Some very good advice and an ansight into the publishing process from experienced editor Euan Mitchelle. Excerpted from his book “Your Book Publishing Options”
The Publishers’ Paradox
Publishers want a submission that is different yet has been done before.
A paradox is a statement that appears to contradict itself yet contains a slippery truth. How can publishers expect something different – that is, new – but somehow it has been done before? This doesn’t seem to make sense. The answer is that publishers want evidence your genre or type of book is already selling in viable quantities, and your submission has at least one marketable point of difference from the existing competition.
Remember the example of the new atlas on page 31? If you think your book can’t be pigeonholed into an existing genre or combination of genres (cyborg-romance, gothic-crime), think again. This can be particularly confronting for fiction writers, as I found when my first manuscript was summed up by publishers as a coming-of-age/on-the-road tale. Up to that point it was my unique story that I didn’t like to categorise.
To a publisher it was just another text whose commercial potential could be guesstimated. Therein lies the key difference that your submission needs to overcome.
You are going to improve your chances of pitching to a publisher if you can put yourself in their shoes. But I have read too many submissions – in my later role as a publisher – that are self-centred (including a new writer’s career goals), rather than focused on how a book might fit with the publisher’s existing list of titles. The following alternatives aim to turn an ordinary submission into an extraordinary pitch.
