Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [80]
I’m beginning to doubt that it’s true.
A case in point: In 1977 a fellow named Chuck Ross set out to establish the difficulties faced by new novelists. He submitted a novel to fourteen publishers and thirteen literary agents.
And the novel he submitted wasn’t one of his own but a freshly-typed copy of Jersy Kosinski’s Steps, the National Book Award winner for 1969.
No one recognized the manuscript, although one editor compared the author’s style to Kosinski. Neither did any publisher want to issue the book or any agent offer to represent it. Admittedly, Kosinski’s novel is an experimental work, and not the sort of item that has best seller written all over it when it comes in the guise of an unknown writer’s work. The experiment doesn’t prove that agents and publishers are all idiots, or that the emperor has no clothes, or anything of the sort.
But it should give you an idea of what you’re up against.
And just what am I up against? The wall? Is it safe to say that the new writer is facing impossible odds, that I’d be better off putting my book in a dresser drawer, or not writing it in the first place? Should I take up Sunday painting instead? Start taking cello lessons?
You can do any or all of those things if you want. I told you before that nobody ever said you had to write a novel. Nobody’s saying now that you have to publish one, or try to publish one. It’s your novel, for heaven’s sake. You can circulate copies among your friends, lock it away in a safe deposit box, or use it to insulate your attic. You can submit it to fourteen publishers and thirteen agents, and then, satisfied that you’ve made the effort, you can put it in the outhouse next to the Monkey Ward catalog, so that it won’t be wasted.
Or you can bundle it off to a fifteenth publisher or a fourteenth agent.
If you want something badly enough, Fredric Brown pointed out in The Screaming Mimi, you’ll get it. If you don’t get it, that only goes to show you didn’t want it badly enough.
This is no place for specific advice on marketing your novel. Market conditions change constantly. Annual editions of Writer’s Market and marketing columns in Writer’s Digest will keep you in touch with these changes as they occur. If you’re writing category fiction, your own day-by-day research at bookstores and newsstands will let you know just who’s publishing exactly what.
A few marketing observations, however, might be useful.
It’s been a trend of late for publishers to adopt a policy of declining to read unsolicited manuscripts. This doesn’t mean they’re all a bunch of flint-hearted old dogs. It simply means that more and more of them are finding that the cost of reading over-the-transom submissions is unaffordably high, given the infinitesimal number of such submissions that wind up getting published. By limiting their reading to agented manuscripts and others that have come recommended, publishers can save thousands of dollars a year.
What does this mean to you? First, let me say that it’s not as disastrous as it looks. It certainly doesn’t transform the business of novel writing into a closed shop. You don’t need a track record, or an agent, or even a membership card in Author’s League in order to have your novel considered for publication.
What you do need is permission to submit your novel, and what I would suggest is a query letter. Let’s suppose you’ve written that gothic novel of the windswept moors of Devon and your market research has led you to believe that it would have its best chance of acceptance at any of six paperback houses. You’ve checked Writer’s Market and learned the name of the editor at each house who’s likely to be in charge of gothics. Now you sit down and write each of the six editors a letter, something like this:
Dear Ms. Wimpole,
I have recently completed a gothic novel with the working title of Trefillian House. Its setting is Devon, its heroine a young American widow hired to appraise antique furniture in a creaky old mansion on the lonely windswept moors.