This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Submitting your novel to literary agents is a daunting business. There is no avoiding the fact that you’re sending your work out to be judged and that can be both frightening and painful.
I’ve been through the process a couple of times, and I can honestly say that it gets easier with practice. It helps, too, if you can remember that each agent (or publisher) is not judging (or rejecting) you as a person, they are making a business decision about your work based on the small sample they have seen.
Here are the tips I picked up along the way – I hope they are helpful.
First off, separate your ‘writing self’ from your ‘publishing self’. Your writing self is the one who put her heart and soul into creating the novel. It’s the self who thinks of the book as ‘her baby’ and who dreams of critical acclaim while being simultaneously terrified of revealing her writing to the harsh critical eye of the market.
Your publishing self is the business woman. The one who knows that publishing is an industry. Smart, book-obsessed people run that industry and they are all hoping to find the next ‘big thing’ but, equally, nobody knows what that will be. And, like any creative industry, the worth of the product is very much in the eye of the beholder. It’s subjective. Say that again (loudly) with your best, confident, business-self voice: ‘It. Is. Subjective’. (Don’t believe me? Go and look at the Amazon reviews for a recent bestseller or work of ‘classic’ fiction. Opinions will vary. Wildly.)
The next step is to expect rejection. I don’t say this to be discouraging, but quite the opposite; embrace your certain rejection. Pick a novel from your bookshelves and feel it in your hand. Know with utter certainty that both the book you are holding and the author who wrote it were rejected at some point.
The third step is this: Just do it. Much like writing the damn book in the first place, the only way to get through the fear of submission is to get started. Once you’ve got a few rejections under your belt and the sky hasn’t fallen onto your head and people aren’t stopping in the street to point and laugh, you will find it easier to continue.
So, a few practicalities. I’d advise sending out submissions in small batches. With the best will in the world, agents are super-busy and take an average of three months to respond. If you submit one at a time, the process will take forever.
Why not save even more time and submit to your entire (carefully researched) list of dream agents all at once? Well, small batches give you a chance to tweak your submission along the way.
If you’ve submitted to, say, ten agents, and you’ve received zero requests for the full manuscript, you might want to check over your submission package to see if it can be improved. Perhaps, on a second look, you realise that your first chapter isn’t as good as you originally thought and it really ought to be cut completely. Or, you discover that your covering letter opens with an embarrassingly ponderous sentence or a misspelled word (the horror!).
Finally, read the submission guidelines carefully and follow them.
Yes, really.
Yes, all of them.
Yes, every time.
Most agents ask for a covering letter, a synopsis and the first three chapters. Next time I’ll tackle the covering letter.