Choosing the Right Publisher

Well it’s time.  You’ve spent an enormous amount of time working on your baby, your story.  You’ve developed the most amazing plot, your characters jump off the page, you’ve polished it to perfection, and even you feel elated with you read it. 

So now what? 

Now it’s time to start the research you MUST do  in order to find the right publishing house for your work.  What kind of research?  Well what genre is your book? Figure out which houses publish your genre.  Read the books they publish, to make sure you fit in.  If you write steamy historical romance, you wouldn’t submit to a historical Christian romance house.  Make sure the houses you choose are still aquiring.  Find out who the editor is.  Read their writing guidelines and follow them to a “T.”

You need to know the publishers inside and out before you submit your work there.  You want to make sure your baby will be taken care of, and that so will you.  I’ve heard a lot of horror stories lately, and you don’t want any of those things to happen to you.

Where can you find a list of publishers?  Writers Market, Passionate Pen, Preditors and Editors, Romance Writers of America

Do you want a big house, small house, e-pub, the list goes on and on, and doing your research is the most important piece.  It shows you are dedicated.  Don’t start at the bottom, give yourself credit and go for what you want.  With perseverance and dedication you’ll get there. 

Some publishers will let you submit or query to them without an agent, and some won’t.  So make sure you know which before you start submitting.  Do they accept simultaneous submissions?  Meaning can you submit to multiple publishers at one time.  A lot of publishers are leaning towards no.

So now you’ve checked out the links above, you’ve written a list of every publisher that is aquiring your genre and that you want to submit to.  Now you need to make another list.  This list is numbered 1 - however many publishers you like, I generally do about 5-10 for each manuscript.

This is the list you will go off of when submitting.  You write on the list who the publisher is, who the editor is, the address, the response time, what you need to send, when you sent it, and the response.  While you’re waiting for that publishers response, you should prepare your next query letter, because if you get rejected you want to be able to send it out to the next publisher on your list.

Now if your top house is one that only accepts agented submissions, than you do the same research above except for agents, make the same list and send out your queries.

Anybody else have any suggestions?

Good luck with your submissions!

Eliza