You’ve written the novel. What next?

Disclaimer: AI-generated image

There’s a quiet pleasure in letting the novel always remain a “someday” project. Once you’ve tackled it, there’s a ton of other questions you suddenly have to answer again.

Like, “How do I get a publisher?”

Or, “Is this even good enough?”

“Am I wasting my time?”

Till now, no one but you has read the whole damn thing. Not that you’ve asked many to do it. Maybe you’re just plain terrified because what if someone reads it and finds that it’s trash?

Your spouse knows that you’ve written it, but expecting someone to read more than 50,000 words of something that may never see the light of day feels like a stretch. Especially when they’re busy and prefer to read for leisure before bedtime.

So you do the brave thing. You prepare the submission kit: concept note, comp titles, synopsis, sample chapters, and query letter. You check the manuscript for errors until you can’t bear to read the same thing one more time.

You research publishers — the big ones, the medium ones, the independent ones, the small ones, and the seedy ones.

You research literary agents. The out-of-your-league ones, the approachable-but-too-good-for-you ones, and the ones who seem just a little shady.

You read Quora answers and Reddit threads and get the tea on who’s legit and who’s a scammer.

And then, you hit send.

And then, you wait.

For three weeks, radio silence. You can hear the crickets sing every time you refresh your inbox, other than another spammy credit card offer hitting you for the millionth time.

Then, a couple of rejections roll in. They’re not outright rejections, of course. Carefully couched in polite language — but you’ve lived enough to read between the lines.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t, at present, fit into our publishing schedule.”

“We really appreciate getting a chance to consider your proposal. However, we regret to inform you that we would be unable to take it further for publication.”

The rejections are from the medium-sized ones, the ones you could envision picking you. Of course, the big ones haven’t replied yet.

It doesn’t hurt. Because you weren’t delusional when you hit send. You knew the chances were slim.

Then a month passes. Slowly, the others you reached out to start to respond.

The message is clear.

“We can’t do traditional publishing at this moment. But we’d be happy to consider hybrid publishing.”

That’s shorthand for “Pay up now.”

They call it “hybrid publishing,” but you hear “vanity publishing.” And your pride gets in the way.

You know how desperate this looks. You consider it. The money isn’t a problem, but do you really need to do this just to get published?

There’s the steady day job. There’s respect. There’s the craft that no one can take away from you.

Do you need this? Isn’t self-publishing an option that’s better than this? More questions. No easy answers.

So you start a Substack while you figure it all out.

Maybe this will lead to something 🤞