What are the chances of actually getting a publisher to accept a book?

[flyfishnevada]

I agree with a lot of what had been said. Odds of being accepted are long at best. Even if you do get accepted, you'll likely never earn out your advance.

There is another way. Self publish. Publishers are beginning to use the indie ranks as the minor leagues. When an Indie author has a hit, the publishers come calling. E.L. James and 50 Shades of Grey is a great example. You may not like that book or the genre, but she wrote a book, self-published and now she's got a fat publishing contract. There are many others and I think there will be many more.

Why would a publisher pick your manuscript and devote time, money and resources to it when they can go to the fantasy top 100 list and contact those authors? They are proven sellers, many with built in name recognition in the genre. The risk is minimized to the publisher.

But that begs the question, if you're in the Top 100 on Amazon in the Kindle store and you're seeing nice royalty payments each month (maybe six figure payments), what can a publisher offer you that you don't already have. They take control, they get a slice of the pie you already earned and now you're answering to them. Other than a nice guaranteed advance that likely isn't much more than you're already making over the course of a few months, they can't offer much.

All that advice above applies. Heinlein's advice is gold. Do it. You want to be successful, submitting to publishers is one way. But self-publishing and looking at your writing as a business is another way and probably increasingly the better way to becoming a successful author.

 

[BWFoster78]

Refrain from rewriting?

Oh dear, I'm screwed...

I'm not sure cause I didn't look at the source material, but I would guess that the advice "Refrain from re-writing" would refer to the inclination of many writer to never think that their work is good enough. At some point, you need to call it finished and move on. Once you reach that point, send it out into the world and don't touch it unless you're asked to by an editor.

The question, of course, then becomes, "When do I call it done?"

Before it's perfect but after it's good enough.

 

[Kevin O. McLaughlin]

"Refrain from rewriting" is probably the most hotly contested of Heinlein's rules. I have the original book where the essay first listing those rules appeared (Of Worlds Beyond: the Science of Science Fiction Writing). They're an afterthought he adds at the very end of his essay. He didn't go into a lot of detail about his Rules.

Here's my take on it:
Back in the day of manual typewriters, revision as we know it today did not exist. You had to *redraft* - that is, you had to start at page one and rewrite every single cotton-picking page. It took time, energy, and a lot of paper! And writers didn't do very much of it. Writers wrote a draft; then either submitted it, or went over it once to work it over, then redrafted once, then submitted it.

Yes, I started writing on a manual typewriter. See, I *remember* the pain of redrafting.

Now, we open our work on a computer and can happily, easily tweak to our hearts' content. We can revise endlessly, changing a few words here and a few words there. We can spend years playing with the words and sentences.

It is unclear whether any of this actually produces superior prose. One argument is that a well-polished manuscript is something like a stone left in a river too long - smooth, flat, and uninteresting.

Many of the best writers I know do only one draft. Many others do a single, brief round of revision before submitting it somewhere or publishing it.

The source of the "revise until it is good" myth is actually college English classes. Professors needed to get students to do assignments throughout a semester, but didn't want to actually grade one paper per week per student, when they have hundreds of students. So the revision myth was born - the idea that you need to write a paper, then revise it multiple times to make it any good. Oddly enough, back in the 90s and in very recent years, my first draft papers have managed to get "As" almost every time.

Writers often have a hard time seeing what about their work is really appealing, unique, and interesting. Writers can therefore have a bad habit of taking out some bits which maybe ought to stay put, and changing things that remove their unique voice, their unique feel, their style from the writing. Bad revision is worse than no revision. I *never* revise before having a beta reader or three look at a work. And then I look at their comments, and revise based on those thoughts - what Heinlein meant, I think, when he said "refrain from re-writing, except to editorial order". I may not be able to see that a scene reads poorly, because I have the scene more clearly in my head. Likewise, I might revise out of a scene elements which are very appealing to the reader because I feel they are unnecessary.

And again, ALL of this is controversial. Some writers stand by the "revise many, many times" concept. Others believe that the best voice to write in is creative voice, not editorial voice, and that revision is a negative thing. Most writers fall somewhere on the spectrum between the two extremes.

But here is one important fact: there seems to be no correlation between writing quality or success and number of revisions. Writers who revise less don't seem to produce books which perform any worse than those who revise quite a lot.

 

[flyfishnevada]

I don't take that piece of advice as never do a rewrite. Obviously, some writers just puke words onto a page and then go back and structure and edit them. Others fuss as they write and their first draft is pretty clean. You do what you need to get a clean draft, then edit.

I take that "Refrain from re-writing," to mean you don't go back again and again, massaging the prose, reworking every details. You don't do an actual re-write. Obviously, cleaning up a draft is easier with a computer and word processor but you don't go back and re-write the thing. It's more a caution about reworking a story to death at the expense of writing new stories. Honestly, the story that pours onto the page or screen in the first draft is probably the most organic and honest story and rewriting and reworking it too much kills that. Many a good story has been killed by a publisher's editor.

There is no such thing as perfection. Write it, clean it up, edit it, publish it, rinse, repeat. The only thing worse that publishing a book you spent weeks working on and having it sell poorly, is watching a book you spent months or, God forbid, years on sell poorly. Every book is a new chance to gain readers, to catch that wave and have it take off. This is a business and books are your product. If a book fails, move on and write another. That tenth book might be the one and it might resurrect the others.