Saloon Bar Top Tens
Ten ways not to get published
- Send a full length, 110,000 word manuscript in small type to every publisher in the land, and forget to stick any stamps on the parcel.
- Attach a note to the above explaining that you would have sent just a sample chapter 'but you need to read the whole thing to understand how it all fits together'.
- Ring the publishers twice a day demanding to speak to the managing editor as you 'want the organ grinder not some performing monkey'.
- Dismiss the leading writers in your chosen field as 'talentless wankers' irrespective of the fact that the person to whom you're addressing this opinion signed them up and has been publishing them successfully for years.
- Turn up at book launches and signings with said manuscript under your arm, buttonhole anyone who looks important and bore them rigid for half an hour about how you're 'far better than this cliché-ridden tosser'.
- Talk loudly about how you're 'talking to a number of agents at the moment' when all you've done is pick a few at random out of the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook and send them the manuscript on spec.
- Namedrop a vanity publisher as being interested in your manuscript.
- Turn up at the London Book Fair and harass the poor work experience kid minding the big publisher's stand while the important people are taking an extended break at the bar. Take their name, give them yours, phone the publishers the following week and wonder why nobody's heard of either them or you.
- When a publisher leaves a message on your answering machine asking you to ring them back, don't. Wait for them to call again. They've got to really want you before you throw in your lot with them. This is, after all, the start of a bidding war.
- Sign up for a creative writing course and disagree loudly with everything the tutor says for the first hour before falling into a haughty sulk. Punctuate the rest of the session with tuts and derisive snorts.
