Didn't Know Much About Publishing

Mood: Cautiously Optimistic
Music: Wonderful World, Sam Cooke

I want to take a moment to break down the publishing process, so you can understand exactly what I'm up against. Forget about all those Woody Allen movies, with writers living in expensive Manhatten apartments, attending cocktail parties where editors from Random House express delightful interest in their new screenplay or book. That has nothing whatsoever to do with reality.

To get published, you first need a completed manuscript (for fiction. Non fiction writers have the burden of producing a flawless proposal and somehow convincing people they can write without showing the actual writing).

Next, you have to find an agent. The idea of sending a book off to a publishing house directly is ill advised. The houses have a word for unsolicited, unagented manuscripts: slush. They hire people to speed read through such slush, which is rejected at a staggering rate. One house estimates it purchases a book from the slush pile about once a year. And then only if the Yankees are winning.

To find an agent, you have to put your book aside, and craft a query letter. This is a letter which is supposed to:
1. Persuade the agent to read past the first sentence;
2. Enthrall them with your plot;
3. Flatter them by mentioning any of the personal tidbits about them you've been able to find via cyber stalking;
4. Impress upon them your ability to write like Hemingway and sell like Rowling without dare saying you can write like Hemingway and sell like Rowling; and
5. Express how humble you are about the fact that you even bothered to waste their time by existing in the first place.

All in less than a page, please.

If you happen to get an agent to get interested in your story via the query letter, then they'll generally request a partial manuscript. This means you slop off to the Office Depot, where you purchase the most expensive paper available, invest in a replacement printer because yours smudges every fourth line, and go home and print the first three chapters of your story. These chapters are usually mailed unbound, and properly formatted.

Did I mention formatting?

Your manuscript needs to have one inch margins all around, and be set, preferably, in Times New Roman or Courier size twelve font. And be double spaced.

Did I mention the expensive paper?

If an agent reads your partial manuscript, on your fancy paper, and thinks you have something worth merit, they'll request a full manuscript. Yes, we are four hundred words into this post and we still haven't gotten to the part where they offer you representation. You could still be rejected at this point.

If the stars align and your full manuscript is well received, then the agent will offer you representation. This means that THEY now get to schlep around to publishing houses with your book, and subject themselves to rejection on your behalf. If agents seem to have just the teensy tiniest bit of a God-complex, I forgive them this fault right here. I understand being picky about which manuscripts you read, when you are the one who will be red faced in a Manhatten sky scraper after Mr. Editor tells you the book you're representing would be better purposed as bird cage liner. At least, as a writer, I get to experience rejection in the privacy of my home, with available chocolate.

There you have it: Publishing For Dummies. Dummies like me, who know this information and still fail to calculate that I likely have better odds purchasing a lottery ticket.