Dear xxx,
Congratulations on being such an avid reader and writer. That’s wonderful! As to the process of having a book published, it is a long and complicated thing. If you google how to get a book published you will encounter all sorts of scammers who just want to steal your money with the end result that your book might get printed, but that’s not the same as getting published. The difference is this: anyone can write a story and get the story printed and bound into book form, but the only people who would ever read that are the people you give it to. When a book is published, the writer crafts a unique story with wide appeal that a publisher (which is a category of business) buys and the publisher has the author work with editors to make the story even better. That part of the process alone can take several months. The publisher also works with marketing people and designers etc etc, and then gets a printing company to do the actual manufacturing of the book. The publisher also sends out advance review copies of the book to reviewers across the country. They read the book and then give it a rating and they write a review of it and those reviews get published in various places and readers read those reviews and it makes them decide whether they want to buy the book or not. The author doesn’t pay for any of that to happen and they’re really not involved in the business end of it. The author gets paid. How much? On a $10 book, an author would be paid $1. So the way to have an income as an author is to write a book that a ton of people will buy. Publishers are very picky about the books they publish because it’s such a complicated and expensive process for them. In fact, a publisher might get thousands of people sending them book manuscripts in a year and they only publish one out of maybe 10,000.
To put it another way, what if you were interested in being a veterinarian? No matter how gifted you were in science, you still wouldn’t do surgery on a dog, right? You still need all the training. It’s the same thing for being an author. There are lots of people who are talented in writing, but they still need the training.
My advice to you is to take your time and learn about the craft of writing now, rather than trying to get published right off the bat. A good way to prepare yourself to be an author is to read widely, which I know you’re already doing. Set yourself a goal of reading 1000 books in the same genre as what you’d like to write. I know that sounds daunting, but reading widely is the way to expose yourself to all sorts of story techniques and give yourself ideas of what may work for you. It’s a pathway for you to develop your own unique writing voice. People who haven’t read widely risk sounding like the last author they read.
The other thing to do is to write every day, which I suspect you’re also already doing. Keep up the good work! Just like a marathon runner trains for a race by running, an aspiring author trains by writing.
If you get your whole book written, the next thing to do is join a critique group where others who are writing books give you feedback on your story and that helps improve it. Writers need to be humble and to realize that they can always improve. It’s a hard profession.
I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was in 4th grade and I wrote my first novel in 8th grade but my first book wasn’t published until I was 42 years old. I did have other stuff published before that though. For example, I was the editor for the school yearbook in 8th grade and wrote for the high school newspaper and was a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines before writing books. I also went to college and did a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and a master’s degree of Library Science. When publishers look at manuscript submissions, they also look at the writer’s background. They are more likely to be interested in a story written by someone who has been published before and who takes their writing so seriously that they study in college to improve themselves, so taking these steps at the beginning can lead to long time success.
Good wishes with it all and big hugs to you
Marsha
