How To Get Published
A friend of a friend asked for some publishing advice recently, and I put together a little something that I thought might help others as well. Here you go:
Most of the big publishers require an agent, so if you have a finished manuscript or a solid proposal for a longer work (usually that means a few sample chapters and a well-developed outline), you can start there. Editor Brooke Vitale has an excellent list of agents who take children’s and YA literature.
Smaller and local presses don’t always require an agent, so you can also can start there if you like. In Maine, Islandport and Downeast Books do books with Maine/New England themes.
When it comes to looking for editors, assistant editors and associate editors can be the best targets. They are still building a list of writers and illustrators. Full editors and senior editors often have well-established relationships with creative types and not as much room on their lists for new people.
One thing that can help is to go to bookstores and libraries and look for books that you like or that seem similar to what you’ve written and see who the publisher is. Do check pub dates, too, because it’s not that helpful to see what a publisher was putting out a decade ago….you want current stuff.
Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators both have classes and workshops that can be helpful. And it can just be encouraging to get together with other people who are starting out and gather tips that way.
It’s a long slow process to get published! While you have one book out there looking for a home, continue working on new ideas and developing more manuscripts. It’s good for your mental health and for your career to have more than one (or two, or three) projects to show.
A friend of mine says, “It is the ground state of a manuscript to be rejected.” Most manuscripts are rejected most of the time. Prepare yourself, allow yourself to be sad for a few days when you get your first (second, third, seventeenth…) rejection, and keep going. Chocolate helps.
Poets? Poet’s? Poets’?
So I gather there are some questions about Taylor Swift, poets, and apostrophes.
Should it be The Tortured Poet’s Department? That would be correct if there is only one tortured poet in residence. Perhaps it’s a very small college.
Should it be The Tortured Poets’ Department? That would be correct if there is more than one tortured poet present. A seminar, maybe.
Should it be The Tortured Poets Department, as on the album cover? This is quite correct also, just as long as there is, again, more than one tortured poet. In this case, instead of a department belonging to tortured poets, it’s a department of or pertaining to tortured poets–kind of like the housewares department is not a department that belongs to housewares, but a department where housewares are relevant.
(There’s an argument for The Tortured-Poets Department, but honestly, it just looks clunky and awkward.)
Should it be The Department of Tortured Poets so that we don’t have to have this conversation anymore? I vote for this. When in a total grammatical quandary, rephrase!
Joys of December
The satisfaction of hitting SEND and whooshing off a second draft to your editor is just about equaled by the satisfaction of having a stack of Christmas presents wrapped, packed, addressed, and ready for the post office.
Read MoreGeorgette Heyer and The Grand Sophy
So Georgette Heyer, it seems, is no longer an antisemite.
Of course that’s ridiculous. Georgette Heyer is exactly as antisemitic as she ever was–at least, her books are.
In The Grand Sophy (which happens to be the only Heyer book I’ve read; it was enjoyable) the moneylender is no longer swarthy, greasy, and named Goldhanger. He’s now just named Grimpstone. He still has an ingratiating leer, for whatever that’s worth.
I have mixed feelings about this. If these changes, made with the permission of her estate, mean that a new reader can float through the book without getting smacked in the face by a truly ugly, damaging, and hurtful stereotype, that seems to be a net good for society.
And yet….
When Mary Bly, a novelist and scholar, wrote an introduction to the book explaining the changes and why they’d been made, the publisher balked. Bly withdrew from the project, along with her introduction. That does bother me.
To make the changes–maybe.
To refuse to discuss or acknowledge the changes–a problem.
We gain something when hurtful stereotypes are removed. We lose something when we refuse to–or are not allowed to–acknowledge that Georgette Heyer might have been a talented writer who portrayed smart, independent women (for the time period and genre in which she wrote) and a bigot at the same time.
We lose the ability to think about books and writers and ourselves with nuance. Maybe we begin to think that the only people who harbor bias are villains as one-dimensional as Goldhanger/Grimpstone–not lively writers of light fiction who gave a lot of pleasure to the world. Not people we admire. Not people who might look a bit like us.
Read MoreSarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Readers will treasure the blossoming friendship between opposites in this whimsically illustrated tale. Short chapters and plenty of action make for an accessible and appealing reading experience. . . . Touching and inspiring.”
—Kirkus Reviews