Five BIG Mistakes I Made When Trying to Get Published

I made the blunders… so you don’t have to!

1. Sending the manuscript out before it was finished.

Because I had read that the turnaround for agents and publishers to respond to a sent manuscript could be weeks, even months, I decided to get a jump on things in June 2020, which was two months before I actually considered The Walk to be ‘finished’ – the first time I thought that, anyway.

For those who have never embarked on the frankly dreadful process of querying a manuscript, the vast majority of industry recipients will ask for a sample of anywhere between one single page and 30,000 words with a synopsis, and make their decision based on that. If they’re going to take twelve weeks to read your one-page offering and then email you with an eloquent re-phrasing of ‘Nah’ (or worse, ghost you) it can be super tempting to start sending it out once you hit the halfway mark, and worry about having a full manuscript if and when you’re actually asked for one.

Just don’t do it. It’s stressful, you will change your mind about so many aspects of the thing, you’re not ready. Don’t do it.

2. Sending the manuscript out before it was ready.

Ready is not the same as ‘finished’. The Walk was ‘finished’ in August 2020. It was not completely ready for professional industry eyes until at least a year after that, by which time I’d already sent it to at least fifty agents and publishers who, of course, wanted little or nothing to do with it. It was okay, it was a complete story, but I had re-drafted aspects of it maybe only once or twice and it wasn’t excellent. It wasn’t a five-star read. It was finished and I was eager to send it out to get to the point I am out now, which is a wonderful place to be – but I had to learn some patience. And patience is hard!

3. Not doing my research.

When I was first writing The Walk, Irish novelist Sally Rooney was all the rage. Luckily for me, it created a great surge in the market for Irish interest literature and then especially so when her second novel was adapted by the BBC for British television in 2020, to the delight of millions.

When querying a manuscript, it helps in your cover letter to identify an existing market for your book – for instance, ‘I think fans of Dean Koontz and Lee Child will really like this US-based, ex-military thriller I’ve written’. Because publishing is basically on its knees as an industry (which is a. very sad and b. another blog post in itself), you need to show them that you understand the market, so you can do half the marketing yourself alongside them.

That in mind, then, imagine how fast my manuscript sample and cover letter went into the bin – digital, or otherwise – when the receiving agent read about how, thanks to the popularity of Sally Rooney’s million-copy-selling novel ‘Ordinary People’, there was a great market for my book. Sally Rooney’s one-million-copies-sold bestseller is called Normal People.

Not Ordinary People.

I was too lazy to check because I was so sure I was right – after all, I’m a massive book person, aren’t I? I’m a massive something, that’s for sure. Another dozen or so submissions wasted because I made a daft error like that. Do your research!

4. Taking rejection personally

A great book to have about your person when querying a manuscript – or any creative piece of work, really – is the Bloomsbury ‘Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook’, reprinted annually with all the latest info. In fact, there are a lot of published books about how to publish a book out there – a bit inception-y, if you ask me, and there’s certainly an irony there. In any case, what they all have in common is a very impassioned statement about how hard it is to get a traditional publishing contract anymore. You are warned – expect rejection, and lots of it. Expect to be ghosted, expect to have your work torn apart and your dreams dashed by someone who read the synopsis and decided they didn’t like it, without giving your actual written word a glance.

The Walk received over 100 rejections – some of them with beautifully written positive feedback and an urge to keep going, or ‘send it to my friend over at [insert agency name here]’. Other times, I got a standard copy-and-paste response, a jumbled-up attempt at a summary of my own book that showed so clearly that they hadn’t even remotely read it or double-checked what the characters’ names were (see point 3 again!), and some just didn’t respond at all.

It was difficult and painful, and I really did consider giving up on a lot of occasions, because it can really start to poison you against yourself. That negativity and doubt and time spent sulking was such a huge waste of my own time and effort. But in the end, 100 rejections weren’t quite enough to squash my spirit, and it shouldn’t squash yours either.

5. Worrying.

What if people don’t like it?

What if Irish people feel offended?

What if the Catholic Church find it and go nuts and throw me out of the congregation?

What if the survivors of Bessborough are offended?

What if I get loads of spitefully written one-star reviews on Amazon and I’m ruined forever?

What if I get famous and then bad stuff happens – mo’ money, mo’ problems-style?

What if it’s actually really dreadful and my friends and family who have read it are just being nice, and then I put it out in the world and people are mortified on my behalf for thinking I could actually write?

Waste of time and effort, and it restricts the creative process. None of that happened – especially not mo’ money, mo’ problems, that’s for sure.

Go read Roland Barthes ‘The Death of the Author’, make a gin and tonic, and write it anyway.