getting published, some help?

flogen

Im in the process of writing a book, and i know its premature, but are theyre any people who have been published who can lend any advice about getting out there or what to do/send??

I know that with enough commitment i can finish what im doing in a few months, because its been in the planning for ages and i just never gave it enough time, which im committed to doing now.

id be grateful of any help!!

Flogen

Specky

Well I've never been published so I can only pass on my opinions, and I am sorry for being a "Mr Picky-Pants" but if I received a manuscript and saw a page full of spelling mistakes, bad grammer and poor punctuation I'd say to myself "this is going to cost me a fortune in editing and post production....feck it!" and stick it on the bottom of my reading pile.

Of course, I am making the assumption here that you're writing the book in English and that English is your first language. If I am wrong in either of these assumptions then I do apologise. It would explain the error density in your post....

Whether writing is an art or a craft, at its foundation is the language you choose to use. The spoken word is much simpler, relying heavily on the contextual clues embodied in tone and facial expression to support the meaning of the words. The written word has no such supports and relies entirely upon the marks you scratch out on the page. Grammer, spelling and punctuation are not there to impose artistic restrictions upon the writer, they are there to free him/her from having to worry about the reader's ambiguous misinterpretations!

I know this is just a post on a message board, but bad habits are bad habits.

There, their, they're
Were, where, wear, we're
Its, it's

All different words, all spelled correctly but all with different meanings. Learn them. Use them

flogen

well thank you for your input, and I'd like to inform you that english is infact my second language (if the Irish constitution is to be believed), while in reality it is my first.

I consider my grammer and spelling to be fine, thank you, however I dont concern myself with perfection when it comes to a quickly typed post on a forum. Naturally if I was going to send out a manuscript to a publisher, i would consider it vital that it is a well written as i could make it, otherwise i would waste their or my time.

I'd appreciate a less patronising responce in future, as i understand the rules of there, their and they're, however I do thank you for your suggestions.

Flogen

MojoMaker

What is a responce? What it's not is a typo, unfortunately. You'd also be grateful for any help, not of any help.

Small points I know, sorry, but it does leave one with a poor initial impression nonetheless. I have an article in my office that might interest you regarding getting published. I'll post it tomorrow if I remember it.

Specky

I consider my grammer and spelling to be fine, thank you, however I dont concern myself with perfection when it comes to a quickly typed post on a forum. Naturally if I was going to send out a manuscript to a publisher, i would consider it vital that it is a well written as i could make it, otherwise i would waste their or my time.

Look, I'm just trying to be realistic here and probably save you time, effort and heart ache.

Your spelling and grammer clearly are not "fine", otherwise they would be at least good even in a quick post...you can still use good grammer with few words. I don't claim to have perfect grammer or spelling either, I generally don't bother with the spellchecker and we all make the occassional typo or "get lost" half way through a paragraph when typing "on the fly", but I do try to make myself understood when I'm trying to communicate, whatever the format.

It's perfectly natural to be defensive about your use of language, I'm sure you speak well, as do many people, but the trick is to be able to make yourself equally well understood on paper which, as an aspiring author, is where it counts.

I don't understand your contention about spending less time on a post than on something you intend to submit as a manuscript. That implies that the use of proper English comes as an effort to you. If that is the case then you're going to spend an awful lot of time proof reading and correcting your work...time that could be used more creatively.

It also implies that you are willing to accept a certain amount of misunderstanding in replies to posts...again, this results in wasted time both for you and your correspondents.

In a world of constantly eroding standards I may reside in the minority of people who believe in the value of the correct use of the language, but since it is the tool with which I must express my feelings, opinions and desires I choose to stand firm behind my convictions in the hope that I may be understood.

yellum

Originally posted by Specky

Your spelling and grammer clearly are not "fine"

You didn't spell grammar correctly.

NITPICKING: A game all those hiding behind a monitor and a keyboard can play.

Specky

You didn't spell grammar correctly.

...and neither did the original poster. Selective nitpicking to try to prove a point is even easier.

As I mentioned in the post, I do not claim to have perfect grammar or spelling. Do I actually have to quote my own mails to get people to read them?. Nice to see a moderator with such a balanced viewpoint.

The original poster asked for advice. My advice was that they ought to make more of an effort with their English (even I would run a spell checker over a manuscript to pick up things like a mis-spelled version of "grammar" but the checker will not fix the actual grammar for you).

Work away on your book. Seriously, good luck to you. It's an enormously difficult endeavour to see through to the end and completing the manuscript is just the beginning of the road to publication. I admire anyone who can get there. However, you're going to have to learn how to take criticism a hell of a lot more professionally than you do at the moment if you ever expect to get to the end.

DapperGent

Specky you could well be the least helpful person in the world.

Specky

Specky you could well be the least helpful person in the world.

Will I receive my medal in the post???

I'd have to say that although I have some great friends on boards, who I enjoy conversing with on all sorts of interesting topics, possibly some of the best entertainment I get is from reading the absolute nonsense some people come out with. This thread is another perfect example.

The original poster asked for advice. They didn't qualify their request with any "be gentle with me" pleas so, as usual, I said what I thought and provided practical, realistic advice.

Not one single other piece of advice to the original poster has been offered in any of the other posts to the thread but I am the one that is accused of being unhelpful!!

Perhaps you would consider it more helpful if I were to simply say "Oh well done! You're great! Send your manuscript to Blah & Blah..."

What would be the point in that if what I really thought was "Jeez, if that post is any reflection on the quality of the written English in the book then this guy's going to put in an enormous amount of work, build his hopes up that he's going to get published and then suffer a lot of rejection before perhaps either giving up or having to re-work most of what he's done before he can get someone to actually read what he's written"?

That's the difference between advice and immature wishful thinking.

DapperGent

Originally posted by Specky
The original poster asked for advice. They didn't qualify their request with any "be gentle with me" pleas so, as usual, I said what I thought and provided practical, realistic advice.

I didn't notice any advice being proffered at all. The original poster asked for help with getting published you replied saying effectively "Learn to spell. Pffft.". Leaving aside the already pointed out inherent differences between writing a piece and tapping out a post, this trash:

I know this is just a post on a message board, but bad habits are bad habits.

There, their, they're
Were, where, wear, we're
Its, it's

All different words, all spelled correctly but all with different meanings. Learn them. Use them

Is simply a combination of ignorance and arrogance.

Originally posted by Specky
That's the difference between advice and immature wishful thinking.

No it's the difference between being an asshole and shutting the fuck up. That wasn't advice it was criticism. Non-constructive at that.

Redleslie

Flogen - get the Writers' And Artists' Yearbook. It's got all you need to know.

Nitpickers - Shut up and go away you ignorant cretins. Many famous writers (F.Scott Fitzgerald for example) were hopeless spellers or didn't care much for the conventions of grammar or punctuation. Where's the apostrophe in Finnegans Wake? There isn't one. There's more to good writing than correct Oxford dictionary spelling and Victorian grammar. Look at Will Self. Impeccable grammar, gigantic vocabulary but there's just one problem with his books....THEY'RE AS BORING AS ****!!!

Have you forgotten to read the charter? This is a warning.

Specky

Dappergent - your posts have descended into angry, non-sensical rants. I don't see how criticising me is of any assistance to the original poster. You seem to have decided to make a stand on this subject, perhaps as the result of some personal insecurity or bitterness.

Whatever the cause, you have completely missed the point I was trying to make, and although it is my prerogative as the one making the point to attempt to make myself understood, I'd be wasting my time with someone so quick to lapse into name calling and insults.


Redleslie -

There's more to good writing than correct Oxford dictionary spelling and Victorian grammar.

Absolutely, without doubt, I could not agree more. What does make a good book? It has to be a combination of style and content.

Spelling is irrelevant in the context of knowing how to spell "miscellaneous" (or whatever), that's what spell checkers are for. I don't think you can really dismiss the misuse of fundamental words in the language so lightly though, especially when they can cast such ambiguity on meaning, and hence have such a pivotal role to play in delivering the content.

It's naive to believe that any manuscript gets to print without being heavily scrutinized by an editor who's responsibility it is to ensure the "correctness" of the finished product, including fixes in spelling, punctuation and (horror of horrors) grammar.

The exception to this perhaps would be with poetry and certain types of literary fiction where the rules may be broken for artistic effect. However, to pull this off it is a prerequisite that the author displays a thorough understanding of the rules he is breaking in the first place.

In today's market driven world a publisher will see literally (ho ho) hundreds of manuscripts per year, he will read very few of these and will read even less all the way to the last page.

Whatever about having to capture the eventual reader of the book in the first few pages, the book will never even reach the bookshelf if the author does not first capture the publisher in those first crucial pages.

The difference is that the reader just wants a good read. The publisher wants a book that will sell in volume, has a long shelf life, has a wide audience (hopefully internationally), can be brought to press rapidly, will cost little in production, is of the right length to produce in both hard and soft cover etc etc etc.

If you have a literary agent (unlikely for a new author) you have a chance of making a pitch that will improve the chances of your manuscript getting read or it may make the publisher more tolerant of errors if he believes there's enough value in the content to offset the costs of fixing the mistakes, but publishing houses that have the required capacity to take a risk on a new author (and hence the ones that receive the most manuscripts from new authors) will throw out manuscripts that need to have money spent on them. It's a business.

It's interesting that you should give that particular link, as it mentions how This Side Of Paradise is "...infamous for the errors - in spelling, fact, grammar, and chronology - that peppered his text."

However the publisher has now seen fit to "fix" the book - "This new edition, prepared with the most recent techniques of modern scholarly editing, brings into being an accurate, fully annotated text based on Fitzgerald’s original manuscript."

So as you can see the publisher clearly sees a need to edit the work in a way that (possibly) was felt unnecessary when the book was first published in the 1920s. Does this not reflect the demands of the 21st century reader for linguistic accuracy?

BEAT

I am not going to lock this thread or delete posts but I will ask posters to stay on the topic at hand.

We have a poster asking for help here, he has a valid question.
If you can contribute to answering his question or helping him in anyway then please do so.

If you want to start a thread of your own debating the skills of a writer please do so, there is plenty of room in this forum.

Your friendly neighborhood Mod,

Beat.

Nevyn

Publishing is a business and with the current trend in mass marketing an author only if there is a series of books and multibook contracts is very hard for an author starting out to get their foot in the door.

Yes to you it is your Art but to those in the biz it is a commodity, with or without the errors but Specky does have a point that you need to make your work stand out in a good way and not in a way that gets it chucked out.

The majority of publishing houses do not read unsolicited manuscripts no matter how good the spelling or grammAr.

Yes you may have a story to tell but you have to consider is telling in this format right for the subject and can you make it work for you. Then the Slogging begins, and the rewriting and getting stuck rewriting the first 4 chapter over and over which takes up twice the amount of time it would have took to write the other 6 chapters.


now slightly more practical stuff:

you will need to write a 1/2 page 500 words summation of the book, this and the first few chapters are what you should send off for consideration.

you should list quite clearly in this sumation what type book it is, horror scifi romantic war histroical bio ect
for most aganets publishers infact employ readers to read a certain genre for them. If the summation and chapters get passed that reader then they will look for the rest of the manuscript.

Plus only sending in that much costs a lot less and do remember you will not get it back and make sure you have many copies both hard and soft of your book and back up regularly and never delete passages or if you rewrite or reshuffle the book as you will believe me always keep the last verison,

yes it will do your head in having lots of copies but what seems like a wonderfull idea now my not work out two chapters later and when your book goes through the editing process this can be a gret help.

flogen

cheers, thats a good help.

Ive come to realise just how annoying getting a book published can be, its a shame that something that can be considered art has to be made into such a laboured process, but thats the way it goes......

Oh, and about getting your work solicited, whats that all about? What do you have to do there?

Flogen

Redleslie

Originally posted by flogen

Oh, and about getting your work solicited, whats that all about? What do you have to do there?

Flogen

You should try to get a reputable agent (list of names and addresses in the Writer's and Artists' Yearbook) and they'll contact publishers on your behalf. If you haven't done so already, you should try get some stuff published in magazines and newspapers to show you have some writing experience.

Gordon

A tricky part to getting published is getting the proper rights to your work also. Be warned - you may have to pay through the nose for a lawyer that will debate with the publishers your best outcome. A friend of mine who is a cartoonist writer has just been published in Britain. His agent didn't do well at all at securing a deal as he would be getting 5 or 10% of the sales I think. He paid through his nose for a good lawyer and is getting 60% of sales plus all merchandising.

He will however have to pay the lawyer most of the money he gets.

His books originally had many spelling mistakes, however, I think Specky's comments are justified. If I was a publisher I wouldn't sift through a page of tricky English unless the core idea was great. The key thing is to make your work perfect so that the publishers have no leg to stand on when they give you your cut. "Hey, why so little money you're giving me?!" "Well, we had to change it so much so you don't deserve it all". Is the advice my cartoonist friend gave me.

Good luck.

RopeDrink

I know this is just a post on a message board, but bad habits are bad habits.

There, their, they're
Were, where, wear, we're
Its, it's

All different words, all spelled correctly but all with different meanings. Learn them. Use them

What a degrading pile of dribble. I'm sure you'll find that not all 'TOP NOTCH' authors have impecible grammar or spelling, and I'm sure there's a hell of a lot of them who actually 'rely' on editors.

As for the rest of the replies here, my Aunt has just finished writing her own life story (A 'VERY' interesting one it is, too), and if anything the publishers were fighting to get the book off her. It goes to show you that regardless of anything, it is the initial story that counts. If it's worth publishing, they won't be too pushed about paying some bloke to skim through it and make the odd spelling alteration.

flogen

thanks for that, i got some advice from a lecturer of mine which im going to follow along with all the advice here, Il just get on with it and worry about the bits and bobs when its finished, and not any sooner.

Flogen

MojoMaker

Poor spelling and poor grammar *can* be indicative of a less than rounded grasp of English and *may* result in contrived or stilted story development. Many editors would be wary of a potential author with a great story but a poor ability to tell it. The trick, obviously, is to have both.

It is unusual to be poor at spelling and otherwise brilliant with English expression. Unfortunately difficulties with the pronunciation and spelling of words is often accompanied by similar difficulties in grammar, sentence structure, and meter.

Specky's response, while perhaps not directly addressing the initial question, was nonetheless useful criticism. A writer, like any artist, thrives on criticism, and it's worth noting that constructive criticism can take many forms. What may appear at first to be negative can in fact be extremely useful.

Lastly, someone mentioned it already so I won't linger, publishing is a business and holds little room for raw talent sadly. 50% of the battle is making a favourable impression with a good agent or an editor at a publishing house. The initial impression you give is absolutely vital to your success, and anything that could conceiveably detract from that should be eliminated as early in the process as possible.

genie

Use the Writer's Handbook by all means but beware that there are some sharks in there. Loads of 'agents' that have deals with vanity publishers etc. Never pay upfront fees to an agent. An excellent site for sorting the wheat from the chaff agent-wise is predators and editors.

The Beer Baron

There's a lot of stuff regarding correct manuscript format on the web (with useful sample manuscripts also)

What I didn't know- and I thank Thaed for this:

you will need to write a 1/2 page 500 words summation of the book, this and the first few chapters are what you should send off for consideration.

you should list quite clearly in this sumation what type book it is, horror scifi romantic war histroical bio ect
for most aganets publishers infact employ readers to read a certain genre for them. If the summation and chapters get passed that reader then they will look for the rest of the manuscript.

interesting. Anywone have any idea how this should be written- obviously the summary of the book should be every bit as interesting as the chapters you submit. But I'm stumped as to how approach it- formally, informally- any sample summaries would be well appreciated.

As for spelling and gramma(e)r I guess you want to appear as professional as possible but no matter how pedantic you might be correcting yourself you'll always miss a few, there's people paid who's job it is to edit and check thru you're spieling and grammer. Personally I'm not 2 bothered with it all, one of my mates checks through my stuff and generally finds it, but a lot of the stuff I write is dialogue heavy and written phonetically, in addition to inventing my own words- I'm a great fan of onomatopoeia. Being careful is one thing, but you're better off not worrying too much about it and getting anal to the point that you loose your creative balance.

tbh I think the biggest problem, at least what I encounter, is to do with the flow of the story. For example I frequently suffer from tense problems, I mix my past tense with my present, or mix and match narritive styles. This I try as a means to tell the story but often I mess it up and need to look @ it over and over. Other times I mess up dialogue and have the two separate characters saying the same thing from one line to the next. Problems that effect the flow of the story rather than the grammar itself are more important I feel. Leave the editing until you've thrashed the thing out a thousand times, also, print out what you've done and correct it with a biro 1st- I feel it's easier to spot mistakes on paper than it is on a screen. Editing is more than just correcting spelling and grammar and more to do with cutting out or reshuffling aspects of the story that effect the flow of the piece much like when a director decides to cut a scene as it's too long. Instead keep it snappy, particularly in descriptive passages- don't over do it, I've read so many books where the author decided goes into too much detail explaining a character, their clothes, their house, or worst of all, in Sci Fi- where the author spends more time explaining technology than concentrating on the story. Not really to do with publishing I know but @ least I'm trying to advise without putting red X's through your original post.

luckat

The lack of an apostrophe in Finnegans Wake isn't illiteracy but the expression of a multilingual pun; in English, for instance, it can mean "Finnegans wake" (oh yes they do, they wake all the time), as well as apostrophe-needing terms such as "Finn again is awake" and Finnegan's wake"; other recognised meanings include one in, I think, ancient Egyptian, which completes the circle begun by "riverrun..."

But that way madness lies.

Flogen, if you want to be published, write a story that no reader can put down, a story that readers will starve rather than put down.

One Derry sheep farmer got published by Poolbeg when she missed the UCD Ag students' farm experience day and wandered into Hanna's in Nassau Street with her handwritten manuscript.

"How do I turn this [pointing to the manuscript] into one of those [pointing to the books]?" she asked the man behind the counter, and he pulled out the Golden Pages and wrote down a list of publishers.

His handwriting was awful; the only one she could read was Poolbeg, so she rang them up and they told her to send along the manuscript.

After a couple of weeks Poolbeg rang her back and said yes, they'd like to publish the book. Canny in the ways of sheep farming she asked: "How much will it cost me?"

jerenaugrim

I've worked with writers professionally, and most of them had trouble with spelling and grammar. What's important is a good idea. That's why Cecelia Ahern is successful- the concept of her book is original. We used have people coming in, asking how they cd get started writing. The answer we gave- not being smart- is, just start.
As regards getting published, it's very difficult without an agent. If an agent thinks you're good, you have a chance. Having said which, when I was in the business, a cupla years back, there were only three (I think) proper, respected agents in Ireland. Cecelia Ahern's agent has since joined that number.
It's not impossible to get published without an agent. The likes of Steve McDonogh of Brandon Books in Dingle has had huge success publishing books generated out of stuff people sent him handwritten in copybooks, for example (Alice Taylor- not everyone's taste, but her first book was the all-time bestseller in Ireland until Keane's autobiography- Roy, not Terry!) Roddy Doyle cdn't get published either, self-published The Committments- 3 novels later, he won the Booker.
Check out the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook. Ring around. Make sure you're not wasting your time sending your manuscript to someone who doesn't publish that genre. And, despite what I've said above, first time out, make sure your manuscript is perfect spelling- and grammar-wise. Once you've had a bestseller, your sub-editor can correct all that!
Good luck. What's the book about?

flogen

thanks for that help everyone.

To be honest, Im not keen on saying much about the book, some of that is paranoia etc, but the main reason is that I have so far found it difficult to describe the book well without giving away too much information, or too many of the twists.

I am happy with it (although its all in my head at the moment) and have done everything I can to turn the original idea into something enjoyable, gripping, plausable and consistent... but I wont know if all my thoughts and effort were worthwhile until I have it all written out infront of me......

anyway, thanks again, I'll let you know when you can pick up a copy in Easons;)

Flogen