Currently as I write this I am taking a short break from my extensive project for which I have been hunkering down, preparing my current novel before I ship it off to a formal publisher—many publishers, I should say, considering just how many manuscripts you must ship out in hopes you might catch a single hit/acceptance.
And from there I hope to implement a new aspect of my writer's journey, whether it's through a rejection or—better yet and far more unlikely—an acceptance.
With that being said, I will let you in on a few key secrets within the Market [1]:
- You want your manuscript to be in as tip-top shape as possible before shipping it off to a publishing house
- Reason: even though publishing houses assign their own editors to an accepted manuscript, there are many manuscripts they must go through upon deciding on an acceptance. Having your manuscript as polished as possible could very well be the difference between your manuscript getting tossed into the shredder versus into the consideration pile, or better yet, into the acceptance pile
- To say the odds are not in my favor of getting accepted Round One [2] is not a pessimistic view; it is realistic
- Reason: While no one really knows the statistics of how many first-time authors actually get published right out of the gate, I learned in a writing class of mine from a speaker who worked in the publishing market that about only 10% of fiction-genre manuscripts ever make it past the first review stage and go into the acceptance stage. Now most of this is because of submission error. Below is an example of submission error: Writer Barry wanted to submit his sci-fi genre-based manuscript to Lovington Publishing House. Only he didn't do any research before submitting to them. If he had, he would have learned Lovington Publishers only accepted romance-based manuscripts, which is why they disregarded his sci-fi. But there's also the fact publishers want something ready and "easy" meaning they don't have to put in a lot of effort to get it published. And this makes sense as according to the speaker of my class, publishing houses who specialize in fiction get anywhere between 250,000-1,000,000 submissions a year. That's roughly about 685-2,738 submissions a day! Granted these numbers are all merely "ball park" numbers, and may not actually reflect the real numbers, but that's still a lot of manuscript submissions no matter how you slice it. The other factor is this: publishing houses want manuscripts that will make them money. Seems obvious, right? Unfortunately for us writers we don't know what this criteria involves. But we can attempt to hit the mark by ensuring we have the appropriate word count the "house" is requesting, that our submissions are as error-free as possible, and that we're submitting to someone whose genre meshes with ours. But even then we may still miss the mark.
So with that being said, I don't except to get accepted right out of the gate, but I'm still sure as heck going to try! And on that note I'm going to go back to work on my novel considering my deadline for "absolute completion", meaning when I'm hoping to send it off, is this Sunday (May 10th). Though I recognize I may have to adjust that....
Either way, wish me luck 💖🍀
>>> Here's an additional and wonderful resource into getting your manuscript ready for submission into the Market: Submitting Your Manuscript to a Publisher 101. I will also add this link to the list located at the bottom of my blog as a permanent resource.
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[1] the Market with a capitol "M" encompass everything there is to writing including the publishing companies, the writer's market, and the editor's market
[2] Round One refers to the first time you've submitted your manuscript
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