Is your dream to see your book on shelves, to walk into Barnes & Noble and sign your own copies of it? If so, you know that it’s a long way to get there. Right now, you’re writing one of your first stories, or maybe you’re deep in revisions and things seem a little bleak. At some point you wonder: is this all worth it? What are my odds at actually being published? You’ve come to the write place, pun intended. In this article, I’m synthesizing what the Internet has to say, statistically, about your odds of being traditionally published. Hint: it’s not great 🙃, but not as bad as you think. What do I mean by getting “traditionally published”? I mean Book —> Query —> Agent —> Editor at Pub. House —> Release. Yay! Let’s get into the numbers. There’s a statistic out there that agents accept less than 1% of all submitted manuscripts. This sounds awful, but don’t worry yet. What is this >1% about? It has to do with the number of submissions (usually unpublishable) that agents receive, and also the existing clients an agent already has. Because of precious time, many manuscripts are auto-rejected. If you get rejected this way, it could mean you need a better query letter, or that your book isn’t right. 90% of manuscripts are cut based on the query letter alone, while other sources say as high as 95%. While this sounds dismal, remember that rejection is mostly not up to chance. If you’ve got the perseverance to edit your book until you can’t any more, then maybe you’ve got a shot, and maybe you’re already ahead of those 90-95% of submitted manuscripts that will be rejected. As Alexa Donne (traditionally published author of The Ivies and more to come) said in her video, Your Competition to Get Published (Isn't What You Think It Is) , no one really knows the numbers. By her estimate, your actual competition for agented contracts are the people who 1) finish a book, 2) edit it to a publishable standard, 3) want to go the traditional publishing route, and 4) query it. But this competition pool is cut down further because of blind submissions—submitting a manuscript without researching the agent—bad queries, or unmarketable material. Donne estimates that ⅓ of the authors who have a good query and a good book will get agents, and a small percentage of those will get published. Of the manuscripts that are accepted by an agent, the odds are about 1 in 5 of catching a publisher’s eye and getting that sweet, sweet contract. 20% doesn’t sound that bad, right? But if 20% sounds bleak to you, here are some things you can do to give yourself the greatest chance at traditional publishing.
So that’s what it comes down to, luck? Yes, that and a good book, and a good query letter, and the right agent. I am not here to discourage you at all from traditional publishing. Instead I want to give you a realistic outlook, and hope. I want you to write, because the only way you’ll ever know if being published could happen to you is by putting yourself there. Even if you fail to get representation with one book, that doesn’t mean the rest of your stories are doomed, and it doesn’t mean you can’t be a writer. Keep trying, we’re rooting for you. Grayson Yountis a writer based in North Carolina. She attends writing classes of all kinds at UNC Chapel Hill and has a particular fondness for sharp imagery. In her free time, she drafts her own novels.
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