Seeing your story rendered in ink and paper is a goal for many writers, but how do you make that happen? The business of publishing can seem opaque and intimidating. There’s a lot you’re expected to know, and the purpose of this guide is to equip you with the tools and knowledge to get your writing out there.

This post is specifically about longer works. This includes:

  • Book-length works (novels, memoirs, nonfiction books)
  • Collections of shorter works packaged together to be sold as a single book (poetry collections/chapbooks, short story collections)

For this guide, I’ll be referring to the thing you wish to sell as a “book.”

Shorter works that are not published as a single book go through a different process. You can find info on that [here].

0 | Is this the right path for you?

Every writer has different measurements of success, and that’s okay. Just like how there’s writers who can’t imagine ever self-publishing their work, there’s writers who can’t imagine the opposite.

So, you need to ask yourself: do I want to go through this process? Is this the best thing to do for me and this specific piece?

Traditional publishing doesn’t make you a “realer” or “better” writer than someone who doesn’t, and that’s important to remember. You can self-publish some pieces and traditionally publish others. Do what works best for you!

For books, you also need to determine if you want to get a literary agent. All of the big publishers require an agent to send them books to consider, but many smaller presses do not. Some kinds of books, like chapbooks, rarely require literary agents. Do some research for the norms of your field.

Regardless, the steps to submission require you to put together the same kinds of materials, so you should keep reading!

1 | Have a piece to publish

You can’t sell a piece if you haven’t written it! Make it the best possible version you can, and then get feedback from your fellow writers and make it even better. Agents and editors will likely work with you to make your work stronger (plot/developmental editing as well as line-by-line copyedits), but they still want to see something highly polished.

Note: Many scammers posing as agents or editors will say you need edits and will refer you to someone to pay for that. This is not normal, this is a scam. Either you are editing your own work (unpaid) or the editor at the publisher is editing it (and they’re being paid by the publisher). You should not be paying anything. You can choose to pay for editing, but that is to get your work submission-ready, not as a “requirement” to be considered by an agent or editor.

Once that’s done, you’ll make the specific files you’ll be submitting. 90%+ will ask for—or expect—“standard manuscript formatting,” which means Shunn’s standard modern formatting [link: https://www.shunn.net/format/story/].

Some places will ask for something different, like a PDF or the font to be in Courier. When that happens, make a separate file so you don’t have to constantly fiddle with the main one.

Additional note: If you plan to submit a non-fiction book that isn’t a memoir (i.e. self-help book, cookbook, popular science), it’s more normal to have an incomplete draft, especially if your book is the kind that would require money to research/complete. You will still need some sample chapters, so you can’t be pitching with nothing.

2 | Make the rest of the submission materials

Each agent/editor will ask for slightly different things, but there’s going to be several types of documents you’ll be sending out over and over. Make each of these and save them in a folder. This is your “submission package”.

You will need:

  • A bio. This is very brief (maybe 100 words) and it’s worth highlighting previous publications, education/experience relevant to your book, etc. You can just say your job, where you live, and how many kids/cats you have, too. It’s okay if it’s not “impressive.”
  • The opening of your book, at various lengths. Start at page 1, which means your prologue, if you have one. You’ll probably need:
    • The first one/two/three chapters
    • The first 5/10/20/30/50 pages
  • A pitch, like an elevator pitch. There’s plenty of guides on how to do this.
  • A list of similar books. These should be similar genres/age demographics as your target audience, as well as published the last few years. So no Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, etc.
  • A synopsis. This goes through your entire story/spoils everything and follows your main character through their entire journey. This should be one or two pages; different places might ask for a specific number. [Here] is a good guide on synopsis-es.
  • Your target audience. Age? Gender? Interests? Don’t say “everybody,” there is no book that everybody likes. This is really important for nonfiction books.

2.5 | The dreaded query letter

It’s both less scary and way more scary than suspect!

But first, let’s take a step back. This is the “letter” (main message or email body) you send to an agent (and, sometimes, editor) that introduces you, your book, and why you would be a pleasant person to work with (because publishing is a business, and there’s a lot of money involved with books). You will be copy/pasting this a lot, and make sure you always include the name of the person this is for!

The norms for the US and UK are slightly different, as in whether the bio (which you already have!) and housekeeping (NOVEL is a 50,000 word fantasy novel for….) goes at the start or end. But the majority of the letter is about your book. It’s similar to the “marketing copy” you’d see on a website or the back of the book, but not exactly. Marketing copy is to convince one person to spend $20 on a book. A query letter is convincing someone to spend thousands of dollars on your book.

There is a lot out there on query letters, including paid classes and critique services, which you absolutely do not need to do. It does require you to do a ton of research (and, hopefully, crit from other writers, especially ones who have gotten agents with their query letters). [Jane Friedman is a good place to start].

The thing that can be very hard about query letters is that it can reveal serious flaws with your book. It might reveal to you that your main character is too passive, or doesn’t have any strong desires, or that you have too many POVs and you don’t even know who your main character is. It can suck to hear that! But this is something you can fix.

By the time you’ve created all of these materials for your book, you should know it inside and out.

3 | Find an agent/publisher

The best place is [QueryTracker]. It’s free, but the paid features are really helpful if you like dealing with data.

The biggest mistake people make when submitting is to send to places that will never say yes. A publisher that only publishes novels for kids will never publish your cookbook, so submitting that would be a waste of everyone’s time. Make sure you read the guidelines and what an agent/editor says they do not want and respect that.

Sometimes an agent/editor might have a “manuscript wish list” (MSWL) of the kind of stories they’d love to sell/buy. If your story has one (or more!) of those things, that’s awesome! Feel free to mention that in your query letter. It’s okay if your book has nothing on their MSWL, too. Many agents/editors don’t have a MSWL or haven’t updated it in awhile.

Really small/local publishers will probably not be on big sites/services like QueryTracker. You’ll have to do a little more legwork, but you can ask your writing friends, check social media, etc. Who published the books most similar to yours? Take a trip to your local bookstore or library and write down all the publishers similar to yours.

The acknowledgement sections of books will include the author’s agent as well, and you can usually find this information on their website or social media.

3.5 | WATCH OUT FOR SCAMS

There are so many. No matter what stage of your writing journey you’re on, you should keep up to date with [Writer Beware]. Many scams operate in the same manner and new names pop up as old ones are identified as scams. By knowing how they work and staying up to date on the methods, you can keep yourself safe.

These scams work because a writer isn’t aware of the norms of the industry. You should NEVER:

  • Pay an agent to represent you or “try harder” (they only get paid if they sell your book to a publisher. If you pay them first, why should they try at all?)
  • Pay a publisher to publish you (because then why would they need to market your book? They already made money off of you)
  • Pay a publisher’s editor, graphic designer, marketing team, etc. (then it’s not a “publisher,” it’s an agency selling services, so it doesn’t need to sell books to make money)
  • Pay for “screen treatments”/story boards/other stuff for a Hollywood exec to make your book into a movie/show/etc.

If any agent, editor, publisher, lawyer, etc. reaches out to you out of the blue, it is probably a scam. You will see on a lot of agency and publisher websites pop ups that say “We are being impersonated, it is not us if…”.

Always be cautious, and do everything you can to verify someone is who they say they are. Phone numbers are easy to fake (caller ID cannot be trusted), and it’s easy to make similar-looking emails (swapping an l for a 1, etc.).

Deceptions work because the bad guy tells you something you want to believe is true (I’m sure you can recall several times this has happened in politics). Writers want to believe their writing is amazing, they want to believe someone wants to make their unpublished manuscript into a Netflix show. They want to believe that the reason their efforts at securing an agent are failing is because they don’t have 10,000 Twitter followers, not that there’s any issue with their book.

Scammers do not do this to “steal” your manuscript, because then they would need to go through the effort of publishing it. They want you to write them checks. You can lose thousands of dollars on these scams, up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Be careful out there.

4 | Submit!

Most places use a form (such as QueryManager), but a lot use emails. The exact method of submitting, and what materials to include, will be on the submission/querying guideline page of the agent’s/agency’s/publisher’s website. Make sure to include everything they ask for, even if it seems silly.

Record your submission somewhere, like QueryTracker or a spreadsheet. You don’t want to send the same query to the same agent twice!

5 | Wait

This is not fun! Unlike short stories, these tend to be a lot longer of a wait. It will likely be many months. You can check QueryTracker to see average response times/response rates, but it’s easy to drive yourself mad obsessing over the data.

Pick a day of the week or month to focus on queries. Find new places to submit, check on the pending ones. You’ll likely be marking a lot of them as “Closed, no response,” as many agents/publishers operate on a “no response means no” system.

6 | So, you got a rejection

It’s going to happen a lot, and it’s going to hurt! Books take so much of our time and we have such grand hopes for them that getting rejected can feel extra terrible.

But it helps to remember that:

  • No one loves every book. There are best sellers you can’t stand, and you don’t want an agent to sell your book if they don’t like it
  • These are business decisions. They might love your book, but they may not believe they’ll be able to sell it because [insert market factor here]
  • They may have just signed on another project that is very similar to yours
  • Agents can only juggle so many clients. Publishers (especially small ones) can only publish so many books. They will have to turn down projects they want to do because they don’t have the bandwidth
  • The market is always changing. What’s unpopular today might be popular in 5 years, and there’s always new agents/publishers appearing

Please, do not try to read too hard into a rejection. They’ll say something vague like “This didn’t work for me.” Personalized rejections used to be more common, but between the volume of queries agents/editors deal with and some people being Very Nasty when rejected…it’s safer for them to not be personalized.

Be nice to yourself when you get a rejection, especially if it hits very hard. It does get easier over time, but there’ll be days when it hits you just wrong. I strongly recommend making a separate email for writer stuff, so you only check it when you’re up to it and won’t get blindsided by notifications on your phone.

7 | You got a request!

This is unique for books. If the agent/editor liked your submission package, they’ll request the full manuscript (or, less commonly, a less than full “partial”). This is very exciting, so please send it right away in the method they request.

I’m sure you’ve read about writers that submitted their first batch of query letters to wake up with several requests for fulls and then several offers of rep by the end of the week. That is very much not common. You know how long it takes to read a book; an agent has to do that plus all the other work they need to do. It will probably be several months before they get back to you.

There is still the chance you get ghosted when you send out a full. It sucks a whole, whole lot. And, of course, they can still reject a full. These will be extra not fun when they happen, so be very nice to yourself if it does.

8 | You got an offer!!!

It’s the big day! You may celebrate, but don’t sign anything just yet. Remember, this is a business relationship, so you need to look out for your own interests.

You should reach out to the other agents you have yet to hear back from and alert them, asking if they want a full or to respond if they already have a full. If you get another offer, that’s awesome!

Ask the agent/editor what their process is like, if you can speak to any of their other clients. Some agents are very hands off and some are very involved, what would you like better? Do you want a publisher that does eBooks only or physical books in stores?

It’s okay if you don’t know these things yet. You can ask other writers and do research. Your agent and editor should be people you’re happy to work with and can trust.

9 | Now what?

Probably more editing and revisions! Read your contracts, meet your deadlines, and communicate. This is going to look different for everyone, so don’t be afraid to ask questions or seek outside advice.

Final Thoughts

I know this seems like a lot! But getting your book ready to submit is the hardest part. The rest of it is just…waiting…and then waiting again…and again….

The best way to deal with it is to work on the next book 🙂 The more you write, the better you get!