APPENDIX ONE

The Easy Way To Write

A Proven Strategy for Getting Your Novel Taken Seriously by Agents and Publishers

Introduction

This guide is intended to help you on your quest for publication. It is based on the latest information gleaned from numerous writers, agents and publishing professionals. It is however, an entirely personal view.

The publishing industry offers no guarantees. Even successful authors sometimes have to go through the following process after they’ve had a

‘hit’ book, or even a series of ‘hit’ books. That’s the reality of choosing a career in the Arts. You’re only as good as your last – or next - success.

According to a recent Jenkins survey, there are currently around six million unpublished manuscripts in the US alone. Of course, only a fraction of these will ever see the light of a publisher’s desk but still, you can see immediately that you are up against a steep uphill climb.

However, books currently sell well. The fact is about that one in fifty submitted manuscripts in the US do get published, and that many people in the industry do make money – a lot of money.

So don’t despair. If you keep at it, one day it will be your turn.

For now the reality is that, as soon as you start submitting your manuscript, you will inevitably receive rejections. The important thing is

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not to take them personally – they rarely have anything to do with your writing.

John Grisham, Stephen King, Anne Rice and Patricia Cornwell collectively had their novels rejected hundreds of times before they were taken seriously. There’s no shame in rejection – it’s par for the course.

Getting published is about persistence.

Think of it this way. Each rejection is actually one step closer to a sale.

Hang in there and one day it will happen!

Tools

Firstly, you will need a current list of agents and publishers. In the US the most comprehensive guide is Writer’s Market, published by Writer’s Digest.

In the UK, it’s the Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook published by A &

C Black.

In Australia, it’s the Writer’s Marketplace, produced by Bookman.

Unfortunately, these books can be expensive, especially if you want to submit to areas of the world outside of your own – you will have to pay more for imported books. If you possibly can, find someone else who has already bought them. Or go your local library, which should stock them in the reference section.

It doesn’t really matter if they’re out of date – you can always confirm contact details later. Contrary to what you might hear, publishers are not

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too ‘prickly’ about getting their names wrong – the turnover of staff is so high nowadays it’s hard for anyone to keep up! Agents, though, can be a little more sensitive. They expect you to have done a degree of homework before you contact them.

If you are worried that your manuscript won’t end up with the right person, make a quick phone call to the publishing house and ask whose name you should address your query. Talking to the reception desk is sufficient. Not all editors take kindly to cold calls from authors. Agents again, are different. Sometimes they prefer a direct pitch over the phone.

Make a list of all the publishers and agents you think will be interested in your work. Target specifically. It really is a waste of time (and postage) to send your manuscripts to inappropriate companies and individuals. Think about what genre your work might fall into and then match it with the genres that the recipients handle. That way, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and heartache.

Agent or publisher?

You will need to decide what’s most important to you. Do you want to go it alone? Or do you want someone else to deal with the business side of things?

There’s no real problem with sending your manuscript to publishers directly, although many say they prefer you to use an agent.

It’s rare nowadays that publishers will publish a first book from an un-agented submission. There are many reasons for this, not least that agents are

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considered by most publishers to be a necessary foil between the writer and themselves.

This is partly because agents spend their lives sorting through bad books to find the good ones – something the publisher is increasingly unable to find the time for. Also, many individuals in the industry simply prefer dealing with someone not too close to the writing.

Publishers feel they can be more honest, pragmatic and realistic about a book’s chances of success when talking to an intermediary. That way they don’t risk hurting a writer’s feelings. And in business terms, publishers feel more confident that the agent will understand how the money and contracts work.

Submission

To start submitting to agents and publishers you need to think in terms of having a “submission pack”

This will include the following:

1. Your introductory letter 2. Your biography

3. A short synopsis of your novel.

4. The first three chapters of your novel.

5. Return postage

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Intro Letter

This is the first thing your recipient will look at – it’s therefore imperative you make this slick, professional looking and in faultless English.

Always use clean white paper in A4 or quarto size. If your printer is not printing cleanly then get it fixed. Don’t send anything through the post you would not want to receive. Never use colored paper or weird fonts.

You need say very little. Any more than 100 words is excessive. Just introduce yourself, your book and mention that it is offered for publication. You might mention too why you think your book is especially relevant to the market place but be careful - this might be taken the wrong way. It is the recipient’s job to make those kinds of judgments and he/she might not take kindly to being lectured to.

As far as your intro letter’s content goes, take a look at the following example. Okay, it’s short to the point of abruptness but it does get all the necessary information across quickly and efficiently.

E O’Connell

Publishing Co Pty Ltd PO Box 0000

NY 0000

(Date)

Dear Emily,

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Please find enclosed a synopsis and sample chapters of my latest work,

“Title”

It’s a 115,000 word supernatural thriller, offered for publication.

I have also enclosed my biography.

If you’d like to see a full copy of the ms, I’d be very happy to send it to you with return postage.

There’s an SAE for your reply.

Many thanks for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Chadwick Author

www.pchadwick.com

A letter like this shows that you are professional and don’t like to waste anybody’s time. After all, Emily probably looks at a hundred of these letters a day. It’s pretty obvious to her what your letter was going to say, even before she opened the envelope.

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Unless you have something riveting to say, keep it short and sweet.

Never try to sell the book or your writing, or explain something you feel the reader should know first. If your manuscript doesn’t work on its own terms, without any prior introduction, you shouldn’t be sending it out!

Biography

This one page document will list all the main achievements in your life that have a relevancy to your writing. Don’t mention trivialities like your jobs or hobbies unless they have a specific bearing on your fiction. For instance, if your lead character is a postman, and you are too, it might be worth mentioning – though it’s not imperative.

However, if you’re a politician or a celebrity, it’s definitely worth mentioning.

Famous names carry great weight in the publishing industry nowadays.

Celebrities can sell their shopping lists. The rest of us have it a little harder.

In your biography, mention your successes. List any writing competitions you might have won (however minor) and anything at all you might have had published. Remember that one page is sufficient.

Any more looks like bragging.

The object here is not to blind your reader with your accomplishments.

The idea is to make your novel seem like a natural extension of your life – and that you are more than qualified to tell a good story well.

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Agents like to know where your manuscripts have been. They don’t like surprises when calling someone in the industry about your work. It’s best to list previous relationships with publishers and agents even if the relationship didn’t work out for the best.

Amateurs tend to list their achievements chronologically like a work CV. In the creative field, this can look bad if you have great gaps where you seem to have achieved nothing in your writing. The more professional you become, the shorter the descriptions of your achievements you need. Hence, even if you’re not hugely successful, it makes sense to appear so – by keeping your biog short and punchy. Like this:

Sandra Midden is a popular crime prevention speaker in her hometown of Penley Bush, Arkansas. Her short story, “The Midnight Cuckoo” won the 1999 Wheatsheaf Prize. When not looking after her three young children – and her husband - she writes detective fiction based on her close relationship with the local police department. She is also a keen collector of political memorabilia.

You’ll notice that the biography is written in the third person – a common technique I would recommend.

Synopsis

Most writers consider this the hardest thing they’ll ever have to do – that is, break down their novel to its key elements and summarize them into less than 2000 words. Even this is considered long. Movie synopses –

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used to generate millions of dollars - are generally less than 200 words long.

For a reasonably complex novel I would recommend no more than around 750 words. This is short, I know, but the reality is that your synopsis will probably be read by many more individuals at publishing houses than your manuscript. It’s therefore important to make it snappy, well paced and a riveting read.

Many writers are completely stumped when it comes to writing synopses. They don’t know what to leave in, what to omit, whether to tell the ending, leave out minor characters and sub plots… the list goes on.

If you’ve written you book ‘the easy way’ you should now be able to go back to your original ‘10-point plan’ for your novel. I would recommend you use this as a starting point, rather than doing a synopsis from scratch. (See “The Easy Way to Write a Novel”, Part Two.)

Contrary to what you might think, the purpose of a synopsis is not to tell the story of your novel. If it does that too, all well and good. However, the main purpose of a synopsis is to get people interested in your work.

Books are bought and sold on their synopses. The sad fact is, people don’t have time to read whole novels nowadays, especially in the publishing industry.

The synopsis will be the ‘pitch’ that will do the rounds of the publishers’

marketing meetings. If it’s good and passes the scrutiny of the meeting’s attendees, it will then go to the editorial department and on the strength of the synopsis alone, a real live editor might read your first three chapters.

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So – how’s it done?

You’ve read the backs of paperbacks? Of course you have. Find one now and take a look. Okay. The truth of it? The blurb there is often written by marketing and copywriting people that have never read the book, although they probably have read the synopsis and been at meetings where the book was discussed.

In order to write the ‘pitch’, they pick up pertinent elements of the book they think will grab a potential readers attention, and write a compelling précis.

For your synopsis, that’s what you need to do.

Imagine you’re making a movie promo.

You want excitement, suspense, intrigue… and you want to get it across in the shortest time possible. Most of all you want a sense of anticipation. You want to make the reader feel the next most important thing their life is to read your book. They cannot go on without it!

You need to set up questions in the reader’s mind – quickly – questions they cannot possibly answer without flicking back to page one and reading your book.

When you’re telling the story of your novel, remember that you need a sense of urgency. You cannot waste a single word. Remove qualifiers and unnecessary adverbs, write in the present tense to achieve immediacy, and tell the whole story. It’s cheating to have a cliffhanger in a synopsis.

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The three main elements you need to get across in your synopsis are theme, characters and plot. The theme can be stated outright. The pursuit of money causes grief. Murder has consequences unforeseen. Duty cannot be resolved with love. Whatever.

Then get your characters in - early. Describe who is in your book, their motivations and the obstacles to their agendas. How do the characters interact? Tell what exciting things happen when they get together and start telling the story – succinctly, with passion and enthusiasm.

Keep going, building the excitement, the sense of jeopardy and urgency until you reach the climax.

When you’ve finished, re-read your synopsis several times. The golden rule is: if it’s boring, chop it out, even if it’s just a word or a phrase. If it reads slow, get rid of it!

Your synopsis should be a roller-coaster read: fun, thrilling, and nail-bitingly exciting.

The First Three Chapters

There is no rigid rule about how much you send of your manuscript, except that 99% of the industry doesn’t want the whole thing. Don’t be disheartened by this. It works in your favor. Mailing manuscripts is expensive. Sending just a section is much cheaper.

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Three chapters is the industry standard. It doesn’t have to be the first three but if you’ve written a good book, the most compelling storytelling should be at

the beginning of your novel. If you find you are scratching around looking for good bits, you might need to review your entire manuscript!

If your chapters are very long – say 25,000 words or so, then just one or two chapters will be enough. Most editors won’t read more than a few pages anyway. After all, how long does it take you to realize if you like a book or a writer? About a page and half probably, slightly less if the story seems a little obscure or slow.

Remember that the only person who will read the whole of your actual manuscript is an editor – and this person is usually not the person you send your submission to.

It works like this. A submissions editor, let’s call her Jane, screens out about every 99 submissions in every 100. She’ll send out all the rejection letters. The 1 in 100 Jane thinks has potential she will send to an editor, say a guy called Derek. He is the real live person who edits and proofreads books for a living.

Note this, because it’s important. Unless Derek is overridden by a publishing house director or by the marketing department, it is Derek who will decide whether your novel is worthy of his time and attention, and therefore whether it will be published.

Bear in mind that Derek is probably a frustrated writer who thinks he could have written whatever you have done better. Your work literally needs to shine like a beacon to impress a guy like Derek.

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So make sure you have checked and rechecked everything a hundred times on the pages you submit. Spelling, grammar, formatting, sense, nonsense, themes, characters, plotting, foreshadowing – everything should be as perfect as you can get it. Don’t worry that the rest of the manuscript isn’t up to the same standard – you can worry about that later – when they’ve offered you a deal! Seriously…

Don’t let the idea of ‘Derek’ intimidate you. Think about it. If he knew what sold and what didn’t, he’d be writing best-selling novels himself.

The fact is most best sellers spring out of the blue – nobody can predict them. Really – absolutely nobody! The trick is to play the game and do what every self-respecting author does: cross your fingers and hope like hell your book becomes flavor of the month – this month!

The more books you write, of course, the more chance you have of achieving this end. The best advice is, after each book, send out your submissions and get back to writing. Don’t leave it too long before the next book – you need to get your juices flowing quickly otherwise you’ll start to worry. And, as I

point out in “The Easy Way to Write A Novel” worrying is the worst thing a writer can do.

So don’t give yourself the chance. Just write.

Return postage

It seems absurd in the 21^st Century that so many publishers insist on paper submissions and then proceed to send them back to you!

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Apparently, there is a copyright issue here. If a writer can prove that a publisher once held an electronic version of his or her book and the publisher subsequently publishes a book similar, the complainant, assuming the writer takes them to court, is likely to win the case.

It’s a mistake to get paranoid about it but ideas do get ‘recycled’ all the time. A publishing person might take on board your idea – only to reject it - and then completely unwittingly be open to the very same idea from someone else.

Unless a publisher is blatantly plagiarizing an author’s work, there’s very little a new writer can do about this. Even copyrighting your material won’t help you - before you’re famous.

On the positive side, your material is theoretically copyrighted from the moment it leaves your head. Try not to worry about plagiarism.

Certainly don’t let it stop you writing and submitting. It’s pointless to lose sleep over having your ideas poached. It happens – or sometimes just appears that way.

Besides, it’s not all about ideas anyway. Good writing is about how you

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