Tag: submissions

Posted on By jessmeats
  • 1 Comment

    • Submission response

    I’ve received what was effectively a “please wait” email about a short story I submitted recently. The place I submitted to want a specific number of stories and they’re waiting until the end of their submission period before they decide which ones they’re accepting, which makes sense.

    I’m not sure if they send out the same email to everyone about making the decision when the submission period closes or if they do a first round of reviewing the stories. I’m hoping the second, and I think it makes sense given that there was about a week between me submitting the story and receiving the response. It’s plausible that they go through initial submissions to divide into no and maybe piles, and then go through the maybes when they have all the submissions. In which case, it would mean that they read my story and didn’t reject it right away and I’m now in a short list pool.

    So I’m being optimistic about this story and its chances. Fingers crossed.

    Posted on By jessmeats
  • Leave a comment

    • Writing Update

    I’ve submitted a short story this weekend. It’s one I’m very proud of so I hope it is received well. This is the third time I’ve tried sending the story out. The first time, I received a form rejection, the second time I received a personalised rejection, so hopefully this continuing trend of improvement means that the third response will be an acceptance. Who knows? I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

    I have next week booked off work and since all my wonderful travel plans are cancelled due to plague, I intend to spend some of the time working on my writing. I have edits for the third book in the Shadows of Tomorrow trilogy to go through. Edits are never the most fun part of writing a book for me, but they are important so my plan is to spend some of every day working through those to get it done.

    I also have the second draft of the fourth Codename Omega book to finish. I’m nearly done, but there’s a plot thread from near the beginning that sort of trails off. I need to try and tidy that up a little bit before I let someone else read the story. This fourth book is a little different from the first three in the series in a way that was a lot of fun to write and that I hope will be a lot of fun for other people to read.

    I may not be able to use the time they way I’d intended, but at least I can use it productively, in between trying to get exercise despite social distancing restrictions. I’m trying to make the best of things, which is all we really can do.

    Posted on By jessmeats
  • Leave a comment

    • When I was at Eastercon, I had a conversation with David, my editor at Guardbridge books, about book submissions and the process from his perspective. I did a video interview on the subject for my YouTube channel, but there are a few points of advice I thought it was worth highlighting here.

    1. Send Your Book to the Right Publisher

    Guardbridge Books publish science fiction and fantasy, usually books that have something a little bit weird or different about them. Yet, I was told that they receive quite a lot of submissions from authors of Christian fiction. I once attended a talk by another editor who talked about how the publisher she worked for, which produced educational books and text books, received loads of fiction submissions despite the fact that their website and information clearly stated they didn’t publish fiction.

    If you submit a book to a publisher that doesn’t publish your type of book, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. These days, a lot of publishers accept electronic submissions, but you might also be wasting paper, printer ink, and postage if you submit your manuscript physically. When you’re sending your book out to publishers, do a little bit of research to find out what publishers are likely to be interested. Check who publishes books that are similar in style to the one you’ve written. Don’t waste time sending your book out to publishers that will never in a million years publish it.

    1. Read the Instructions

    Pretty much all publishers have submissions guidelines on their website. These include information on how to approach them (inquiry email, sample chapters, full manuscript) as well as information on the formatting they’re looking for. Most publishers like double-spaced, left-justified, 12 point font, and things like that, but once in a while, you’ll come across a publisher that has a particular format they want to see. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t follow their guidelines.

    There are similar variations when it comes to synopses. Some publishers want a 1 page synopsis, some a 2 page, or 2-3 page. Some will ask for 1000 words or 500 words. And so on. When I was sending my first novel out on submission, it felt like every publisher had their own rules for how long the synopsis should be.

    You want to follow the guidelines of the publisher you’re submitting to. After all, if you can’t read their instructions, why should they trust you to write?

    1. Proof-read your submission

    This was one that David didn’t mention in the video, but he did mention to me afterwards. The submission doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect, especially since editing and proof-reading is part of the publishing process, but one thing an editor is going to do when looking at a submission is think, “How much effort is this going to take to get ready for publication?” A first page that has two or three typos in it is probably fine. A first page with two hundred is another matter entirely.

    If the editor looks at your story and it seems like you don’t understand how to punctuate speech or spell common words, they’re likely to think that your book will take significant effort. If your book is absolutely mind-blowing in other ways, you might get away with it, but you are definitely stacking the odds against you. Publishers put a lot of time and effort into getting a book ready to be released into the world, and the more you can do to convince them it won’t be a trial, the more likely they are to be interested in your book.

    Check out the video for the other suggestions and comments David had about the submissions process from an editor’s perspective, and good luck with your publication efforts.

    Posted on By jessmeats
  • 2 Comments

    • The Submission Grinder

    If you write short fiction or poetry, I want to share a wonderful resource with all of you: The Submission Grinder.

    This website stores a lot of information on a huge list of magazines, publishers, anthologies and writing contents, and it’s all searchable. There’s an advanced search page that lets you put in details about the story you’ve written, like its genre and its length, and the website will give you a list of places that accept submissions of that type. You can add a bunch of other qualifiers into your search – like whether the place accepts simultaneous submissions, whether it takes print or electronic submissions, or even what the minimum pay you’re interested in is.

    The website also stores information on how long it takes for various publications to respond to submissions and how many of those responses were rejections or acceptance. Each publication has graphs about this data so you can see visually how long you can probably expect to wait to hear back from the place you’re submitting to.

    You get access to the search capabilities without having to sign up, but if you do become a member, you can also use the site to track your own submission history (something I’ve previously been doing in Excel files). You can log in a submission every time you send a story out and track the response, adding to the massive pool of data that the story contains, as well as having a log for your own purposes so you know exactly where you’ve sent your work before. As you start entering this information, you begin to get a dashboard that shows you how many stories you’ve submitted and what the responses have been, which stories have done well or badly, and even how much you’ve been paid.

    While the submission tracking information is useful, this is stuff I’ve been doing for myself anyway, so this isn’t massively important to me personally, but the search capabilities are amazingly useful. This site is a brilliant resource if you’re trying to figure out where to submit your work.

    Enjoy, and best of luck with your story and fiction submissions.

    Posted on By jessmeats
  • Leave a comment

    • Submissions

    A couple of days ago, I was on the train and near to where I was sitting, a mother and daughter were having a conversation. I wasn’t deliberately eavesdropping, but I couldn’t help overhearing some of their conversation and at one point they started talking about the fact they were both writers aspiring to get published. The mother was talking about sending the work to agents. She said a few things that made me want to jump across the carriage to correct. I couldn’t do so at the time because it was a crowded train and there were people sitting between us, as well as it being awkward to just barge into someone else’s conversation.

    But I’ve been thinking about that conversation and the things I might have said if I’d been sitting right next to them.

    The woman said at one point that you don’t need to have a completed book to go out and hunt for an agent or a publisher. She said that you send out a synopsis and sample chapter but don’t need to have the rest of the book finished.

    There is a grain of truth to what she said. When you submit a book for consideration, you do send out samples rather than the whole thing. Most publishers ask for the first three chapters and a synopsis (a summary of the whole book) but this can vary. Some publishers ask for a number of words or a number of pages instead, and the length of the synopsis can vary (500 word, 1000 words, 1000-2000 words, 2-3 pages, 1 page, etc.). If you are sending your book out, it’s vital that you check the submission guidelines of the publisher or agency you are approaching and tailor your submission according.

    The main point I would question though is her assertion that you don’t need to have the book finished. If you are working on a fiction book, you should have the book completed before you send the samples out. There are a few different reasons for this. The first is simply: what will you do if they say yes? If you send out your three sample chapters and an agency or publisher comes back and says they like it, you have to be ready to send the rest of the book. You don’t want to get a positive response but have to go back and say that you’re only halfway through writing the book. The publisher is not going to wait.

    The other big reason is that books change over the course of writing them. When I started writing Child of the Hive, Rachel wasn’t a character. I didn’t plan on her at all. I just needed someone to interact with Alex and Will at one point and I gave her a name. But then she kept coming back… and developed a crush on Drew… and insisted on being part of the plot. By the second half of the book, the story doesn’t work without her and I had to go and write her back into the opening chapters so that she wouldn’t just appear out of nowhere. If I had submitted the story when I’d only written the first three chapters, the synopsis and opening I sent would have only vaguely resembled the finished book. I had some major changes with Shadows of Tomorrow too. When I started that book, Cassie was the main character, but I realised a few chapters in that Gareth was the one making all the decisions and participating in all the action. I completely rewrote the opening chapters to focus on him as the main character to avoid confusing people as to who was the protagonist. Maybe writers who stick more closely to their initial plans than me won’t have this issue, but I wouldn’t be able to submit opening chapters at the start of the writing process because I would need to completely change them at a later point when the story changed.

    A related point to this is that you shouldn’t submit the first draft of your book. When writing, you should go through different drafts. For me, the first draft is about getting the bones of the story down, working out the rough flow, and getting the plot sorted out. The second draft is about fixing the plot holes, making sure the whole thing hangs together, and, where necessary, inserting new characters into the beginning because they refused to get out of the story. The third draft is then all about tidying up. This is where I improve confusing sections, cut the boring bits, and fix the wording in places where it’s a bit awkward. I also attempt to hunt typos but I struggle with this. I only submit the story after all of this.

    What you send to a publisher or agent should be the best book you can possibly make it and that means revising the book before you send it off. Not everyone needs three drafts. Some people who spend more time on the planning stages can probably do it in two because they have less plot hole hunting to do, but the fact remains that you still have to work on the story before it goes out. Just because the publishers and agents only ask for the opening of the book in a submission, it doesn’t mean you should submit when you’ve only written that far.

    You might have noticed though that I specified ‘fiction book’ near the start of this post. The rules are slightly different when submitting a non-fiction book. Usually, you will submit sample chapters along with some information about the book (the target audience, what it’s similar to, what its unique selling point is, etc.) and a breakdown of what you will cover (similar to the synopsis). When submitting a non-fiction book, what you are submitting is a proposal for a book you intend to write. You don’t necessarily have to have finished writing it in this case, but as before, check the guidelines on the website of whatever publisher or agency you are thinking of sending your submission to.

    Posted on By jessmeats
  • Leave a comment

    • Submitting your novel

    If you want to be an author, writing the book is only part of the book. You might have written an amazing story, but that means nothing if you can’t convince agents and editors to look at it. If you want to be traditionally published, you still have to go through the work of submitting the book to publishers and agencies. Here are a few top tips and things to think about when submitting your book. Some of these are based on my own experiences, some are based on advice I’ve heard from agents and editors over the years.

    Send to the right place

    I was at a talk once by an editor who worked with non-fiction children’s books. The publisher she worked for only produced educational books, but she said they still got hundreds and hundreds of submissions of fiction. Those were a waste of time for everyone involved because it didn’t matter how good those stories might have been, they were never going to get published by someone that didn’t publish stories. Pay attention to what the publisher does and doesn’t accept. If they have a big notice on their website saying that they don’t accept science fiction and fantasy submissions, there’s no point submitting your sci-fi novel. If they only publish romance, there’s no point sending your horror. You are basically guaranteed to be rejected if you send the book to the wrong place.

    Most places accept electronic submissions these days, but you used to have to print out sample chapters and post them in, which meant each submission cost actual money to send. Now, you don’t waste money in the same way, but you’ll waste your time and the publishers. Better to focus on finding a publisher who does print the sort of stories you’re sending them.

    Spend time on the cover letter

    When you send in a submission, you send it with a covering letter or email. Some books get rejected here if the cover letter makes it sound like the book isn’t particularly interesting or isn’t what the publisher is looking for. Take your time to craft a description of the book that explains the key concepts, genre, and target audience of your book in a few short sentences. You don’t need to explain all the intricacies of the plot in the cover letter, but you need to explain how it’s going to be marketed. You want someone to read your description and think, “Yes, I’d be able to sell a book like that.”

    Keep your cover letter short, describe your book in a way that makes it sound interesting, explain who would be likely to buy your book, and then proofread the whole thing at least five times. I’m serious about this last part. You don’t want to be rejected because of a typo in your first sentence.

    Get someone to check your synopsis

    When you submit a novel, you almost always have to send a summary of the plot. This is called the synopsis and it describes the key events that happen in the book from start to finish. Different publishers and agents provide different guidelines for how long your synopsis should be – 1 page, 2-3 pages, 500 words, 1000 words, etc. You may end up writing your synopsis several times to fit with all these different submission guidelines. I always find this incredibly difficult because there’s so much that happens in a book and it’s hard to know what to cut out. As well, you need to create a synopsis that’s coherent. Again, this is something I struggle with because I know all the background and everything that I’m leaving out, so something will make perfect sense to me while it’s thoroughly confusing for someone else. When I’m submitting a story, I will get someone to check the synopsis for me. It’s important that this is someone who hasn’t read the book because they will be in the same situation at the person to whom you’re submitting the story with no prior background knowledge. They will be able to spot any points where you’re assuming knowledge the reader doesn’t have.

    This is not a definitive list of advice, but hopefull this will help you out if you’re at a point where you’re sending your story off to publishers. Good luck.