Book Watch Update 3: What an Author Really Does While on Submission
Notes from the trenches (and an update!)
As I tell aspiring authors all the time, there is no standard, ideal pathway to publication.
The best you can do is write a dang good book, decide what publication success will look like for you, and outline an actionable plan that will best position you to accomplish what you want.
But there are always surprises along the way.
It’s like planning for a road trip. You have to make a plan. Think through where you’re starting, where you want to end up, and what route will get you where you want to go. But there are things you can’t know until you’re already in transit. Like that a bridge is out. Or that a five-car pileup has the interstate shut down for hours, sending you onto back roads.
That’s what navigating the publishing industry feels like.
You make the best plan you can, then roll with the punches.
That’s me right now.
Mid-road trip.
Hands on the steering wheel, foot on the gas, eyes flicking between the idealized route guidance to the reality of the road ahead.
If you’ve been here for six months or more, you’ll remember that I signed with an agent to represent my work moving forward.
This is no small feat.
Those who do math say the odds of landing an agent are 1 in 1000.
Why the long odds?
Simply put, lots talented people are writing and pitching good books. So you’re swimming in very crowded seas. To stand out, you have to be very skilled or very connected or very persistent or very lucky or very blessed or some combination of these elements.
This is not the fun part of the publication process. Talking about it is like looking at the back side of a cross stitch. It’s just a whole lot of drafts and emails and waiting for responses and checking in and worrying and second-guessing yourself and tedium.
Hopefully this time around, this phase won’t last too long.
Because I’ve written a dang good full-length romantic comedy that I can’t wait for you to read.
Seriously.
It is so good.
But it could take time for that book to find a home.
The wheels of traditional publishing grind both slowly and exceeding small.
Landing a contract takes time. Negotiating a contract takes time. Ironing out all the details takes time. So, so much time. The gap between finishing a book and getting it in front of your readers’ beady little eyes can sometimes feel interminable.
In the meantime, what’s an author on submission to do?
Write another book, of course.
Or several.
After getting the manuscript of that dang good romcom safely into the hands of my agent, pulling a proposal together, and letting her take the reins on pitching, I immediately turned my attention elsewhere.
I wrote the draft of an entirely different book.
Yes, another new book.
After writing a full draft and giving it an initial revision, I’ll say it’s not dang-good quality yet, but that’s how all my early drafts are. I know what I need to do to get it there. I am completely confident that it’s just a matter of time until I have a second entirely new dang-good book ready to go for you.
But why stop when you’re on a roll?
While letting the dust settle on the not-quite-dang-good-yet draft, I’ve gotten a jump start on a third book.
Yes, a third new book.
Because why not.
This one’s a bit harder to explain, so all I’ll say for now is that though I told my writing group I planned to focus on fiction from here on out, that I was now writing romcoms exclusively, and that, despite my actual life being “all com and no rom,” as someone recently put it, I was going to write such killer romantic comedies that my name would eventually become synonymous with the genre, I am once again cooking up some nonfiction.
Because I am who I am.
Because sometimes your topics just choose you, and you have no choice but to choose them back.
Because I was and am and always will be a multi-genre writer with Thoughts and Ideas and Opinions and Opportunities and a whole lot of words spilling out.
Due to the unpredictable nature of publishing, however, it’s hard to predict which of these projects will land the next deal.
Because fiction and nonfiction work so differently (I do not have the bandwidth to explain why today, so just trust me on this—or Google it) even though the nonfiction isn’t even wholly drafted yet, it may wind up placing before the two romcoms, one of which is essentially “done.”
Then again, it might not.
Or none of them may sell—ever.
Because that’s the nature of this sort of work. The writing life is a wonderful life, but the publishing industry can be cruel.
Nonetheless, I have hope.
Not just because I believe in myself and in my work.
I’ve been through this before.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been sitting on a throne of unpublished manuscripts.
Between 2013-2017, I spent years writing and pitching a slew of books before they all got picked up for publication around the same time.
We call this season Bookmageddon.
Some of you were around for it, and oh, my—what a special time.
I still can’t talk about it without my right eye twitching.
And yet…
Here we go again.
Because here’s one thing about me.
I’m just going to keep on writing. That’s not in question. I just keep going. Because much like Sia, I also am a Porsche with no breaks.
The question isn’t whether you’ll ever get to read these books.
It’s just a matter of when.
Haven’t read any of my books yet?
Catch up with my newest (#1 Amazon Bestselling) release, Socially Awkward.
Finally got to read this one -- you know how my spring has been 🫠 Excited for you!