There are a lot of people out there who come under the general umbrella of publishing. Most of them will, be you the greatest writer in the world, have no interest whatsoever in your book.

This may sound obvious. When you send off to Pig-focused Publishing Ltd and they write back saying, “Thank you for your epic nine-volume fantasy novel of some 200,000,000 words, but we feel unable to progress this project because of the general dearth of pigs(1) ,” then you’re, to change species, barking up the wrong tree.

 

However, there are a lot of non-specialist publishers out there, and still, most of them won’t want to touch whatever you’ve got with a bargepole. Believe me, some of them keep a bargepole to hand specifically so they can refuse to touch manuscripts with it. It’s a quaint industry in some respects, but the bargepole-makers are glad of it.

 

So…

 

I’ll confine myself to fantasy fiction, but the rules should hold for pretty much anything:

 

If you read fantasy then you might well look at who’s publishing the writers that you like. That’s one easy option. You might think it’s a dead cert that someone who writes something is likely also to be someone who reads that same something, but this is a curious phenomenon in fantasy. You’ll find, very frequently indeed, that a fantasy author, when answering the questions of people at a signing, say, will deny all knowledge of the genre. Some will say that they never read any fantasy, others that they simply don’t really read it any more. Now I know for a fact that some of them actually don’t, but with many of them one can’t help wondering if they’re either (a) trying for credibility as a “serious” author (4); or (b) are wary of admitting to having read any given author for fear of being labelled a plagiarist from some chance (5) similarity of plot.

 

Of course, perusing the spines of your library won’t help you with agents, so…

 

A surer way of going about things is to get hold of a list of publishers and agencies. I’ve only come across two, The Writers’ Handbook and The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook (6). Both give the same kind of information, namely a horrifyingly long list of publishers, one of agents, and an index divided into genres.

 

So: Look up your index: Science-fiction and Fantasy publishers. There is a depressingly small handful. Science-fiction and Fantasy agents: a smaller handful. The task is now manageable.

 

Except that actually, a fair old number of the “generic” publishers, and agencies, will consider genre fiction. You’ve more chance with the specialists, but there are a lot more generalists, and you’re hungry, right?

 

So get a telephone and a working weekday when you have all the time in the world, and start calling. You see, at the end of the day, there’s absolutely no guarantee that any of them are remotely interested in you, even if they say they are in print. Times change, publishing fortunes rise and fall, and you’ll find that a lot of them (publishers and agencies both) are simply not taking on new writers at any given moment. To save yourself a fortune in postage, do the telephonic legwork first. Ring them up, ask for the relevant person or the relevant imprint. Tell them you’d like to submit and ask for their guidelines. They’ll either tell you:

  1. We don’t read that kind of stuff
  2. We’re not looking for any unsolicited manuscripts
  3. Please send us…

After all, frankly, Herman Melville could have walked into the offices of the Nantucket All-Whale Publishing Co and said, “I’ve got this idea for a book…” and they’d say, “Sorry, we’re packed out with philosophical-metaphor-masquerading-as-whaling-novel projects at the moment, and have you tried, All-Blubber Action Tales down the street?”

 

And you note down what to send and who to send it to, if different from the contact in your book, and move on. You should accumulate a list of people who, in all likelihood, will still not be much interested in your magnum opus.

 

Next: Agents, publishers and parasites. Or something else. I’ll get to it eventually anyway.

 

(1)   And so was born The Deathtrotters of Isenschwein, Book I of the Chronicles of Babe the Wanderer (2)

(2) By Ivor Pigge (3)

(3) I apologise unreservedly for this but I couldn't resist it.

 

(4)   I do not hold with this genre snobbery. I hope I never shall. Sooner or later I’ll get my rant on about this kind of thing.

 

(5)   Or perhaps not-so-chance, hell, who knows. They say there are only so many plots in the world. It’s amazing that Aristophanes or someone hasn’t sued the entire industry into bankruptcyland.

 

(6)   Looking at my own copy of this, to check the placing of the apostrophes (7) I note that I have, as of October 2007, the 2008 edition. It’s a forward-looking publication

 

(7)   Well, it might have been intended for one writer and one artist, who knows? They probably live together, so they could share the same book without much disagreement.