Writing.Com General Discussion

If by "completing" a book, you mean writing a first draft, then you're not yet ready for publication.

As KenF said: What you've got to consider is if your stack of rejections is because you haven't aligned with the right Agent/publisher or because your writing is failing their reasonable protocols to avoid bad projects?

It's almost always the second: Noah Lukeman wrote that 99% of the unsolicited novels submitted to agents/editors are rejected for technical incompetence.

Writing well enough to get accepted by a traditional publisher takes learning about how to do it right, training yourself to read as a writer so you can see your own mistakes, and doing a lot of craft-work on the page. All that's before you get to the copy editor stage because a copy editor just cleans up what's there.

It's common for a manuscript that is accepted by an agent to be rewritten again before being submitted to editors, who usually want a rewrite before giving the manuscript to the publisher's copy editor for the final polish.

Before looking for critical feedback from over-worked professionals, it helps to find out what publishers expect in regards to quality of craft. The craft aspects of writing a novel or memoir have changed significantly in the past couple of decades, and are still evolving. To help aspiring authors, people with experience and expertise in the traditional publishing industry have published books on what works. Public libraries usually have a selection of such "how to write" books in the 808 nonfiction area. A book that's particularly useful to study before trying to publish is Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages. It explains many of the reasons a manuscript will deserve to be rejected and what to fix before submitting.





Northernwrites___

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