On March 2, 2017, Christie V Powell wrote, “The problem with querying is… that supply exceeds demand. There are more good writers out there than there are reader eyeballs.” I came across this statement by an agent recently and wondered what you thought about it.

I asked my husband, and he mentioned a study of song popularity. There is a threshold of skill, he said, but once this is surpassed, which song “makes it” and which doesn’t is completely random.

This was not comforting.

Sadly, I think this is probably mostly true. And true of all the arts. Humans are drawn to art, and many of us are good at it and love to make it. There aren’t enough readers, theaters, concert halls, museums, art galleries to provide all of us with an audience, let alone a living.

Once the skill threshold has been reached, luck becomes important. Agents’ slush piles teeter to their ceilings. The interns and junior staff who read them–I’m guessing–find no easier to say than yes.

Many of you know that it took me nine years to get a manuscript accepted. I may also have written before that at one point in my long trek it occurred to me that if I had set out to become I brain surgeon, I would already have been one (aside from the fact that I’m too squeamish even to remove a splinter). This thought jumped to the fore when I met a doctor who had given up his practice to try to write for children. Yikes! I thought. I hope he knows what he’s getting into. Yikes! I hope he has savings!

During my pre-published time, an editor visited one of my writing classes. He said that the way to get published was either to write something great or to write about something that few were expert in. The only subject I was expert in was welfare programs for people who were healthy enough to work, and that topic didn’t seem promising for a children’s book. As for great, I felt defeated right off.

Hence the nine years.

Now, let me try for some comfort.

When I talk to kids about the nine years, I ask them for the moral of my story. Hands pop up, and the answer I get is, “Never give up,” which was true for me. If you give up, you don’t get published. You also may stop writing, and for some of us, that’s like cutting off a limb.

Okay, maybe not comforting. I’ll try again.

There’s another moral. During those nine years, I took adult ed writing classes and read the Newbery-and-Newbery-honor-winning books of the prior twenty or more years. Both helped me become a better writer and one who could write for the readers I wanted. In my classes, I met other wannabe writers. We supported each other. I joined and formed critique groups and made friends. Turns out, this was one of the happiest times of my life, even though achieving my goal still seemed more a dream than a likelihood. So the second moral is: While you’re never giving up, find a way to have a wonderful time. Which will help you stick with it.

Also, a critique group and classes gave me a (tiny) audience, and one of my most important reasons for writing was to be read. 0thers were self-expression and to learn a skill.

So these are comforts, I hope, for continuing to write, regardless of the eventual outcome, which, unless we have a crystal ball, is unknown. And I still find them valid. I’m published now, but I don’t know if a particular book will catch on with readers. My audience for any one book may be small, but I’ve still added to my skill set by writing it. I still have writing pals who sustain me. This, as I’ve said here before, is especially true of writing poems.

But there are things that we can do to increase the odds of luck smiling on us. Some of these, alas, don’t apply until you turn eighteen.

Go to conferences, if you can afford to. At many writing conferences, the editors and agents who are speakers and panelists will preferentially treat participant submissions, which means your work won’t be placed at the bottom of the slush pile.

If the conference includes a critique option from an editor or an agent, sign up for it, even if there’s an extra fee. Frankly, these industry readers (I’ve been one) will see a lot of work that falls sadly below any reasonable threshold. Writing that rises above will be a relief. The editor or agent will be so happy not to have only bad news to deliver to the writer. You may begin a relationship that, if not immediately, may result in an eventual acceptance.

When you’re there, move outside your comfort zone. Introduce yourself to editors and agents. Talk about your work. Do not mention your uncertainty about its worth.

Also, for the comfort of community, speak with other participants. Make friends, if any of them appeal to you. Share experiences. Get tips.

If you’re old enough and you’re writing for children or young adults (which these days extends into college age and a little beyond), join the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (www.SCBWI.org), a great organization for people just starting out–in terms of its focus on getting published as well as on craft. Get involved in your local chapter, where there may be meetings and may be a regional conference that’s much cheaper than the national one.

Send your work out! You can’t get published if no one is looking at your stories. I once heard of a critique group where the person who got the most rejections in a year got an award–because the one with the most rejections is the one most likely, after a while, to get the most acceptances. I recently went through my files. My folder of personal rejections is about three inches thick! I didn’t keep the form letters, or we wouldn’t be able to get into the basement.

Don’t get in your own way!

For example, a woman in my favorite writing class was working on a book I adored. I don’t know if she’s finished it, twenty years later. I know it isn’t published, and I also know she’s shown it, or parts of it, to this friend or that. She keeps fooling around and not getting to the point, and the world is deprived of a great story.

If you do send something out and get criticism from an agent, take the criticism seriously. Try out what’s being offered to you, and do it relatively quickly. After you’ve revised, ask this person if she’s willing to see it again.

Before you send work out, proofread it obsessively. It should be free of typos, spelling errors, and grammar mistakes. If it isn’t, you won’t get much of a reading. If you’re not good at this skill, ask someone who is for help–not with critiquing the story, in this case, just checking for these sort of mistakes. Same for query letters. With something as short as a letter, read it backwards, which will help you notice the itty-bitty things.

End of lecture.

But here’s a little more comfort: According to my favorite podcast, Planet Money, fiction writers are unlikely to be replaced by robots. Chances are better than ninety percent in our favor.

And new people break in all the time, and debut books come out constantly. Yours can be one of them.

So–since I have no prompts to offer this time–have fun, and save what you write!

Before I start, here’s a link to an interesting New York Times article about reader reviews on Amazon: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/technology/amazon-book-reviews-deleted-in-a-purge-aimed-at-manipulation.html?hp&_r=1&.

I didn’t finish writing about publishing last week, so here we go back into it.

You may remember that I mentioned the Rutgers conference and said it’s the best one I know of, but I didn’t say why. First off, here’s the link again: http://www.ruccl.org/One-on-One_Plus_Conference.html. The conference is for writers for children and young adults, and it’s another one that you have to be at least eighteen to go – but if you’re not there yet, you’ll reach that mark sooner than you think. You also have to submit a writing sample to get admitted to the conference. You’ll find information on the website.

The conference is the best because everyone is paired with a mentor, who is either an editor, an agent, or a published author. The overwhelming majority of mentors are editors or agents. I’m one of the few author mentors. They let me in because I’ve been going for so long, first as a mentee – and I met my agent at the conference. We’re not paid for mentoring. The editors and agents volunteer because they’re hoping to find new writers.

There’s a panel on some publishing or writing topic and a speaker, but the most worthwhile parts are the one-on-one and the five-on-five sessions. Before the one-on-one, the mentors read the selection submitted by the writer with whom they’re paired. Then the two meet for forty-five minutes and discuss the work and answer any question the writer may have.

In the five-on-five, five mentors and five mentees get together to talk about publishing and craft, with one of the mentors as a moderator to keep things moving. Again, the mentees can ask whatever they like.

And there’s lunch, when the editors and agents mingle, and you may be able to ask an agent or an editor if you can send her something.

In my starting-out days, before I had an agent, when publishers still looked at unagented submissions, I often waited many months for a response. Even if I’d met the editor at a conference, I waited. Sometimes my work was lost. It was maddening. Once or twice a rejection letter for someone else’s story arrived in my mailbox!

In their defense, editors are very busy, and they squeeze in reading manuscript from newbies in odd moments. So, as is true of everything else in writing and publishing, you need patience.

Most of the editors and agents who go to conferences are near the beginning of their careers. If one of them falls in love with your manuscript, she will be almost as happy as you. Editors advance through acquisitions. If your book does well, it’s a feather in her cap. If it does super well, she may get promoted, say from assistant editor to editor.

Your editor does a lot more than edit. She (most are women) will negotiate your contract with your agent, your literary lawyer (see the last post), or you. She represents the publisher with you and your agent.

She represents you inside the publishing house. One of her jobs is to get the sales force, the people who sell books to bookstores, excited about your book. As an example, my editor dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood when she presented my picture book, Betsy Red Hoodie, to the sales people.

She’ll consult with the art director about your cover. If your book is illustrated, she’ll have a say in picking the illustrator. More than anyone except your friends and family and possibly your agent, she’ll be your book’s biggest booster.

And an agent does more than find you a publisher. She (again, most are women) will negotiate your contract, which means she’s an expert on contract clauses, language, and the fast-changing publishing world. She knows each publishing house and what its policies are. There are differences, but I’m not privy to those secrets. I think the similarities are greater than the differences.

Your agent may also represent your film rights and may sell your book in foreign markets. Or may not.

Your agent will certainly represent you to the publisher. If your relationship with your editor gets gummed up, she’ll help you straighten things out.

Your royalties go to her. She takes her cut, usually fifteen percent, and then passes the rest on to you. But before she pays you, she checks over your royalty statement to make sure it looks correct. For example, you’ll get a different royalty rate for hardcover books and for paperbacks, different again for e-books. She’ll check to make sure that the correct rates are applied. Mistakes have been made!

Onto the contract.

I discussed some of this in my post almost exactly two years ago, on December 29th, 2010, so you may want to go back and take a look.

When you sell your book to a publisher, you’re selling specific rights. For example, you might grant it the right to publish in English all over the world or in English only in North America.

In exchange, you receive an advance against future book sales (royalties). You have to make some promises, like that you’ll deliver the manuscript by a certain date – which you can negotiate. If this is your first book, you’ve probably already delivered.

The contract will say that the publisher can’t change your words unless you agree, but it can follow its own standards of punctuation, spelling, and so on. In other words, it’s your book. I hardly ever make a fuss over a comma.

The contract commits the publisher to releasing your book within a certain time. And it spells out your royalty rates and says when you will be paid (usually twice a year).

Subsidiary rights are included in the deal, which means that you’ll let the publisher handle things like book club or audio book rights. (Or your agent may handle the sale of audio book rights.) The contract will specify what percentage you’ll get and they’ll get if there are such sales.

You have to warrant (assure the publisher) that your book is original – that you wrote it.

There’s more, but that’s the heart of it. There are other parts that you need to keep in mind, but your agent or literary lawyer will go over everything with you. Ask questions. You should understand it all. My latest contract is thirteen pages long, written in legalese. Many of my books have been published in other countries and most of those contracts are blessedly short, not much more than: I promise I wrote the book, the publisher promises to publish it, and if it doesn’t, I keep the money. Nice.

Here’s a prompt:

I forgot to say anything about query letters because they weren’t very important when I was trying to get published. But nowadays, you need ‘em. Usually the query letter will go with your sample chapters and probably a synopsis of your story. The purpose of the query is to create interest in your book, much like the copy on the back of a book creates interest. You paint your story in the best possible light in a few paragraphs and say a little bit about why you wrote it. The letter should be less than a page. Here’s a link on the subject: http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2010/08/how-to-write-query-letter.html. If you google query letters you’ll find more. A query letter is a little like bragging, which may be hard for some of you but in this prompt I want you to give it a shot. Write a query letter for one of your stories. Could be your latest NaNoWriMo creation. Even if you’re unhappy at the moment with everything you’ve ever written, pick one and find great things to say about it.

Have fun, and save what you write!