Last week, I was corresponding with a friend and fellow writer whom I met at the Writer’s Digest conference back in August. We were comparing notes on the book-publishing dream; we’re both in the process of seeking agents for our first novels. After catching me up on the agents she’d talked to, the re-write she’d just finished, and the first draft of her next novel, she wrote something to the effect of, “No matter how things are going in the publishing world, I’m going to just keep writing.”
Just keep writing.
Having a traditionally-published book is the pinnacle of every writer’s dream. A published book means you’ve been deemed worthy of an agent’s time and a publisher’s money. It means your story will get into the hands of readers, potentially many more readers than you could have reached on your own. (I say “potentially” because writers who are excellent marketers and self-promoters are also capable of reaching many readers via self-publishing.) For writers, getting a book published is the white whale. It’s our chance to sit at the table with other “writers, readers and lovers of words” (see what I did there?) and put all our hours sitting alone in front of a computer screen to worldly use.
But getting a book published is really, really hard. Before you even start, there’s a ton of research to do. You have to learn how to write a query letter, which agents accept your genre, whether their agencies are reputable, and about their submissions process. If you’ve never gotten any of your writing published before, sometimes you have to take a step back and attempt to get a short story or article published, so that you have some writing credits to put in your query. Once you begin querying, the process takes months, sometimes years. Some agents will reply to you with a yes or a no; others will reply only if they’re interested. You’ll get everything from impersonal rejection letters, to kind responses with suggestions for improvements, to requests for more of your work. Sometimes you’ll be completely ignored. I learned very quickly that there was no way I could set a personal deadline for getting a book accepted or published. The only things I can control are the quality of the query letter, the research on the agents and the number of agents I try to reach; every other aspect of the timeline is out of my hands.
In that spirit, I answered my friend, “Like you, I’m just happy to be writing and having a project, even with such tiny glimmers of hope from an agent. I feel like it’ll happen ‘eventually,’ but I’m proud of my work, regardless.”
Just keep writing. You can’t control the publishing world, but you can love and nurture the world inside your head and on your pages.
If you have a book-publishing or agent-seeking story, successful or still in progress, I would love to hear it and possibly share it on the blog! Please get in touch via comments or email me at leannesowul(at)gmail(dot)com.