Why won't they publish me?!

The eighth in our series of harsh truths…

#8      Publishers don’t like new writers

It’s the truth. They don’t.

From a business standpoint, it makes logical sense. Why risk your time and money on someone unproven when you can publish the work of someone who’s already popular?

For big publishing houses, it’s not often worth it for them to take that risk.

It makes more sense for them to seek out well established authors, those who already have a solid fan-base, and help them to build off it. This also gives the publishing house a better name, because they’ve published the work of a more well-known author.

However.

For smaller publishing houses, it’s often worth it to publish a few (or even several) newer authors in a year. It helps get their name out in a way that’s more appealing to the small house.

So there is a chance, even if you’ve never been published. I promise, there is. It’s just smaller than you’d like to think.


Whatever houses you end up sending your manuscript to, you're going to get rejections. Especially if you're new, if you don't have an editor or an agent, and if it's the first thing you've ever written.

But don't give up! There's always self-publishing, which I'll discuss next week. 

And a little shameless plugging:

My friends over at RAD Writing (you remember them: the editing people!) are going to publish my next book! They’re just starting out, so they’ll only be publishing the one book in the next year, but after that they will publish far more than that.

AND they will cater almost exclusively to new authors.

But I’ll give you more info on that later. :)

For now, have a lovely weekend, and remember not to give up on sending your work out to publishers. There’s definitely someone out there for you!

{RD}