Getting Your First Book Deal

I have had three novels accepted by publishers at this point. The first two didn’t pull through for different reasons. The third happened only a few days ago, and I’m just starting to come out of the initial daze of seeing my book available on someone else’s site. It’s my NaNoWriMo novel, the one I wrote just last month: The Automaton of Miss Ada Stirling. JukePop, the company that agreed to publish it, publishes stories one chapter at a time in serial format. That means that you only need to submit the first chapter before they decide if they want you or not. So most of the first two weeks after NaNo I spent working on that first chapter, using the editing tools I mentioned earlier and revising it until I was sick of it. Then I submitted it.

But getting a book published is much easier to do than winning the lottery. There are more books published every day than anyone can keep up with, more new authors and debuts than there probably should be. If you’ve gotten rejected, that just means that you’re not done submitting. Keep at it, and one day that email will say “congratulations” instead of “sorry,” and you’ll have a book on someone else’s shelf. It’s real. It happens. And you might be next. Happy submitting!

P.S. It seems my best auditions were the ones where I didn’t think I had a shot, where I decided just to go crazy with them because there was no way I’d get in. So feel free to mess around and not be perfect–you never know.

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