My 20-Year Journey to “Yes”

The Unspoken Rules of Publishing

I have a confession to make: when I first started on my publishing journey, I really thought that the normal rules wouldn’t apply to me. I had heard that it would take diligence and patience to make my mark, but surely those warnings were meant for other people. MY writing was on another level, and I was going to be “discovered” in no time.

Further confession: I got my first publishing deal almost exactly 20 years after writing my first book, and I can’t even bear to read those early manuscripts anymore. This is how I got from there to here, annotating the mistakes I made along the way.

I Want to Write a Book. Where Do I Start?

I had wanted to write picture books ever since I read one to my then two-year-old cousin, and marveled as he pointed to a picture of the Northern Lights and asked me “Is that the Aurora Borealis?” I was so struck by how this little mind saw something that interested him at such an early age, and retained information far beyond his age level as a result. It became my dream to be able to do that for another child through my writing someday.

Being a senior in college at the time, I convinced a professor to give me college credit to write a picture book of my own. To make the project more complete and sellable, I also got an artist friend of mine to illustrate it.*

(*Mistake 1: Publishers DO NOT LIKE IT if you have your books illustrated on your own. If you’re a writer/illustrator, that’s fine. But if you’re not, and you get drawings made anyway, you will appear to be creatively inflexible. Remember, publishers want to be part of the creative process, which means having control over the art. If you try to do that work for them, they will almost certainly not want to work with you.)

Once that book was finished, I immediately pitched it to agents, and found one willing to represent it, provided I paid several hundred dollars to cover expenses.**

(Mistakes 2 and 3: Rushing a manuscript off to agents/editors is a very bad idea, because once it’s rejected, it can’t be pitched again unless someone asks you to do so. So by rushing it out before it was vetted and revised, I was shooting myself in the foot. And, FYI: if any agent asks you for money upfront, IT IS A SCAM. The fact that I even considered this “opportunity” is something that embarrasses me to this day.)

For the next ten years or so after that incident, I came up with multiple ideas for other stories, but never wrote any of them down.***

(Mistake 4: Why oh WHY didn’t I do more writing? I wasted a decade where I could have been fine-tuning my craft and improving!!)

What to Write About?

Once I had kids, the ideas started flowing, and my manuscript count finally started to rise. After each one was complete (not really), I would get up the nerve to send it out to a few agents, but never heard anything back.

Finally, more than a decade after I first got this dream of publication, I realized that my failure to work within the “process” was hurting me. If I’m being honest, this realization is really day one of my actual publication story.

I joined the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), got myself into a critique group, and dedicated myself toward my work. My ideas got more ambitious and my execution of them started to improve. Slowly. I remember exactly where I was the first time an agent asked to see more of my work, as well as my feeling that this was proof that I was on the right track at last.

I began attending conferences and writing retreats, joining groups like 12x12 and Storystorm, and building up my tribe and support system along with my collected works. At one conference, I read a manuscript at an open mic that a published author said was “awesome,” and, at a critique session, an agent said of the same piece that she could see it getting published. This is when I KNEW I was headed in the right direction.

Getting a Writing Agent

About a year after that, I attended a workshop that gave me the right to send a manuscript directly to a publisher. When he replied a few months later, he said he loved it and asked who was on my “agent wish list.” Obviously, my list at the time was one entry long: whoever would be willing to sign me. I replied with the names of some agents who I’d met and liked over the years. This publisher wrote back to say that he knew three of them, and would contact them for me.

One week later, I had three offers of representation. I still get starry-eyed when I think of that.

Importantly, signing with my agent was not the fast-track to publication I had thought it was. Instead, he spent years breaking me down as a writer, helping me identify my bad habits and fix them, and getting me to the place where I was really ready to create publishable works. The third book we sent out didn’t sell, but one publisher liked my writing, and asked me to submit something new. That fourth book, on an exclusive submission, was Your Future is Bright.

I’ve broken all this down here to show that my journey – along with (I suspect) just about every other published author’s – is long and circuitous and unpredictable. The only thing you know for certain is that if you don’t do the work (or just stop doing it for ten years), you will not get better, and nothing good can happen.

So go out there, make your own mistakes, and one day, please do share YOUR journey to publication with me.