Reply #10: then there are at least two thing you need before approaching a [View All]

[BigMcLargehuge]

publisher -

1. A completed manuscript (novels start at 100,000 words FWIW)
2. Someone to represent you

Finding an agent is as hard as finding a publisher. However and agent can open doors that a run of the mill writer can't. Expect to pay 10-20% of your earnings to an agent too.

First books don't earn much money and enjoy only limited print runs unless you are Michael Jordan or someone with immediate name recognition. This will dissuade agents from reading and responding to your work.

Here are the tools you need to get you started looking for someone to read/represent your work

Get the most current Writer's Market and sign up for their online service. Target your queries to the publishers that handle your specific type of work. Read a few recent titles from their catalog to see what the purchased. Perfect your query letter and proposal.

Prepare to wait.

Once you send out your first batch of submissions, get back to writing.

Don't take rejection personally. If you are fortunate enough to get a personal rejection you are one of the lucky few. Most times it will be a simple "dear writer - no thanks" letter.

Find a writer's group in your area, check it out, decide you hate everyone in the group, launch a coup of writer's group leadership, fail but do so in a blaze of glory that in turn consumes the entire group rendering them even more impotent than when you joined and are reduced to self fellation and the repeated readings of each other's journal entries and medical newsletters.

THEN, go back to writing. Write everyday. Write every spare minute. Write even when you aren't writing (listen to people talk, mentally catalogue facts and figures from other media sources, describe the places you're visiting as if you were writing about them).

Here's some perspective for you from my own history as a writer -

I've published a few pieces of short fiction in small press mags (I was paid in copies).
I've written a weekly column for the local paper (it ended when the publisher and I almost steanged each other one afternoon)
I hired the editor of that paper as my editor and agent, he has contacts through his work at the paper, and am starting to get proposals read and responded too.
How many books have I written? 4
How many short stories? easily 100+
How many hours per day I spend on my current project - 4
How many days I write a week - 7
How many words in current project 65000
How many words expected in total 120,000
Time spent on most recent project - 7 months.
Time from when I started writing to present - 15 years.

How much I've been paid - two copies of one magazine