part I): Daniel Blythe

Daniel Blythe is one of those rare creatures: a writer who makes his living from his writing work. He's also a regular contributor to this blog, and can be found in the comments-streams on many of my posts. His latest book is Autonomy, and is a Doctor Who novelisation. Here's the story of his route into publication: I hope that it will be the first of many to appear here.


I've learned a few lessons from my years of being published – not all of them pleasant. They are:

1) Philip Pullman was absolutely right when he said that the three things you need are talent, luck and hard work, and that the only one you have any control over is the hard work.

2) You probably aren't ready to be published when you think you are.

3) Even after you have become published, most people in publishing will treat you like an annoyance, a lackey or an irrelevance. The fact that there would be no "publishing industry" without you and thousands like you is totally lost on them.

My breakthrough – after a couple of years of unpaid short stories in the small press and so on – came in 1992 when Peter Darvill-Evans of Virgin Books invited submissions for his range of original Doctor Who fiction, a new idea at the time. My proposal for The Dimension Riders was accepted in 1992 and the book came out in November 1993 in time for the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who. It was hugely exciting to see stacks (yes, really, stacks) of my books in bookshops – on shelves, on tables and even on the floor. And it was very satisfying to keep sneaking into these bookshops and moving them to even more prominent positions.

After that, I did a second book for Peter's successor at Virgin, Rebecca Levene, called Infinite Requiem, which sold pretty much the same – both books received a small advance (under £2k, as I recall) but did very well in royalties. Virgin knew what they were doing. They could afford to take on new, unknown writers and pay them peanuts, because it was the Doctor Who brand and Sylvester McCoy's face doing the selling. One more short story in a Virgin anthology and I moved on – very amicably. I tried them with a couple more ideas, I think, but nothing really gelled.

I was trying my "proper novels" with editors, and receiving often quite patronising responses. The fact that I was published – *published*! – and my books had sold tens of thousands of copies was met with an indifferent shrug from the Katies and the Melissas. But I'd been writing what became The Cut, and this helped me to get an agent. I queried ten, but the one I eventually found was young, keen, clever and seemed on my wavelength. We met up in London for a chat, and clicked. She took me on, read the first half of The Cut and seemed very enthusiastic about selling it. Over the course of the next few months, she tried several publishers and got the frustration of the "rave rejections" – i.e. "we love it, but..." Eventually it ended up on the desk of Tony Lacey at Penguin and it happened to be the sort of thing he was looking for. It was published as a Penguin paperback in 1998, and got decent bookshop exposure and went to a reprint. The advance was a mid-range four figures, but I was just happy to have anything. I had an agent, who had sold my novel to a big publisher. Things were up and running, and I was still only twenty-eight.

I'd like to say this started off a productive and long-running association with Penguin, but I'd be lying. They bought my next novel, Losing Faith – for about double the advance paid on The Cut – and then sneaked it out into the bookshops under cover of darkness, with about as much publicity as the Much Binding In The Marsh Fete gets. In fact, I'm sure the Much Binding Fete gets a lot more, as it would have a notice in the parish newsletter and a mention in the Binding Gazette. To everyone's feigned astonishment but mine, Losing Faith didn't do terribly well in trade paperback and Penguin declined a) the option on my next book and b) to do the B-format paperback of Losing Faith.

I am normally a mild-mannered person. But this is the only time I can recall actually screaming and swearing (most unprofessionally) down the phone at my agent. I literally could not understand how this had happened. It was in the contract that they would do the paperback. It was IN. THE. CONTRACT. So that was my lesson for 1999 – a publishing contract, when they want it to be, is not worth the paper it's written on. I'd been pinning a lot of hopes on the paperback – being told I was not having one really felt like being kicked while I was down.

I kept my agent. It wasn't her fault. (And where, after all, was I going to find another one? It would be like dumping a nice girlfriend just because she hadn't helped you not to lose your job.)

But it was my lowest point as a professional writer. I had assumed – naively – that once you were published, it opened doors. That you would no longer be ignored and treated like the least important cog in the machine. That the advances gradually crept up, sneaking towards "proper salary" level, until the big breakthrough novel on Book Five or Six, when it would all go mad. To say I'd had a major reality-check would be an understatement.

So there I was at the age of twenty-nine, feeling as if I was right back at the start again. Where did it all go wrong? Where would it go from here?

Luckily, an opportunity was just around the corner – one which would change my writing life for ever...


And no, it wasn't meeting me, as Daniel and I didn't become acquainted until much later on. You can read the second part of his story next Tuesday, and if you have your own story of publication which you'd like to see featured here, email it to me at "HPRW at tesco dot net". I'll look forward to hearing from you.

How I Got Published: Tell Your Story

I keep reading comments online which insist that you can only get a book deal if you have mysterious connections in the publishing business; and how it's absolutely impossible for new writers to get published at all.

The logic of these arguments is fundamentally flawed, and they're just not true; but how to convince people of that? It must sound so very reasonable if you're an unpublished writer floundering around in the wasteland of the slush-pile, or drowning in a sea of rejections. I can waffle on all I like about the alchemical mix of talent, market awareness, persistence and luck which it takes to get a book written and published well from this side of the publication fence; but unpublished writers don't want alchemy, they want real information, something more concrete and clear. They want a magic key which opens publishing's door for them: they want to see what transforms an unpublished writer into a published one.

Daniel Blythe, a writer who comments here regularly, has had a stroke of brilliance (again: he's good at that). He's suggested that I start to include in my blog writers' own accounts of how they got published.

So, tomorrow the first in what I hope will be a new series: Daniel Blythe will tell us how he first got published. His is a cracking story which shows just how talent, wit and hard work can make you very lucky indeed.

If you've been published and would like to contribute your own story, just email it to me (my address is over there, in the right-hand column) with "HPRW: How I Got Published" in the subject-line. I'm looking forward to reading your contributions, and will use as many of them as I can.

For Unpublished Writers Everywhere

I can understand your frustrations. I can understand your longings to be published. I can even understand you considering calling yourself "prepublished" in an ironic, post-modernist way.

But what ever you do, please don't actually do it. It's embarrassing, and will draw the attention of the Point And Laugh Brigade.

My thanks to Editorial Anonymous for making this clear.

Moving From Self-Published To Mainstream Publication

If you've self-published then you've already tested your book, as a product, on the marketplace. If it failed to sell in any great numbers, then in the eyes of a lot of publishers, you’ve proved that it doesn't have the potential to sell in sufficient quantities for them to take it on. This might well be because you, as a publisher, don't have access to the same sales and marketing clout that the bigger publishers employ, but many of those big publishers aren’t interested in that: all they see is the numbers they find on Nielsen’s sales reports. As far as they’re concerned, your book hasn't sold well and so you've shown that it's an uncommercial product.

This probably means that those publishers miss out on a few books with real potential: but as publishers have so many titles to pick and choose from, it's no wonder they tend to dismiss books so easily.

Why Good Writing Gets Rejected

I have a reasonable amount of experience of the publishing world: I worked as a non-fiction editor for a book-packaging company which gave me direct experience of editing for some of the best publishing houses in the world. In the process, I learned a little about the publishing business; the differences between good and publishable; and the horrible truth about the slush pile.

I've had a reasonable amount of non-fiction published and so have seen that it is possible for complete unknowns to get themselves good publishing deals with a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work.

I've also had all of the novels I've written so far rejected. I've won all sorts of prizes for my fiction and have received only positive comments from agents and editors, so I know I'm competent: but what went wrong?

While I'll agree that my second novel is overlong and far too quiet, I still consider my first to be good-to-excellent—but, having worked in publishing for so many years, I can understand why it hasn't been published, despite a few very near misses: it would have been very difficult for the sales reps to sell it into bookshops.

Without my editorial experience I would be far less able to understand why that's so important; and without my non-fiction publications I might have gone on to conclude that it's impossible for a newcomer to get published. I'm lucky: I can see this from all sides and while I would dearly love to see my novels in print, I can understand why they are not.

I can only imagine how painful it must be for good writers without similar industry experience to understand why their excellent work has been rejected.

Trios: The Third Sign, by Gregory A Wilson: Getting Published

My thanks to Gregory A Wilson for this candid account of his route to publication, and for persisting with this series despite my hopeless lack of organisation! Contributions from Greg's editor and his cover artist will appear over the coming weeks, and if you'd like information about his upcoming readings, convention appearances and other events, just take a look at his website.


The road to publication has always been a long and winding one, as every aspiring author knows. But modern market circumstances and a crowded, competitive field has now made that road even longer and more winding than some might realize, and navigating it to its end now takes more than a good idea and good execution. It takes a bit of luck, a lot of persistence, and an overabundant amount of patience.

I started writing my first novel, a work of epic fantasy entitled The Third Sign, in 1996—or at least the first couple of chapters of it. But as I usually did in those days, I got buried in a host of responsibilities and let it go. Six years later I graduated with my doctorate in English, and wanting a break from academic work I went back to those early chapters, revised them substantially and this time, having learned in the process of writing my dissertation that I could actually finish something I started, stuck with the book until it was completed—which didn’t happen until the summer of 2004 (I moved, started two new teaching jobs, and got married in the interim, so I was a little busy!).

When I finished the novel I breathed a big sigh of relief; I knew there was more work to do, but figured the big job was over. I got my Writers Market books, got familiar with Jeff Herman’s agent lists, and started querying agents, ten at a time, adjusting my query as I went. Nearly eighty queries later I took a step back and took stock of my situation: a number of partial manuscript requests, a few fulls, and a couple of very near misses—including one agent with whom I had discussed a number of aspects of the manuscript before she finally decided to pass, not (according to her) because of the quality of the book but because epic fantasy was “oversold”; she told me she had seriously considered taking on my book anyway, but ultimately decided the market would have been too difficult. At that point I was stuck—I could either put the novel in a drawer and forget about it, going on to something else, or I could go another route.

One year later I attended GenCon, the largest fantasy, science fiction and gaming convention in the world; it had a significant writing track with a number of well-known authors, editors and publishers in attendance, and at a small press panel I ran into one of them: John Helfers, editor (recently nominated for a Hugo award) at Tekno Books, which handles speculative fiction acquisitions for Five Star, an imprint of Gale Cengage. John was interested in my book, and I liked what he had to say, particularly his point that the reason the market for epic fantasy books was allegedly “oversold” was because people kept buying them! So in January of 2006 I decided to submit the manuscript to him. We went back and forth a few time discussing revisions and the like, which I made; I resubmitted the manuscript in early 2007, and in late 2007 he made the offer. I accepted in early 2008, and here we are, only a few weeks from publication in 2009.

I’d be lying if I said I was happy with the incredible time delay in this business. There’s a lot more work involved with getting a book in print than simply writing and revising it, though I believe those have to be your primary tasks: I’m a writer, not a salesman or marketer, and it’s important for me to keep that in mind. (The best thing I can do to sell my first book is write an even better second one!) And the time lag from initial conception to actual print—in my case seven years, thirteen if you count my first dabblings with the book—can be discouraging when you want nothing more than to share it with a larger audience. But I’m very happy that I didn’t abandon the book, or accept the idea that it just “wasn’t meant to be.” Getting this published has opened a number of doors for me in terms of future novels (I’ve already completed a second book and am working on a third) and an editing project, and I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a number of very positive pre-publication reviews thus far. I’ve also been very happy with Five Star in particular; they’re a smaller but well-respected press which has handled a number of prominent authors in the past, and all of the people I’ve worked with there have been both professional and supportive (including the two others who have contributed articles to this series, my editor John Helfers and the cover artist, Joshua David McClurg-Genevese). None of this would have been possible if I had fallen prey to the temptation to self-publish, or even worse to go with a vanity publisher; I was warned away from those options very early in my career before I could ever seriously consider them, and it was an important warning.

Ultimately, despite the difficulties and setbacks, the opportunity to share publicly a world I have long imagined privately has been well worth the time and effort. I’m excited about the prospects for both this book and my future work, since my intention is not simply to write one book but to build a career, and I feel fortunate to have been given that chance—but I think the moral of my story may well be that publication by a reputable press is not the result of divine intervention or random chance, but rather hard work and patience. And the opportunities are out there, if you’re ready to take advantage of them.

Trios: Beachcombing, by Maggie Dana: My Potholed Path To Publication

Maggie Dana, author of Beachcombing, comments regularly on this blog; she wrote a wonderful piece about typesetting for me a few weeks ago, which resulted in a spectacular spike in my reading statistics; and she's recently had her first grown-up novel* published. Here's her own account of her tortured path to publication, in which she demonstrated dedication in the extreme. Following pieces in this particular Trio will come from her editor Will Atkins, who will discuss the success of Macmillan New Writing and explain what he looks for in an author—and it's not just the writing.


When asked what got them started writing, quite a few authors will say they were bitten by the bug at an early age, six or seven, or even as late as twelve. But not me. I was a ripe old thirty-nine before I began writing, and only because my job for an absentee boss at a U.S. children’s publisher left me with little to do. So, to keep boredom at bay (and to look busy), I wrote a kid’s book—on their time, their paper, and their typewriter, and then (oh, sweet irony!), I turned around and sold it to them for $1,500, a decent chunk of change back in 1979, especially for a single mum with three teenagers, a dog, two cats, and a horse to feed.

After writing five more books for children, life intervened and it was another fifteen years before I got back to writing again. Women’s fiction this time. I’d had no trouble finding a publisher for my kids’ books; how hard would it be to find one for a novel? (Do I hear laughter? Snorts of derision?)

A year later, my first effort weighed in at 180,000 words. Feeling rather pleased with myself, I fired off a handful of query letters and landed a New York agent who, while full of enthusiasm for my novel, told me cut it in half. I protested, vociferously, but she put her foot down and deleted the first ten pages while telling me, firmly, that my story began here, at the top of page eleven.

I spent another year cutting and rewriting, and cutting some more, till the story was a manageable 90,000 words and my agent declared she was ready to submit… the day before 9/11 turned the world upside-down. Months and months went by, and my agent dragged her feet, saying the time wasn’t right, that publishing was in disarray and editors were freaking out over the anthrax scare, that nobody was buying fiction, let alone women’s fiction. Discouraged, I stuck the manuscript in a box beneath my bed, and went back to writing for kids.

Picture books this time. I found another enthusiastic agent with an impressive client list, but her personal problems got in the way of her professional life and she wound up dropping the ball as well. Even more discouraged, I stuffed my four picture books into the box with my novel and decided I wasn’t cut out to be a writer after all. Besides, I had a living to earn. I couldn’t afford to waste time writing stuff nobody wanted to read.

But a good friend, another writer, disagreed. She nagged and cajoled, encouraged and threatened, till finally she convinced me to blow the dust off my novel and begin all over again with a different tense, a different point-of-view, and a different title. Using my original version as a detailed outline, I spent ten months writing from the ground up and having more fun than I expected. Layers of stodgy writing fell away, a fresh voice emerged. Maybe I was a writer after all.

More queries went out and a third enthusiastic agent entered my life, but after coming close with a couple of New York editors and being turned down by a handful more, my agent told me to write another novel and she’d sell that one instead. So I did, but the result didn’t sit well with her. At first, I was angry and indignant; then apathy set in. I withdrew from my online writing group, parted company with my agent, and added yet another manuscript to the box under my bed.

Time to think seriously about giving up altogether.

But that determined friend wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted my novel would appeal to readers in England, given a huge chunk of it is set in London and Cornwall, and why didn’t I try submitting it myself to publishers in the U.K.? So I did, and wound up in the capable hands of Will Atkins, my brilliant editor at Macmillan New Writing.

Time elapsed from that hefty first draft to publication? Ten years, almost to the day. So when authors say that getting published is all about the three Ps, passion, patience, and perseverance, I’d like to remind them there’s another P in that path to publication: potholes.

* I'd originally referred to Beachcombing as Maggie's first adult novel but it's been pointed out to me that an "adult novel" has certain connotations, particularly in the USA. So I've changed it to "grown-up novel" now, which sounds slightly Playschoolish to me: if anyone would like to suggest a better phrase, I'd be happy to hear it!