How Will I Know My Work Is Worth Promoting?
New writer? Seasoned but unsure? Find out how much rejection you should get before you hang it up.
At some point, you decided to become a writer. Maybe it was a “So You Want To” page from TVTropes.org. Maybe a fan of yours gassed you up on Wattpad. Maybe you read an awful piece of published fiction and thought, “I can do better than this!” One way or another, you’ve been bitten by the writing bug.
To prepare, you’ve read dozens—maybe hundreds—of articles about writing (and possibly a style manual or two). Having done all this research, you’ve found that thousands of writers endured years of rejection before getting published. Now you’ve got cold feet—you’re not sure if you’re cut out for a career in writing. How do you figure out if your work is worth pursuing or promoting?
The writing lifecycle
For each stage of the fiction-writing journey, there are a variety of people available to read your story. Given the cyclical nature of story development, some audience members will be useful in multiple phases of your story’s development.
Alpha Readers
Alpha readers approach your work as a fellow writer and help you identify the areas of your story that need development—character, plot, etc. Alpha readers are used early in your writing process; they are the first ones to read after you write. The work they are given should still be proofread and formatted for clarity—it shows respect for them and their time. Often, alpha readers are found within critique groups.
Beta Readers
Once you’ve gone through some edit cycles with your alpha readers, you can introduce beta readers. Beta readers approach your work as a casual reader would. They can be fellow writers, but as casual reader avatars, they only need to tell you if your story held their interest throughout and if it resonated with them. Beta readers can provide the first inkling that your story might be ready for promotion.
Once your book has gone through substantial critique and beta reading—with attention paid to the target audience and contemporary publications in your genre—it might be ready for querying. More can always be done to improve it, but this is the bare minimum of polish needed.
Preparing for rejection
Rejection takes a variety of forms. Worse, it poses a risk in every phase of your writing. Posting your work on social media may result in crickets or heckling. Your critique group could recommend a complete overhaul for your beloved story. You could be rejected or removed from a critique group. You may even reject your own words as you write them. All this before your manuscript is even complete!
Querying
The myriad types of rejection you will face before finishing your manuscript are generally easy to fix. The ones you suffer while querying are much less so. Rejection is such an ingrained part of the traditional publishing experience that numerous writers—anonymous and prolific alike—have made a game out of being rejected while querying. Writer’s Digest recommends giving up with no less than 80 agents queried.
Critique groups
Virtually all writers wanting their novels traditionally published must suffer the tribulations of critique groups. The first hurdle for many is simply finding a critique group. Stories abound of terrible critique group experiences. Being inundated with terrible writing is often the least of one’s worries: poor engagement, anemic feedback, and bruised egos are common complaints. Regrettably, it’s enough to make many writers give up on collaboration altogether.
Getting good critique is based on:
· how specific your critique requests are
· how experienced your critique group is
One of these is absolutely within your control and the other is not. Steel yourself accordingly.
Pay or don’t pay
One of the issues with getting into a good critique group is a lack of experience. As I've found when searching for a critique group, the better ones tend to restrict entry to people that have written a novel or two, publication usually notwithstanding. That means you'll simply have to weather the unpredictability of “open” critique groups for a while. This can be mitigated by spending some money.
Hiring a professional editor will be effective, but wasteful early in your writing journey. Plenty of the feedback you’ll receive on a first draft could have been freely obtained from a willing alpha reader, of which there are plenty online. Another way to spend money: purchase a membership for a regional writer's association. The writers who pay for such a thing are somewhat more likely to have better writers than you'll find in free forums. The ultimate expense: join a MFA program.
Regrettably, none of these options will guarantee a pleasant critique experience. “Free” critique groups are good enough until you've written a certain amount, as you're going to make “basic” mistakes no matter how much theory you read about.
Be specific
New writers may not know what to expect in a critique group. Other members of the critique group may not be experienced in giving critiques. The only way to mitigate these circumstances: be specific in your critique. Instead of assuming your critique partners know what you want, ask for it directly. “Is my diction appropriate for the genre?” will go much further than “Is my story okay?” in getting the information you need.
When to quit
There will likely come a time—especially for your first two or three novels—when you begin to think of quitting. It may be transient, but many writers discover the opposite. Here’s a rough guide to hanging it up on your novel and on writing in general.
When to stop querying
Writer’s Digest says don’t stop querying before you’ve reached 80 agents. This number assumes that you’ve done your due diligence in crafting a strong query letter and sent it to an agent explicitly interested in representing your kind of manuscript. The research required to optimize your query letter and find appropriate agents is significant: editor Lisa Poisso recommends sending 5 queries per month for 4 months. Accounting for reply time, this will yield 20 results in a 6-month period. Once you’ve used the information to determine what needs to be fixed, you can start another wave.
Simple arithmetic indicates you should expect upwards of 2 years to hit the recommend number of queries. Many writers take longer than that to get a manuscript request, much less a publishing contract. If you approach your writing craft and your marketing systematically, you might be able to make it. If you find the prospect of sitting on an unpublished manuscript for two years unconscionable, note that self-publishing will simply force you to do your own marketing. You’ll also have to do without the connections and resources a publishing house has to offer. It can certainly be done, but it requires a separate set of skills.
When to stop writing
Everyone starts writing for different reasons. Some do it because they love telling stories. Others seek fame and fortune. Intrinsically-motivated writers often never stop writing; writing is to their spirits what breathing is to their bodies. Others, who write as a hobby or are driven by external motivations—be they benign as writing for their friends or as grandiose as the aforementioned fame and fortune—will do well to think of an end date.
Choosing and end date for writing—or at least attempts to get published—is a highly individual task. You must factor in: commitment to the writing craft, rejection tolerance, your living situation, and retirement plans, among many other things. I would recommend reevaluating your career prospects after 5 years and 10 years for full-time writers and part-time writers, respectively.
I took up writing fiction and blogging as a hobby, so I don't know if I'll be doing it in ten years. But it takes time to learn the craft, so I want to put my “10,000 hours” before I get into "should I keep doing it?" So far, I enjoy the challenges that being a writer entails: learning how to tell stories, invoking others' emotions, marketing myself. There is no way to predict how successful you will be. Try it, then reevaluate your interest.