20 Tips for Selling Your Novel, Part Three: Getting it Out There

Once your draft is polished and ready to go, you need champions to bring your publishing dreams to fruition.

11. Do your homework on agents and publishers

Just about the most self-defeating thing you can do is to submit blind to agents (or publishers) simply because you’re excited to have a book ready. Why waste your time and theirs by sending a cold submission to an agent or editor who has never signaled that they will read unsolicited work? It is easy enough to find out who is looking for work and what they are looking for. At the same time, you should be reading up on them to see if they are good fit for you; check out their track record with work like yours.

Your best bet for traditional publishing is to get an agent first. It’s not effortless but it will give you help with opening doors and with negotiating contracts once you do. You’ll need to sleuth out not only who to pitch but when. These days, Twitter is a major literary matchmaker, home to pitch events (think speed dating for authors, agents, and some editors). The hashtag #mswl (and its website) will often let you know which agents are accepting what in a given moment. And you can also follow an agent’s (or publisher’s) feed to see when they’re open.

Before you reach out, you need to know three things: 1) if they are accepting new clients; 2) what kind of material they rep; 3) what they want to see as a sample. If they are taking on new authors and you write the kind of work they sell (and only if both those statements are true), then send exactly what they ask for. If they say 10 pages, don’t send 30; if they say three chapters, don’t send one. (The same applies if you are pitching an editor that accepts unsolicited work.)

12. Prepare to pitch

In Hollywood, a logline is that one-sentence slogan — often in an x meets y form — that distills a story to its essence. (I sold my latest book with rhe logline “ it’s Back to the Future meets Love Simon.”) Loglines get joked about for being formulaic, but coming up with one is a great exercise in focus; writers need to be able to very quickly say what their book is and what it’s about, without walking through all the plot and character context.

Visit pitch and logline guides to see what others have done, but practice getting your story into one sentence and into two sentences. Try a version that makes comparisons to other established work. Try a version that names a character, their want, and a conflict. Try a version that mentions the genre and tone. Play with a bunch and then keep two in your pocket: a one-liner and slightly longer one.

Once ready to pitch, keep the query letter short. Address the agent or editor by name. Grab the reader in a short sentence with some action or question from the book and use that to lead into a few sentences that will introduce the title, genre, length, main pitch, and perhaps analogous books (i.e. “for fans of…”). Your next paragraph is about you, including any writing credits or (briefly) life experience that makes you the right author for this book, as well as why you are submitting to this specific agent or publisher. (If you have the same work in submission at this moment with other agents/editors, say so briefly here.) Sign off with thanks or whatever warm salutation you like and that’s that.

13. Submit without desire

The Buddhist version of doing something without desire does not mean not wanting things; it means not wanting something only because you cannot be at peace with your current state of being or because you are convinced you can’t live without getting what you want.

Submitting without desire means submitting without getting so focused on a possible future that you ignore the moment now. This is a valuable tool in novel submissions. Yes, you want to be published, and you submit hoping for that outcome, but you have to remain present in your current life instead of eternally living in the dream of that prospect.

Submit, submit, submit — and let those submissions go. Don’t obsessively refresh your email inbox; agent submissions typically take weeks, if not months, to merit a response. You will make yourself less mentally healthy by sitting waiting for the proverbial phone to ring.

Don’t personalize any rejections that come. Here’s why: Tens of thousands of people each year are doing what you are doing; agents and editors cannot keep up with all the pages sent their way. They’re human, after all. Some rainy Tuesday, your wonderful draft will get its only read from an agent who has just stubbed their toe and spilled coffee all over themselves. Or your epic could land on a desk just as a publisher cuts all their budgets for the coming year. It could hit the inbox of an agent who just sold a book in that exact genre and can’t rep two at once. You will never know.

Truly, rejections are not personal; these people don’t know you or owe you anything. Some rejections are less about the caliber of writing and more about intrepersonal fit. A successful submission is a kind of kismet: the right thing reaching the right person at the right time.

14. Keep submitting

Submission fatigue is real. I have books and plays that got picked up and books and plays that did not. The wait can be agonizing if you let it, or you can reframe it this way: every time you send something out into the world, you open doors for yourself.

I can tell you a half dozen stories from my own life where work that was passed on nonetheless made me a connection or earned me an opportunity later. I got a grant thanks to someone who read a rejected play of mine. A book publisher came to me with a proposal for a project a year after passing on a manuscript I sent them. A play that one agent told me was unsaleable got multiple offers. A theater director produced a play of mine that had sat in someone else’s slush pile for 8 years. (8 years!)

I could go on, but the point is this: You never know who is working on your behalf behind the scenes. And no one can be doing that work if you don’t submit. So get on it!