Submissions Masterclass ~ Week One
We know how hard submissions can be! We’re here to make it all just a little bit easier by bringing clarity to the process! Welcome to “Week One: The Submissions Checklist” by Jenny Hale.
You’ve finished the book! Now what? Submitting to agents and publishers is a marathon, not a sprint. And you’re going to need to be super organized. There’s no magic number for how many times you’ll need to submit a manuscript or for how many rejections you should get before you call it quits. I’d submitted my first manuscript for two years, nonstop. Finally, I was ready to put it into a drawer and move on, but I sent it out one more time. I got a contract. The book I almost stopped submitting was Coming Home for Christmas that went on to be a Hallmark Channel original movie.
For that novel, I kept 5-10 open submissions. When I got a “no,” I would send it out to one more. My suggestion is to send your manuscript out to a couple people to see if you get any feedback. Then, if you do, revise and send it to a few more, keeping track of the different versions of your manuscript that you’re sending out. I usually use “the title + v (for version) + the number manuscript”. So, my first draft was “Coming Home for Christmas v1.” After I got feedback, I’d revise and save it as “Coming Home for Christmas v2.” (I still use this format with my own drafts and with our authors, here at Harpeth Road.)
It’s also important to keep good notes becauase you don’t want to send your manuscript to the same publisher twice. While we’re very busy, we do remember what we read most of the time, and we will also remember if someone is filling up our inbox unnecessarily. As a submitting author, in order to keep track of everything, I kept a spreadsheet—a checklist, if you like. I’ve attached a similar spreadsheet to this post for you. I printed one page per letter of the alphabet and wrote all the A-names on one page, B’s on another, etc. so that I could find whether I’d sent something to a particular publisher/agent already or not.
I hope you find it helpful!
(c) Jenny Hale, 2022
