Extract from Chapter 1: What do writers want?

Let’s consider some arithmetic.

We know that a publisher accepts (at best) 1 unsolicited manuscript in every 100. Let’s take a realistic view and say that it’s 1 in 1000. But what happens to the other 999, after they have been wrapped up and returned to their anxious owner? Answer, they get sent on to another publisher. And then another. And another. And another.  And so each publisher is not rejecting a set of 999 manuscripts which is completely different from the 999 rejected by every other publisher. There is some overlap.

How much overlap, no one knows. We can only guess. What we do know is that some writers are very persistent. One publisher’s reader found himself reading a manuscript which felt a bit familiar, and when he checked his records he found that he had rejected the book eight years earlier.  My own rough guess is that book writers get depressed and lose confidence, on average, after 15 or 20 rejections. After all, it takes time and effort (and money) to wrap up the parcel yet again, write yet another covering letter, and sit and wait for another three months. Or six. Or nine. Only to find that the firm has lost it. Sorry, don’t remember that one. What was it called again?

Let’s say that the unhappy soul submits her book to 20 firms and then gives up. This means that the actual odds of getting a book published are not 1000 to 1 but something more manageable. Perhaps about 50 to 1. We cannot know for sure, but in any case, the overlap factor means that the odds are not quite as appalling as they look at first sight.

Odds of 50 to 1 against are, of course, still pretty alarming, but since I have myself sold two books to publishers without using an agent (one fiction and one non-fiction), I know for certain that it can be done. Or, more cautiously, I know that it could be done in the past.


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