Take heart. Take a big slice of heart. It’s actually easy to get published.

It’s obviously a lot less easy to publish exactly what you want to write, or exactly what you’ve managed to write, and it’s pretty damned hard to get a devoted readership. But…

Let’s start with easy – and I’m saying this after a newly mailed rejection’s just pinged the email with its next nail for the coffin – Yes. It’s easy. I keep telling myself that despite everything. For one it’s easier than a heap of other things that people don’t spend half as much time dreaming about.

It’s easier than getting onto TV. It’s easier than becoming than becoming a circus performer. Easier than becoming a tapestry-maker or a thatcher. Easier than getting to direct films. Maybe easier than finding an honest politician or a till-death-do-us-part relationship. Take heart. When you walk into a book shop, don’t feel depressed at all those lucky, lucky published people. Rejoice. The system wants this many published authors – even if they’re stuck on the shelves and the remainder piles – and it craves more.

Yes, getting published is a really achievable ambition. It’s obviously a lot harder to make a living at writing. It’s very hard to become known as a writer. It’s very hard to produce a treasured classic. But for many there’s a simple dream of is just being published.

Why?

Well, probably for simple affirmation, an acknowledgement by someone else that you deserve to be called a writer. It also chimes with all those reasons for being published that feel so wrong. Who do you want to teach you creative writing, for example, the lady who’s published or the lady who isn’t? That’s usually a question that everyone answers without even asking the potentially more important stuff: how good a teacher they are, whether their own work chimes with the student in question, never mind what they’ve published exactly and how reputable it really is outside a niche of die-hards, No. Published. That’s what makes you an author. That’s what makes your work worthwhile. And, if you’re not very psychologically careful, you end up thinking that’s what makes your life worthwhile.

Nonsense.

Write because the writing is what you need to do. If you’re published by someone it’s because they can see something beyond that need, an inroad, a paying audience, or a business opportunity – publication s not a sign that you are or aren’t a writer. Of course bad writers generally get published less than good writers, so, in some quarters at least, it is a badge that confirms you’re not a bad writer. It’s far from the case though that only good writers get published, or that somehow it’s being excellent that gets you published.

If you want to be published then the path is well known. It’s a fairly straightforward set of steps. The problem comes when… No, save that for the end. Here’s what I believe the steps are, and you just need a 90% productive effort on ALL of them.

Here are the steps

  1. Know what writing is
  2. Know the craft of writing
  3. Know the audience that suits you
  4. Make your suitably deliverable USP
  5. Know where you fit in the hierarchy of agents/publishers
  6. GO! (write…or rewrite…. or patch and scrape at what you’ve misguidedly started)

If you’ve done all of these properly, there you are. You should have no trouble getting published. Agents want books, good books, books they can sell, books from writers who know their audience and have got that neat USP. Publishers want the same. It doesn’t particularly need clever writing or deep philosophy or society-changing themes. If you’ve got your book done to the steps here then there shouldn’t be a problem. If you haven’t got one, then go back down the ladder and see where you didn’t get the 90% productive effort for one of the steps.

Getting published, step one: Know what writing is

You could by-pass this if you were already famous for something else, but let’s for a minute assume the publication will be because of the writing. Here’s your first step. Know what writing is.

Do you? Really?

For those who want to write and who need all their words in writing this stage may have been completed between the ages of 4 and 14, but then you have to be wary that your sense of what good writing is isn’t obfuscated by literature courses and social snobbery around what reading should be.

Reading is key. It needs to be reading that teaches you what writing is, though. You need to be alert to why a set of phrases works or doesn’t. Why one passage of writing is pompous and off putting, why another seems frothy and overly-sweetened. Classics are a must but it’s probably a 10% dose. The reasons why Joyce and Dickens are still read are not always because they illustrate what writing should be.

Get to know which writing you want to emulate. Make sure it’s writing that living readers acknowledge as good writing. Your style could well do with the spice of Woolf or Wilde or Wodehouse but beware of making that spice the substance of the meal. You need to practice your way into a deeper understanding. Exercise across a range of styles, do pastiches, emulate writing that delivers emotion successfully to you – and spread the range of emotions as wide as possible, emotions of pity, hilarity, anger, fear, disgust, affection, scorn. What writing does that for you? How could you do it for others?

Pick up on all aspects of style. Emulate it. Then step away from the copies and begin to understand what writing is for you.

Getting published, step two: Know the craft of writing

This is where the hard work starts. It’s not particularly hard work to know what good writing is for you and your hoped-for circle of influence. Knowing the craft of writing is something else.

There’s a few hundred thousand books out there, courses too, some good some bad. Blogs galore, as the developing craftspeople try to fathom what their shortfalls are and what aspect of the craft they’ll take to next.

For me being able to articulate craftspersonship is part of the process. That’s not to say you can’t do it without. There’s plenty of great books written through intuition and just riding the time-honoured patterns that you’ve been steeped in through endless reading. If you want to improve at anything though, get to the stage where you can articulate the essence of that craft.

It’s like chess. You can intuitively move pieces into or out of danger. Once you’re a grand master you probably have a raft of unarticulated sensations about the game. Yet in the step between beginner and master you will improve fastest when you’re able to say exactly why one move is better than another, to talk it through in words. Same with snooker, same with football. If you can give name to it then you begin to really know it. If you have to teach grammar, to explain the rules and the exceptions, then you know grammar. If you are a designer you know why something will work and can explain the parameters of design function – it’s not just a case of moving stuff about and maybe getting lucky.

It’s the same with writing. Can you say which bits of your writing are good and explain why?

That’s craft and if you can’t then this is possibly a step you’ll struggle to pass.  Why does one set of sentences work with better rhythm than another?  Why does one combination of words have more potency than a set of synonyms. What is fresh and what is stale? What is expansive and what is cluttered?

What qualities of character are most likely to get audience response? How are traits described and nuanced? How does conflict flow, develop and resolve? How are readerly expectations toyed with and variously delivered? How is a familiar pattern thrown open to unexpected delight.

Get the books. Do the courses. Think long and hard why some things work and some things don’t.

Understand all the rules. And if you’re breaking them understand exactly why.

Getting published step three: Know the audience that suits you

If you’ve got an eclectic taste this might be a difficult step. If you are desperate to be innovative and experimental then this could be the most difficult step.

It’s easiest if you love one kind of book and you’re desperate to emulate it. Romance. Fantasy. Teen dystopia. Tartan noir. Dada. These are genres with audiences and if you know that you want to grab that particular audience’s attention, then this should be a breeze.

Publishing is not about literature. That fact used to confuse and beguile me. I studied great works that had stood the test of time. That was what i thought literature meant. I believed natively that the literature had come from brilliant minds as a conduit of great souls, that there was something in the work itself that was of quintessential literary greatness and that that was why it had been published and cherished through the decades.

Bollocks. Of course.

Literature studies are not about great works, they’re about great publications. As a subject of study, a book that has had a publishing history and an audience and a social reaction and a critical history is a far far different thing from an identical book that was never noticed.  Even if you are going back to the text itself with the New Criticism the fact is that those texts have risen to a point of critical attention. They are works within markets and within social contexts. Whether it was the direct aim of the writer, or of someone who discovered the works lying in a drawer, or of some unscrupulous literary thief, the work evolves into, of and for an audience.

So, if you want to be published you cannot be sniffy about audiences. You can’t be random or natively optimistic either.

Nothing short of this: you need to define who will read your work and guarantee that, given the opportunity, they would respond to it as with a range of their favourites. No point saying that a work is for porn lovers who also like a bit of Enid Blyton, that isn’t a valid target audience; no point saying your audience is all those who’ve caught the Kabadi on TV and are sure to want a horror story based on the ghosts of former champions – that’s at best an uncertain audience.

Look at who’s reading books and make sure yours could be tossed into a pen of at least a few thousand who would welcome it as a familiar if uncommonly interesting friend.

Getting published, step four: Know your USP

Once you’re among that audience and you know them well and can imagine the looks on their faces when you show them your front cover – and as you picture a persona of a reader and take your imagination through their reactions to your work – this is the step where the difference, the exception, the quirk, the niche, the je-ne-sais-quoi is utterly essential. The Unique Selling Point.

This audience wants more, they can’t wait to get the next great thing, the novel that will make them feel the way they have with all their favourites in the genre, they want more but why do they want this one? The same but different. That’s what everyone wants. Same ball-park but a remarkable variation in the bleachers.

The best end of this is a quirky, utterly Zeitgeisty premise that makes everyone pant to get the full story. Easier said than done, but framing this is the best step in any journey to a publishing deal.

Again, articulate the difference. Show the significance and originality of that difference, and understand exactly how different it can be whilst still being with the same audience.

Getting published, step four and a bit: Make your USP suitably deliverable

It’s the same point but different. Call it a log line or a premise or a blurb but what you’re after for this step is an astonishingly concise and beautifully delivered sense of where that USP lies. If it’s all in the twist at the end that you don’t want to reveal until the close then you’ll struggle. If the USP is its befuddling complexity then you’ll struggle. If the USP is not unique enough then you’ll struggle. If it’s unique but not something that will sell then you’ll struggle. If it’s not one point but seven then you’ll struggle.

For maximum appeal then, you know your audience, and here is a concise statement of the one clear, exciting difference that makes it wonderfully saleable. If you’re unsure how it should go imagine how you’d sell Silence of the Lambs with a USP. Or Northern Lights, Bridget Jones’ Diary, High Fidelity, To Kill a Mockingbird – they all did it to a level that made them exemplars. 

There’s a stack of posts on log lines and blurbs. I did one myself a while back but have forgotten what I said. (How to craft a logline or blurb.) Egri and McKee have interesting opinions to share. Basically it needs to conjure the possible development in the mind of whoever reads it.

Getting published, step four: Know where you fit in the hierarchy of agents/publishers

So you’ve got the book done and written, it’s great. It’s got a USP, you can deliver it – who do you deliver it to?

Consider the tale of the Most Unloveable Man on Earth though.  This MUMonE wanted to find love. He bought a bunch of flowers and thrust them in the face of the first supermodel that walked out of the Ritz. No dice. He got new flowers and thrust them at the first supermodel that walked out of the Hilton. Still no dice. He did the same thing a third and fourth time and then gave. Convinced he must be unloveable and unattractive he threw himself off the nearest bridge.

The most demoralising thing for amateur writers is the endless stream of rejections. You’ll get plenty of those, everyone does. But as with the parable of the MUMonE, you can do yourself a favour and at least be pitching realistically.

How do you find an agent – well, of course you google ‘em up. Those first page of google agencies must be choking for unknowns. You want a publisher, well whack your manuscript off to Penguin, why not?

Just as some footballers are at Stevenage and some are at Liverpool, just as some horses are doing the Grand National and some are pulling drays, as some chefs are at The Dorchester and some run burger vans outside Dorchester, you need to recognise what your Zone of Proximal Development is and where you belong at this stage in your career. If there’s a pyramid to climb with your literary heroes at the top then its unlikely you’re going to leap up there immediately. Be sensible. Be patient. Be realistic.

Your, ZPD, Zone of Proximal Development, is where you’re capable of moving to next. Understand that while some publishing is a rags-to-riches success story for an ambitious unknown, most of it isn’t. There’s a publishing house for you, there’s an agent for you. Assuming you’ve got through all the steps so far then you’ve got something to sell and someone will join in your quest (publishing) rather than no-one (self-publishing)

Here you go. Find the right person to support you and go for it.

But is being published a real and worthy quest?

The problem of course is that you don’t really JUST want to be published. You want to write what you want, you want to do it your way. Or you do want the publication but not the work. Or you do want the work but not the achingly dull practice of the craft before the work becomes justifiable as a potential fame-maker. 

Is that a word? It should be (or someone can tell me what the established term is). Fame-maker. We sift around in the dirt, cringing at our own anonymity and we’re looking for the elusive Fame-maker. The illusive Fame-maker. The thing that will get us recognised and will validate us. That will make us good in another’s eyes.

We are alone, reaching out here and there. Our published work seems a chance that a larger than normal number of people will connect briefly with us, they will seize our ideas and understand how we feel. It’s great to reach out and connect and great to make a gift of your ideas.

Don’t get too distracted by that, though.

There’s something in the process that must take precedence over the product. The steps above aren’t just steps towards getting published, not really. They’re steps in making the experience of writing better, better for you the writer. If you know what’s good, know the craft, if you think about audience and who might ideally read what you write, if you focus in on what is unique about your own practice and you do that well enough to get a concise simple statement as to why what you offer is valuable, then you’re not simply making steps towards some business ideal like publishing, you’re developing a craft, one that is intimate with the human brain and its craving for language to make sense of experience.

Do the steps anyway. Don’t treat publishers as gods that you need to please. Please yourself. Just move those few steps closer, wherever possible, to those great ideals that our literary heroes have established.