The (Very) Long Road to A Published Book
The year was 2011. The day was some day midweek, and the place was inside my friend’s car on the way to Beverly Hills. Naturally there was stop and go traffic, the worst. It was Los Angeles, after all. We were discussing books and writing.
“We should write a book together,” I said. My friend is hilarious and I think I have a decent sense of humor. “It would be so funny! Maybe a young adult book.”
“Yes! Let’s do it,” she said. And why not? We came up with a very commercial concept for a story.
We volleyed ideas back and forth and suggested plots and characters and names. By time we headed back home later that day, we had a rough sketch of a young adult novel that would be set in the luxurious town of Bel Air with two glamorous teens at the center of a scandal. Inspired by our love for all things Real Housewives and Bravo TV, we gave our story a reality show angle.
Kristen and I got together, note pads in hand, Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat beat sheet in front of us, taking notes and jotting down suggestions, ultimately piecing together a coherent story. For months, we took turns writing chapters.
It was a lot of fun to let my imagination go and write with instant feedback from my writing partner. Thankfully, we worked well together and since we had a basic outline, we didn’t stray far from what we originally planned. The writing was easy. When the manuscript was complete, the real work began.
In case you aren’t a writer or author, what comes after finishing the book is the hard part. You have to comb through your story and with a metaphoric machete, you hack away excess words and poor grammar and sentences, sometimes paragraphs, you take away characters. You have to be brutal. Yes you spend hours, days, weeks, months, on writing and with a few bangs on the delete key, your words are washed away but you remind yourself, it’s for the good of the story.
When you’ve edited your manuscript, you create what’s called a query letter and send it to agents. A query is a letter of introduction where you explain the basic premise of your book and who you are and hope the agent likes what you’ve said and finds your book idea fascinating. Hopefully the next step is the agent writing and asking to see a sample of your book.
In a perfect world, the agent will read your glorious manuscript over a weekend and call you first thing on a Monday morning to discuss your masterpiece and by the end of the day, you sign with them. In this dream, publishers will battle for what will be a bestseller and you will receive a huge check for your brilliance.
In this fantasy, within a year, your novel will be in the window of every book store in America and a movie deal will be on the table with a major celebrity attached to produce and star in the adaptation of your work. You will be whisked off the the Academy Awards because the film will be so incredible that it will be nominated for multiple awards, all because of the words in your brain tumbled out on to the page and created a work of art that is too stupendous to be ignored.
This is rare but I’ve read (and often dreamed) of it happening.
More than likely, you will receive a note that says, “Thanks, but no thanks!”
Rejection is cruel. It’s harsh. It’s especially crushing for those sensitive artistic souls like myself. From the time I began writing books in the early 2000’s to now, I have more than enough rejection letters to wallpaper my house five times, maybe six.
But I digress.
The query thing is a process. I am a researcher, so I spent a lot of time making lists of agents who represent Young Adult books. Every agent has their preferences and you are setting yourself up for failure if you send a query letter for your YA book to someone who only represents Adult Horror novels or non-fiction books about the stock market.
If you want to be thorough (I recommend you be thorough), you narrow down the list of agents who work with your genre, then you find each agent online and figure out what novels they’ve worked with previously, and you ask yourself if they would like your book.
At this point, you send out query letters and sample chapters and wait. Sometimes the turnaround is quick, a day later and you get a response but more often than not, it takes months and months.
Waiting and waiting.
The Blondes of Bel Air, despite what we thought of as a marketable plot and a catchy title, did not immediately get signed by an agent and receive a huge deal from a major publisher. I guess I was delusional thinking it would happen quickly.
It took months before an agent signed us. The wait was worth it though, we were so thrilled to sign with an agent and thought for sure that big, dreamy book deal was around the corner.
It wasn’t.
Per our agent’s instructions, we edited and rewrote the book. We changed the plot once or twice and then changed it back again.
Years passed.
Yes, years. The bottle of champagne I bought to celebrate the book deal that never happened grew stale and flat.
My kids grew up and got their drivers licenses and graduated high school in the time it took to write and sell this book.
Eventually we decided to part ways with our agent. We weren’t sure if our novel was a priority for her or were we sitting on the back-burner for the last few years? I didn’t understand how or why the book hadn’t found a home, not only did we have this first book complete, but a second was written and a third was planned. We were not a one trick pony with a single story to tell. Our Blondes series had potential to keep going: multiple books, a TV show or movie, product tie-ins, we were stumped as to why a publisher didn’t see what we thought to be a sure hit.
Rejection is humbling. Maybe it wasn’t as amazing as we believed it to be, but surely it wasn’t a dud. Either way, it was time to take matters into our own hands and see if we could get a deal on our own.
Months passed yet again.
Many publishers, especially the really big ones, won’t look at a query letter, let alone a manuscript without an agent. We set our sights on small independent publishers because at this point, we wanted our book published and out in the world.
Both of us were frustrated, tired of waiting for this book to find a home.
We sent lots of query letters to small publishers and finally, FINALLY, we got an offer from Black Rose Writing. We signed the contract, excited our story would get out into the world before we qualified for the AARP. The best part was that our book would be published within a few months.
Publishing with a small publisher lacks the resources of an enormous publishing company with loads of advertising and marketing dollars. The Blondes of Bel Air won’t get a page in People magazine or a mention in Entertainment Weekly, it won’t have full page advertisements in the papers or on the sidebars of popular blogs. I know getting the word out about our book will be a challenge, much like finding it a home was a challenge. No one said making dreams come true is easy.
If you are writer with goals of becoming a published author, I want to encourage you to never give up and keeping moving forward. The road might be long and tough and filled with potholes and detours, but you can do it even if you have to do things differently than others.
You can self publish (Amazon makes this easy), publish an e-book via Kindle (I’ve done this), you can pay to have your book printed by what’s called a ‘vanity press’ or you can post chapters of your book on a blog and have your blog audience read your book, I think this is how The Martian initially got attention and look how that became a major movie. There’s always the smaller publishers, more and more are popping up each week because there’s such a demand for non traditional routes to getting a book published.
Time goes by no matter if a book is sitting on your computer or sitting in the hands of an agent. The months slip away and the years pile up and if you want to do something then I am telling you to DO IT NOW.
Do it yourself. Take control and make it happen!
