The Long Journey: How We Arrived At The Publishing Deal

This post will be short (that's always my goal on here - I know you have plenty else to do besides reading what I write to you each day!), and it will serve three purposes:

1) To let you know how I arrived at the publishing deal for The Great Lenore.

2) To serve as a caution for those of you who hope to "make it" as a writer, and to let you know that the road is not always easy.

3) To serve as an inspiration and motivation for those of you who hope to "make it" as a writer, and to let you know that you just have to keep pressing, keep pressing (and so on).

I will attempt to knock out all three of these points at once, by simply telling you how we arrived at this point.


Interjection
I just finished writing this post, and it's not as short as I'd hoped it would be. Hopefully it will educate and inspire those of you who have time to read to the end, but to those of you who don't have time, I'll put this in now: To all of you who have traveled along on this journey with me (and to all of you who are just now joining up), thank you! I feel like this book belongs to you just as much as it belongs to me. I'm excited to share each step with you.

Moving on...


The Great Lenore
Two years and five months ago, I completed the first draft of The Great Lenore. It was my fourth completed manuscript, and the other three were already in the trash by this point, so I knew that the chances of me pursuing this newborn manuscript all the way to publication were slim. However, there was something about this manuscript that sparked something inside me. Something that made me think..."Maybe this is it. I mean...it's really, really good. Maybe this is it."

I spent about two months editing the manuscript, and I prematurely began to approach agents. My query letter was mediocre, and my sample pages were unpolished. I got a few nibbles, but nothing came of these nibbles, and I went back to editing the manuscript.

For months, I edited The Great Lenore, and then I edited it for months more. I tore it apart and pieced it back together and made it everything I believed it could be. And then...I set it on the shelf. I'm not sure what I was waiting for...

Last April (2009), I received an email from an agent who had misplaced my query letter somewhere along the line and had just stumbled across it. She asked if The Great Lenore was still available, and three months later she became my agent.

This agent was a well-respected, successful, AAR agent, and when I signed with her I thought my journey was over. It would only be a matter of time before the novel landed its publishing deal, and all I had to do was wait...

I won't go into the details of this time in The Great Lenore's life, as it has been well-documented in what has become the single most popular post on this site. You've probably read it already. But in short: About eight months later (and after submissions to only three publishing houses in that entire time - two of whom had seriously positive reactions to the manuscript), my agent and I parted ways. Yes, I was back to Square One.

I sent out query letters again in February (2010), and this time I had a mind-blowing 28 requests for the manuscript. Surely, I would land a new agent with no problem at all!

The responses started rolling in. "I loved this, but I think you should change this." "I loved this [that the other agent thought I should change], but I think you should change this [that yet another agent had liked]." The world of publishing (as agents will put it, "The current state of publishing") has changed the way agents operate. Whereas they used to find a writer they loved, thereafter working with them to make the manuscript sparkle, agents are now (largely) looking for ready-to-submit-to-publishers works. Better yet, they're hoping to not hook up with a first-time-novel at all if they can help it, because the risk is so much higher. (If you are a first-time novelist searching for an agent, trust me: Still approach agents! It's a great route to go if you are able to find an agent who cares about your manuscript as much as you do, and there are plenty of excellent agents out there who might be just right for you!)

I had a lot of seriously close calls, but I quickly realized that agents were probably not the way for me to go. They didn't like the fact that three publishers had already been crossed off their list for them, and I was beginning to grow uneasy thinking about the lack of serious *drive* I was feeling from most agents as a whole.

About three or four months ago, I decided to research independent publishing houses. Most of these still require you to have an agent, but I found about 25 or 30 that I could approach directly. Of these 25 or 30, there was one that I really liked, and there was a second - Atticus Books - that I fell in love with immediately (as is proven by an older post in which I told all of you how much I love them). I decided to approach these two and see what would happen, and within about a week I received an email from the first one, telling me their list is full through the end of 2011 and they are not currently considering anything at all. Not long after that, I received an initial response from Atticus Books, and three months later, here I am: Publishing deal in hand.

I could not be happier with where I landed (and I mean that - give me a choice between St. Martin's Press and Atticus Books, and I'll take Atticus Books, where I can contact my publisher if I have a question and know that he'll have an answer; where I can work with people directly and efficiently; where I know they take my book just as seriously as I take it, and where they will do everything they can to make it a success; where they're pretty-much-just-generally awesome), and I can hardly wait to see where the next steps take us.

To those of you who lasted to the end of this (regrettably) long post, thank you.

And thank you to all for your support.

I am yet young - only 25 years old - and I still have plenty to learn. But I have also learned plenty, and hopefully some of what I have learned overlaps with some of what you have not yet learned...hopefully something I say on this site will help you.

Cheers, Dear Reader.
~JM

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