How The Hell Did That Happen?

Humbling. That’s definitely my word of the day when contemplating my journey so far. I went from being a relative expert in my field, to knowing the square root of zilch when it came to publishing.

So how do you find a publisher, or better yet an agent? It was here I found myself thrust into a chicken or egg scenario. Many publishers will not accept unsolicited manuscripts, meaning without an agent they will not even consider your work. Most agents require a list of previously published books. It was very frustrating.

Research helped a little, but there are so many misleading companies out there that dominate Google searches. For the inexperienced it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. There are a vast amount of websites demanding payment for their services with no guarantee of success and author scams galore. I found it incredibly hard to weed out the impartial information from the money-seeking vanity press schemes.

For those of you starting on this journey I recommend the Writer Beware page on SFWA (link below). I really wish I’d read their articles way back before wasting time, effort, and money. FYI they also have a great FB page, useful even if your genre isn’t sci fi.

WRITER BEWARE® - SFWA

As is a common theme in my life, I did things the hard way, working backwards to make an already difficult task even more challenging, because you know, why not?

I was super excited; I had achieved the inconceivable and written a book. I was desperate to get it out there and so charged full speed ahead, casting a wide net to just about anyone and everyone.

I learned quickly that the problem wasn’t the manuscript, it was all the additional parts that I was clueless about. I haphazardly threw together a pitch letter, a tag line and my first cringeworthy attempt at a blurb. I mean if you can spew out a 90k word manuscript, how hard can a one-page blurb be, right?

That one came back to slap me in the face. After reaching out to every man and his dog on Query Tracker, along with throwing in a few queries to agents and publishing houses on Publishers Marketplace for good measure, the response I received was pretty shitty. Shocking right?

Some replies took a few weeks, some a few months and some disappeared into the ether never to be heard from again. Of the responses that I did receive some were generic, standard, and nonspecific, some were just plan mean, and a minute few were really kind and helpful. Some even offered some constructive criticism (I hope the minority know how much of a lifeline a few kind words can be to a newbie).

The main issue was that no one wanted to read the full manuscript. When you submit to publishers and agents, they each have a very specific set of guidelines to adhere to. They want a query letter, a blurb, often a tag line, and normally a synopsis. Some request a specific number of pages, some the first few chapters of your manuscript.

With a query letter and blurb that were quite frankly crap, I’d well and truly set myself up for failure. I now realize that had I slowed down I could have saved myself an immense amount of disappointment.

So, back to the drawing board I trudged, again delving into a plethora of websites, articles, and pages courtesy of Google until I stumbled upon Critique Circle.

The first thing I love about this site is that it’s free, meaning the feedback you garner overall tends to be genuine. It’s an online community where writers submit excerpts for feedback from other writers. When you join, you are required to read and submit feedback in order to gain points. The number of points you achieve depends upon the length of the feedback you offer to others, and there is a minimum word count.

Once you accumulate enough points you can start to submit your own pieces for review. The first thing I submitted was my blurb and I received a ton of really constructive feedback and tips. Extra helpful when it was specifically about my work rather than a generalized list of what you should or shouldn’t include.

I found the experience extremely helpful and so thought why stop there. That is when I discovered “The Hook,” a weekend event that had its own set of rules and regulations.

I will warn you; this one was brutal, even the site itself recommends that you only submit if you have thick skin.

Basically, any member who comments on your work remains anonymous, unlike the regular methods where member names remain visible and as the author you get to grade their feedback as helpful, constructive, polite etc.

This means there is no accountability for the comments left, and for many the gloves were well and truly off. The idea is that members read until they lose interest, then comment on why they chose to stop at that specific point.

I don’t consider myself particularly sensitive and so figured I’d give it a go and nervously submitted my first chapter.

It was definitely a reality check. There were a few utter dicks who clearly took advantage of the event to offload some inner anger issues (cheaper than therapy I guess). However, there were also some really genuine and helpful comments. My opening chapter laid out the scene and set up for the story. I have since learned that this is not what readers today want.

My first chapter was a little like a rollercoaster, slow and steady to start as it built into something, well big. If any of you have ever ridden the Hulk coaster at Universal, you’ll know that it breaks tradition by launching you at warp speed within the first few seconds of the ride.

This is kind of how an opening chapter needs to be, something that grabs the reader by the throat and rips them along with it, leaving them with far more questions than answers. Mine, in comparison, was boring and cliché (yes, I started with the protagonist waking up one morning, predictable much?).

It was exactly the feedback I needed. I rewrote the first chapter and restructured the next subsequent chapters in a way that kept the reader guessing, for a little while at least. On the back of that I was able to craft something halfway decent which ultimately led to a couple of publishers requesting my full manuscript, and from there I secured a contract, more details of which I will share in a future blog.