Posted on 14th December, 2023
How I Got Published
I once read a very harsh review of a first novel in a national newspaper, thankfully, not mine. Let’s call the author of the book in question John Doe. The headline on the review was, “Everyone thinks they have a novel in them. Unfortunately, John Doe’s got out.”
This sums up nicely the widespread belief that anyone can write a novel. Not true. They’re harder than you might think and most people don’t have the ability, or the staying power, to write eighty to a hundred thousand words, let alone make it a coherent, original story that will engage a reader.
The next misconception is that, if the book is good enough, and you persevere enough, it will eventually get published. Also, not true. Publishers like to say it to aspiring authors because, well, they’re in the business of encouraging writers, aren’t they? They want people to write books because that’s the product they sell and they need something to fill the pipeline. Don’t they?
Wrong. They have enough books already coming to them from established authors and agents, and they don’t need yours. They don’t want it, in fact, whatever they say.
Two anecdotes to illustrate this:
Many years ago, when I was living and working in Rome, I met an American writer who had started work after college with a major New York publishing house. As a new, entry-level employee, he was given what was regarded as the lowest, least rewarding job in the company: he was put in charge of the unsolicited manuscripts sent in by wannabe writers – and you can tell how much those submissions are valued by the derogatory term they’re given across the whole publishing trade: The Slush Pile.
His instructions were quite clear. On no account was he to read any of the manuscripts. His job was to open the envelopes, riffle through the pages to give the impression that someone had read them, then put the manuscript back in the post to the author. He was also in charge of what was known as “The Crazy Line.” This was the phone extension to which the switchboard diverted all the calls from unknown authors and his job was to fob them off and stop them bothering anyone else in the company.
Second anecdote:
At the beginning of my own career – in the 1980s – when I was trying to work out how the publishing business worked, I went to a seminar at a literary festival entitled something like “How to get your first novel published.” Two of the speakers were from Faber and Faber and they did their best to make out that they were entirely open to submissions from new authors. I smelt a rat and at the end I managed to ask a question: how many manuscripts from the Slush Pile had they published in recent years? The answer, after a long, embarrassed silence and a brief conferral, was, “Probably not a single one since William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.” Which was published in 1954.
That might reflect how bad the submissions were, of course, but it might also reflect how hard they were looking at them.
So how did I get published?
The short answer: the hard way.
I was twenty-four when I quit my job as a journalist and went to Venice to write my first novel – a typical young person’s story about love and loss, low on plot, high on literary pretensions (it has long since been dumped in the bin, but was almost certainly rubbish). Coming back to England, I sent it off to numerous publishers and got rejected by every one (those that replied, anyway; most didn’t even respond). Did they read the manuscript? Looking back, knowing what I now know, I doubt it.
I then wrote another book, then another, then another… All were turned down by publishers. Five rejected manuscripts on, I finally got a book accepted.
How? First thing, I went on an Arvon Foundation writing course.
(If you’ve not come across it before, the Arvon Foundation is a charity that runs short residential creative writing courses at several centres around the UK.)
By this stage, I was pretty disillusioned with novel writing so I went on a screenwriting course, thinking that might open up more opportunities for me. The course was held at Lumb Bank, near Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, a large, country house that once belonged to the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. There were two tutors on the course: the writer, Andrew Davies, who was relatively unknown then but has since become famous for his TV adaptations of classic novels, and a successful TV producer named Susi Hush – who died tragically young, but a lovely, generous woman to whom I owe a massive debt.
Susi liked some of the work I did on the course and, afterwards, introduced me to a screenwriting agent at one of London’s leading literary agencies. I began writing scripts for television and film and, when I wrote another novel – my first Mike McLean thriller, An Exceptional Corpse – my agent gave it to one of the book agents at the agency and he sold it to HarperCollins.
The moral of this story: get yourself an agent.
Agents control the writing business, whether that’s book publishing, or film and television scripts. Without one, it’s going to be a struggle to get anyone to even read your work, let alone buy it. But getting an agent isn’t easy. They’re busy people, mostly with long lists of existing clients. Their default position regarding new writers is to say “No”.
So what do you do? Keep trying, but if it’s not working, there are other routes into publishing now. You can self-publish. Many very successful authors do. But that’s another story.