What's the best way to get a first novel published?

[nuxvomica]

I've written my first novel (thank you, Nanowrimo) and I've been researching publishers and agents. It seems that every path is a pretty long haul and it sounds like most people are in the business to just refuse new writers, especially if, like me, they have no history of short story publishing. The novel is also pretty unique and hard to categorize. It's social science-fiction but has no aliens or space travel. Everything happens on earth about 4,000 years ago. I've gotten the first two chapters out to some friends and the response has been extremely positive. (One friend's 11-year-old daughter stole it from him and loves it. She wants to read more but I'm afraid some of the later chapters may be a bit too intense for that age group.) I'm sure you've never heard of an author's friends being really excited about their first novel before. ;-)
I think my biggest problem is that I really, really love the novel myself (yes, I'm prejudiced) and I'm impatient to get it out there but I want to make sure it has a chance to get a wide audience. I've been thinking of publishing it myself on Createspace but I worry that it will just languish there and no publisher would ever want to touch it after that.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. If you can go to a writer's conference

and try to arrange a meeting with an agent.

It IS a long slog and if it helps there are, if memory serves, eight agents kicking themselves over Harry Potter. That's how many times it was refused

[nuxvomica]

2. I've just started looking into conferences

I found one that seemed ideal, location wise, but it's going on now and I'm not prepared. Thanks for pointing me in that direction. I'll focus on finding a conference and planning for it.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. You welcome and good luck

and as to the shorts... there are online markets that are easier to sell to. You may want to try your hand with a few of those.

[Ozymanithrax]

4. Get a list of agaents that accept material and starting sending it in.

Look in Writer's Diegest.

[nuxvomica]

8. I subscribed to Writer's Market about a month ago

So I'm doing the research there. I recently got an e-mail from Writer's Digest with a link to the "8 Basic Writing Blunders". My novel has the first two -- sort of -- but none of the remaining six. ;-)

[sybylla]

5. Join a sci-fi writers organization and look for targeted help

I know they're out there. Through them you should find a list of reputable agents who handle your genre, tips for querying and pitching, writers groups and beta readers who'll give you a critique or advice, conferences and reputable contests specifically aimed at your genre.

BTW, winning a contest is a great way to get some attention. Some contests have great prizes - including publishing the work. And if you don't win, you might get some excellent feedback from an industry perspective.

The last hasn't been my experience. I seem to have written a love-it-or-hate-it novel with judges outright contradicting each other. But I have found some critical gems among their feuding over my brilliant/crappy story.

I emphasize the word reputable because in your rush to get published, you should know there are a lot of hucksters out their just waiting to offer you a short cut that doesn't exist in exchange for a lot of your money. Don't fall for it. Publishing takes time. You want to give your great story the best chance to be seen and read by the greatest number of people. Don't give it short shrift. I find the marketing part is the hardest part of writing but worthy of the best effort I can give it.

Lastly, when you're in front of an agent, don't say "I really, really love the novel myself." Don't worship your work in any way. If an agent or editor thinks you're in love with your work, they'll take it as a warning sign that you may not be capable of accepting criticism or even tearing apart the weak areas and reworking them into something stronger. That makes you appear hard to work with and no matter how good your novel is, if an agent or editor thinks you'll be hard to work with, they won't touch the novel.

Congratulations on finishing your novel! :toast:

Good Luck!

[nuxvomica]

9. This started out as just a personal challenge

And a way to get this one idea I had on paper. Now that I've invested so much in it, it appears I need to start acting like a writer -- researching the market, attending conferences, workshops, etc., which is a bit of an unexpected exertion for me. But that's ok because I found after writing nothing for thirty years, I actually do enjoy the process of stringing words together enough that the legwork doesn't seem so bad. Maybe my writing is just crap and if that's what I discover, so be it. I think I'll look into the writing groups online at first and I will try to remember that the love between me and my novel is a love that dare not speak its name. ;-)

[SheilaT]

6. A lot of science fiction does not have

aliens or space travel. I want to ask, how widely read are you in the s-f genre?

I'm also under the impression (and I'm not only have never published a novel, but haven't even written one, but got this from a name published s-f writer)that the best way to submit a novel is to submit the first one or two chapters, depending on how long they are, and a DETAILED synopsis of the rest of the book. I understood that even this guy was still submitting that way, although this was a decade or so back.

Also, I think that it's really important to have people look at it who aren't afraid to hurt you feelings and tell you exactly what areas need work. Do you belong to a writer's group of any kind? Have you ever attended workshops? I've found those things to be enormously useful in shaping my writing.

[nuxvomica]

7. I've mostly read the older classics

Verne, Wells, Bradbury, Herbert, Asimov... In fact, the writing style of my novel is heavily influenced by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But I read those long ago and haven't read much sci-fi since. I am desperate to have someone hurt my feelings because I suspect I like the novel too much. I want to get a level head about this so that I can lose some of my impatience. The reason I noted that it's not "space opera" is that I think a lot of people assume there are those elements when you say sci-fi.

[SheilaT]

11. You really ought to do some catch-up reading

in the field. It is so vastly different now that you'd be very surprised. First of all, crappy (and I really mean crappy) fantasy has nearly overwhelmed the genre. And right now there's this truly dreadful vampire thing going on. Nonetheless, there's a fair amount of pretty good social science fiction and even hard science fiction out there.

The problem with friend/relative readers is that they'll make all sorts of allowances for flaws in your writing. You need to find a critiquing group, go to a conference that offers one-on-one with an agent, or take a writing class that's a workshop. Or find an appropriate workshop out there. Are you familiar with Clarion? Unfortunately for your novel, most workshops are geared to critiquing short stories, but you might find something out there for a novel.

And as a sometime writer myself, I know how easy it is to love what you've written, and be totally unable to see the flaws or where it needs reworking.

But I am a little concerned that if your writing style is heavily influenced by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea it may not be all that appealing to the modern reader. What or who do you see as the primary market/reader of your novel?

Added on edit:

Given the many positive responses you've gotten, it's possible that you have it exactly right, and so just follow some of the other advice about finding an agent willing to look at a first novel.

[nuxvomica]

12. What would you suggest I read?

I think the market for the novel is the casual, soft science-fiction reader. None of the people who've read it so far are sci-fi fans. My writing style is heavily influenced by the 19th-century writers, whose works I found to have a consistent and absorbing rhythm, so it is probably a bit archaic sounding but I also consciously attempted an antique feel to the prose to evoke the period of the story. I was careful not to overdo it, though. At least I hope so. ;-)

[SheilaT]

13. Even though you've read s-f in the past,

I'm inclined to suggest books I recommend to people who don't think they like science fiction. Time and Again by Jack Finney is very good in that regard. I'm personally partial to a couple of Canadian s-f authors, Robert Sawyer and Robert Charles Wilson. Wilson's A Bridge of Years is a particular favorite of mine. Both of them write books that are much more driven by character than by plot.

I'm also fond of Jack McDevitt's work. He has two series (of a sort. Each book can be read completely independently) which take place several hundred years in the future, and FTL (faster than light) travel is possible. One is a universe in which we've made contact with a handful of other intelligent races, the other in which we seem to be completely alone in the galaxy. Basically the characters are 21st century people who can travel to other stars and have interesting things happen as a result. But they are completely contemporary to us in behavior and attitudes, and for me that works.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote the very good novel Jumper which was turned into a dreadful movie. He wrote another one called The Wild Side which is about a 19 year old who has access to a portal to an alternate Earth, one in which humans never evolved. What happens when he and his friends visit that other earth and do things like bring back passenger pigeons is the basis of the plot.

I do also like a lot from the "Golden Age", and Asimov's {i}The End of Eternity is one that has been overlooked and is just crying out to be made into a movie.

Personally I'm extremely partial to time travel and alternate history and truly hard science fiction, the kind in which you get a serious dose of physics or chemistry.

Sometimes a novel will have only one science-fictional element to it, and then it's just an arbitrary decision on the part of the publisher as to how to market it. There's a whole large sub-genre of time travel romance novels, but they're romance novels with some odd bit of time travel in it, and of course aren't in any way s-f.

Since your novel does not sound like standard science fiction, maybe catching up in the field isn't so necessary as my first thoughts. There's a lot of stuff out there that isn't defined as science fiction, or at least isn't relegated to the s-f ghetto. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale comes to mind. Of course, she was already a successful, published writer by the time she wrote that one. But if it had been a first novel from and unknown, it might possibly have wound up in the s-f ghetto.

I suspect you love language and how to express things, and so the rhythm and word usage is as important to you as the story you're telling. I wish I knew the publishing world better. I do sort of hang out in a part of the s-f community, and I've learned a little bit from that. I can tell you that in the s-f community personal contacts with editors are fairly easy to make, and those people are generally willing to look at work from unknown and not yet published writers. But it almost seems like your novel could be published as mainstream, because the thing that might make it s-f is the setting.

[nuxvomica]

14. "A Bridge of Years" sounds like something I would like

I will have to check that out. Thinking about where the story "fits" reminded me of a short story by R.A. Lafferty that I read decades ago called "Selenium Ghosts of the 1870s". It's similar to my novel in that it describes a matter-of-fact but nonetheless fanciful technology that was invented in the past.
I take great pains to ensure that the technology appears plausible, or is at least explainable. In that way, I think the novel might have a pretty good physics geek appeal. Based on what you wrote in your post, and without revealing too much more, I think you would like it. ;-)

[SheilaT]

15. I can tell you, that from the little you've said

it does sound like something I would read.

[Ozymanithrax]

10. Go to the books stoor and look in "Writer's Market" for a place ot send your novel...

The listing for that Market will tell you what format they expect. They will tell you exactly how they want you to send submissions.