So you want to send your novel out on submission?
On the verge of doing it again and struggling with those intense conflicted feelings of excitement and fear of disappointment...
This is a long post, and it’s going out to my free subscribers. It’s about the pain of going out on submission, following the process of sending out the first novel I have tried to sell in eight years…
Bank Holiday Monday. I’m typing up a chapter that I wrote this morning by hand. It’s the sixth chapter for my Into Being book (on the craft of memoir, published by MUP), which means I have one more chapter to write after this one. I am on schedule to have a finished draft by end of June, to deliver to my publisher in the autumn, as planned.
At about 4pm, notes come in on my novel, from an editor at Curtis Brown, which I am hoping will be sent out on submission this week. It’s the second time the editor has seen it, as she had made suggestions for a few structural changes which I’d implemented and my agent had sent it to her for a final read through. This time she kindly also tidied up some of my prose. She said in her email – I’ve suggested cuts to the bits where you are ‘telling’ but didn’t need to because there was enough ‘showing’ already there.
I still struggle with this after so many years of writing – trusting that you have the right balance, to give enough to set up character, without going overboard. It’s interesting also when an editor does a close edit like this, and you begin to notice other areas that are overwritten. So I accepted her changes, which were all really useful, and at about 7pm decided to skim read the second half of the novel for a further clean up. I ended up chopping quite a few adjectives, and areas that were – come to think of it – overwritten.
It’s a such a strange thing to be both thrilled at the possibility and potential of a book deal, but simultaneously dreading the disappointment of it not happening
Prashad was out, and the kids were up in their rooms, Biz was yowling from upstairs and Elsa was with me in the kitchen. I poured myself a glass of wine and sat on the sofa and engaged my critical brain – not reading for sense but precision. It’s a different brain and a different set of eyes than I use when I am reading more broadly. It allows for close reading. Anyway, this went on for many hours. Elsa lay down beside me, then got up, trotted into the living room, jumped up on a chair and stared out of the window. At various points she barked. She scratched the carpet. I shouted at her from the kitchen. She lay at my feet, licked a wound on her leg. I nudged her with my foot, and she stopped licking. She sighed. She tried to sleep, before standing again and starting all over.
When Prashad returned she barked at him in excitement and spun around. I told him I was editing. He backed out of the kitchen. I said, I didn’t mean to be rude. He came back into the kitchen and helped himself to some food and went into the living room and sat watching a bit of telly. Time ticked on.
I hit 200 pages. I hit 201… anyway. You get the gist. It wasn’t until dead on 10.30pm that I had finished the edit, carried my laptop to the bedroom, finally closing it and washing my face and teeth and getting into bed. But my head was buzzing. I could not sleep. A sense of excitement, fear and dread, all tumbled into one. It’s a such a strange thing to be both thrilled at the possibility and potential of a book deal, but simultaneously dreading the disappointment of it not happening. I am not sure I have experienced any other situation that makes me feel such intensely opposite feelings at the same time.
What if a publisher likes it? What if two or more publishers like it? What if there’s an auction? What if I make some money from this… In the shadowy areas of my mind, I see the flash of an image of a holiday home I might buy, a holiday abroad - finally - running with my kids into a big blue sea and splashing about; I could get a new car. I could buy my daughter a car!
Then I see a glimpse of the finished book, a beautiful cover, a launch party with my family and friends, them reading it. Particularly those who have spent time in Cornwall where this novel is set, where a group of us go each year camping and have been doing so for the past 15 years since our children were small.
This morning, I drive to my job teaching creative writing at the University, and I am tired because I slept so badly, and I find tears well into my eyes when I think of various friends reading this book, of it speaking to them. It is this that is most important, way beyond the money – it is friends and family reading you – seeing the images you make up in your mind, understanding where all that hard work has gone, the hours of retreating, the reason we so often have to close the door.
But then I shut these thoughts down as soon as they emerge, because so often it does not end up this way, so often these thoughts are dangerous. Most times, from experience, this doesn’t happen. Most times this process is painful. Most times it is about waiting and guarding yourself from rejection.
It took me back to the first time I ever went out on submission for my first novel, Shadowing the Sun. I was in my 20s and had written it on an MA, graduating with a high distinction. I then sent it out to a few agents. One came back – I can’t remember his name – with a patronising letter saying, ‘your dad upset you. So what? No one wants to read this stuff. ‘ Like he was telling me to go get some therapy! I felt so undermined that I stood on the roof terrace at my work and cried down the phone to my mum.
I had been naïve to think it would be easy.
But we all remember the moments we had good news. A couple of months later, an unnamed phone call came in while I was running for the bus and I let it ring out. An agent left a message telling me she loved my novel and wanted to meet. I didn’t ring her back immediately. I wanted to sit on the bus and close my eyes and breathe. This was one of those moments. When I went to meet her, she said - this will be the longest most important relationship you will have in your publishing career. When I stood before her in her office, I told her I was pregnant.
My novel went out to a lot of publishers and we got a lot of rejections, but then some months later, after the second round, we had our first offer, and it was with this offer that my agent could go to the remaining publishers and see if any of them were interested. Another came back and said they also wanted to publish it – it was between a small press, Portobello Books (which later merged with Granta) and a larger press, Random House, and I chose the smaller press. My agent had said it was better to be a big fish in a small pond, rather than the other way round. When I went to meet them both I took my newborn baby and had to breast feed her between meetings. It amazes me now that my entry into publishing was also my first experience of being a mother. I had been in the bath some years before and I had made a wish – I wished for a book and a baby. I was very lucky to have been given both but had no idea that one would trump the other.
My novel did well. It got a lot of review space, and I was even compared to Joe Dunthorne in one piece of journalism, who was doing particularly well at the time with Submarine. But this was just before social media and I didn’t really grasp what was expected of me for publicity. My book made it onto the Waterstones tables, and the two-for-one promotions, but within a few months it got tucked away on a shelf and within a few years it was out of print. There were much fewer ways in those days to get yourself noticed.
Within two years I had had another baby, and raising two young children with a husband who was working long hours running his own business was difficult for nurturing a writing career that had plummeted as soon as it had begun. I wrote two more novels, late at night when the children were in bed, but didn’t manage to place them. Both went out to multiple editors and for both I had months and months of waiting. Both had interest. Both got as far as acquisitions. But both in the end failed to sell with a mainstream press.
Waiting is part of the game – we all know this – and at the start of sending out your book on submission, waiting is okay, because no news generally means good news. This is because the rejections tend to come in first. Waiting means people are reading, or maybe even sharing, even taking the book to acquisitions… This all happens behind the closed doors of the lofty publishing houses, in meeting rooms, conversations in lifts. One editor was really keen on one of my novels and had held onto it for months. My brother was visiting the publishing house for a meeting and bumped into the editor in a lift. She spent the entire time raving about the novel I had written. How it reminded her of a Mike Lee film. When my brother relayed this to me, I hung on to his every word.
But then some months later I stood at the sink on the campsite in Cornwall my family visit each summer. I was washing up and crying. A friend came over with her plastic bowl of dirty plates and asked me what was wrong. I had just had a conversation with my agent who had spoken to this same publisher who had told her that she finally had to turn down my novel. She had loved it, she said, but she could not convince her team. She had been my final hope. In this moment it was over.
I know what it’s like to be on the other side of success. To have to knock at doors that however hard you work, however much you write good prose, simply won’t open. I know that this can sometimes last years and years. I also know how sometimes you can be overcome with envy for those writers who are on the other side. Who have made it across, who are waving the arms of success. I have been both the writer who had years of this, but kept on writing, who believed that good books finally find their home, and the writer who eventually found got some attention. In that time, I have changed agents. I have changed writing form. I have reinvented myself. I had success with my memoir in 2022 and I am now on the other side. But I am returning to fiction, and I am about to venture out again…
I will be recording my process of having a novel on submission for the first time in eight years… and it will be for my paid subscribers only because it will include some sensitive information. If you’d like to join us on this journey, you can subscribe here… I hope to see you over on the other side.
In the meantime, let us know your stories of success and disappointment in this tricky and challenging world.
This is interesting, Lily. I noticed that many writers have an emotional response to rejection and acceptance. For some reason, I'm completely detached. I wonder if it's because I'm schizophrenic. A symptom of schizophrenia is muted emotion, which I have in spades. I don't jump when someone jumps out at me shouting BOO! I rarely cry. When I do, it's 'inappropriate' like when I cried watching a documentary about the colour blue. I laugh at 'inappropriate' moments n'all. At death and tragedy. My own tragedy too. Someone crying can make me aroused for some reason. It's confusing at times. When I experience trauma (I've had a lot, believe), I experience it like a distant scream, something happening deep inside, or a long way off.
When I write, I experience an ecstasy. My method is Mystic and informed by visions. It's an intense experience of heightened perception, sensory overload and altered state. But when I'm published, I don't feel the same excitement or joy others describe. Neither do I feel the same sadness of rejection writers talk of. But I've always been like this.
I never cared that I couldn't pass exams at school. I never got a certificate for anything and left school with no qualifications. But when my books were in Waterstones, on a table in many stores, including the biggun in Piccadilly, I felt no pleasure. I was slightly amused if anything. At the situation, how it came to be after only starting to learn to use punctuation, gramma and paragraphs (even sentences!) age 40.
I think I have an emotional disconnect from pain and pleasure. So I never experience these highs and lows that other writers speak of.
Thanks for sharing this piece about the highs and lows of your publishing journey so far, I think so many writers expect it to be a linear process but it so rarely actually turns out that way. Good luck with your forthcoming submission!