Once again, it’s time for an Open Mike/Mic! Ask questions, complain about your vampire ducks or celebrate slaying them, or just grumble about the weather. Whatever you want.
Once again, it’s time for an Open Mike/Mic! Ask questions, complain about your vampire ducks or celebrate slaying them, or just grumble about the weather. Whatever you want.
Do you have a sense of how many authors (people who have completed a book and attempted to send it out) end up getting traditionally published? My spouse thinks it’s .01% and I’m wasting my time sending stuff out, I feel like it’s probably higher but don’t really know.
It’s easy to find surveys online that say things like “the average published author wrote 4 books before publishing their first book!” but of course those can only survey published authors so can’t really answer my question.
I would also love an answer to that, except the question I really want answered is something like: how many authors (people who completed a book, and have done a sensible amount of work in terms of editing and beta reading, and are generally sane, and aren’t so egotistical they think their every comma is golden, etc) and attempt to send the book out get published?
I know, it’s impossibly subjective. But my impression is that a surprising number of would-be ‘authors’ fail to achieve basic professionalism, so the success rate of people who put in an appropriate level of effort is a bit higher. I wonder if anyone has a good link to an agent who’s tried to quantify the share of manuscripts they receive that fail basic things like ‘used spellcheck’.
Well, there’s the classic “Slushkiller” article here: https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html. It’s a few years old, but I suspect the slush pile hasn’t changed that much (certainly not for the better).
The estimate there is that 1%-5% of submissions are actually any kind of publishable. No stats on how many of those go on to get published, but it always makes me feel better to consider that the “competition” is a much smaller number than the raw subs.
When I was involved with an online critique site, many years ago, well over half the stories–it might have been 80%–had extremely serious issues. If they showed up in a slushpile they would not have been considered. And these stories were somewhat enriched for good ones, because bad authors are less likely to request critiques.
I was particularly struck by the high proportion of submissions that were labeled stories but had no development–no dialog, no description, no action. Just a synopsis-like list of events. I wanted to say to these people, go read a story and compare it with yours! Don’t you see something is missing?
I’ve heard 90% repeatedly as an estimate of how much of the slush pile is hopelessly dysfunctional.
What I don’t know is how much of the 10% gets published. Would also love to hear numbers, or even anecdotes.
Thanks Mary and Liz. You give me hope that the level of competition might not be quite as extreme as people think.
Let’s hear it for the vanity publishers. Whatever else they do, they drain off some of absolute worst from being nuisances.
I was once in a writer’s online crit group where one writer made such a nuisance of himself that there was general rejoicing when he came back to brag that he was being published by PublishAmerica.
I found three scenes in the notebook I carry for writing on the bus/at meetings. I quite like the narration and dialog, I was clearly on a roll, and I’d like to be able to use this material. But it is a complete mess as far as continuity goes. Evidently I didn’t know whether it happened before or after multiple key events, and so it veers incoherently among different versions of the timeline.
I transcribed it into a file and am now staring at it in dismay. Maybe it all has to be thrown out, bar a nice turn of phrase or too.
I find it helpful to decide what order of events, move the scenes accordingly, and just edit the continuity itself as a pass. Sometimes its less intimidating when actually figuring out what precise details need updating.
Possibly they are not all the same story?
They clearly are the same story. They’re three bits of a subplot that should be threaded through the main plot (if it’s in there at all, which is still in question). But their threads are all crossed. People know things that they only learned in chapter X, but don’t know things they learned in X-2. They are not even internally consistent with each other, let alone the main plot. I don’t know how I managed this, except that writing snippets during lab meeting may be hazardous to continuity….
I like the suggestion to put them in place, if a place can be found, and only then try to fix the continuity. Probably a lot of rewriting to do but maybe I can save the good bits.
Coming up to my first year on Substack. Looking at publishing a collection.
https://writingandreflections.substack.com/
Since the novel-in-progress keeps getting farther from the end the more I work on it, I’m taking a break to work on a short story. I love the concept. I quite like the text I’ve already written. The structure is an absolute train wreck (and structure is *not* something I normally have trouble with). I have outlined, timelined, and mainlined caffeine, and it’s still a pile of smoking rubble. I may yet go outside and weed a flowerbed rather than stare at this thing any more.
What’s wrong with the structure, specifically?
Could it be you have something here that needs to be told in a fancy way, not linearly?
Could it be you are starting, or attempting to stop, in the wrong place in the sequence of events? (Too early, too late?)
I’m not even sure, tbh. I say that I don’t normally have trouble with structure, but this story is much more structure-dependent than I usually write.* The idea is that it’s told in EULA statements and tech support chats and timestamps. I’ve worked out what the timestamps need to be for what I know is going on behind them (I have a spreadsheet), but when I try to fit the narrative progression onto that, my brain seizes up and I feel like there’s some fundamental flaw in the timeline that my back-brain can see, but I can’t.
And I am struggling to fit any baseline of “normal” into that format, for the story’s action to contrast against. Possibly that’s a case of “starting too early”, but it feels wrong to start with the first panicked call to tech support.
(*I’ve been running into this a lot lately, where something that usually comes easy for me is suddenly an obstacle. I don’t know if this means I’m writing stretchier material than previously, or if I’m just getting stupider.)
I’d argue you’re just challenging your skills and experiencing the struggle that goes with it.
Hmm, maybe Our Hostess could do something on that: how do you define or even recognize “stretchy”, when it’s not something obvious like trying a whole new format? I swear everything I try lately gets harder than the last, but it doesn’t *feel* like I’m pushing the boundaries all that much….
Could you start with the panicked call (I rather like that idea) but fill in “normal” retrospectively? Harder without a narrator but seems like it could still be possible.
With this format I think it could be actively risky to start earlier: you’re trying to establish normalcy but it could easily be written off as boring.
I think I might have to. Given the format, there’s no one for the narrator to “talk” to in the normal phase — nobody calls tech support when everything’s going fine.
I’d considered adding a blog post or some equivalent for a day-in-the-life view, but that kind of thing wouldn’t fit in later and I think having one or two hanging at the beginning would end up feeling unbalanced.
I’m apparently writing the romance novel (not even novella anymore!) that no one asked for, not even me, and the second couple took over a lot of the story, and the tone is not nearly as comedic as I’d planned. But hey, words! Thousands of them! I’m just scribing it apparently.
Yay words! Even if they’re not the words you expected. 😉
I’m working on a story where I started with the title and before I finished the outline, it didn’t fit the title anymore.
Come to think of it, A Diabolical Bargain snuck up on me by pretending to be a novelette.