How Not To Get Published - How To Win the WWOTYA - 2, The Publishing House

By: Gabrielle Guichard
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:43:26
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To aim at the wrong audience is not enough to insure a failure. You will dramatically worsen your case by sending your manuscript to any publishers or, still better but demanding systematic investigation, by sending it to publishers who never publish the kind of work you write. Poetry to a medicine oriented publishing house, romance to a specialist of History, etc. There are innumerable possibilities. My favorite: send your manuscript to a publishing house specialized in bilingual books and ask yours not to be translated. On the contrary, you may miss the WWOTYA if you send 2 versions of your work, even if the one in another language than your mother tongue needs tons of corrections.

Of course, you send your manuscript to several publishers, and they know it; anyway, make sure that each of them knows about the others. First, you give the feeling that you are not quite sure of the quality of your work --and the lack of confidence may be contagious. Then, publishing houses are full of human beings (I know you doubt it, nevertheless, it is true) and human beings tend not to like to be treated like anyone else among the crowd. Publishers are no exceptions. A human being has a name and simply hates to be called So-and-so. Thus, instead of simply writing “Dear Sir” either you will address your mail to So-and-so or you will misspell the name. Both work as well: your manuscript will remain at the bottom of the heap for long.

In any case, you will not fulfill the publishers' technical requirements. If they ask for a synopsis, send the first chapter; if they ask for one chapter, send the whole manuscript; if they want it a PDF file attached to an email, engrave wax tablets. Do not be disturbed by all their prerequisites and act your own way or you might well have your manuscript read by the right reader.

Nevertheless, do not be too confident : strange things happen. The doctor responsible of medical publications may be fond of poetry. In the third lesson, we will enrich our deterrent arsenal with the study of the general plot.

Gabrielle Guichard
writes bilingual textbooks and is in charge of the English-French department at Multilingual Bookstore, the publishing house that translates and publishes bilingual and multilingual short novels.

Article source: Expert Articles

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