Writing is certainly a journey. It begins with a desire in your heart followed by a thought in your mind. The thoughts pile up and spill onto your page. Once you have emptied your mind of the river of thoughts: your book is done, right? Wrong! The work now begins.
So I’m sitting with my critiqued section of manuscript, but no publisher. I began to check out Publishing Houses online. While on several sites, I discovered that the big publishing houses refuse to take manuscripts from new authors. On one I was instructed to not send it in as it would not even be read.
How then can a new author get started? I knew there must be a way because new authors appear on the market on a regular basis. I was becoming frustrated when I landed on the Bethany House website. They also don’t accept new work, but they directed me to a site called Christian Manuscript Submissions. This is a site where, for a fee, you can post a book proposal consisting of a tentative title, category topic, potential market, similar books, promotion ideas, summary of your book, table of contents, and two or three chapters of your manuscript. Many publishing houses use this site to find new authors. In fact, their websites stated that they would only consider manuscripts that were posted on this type of site.
We discussed this and decided this was the route for me to pursue. I had gathered information about self-publishing but wanted to save that as a last resort. For me; I wanted the advice and criticism of an editor, the cover designed by a professional, marketing done by a professional and promoted to a wide market, etc.
Many of the things this site required, I had already done when I had sent my work in to the first publisher. It was only a matter of adding a few things and making a few changes here and there. I had it ready in a few days and emailed it in. Now to wait again. I had a six month window to leave my work on the site. If a publisher was interested, they would contact me.
Within a couple of weeks I had an email stating that a publishing company was interested in my work! I was so excited. But there is always a catch. This company was a full publishing company; editors, cover designers, promoters of books to all the major book stores in
Could I do this? We began to brainstorm ideas of how to promote my book without going to bookstores which is not permissible as the Publisher does that. I was amazed that in a few days, we had come up with several ideas. I emailed back that I was interested.
Now the process would start again. I would be submitting the entire manuscript this time and then the wait for the decision would begin. At this point they had only seen a small portion of my work. Would they feel it was good enough to publish?
Well, that lesson in patience was about to be put into effect again. Maybe I was a slow learner and had to have the lesson repeated over and over. Whatever the reason, the wait began again.
Leave a Reply