Every time I walk into a bookstore, I always take a moment to think, truly think, about the thousands of books in front of me. Somebody had to write each and every single one of those. Years went into turning each title into a full product. We all, on some level, acknowledge that writing and creating books is hard work.
What nobody tells you is that writing the book is the easy part.
Over the past two years, myself and three friends have worked on creating a novel and bringing it into the world. Three authors, one editor, and if you're me, one salesperson trying to bring it all to life. This project was about more than just writing a book. It's also about everything you never get to see in regards to how books get from an idea to a finished product.
Here, you'll get to see some background information on the book itself, as well as every step I've taken from the minute the book was finished up until now. It's a long process, but don't worry - I've tried to make it easy for you all to take in :)
Allow me to set the scene: March 31st, 2019. Three friends just spent the day at the local Renaissance Festival. They're all dressed up, and at this point in the day a bit worn down. On their way home from the festival, they decided to grab a bite at a restaurant that was on their way, a Chili's, to be specific.
After sitting down to eat, one of them muttered a single phrase, that would end up starting it all.
"You know, we should make our own fantasy characters, and make a book with them or something. That would be fun."
And now, here we are.
Now let me correct an initial assumption: This didn't actually start as a book. We originally planned on making a comic series, since we all for some reason thought that drawing and writing would be easier than just writing. So after our initial character creation in that Chili's, the idea basically sat untouched for months. Upon finding our original sketches and plot layout, I decided that we weren't going to let this idea just sit and rot in our heads. No, we were going to write a book.
We began writing on September 13th, 2019. We had planned for around 20 chapters, and had no idea what our target word count or page count was. We just had an idea, characters we loved, and a story to tell. Around May of 2020 we brought on one of our friends as an editor, to help polish what we'd already written while we worked on finishing up the book.
Below you'll see the original character concepts for the three main protagonists, as drawn back in Summer 2019. They've changed a lot since then, as you'll soon see.
Created by Bella Johnstone
Created by Aden Edwards
Created by Lex Escobedo
The fateful day finally came. On September 5th, 2020, at 1:49am, we finished the first draft of the manuscript. We spent the next month and a half editing like there was no tomorrow. Grammar issues were fixed, plot holes were identified and closed, dialogue was cleaned up. Everything we could get in a first edit, we took care of. We brought on some friends as beta readers, who basically go through and give us feedback on major parts that need clarification or fixing. With the help of them and our editor, we cleaned up our work to the point that we felt okay beginning a process that would end up being even harder than writing the book itself.
In November, I began the process of trying to get our book published. This process starts with one very long, very frustrating, and very heartbreaking process: Querying.
Querying is a process almost every author aiming to get traditionally published has to go through. I say almost, because sometimes publishers will go to authors if they need extremely specific content. But for the most part, you have to query.
This process involves sending a query letter and a sample of your manuscript to literary agents. These agents are the people that will help you sell your book: if they decide to take you on as a client, it is their job to find an editor who will publish your work, help you understand your contract with your publishing house, and will help market your book. They don't make money until you make money, so selling your book is their top priority. Because agents make their living by selling books though, they need to be passionate about what they choose to acquire each year. They can also only acquire so much each year, so they cannot take on anything they don't truly think they can sell.
You can also on occasion query small presses and even editors, but this usually isn't the case. Some people have more success querying small presses, but many opt for the long road of querying agents. Agents are usually the ones who will get you into a major publishing house, or an imprint of one. The bigger the house, the better your chances of getting good publicity, an amazing cover that'll pull readers in, and possibly even a spot on the ever-elusive New York Times Bestseller list, aka every author's dream.
Now, most queries are rejections. This is something every author learns very quickly. If you get an offer within your first 10 or 20 queries, you're unbelievably lucky. Sometimes you'll get requests for partials or fulls: aka more material from your manuscript. I've had a couple of these requests in my time querying.
As of late March, I've sent over 70 queries, and had over 50 rejections. It's not an easy process to stay positive through.
What you see in the image above is my query spreadsheet, where I track every agent, editor, and publisher I want to query and have queried. Everything is color coded and I update this list weekly.
After months of query after query, I found a wonderful new thing to get involved in: Pitch events!
Pitch events happen on Twitter, so it's important for querying authors to establish themselves as authors and get involved with the publishing side of Twitter. I couldn't tell you how many agents, editors, publishing houses, writing groups, and publishing news pages I follow to keep up with everything. A few agents even follow me! But being in the know is important for pitch events, as it can make or break you.
Pitch events are an opportunity for authors to connect with agents who want their work in an unconventional way. Event hosts create a specific hashtag, as well as genre and audience tags, and authors get the opportunity to Tweet a pitch for their novel. Yes, a pitch for a book in under 280 characters. It's just as challenging as it sounds. Each pitch event has specific guidelines, usually to limit what types of books can be pitched or what authors can pitch. On pitch days, you get a certain amount of pitches you can tweet: It's good to usually have a few variations to post. For most events, it's one pitch an hour for ten hours. Larger events have more restrictions.
During these events, it's a rule to not like other authors Tweets. If you like a pitch, it's customary to retweet it so it gets boosted in the event hashtag. Agents, Editors, and Publishers however are free to like all they want - and a like from any of them is a huge deal. A like means they want to see your query material, and usually more of your manuscript than they'd see from a traditional unsolicited query.
I've actually had a decent amount of success from these events, given what I was up against. I managed to pull between 1 and 4 likes in each event. In one of the biggest pitch events of the year, #PitMad, which happens quarterly, I was up against hundreds of thousands of authors for likes. I'm not kidding. The whole day of the event, the tag was number 1 on trending and had over 500k tweets by the end of the day. Even though they usually don't lead anywhere, the interest alone is something authors should be proud of. A good pitch, after all, is what an agent will need to sell your book to an editor.
In March, I had an opportunity to get some help from the very people I need to impress to sell this book: Agents. Occasionally, agents and editors will offer to do critiques of a certain number of pages or chapters, usually in partnership with some charity. They'll auction off these critiques for a good cause. I was able to get two of them: one for my first 10 pages, and one for my first 3 chapters. These critiques have been amazing. It's hard sometimes to take in feedback on your work when it's not all praise. However, learning exactly what's wrong from the very people I need to impress? That's how you fix things. I've had my first call with one of the agents to discuss the feedback, and it was amazing! As an author its easy to forget agents are people too, when the rejections pile up. But the phone call I was so nervous for was a blast. It was fun getting to ramble about possible changes with someone who knew if those changes would help or not. I look forward to my next call in the upcoming weeks.
In case you missed it, you can view my final presentation here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HqjArT3t9bxee8rFCZbTM1h8EmcmscTx_XCGkzVpz6A/edit?usp=sharing