5 Ways Unpublished Writers Can Make Themselves More Attractive to Publishers

I’ve been treasure hunting in the slush pile at Rebelight Publishing Inc. for just over two years. One of our mandates is to publish new authors, so part of my hunt includes searching for manuscripts from unpublished writers. Of our thirteen signed authors, five are new to publishing. In other words,

over 38 per cent our stable of authors are publishing their first novel with Rebelight. Besides having a well-written, riveting, out-of-the-box story, here are five tips for showing publishers you’re ready to take the next step in your writing career.

1. Research query letter writing before you start querying. Query writing is tough, but there are resources galore online. Telling me that you don’t know how to write one because you’re new to this only makes me think you’re unwilling to put in the hard work needed to learn a new skill. And there are tons of new skills to learn when you publish your first book.
2. Show me you’re serious about your writing. Maybe you haven’t achieved publication yet. It’s understandable in this publishing climate. If you don’t have publishing credits to boast in your query letter, then tell me what you have been doing to hone your craft. Have you been mentored by a professional writer? Are you a part of a writers’ group? Have you taken courses and sought out critique of your work? This tells me you’re willing to take risks and go the extra mile for your writing career.
3. Do your research. Know how the publishing business works. Again, information is available
   
   online. You may be a novice, but you need not be ignorant. We want to know that any new author we bring on-board understands the business and just how tough it is, so they’re prepared for the next steps in their writing career.
4. Be professional. Your query letter, synopsis, and all correspondences should reveal professionalism. Not that you can’t be friendly, but never should the friendliness undermine your professionalism. We are interested in working with professional writers who can go the distance.
5. Conduct yourself with integrity. We publish books for young people and, like it or not, young people will seek you out online. We want our readers to be able to connect with our authors. We do check potential authors’ social media outlets to ensure the author is someone we want to work with and is someone we're proud to associate with
   Rebelight. Be aware of what you’re making public and the effect it may have on your career.

Four Reasons Why Your MS May Have Been Rejected That Have Nothing to do with Your Writing.

Who hasn’t been discouraged by rejection letters at some point?

Today, I’ve removed my author hat and donned my publisher hat to give you four reasons why your MS may have been rejected that have nothing to do with how well you write. First the disclaimer. My views may be different than other publishers. I can only speak to the processes of Rebelight Publishing.

Upon receiving a rejection from a publisher or agent, authors often blame themselves, rationalizing that the problem must be their writing skills. While that could be, often it isn’t the case.

When I dive the slush pile, I first go after manuscripts that fit our publishing needs. As a company, we look at our book list and identify the holes. A few months ago, we determined a need for middle grade manuscripts under 30,000 words. I went to the pile, read those submissions, and dealt with those queries first. We requested fulls, read, and signed a couple authors. If you submitted a YA manuscript to us at that point, you’d be hearing crickets in your inbox. We had a need, and it was my job to fill it. That means those MG manuscripts had to take priority.

We are a small publishing house, and we don’t want to compete with ourselves, which is why we’ve

chosen to publish multiple genres. During each cycle, we try to publish a variety of books—some MG, some YA, some historical, some speculative, some contemporary. If you send us a YA high fantasy, and we’ve just signed a YA high fantasy, you’ll likely receive a rejection for the sole reason that we’ve already filled that spot. This has nothing to do with the quality of writing, the story, or your value as the author.

Another reason you might receive a rejection is that writing style isn’t what we’re looking for. We have a certain type of book we publish at Rebelight. That does not mean other styles are wrong or lesser. This is simply our preferences, and what we’ve found does well in the marketplace. While your style may not suit us, it may suit another publisher just fine. This is why you should query widely. You never know when what you’ve written is just what a certain publisher or agent is looking for.

Ooh, I said that word—marketplace. While writing is an art, publishing is a business. We want to sell book—lots of books. We have to make a judgement call about each book we publish. We make a huge investment of time, money and resources into each book. We have to determine if this is a book we can fully get behind and market. If we feel we can’t, no matter how great the writing, the manuscript is going to get a rejection.

However, sometimes it is the writing. If you are receiving a lot of rejections, enlist additional beta readers to see if there’s something you’ve missed. It never hurts to have an extra set of eyes on a manuscript. I’m just hoping that as you read this you realized there are a lot of different scenarios in play. The best thing to do is not take it personally.

It’s human to get discouraged, but don’t give up!

Querying for the Young Writer

Hello everyone! Its been awhile since I've posted on here. That's because I have been absent for the past month. For the first ten days I was on a cruise in Alaska with my family. It was really a breathtaking experience and I'll talk more about that in my next post.

But today's post has to deal with the other thing I was doing this July. For two weeks I was a Residential Assistant at a creative writing camp called Shared Worlds. Its a fantasy writing camp in which kids from ages 13-17 get together in world building groups and create worlds together from scratch. Its truly an exciting experience. I should know: I went there myself for three years.

All of the kids who went to camp with me understand what its like to be a young writer. Some of them are more advanced than others. Some of them have been writing for longer. But they all have aspirations to one day have books in print.

So today, I'm talking a bit specifically to young writers, especially those who are querying or want to start querying in the future. I started diving into the trenches when I was sixteen, so I know how it can be. Let's go over some tips for querying your novel.

1) Seek advice

This is important for any writer out there. Everyone should get multiple sets of eyes on their query and first pages before sending them off. But for young writers in particular, this can be a helpful resource. If you were like me in high school, you didn't show a ton of people your writing. Taking this into consideration, the querying process can seem really frightening. So before diving in blindly, you want to do research. Talk to other writers online who have been through this. Sign up on agentqueryconnect.com and find people who are willing to lend you a helping hand. They're out there and super friendly. I don't know where I'd be without the people online who gave me advice for the querying process.

2) Beg for Critiques

If you are a young writer, people will be inclined to critique you less harshly. Again, if you were like me, you received heaps of praise from your peers and teachers and believed, naively, that you were the best writer ever. It only takes a stack of rejections to tell you otherwise. It is possible that, as a young writer, you have never received a thorough critique. Beg for one. Hand out your writing under the guise of 'tear it apart. Leave no word alive.' Not only will it improve your manuscript, but its better to get a harsh critique from people you trust first.

You have to build up a backbone to enter the trenches. It might hurt, but your writing will be better for it.

3) Query as if you were Older

Something I see in the slush pile a lot when it comes to young writers: A stress on their age. People who point out that they are 'just sixteen' or 'in high school' and writing a book. You don't see older writers saying their age. Why? Because its not the age that matters. Its the writing.

I think some writers stress their age as a bragging point. Like 'I'm young but I'm querying and that's special'. Honestly, its awesome for ANYONE to be able to finish a book, no matter the age. If you're a good writer, then age won't make a difference. My agent didn't know I was eighteen until we had the call. And it worked out fine for me.

Those are three important tips for young writers, though some of that advice holds true for writers of any age. Get advice and get critiqued. And young writers, never stop trying to get better. You have a long road ahead of you, but you have the talent and the drive to back it up.

Happy Writing!

Reasons for Requesting: Queries

Let's go with another positive post today and talk about reasons why I request from the slush pile: the query letter itself.

Queries are really hard. Any writer who has ever been in the trenches knows this. Exactly how do you bottle up your wonderful story into just a 200-300 word summary? It takes a lot of practice to finally learn how. But I can tell you that all the practice is worth it.

I find a lot of the queries I read aren't very good. They're either too long or too confusing. They focus more on the author's life story than the actual book or they focus too much on the little details of the story rather than boiling it down to what's really important. But I never pass judgement just on a query. I'll always look at the pages no matter what the query says.

So then you might say, 'why does it matter? Can't I just let my awesome writing shine through?'

Well, having a query that makes your concept shine does something important. It makes me want to like your story. If I read a query that pops, it gets me excited. It makes me want to read the pages and I will over look a few flaws in the first pages for a good concept. Because, gosh darn it, I want this to be good. Now you need to have the writing to match it, but it helps to get me enthusiastic.

If a query is dull or confusing, I'm more likely to search for reasons to reject. Because I'm not excited, I'm looking for an excuse to stop reading. Flaws become more visible. Even worse, if your query is snarky or arrogant in tone, you might make me REALLY want to stop reading.

This isn't a constant rule. I have read first pages attached to lack luster queries that really grabbed my attention. But those are the exception and they only do so because they pop from page one. But usually, really good writers have the dedication to write stellar queries. (I have never requested more pages after a snarky query letter though. Humor is good. Snark and arrogance--NOPE!)

Make your query count. Because the query can affect an agents outlook on your story from the beginning. Its probably best to make that outlook positive rather than negative.

Reasons for Rejection: "As you know, Bob" Dialogue

Happy Sunday everyone! And welcome to my first official non-intro post on Operation Awesome!

As mentioned in my introduction post two weeks ago, I am an intern at a literary agency and one of my responsibilities involves reading the slush pile. The agency asks for a query, synopsis and the first fifty pages with submissions, but usually, I can tell if something is for me in the first ten pages.

Within the first ten pages, I either fall in love with the voice or I don't. There a lot of different things that make me fall and love and a lot of things that make me reject but today we are going to talk about a reason for rejection I call "As you know, Bob" dialogue.

This is a way of exposition dumping that seems clever because it is done through dialogue but comes off sounding very unnatural because... well... the characters have no reason to bring it up. Consider this scene.

"I can't wait to visit the rain forest this summer." Bob said.

"Are you sure? As you know, Bob, your parents were killed by a vicious tiger in the rain forest leaving you an orphan when you were very young." John replied.

This is a slightly exaggerated example, but the issue should be obvious. John is telling Bob something he already knows. Why bring it up? Its not as if Bob spontaneously forgot this life scarring trauma. This dialogue is here solely for the benefit of the reader and it comes off as awkward.

Exposition is hard. We have to find lots of clever ways to hide it. Sometimes we stick it dialogue but if not executed right, it will stand out like a sore thumb and the agent will be quick to throw the pages in the rejection pile, as natural dialogue is one of the most important elements of any novel. So what's a simple way to fix 'As you know, Bob' dialogue?

Simple: Put someone in the conversation who DOESN'T know.

JK Rowling is a genius in many ways but the best thing she ever did for the Harry Potter books was to make the main character Harry Potter, a boy who knows nothing about the wizarding world. He has to learn as he goes along, just as the audience does. In this way, Harry is an effective narrator. If he was a wizard like Ron it would be much harder to explain the world to the audience without some exposition riddled dialogue.

Exposition in dialogue is fine. But make sure that it makes sense. Put a confused outsider in the mix and you are on your way to a much more natural conversation. And that's another reason for rejection you can cross off your list!

Surfacing the Slush Pile...Two Years Later

So it wasn't quite two years. Twenty-two months to be exact. But approximately two years ago, after my agent and I broke up, I sent my manuscript out to a couple of slush piles for consideration.

A couple of days ago, I heard from one.

Yes, 22 months. But, if any of you know the publisher, Baen, you know it is pretty common for them.

The funny part about it, is that they googled me and found my website. Then they used my contact form on my website to tell me they couldn't get my email to work. So here I am at home, wondering what they would send me. I mean, if it was a rejection, would they bother to ask me for my email before they rejected me?

Well, come to find out that it was indeed a rejection, but a personalized one. The frustrating thing about that sort of rejection, is in the last two years I've resurrected my book and revised at least two more times. Is isn't the same book now as it was when I submitted two years ago.

Now Baen slush, I believe, initially starts with the Slushmaster General. They aren't official editors of Baen, but readers. But to get a personalized rejection from readers is still a good thing. I guess they don't give out notes in their slush all the time. Several of their criticisms were things that I fixed during edits. A few more are easy fixes. Their biggest complaint was pacing. But the interesting thing about that, is that this same version of the manuscript was considered by an editor of a great publishing house (when it was in the YA round of submissions), and he never mentioned pacing issues.

So this goes to prove that writing can be very subjective. One person liked my pacing, another didn't.The publishing industry can be a tough market, because it truly is very subjective. But the key is to always keep an open mind. Because if this slushmaster didn't like my pacing in specific spots, there is a good chance someone else would feel the same. So it is good to get feedback and at least consider how you can apply it in your writing. There is always room to improve.

But an encouraging note they sent me, is that they thought it was well-written and imaginative. They even said that my magic system was reminiscent of the magical systems Brandon Sanderson has invented in his books. BRANDON SANDERSON! Now, if you read fantasy at all, you'd know that made me one happy little writer. Brandon Sanderson is awesome, one of my favorites. And for them to compare me to him at all....well, that rejection made my day.