Be Your Own Editor

Ben writes:

I recently decided to actually write a novel, something I have been kicking around for years. I recently read your article on e-marketing and had a few questions for you. I obviously haven’t sold my manuscript, I haven’t even finished it yet, but you are the first person I’ve found who I can ask questions to directly so I hope you will have patience with me. I currently only have one sample chapter completed and was wondering, do you wait until your manuscript is complete before searching for publishers, or do you use samples to begin the search early? Any advice you have would be wonderful.

Congratulations on writing your first chapter, Ben. Now get back to work.

This answer’s easy: yes. Unless you’ve got a few recent bestsellers under your belt, which I assume you don’t, you need to finish your novel before trying to find a publisher. The first step in the selling of your work is submitting query letters to literary agents, and no decent agent will look at sample chapters for an unfinished novel by an unpublished author.

Why? Because they’ve got a mail bin full of queries from writers who’ve already taken the time to complete manuscripts that agents and publishers can judge in their entirety. Agents might ask for a sample initially, but if they like it, they’ll want to read the whole thing. And the same goes for publishing houses large and small.

If you’ve never written a novel before, how will agents and publishers know that you can sustain the level of writing in your sample through 300 pages? How will they judge character arcs and your ability to create a compelling plot? How will they know that you’re dedicated enough to finish it? I can think off the top of my head of about five people I know who’ve started novels but never finished them.

While a sample and an outline can often be enough to sell a strong nonfiction book proposal, they’re never enough to sell a first novel. The market is much too competitive, and the author is too much of an unknown quantity. And don’t think you should send your first draft out there, either. You’re competing with people who’ve done twelve rewrites, and neither an agent nor an editor is going to want to take on something that still needs a lot of work. So while you can certainly keep the market in mind as you write, you can’t do much about it until “The End.”

Thanks for writing, and good luck finishing and selling that novel.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Literary Agents, Readers Q&A, The Book Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.