Guest post by Lauren Martinez Catlin
It's all about who you know.
No one wants to hear that, certainly not me.
I've been trying to get published since I was 13 years old, when I had an award-winning short story in hand.
Since that disappointing experience I have
queried four different novels.
I've
purchased two copies of
Writer's Market, and three copies of the equivalent
book on literary agents.
I'd read
countless articles on how to get published, what agents are looking for, how to
write a dynamite query letter, the importance of what font you use.
Finding an agent seemed not so much like a
business deal as a mystic pagan ritual; if you coughed at the wrong time the
whole thing would be ruined.
One day the
magic finally happened; my father gave a copy of my latest book to a friend,
who then gave it to another friend who happened to be a literary agent. Several months later I got a call from my
father (of all people!) saying that the literary agent loved my book and was
dying to represent me. My husband and I
called everyone we knew and threw a huge party at our house. My best friend brought me a bottle of
champagne. People congratulated me on
all my hard work and persistence. And
then nothing happened. More than a year
later on one of my routine “just calling to check in” calls, I learned that
agent had left the company and they were dropping all her clients. I sat down and cried at my day job.
Then there
was the Amazon Breakout Novel Award (ABNA).
It
was a novel contest, and the prize was a $25,000 book deal with
Penguin.
I took my latest novel (a different book than
the agent had), and submitted it.
I did
make the first cut, I was in the top 20 percent, but I didn't make the second
cut.
The next year I tried again, same
result.
I queried that second book to a
few people, but I couldn't bring myself to do the mass mailings I'd grown too
accustomed to.
I kept writing, because I
honestly don't know what else to do with myself.
About a
year later, a friend of my husband from his work started publishing travel
guides on the Kindle. It was something
he was doing on the side because he was being shipped off to Belgium for months
at a time and he needed something to do on the plane. The travel guides were aggregated information
he pulled off of the Internet, not original work, but they were making some
money. He wanted to see if he could take
on some authors with original work, and he knew that I wrote books. This wasn't how I was hoping it would happen,
but this point, I had five books sitting on my hard drive, and I didn't want to
die with them languishing there. So I
said okay. A few months later, I held a
proof copy of my book in my hands. It
was solid and heavy and when I opened it, words I had written were there in
print.
Like most
of the stories I've heard from published authors, this journey is completely
impossible to duplicate. You can't marry
my husband and hope he'd keep the same friends who'd decide to open a
publishing house. I used to get very
frustrated about this kind of story, because I am a very proactive and
pragmatic person. Thus, I will break out
the underlying principles that are duplicable.
First,
write every day. There is something very
sad about having five complete novels sitting on my hard drive, but knowing a
guy who's opening a publishing house does me no good if I don't have a novel to
give him. I had a few, and chose my
favorite. As frustrating as ABNA was, I
wouldn't have been able to participate at all if I hadn't had a novel to
submit. This may sound elemental, but
the first step in publishing a book is writing a book. This is slightly different for non-fiction,
where I've heard you can sometimes get away with a very detailed outline. Write every day anyway, you'll be better off.
Second,
call yourself a writer. Knowing a guy
who's opening a publishing house doesn't help me that much if he doesn't know I
write books. When people ask me what I
do, I tell them that I'm a novelist. I
told them that when I was an administrative assistant, when I was a grunt at a
software company, and when I was a nanny. Those are just jobs, what I do is write books.
Third, make
lots of friends. One of the smartest and
most fun things I've done in the last few years is start performing spoken word
poetry all around the metro. Performing
has given me a chance to promote some causes I really believe in, to meet lots
of other artists, and yes, to gain a tiny bit of name recognition. I'm pretty solidly introverted, so going to a
big event to perform and then try to network is a big challenge for me. Here's how I do it. I pretend that I'm a confident and
interesting person that people want to meet. I pretend that when I approach someone that I'm being very gracious and
magnanimous. I hand out business cards
and say, “Let me know if I can do anything for you,” like I'm doing them a big
favor, and not like I'm putting feelers out for new gigs.
I was invited to write this guest blog because I'm friends with the kind and generous man who runs this website, and he knows that I'm a writer. So there you go.
About the Author:
Martinez Catlin is an author and poet who is committed to inspiring
compassion through the written word. Her work has enhanced the efforts
of A Minnesota Without Poverty, Breaking Free, Source Ministries,
Justice4All, and A Beautiful Rescue. She graduated from the University
of Minnesota in 2008 with a degree in English Literature. The Other Side of Silence is her first novel. She currently lives in Minneapolis
with a very cute husband and a German shepherd.
Check out her website, buy her now-published novel, and watch some of her performances.
