This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. To work with Caroline on your next book, head to her Reedsy profile.
I wanted to give a talk today about what it's really like to be a writer and navigate the stormy road to publication. I'm gonna talk to you about writing the book that haunts you — because you need a really good product to get published today — as well as query letters, agents, handling rejection, figuring out what publishing process is best for you, and what happens after the book deal.
Writing the Book that Haunts You
You don't get many shots to reach an editor or an agent, so you want to write the best book you can. Please, please don't write to the market. If every single book out there that's on the bestseller list or seems hot is about, like, whaling, don't write about whaling because it takes a year minimum for a book to come out (unless you're self-publishing), and by that time that topic of whaling might not be there.
The market just changes and changes. What you should do is write the book that you yourself want to read. Write the book that really, really haunts you. I wrote my recent book Days of Wonder after a friend of mine had admitted that she had committed a murder when she was 15. And she did do it, but she turned her life around after being released from prison.
That idea just obsessed me, and I had to write about it. I didn't think about the market at all. If I had, I might have been told, “This is too dark a subject,” or “People don't want to read about murderers.” Just listen to what's in your gut. Different writers write their books differently.
Should you take a class? Yeah. Should you go to a writer's conference? That's good. Does going to college to get a master's degree in Fine Arts help you? Not always. So, start with the idea.
One thing that I always tell writers when they're writing a book, which is a big ordeal, is that you need a premise — a few lines to tell who the main character is, why they have to act right now, and what is at stake. You need it because when you're approaching agents or editors, or even when you're just telling friends about your book, you have to say something that will make them think, “Oh my god, I want to read that. What's going to happen next?”
I think everybody's probably seen or heard of the movie Jaws. Think about the premise of that. This is a story about a sheriff struggling in a beach town. He has to have a good summer. He has to bring in money. If he doesn't, he could lose his job. And then he discovers a great white shark is in the area.
So, he has two choices. He can either:
- Close the beaches, which will ruin the economy of the beach town and possibly cost him his job, but no one will get eaten by the shark.
- Keep the beaches open, and then people will be eaten by the shark, but the town will be okay.
You want that premise. Some writers will jump in and just write their book, but I feel like every story, like every human, has to have a structure, a skeleton. If you've already written your book and you're just wondering what to do next, you still want to go back and make sure the skeleton is there.
So, my skeleton is basically what I call the “wants and needs” list. Make sure that your novel has a character who wants something desperately, with great stakes attached. In Days of Wonder, it's this girl who was sent to prison when she was 15, who gets out when she's 22, and there are three things she wants:
- To remember what happened the night she supposedly attempted murder,
- To find out if she’s guilty or not guilty, and
- To find a child that she gave birth to in prison.
Where is the child? Can she see it? What's going to happen? These are all things that will propel your novel.
Fixing Common Manuscript Issues
Once you have a draft, what do you want to do with that draft? You can't just send in a messy draft to an agent or to an editor. You shouldn’t even self-publish it. It's got to be perfect, as perfect as you can get. I’m on the Reedsy Marketplace as a developmental editor, so I want to tell you about some of the issues that I see crop up over and over again.
Start in the right place
A lot of manuscripts I see start with a description. That doesn't work because we don't know who the character is. We don't really care if a house is beautiful or if it's on a grassy lawn or something like that. We want to know who the character is and what it is that they want.
Start in the middle. Think of yourself jumping into “the inciting action.” What is the problem? For Jaws it would be: a young woman is in the beach at night swimming alone when a shark pulls her down and she's eaten. That starts the whole story.
Make sure the first chapter asks a question
In Jaws, the question would be “Will this town survive?” The last chapter is the answer to that question. In Jaws, the answer is yes, it will, because the shark is gone.
In my novel Days of Wonder, the question in the first chapter, which follows this 22-year-old getting out of prison, was “Can I rebuild my life? Will other people ever forgive me?” At the end of the book, we find out the answer.
Make sure you line edit
Look for unnecessary words in your manuscript. For example, if you write “It was a hot sunny day blistering with heat,” I bet you can guess what needs to go, right? All you have to say is “The day was hot” — “hot” is the same as “blistering with heat,” which is the same as “hot and sunny.” You want to distill everything down to its most powerful. You can also just say: “The day was blistering.”
Root out adjectives and adverbs
I know there's a lot of talk about “show, don’t tell.” That mostly applies to adjectives and adverbs. Go through your manuscript, and every time you see an adjective, see if you can replace it with an action.
Instead of saying “Joe was really tall,” you could say, “Joe was the only one who couldn't get into the room. He had to duck to get into the doorway.” We know that he's very tall because he ducked.
Then we have unnecessary adverbs. Take this example:
“I love you,” he said lovingly.
You don't need “lovingly” here because we know from the dialogue that he loves that person.
But if it was something like:
“I love you,” he said furiously.
Now, that's an interesting adverb because we don't expect the furiousness.
Find beta readers
So, you have a draft. What do you do before you send it out or try to find an agent?
You need somebody else to read it. Some people call them beta readers, some people call them developmental editors. Beta readers are people who are reading your draft to see what happens. A beta reader shouldn't be a friend of yours, they shouldn’t be somebody who loves you, because they will not give you the criticism you need.
If you can get a published author to do it, that's great. You might have to pay them, you might want to trade pages. You can go to a writing group, that's really good too.
A novel should be anywhere from… the sweet spot is 60,000 words to 95,000 words, tops. Anything over 100,000 words is too long because it will cost publishers too much to produce.
Hire a professional editor
You know, I've published 13 books, and I'm a New York Times bestselling author, and I have two different developmental editors. Hiring a developmental editor is so important because when you're writing your book, it's like you can't see the forest for the trees.
You're not going to pick up on things. You need a fresh set of eyes. Developmental editors can tell you, “This is too slow,” and they'll show you how to speed it up. Or they'll say, “This character isn't developed enough,” and they'll show you how to develop the character.
As I said, I've written 13 books, and I'm still learning from my developmental editors.
The Different Kinds of Publication
So, yay! You have a novel, you've gone through the editing process… now you have to figure out what you want to do with your book. Do you need an agent? Do you want an agent? Let's talk about the forms that publication can take.
Do you want to self-publish? Do you want a Big Five publisher? Self-publishing doesn't require an agent, which some people think is a good thing, and we'll talk about the pros and cons of that. But let's focus first on what you think and what you want.
Self-publishing
I usually don't recommend self-publishing unless you are writing a bodice-ripper or a romance. Sci-fi does really well in self-publishing, and so does self-help. Literary fiction doesn't do very well in self-publishing — you'll be lucky if you sell 300 copies.
Regarding the amount of copies you want to sell, 5,000 is considered okay. 10,000 is better. 50,000 is phenomenal. That would be great! Chances are, you won't do that in self-publishing unless you're writing a certain type of book. All you have to do is look on TikTok to see thousands of successful self-published authors. But again, they are authors of a particular kind of book.
The pros of self-publishing are:
- You have control.
- You can decide how your book gets published.
- You decide what the cover looks like.
- You get more money back.
Now, let's talk about the cons. First of all, self-publishing has no gatekeepers. That means that there are hundreds and thousands of other self-published books you're competing with. And some of them should not be published. They're not ready to be published, or they might be screened. Some of them are full of hate. There's no gatekeeper. So anything can get published.
The second thing is that, when you're self-published, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to get events. Bookstores don't want to host you because they don't get a cut.
You won't get reviews unless you pay for them. And even then, the only reviews you'll get will be at Kirkus, which is a pre-publication review, and Publishers Weekly, and a few other places like that.
So, I actually know only one person who did really well self-publishing something that wasn't writing sci-fi, romance, or self-help, which is Lisa Genova. She wrote Still Alice, which is about a woman with Alzheimer's — a beautifully written book, which helped. She self-published it, got it on Amazon, and got a zillion reviews. Doubleday, one of the Big Five publishers, took note, re-published it, and it became a movie.
You don't need an agent to self-publish, but think carefully before you do that. I always tell people it's better to aim high, then you can always go down.
The Big Five Publishers
Okay, so let's talk about the big publishers. In the United States, they are known as the “Big Five”:
- Penguin Random House
- Hachette
- HarperCollins
- Simon & Schuster
- Macmillan
These publishers also have tons of imprints you can try, like Little, Brown and more. But again, let's look at the pros and cons — and bear in mind that to get into these places, you absolutely need an agent.
Name recognition
These publications will send your book as an advanced reader's copy (ARC) or a galley, which comes out about six to eight months before the actual book. That goes to reviewers, it goes to bookstores, it goes to influencers. People see the names of the Big Five, and they know that those books have gone through gatekeepers. They also know that those books are totally worth attention.
Big advances
You can get up to $200,000 in advance. An advance is money that they give you before the book is published. You are supposed to sell enough books so you can earn it back.
It's a complicated system that I really can't explain, but in the sale of any book, the publisher might get 80% of whatever money comes. You might get 10%. Once you earn enough money to earn back that $200,000 advance, you get royalties, which is the amount of money on every book sold.
And that's great! But here’s the problem. I know a lot of people who sold books to Random House for $200,000. They only sold around 2,000 books, which meant that when their royalty statement came out, it shows that they hadn't earned back a lot of money. You don't have to pay it back, but what’ll happen is that Random House will never buy your next book. Another publisher may not buy your next book because they’ll think, Look at all this money you lost. We don’t want that.
Smaller publishers and hybrid presses
What about smaller publishers? You’ll still need an agent, but smaller publishers are very prestigious. Those are the pros. They do a beautiful job. My publisher, Algonquin in the United States, has been wonderful. They never stop promoting. Their editors are fantastic. They don't give huge advances, but they do so much publicity for you — that is important, and we'll talk about that today too.
Unfortunately, my publisher has just been bought by one of the Big Five, Hachette, so things are about to change.
There is something new called a hybrid press. It's kind of a step up from self-publishing. So, you do have to pay them money, just like you have to pay money to be self-published, which can be anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 of your own money. But they do work for you. They will do publicity.
So what you should do is go to a bookstore, go look online. Look at the books that are from big publishers. Look at the books that are self-published. Look at the covers, see how they've done, and see what you think of each.
Note: Most vanity presses these days will claim to be hybrid presses. Before you work with any publisher claiming to be a hybrid, make sure you check out this post.
The Search for an Agent
Why do you need an agent? Because agents know the business. I've had agents take a contract that I was thrilled with, with an advance that I was thrilled with, and say, “No, we want more.”
My agent was also the one who put this in clauses: If I got on the New York Times bestseller list, I would get an extra $10,000. If I got a movie deal, that's also more money.
With the way publishing is now, agents are your one steadfast thing. Editors move around a lot — the agent is your one steadfast person.
So, how do you find an agent? Well, there's a bunch of places:
You can go to AgentQuery. They have a search engine, and you just put in what kind of book yours is. Is it literary fiction? Is it commercial fiction? There's no real difference between those now in publishing, so just put in whatever you think. Is it a memoir?
You can go to Poets & Writers, which also has a search engine. Every year, they do a special issue on agents and what to expect.
Note: Reedsy also has a directory of vetted literary agents.
This is my secret weapon: Go to a bookstore, pull out the books you love, and look at the acknowledgment pages. These pages will tell you, if an author loves their agent, they will thank them profusely.
Search up “agents” on Twitter (X). Once you have a list, you can get a feel for who they are.
You have to Google every single agent on your list of, say, 60 agents because they’ll all want something different. Most agents do want a query letter, which is a document telling them who you are, what your book is about, and why you want this agent.
You also want to check out: Who are these agent’s other clients? If you don't recognize any of the other clients, you don't want to go with them.
Does the agent want you to pay for anything? If they do, you don't want to go with them.
Also remember that you’ll want to find something personal to say about the agent in your query letter. Even if it's something like, “I just recently read an interview with you and I loved when you said blah, blah, blah, and I think you'd be a great agent for me.”
There are things you can do to improve your chances of getting an agent. Publish short stories! Is there any part of your novel that would work as an excerpt or a short story somewhere? Poets & Writers has a whole listing of where you can send those stuff.
Publish personal essays, they don’t have to be about the books. There are hundreds of great places to do this. The Millions, Refinery29, Salon, The New York Times.
Get on social media. You do not have to do this for long, I'm only on it for like 10 minutes in the morning, 5 minutes at night.
Make sure that you have a profile that says “Author.” You can say what kind of author you are (sci-fi writer, historical novelist, etc.) because what you're going to do is follow every single agent you have on your list. When you do that, they're going to see the follow and say, “Well, who is this?”
And then they're going to go to your profile and see that you're a novelist, then they will follow you back. Also, get a website, or at least think of one.
Writing a Query Letter
Okay, so let's talk about the query letter. It's totally formulaic. The first paragraph is about the agent. Why do you want this agent? Here’s a basic outline:
Dear Ellen Levine,
Recently, I saw that you were acknowledged in this book I read. I love the book. I loved what your writer said about you. I'd like you to be my agent.
That structure stays the same — just make sure you personalize every query letter you write based on the agent you’re sending it to.
The second paragraph also stays the same — that's your pitch. If you had written Jaws, you would say, ”My book Jaws is about a struggling sheriff of a beach town who must decide whether to keep the beaches open and save the town, even though there's a great, white, rampaging shark, or whether he should close the beaches and lose his job.”
This is the paragraph where you want to mention comp titles. Why do you need comp titles? Because when agents and editors go to bookstores, the bookstores want to know, what is this book like?
If a bookstore does fabulous selling scary books, they're going to love it if your comp title is Stephen King. If the bookstore only sells romance novels, they're going to see the comp of Stephen King and they're going to think, Oh, we probably won't buy that.
Same thing with reviewers. Same thing with anything like that. You want to have a comp. And again, aim high. Why not? You might as well. A lot of times people will name two different comps. They will say, my book is like if Stephen King, who writes horror, had married a romance writer. That means it's got a wide audience.
The third paragraph is always, “Why me?” If you're writing about sharks and you studied sharks, that goes in there. If you've published something before, that goes there too. If you haven't, then you don't have to worry about it at all.
The last paragraph is about thanking the agent: “Thank you so much. I look forward to your reply.”
And then you wait. How long do you have to wait? Depends. Some agents will respond to you immediately. Some will take three months. If they take three months, which is a really, really long time, and you're probably ready to, like, take Valium, you're allowed to email them and say, “I just wanted to double-check on the status of my manuscript.”
The Agent’s Response
There are three kinds of responses you'll get from agents. The first kind of response is going to say something like, for example, “I didn’t relate to the characters.” That means they didn't even read it. That probably meant that they gave it to their young assistant or they just didn't have the time.
If you get a letter that seems like a rejection but it mentions something specific about your novel, then it's not really a rejection. Like, they might say, “I've read your novel, Jaws, I loved it until I got to the end, and then I was hoping to get the point of view of the shark.”
That's when you email the agent back and say, “Thank you so much for the time you spent on my manuscript. I would love to do this. And I was thinking, I'm actually going to rewrite it and put in the point of view of the shark. Will you look at this again?” They almost always say yes.
Then the third kind of response, which is the one you want, consists of them asking you to give them a call.
Just like with publishers, you want to think about what kind of an agent you want. There are different kinds. My first agent was a shark. She sold every single book I wrote but she wasn't very friendly. I mean, I was always afraid to call her. I would pretend that I was smoking, just to calm myself down, even though I don't smoke.
I decided I wanted a new agent, and my agent now is really, really warm and welcoming. She sells a lot of my books, and she's just great.
After the Book Deal
So, you have a book deal. Now what? As I said, it takes a year or so to get a book out. Self-publishing is much less, but even with self-publishing, you're going to want to talk about whether you need a publicist. We're going to do pros and cons.
If you go through a traditional publisher, your editor will usually want revisions. Even if you've gone through a developmental editor, trust me, you want this. It makes a better, richer book. Not only does the editor go through revisions, but the next stage is a copy editor. What the copy editor does is line editing, which we talked about earlier.
They also fact-check things. Like if you have someone suddenly pregnant on page three and then on the next page, two days later, she has a full-blown baby, you want to fix that up.
Magazines! This is for any kind of book. Magazines and reviewers need to be contacted six months before the book is out. Newspapers can wait, like, four months. Radios need to be booked right away. Bookstores are often booked for events eight months ahead of time.
If you're self-publishing, you get to choose your cover. However, not getting to make or choose your cover can actually be a pro because traditional publishers have a marketing department and a publicity department, and they know what sells. They'll give you three different choices of covers. If you don't like them, you can suggest what you would like to see, and they'll give you mock-ups.
Titles are also marketing decisions. You want to have a great title. And I will tell you, 90% of the time at Reedsy, I see the wrong titles. I always work with writers to get a title that's evocative and meaningful.
Blurbs. I don't know if self-published books have blurbs, but the blurbs of traditionally published books are on the back covers. They're from authors that say things like, “I love this book!” or “This is actually fabulous!” It's part of what they call “comp stuff” — you try to get blurbs from authors who are like you.
I have blurbs from Ann Napolitano, who is a Today Show author. I have Adriana Trigiani. I have big names because a lot of times, that's what their readers look at. They think, Well, if this author blurbs her, then maybe I'll like her book. So, you might want to get blurbs.
Do you need a publicist? Yeah, you do. It used to be that in the big publishers, their publicity and marketing department would handle everything. It's not that way anymore. I used to get 42 city tours paid for by my publisher, Algonquin. They did everything for me. Now, publishing is different. After COVID, they told me they weren’t touring their authors anymore. You can only go to places which will pay for you.
Luckily for me, there are book conferences that will pay for you. There are places that will give you room, board, and money to boot. So, it's hard. Publicists and marketing people in publishing now are really, really busy. They don't have the time that it takes to go to places and suggest your book for review, network, or do whatever needs to be done. So, they do do it, but not so much.
If you're self-published, that's really a problem. Unless you know a lot of people in publishing, you're not going to get reviews. You're not going to get the word-of-mouth excitement. People might not know who you are.
The pros of a publicist is they can get you phenomenal things. I hired a publicist for Days of Wonder, and I got on CBS TV. I became one of their book club picks. I got reviewed everywhere, and it was worth every single penny for me.
The cons are that publicists can be expensive. I have a friend who got a top publicist; she paid $25,000 for a campaign, which is about four months’ worth of work. The publicist was not able to get her anything except one review. She still had to pay that money. There are a lot of publicists who are not good.
That’s why, again, if you want to have a good publicist, you have to research them. Go to their websites, see what books they've worked on. If you don't know the books, then you don't want to use them.
Getting a publicist for a self-published book is more difficult. Can you do it all yourself? You can, but I'm telling you, it's a full-time job.
Rejection
Okay, now I want to talk to you all about rejection because that is part and parcel of publishing.
Will you get rejected? All the time. Should you let it hurt you? No, don't. A rejection is just one person's opinion. I heard Anna Quindlen speak, and she doesn't even read her reviews. She said that you cannot take no for an answer.
I always tell the story that my ninth novel was rejected, on contract, by my then-publisher because they hated the book. I figured that my career was over, and then Algonquin picked it up, and they turned it into a New York Times bestseller its first week out. It went into six printings and the same publisher who rejected it asked if I wanted to come back to them. Of course I did not.
But you have to believe in yourself, believe in your writing. You know, there were so many stories of books that were rejected 60 times. Then the 61st time, they found a publisher.
Community and Wrapping Up
So, what else helps? The writer's community has saved me. I've had writers help me. I've had writers, you know, get me to their favorite bookstore or whatever.
How do you build community? Here's one way. Every month, write a lovely handwritten letter or a lovely email to a writer you admire. Again, aim high. Do not ask for anything.
Simply tell the writer how much their work has meant to you. They will respond. I guarantee they will respond. That's how you build community. Show up at people's readings. Every writer, no matter how famous they are, worries about going to a reading and having nobody show up.
Help other writers. How do you do that? Praise their work on social media. And tag them so they see you've praised them. Engage. No one will understand what you're going through except for other writers.
The most important thing to remember is that your writing career will not look like anybody else's. Never, ever, ever, ever give up.
