Patience Obtains All Things

Since I started taking my professional novelist ambitions seriously many well-meaning folks have asked when my books will be out. I'm grateful that people have shown interest in my work. I also advise those people to stoke their enthusiasm for the next several years.

Taking an idea from draft to finished manuscript to publication usually takes a long time. Published author's I've consulted say that the average is about five years. This means that some authors get published in a year. For every first year prodigy, someone else waits ten years.

It takes me about six months to write a novel draft. I go through a minimum of three drafts before I start to think that my work might be fit for public consumption. Each draft goes out to beta readers from whom I get as much feedback as possible before re-drafting.

When editing devolves into aimlessly pushing words around the page, I've done all that my petty skills allow. It's then time for agent queries and possibly a few direct publisher submissions. I don't approach many publishers directly because:

1. Few publishers even accept unagented submissions these days.

2. Those few publishers who do allow open submissions still give top priority to projects from agents they've done business with before.

3. The stigma that writers making unagented submissions weren't good enough to land agents.

4. Publishers are far less likely to buy a manuscript rejected from their slush pile (which it almost certainly will be) even if an agent represents it later.

5. It is extremely poor form to submit the same MS to multiple publishers at once. It can be career-ending to get caught.

I'm focusing most of my efforts on querying agents. It's generally okay to query more than one at a time if you promptly inform the others when one accepts you. Agents who say they're taking on new clients will only add one or two at most, but those odds are still better than in the slush pile.

The good news is that I've been hard at work querying agents. Most have replied via form letter, which is neutral. The few personalized rejections have only been encouraging. To my surprise, no one in the industry has yet labeled me an illiterate hack.

Once again I ask your kind patience. Delayed gratification is the best gratification.