It’s true to say that everyone has a book in them, but it’s not until you’ve finished your first master piece that the hard graft really starts.  So with this in mind, let me take on a brief and frustrating trip through the wonderful world of publishing… 

You’ll need three things initially: the patience of a Saint who went to St Patience University for applied patience, the skin of a rhino, a small forest’s worth of paper, plus 30 gallons of black ink.  A small loan for postage and A4 envelopes would be advisable.  The game is to get your book published before you die.  You’ll also need 14 quid for the latest copy of the Writers’ & Artists’ Year Book. 

This book is the Bible for the aspiring writer and it’s filled with every publisher, agent and their cleaners in the known world.  It’s more confusing than useful, but you need a copy so you know how to approach the people concerned.

At the very basic end, you’ll be asked to supply: an introductory letter, a brief synopsis and the first three chapters of your book or the first 10,000 words, which ever is the greater.  Then by the means of magic alone, you’re supposed to know: how long the letter should be, what to put in it, how brief should a brief synopsis be, and will the type face Britannic Bold, be acceptable?  It won’t.

What happens?  You spend a week putting your submission together.  In fact you’ll have spent so much time checking and re checking your work and the needs of this faceless God you become word blind.  You post it off with hope in your heart and you wait. 

A week goes by and so does the next.  And it carries on like this until, quite by chance you peruse the Bible and spot the word, line spacing.  Oh bum, you exclaim, when you find you should have put a space between every single line of type.  Actually what you shout out is, oh bollocks, when you realise your first submission will have hit the bin shortly after it arrived.  

The rejection letter arrives and things begin to get a tad more arty-farty.  In the next rejection letter you find that, ‘although your work is of value, we at Sole & Confidence Crushers only sign two new writers a year.’  More expletives ensue.

You see another publisher to approach and the submission process begins again before fully reading them.  After two days you read – please supply a 10,000 word synopsis.  Bastards, was the word I used the most.  Then you read a critics view of what goes on in a publisher’s office.  They get so many submissions it’s possible that if your introductory letter isn’t punctuated properly, they won’t even bother to read your manuscript.  The title of this piece is purely for encouragement purposes only!  Lottery ticket anyone?

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2012 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Neils Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.