The #1 Reason Your Book Gets Rejected

The #1 Reason Your Book Gets Rejected

As I’ve said before, this is advice for new writers. Writers with just one or two publication credits. If you’ve got a list of pub credits as long as my…arm, then this probably isn’t the reason your book got rejected. Go back to one of the earlier posts and see the stuff about bad timing, bad luck, or just not being a good fit for a publisher at that time. It’s more likely to be that. But if you’re just starting out, this is the #1 reason most books or short stories don’t get published.

You Don’t Know How to Write for Publication Yet.

This shit is hard, y’all. It takes years to learn how to write a novel or a really good short story. It takes even longer to learn how to do it again and again, day in and day out, either for a living or a supplemental income. You don’t just walk out of college with a freshly minted BA in English and sit down to write your first novel. Okay, you probably do, but it almost certainly sucks. And that’s okay. Your first book, story, blog post, article, poem, or whatever the fuck you want to write is supposed to suck. Just don’t think people are going to pay you for it. And don’t think that it’s worth charging money for it.

 

So how do you get good? How do you get ready to be published? Well, strap in kids, I’m going to give you the Secret to Becoming a Published Author and getting all the women, blow, and cash you can ever imagine. 

Work really hard, study a lot of shit, read a fuckload, and put a metric shit-ton of words on the page.

Come on, there’s no fucking secret to it. I spent almost a decade writing a blog and working for poker websites before I wrote The Chosen. I had more than a million words written and about half a million of it published by someone other than my blog before I started writing fiction.

You want to get good? Write.

You have to write. You aren’t good if you’re getting a lot of rejections. That’s the main reason people get rejected. It’s not because they don’t like you. It’s not because they don’t like your politics. It’s not because they don’t like gay people, or straight people, or white people, or African-Americans. It might be because you’re an asshole, but you can probably hide that for the fifteen minutes someone spends with your query letter. It’s almost always because you aren’t ready yet. You don’t serve mashed potatoes that are cold in the middle, and you don’t get your book published until you know how to write, and how to be a writer.

So what do you do?

Write – and join a critique group. You can’t learn in a vacuum. I learned a ton writing my blog, because I had people reading my work every day, and they would call me on it if something sounded stupid. Then I worked for an editor, and they called me on it when I wrote shit. If you live in the boonies, join an online critique group. I know it’s hard to show your precious little manuscript to a room full of strangers, but suck it up, buttercup. It’s one of the best ways to improve. And no, nobody wants to steal your fucking idea. If you think that people go to critique groups to steal ideas, then just be a goddamn stamp collector, because there are already enough idiots in publishing and writing, we don’t need another one.

Read – it’s a fucking mortal insult when someone walks up to my table at a con and says “I have a fantasy novel I’m writing (have written),” then they follow that up with “I don’t really read, I just want to write.” Fuck. You. Read. Read in the genre. It’s fucking necessary. You need to know what the tropes are. You need to know what the crutches are. You need to know what’s selling, and what’s oversold. You need to know what’s been fucking done to death, and when an original idea is actually original.

Study – There are amazing books out there, many of them written by people who are doing exactly what you want to do – making a living off their words. Why would you not take the opportunity to learn from them? I really like On Writing by Stephen King and Goal, Motivation, and Conflict by Deb Dixon. Every writer in the world has their favorite. Ask someone.

Go to Conventions and Writers’ Conferences – Yes, they cost money. Some of them are expensive. Most of them are worth it. Where else can you sit in a hotel bar and talk with half a dozen publisher writers? Where else can you sit in a room and listen to six or more people tell you how to answer writing problems? I have several friends, manny of whom I’m now publishing with Falstaff, that I met when they were attending conventions and sitting in the audience taking a shitload of notes. They kept their mouths shut and their ears open, and they learned. And they got better, and now they’re building careers.

Write – Oh, did I say that one already? That’s because it’s the fucking key to it all. I don’t give a shit how many hours you work. I don’t give a shit how young your kids are and how much of a pain in the ass they are. I worked two jobs when I was starting out and still blogged every day building my voice. I drove from Charlotte to fucking Arkansas, spent three nights in a hotel to attend a con where I was nominated for an award that I didn’t win, sold two goddamn books, then drove two days home. I’ve been to cons where I slept three or four hours a night because I was networking in the bar (yeah, I know, but I was networking. Ask my friends how many times they’ve been in a bar with me until the wee hours. Then ask them how many times they’ve seen me actually intoxicated. Those numbers won’t match, and you can probably guess which number is surprisingly low.) then got up to make a 9AM panel.

I’ve been to cons with bronchitis when I was so fucked up on codeine-laced cough syrup I don’t remember the convention, and I was at Dragon Con doing panels and working the convention while I knew my mother was dying. I said my goodbyes on Thursday afternoon, told her I loved her for the last time, drove back to Charlotte, got in the car with two friends, and rode to Atlanta. I got the call Monday morning that she was gone, and we buried her two days later. So don’t tell me you’ve got shit to do that gets in the way of your writing career. I’m standing here shouting from the goddamn mountaintops that if there are things in your way that you don’t want it bad enough. Go read Sherrilyn Kenyon’s website where she writes about how she got her start and all the shit she went through. Then tell me your job is hard and you’re too tired.

If I sound hard, and mean, well too goddamn bad.

This isn’t my hobby. This isn’t what I do when I feel like it. This isn’t something I do when the muse strikes me. This is how I feed my family and keep a roof over our heads. And if you aren’t willing to work as hard as I do, then get out of my way. But if you want it, if you are willing to scratch and claw and work for years to get good enough just to get a personalized rejection letter, then let’s go. I will do anything I can for you. I will help promote your shit. I will perhaps even publish your shit. But if you’re in this because you think it’s an easy ride, go somewhere else. I ain’t got time for dabblers.

I just spent two days working a comic con with two friends. One of them is a doctor. He has literally saved lives, and watched people die in front of him. He has a job, an important job, and he’s good at it. We need him doing his day job. But because this is something he loves, he works all week then drives all across the Southeast doing conventions. He works all day and goes home to write. He’s got one novel out now, with two more coming in that series, and I’ve signed him to a three-book contract for another series. Now tell me you don’t have time to get some words on the page.

You want to know why your book got rejected? Because out there in the dark of night, at 11:35 on a Sunday night when I’m writing a blog to promote myself, promote my brand, and hopefully give a little back to aspiring writers, there’s somebody else who’s working on their craft. Somebody who wants it more than you do. Somebody who’s willing to work harder than you. Somebody who will invest the time and energy into developing their writing ability to something worthy of publishing.

Note that I never mentioned talent until just now. I’ve said this from my senior year of college when I first started directing plays. I don’t give a fuck about talent. Talent doesn’t mean shit. Give me a choice between an A-plus talent with a C-minus work ethic, and a C-minus talent with an A-plus work ethic, and I’ll take the work ethic every time. Fuck talent, get to work.

You like this shit? It’s moving come September. My blog will be more events and fun stories, and my writing advice will be for my Patreon patrons. Because I gotta make a living. My podcast will still be free, and my stuff on Magical Words will still be free, so there’s plenty of ways to get my advice for free. But these blog posts will be patron-only. But they will be available for everyone that pledges $1 or more, so it’s affordable. Go to Patreon to check it out. 

Why I Rejected Your Book, Part 2

Why I Rejected Your Book, Part 2

Writing Rants Cover Part 1 of this post got a lot of traffic, generated a fair amount of Facebook discussion, pissed some people off, and hopefully was useful to some of you. It also spawned my new podcast, Writing Rants, which is coming soon right to this here web space.

I do want to clarify one thing about these two posts – if you are a multi-published author, most of this isn’t going to apply to you. If you have been working in the business for a while, you get to use adverbs, you get to start a story in the wrong place (#2 on the list – spoiler alert) and you sometimes get to use passive voice. Because you have been working in the field long enough to know how to do those things. Presumably.

But at least you have enough equity built up with editors through your publication history that we (I) are willing to give you a shot. If I know you, if we’ve met at a con and shared a table together, you get a lot more leeway than someone who I know nothing about. If your query letter comes in with a list of half a dozen published novels or a dozen or so published short stories, then I assume that if it starts off oddly, you know what you’re doing, and I’ll give you a little more time than someone who has no credits.

That’s not fair. I know. I also know that it isn’t fair I got cut from my Little League team. Bullshit. It’s totally fair, and it’s fine. I got cut from the team because I was too green and not athletic enough. Why did your story get rejected? Well, let’s continue on to the top two reasons I reject a submission.

#2 – Your story starts in the wrong place – I see this taking two forms. In the first, there are certain beginnings that cliché, or at least cliché for certain genres, and I just don’t want to see them. Here are a few things to avoid when submitting  –

  1. Starting off in a dream – Don’t do it. It’s trite, it’s over done, and very seldom done well. Particularly avoid being clever and tricking the audience into thinking that what’s happening in the dream is actually part of the narrative, then jumping out of the metaphorical closet and yelling “GOTCHA!” it doesn’t make you a clever writer, it makes you a douche. And it makes you unreliable to the readers. Remember that every word you put onto the page is part of your contract with the readers, and if they don’t trust you, they will not be invested in the story.
  2. Getting up in the morning – Reading about someone getting ready for school or work isn’t interesting. We all get ready for school or work every day. Unless there’s something reaching through the mirror while your protagonist is shaving, don’t tell me they shave. Start in the action.
  3. Starting away from the protagonist – Unless you’re writing a thriller, and you’re starting the book with the Terrible Thing being performed by the villain, and we’re going to return tot he villain’s POV every once in a while throughout the book, Don’t start the book anywhere but focused on the protagonist. You have limited time to introduce the main character and get the audience to love her. Because they downloaded the first 10% for free on their Kindle, and if you don’t hook them in the sample, you won’t get them to buy the rest of the book. I know I download a LOT of samples, and I buy very few of the books I sample. If you want an example of a book that hooks you from the jump and almost forces you to buy it once you read the sample, try Alice by Christina Henry. It’s a helluva book and hooked me from the beginning.

Of Lips and Tongue by AG Carpenter is one that didn’t just hook me from the beginning of the book, it hooked me from the first line of the query letter. “Delaney Green is one of them that don’t burn.” It puts me into the world of the story in one line. I know that it’s Southern. I know that it’s supernatural. I know that supernatural things are somewhat accepted. I know that the character is locked askance at because of her abilities. I got all that from the first sentence of the query letter. I bought the novella, and two more.

In the second, the story just doesn’t do anything in the beginning. Sometimes an author spends too much time setting things up and introducing characters, and not enough time moving the action along and hooking a reader. Remember that I am a genre fiction reader, I’m a genre fiction publisher, and a genre fiction writer. We are not working in the literary fiction world, we are writing potboilers and page-turners. Shit has to happen. And it has to happen from the beginning. It’s not necessary that there be a fight scene on Page 1, but it’s also not bad.

With my book Genesis, the first draft of the book was awful. I started the book 100% in the wrong place. The premise of the movie is Red Dawn meets X-Men: First Class. An EMP destroys the world’s technology, and without the interference of all the tech, people are able to harness the elemental magic of the earth again. This ability only manifests itself in teenagers and people who are more open to change and magic (hippies). I started the book with the protagonist getting ready for school. Then I realized that no one gives a shit about that. so I started the book at the point where the EMP has hit and she and her brother are hauling ass out of the school. The book works much better when it starts in the right place.

By the way, Genesis has recently been uploaded for audiobook, so that will be available soon!

And I’m almost at my thousand word limit, so you’ll have to wait a little while to find out The #1 Reason Why I Rejected Your Manuscript.

And now time for a little shameless self-promotion –

Man in Black 2 Black Knight Chronicles #6 – Man in Black releases today! It’s my book birthday, and yesterday was my birth birthday! So if you want to show the love, go buy the book! If you don’t have $6 to buy Man in Black, check out one of my other books. The Black Knight Chronicles Omnibus, collecting books 1-3, is on sale for $2.99.

And if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read most of my other work for free! For just $9.99 per month, you can read every Bubba the Monster Hunter story, every Quincy Harker story, and a ton of my other work as often as you like! And right now you can try KU for free for 30 days. Just click Join Amazon Kindle Unlimited 30-Day Free Trial.

If you like these blog posts, and want to see more of them, you can head over to my Patreon and pledge your support. I’ve changed my rewards around a bit, and there are some improved perks at different patron levels, so go check it out and fund my convention travel budget.

Why I Rejected Your Book, Part 2

5 Reasons Why Your Story or Novel Gets Rejected, Part 1

Since opening up Falstaff Books, I’ve been dealing with more submissions than ever. This is awesome, because submissions, particularly unsolicited submissions (or “slush”) is how we build anthologies and a catalog. I, just like every editor and publisher I know, am excited every time I open a query letter and start to read the attachment. I want to find the next amazing book or story, because if I publish it, not only do I get to help bring an amazing book to life, but we all get paid. Remember, a reputable publisher doesn’t make any money unless you make money. Unfortunately, most of what comes in on submission gets rejected, and I want to touch on some of my personal top reasons that your story or novel gets rejected. Some of these are pet peeves, and in a world where my time is incredibly limited, it only takes hitting one hot button to get your book or story rejected. So here, in reverse order, are John’s (and John’s alone) Top 5 Reasons I Will Reject Your Book or Story. I’ll bring you Part 2 next week, because this is running long.

5) Bad Timing – sometimes you honestly just get screwed, and you submit a story or novel (for here on out, I’m just going to call them books) that is too similar to something we just acquired, or too much like something else on the market. For example, if you have a great idea for an urban fantasy series about a male wizard for hire in Indianapolis named Barry Teasden who has a spirit trapped inside a gargoyle on his desk, I’m probably going to pass. Frankly, if you have any kind of urban fantasy detective story, I’m probably going to pass unless it’s 100% goddamn amazing, and there’s something to set it apart from any of the dozens of urban fantasy detective series out there. Including the ones written by the publisher.

But a lot of times you can’t know that we’ve just bought a story in the same genre as yours, or have something on the docket that hits many of the same check marks. For example, it would be hard to know that we aren’t the place to send your “changeling travels to Fairy in search of her absentee parent – hilarity does not ensue” novel, because Changeling’s Fall hasn’t released yet. But it will come out late summer/early fall, and it is the first in a series of four novels about that set of characters. So that’s great for us, because it’s an amazing book, but it’s not great for writers of similar books, because that market is now closed to them.

4) Didn’t Follow the Guidelines – When I worked in the lighting business, I was a middle manager. I had a dozen people that reported to me, and I was responsible for hiring and firing them. One thing I was always looking for in people was a college degree. Not that I thought you needed a degree to do the job, because you certainly don’t. But because having a degree was a shortcut to show an employer that you are capable of sticking with one task for a long time and completing it. Submission guidelines are the same thing.

What am I saying? I’m saying that I’m perfectly capable of quickly reformatting your submission into the typeface, font size, and spacing that is easiest for me to read. Take me less than a minute. And that’s not the point. The point is – are you someone who pays attention to detail, or are you a pain the ass? Do you understand that this is a business relationship, and as such there are ways to do things and ways not to do things, or are you a special friggin’ snowflake that I’m going to have to remind to do everything and hound about missed deadlines?

Submission guidelines are a test, like Van Halen’s green M&Ms. The band never gave a single shit about the color of the M&Ms, but a venue that took the time to either adjust the tour rider to take out the stupid line about the green M&Ms, or took the time to pick out the green M&Ms, was a venue that was paying attention to details. And that’s a venue that’s probably going to have the right safety equipment, the right number of backstage passes for family and guests, and won’t have food in catering that the band is allergic to. A writer who follows the submission guidelines to the letter is probably a writer that will respond to edits quickly and succinctly, will get their shit turned in on time, and generally will behave like a professional.

So follow the goddamn guidelines.

3) Book or Story needs work – Nobody’s first draft is worth a damn. Not mine, not yours, not Neil friggin’ Gaiman’s. So polish your work before you send it out for someone to potentially purchase. Have someone help you polish it. There are critique groups everywhere in the world, including online critique groups for people who live in rural areas and don’t have enough people close by. Use one.

Note – I am not suggesting that you pay an editor to polish a book that you want to sell to a publisher. That’s what we do. It’s our job to handle that level of editorial. But I am saying make friends with writers who are where you are in your career, and work together so that all of you get better. Having someone to put fresh eyeballs on your work will help with things like homonyms and words that either aren’t spelled like you think they’re spelled or words that do not mean what you think they mean.

Here are a few things that will kill the submission before it really gets going. Remember, these are things I don’t care for, but they aren’t universal. They’re pretty close, though. Eliminate these things from your storytelling and it will help you make more money as a writer.

Passive Voice – People need to do things, not have things done to them. Brutus needs to stab Caesar, we don’t need to hear that Caesar was stabbed by Brutus. If your POV character keeps having things done to her, then maybe she shouldn’t be your POV character. Or maybe you should write from a closer POV, so we can understand her reaction to these things better. But get rid of passive voice.

“To Be” – It’s really not to be. The more instances of “was, were, are” you can eliminate from your writing, the more immediate you can make it. Use strong, active verbs to tell the reader what’s going on in the scene. I wasn’t standing by the bar watching the room, I stood by the bar watching the room. I am not sitting at my desk writing a blog post, I sit at my desk writing a blog post. The various conjugations of “to be” distance the reader from the action and reduce the immersion of the character into their surroundings. It blunts the edges of your writing, makes it dull.

Adverbs – You get one per every 50,000 words. You can have them back when you’ve published a million words of fiction. Don’t argue with me, just cut out the annoyingly ever-present and ridiculously repetitive adverbs.

That’s enough for Part 1. I’ll come back next week with the next two pieces of the puzzle – Your Story Starts in the Wrong Place, and You Aren’t a Good Enough Writer (Yet). I figure if these didn’t piss everybody off, those certainly will!

 

If you loved this, hated it, or just want to meet me live and in person, come say hi at the Charlotte Comicon, this Sunday, August 7, from 10AM – 5PM at the Embassy Suites in Concord, NC. More information here.

If you love my work and these blog posts and want to keep me writing, feel free to visit my Patreon page. I give away all sorts of free stuff to my patrons, including autographed books from my collection, free audiobooks, and free ebooks.

Black Knight #6, Man In Black, is available August 15th, just after my birthday! You can pre-order it now!

Why I Rejected Your Book, Part 2

Upcoming Releases and Appearances

Hey folks – I know there are a few people who aren’t on my mailing list that sometimes pop by here, so I wanted to give everybody an update on what’s going on and where I will be.

BTW, why aren’t you on my mailing list? Sign up here and you’ll get a free book!

So, new stuff. Here we go. On July 29, I released Heaven Sent, book #5 of the Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter series.

Heaven Sent Cover

In Heaven Sent, we travel back to 2009 to see the first meeting between Harker and Glory, his guardian angel. She shows up at a crime scene where he is looking into the death of a prominent Charlotte attorney. The lawyer is found in a mall parking lot in the middle of the night, and his body has been drained of most of its blood. Not vampires, this time, the huge slash across the dead man’s throat makes that clear. So why is Harker involved?

To the naked eye, there’s no reason. But when Harker looks over the crime scene with his Second Sight, he sees something strange about the man. Wings. The dead man has a pair of golden ephemeral wings sprouting from his back. The dead man is a Nephilim, a half-human, half-angel hybrid that can walk among the mundane world without anyone ever being the wiser.

Now he’s dead, and he’s not the first one. Quincy Harker has to find out who is murdering angels in the Queen City, and why. Then he has to stop them. Good thing his backup on this case was Heaven Sent.

Heaven Sent is available exclusively on Amazon, as part of it’s Kindle Unlimited service.

I promise, I’ll get into why I went back to KDP Select, making many of my titles available free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers, in another post. Maybe here, maybe on Magical Words.

Coming Soon – Man in Black – Black Knight Chronicles #6

Man in Black 2

The latest installment of the award-winning Black Knight Chronicles series finds Jimmy Black in more trouble than he’s ever been. He took care of one threat in the last book, In the Still of the Knight, but now he has to deal with all the fallout of the choices he made there.

He’s the new Master of the City, a supernatural crime lord who only ever wanted to be a superhero. He’s been called in by the police to help on a case where he just wants to bite everybody instead of working with them. He just found out that there’s a mysterious Vampire Council, that they’re watching him, and if he screws up – they’ll kill him.

And on top of all that, he’s having serious girlfriend issues.

And oh, yeah, then there’s Lilith…

Man in Black will be available everywhere books are sold August 15th! 

Google

Amazon

Kobo

 

Coming in August – Queen of Kats Part 2 – Survival

Queen of Kats 2 cover

Once upon a time, there was a thief named Remarin. He was a very good thief, if a it lacking in impulse control. Remarin was hired to steal something because, well, thief. He stole the thing, but his fence double-crossed him. Because, well, thief. So Remarin killed the fence and ran off with an urchin boy he found hiding in the back room of his fence’s shop.

Except the urchin wasn’t an urchin.

And the urchin wasn’t a boy.

She was a girl, her name was Kit, and her uncle murdered her father and took her throne. It was all very much like Hamlet, except without the iambic pentameter.

So Remarin traveled through the lands with the disguised princess, finally settling in one spot for just long enough to get comfortable.

Until someone from Remain’s home finds him. It seems Kit isn’t the only one living a life under false pretenses. And now Remain’s past has caught up to him. The thief has to confront his real identity to save his brother’s life in Queen of Kats Part 2 – Survival.

Queen of Kats will be exclusive to Amazon, but you can get it, and all my new releases, early just by becoming a patron! With Patreon, you choose the pledge, and the rewards. Get free stories, ebooks, and previews! Click here to become a Patron!

Coming sometime in September will be a new Bubba novella. More on that as it finishes.

Where to find me

As convention season winds down, I’ve got a few more appearances on the docket this month and next.

8/7 – Charlotte Comicon

8/13 – Clover Community Con

8/27-8/28 – Soda City Comiccon – Columbia, SC

9/2-9/5 – Dragon Con – Atlanta, GA

I hope to see y’all at one or more of these events!