Why Worrying About Getting Published May Be Ruining Your Writing

I go to conferences all the time and the most commonly asked questions are those about publication:

How do I get an agent?
How many words should my manuscript be?
What’s hot right now?
What about ebooks?
How do you self-publish well?
Who do I need to know to get an “in”?
What does an agent want on the first page?
How do I get blurbs from famous authors in my book?
How do I get people to review my book on amazon/goodreads?
How do I find the names of editors to submit to?
What do I do if someone else’s book title/idea is the same as mine?

I admit, I get tired of these kinds of questions. It’s not because they’re not interesting questions to ask. It’s not because people don’t need to know these kinds of things. It’s because the people asking these sorts of questions display a level of ignorance that to me indicates I should withhold the information because they need to figure out a lot of other things first.

Me telling you how to submit to editors and where to find names and addresses so you can do so isn’t going to help you get published if you don’t have a good manuscript. And my experience has been that people who spend the number of years it takes to write a good manuscript mostly also pick up the information along the way to know how to contact the people you need to know and what the rules are for submitting.

More useful questions for beginning writers to ask are things like:

How likable does my protagonist need to be?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in third person versus first? Or past versus present?
How do I find a writing group and make it a useful experience to have one?
Whose advice do I take when I’m revising?
How do I know if I’m making it better or worse?
How do I make the reader feel like this is happening to him/her?
What are ways to increase the stakes?
Where do I put in world building details to make sure I don’t slow the pace?
When do I know a book is ready to submit?

I’m not intending to come across as arrogant, but I think that I sometimes when I feel like people are putting the cart before the horse. When people ask me how many words are in a MG book or in a YA book, I tell them that they should be reading a lot of books and finding the answer out to that themselves and they’d have a good sense of it. I tell them that when you read enough books, you start noticing which house publishes what, you read acknowledgements pages and see agents’ and editors’ names mentioned as they are thanked.

Parents ask me about how to get their children’s books published. I say the same thing: don’t. I really don’t consider it a favor to your child. I think most children should not be published. I think it’s exploitative. If your child is one of the three teens who is ready to be published, you don’t need to do the work for them. They do it for themselves. They show they’re ready by acting as adults and figuring it out on their own.

When people spend so much of their time and energy on trying to make money from writing, I feel like they are trying to live the dream instead of the reality. Writing is a lot less about publishing than you probably think it is. There are a lot of things about being a published author that you will need to know when you are published, but if you don’t learn how to focus on the work without paying attention to the furor of the publishing world now, you will be swallowed up and never seen from again when it happens. If you don’t love sitting down and writing all by yourself, you won’t get the work done when you’re under deadline and there’s no one there to help you along.

Yes, there are people who are doing great work and never sound it out because they lack confidence in themselves. There are a thousand times as many who are sending work out before it is ready. I’m not saying never send your work out. I’m just saying make sure that you care more about your work than about the dream of being an author, making lots of money and being lauded by millions. That may or may not ever happen, but even if it does, it will end up being a distraction to the work itself.

You and the words on the page, making them the best you possibly can. That’s your job. The less you see it that way, the less likely it is that you will be published. Because publication generally follows naturally on the heels of good work.