How to liberate your novel
A journey to getting published.
My debut novel, Melting in the Middle, has been six years in the making. The story starts in the season of Advent, but it was more akin to an Epiphany that I had a year ago, when thinking about how to get it published.
I had attended seminars on ‘how to get a literary agent’ (sound familiar?) and had a near miss or two. One agent said they had placed my submission hovering on the ‘take a second look’ pile only to then decide ‘not quite’ when they came back to it. I’d heard about the infamous ‘slush pile’ of submissions waiting to be reviewed, but there was a ‘second look’ pile too? The literary equivalent of purgatory?
The process left me with huge admiration for those writers who do find an agent, but also a lot of introspection, and a realisation that it was time to ‘get real.’
Firstly, I had to accept that the stats weren’t encouraging. One agent said they received 70-100 submissions a week, presumably 50 weeks a year, and in a good year took on maybe ten new authors. As a certain character in my novel would say, ‘Do the math.’
Secondly, I had to consider that for all my re-writing, maybe my novel still wasn’t the best I could make it. I’d already had great advice from a literary consultant, and early readers really liked it, but a friend (in the world of publishing) advised me to find an objective freelance editor. She duly provided a brilliant balance of positive feedback with some hard-nosed advice on how to make it better (which of course, for time reasons, it’s difficult to receive from agents).
Finally, the same publishing friend, who really ‘got’ my novel, said, ‘I just don’t think it’s an agenty sort of book.’ In other words, no matter what I did to ‘just write better’, I still might not make it beyond the slush pile. And this resonated. I don’t think my novel sits tightly in any one genre. If I have to label it, I call it comic fiction, but this rarely appeared as a tick box on a literary agent’s submission form. And when I searched what agents were looking for, comic fiction didn’t seem to be high on many of their wish lists.
My friend advised me gently but firmly to look at other options, including self-publishing, and made a telling comment: ‘All I can say, Andy, is that for everyone I know who has gone that route, it’s brought them joy.’
And so far, it has. There have been four particular sources of joy for me that might be useful to share.
Pace. I only started to seriously think about self-publishing at the start of this year and sent my full manuscript to Matador in March. Within a week they had reviewed it and said they would publish it by November. Compared with submitting initial chapters to agents and having to wait at least six weeks for a response, this felt truly amazing.
Involvement. I recognise this is a double-edged sword. An obvious advantage of finding a traditional publisher through a literary agent is the level of marketing support they will provide and hopefully they will open doors to literary festivals etc. Through self-publishing, it’s obviously down to me to get quite involved and do a bit more of my own marketing, and I recognise I’m unlikely to get the same reach. However, I’ve enjoyed the degree of involvement and intellectual challenge I’ve had through the process, and still feel I have had good marketing support from Matador, far more so than if I had simply tried a completely DIY approach through a certain humongous online bookseller.
Control. By time I came to the decision to self-publish, having worked with a brilliant editor, I knew that I didn’t want to fundamentally change the book again. I recognise there are ways in which it could be made more commercial or appeal to a wider audience, but I feel that, essentially, I have written the book I wanted to write. Matador’s approach has not been to change my book, but to present it in the best possible light and I’ve still benefited from their expert advice on cover design, typesetting and so on.
Completion. I’ve wanted to write a novel for most of my life, and there’s no doubt that seeing the finished book arrive through my letterbox was a deeply satisfying moment, if still a little scary (what if there’s still a typo, even after 264 rounds of proofreading?). I’ve loved writing this book (most of the time) but I did really want to clear my head for the next one, and all the time I was still thinking about submission letters to agents I couldn’t reach any sort of closure on this.
I really would not discourage anyone from seeking an agent, particularly if you are starting out on the road to get your novel published. And agents clearly bring a degree of ‘quality control’ which helps to ensure we all get to read well-written books. I am writing a second very different novel and will certainly explore that route again. But it’s a clear statistical fact that many people embarking on their debut novel are going to find it very tough to find an agent, and might for various reasons just not be right for an agent – but still have a real desire to be heard, and hopefully a book worth reading.
If that’s you, and you’ve challenged yourself to write the book as well as you can, maybe it’s worth a little time and investment to liberate your novel and unlock yourself from the frustration of being an unpublished author.