A Novel Published
Does Your Novel Have A Heartbeat?
By Holly Lisle
PART I of The 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series
You’ve read through what you’ve written—your first few scenes, your first chapter, your completed novel—and you’ve discovered that your words don’t move you. They don’t make you want to keep reading. They don’t make you laugh or cry. If writing is bleeding on the page, well, you might have scratched yourself, but you don’t need a transfusion. And you don’t know what went wrong.
When you started writing, did you know what story you were telling? This is trickier than it sounds. You might have known your characters, you might have known your world, and you might have known your plot…but even with this much planning done, it’s entirely possible that you had not yet located your deep layer, the heart of your story, the engine that drove you to write it in the first place.
Odds are very good you did not know your theme.
Your theme is nothing more and nothing less than the heart of a novel. It is not a grade-school exercise in tedium, that single droning sentence you wrote that told your reader what you were going to tell him. In a novel, your theme is a living, vibrant, critical thing. It is your particular passion in this particular novel summed up in a handful of words. It is what you need to say.
Need. That’s the critical thing in a theme. If you’re writing novels, if you are doing something this complex and challenging, you’re doing it because something in you needs to write. You have something to express, some particular point of view, some set of life experiences, some driven hunger that you must put down on paper. You NEED. And you need to say what you need.
Maybe it is: In spite of having survived heartbreak, I believe in true love. Or: I believe good can triumph over greater evil. Or: If I were King of Everything, this is the way the world would be.
Your plot is the map of your story. Your theme is the map of your soul, and it is where your characters will find their direction, their flaws, their hungers, and their own passions. They only breathe with your breath, and they only bleed with your blood. Your plot may be Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl, but your theme—your take on the world based on your life, your own hopes and aspirations, your own beliefs—might be Chubby Bald Guy Deserves the Love of a Wonderful Woman.
You have themes in you. You’ve built them from love and courage, but you’ve built them from anger and fear, too. You live with them every day, when you’re muttering that argument you had with your spouse or colleague, designing better comebacks; when you’re watching the boss cheat someone and you’re getting furious about it; when you’re watching a disaster and telling yourself, Someone could have prevented that; when you’re hearing the latest political garbage and thinking, This is not the way the world should be.
I could do this better. I WOULD do this better.
And so you write.
You have rich, powerful, compelling, passionate themes boiling inside you. You have something worth saying. Now you just need to know how to figure out what it is, and how to get it on the page.
In Part II: How To Find Your Novel’s Pulse, you’ll learn how to identify your themes, and figure out which are worth pursuing.
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It has never been easy to break into the published novel market although there are a few ways, but all of them need you to believe in yourself fully and never give up.
To tell you how I did it eventually after 23 rejections for my first novel I have to go back to 1971 and was just about beaten even though I had received a multitude of great critique from professionals.
I was 20 years old then and still at Vet college.
I had started out by submitting to all the large book publishing companies with rejection after rejection, and was gradually working down through a list I’d compiled before hand but I don’t think most of my submissions even crossed a desk before the rejection slip was sent out to me, but that’s always the same for a total unknown author I’ve since learned.
I was studying in Scotland at the time and struggled to keep on finding the extra cash to pay postage to keep on submitting and was even getting pretty angry about the whole thing and in the end I wrote a letter to one of the major British newspapers enclosing my full manuscript with a deal offer that went a bit like this:
Dear Editor,
Please read my book manuscript before you reject it and throw it in your bloody trashcan as everyone else seems to do.
Once you’ve read I want you to think about breaking it down into four parts to print as a serial book form in your Sunday edition.
If you are willing to print the first part of my manuscript you have my full consent to go ahead and do it without any obligation.
I am aware that all newspapers know their ‘standard’ sales receipts so by the time the final part of my manuscript appears in your paper you will know if it helped to boost your weekly sales figures or not.
Now here’s my deal sir:
If your sales figures have remained roughly the same during the four weeks that my manuscript appeared in your paper then you owe me absolutely nothing at all, and I will owe you my thanks for being prepared to give my first novel a public airing, but if your sales figures did rise by a minimum of 5% during the final two weeks you pay me one thousand pounds for the rights to publish my book.
I have no way to know if you decide to cheat me or not, but while the sum of money we’re talking about here may be small to you, it is a hell of a lot to a struggling student, so please bear that in mind.
OK, so that’s not my exact wording, but it went something like that, it’s far too long ago to remember how much cheek I had then and I’d got to the stage where I felt I had nothing left to lose anyway.
To my surprise I receive a letter back from that editor a week later with a cheque for the full amount I’d asked for if things went well.
The letter told me that they would publish my novel just as I’d suggested and he though the sum I’d asked for the ‘one off’ publishing rights was a gift as far as the paper was concerned.
Needless to say that my book was published in the four parts over the next month, but the best part of all was that after the final section appeared in the paper I received an offer to publish it in a book form with a contract for a follow up book that had to be finished and handed into the publisher within 12 months.
Well, I’ve published 17 books since then, so the risk I took paid off, and that newspaper editor and I became and remained friends until his death from natural causes in 2002.
It’s a friendship I value and cherish even today.
How do I get my novel published and noticed?
I’ve written a novel that I think is pretty good. How can I get my novel (and maybe other stories as well) published and noticed when I don’t have a lot of money to pay a publisher and literary agent?
Do I need to have money to get my work noticed?
wwww.writersmarket.com has a list of publishers and literary agents that are reputable. If you get a good agent or publisher, you shouldn’t have to pay anything. What happens is when your book gets published, they get a percentage of the profits. How much of a percentage they get is determined by your contract.
You need to get some information on what publishers to submit the book to. Try the Writer’s Digest. They have a great deal of articles and books on this subject.
It also depends on the subject matter. See if you can find a publisher that is interested in that particular subject matter.
Or worse comes to worse find a vanity press and sell on the web.
Good luck.
I wish I could get started on writing.
An unsolicited manuscript will be completely ignored. Contact a literary agent. Here is a website to help find one. Good luck.
http://www.writers.net/agents.html
How did you get your first novel published?
I’m interested to know what you went through to get your first novel published (Not self publishing) and how you managed it in the end as I know how tough it is to make it.
How many rejections did you get along the way, and how did you finally find a way to break through the barriers that keep 99.9% of new authors out of the market.
I ask that you please give as much detail as possible, but not because I’m trying to get published myself.
I will reveal why I ask after I have read any/all answers.
What are the steps in getting a novel published?
I wrote a children’s novel for ages 8-12 and i want to know the steps in getting my book published. I live in San Diego and don’t have the money to go anywhere for anything or get an editor.
How do i get a novel published?
I am currently working on my second novel, neither is published and i have no idea how to even get started on getting published.
How does a normal person without connections to the publishing world, get a novel published?
I was just wondering. If you were a normal person, and didn’t know anybody at all in the publishing world, how exactly do you get a book published? I mean, the postage would just cost to much to send a whole couple hundred page novel to a bunch of publishers. Besides, most publishers will just turn you down, right? Is there like a website where you can send your story to the publishers or something? I think it would just be so hard to get your work out there and published, you know?
– Finish the book. By that I mean proofread it a couple of times, make sure its perfect. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
– Get a copy of something like Writers Markets. The book will have listings of reputable publishers and agents. Check their websites for their submission details and make sure you follow them to the letter.
– Usual practice is to send a query letter first, along with a full synopsis. Sometimes they also ask for sample chapters and / or your writers CV. There are a number of sites and books that tell you how to write the perfect query / synopsis / CV.
– They will take up to three months to respond with a yes or no answer, sometimes asking to see the whole book if they’re interested. This isn’t a guarantee of a yes; they sometimes still reject you afterwards. If you haven’t heard anything after about two months, you can send a polite enquiry and ask if they have had the chance to read your work yet. Most don’t like multiple submissions to other publishers either.
– When you finally get a yes, and an offer of a contract, read it carefully. Make sure you have no doubts about anything in it. Publishers are happy to explain points to you if you are unclear (after all, they’re there to help. Without your book, they don’t get their percentage). There are also many websites that can help you out with understanding contracts. If you have an agent. they can do this for you too.
– Once you’re signed, the publisher will start with information and cover designs etc. You have input in the cover from the questionnaires they get you to fill out but they get the final decision.
– Then the editing begins. You can go through rounds of edits before both you and they agree that your book is ‘finished’.
– After that its a case of waiting for the release date.
People will tell you that you need an agent. You don’t. I have two publishers for two different books and I don’t have an agent; I deal directly with the publishers. Many of the larger publishers are unwilling to read unsolicited material but there are a lot out there who will if you look for them.
Other things-
Don’t take rejections to heart. I have piles of rejection letters that I have received over the years (yes, years) and if I took them personally, I would have given up ages ago.
If a publisher says that you will be charged a reading fee or such, stay clear. A good publisher does not ask you for money; the editors and such are in house and it is part of your contract with them. That’s part of what their percentage pays for. The same with agents. They shouldn’t be charging you reading fees, and also look at what percentage they take. Most take about 10-15% but I’ve seen a few who take 20%.
Hope this answers your questions.