Whereas submitting work to indie journals is democratic and easy (see previous post), for the first-time novelist, finding a home for your novel tends to be a dispiriting process. For a start, almost all the publishers you will have heard of say they will not accept ‘unagented submissions’. So you follow the online advice and try to hook yourself an agent. Searches for literary agents produce slim pickings, if, like me, you decide to start with the ones based in Scotland/the North of England. You find a few email addresses and dutifully fire off a polite email with a synopsis and your first 5,000 words. You wait. A few months later, you receive one short reply: ‘Thank you but this is not what we are looking for’. From the others: nothing.
So much for the world of agents, you think. There must be another way. And there is. Small indie publishing houses, the novelist’s equivalent to the poetry and short fiction journals I mentioned, are a rarer species, but they are out there waiting to be discovered. This is when it’s good to have friends who are also trying to publish novels (I think of Courtney Barnett’s line: my friends play in bands / they are better than / everything on radio): you can share whatsapp links to each new one that you find. Many of them do take submissions direct from writers, and if you follow the guidelines, they will reply, maybe not straight away but within a reasonable time-frame. Even if it’s a no they might offer you some constructive feedback.
Which is nice, but still a rejection. So you still need to develop the thick skin of dealing with these, shrugging your shoulders, and moving on. Eventually you will become quite cavalier about rejections, and when you see a reply from a publisher sitting in your inbox you will simultaneously feel a speeding up of your heartbeat, and at the same time be mentally steeling yourself for the inevitable.
That’s the stage I was at when, some months after I submitted the manuscript of my novel to Glasgow’s Ringwood Press, I got a reply from them. It took me a double reading to absorb the fact that it was good news: I had progressed to Stage 2 of the submissions process. My novel would now go before ‘the editorial committee’.
Best not to get your hopes up too much, I told myself. This would be like Scotland getting out of the group stage in a major championship, and then expecting to go on and win the trophy.
Judging by the time Stage 1 had taken, I didn’t expect to hear for a while. So when the next email popped up in my inbox, I was caught off-guard. The rejection hardened part of me probably even felt a bit cheated: you could have at least let me nurture my hopes a bit longer. At the same time as thinking this I had already clicked and was reading the actual email, but the words didn’t quite compute. I went back to the start and read them again, and it dawned on me: they actually wanted to publish my novel.
Yes, it is a very good feeling. Thank you to all the staff at Ringwood for making it happen, especially the novel’s early readers who I’ve now had the pleasure of meeting.
I hope The Hotel Hokusai can repay Ringwood’s faith in it.
T.Y. Garner Writer 