Chapter One: The Short Course in Steps toward Getting Published
You took the creative writing classes, studied grammar and punctuation, read incessantly, wrote enough prose to insulate your attic, had your early stories and novel manuscripts canonized in writers’ groups, devised the really brilliant story plot, and wrote a guaranteed blockbuster novel manuscript. And now you are ready to select from among a large gaggle of New York publishers panting to put your book into print. Right? Well, not exactly.
The really fun part is behind you. Now, if you want to share your novel beyond your household of incredulous spouse, totally uninterested children, and I’ll-love-you-no-matter-how-crazy-you-are cocker spaniel, you face a big dose of reality among thundering hordes of other wishful book authors who also want to see their babies in print.
So, where do you go from here? (Approximately) as Bette Davis said, "Hold onto your hats, boys, it’s going to be a bumpy ride." Here’s one version of the short course in moving your manuscript to printed book.
Aren't We Ready to Start Selling the Manuscripts?
No, you’re not ready—at least not fully ready—to start submitting your manuscript to a big New York publishing house yet. This holds for all but three or four of you out there with a particularly well-connected guardian angel sitting on your shoulder.
First, did you really take those creative writing and advanced grammar and punctuation classes you were advised to take? Did you really read and write until the post office started delivering your personal mail to the local library? When you had stories and story lines that you were really proud of, did you really have other knowledgeable people tear the concepts and contents apart and help you put them back together again? And when others who were not related to you by blood or PTA service or who did not owe money to you were finally applauding your novel or your "how-to macramé-with-just-your-thumbs" manuscript, did you have an English-language (or, better, a publishing) specialist other than yourself edit the manuscript? If you didn’t do at least some combination of these, you have a slight chance of having your work satisfactorily published—but a whole lot less of a chance than those who built the proper foundation for publishing their material.
If you want to save a lot of grief, build that proper foundation before harboring the fantasies of having your work published.
Second, even if your novel or "crashing-for-dummies" manuscript is polished and pristine and gives you no urges to dive into page 150 to change that comma to a semicolon (or that hero to a villain), you have miles to go before you should start wondering who to contact to offer the chance of a lifetime to publish your book. You should now sit down and compose several accompanying documents for your manuscript text. If your book is fiction, now is the time to write a synopsis, biography, cover blurb, marketing plan, and query letter to go with the completed and polished manuscript. If your book is nonfiction, your manuscript need not be fully completed and you can make do with a detailed outline rather than a synopsis, but you also will need a proposal.
Most writers only put together the query letter at this stage, but both agents and publishers will come back for the rest sooner (if you’re lucky enough to evoke interest in your project quickly) or later and will not be impressed if you don’t have them ready. More important than this, however, researching and composing these documents before you start looking for a literary agent and/or publisher for your book will help you ensure that your book really is as focused and marketable as possible.
• The query letter: The query letter is the single most important sales tool to get the agent/publisher to read your manuscript. The bottom line is to try to find out how the targeted agent or publisher prefers to be approached in a query letter—they usually include this information in a submissions guidelines area of their Web site and/or the various annual guides on agents and publishers—and then use that approach. Yes, this will mean that many of your submissions have to be tailored to the specific target.
The query letter provides the pitch for your book, so it should identify the book’s genre and approximate wordage (the computer program’s "properties" statistics will do fine). It should also include a paragraph on what your book is about and information on who it’s targeted to, why the agent/publisher must buy it, and what your background is to make you the most qualified person to have written it. The letter most often should not be over one page, single-spaced, with an extra return between paragraphs, and in a business-letter format, font, and font size. Agents and publishers are increasingly accepting queries by e-mail, but some are touchy about this, so it’s best to be sure it’s OK before using this mode. Discussions on and examples of good sample query letters can be found at/in:
The annual Writer’s Market (as well as other specialized books published by Writer’s Digest)
Jeff Herman’s annual Writer’s Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents
• The Proposal: Unlike fiction manuscripts (which should be completed before the author starts to query agents and/or publishers), nonfiction, more often than not, is sold on the basis of the concept and a description of the content of the book and one or two sample chapters. These concept elements are written up in the proposal. First-time authors are more likely to be expected to have most if not all of the manuscript completed before submitting than those who have previously published nonfiction. For help in writing up a proposal, consult Elizabeth Lyon’s Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write. For online help in writing such a proposal, see Patricia L. Fry’s "The Nonfiction Book Proposal: Put Your Best Foot Forward" at the Writing-World.com Web site at http://www.writing-world.com/publish/proposal.shtml or "How to Write a Great Non-Fiction Book Proposal" at the Robert E. Shepherd Agency Web site, http://www.shepardagency.com/writing_proposals.html.
• The synopsis: The synopsis is a thumbnail sketch for your book. It should be written in third person, omniscient style, and present tense and normally should be no longer than a couple of single-spaced pages (with an extra space between paragraphs to ease reading). Some agents or publishers request a fuller synopsis, however, and books covering this topic frequently suggest a longer synopsis length of 1 synopsis page for every 25 pages of text (and a longer synopsis such as this should be double spaced). It should include all of the major turning points in your book (not any of the nitty-gritty detail) and should lay out the whole plot plan (no coyness about who did what to whom and why). If you find you simply can’t write a clear two- or three-page synopsis (and most authors believe this is tougher to do than writing the book itself was), then there may still be structural problems with your book; it may have a split or frayed main thread (or just too many side strands).
Instead of a synopsis you may be asked to provide an outline. This would contain essentially the same material, but would permit presentation broken down more distinctly into point-by-point elements and would allow for description in succinct slugs rather than complete sentences.
• The bio: A brief written biography is a sales tool both for finding an agent and a publisher and, as one element of the book jacket, for selling your book to readers. If your book is nonfiction, anything that shows you are an expert in or have experienced first hand what you’re writing about would be pertinent. Credibility counts with nonfiction. You need to demonstrate that you are the best person to have written this particular book. With fiction, it isn’t that crucial that you have writing credits if your manuscript is well written. But it certainly will be helpful if you are an interesting person to the potential readers. And if you’ve written a medical crime novel or have a working knowledge of the profession, it will be much easier to sell if you’ve been a medical examiner. It’s always best to be honest with your bio. Do include any education, workshops, or even book collections you may have that have aided you in your writing career. If you have special experiences you feel added to your writing, such as raising children, public speaking, or even heavy reading, include it and explain why it helped.
You can research what a good bio would be in your genre simply by going to the library or local bookstore and looking at the cover bios given on published books in your genre. If you can’t write a bio that shows you are the right person to have written this book, it may be a strain to believe that agents, publishers, and book buyers will think you are.
• The cover blurb: If the synopsis is the thumbnail sketch for the book, the cover blurb is the pinky-tip version. Contemplate yourself waving good-bye to a friend hanging out of a train window as it is leaving the station and them yelling out questions above the sound of air being expelled from train brakes concerning what your book is about and why they should buy it. What you would tell them in about three succinct sentences that would make them jump off the train and rush to buy your book at the concourse kiosk is what the cover blurb is all about. For good examples, trudge back to that library or bookstore and start reading the covers of best sellers in your book’s genre.
• The marketing plan: The crucial question for both the agent and the publisher is "Who could I sell this book to?" The marketing plan demonstrates whether you, the author, have also thought about this and have come up with some reasonable answers. In this plan, you should identify who the targeted buying audience is and, if possible, demonstrate the book’s potential for sale (e.g., by comparing it to other, similar successful books targeted to that audience—but, at the same time, exhibiting this book as unique to the market and as not being affected by the sales of the earlier books). Be precise about what you are willing—and able—to do to promote this book. Don’t forget to mention a Web site and online marketing plans/experience as well. Frequently you will not be asked for a marketing plan, but if you do one, you will have a more realistic idea of the sales value of your book. You may, in fact, have some useful ideas about where the book can be sold that your agent and publisher will not have thought of—and that you won’t realize they did not think of. For help on book marketing, check John Kremer’s 1001 Ways to Market Your Book (described at http://www.bookmarket.com).
What Type of Publisher Should We Target?
"What do you mean what type of publisher do I want to publish my book? The one that will do it, I suppose. Isn’t that all I need to be concerned about?" Well, no, not really.
There are different ways to get your work before the public—and not all of them will result in a printed book—and you should know what kind of publishing you want before you go looking for a literary agent to help find you a publisher. This decision will, in fact, help determine whether you even need an agent to represent your book.
Although there once were essentially only two options open to you to have your book published—finding a printer and/or publisher to cover the costs of printing and distributing your book or paying for printing and distribution yourself—the era of the personal computer and the Internet has expanded these choices. The traditional royalty-paying publisher still exists. But that institution has been joined by a whole range of subsidy presses, vanity presses, and self-publishing services as well as the option not to print the book at all but to have it set up and available on the Internet for download.
Traditional print publishing still provides the aura of (relatively) high-quality books that have been weeded out from the now-considerable chaff. Traditional publishers will not charge the author for anything in the publishing process (beyond costs associated with producing the manuscript, which would include the author-born cost of permissions to use copyrighted material and images). They will pay the author royalties, and, if they determine they will make a tidy profit from the venture, will often pay the author an advance as well. They also will cover the costs of copyediting, cover and interior design, printing, advertising, and distribution. This is the paradise level of publishing. The publisher has signaled a high degree of commitment to the author’s work by assuming most of the considerable publishing costs and risks. The better and larger the traditional publisher, the more likely you will need to find a literary agent first to represent you, (not) incidentally.
The author will share costs, to a lesser or greater degree, with a subsidy publisher. There, in fact, are few pure traditional publishers left in today’s world except to serve authors perpetually populating the best-sellers lists. Even traditional publishers are increasingly demanding that authors deliver submissions in nearly publishable shape (which may mean they have to pay for an independent copyedit if they don’t want to be embarrassed by their book down the road) and contribute heavily to sales promotion. Both of these activities will incur costs for the authors that traditionally were publisher’s costs.
The true subsidy publisher (note that many "subsidy publishers" are really vanity press publishers in drag—pay very close attention to the contract wording of who does what for how much) has at least enough commitment to the book to share some of the risks (read "costs"). Also note that most subsidy publishers do not have returns policies, so bookstores will not stock their books on speculation that they will be sold (although they may order them for a customer specifically requesting a copy of the book). What was traditionally a subsidy publisher is a dying breed (although, as already noted, many traditional publishers are becoming increasingly subsidy-like.) Many academic presses are really subsidy publishers, because they expect professor authors to have grant money to kick into the production kitty. You generally don’t need a literary agent to strike a deal with a subsidy publisher.
A vanity press will charge the complete costs of production and advertising (if any) to the author. There is no publisher commitment to the project in this category; such a publisher probably would publish your laundry list (with all the words misspelled), if you were willing to cover the costs. You don’t need a literary agent (just lots of disposable money) to engage a vanity press.
The essentially self-publisher print-on-demand packagers advertising on the Internet will set up books cheaply (albeit at a wide range of prices, so shop carefully—for a comparison of such publishers, check out Clea Saal’s comparison charts at http://www.booksandtales.com/pod/index.html), but books set up cheaply usually are sold dearly. (The money to cover book setup and printing has to come from somewhere regardless of the publishing mode, and print-on-demand technology is more expensive per unit produced than a good-sized print run would be.) The author also will have to carry the full promotion burden, and since the packager will not have a deep-discount and returns policy, bookstores will not stock the book. For this type of publishing, the author really needs to be satisfied with limited sales and to be able to count the noses of the committed buyers. You don’t need a literary agent to self-publish—and probably couldn’t find one for such a venture anyway, as there probably won’t be profit for the author, let alone for an agent as well.
A much-ballyhooed form of publishing that has yet to live up to its promise is e-publishing, or offering of books as electronic downloads or on electronic disk for reading on personal computers or special hand-held reading devices. When (read "if") e-publishing comes into its own, authors should make more in royalties per book than with traditional publishing (having saved a share of the remainder and warehousing costs). They also will be able to reach a larger audience. However, E-book versions of fiction have not been selling well at all except for such genres as Science Fiction and Romance (the latter of which continues to sell well in paperback as well), and some of the bigger players in this field are already in retreat. Literary agents don’t operate (reputably) in the realm of e-publishing.
All three types of print publishers are represented in the traditional print and e-book publishing fields, so read that contract small print carefully.
Which of these publishers use print-on-demand publishing? All types of print publishers now include print-on-demand publishing techniques in their printing, even though some continue to preprint many of their books—or combine the two techniques by preprinting a run and, when this run is exhausted, filling further orders by print on demand. (However, this requires two separate book product setups, as the production files for print presses have a different form from those for print-on-demand machines.) The traditional form of printing is to print a whole run of books up front. The advantage of this is that the books are readily available to meet demand and are cheaper to produce per unit. The downside is that the printing bill has to be paid up front on a run of books that either has to be sold to realize profit or swallowed (or donated to the neighborhood beach bonfire barbecue), creating debt. And until they are sold, the books have to be transported to more than one point between the printer and the buyer and must be warehoused.
The new print-on-demand process, which is being almost universally used by subsidy presses and which even traditional publishers are increasingly using, allows books to be printed, one by one, as they are ordered. The up side is that there is no (or at least more limited) warehousing requirement or risk of having an unsold inventory on hand. The down side is that this printing process is more costly when producing more than about 350 copies of the book, and the quality of the book is not (yet) quite equal to a traditional print run, especially graphics such as illustrations and photographs.
And once you think you’ve gotten the type of publisher to target straight, we’re sorry to tell you that you also should consider size, location, and attention quotient as well. The size and distance from Manhattan Island of the publishing house you are targeting for your book also determines whether you really need to engage a literary agent, and, if so, whether you need one of the top-notch agents in the business. Unless you have written a certified blockbuster, you may do best with a smaller "out of New York" publisher, who likely will spend more than the three weeks the major New York publishers give a book to rise to the top before cutting the advertising budget. In addition, a good, comfortable fit with your acquisitions and copy editors at a publishing house is very important, and you very well may find that the smaller publishers have more time and attention to devote to you and your book.
But How Can We Find "The" Agent and/or Publisher?
"What a chore. Now that the hard part’s over, I’ll just grab the telephone book for addresses and start sending out those query letters."
Sorry, but the hard part’s just started. Finding the right fit (or any fit at all) for your book with a literary agent and/or publisher usually requires as much, if not more, time, money, and energy as writing and polishing the book took. The most efficient way to go about this is to do careful research before sending out any queries and to target only agents and publishers who are legitimate, who have a record of success, who you think you’d be willing to work with, and who could serve your book the best. This means you need to zero in on agents/publishers who have a high probability to represent your work in the best light, give you the best benefit, and be the most reputable available.
If you’ve decided that the type of publisher you want to target is the type who is best approached through a literary agent, your first concern now is to get a reputable literary agent to represent you, if you can. (If the literary agent asks for money up front, or says there is a reading fee, or has someone specific to recommend to you to improve your book in any way for a fee, run for the exit.) The difficulty in getting such an agent will be a good index to the difficulty in finding a publisher. Finding agents and publishers is one of the Catch-22 propositions for your first published book; neither will feel there is an incentive to consider your project unless you have already been published (and therefore already have an agent and a publisher, neither of which wanted to take you on unless you had already been published).
There are several ways to find out what agents and publishers are available and to zero in on the best fits for your book. All of these ways should be employed to obtain a master list of possibilities.
• Go to the local big box bookstore and find the section presenting books that are most similar to the genre you want to publish. (Not sure what genre your own book is? If not, you can find a pretty comprehensive listing on the Internet at http://dannyreviews.com/subjects.html and a fuller discussion of the primary fiction categories in an article by Jamie M. Forbes entitled "Fiction Dictionary" in the thirteenth edition of Jeff Herman’s Writer’s Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents. Many of the genres and categories are also explained in chapter 3, "Genres," of this book.) Note down the publishers of these books and check out the acknowledgment sections to see if specific agents are identified (and praised by their client author).
• Go to the writers’ reference section in the bookstore. Buy some of the books that list agents and publishers. The most useful of these are the annual Writer’s Market series published by Writer’s Digest (which can also be obtained on constantly updating annual subscription at the Writer’s Market Web site, http://www.writersdigest.com) and the already-mentioned Jeff Herman’s annual Writer’s Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents.
• Ask the local public library for the latest edition of the Literary Marketplace, which probably will be in the reference section. (It’s in two volumes the size of big-city telephone directories). This is the bible for the publishing industry concerning who does what and how to get in touch with them.
• Follow the discussions on the Publishers Weekly Web site (http://www.publishersweekly.com) for what is selling and to whom—especially the "Hot Deal" section. Also, keep track of Publisher’s Lunch at http://www.caderbooks.com, which is a subscription service on what’s being published.
• For a fee, the Agent Research and Evaluation service will review a précis of your novel and provide you with the names of agents who have sold similar work (http://www.agentresearch.com).
We have provided these tips as if it is only the agent you are looking for, but you search for the best publisher fit this exact same way, either if you have decided not to use an agent or if you want to search for agents and publishers simultaneous in case you actually find a publisher first.
And now we’ll pass on that little secret that will have you leaving the agent-seeking competition in the dust and save you tons of money and months of time. When you have a list of literary agents and/or publishers who seem to be likely to be interested in your book, you now—instead of just sending out buckets of costly queries indiscriminately to everyone on the list—start focusing on the most desirable of these agents and/or publishers.
The first thing you do is review all of the information you have gathered on your master list and categorize these in sections from the most attractive to you as far as benefits and services and having successfully represented other books close to the content and style of your book to the least desirable. Concentrating on the top three or four categories, you now find out all you can about the reputations of these agents and publishers out on the various watchdog Internet sites. But you might want to save the categorized master list—your journey to publishing may be so rough you may eventually have to consider querying agents and/or publishers in the lower categories. Comprehensive sites can be found at:
This process of determining who will actually deal with you honestly will have weeded out a high percentage of the agents and publishers you had on your master list. Don’t mourn over how short your vetted list now appears; take heart that the time and money you are now going to put into querying agents and/or publishers has a higher probability of success than all of those around you who didn’t vet their choices first and who are now scurrying down all sorts of rat holes—oops, sorry—agent’s alleys with the prospect of actually regretting having successfully landed one of these.
Now Can We Approach Agents and Publishers with Our Queries and Proposals?
Yes, now you are ready to start querying your choice agent and publisher targets (starting with the top category of desirability). But, oh my goodness, don’t stuff that printout and all those documents in that envelope and send it off to that top-flight agent in that condition!
Sorry, but there are standard understandings—if not set rules—about submitting to agents and publishers, and we’ve just entered the realm where not following an illogical (to you) or archaic (in your view) procedure might just be a showstopper for your submission. This, of course, depends on how persnickety the specific agent or publisher you’re submitting to is about form and format. Probably fewer are than most imagine, but no doubt they will tend to be more impressed by a professional submission than by one that indicates the author knows little about the industry or process and/or may not be literate enough to be writing a publishable work.
First, it’s time to check out again what your project represents. For fiction, your book should be written before you query an agent or publisher. For nonfiction, you should query with a prospectus and sample chapters and normally need not have completely finished the book first. The agent/publisher will most likely ask for material in stages. First, based on a query letter you’ve sent them, they may ask for a couple of chapters and perhaps a synopsis, and, if they like that, they’ll ask for the full manuscript and possibly a bio and a marketing plan. This is a primary reason you slaved over writing and polishing that basic query letter, synopsis, bio, marketing plan, cover blurb, and proposal way back then.
Although there is a general standard for submission formats (provided below), submission guidelines vary from agent/publisher to agent/publisher and can usually be found on their specific Web sites or by writing them for written guidelines. Nearly all will want you to include a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) with your submission in which they can return their reply and, if you desire to have your submitted material returned as well, provide an envelope big enough and with enough postage for the material to get back to you. These should be regular postal envelopes, as an agent or publisher will not take the time or effort to return material they aren’t interested in through a specialized delivery service such as FedEx or UPS. Increasingly, agents and publishers are willing to respond by e-mail instead.
Agents and publishers will vary in whether they just want the query and an SASE; or the query, a marketing plan, and the first fifty pages of the manuscript; or all of the documentation and the entire manuscript at once—but what is important is to follow their directions if they provide them and to send only a query letter and SASE initially if they haven’t provided directions. Similarly, if you can track down a targeted agent’s or publishing house acquisition editor’s e-mail address and they haven’t stated in their submissions guidelines that they don’t accept e-mail inquiries, you may send them e-mail (but never an unsolicited e-mail attachment—agents and publishers have to carefully protect against computer viruses, and your unsolicited attachments very likely will just be zapped unopened—and you yourself are likely instantly to become persona non grata.)
You are almost down to the wire on starting to submit to agents and/or publishers, but you now have to deal with the hurdle of formatting the submissions so that you come across as at least as professional as everyone else who submitted on a given day. The auxiliary documents—query letter, synopsis, marketing plan, bio, cover blurb, and nonfiction proposal—can all be formatted like regular business letters: margins of at least one inch on all sides and in a single-spaced, 12-point (or 11) business font like Times New Roman or Palatino, with an extra line return between paragraphs. However, there are more explicit rules for formatting the manuscript itself.
Many agents/publishers will provide guidelines on how they prefer to receive a manuscript. If they do, follow these guidelines carefully (but don’t hyperventilate over every small deviation from requirements—very few submitters follow all the requirements to the letter, and if your description of your book grabs attention, small deviations will be forgiven, or, more likely, not even noticed). If they don’t prominently post guidelines, here are a few general tips on preparing a professional-looking manuscript and a few do’s and don’ts about the presentation of your content, many of which don’t affect the submission phase but do affect the production phase (so there’s no reason not to do them correctly from the beginning):
• Produce your manuscript on a computer (either PC or Mac will do, although the industry mainly uses PCs at this stage of production).
• Word is the most-accepted word processing program; WordPerfect is also used by publishers, but to a decreasing extent. You should have your manuscript available electronically in one of these systems. When you have actually signed with an agent, and then with a publisher, they will need to have your manuscript available in a usable electronic system.
• Laser printing is preferred; ink jet printing is tolerated. Excellent-quality photocopies are acceptable. Don’t even consider handwriting your material on the back of an envelope unless you are Abraham Lincoln. And don’t expect agents or publishers to accept a submission in either an electronic CD or DVD unless their guidelines specify this preference.
• Use 8 1/2 x 11-inch 20-pound weight regular typing paper. Double space everything in the manuscript, including extracts, tables, notes, bibliography, and so forth. Set 1-inch margins on all sides (although 1.25-inch left and right margins are also generally accepted). Use 12-point type (for everything) and a nonproportional font (like Courier or New Courier)—although an increasing number of agents and publishers are accepting (and prefer) submissions in Times New Roman (TNR) font. The only extra line spaces should be before and after headlines or to denote internal section breaks. There should only be one character space following terminal punctuation (in contrast to the typewriter, where there are two spaces—the computer and publisher’s composition systems compensate for this), and there should be no extraneous character returns or extra character spaces at the end of paragraphs. Use left-only justification. All of these settings help publishers in estimating how many final book pages the manuscript will require (which is important both in projecting production costs and in helping the publisher determine whether they want to publish your book). They also provide anyone reading your manuscript for consideration a standard format that won’t distract their attention from the content of your work while they are reading it.
• All tables and graphics should be extracted from the manuscript and printed on separate pages (and kept in separate electronic files). Publishers tend to prefer that separate electronic files be set for each chapter of the book. Mark placement of tables in graphics in the text with notes (e.g., "table 1 goes here") in brackets, separated by line spaces above and below.
• Sections of books usually flow in the following order, from the beginning (individual books will usually have only a selected number of these separate sections, of course): Title page, copyright page, dedication, epigraph, table of contents, list of illustrations, list of tables, foreword, preface, acknowledgments (if not part of preface), introduction, text, author’s notes, appendix(es), list of abbreviations, endnotes, glossary, bibliography, author(s)’ biography, index.
• Pagination should be consecutively numbered, in Arabic figures, in the top right corner, starting with the first page of the text (following all of the front matter) and should continue on through to the end of the bibliography. Each page should also include the author’s last name and a short book title in the top left corner of the header to ensure that pages are not misplaced by a recipient.
• Publishers prefer endnotes gathered at the end of chapters or the book (most preferred) rather than footnotes. They also prefer that you use the word processor note programs so that they can manipulate the notes, as needed.
• Don’t create any fancy or cute word processing system format styling for your book. The publisher does all of the designing of a book, and all of the styling you put in will have to be figured out and stripped out by someone. Use manual tabbing rather than indent styles (except do hang indent bibliographies to aid editing). No bolding, and many (although not all) agents/publishers want italics designated by underlining rather than script italics. This doesn’t mean there will be no bolding in your final book; just that the publisher’s designers determine which heads are bolded and which aren’t.
Much consternation is often also expended on how submissions should be packaged. Submitted manuscripts and supporting documents should not be bound; both complete texts and partials are sent as loose pages (which is a good reason why the pages need to numbered and identification should be in the header of each page). Rubber bands can be used to keep manuscripts together, and most agents and publishers don’t mind if partials are held together with a single clip. Any sturdy envelope or box that keeps the manuscript clean and straight will do for sending material. Do not use packing material like Styrofoam peanuts, which likely will keep your name and a curse word on the lips of the recipient as long as bits of the material keep popping up in the recipient’s coffee cup.
Sending by messenger service rather than regular mail does not impress, and sending by means that will require the recipient to sign for receipt in person normally will irritate (and may just be turned away). Use of stationery that will stand out or attaching some attention-getter such as a pan of brownies is considered unprofessional and will not have the desired effect. If you’ve been asked to send follow-up material, you should mark the package with a "Requested Material" identifier to ensure that it receives priority attention.
Can We Finally Go Now?
Now you are ready to start hunting for that perfect literary agent and/or publisher. But don’t be surprised if, in the process, you just raise more questions about what to do and how to do it. Be assured that you are not alone or doomed to walk in the dark, however. The age of the Internet has opened the secret compartments of the publishing industry. When you need to ask a specific question about your own particular submission journey, just go to such writer’s discussion boards as those offered by WritersNet (http://www.writers.net/forum/) or Writer’s BBS (http://www.writersbbs.com/forums) and enlist the willing support of all those who have gone before you in this process—or, of course, you can ask the authors of this Web site through the e-mail addresses provided.
you are ready to start hunting for that perfect literary agent and/or publisher. But don’t be surprised if, in the process, you just raise more questions about what to do and how to do it. Be assured that you are not alone or doomed to walk in the dark, however. The age of the Internet has opened the secret compartments of the publishing industry. When you need to ask a specific question about your own particular submission journey, just go to such writer’s discussion boards as those offered by WritersNet () or Writer’s BBS () and enlist the willing support of all those who have gone before you in this process—or, of course, you can ask the authors of this Web site through the e-mail addresses provided.
For a discussion of the process of getting published by a successful literary agent, Jeff Kleinman of the Folio Literary Management Agency, go to http://www.foliolit.com/StepByStepGuide.htm.
