Big or Small or Any at All

Both in my position as erstwhile professor and in my true vocation as a writer, I have come to realize that understanding the publishing world is essential to becoming a published writer. Those of us write because we “can do no other,” but if we want to be read we have to play the game.

There are hundreds of publishers out there. The internet has led to a proliferation of presses, mostly small and of limited distribution. They can easily get your book on Amazon, but with millions of books already there, getting it noticed is difficult.

Once upon a time there were a couple dozen major publishers. They have been bought out by one another until now there are only the “Big Five,” until recently the “Big Six”: Random House (which recently acquired Penguin, one of the six), Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon and Schuster. You cannot get published by any of the big five without an agent.

Smaller, independent publishing houses (Indies) will often look at material without an agent’s intervention, but they are swamped with submissions and often, at least in my experience, they will neither acknowledge receipt of your materials nor will they bother to send you a letter rejecting it.

It used to be that “simultaneous submission” was a mark of bad taste: you should send your book to one company only and politely wait for their rejection, then start all over again. Now, however, such a process is a sure way to lead to disaster. You can submit to multiple places simultaneously. Just be sure to inform the others once your book has been accepted somewhere.

And, of course, self-publishing represents an option. Famous writers, like Mark Twain, sometimes had to pay to be published. Self-publishing today is easy, but success at it is hard. You need to be prepared to promote your book because nobody else will do it for you.

Amazon has easy self-publishing templates. The down-side of this is that many, many people now publish books that should never have seen the light of the web. There is nothing to stop you from publishing good or dreadful work.

Most of us find getting published at all a challenge. Great success stories have come from those who’ve persisted, however. If you’ve got something to say, and a bit of talent, you might even eventually reach one of the big five. Until then, keep on writing.

Comments

Working Through It

The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time. Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot. Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week. I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group. Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday. I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare. I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run. And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating. This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined. One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful. They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only. Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going. The second one was about an hour away. They also met on Saturdays. Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. ...

Patterns

There’s a pattern I’m noticing. For fiction publishers. Even if you aim low you’ll find it a struggle. Part of the reason is the pattern. Lots of websites list publishers. The smaller, hungrier presses either eventually close or get to a place where they require an agent to get in. That’s the kiss of death. Although my stories have won prizes, and been nominated for prizes, I can’t get an agent interested. I’ve queried well over a hundred, so the agent route is one of diminishing returns. This too is a pattern. Back to the smaller presses. I check many lists. What I write, you see, is highly idiosyncratic. It’s literary but it’s weird. Publishers don’t know what to do with it. If a smaller press published stuff like this, I’d find it. The pattern includes writers who never get discovered. Ironically, a number of editors of fiction literary magazines (mostly online) tell me they enjoy my wor...

Creativity

Maybe you’ve noticed this too. When you step away from fiction writing for a while, your creativity becomes flaccid. I’ve had to step away from this blog for a while because I was writing my sixth nonfiction book. God, I’ve missed fiction! Now that I’ve entered that phase of waiting for publishers to respond, I’ve turned my limited writing time back to fiction. I submitted a couple of stories this week and am waiting to hear about those as well. When you’re a writer, waiting is a way of life. Opening my software where I store my fiction stories, I was amazed by how many I found. Some of them are bad—so bad that they’ll never (rightfully) be published. Some are surprisingly good and have been sitting around while I finished up my nonfic. The vast majority, however, are unfinished. Some years back I realized that when I’m writing in the heat of inspiration but don’t have time to finish a story that I need to write down where I...

K. Marvin Bruce

Search This Blog