The Hardest Truth You’ll Have to Accept As a First-Time Novelist
So you wrote your first book; congratulations! You’ve accomplished something many people never do and you deserve every ounce of pride you’re feeling right now. Make sure you take your time to revel in it because I’m here to be the bearer of bad news. The truth is, you’ll probably never score a publishing deal for your first book.
The numbers don’t lie; only about 1–2% of books that cross an acquisition editor’s desk are picked up for publication, and keep in mind that’s 1–2% of agented books. The average odds of getting picked up by an agent are about 1 in 6,000. Yes, six thousand. That means, statistically, each book written has barely a ten-thousandth of a percent chance of getting published. Or to put it another way, about two out of every million books written receive publication from a large publisher. Yeah.
Of course, these numbers assume every book has an equal chance of getting published, which is not the case in the real world. A well-written book with a word count that falls in line with the majority of the genre and caters to current trends, presented with an interesting, attention-grabbing query letter has a far better chance of being picked up than a rambling memoir that’s double the expected word count attached to a poorly written query. But let’s assume you have a beautifully written, reasonable length novel in a popular genre.
What can you do to improve your odds at the querying stage? There’s really only one answer: have more books to query. There’s no harm in continuing to perfect and polish your first novel, but there is harm in doing so at the expense of future writing projects. I recently completed my first draft of my first novel and while I edit and rewrite I’ve already started outlining my next book with the assumption that this one will not sell to a publisher. If your first novel is your magnum opus and you’re prepared to dedicate your life to getting it traditionally published that’s perfectly fine. But for most people, their goal is to get a book out there as quickly as possible. And as counter-intuitive as it seems, the quickest way to get published is to write an entirely new book. And then another, and another.
That isn’t to say you shouldn’t query your first book or two. If you’re looking for an agent you absolutely should query every book you hope to publish. But with every book you increase your odds. You stake out a piece of the querying world that’s just a little bit larger, raise your chances just a little that you’ve written the perfect book for the perfect agent.
There is, of course, another, non-statistical reason you should keep writing books if you hope to get published: every book you write will, in theory, be better than the last. Many seasoned authors look back on their unpublished first book and cringe because they’ve changed and improved so much as a writer. No matter how long you’ve been writing in other forms, a novel is a different beast that requires an entirely different set of skills and the best way to hone those skills is to practice, practice, practice.
Now, of course, this applies only if you’re looking to query agents and get traditionally published. If your goal is self-publishing, while you have your work cut out for you, it’s perfectly possible with enough effort and marketing to successfully self-publish your first novel. But if your dreams lie with scoring that all-too-coveted contract, the sooner you realize that being married to the idea of selling one specific book is holding you back, the sooner you’ll be able to increase your chances of publishing.
