For those of you who haven’t got a clue, the basic process of selling a novel is simple but frustrating: you make a list of potential editors/publishers; you check it over, collect names and addresses, and look up each publisher’s submission requirements; you send the first one whatever version of the novel they want to see (portion-and-outline, query letter, or full ms.; hard copy or electronic); and when your manuscript gets rejected, you send it to the next publisher on your list. Over and over and over, until the thing sells.

That’s it. There are no short cuts. There is no trick or secret handshake. There is no password that only someone in the business can tell you. You send it out, and you keep sending it out until it sells.

So why are there a bazillion articles, discussion groups, blog entries, etc. on How To Sell Your First Novel?

Several reasons. For starters, while there is no trick, password, or big secret method, there are mistakes one can make that will likely get a manuscript bounced within nanoseconds, and a fair amount of the wordage is just reminding people not to make them. Most are common sense: don’t fax the publisher your manuscript; don’t send a sweet Romance novel to a publisher that only does hardboiled detective novels; don’t badger editors at conventions or workshops; don’t turn a page upside down somewhere in the middle; don’t bring your manuscript to your brother’s wedding because you heard that one of the bride’s relatives was an editor and you thought you’d get him to read your novel during the reception. (Yes, that is a true story. No, the editor didn’t buy it.)

Then there are the specifics of How You Make Your List of Editors, which are pretty much the same as the ones I just laid out a couple of posts ago for How To Make A List of Agents (look at who publishes the books you like; get addresses and editor names from Literary Marketplace or Writer’s Market; google for their submission requirements; check them at Writer Beware and Preditors and Editors; do not pay an agent, publisher, or editor to look at your book). That can pretty much fill up a post right there, but I’m assuming that all my readers are smart enough to look at what I said about finding an agent and figure out how to apply it to finding an editor/publisher.

Those two things – trying to prevent basic mistakes and walking people through the process of making their initial list of publishers-to-send-the-manuscript-to – make up about 98% of the posts and articles by the actual published authors, actual editors, and actual agents who give advice to beginners. Unfortunately, the other 2% get most of the attention. These are the how-I-beat-the-system posts by people who used some non-standard submission technique and got lucky, and who mostly haven’t been around long enough to realize that they succeeded in spite of, not because of, whatever they tried.

Because while there is no secret method, password, trick, or short cut to selling, there is such a thing as luck. The trouble is, you can’t control luck. It happens when it happens. Also, it comes in two varieties, and there’s never any saying whether you’ll get the good sort or the bad. Luck is not something you want to depend on.

Most people know that intellectually. But it’s really, really hard to keep believing that it’s true when the ms. keeps going out and coming back, over and over. And all the stories about how Gone With the Wind was rejected forty times before it sold, or how Madeleine L’Engle was about to give up on writing completely when A Wrinkle In Time came back from the very last publisher (except it didn’t come back, that last time) – those stories don’t help much with the discouragement and frustration.

So people look for a second opinion. And they get it from those last 2% of published authors…and from all the rest of the on-line posts and articles and especially forums and discussions by people just like them who haven’t sold anything yet, and who therefore don’t actually know anything first-hand.

This is where you find the folks who claim that “it’s all about who you know,” that you must do certain things (sell short stories first, have an agent, attend conventions, go to workshops, hire an editor/book doctor, etc.), that you’re better off doing something else (self-publishing; starting with the small presses; e-publishing; putting it on your web site; doing a lot of social networking and/or other pre-sale publicity, etc.), that analyzing form rejection letters will tell you something useful, that gaming the system works.

Reading this stuff will make you crazy. Because people argue very plausibly, and there is the niggling feeling that getting published can’t possibly be a matter of make list, send it out, send it out again, repeat over and over til sold. There has to be something more you can do to improve your chances. Doesn’t there?

Well, no, there doesn’t. Because what it all boils down to is, whether your manuscript sells or not depends on somebody else’s decision. Somebody you can’t influence, because you probably don’t know them, and even if you did, it’s their job to not be influenced. Breaking your brains trying to figure out something else to do is like breaking them trying to figure out a way to guarantee you’ll have good weather for Saturday’s picnic. It really doesn’t matter what you come up with; the weather will do whatever it does, and you’ll just have wasted a bunch of time.

There are, admittedly, alternatives to traditional publishing. But that gets back to what you actually want…and anyway, it’s another post.

Take the heady days following the publication of one’s novel. A sizeable number of writers seem to become obsessed with numbers for those first few week. They check their Amazon rankings and Bookscan numbers. They pester their editors for orders-shipped figures and their local booksellers for sales numbers. They do complicated mathematical extrapolations that they would never have considered even thinking about two weeks earlier.

The obsession doesn’t go away even after they’ve become relatively successful; they just start checking whether they’re number seven or eight on the bestseller lists (and trying to decide whether number seven on the New York Times bestseller list is better than number five on the Washington Post bestseller list), or comparing how long their new book stayed in the number X spot compared to their last one, or to some other writer’s.

There’s nothing really wrong with this (unless the writer is one of those who goes a little crazy trying to process all this data), but it’s not obligatory, either. I mean, once the book hits the shelves, there really isn’t much the writer can do to influence those numbers directly, but if they like looking at them, why not? The trouble comes when people who don’t really care about this stuff start feeling as if there’s something wrong with them because they feel no particular urge to look at their numbers every hour or so.

Similarly, there are different approaches to managing one’s career – and advocates of each sometimes get passionate about their preferences. For instance, there’s the take-the-money-and-run school of thought (which includes most of the agents I know) that advocates pushing for the largest advance one can possibly talk one’s editor into, on the theory that a) a known advance means a predictable (and to some extent controllable) income stream and b) a publisher who hands out a large advance is more likely to work hard at distributing and promoting the book than one who’s only given out four figures ahead of publication.

At the other end of the spectrum are the folks who advocate taking a tiny advance (ideally in exchange for a better royalty rate), on the theory that this spreads the writer’s income out over time (resulting in lower taxes) and avoids the problem faced by writers who got such huge advances on their last book that it couldn’t meet expectations, and now no one will make an offer on their new one.

Again, neither choice is generally wrong…and either choice may be wrong for a particular writer, given that particular writer’s financial circumstances and production rate.

In the same way, some writers choose to focus on trying to establish a series or on settling into a particular market niche, while others focus on spreading out into as many different areas as possible. Some writers advocate writing as much as possible, as fast as possible; others think that they get better results (for a selection of different values for “better results”) from working more slowly and carefully. Some take six months off from writing to publicize each book as it hits the shelves; others find their time is better spent working on their next title. Some change agents every five years or so; some stick with one for twenty years or more.

Not one of these choices is right in general, or wrong in general. Just as there is no one-size-fits-all method of writing, there is also no single best way of managing one’s writing career. It’s a good idea to check out what other people are doing, but you have to decide for yourself whether what they are doing is something that is likely to work for you, and whether you think it will work well enough that it’s worth trying for yourself.

And it is always, always your own responsibility to decide whether something is not working and when it’s time to change it…whether that’s something that’s not working in your writing style, or whether something in your career seems to need rethinking.