Two More Secrets to Getting Published

by Julie Coulter Bellon

I’d like to tell you two more secrets to getting published today. Obviously, I know there are many more, but I’m focusing on the ones that I get asked most about, and the ones I spend the most time encouraging aspiring authors to do.

The third secret (the first two were discussed last week) is getting feedback on your manuscript. Now, this can be done in many ways and if you do it right, it may be hard for you. The most common way to get feedback on your manuscript is to have a critique group, or at the very least, some beta readers who will read your stuff and give it honest feedback. You definitely want to get with people who will not just fawn all over you and tell you how great you are (hi Mom and Dad!) but you want people who are willing to be honest and say, I couldn’t understand your plot here, or I got bored halfway through, or I hated your heroine. It’s going to be hard to hear, because this is the baby you’ve worked on for months or years, but it can be very valuable.

For the past few years I have been involved in the LDStorymakers First Chapter conference as a judge, a committee member, or the person in charge of it. This is a contest where five industry professionals will evaluate the first chapter of unpublished authors, and choose the winners for some great prizes. The judges give fairly extensive evaluations that are given to each entrant, not just the winners, and to me, the feedback itself is more valuable than the prizes. Yet, every year I listen to a small group of entrants complain about the feedback. Judges were too mean, or they probably hadn’t really read the chapter since they didn’t like it, or one judge liked it where another judge didn’t so I'm going to disregard the comments that didn't like it. And every time I heard these complaints I told them, “you are the author. You can disregard any feedback you want, but the hardest evaluation will probably be the most helpful.” I wanted them to know that these judges were agents, editors, authors, and publishers who had taken a considerable amount of time to evaluate their work, and those comments, as hard as they were to read, were the ones that I would look at most closely in order to improve.

Of course not all feedback is going to be useful. There are some people who just won’t like your work or have anything constructive to say about it. But it is important to really look at your feedback before you discard any of it. Seriously looking at it all will ensure that you will definitely find those gems to help you make your story stronger, but it may hurt a bit while you’re rubbing the rough edges off.

The fourth secret is to be persistent. Write something every day, even when you don’t feel like it. Even if you only write a page a day, it might not seem like much at the time, but that’s going to equal to a pretty large book at the end of the year. Writing every day also keeps you in prime writing shape and it makes the ideas flow a lot easier if you’ve been flexing those writing/thinking muscles at least a little bit on a regular basis. Successful writers are hard workers who know that there are going to be good days when the words are practically jumping by themselves onto the page, and bad days when the cursor is blinking at you and you can’t think of much to say. But a persistent author can’t give up, they must press forward and finish that scene, chapter, or book. A little at a time, slow and steady, persistence and perseverance can do the trick for authors of any circumstance.

Persistence as a writer also equates to the business end when you get a rejection letter for your new manuscript. It is going to take a little while for the feelings that a rejection might evoke in you to go away, but ultimately, a persistent writer will dust herself off, rewrite the manuscript and submit it somewhere else. The same goes for when an agent doesn’t pick you up. Feel sad, but get up and try again.

Persistence is the writer’s over-arching key to success and every published author will tell you that being an author is full of ups and downs both on the creative side of things and on the business end. And, as I’ve said before on this blog, the only difference between a published author and an unpublished author is that one gave up and one didn’t. Don’t give up.

Thank you to everyone who commented last week, and to Tim who linked to my blog and added his own ideas of the first two secrets. I’ve honestly learned so much from my fellow frog bloggers and from the commenters. It’s a privilege to be here among so many wonderful people and authors. I hope you all are moving toward achieving your dreams in the writing business and that you’ve found something useful here that will help you navigate it. If not, you can tune in to LDSPublishers site tomorrow and read Jeff’s new entry. I know I’m looking forward to it!