With the Web Warrior (he liked that name best, btw... what a boy) working on the new navigation for the website, a few things are going to get shuffled around soon and one of them is the "Advice on Getting Published" page that is currently linked off the "Meet Jennifer" page. (You of course, know all about this link, didn't you?... hehehe)

Anyway, I'm going to reproduce the information here in the blog over a few days, so that it will be filed with all the other Writing/Publishing Tips, and much easier to locate.

Advice on Getting Published

My experience has been that if you are a writer in your heart, it's never too late to get your stories down on paper. My agent has one author whose first book is about to be published. She is 80.

My advice is simple... write.

Very few authors get their first work published. I have a closet full of half-written, unfinished work, dating back to 1973, but every word of it was valuable and a lesson in getting to the point where I could produce a saleable piece of work

The other thing to bear in mind is that there are millions of good ideas, but whether they can be developed into a full-blown novel is an entirely different story.

If you seriously want to develop an idea into a novel, there a few things you need to do.

1. Write a synopsis. It doesn't have to be detailed and it can be changed, but you can't write a novel if you have no idea where it's going to finish up. This was a lesson it took me 20 years to learn.
2. Study the genre you are writing for. Don't write a romance if you've never read one. Know your market.
3. Try to be original. They claim there are only seven basic plots and if you are writing for a market like fantasy, then you need to come up with a new twist on the genre. Publishers are bombarded on a daily basis with wizards/elves/dragons/heroic quest type novels and in order to get yours looked at, it needs to stand out from the crowd. Having said that, don''t be so original nobody understands your work unless they're stoned.
4. Don't even think of sending your work to a publisher until it's completed. Unknown/unpublished authors are a risk. No publisher will take you on until you have proven you can actually produce the goods, unless you already have huge credibility in your chosen field.
5. Develop a thick hide. If you can't take criticism, then don't play in this playground. Having your work edited can be soul destroying. If you are sensitive to harsh judgment, this is the wrong game for you.
6. Don't get emotionally attached to your work. Let it go. Sometimes that wonderful description of a grain of sand just doesn't fit anymore, and if you don't get rid of it, the editor will. Publishers are in the business of producing books that will sell and that means they aren't terribly interested in authors who won't listen to their professional advice. You might get your first book into print, after rejecting all the editorial changes because how dare that illiterate cow change a word of my masterpiece, but unless you win the Nobel Prize for Literature or achieve spectacular sales, you'll be hard pressed to get the second one published.
7. You don't need a mentor. You can either write, or you can't. Having someone hold your hand isn't going to make the job any easier. Writing is a lonely job. All the authors I've met I was introduced to since I was published...
8. Give your work to someone else to read, preferably people you don't know very well, but trust to give you an honest opinion. Join a writers group on the net (there are some good one out there) and post your samples of your work for others to critique.
9. Write, write, write... The world is full of people with good ideas. The published authors are the ones who sat down and got them written.
10. Be prepared to rewrite. Ernest Hemingway said that the first draft of anything is crap. He was right. My personal record for producing a novel is 6 drafts. If you don't think you can go over and over your story twenty or thirty or a hundred times without going mad, then it's probably not a good idea in the first place. My first novel went through about 14 rewrites before I sent it off and at least another 4 after it found an agent, and then it was edited by the publisher.
11. Writing crap is fine. I do it all the time. I find it far easier to fix up the crap than think up the good stuff in the first place....
12. Once you've written it, put it aside for a month or two, then go back and read it again. You'll find a lot of what you thought was brilliant is now dreadful. This aids the rewriting process considerably.
13. Don't overwrite. This is a common fault among new writers. Good writing is getting your point across in as few words as possible. For example : The ground beneath his feet was muddy... can just as easily be written as "The ground was muddy" (Where else would the ground be, anyway).
14. Pay attention to grammar and spelling. Even a brilliant story can be rejected by a publisher because it's just going to take too much work to fix up the poor grammar.
15. You have to start somewhere. Don't get bogged down in the quality of your work in the first draft. Accept that it will need fixing up later and get on with the story. A perfect first chapter is useless if nothing comes after it.
16. The other thing I should stress is that you must believe in yourself. If you don't  honestly, truly, believe that one day you'll see your name in print, then it will be very easy to give up.

It?s a good list but, it does miss some of the essentials.
- Buying nice pens (would Hemingway use a Bic ? I don?t think so),
- having a tidy desk,
- getting a new computer,
- and a laser printer,
- and writing software
- and broadband (so you can down load writing podcasts - who reads these days),
- doing presentation skills classes to prepare for book tours,
- visiting coffee shops to assess their writerly ambiance (i.e. table by the window, open fire, cat on the window sill, proper wooden furniture, Lautrec posters on the walls)
- blogging ? all up and coming authors need a web presence and you can never blog too much,
- maybe some nice clutch pencils, the kind with the eraser hidden under the cap,
- oh, oh, and hunting around the markets for a rakish cap, or bohemian scarf to wear to writers workshops.

I?ve got some others, but the waiter just arrived with my half soy, decaf, macchiato, and I think the cat just peed on my laptop.

lol cats on the window sill.... I wish that is where mine would stay... but no, apparently lying over my hands and arms whilst trying to type is so much better... the only thing better, is fighting with the cat already lying there to get the spot...

*sigh*

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