“You’ve finished your novel,” says a friend or family member to me.  “Now what?”

“Try to get it published,” I reply.

“Well duh,” says the friend or family member, “but how do you do that?”

“Simple,” I say.  “All it takes is faith and trust, and a little bit of pixie dust.”

My friend or family member’s eyebrows scrunch.  “Isn’t that how you fly?”

Oh, right.  I sometimes get mixed up, because getting published can seem about as impossible as flying.

The good news is, while no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to fly (somewhere, a fairy just fell down dead from my implication that there’s no such thing as pixie dust), persistent work may land me a publishing contract.  If I get lucky.  (See, I do believe in fairies, as well as their dust.)

What I’ve discovered inquiring non-writer minds want to know is:  what exactly is that work which, combined with luck, gets a writer published?  That’s what I’m here to tell you.

The Pitch

Once I’ve completed a novel, I must then reduce those 50-100,000 carefully chosen words to 100 or fewer even more carefully chosen words that summarize what my novel is about, capture my tone and style, and make a stranger want to read my book.  Think back cover blurb.

It sounds easy to write a pitch if you’ve already managed to complete a novel, but don’t ever say that to a writer.  Writing a novel is the easy part.  Pitches make writers curl up into the fetal position and wish they’d worked harder at math.

The Agent

If the purpose of the pitch is to make someone want to read my book, then it logically follows that there’s an audience for my pitch.  That would be where literary agents come in.

One upon a time, writers could pitch novels directly to publishers.  In the current economic climate, publishers can’t afford to bank on books that won’t sell.  Since there are thousands of writers trying to get published, the easiest way for publishers to find the novels that will make the New York Times bestsellers list is to consider only work that comes to them via literary agencies.  Agents weed out the drivel and the dreck from  thousands of submissions because they don’t make any money unless publishers pick up their clients.  (An agent typically receives a 15% commission from a book’s total earnings.)

It’s easy for writers to find agents, because we have our own yellow pages of sorts.  The Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market lists the contact info for hundreds of literary agents.  I prefer to use AgentQuery — same info, but free, and also searchable by genre.

The Query

Armed with a pitch and a list of agents, I begin the query process, which consists of emailing and snail-mailing my pitch to agents.  At first contact, most agents only want to see a pitch; a few will, additionally, ask for a detailed synopsis of the entire novel; even fewer will ask for the pitch and the first couple of pages; fewer still ask for a couple of chapters along with the pitch.  Whatever the agent’s submission requirements, I have very little with which to make a big impression!

The Response

More often than not, my queries are met with rejection letters.  That’s something you have to prepare yourself for if you’re going to seek publication:  you will get rejected.  Again and again.  It sucks, but you have to deal with it.

I deal with it by expecting to be rejected; that way I’m never disappointed (well, not much, and not for long), just pleasantly surprised.

So far, I’ve pitched Songs for Piano and Voice to fourteen agents.  Seven of those fourteen agents gave me flat nos (including a few “dear author” form rejections).  Six haven’t responded, though three I don’t expect will at all, as they specify in their submission guidelines that they only respond to projects that interest them.

One agent has responded positively to my pitch.  She asked to read my first five pages to see if my style suited her representation.  Oddly, as I composed this post, she replied to decline my project.

If she’d liked my pages, however, she probably would have asked to read the rest of my manuscript or a chapter-by-chapter summary.  And if she’d liked that, she probably would have offered to represent me.  Then she would have begun the task of shopping my book to publishers.

Rejection stings (content more so than a simple query), but I remain hopeful that someday I’ll tweak the verb tense in the previous paragraph.  Until then, I’ll continue to query.  After all, I’ve only queried fourteen agents out of hundreds.  And I do believe in fairies, and their dust.

And that’s what you do after you finish writing a novel.  Questions?