More will flock to Lulu after recent ISpark Announcement

The reasons it is so hard to get a book published traditionally are not simple and the quality of the writing is only one of several factors. It is by far not the only one.

Actually, new, first-time authors get published all the time. Several years ago, when a similar topic came up in the Lulu forums, I took the time to scrutinize the latest catalogs of a dozen major publishers as well as talk to several of their editors. The result of the first effort revealed that a significant percentage of the new titles were in fact by first-time authors. More than fifty percent for at least one major publisher and no less than ten to twenty percent for others. I was told a couple of interesting things by two of the editors. One is that no editor in their right mind is going to turn down a potentially successful book just because the author is a new one. (As I have pointed out many times, every best-selling author today had to have had a first book at some time). The other editor was even more pragmatic: new authors are simply cheaper to publish. Sure, every publishing company has their Stephen King or Rowling...but no publishing company can exist publishing the work of a small stable of writers. They are perpetually on the lookout for the next Stephen King or the next Harry Potter.

In one way that's a bit like a poll a statistics gathering company executed many many decades ago. By a telecoms company, they were asked to find out what people thought about phones (landlines, when that's all there was.) The poll was eventually judged as worthless because they only asked people, by ringing them. Think about it … 
I looked in to the backgrounds of many of the first time novelists, and the keyword there is Novelist, because many of them had been published by other means,  even 'only' as journalists, or perhaps short story writers for periodicals, etc. and often had a fan base (or Followers as they are called nowadays). At the very least they were trained writers. Even trained in creative writing. Even with Phds in it. In a nutshell, from their very first approach letter to a publisher onwards, they were impressive writers. Once a large sample was sent, it was obvious not a lot of expensive time had to be spent making it readable, never-mind publishable. Then again, they may already have been known to a publisher. Even from just a blog.

Indeed. What you say is often the case. Very rare is the author who sits down at keyboard to write for the very first time in their entire lives.

However, there is a difference between being an experienced writer and being an impressive one. Writing articles for a local newspaper or a personal blog does give one considerable experience...but it is a big step from there to being "impressive." And there is an equally big step from writing non-fiction, short stories, articles for magazines and newspapers, blogs, etc. to tackling a novel. I know a great many who found that to be much more daunting than they expected!

That being said, opening a query letter with "I am an experienced author..." along with a few examples of where this took place (or appending a list of publications) does indeed cut some ice. 

Then there's the celebrity/famous name game. It's remarkable how many people already famous in other fields, have their names on novels nowadays. (How many were ghost written? Who knows?) Just one example (of many, Ron ) is David Walliams, now a top selling children's story writer. Already very famous as a stand-up comedian and from 'Little Britain' and stuff, not to mention swimming the English Channel for charity. Would his stories have been published if he was not already a famous funnyman? But I would assume they would not all have become top sellers if they were rubbish. (25 mill sold.)

Certainly, this occurs all the time...but such books are, of course, a very small number among the total published. In fact, "celebrity" books are often published simply because the publisher knows they will sell well. But then, those are the books that enable a publisher to be able to afford to take chances on first-time authors.

Then there's the Celebrity Chef books and other books to coincide with TV shows, both factual and fiction, with well-known names on them.

Ditto what I said above.

One problem most publishers have is they are inundated by people who think they have the next Steven King or Rowling, and patently have not. But many publishers get so much stuff much of it has to go in the bin unopened. (There are often very small 'windows' each year where they are actually wanting stuff to publish, anyway.) Many will also only accept stuff from Agents, who have already hopefully weeded out the rubbish.

Exactly.

Sure, editors can make bad judgement calls---as every self-published author is quick to point out---but they are, after all, only human. Besides, they may pass on a book that turns out to be best-seller but the next day take a chance on one that does hit the charts.

Or take a chance on one that eventually does not. 

Which happens a lot more often than publishers care to even think about. Just visit any remainder table...

The real problem is that publishing companies can only issue a limited number of books a year, so they have to be extremely selective. More than one editor has had to turn down a book they really liked for no other reason than that the company couldn't take on another title at the time.


Exactly. Hence self-publishing. But it's a shame that SP is now so inexpensive the market gets flooded with stuff that is rubbish in every respect, and often known to be. In my view it's wise to not make it obvious my books are SPed. But the problem there is they have Lulu ISBNs, and my Kindle books are marked as Amazon books.



I think that one of the biggest hurdles a new author often faces is originality. I know that editors are swamped with countless iterations of whatever happens to be popular at the time. Goodness knows how many urban vampire or zombie apocalypse novels wind up on their desks.


Quite so. Recall a few years ago when Lulu's forums were full of what I gathered were YA wanting to publish Vampire, Werewolf and Zombie stuff. It was around the time of the first Twilight film (and the film, not the books.) But I recall some famous writer saying that any writer who thinks they have something original is deluding themselves.  (But if you want to read a truly original SF/F story take a look at N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy.)

Good examples of both good and bad!

Books that "don't need a ton of revision" aren't, I think, a real issue. Besides, that is pretty subjective: pretty much every author thinks that their book is ready for press. If a book needs so much revision that it needs to be rewritten from page one, then there was something seriously wrong with it in the first place. It is not the job of an editor to teach an author how to write.

Indeed. No doubt that's why they insist on a letter of introduction as the first approach. Or being taken to dinner by an agent.

You did real good until that last line! Publishers insist on no such things. They may insist on a query letter first---probably the majority do---but that is not the same as a letter of introduction.

But, barring that extreme, every book will need some revision, overseen by an independent, objective editor.

That's a depressing thought. But it has to be pointed out it's often a battle of opinions, and if the writer wins, it does not mean the book will not get published. However, if you read the Thanks bits of many books, the writer is thanking often dozens of people for their input, and their wife/family for putting up with them.

Well, you do seem to be fixated on "opinions"! But you have to keep in mind what I said about informed opinions. Authors are great at writing books. Editors are great at making sure that books are not only readable (and not just grammatically but that they make sense as well) but marketable. This takes a great deal of experience, expertise and know-how. An editor who may have guided a dozen best-selling authors to the top of the lists is certainly worth listening to.

Authors, as you say, are perfectly free to disagree with their editors. This happens all the time. What usually winds up is that an alternate or compromise solution is found to a problem. And sometimes an author can simply convince an editor to keep something unchanged. Both of these things happen often enough with me. But I never, never, never arbitrarily ignore what an editor suggests or dig my heels in out of sheer stubbornness. That is counterproductive.

Speaking of "thanks" in books, take a look at how many times a book's editor gets mentioned! This is because a good editor is the best friend an author can have. (There may be a lot of tips of the hat to friends and family, but the ultimate arbiter will always have been the editor.)

If a book is genuinely creative, genuinely new and even halfway competently written, then it probably has as good a chance as any other. That is, a book cannot get by on just being creative and new. It needs to be competently crafted and well-told, too.


Readable is perhaps the word there.

Indeed!

The reasons it is so hard to get a book published traditionally are not simple and the quality of the writing is only one of several factors. It is by far not the only one.

Actually, new, first-time authors get published all the time. Several years ago, when a similar topic came up in the Lulu forums, I took the time to scrutinize the latest catalogs of a dozen major publishers as well as talk to several of their editors. The result of the first effort revealed that a significant percentage of the new titles were in fact by first-time authors. More than fifty percent for at least one major publisher and no less than ten to twenty percent for others. I was told a couple of interesting things by two of the editors. One is that no editor in their right mind is going to turn down a potentially successful book just because the author is a new one. (As I have pointed out many times, every best-selling author today had to have had a first book at some time). The other editor was even more pragmatic: new authors are simply cheaper to publish. Sure, every publishing company has their Stephen King or Rowling...but no publishing company can exist publishing the work of a small stable of writers. They are perpetually on the lookout for the next Stephen King or the next Harry Potter.

In one way that's a bit like a poll a statistics gathering company executed many many decades ago. By a telecoms company, they were asked to find out what people thought about phones (landlines, when that's all there was.) The poll was eventually judged as worthless because they only asked people, by ringing them. Think about it … 
I looked in to the backgrounds of many of the first time novelists, and the keyword there is Novelist, because many of them had been published by other means,  even 'only' as journalists, or perhaps short story writers for periodicals, etc. and often had a fan base (or Followers as they are called nowadays). At the very least they were trained writers. Even trained in creative writing. Even with Phds in it. In a nutshell, from their very first approach letter to a publisher onwards, they were impressive writers. Once a large sample was sent, it was obvious not a lot of expensive time had to be spent making it readable, never-mind publishable. Then again, they may already have been known to a publisher. Even from just a blog.
Then there's the celebrity/famous name game. It's remarkable how many people already famous in other fields, have their names on novels nowadays. (How many were ghost written? Who knows?) Just one example (of many, Ron ) is David Walliams, now a top selling children's story writer. Already very famous as a stand-up comedian and from 'Little Britain' and stuff, not to mention swimming the English Channel for charity. Would his stories have been published if he was not already a famous funnyman? But I would assume they would not all have become top sellers if they were rubbish. (25 mill sold.)

Then there's the Celebrity Chef books and other books to coincide with TV shows, both factual and fiction, with well-known names on them.

One problem most publishers have is they are inundated by people who think they have the next Steven King or Rowling, and patently have not. But many publishers get so much stuff much of it has to go in the bin unopened. (There are often very small 'windows' each year where they are actually wanting stuff to publish, anyway.) Many will also only accept stuff from Agents, who have already hopefully weeded out the rubbish.

Sure, editors can make bad judgement calls---as every self-published author is quick to point out---but they are, after all, only human. Besides, they may pass on a book that turns out to be best-seller but the next day take a chance on one that does hit the charts.

Or take a chance on one that eventually does not. 

The real problem is that publishing companies can only issue a limited number of books a year, so they have to be extremely selective. More than one editor has had to turn down a book they really liked for no other reason than that the company couldn't take on another title at the time.


Exactly. Hence self-publishing. But it's a shame that SP is now so inexpensive the market gets flooded with stuff that is rubbish in every respect, and often known to be. In my view it's wise to not make it obvious my books are SPed. But the problem there is they have Lulu ISBNs, and my Kindle books are marked as Amazon books.

I think that one of the biggest hurdles a new author often faces is originality. I know that editors are swamped with countless iterations of whatever happens to be popular at the time. Goodness knows how many urban vampire or zombie apocalypse novels wind up on their desks.


Quite so. Recall a few years ago when Lulu's forums were full of what I gathered were YA wanting to publish Vampire, Werewolf and Zombie stuff. It was around the time of the first Twilight film (and the film, not the books.) But I recall some famous writer saying that any writer who thinks they have something original is deluding themselves.  (But if you want to read a truly original SF/F story take a look at N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy.)

Books that "don't need a ton of revision" aren't, I think, a real issue. Besides, that is pretty subjective: pretty much every author thinks that their book is ready for press. If a book needs so much revision that it needs to be rewritten from page one, then there was something seriously wrong with it in the first place. It is not the job of an editor to teach an author how to write.

Indeed. No doubt that's why they insist on a letter of introduction as the first approach. Or being taken to dinner by an agent.

But, barring that extreme, every book will need some revision, overseen by an independent, objective editor.

That's a depressing thought. But it has to be pointed out it's often a battle of opinions, and if the writer wins, it does not mean the book will not get published. However, if you read the Thanks bits of many books, the writer is thanking often dozens of people for their input, and their wife/family for putting up with them.

If a book is genuinely creative, genuinely new and even halfway competently written, then it probably has as good a chance as any other. That is, a book cannot get by on just being creative and new. It needs to be competently crafted and well-told, too.


Readable is perhaps the word there.
I was wondering if you guys could put a legend up top to let the reader know who is red, who is blue, who is black or purple. It would be great to keep track; the responses are super interesting.