The Road to Publication - PT. 1
Ah, traditional publication! Cue the heavenly chorus! What greater music is there to an aspiring author?
The steep, craggy road to publishing a book began for me in February of 2020. That’s when, after almost ten years of writing ‘The Binding of Siltari’, I began to seriously pitch it to publishers.
Of course, like a good little author, I didn’t just throw it about. I read and researched for months before sending those carefully crafted query letters. I listed publishers and agents, found out who they’d represented and tried to do a little personality sleuthing to see if they might be a good match. I found good reasons to approach each one of them and tailored my letters, accordingly. And, lucky me, I heard back from a whole five of those thirteen queries.
Seeing that first, unread reply in my inbox was a thrill — until I opened it. There, in line two, were the words, “Unfortunately, the story is not what I’m looking for, right now.”
I remember sitting straight and blinking. Not what she was looking for, right now? Alright, well, when would she be looking for it?
I was never to find out. The email ended with a cut-and-copy line wishing me all the best for the future, (in fact, on second look, the entire email might have been cut-and-copied…) and this response set the general tone for all the others I eventually received.
But my book was good, wasn’t it? Great, Auntie Nelly’s Chocolate Drops, I’d worked so hard on it! It wasn’t something I’d banged out in a month. I’d kept my expo trim! My dialogue was punchy! My character arcs drove the story, damnit! Robert McKee, how had I failed you!?
I mean, I wasn’t going to have to…self-publish, was I?
I shuddered.
No. I had worked too hard and had too much pride for that, damnit! Nobody should be subjected to such indignity. The self-publishing world was a latrine, wasn't it? A fail-party, where the armies of the unschooled and unfit poured their collective drivel. A world riddled with punctuation errors and poor-formatting…of cheap, fiverr-produced covers and prices, $2.99 and under…
No. I would never-…it was traditional publishing or nothing. I mean, J.K. Rowling! Remember how long she tried to get published? I certainly do. In every single supportive text-message I’ve received, over every single coffee-house chat, since then, nobody has let me forget it. And I’ve had to invent new expressions of gratefulness to deal with the inevitable reminders.