When Are You Ready? Part 1 of 2 (or more!)

A recent commenter, Emily, asked me a wonderfully tough question: “For me, …I know I've been rejected because the book isn't ready yet. I admire your confidence in yours. How do you know your book is ready?” I realized this wasn’t something I could answer in a few lines, so I wanted to post in reply.

I’m actually going to split this answer into two parts. First I want to take that question and twist it a bit. Since I have decided to self-publish, the first question is not so much “How do you know your book is ready,” as “How do you know the publishing industry will never be ready for you?”

Reason number one is that I used to work in publishing. I don’t want to come off as being bitter about the publishing industry just because I haven’t been accepted by it. I actually never thought traditional publishing was the way to go, but the sensible part of myself told the other part of myself, “Oh just try it. If you fail, I give you permission to go another way.”

Anyway, I spent 18 months as a reader, editor, and marketing manager at a small independent publisher in Baltimore. It was my dream job. I had always wanted to be a book editor, even more than I wanted to be an author. There is something extremely appealing about making other people’s dreams come true. However, I was forced to leave because of the volatility of the industry. As a recent college grad, I needed something more stable—and indie publishing is anything but. I could tell you loads of stories about slush piles taller than me and what it’s like to be on the sending end of a rejection letter. I had to reject books of extremely high quality, simply due to lack of financing to put them into print. Our house only put out about 12 books a year, and we received over 1000 manuscripts in the same time period. The experience gave me a perspective that not many writers are privy to, and it was a major reality check.

But one story stands out in my mind. With one particular novel, Like We Care by Tom Matthews, I saw it from slush pile, through acquisition and negotiation, the editing funnel, exterior and interior layout, and ultimately publication and marketing. (Look for my name in the acknowledgments when you purchase this terrific little book.) Tom is an extremely talented writer, with strong credentials in both journalism and Hollywood. Like We Care is excellent, and Tom has great connections and a name for himself. School Library Journal compared it to Fight Club. Booklist gave it a favorable review, too. We thought this was a recipe for a breakout novel.

But the breakout just didn’t happen like we’d imagined … and it broke my heart.

My takeaway from this is that publishing success is almost completely arbitrary. It frankly doesn’t matter whether Secernere is wonderful or terrible, because whether it sells enough to make back the money put into it hinges on so many unpredictable factors that I can’t control from my end, with my pen and imagination. And frankly, that’s all I want to control.

But I also firmly believe it will never be accepted by an agent or publishing house because it doesn’t fit into a neat little box. Selling in the publishing industry is all about packaging—Who’s your market? What’s the genre? What books are comparable? What kind of “platform” do you have? What’s your 100-word synopsis? (Might I add that 100 words is about .001% of the entire novel. Even a 2-minute movie trailer is over .02% of a 90-minute movie. You’re going to judge and reject me based on .001% of my novel?) Publishing professionals simply do not have the time anymore to read a book from cover to cover and make a judgment based on that. Personally, I think that any judgment based on anything less than that has no merit.

Reason number two is that the traditional publishing model is dying. eBooks and POD books are gaining on traditional large-run, offset printed books. This has have opened the market to anyone who wants others to read their books. Amazon has tons of free eBooks—proof that many authors would rather have a slightly imperfect product actually read, than have a polished, homogenized, rewritten for the workshop, rewritten for the agent, rewritten for the editor, rewritten for the editor’s boss, packaged, agented, marketable, marketed, pretty little book perhaps sit on a shelf, or perhaps sell a little—with the lion’s share of the money going to the publisher.

So my feelings about the publishing industry are what made me know I was ready to go the self-publishing route. As for how I know the actual writing is ready for public consumption … I’ll tackle that in my next post.