Not too long ago I wrote a children's book. Well a draft anyway. Why not, I thought. I do like writing. I was impressed with my efforts and have since gone back and looked at my draft feeling quite impressed with myself. The issue I ran into was what do I do with it? I can draw but I am very impatient and didn't really feel like drawing pictures. I didn't know anything about how books were made so I couldn't very well do it myself. Luckily enough I had an assignment come up for university that required me to write a blog about things related to writing. This blog post is about what to do once you've written your book.
I typed into Google "I wrote a book, now what?' I hate to think of a time when Google didn't exist. How on earth did anyone get anything done. I came across a blog post called 'I've Written a Book. Now What. 22 Steps to Getting Published by Anne R. Allen. I am not about to recount the 22 steps because I would be writing a blog post about a blog post which, although might be common practice in the 21st century, seems fairly unusual to me. Instead I will write my reaction to the steps. I feel that this makes the blog post more personal to me.
1. Celebrate - well this made me laugh when I first read it. I actually really hadn't considered doing this. Still haven't done it yet but I think that's because to me it seems you would only celebrate once something is actually published.
2. Make sure you know your genre - this made me think....is children's literature its own genre or are there genres within that? I Googled it and found this website which was helpful.
3. Research and read the latest books in your genre - I'm in luck, I am a primary school teacher so I do that most days.
4. Write your synopsis, hook, author bio and a basic query letter template - uh, what? I actually have no idea what this means.
"You can find helpful guides in any number of places. AgentQuery provides solid basics. Most agents have similar information on their websites.Nathan Bransford’s blog gives the info in a fun and friendly way, and Janet Reid’s Query Shark Blog is a boot camp for query writers. A number of forums and agent blogs provide critiques of queries—as well as Public Query Slushpile I give the basics for writing an author bio here". Yes I did copy and paste that.
5. Start a blog or build a website if you don’t have one already - Winning! I have done this. Not as an author though. So I may have to edit one of the ones I have.
6. Start researching agents - this was helpful because I was thinking of this like when you want a job. You just throw your resume around hope someone picks you up.
7. Send out your first five queries - do not know what this means and Anne didn't explain it :-( if I were to guess I'd say its just sending your book to a few people.
8. Start your next book - I feel like a lot of people wouldn't do this one? Maybe in Children's Literature sure but long novels?
9. Get rejections. Mourn - haha I like this one.
10. Send out five more queries - clever
11. See if you’ve had any silent rejections - I think this one is like when you've submitted your resume, gone in for an interview....your waiting to hear back from them, you go in and...what's that? Someone has filled the position and you have been declined.
12. Sent out five more queries - At this point I realised that getting a book published is no easy task.
13. Maybe get a request for a partial - feelings of point 12 continued through this point...
14. Get the partial rejected- feelings of point 12 continued through this point...
15. Get a request for the full manuscript - feelings of point 12 continued through this point...
16. Send out more queries - feelings of point 12 continued through this point...
17. Get another partial rejected - feelings of point 12 continued through this point...
18. Get the full rejected - feelings of point 12 continued through this point...
19. Finish book #2 - feelings of point 12 continued through this point...
20. Start all over again with #2 - feelings of point 12 continued through this point...
21. Land an agent - feelings of point 12 continued through this point...
22. If you don’t, you may want to consider a small press or self-publishing - point number 22 actually sounds like a good point number 1. Wow. I didn't think it would be a walk in the park but I guess this really opened my eyes to the trials and tribulations of aspiring authors. It makes me think about what David Malouf said about building a good relationship with agents and publishers. I can definitely see why he has done this.
After all that I probably will leave my draft sitting exactly where it is. At least now if I want to do something with it I will know what it is I should be doing. To be honest it will probably end up where all the other writing I have done over the years has ended up. No where of interest.
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