🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov19.192841.20507@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com>, jeff@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com (Jeffrey S. Freedman) writes:
|In article <BxtDF2.yK@unx.sas.com> sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com (Fred Welden) writes:
|>but the ability to write does not correlate with the ability to get
|>published.  There may be a lower cutoff, a level of quality below which
|>you cannot hope to be published, but if so it is very low indeed.
|
|Ah, there's hope for me yet!
|
|But then, what does it take to get published?  Must one have a relative who is
|an editor?  Or a body like Madonna's?

There's all kinds of ways to increase your likelihood of getting
published.  Having a relative who's an editor would certainly help.
Having a body like Madonna's wouldn't unless you were famous for it,
or were offering it to the editor in question, which might be difficult
if you're in Oregon and he's in New York.  (Editors know better than
most that photos can lie.)  There was a guy in New Orleans who thought
he'd follow John Kennedy Toole's example (Toole killed himself) and faked
a suicide attempt when his book was rejected.  He got some air play,
but I don't think he got published.

Sometimes writers hit on a hot topic, or a hot setting.  Sometimes they
attend the right workshops and make the right connections.  Mostly, I
think, they just plain luck out.  Submit your manuscript to enough
editors with dogged enough determination and eventually somebody,
somewhere, may decide to acquire it.  The process is apparently easier
after that.  For one thing, book contracts usually contain a clause
giving the publisher first refusal on your next book, which means that
it will at least get read by them promptly.

|I read a book on writing in which the author stated that he received 50
|rejections before he had his first book published, and that this was an average
|number.  Yet, if each submission took a month, and if there were no
|simultaneous submissions, it would have taken him over four years before that
|acceptance came.  Am I missing something here?

Nope, I don't think you are.  Of course, there ARE simultaneous
submissions.  It's a real good idea to be doing something else while
you're trying to get published.  Write another novel or two, and, of
course, don't give up your day job.

-- 
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |