Here’s the point of it all: when a publisher posts submission guidelines, they’re not suggestions. They’re not something you might try if you’re not feeling particularly creative today. They’re not even something the publisher dreamed up solely to make your life difficult. There’s actually a pretty good reason that they were written as they were, and following them shows the publisher a number of things:

1. you’re bright enough to follow directions
2. you know how to read
3. you won’t be troublesome down the line as you’re willing to enter the publisher’s turf and play by the publisher’s rules.

Don’t like the guidelines? That’s your right. But move on. Find someone else whose guidelines you do like.

A couple of months ago a colleague and I decided to create a couple of anthologies. Here are the guidelines that we sent out:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR A HOLIDAY ANTHOLOGY

Imagine your favorite holiday stories. Chances are good the protagonists are a man and a woman, possibly even with children. But where are the stories that feature men together, or women together, that will also warm our hearts at this special season?

That’s where you come in. We’re collecting holiday stories for two anthologies, one featuring male protagonists/couples/families, the other featuring female protagonists/couples/families, and we’d like to hear from you!

Your story should run between 2,000 and 4,000 words, contain no erotica, and be in a winter holiday setting. The only requirement is that it be historical fiction. We’re looking for tomorrow’s classics in time for next year’s holiday season!

Pay will depend on securing a publisher and will be negotiated at that time for accepted stories. Deadline is June 15, 2012, but the earlier, the better. Send Word docs to Jeannine Allard at jeannine@jeannineallard.com.

If you were reading that, you may have picked up on three relevant points. We’re looking for:

• LGBT stories
• historical fiction
• winter themes

I didn’t think it was that difficult to read. But I got deluged with stories about cousins, pets, grandmothers, and straight couples. Stories that were situated in the future or on another planet. Stories written by people who clearly hadn’t even bothered to read the entire call for submissions, but who just sent whatever they had on hand.

It was all a little insulting. A waste of my time (because I am courteous enough to read the stuff and respond to it) and a waste of the writer’s time, as well.

So that was me, one time. I can only imagine what acquisitions editors or literary journal editors must be thinking when these things cross their desks day after day after day. And I can guarantee that none of it is complimentary to the writer.

Do you really want to shoot your literary career in its metaphorical foot? Do you really want your name to be associated with slapdash work, with not being cooperative, with being difficult? Listen, it’s hard enough to get published as it is. Do you really want to make it that much harder?

Trust me: they’re not going to discover your fine literary talent hidden in the midst of your inappropriate submission. It isn’t going to happen. So consider going back to basics: read the call for submissions, submit exactly what they ask you for, no more and no less, and behave like a professional. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

1. Write.
2. Write every day, preferably at the same time each day.
3. Write when you don’t feel like writing, write when you’d prefer to have a root canal: that day especially, write.
4. Write when you feel that the words are going to just come pouring out of you.
5. Write when there isn’t a word left to come out of you.
6. Write when you have something important to say.
7. Write when you have nothing of any consequence to say.
8. Write when you get your 473rd rejection.
9. Write when the weather is grand and everyone else is outside enjoying it.
10. Write when the weather is terrible and you want to just curl up with someone else’s writing.
11. Don’t ever stop writing.

And there it is. Follow these ten simple (yeah, I know, they’re not so simple) steps, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

In general I’ve agreed with his opinions, so I have no problems recommending him. Check it out, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

*****
My story was really no different from thousands of others.

I had a completed novel and knew that in order to get it published I had to get an agent. This was the way it was done, I’d been told, how it had been for years.

I spent more than a year looking for one, had quite a few requests, but in the end, no offers for representation. Several told me that although they found While the Savage Sleeps compelling, well-written, and solid, they didn’t think they could sell it. The reasons? There were many, but the biggest snag, according to them, was that it mixed two genres which had nothing to do with each other: forensic science and the paranormal. I remember one of them telling me that the idea was “just too unique,” that bookstores wouldn’t know what shelf to put it on. That frustrated me to no end. I mean, since when is having something different a bad thing? What I also began to see was an emerging theme, that the industry professionals didn’t seem to have a grasp on what the public wanted anymore. They’d developed this model of “what will sell” that seemed so rigid it defied logic.

After a slew of rejections (I stopped counting at a hundred), my dreams of finding an agent and becoming a published author appeared to be nothing more than that: a dream.

But I wasn’t willing to give up on my book—not yet, anyway. I believed in it, knew I had something worth reading, and that it would sell if given the chance. The question now was, how to give it that chance. It appeared the publishing gatekeepers held the key, and getting past them was nearly impossible.

But that was about to change.

E-books were a new emerging technology at the time, but from the start I saw enormous potential, knew it would not only change how we read; it would change what we read.

My first clue came at a writers conference in the Bay Area when one of the speakers got my attention. He told the group, “Do you know you can publish your book on Kindle? Right now? That you don’t even need an agent?”

I hadn’t, but the idea intrigued me.

I’d already owned my Kindle, had fallen in love with it for a variety of reasons, but seeing my own work in e-ink? For people to read? On Amazon, no less? The world’s largest bookseller? The possibilities seemed endless, and man, was I ever there.

I loved the roguish quality of it all. I mean, who doesn’t dream of bucking the system, of proving the Powers That Be wrong? But besides that, there was something else that appealed to me, something much more important: it was the idea of putting the decision back where it belonged–not with the New York agents, not with the big publishing houses, but instead in the hands of the people who mattered most. The readers.

In June of 2010, While the Savage Sleeps went live on Amazon Kindle. It was fun. It was exciting. It was … well, sort of a letdown. You see, in my wide-eyed and naïve optimism, I actually believed it would sell through some sort of osmosis process, that by simply “being up there” among all the other big names, people would find it, buy it, read it.

Clearly, I was delusional.

And I found that out rather quickly because for the first month, I saw a total of three sales. One was me, and the other was—bless her heart—Jeannette, my editor. Don’t know who the other was.

So much for bucking the system.

It took me a while to figure out that there was more to this game, that in order to sell a book, one actually has to get off his rear and promote it. So that’s what I did.

I went deep, talked to everyone I could, studied what they were doing. I Googled my little heart out and visited every online discussion group I could find: Kindle forums, paranormal groups, you name it, I was there getting to know people—the cyber-equivalent of shaking hands and kissing babies.

And it paid off in a big way.

One day in July, While the Savage Sleeps took off. At midnight it hit #98 in the top one-hundred. By the next morning it was #76, and through the day it just kept moving. By five p.m it was #4. A few weeks later it went to #1, passing heavy-hitters like Stephen King and Nora Roberts.

I kept wondering when I would wake up and realize it was all just a dream, but that never happened. My book was in fact a bestseller, and I was thrilled.

But more than that, I think it proved a very fundamental point. The e-reader is not only a force to be reckoned with—it’s also a harbinger of change, leveling what was once a very uneven playing field, fixing a system that for years had been broken. With more than one-hundred rejections under my belt I’d proven that. The agents didn’t think While the Savage Sleeps was sellable, but the reading public disagreed, and they spoke loudly and clearly.

And the most exciting thing of all? This is only the beginning. The Indie Movement is building momentum like never before. Authors who had previously fallen through the cracks are being read while others are not only breaking away from their publishers, they’re finding great success doing it.

Is the system perfect? Certainly not. Is poor-quality work being churned out? Absolutely. Is the reading public smart enough to know the difference?

You bet.

****

I’m very impressed with Andrew, who didn’t let rejections stand in his way. His publishing model may not be right for everyone, but it does prove that you can do what you set out to do. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

A colleague once told me this:

“It’s probably worth mentioning that P.G. Wodehouse was a champion outliner. In fact, his outlining process was more like pre-writing the book, since he went into a great deal of detail at that stage and ended up with something nearly book-length from which to do his rewrite. All on the typewriter, of course, which was probably an asset since he was looking at familiar hard copy while doing the actual refining.

“The problem I see fairly often with authors who use outlining on the computer is the technical ease of drag-and-drop editing or writing in new bits which seem to fit the outline heading but add nothing (or even subtract) from the logical flow of the text. Authors who succumb to the temptation don’t always understand why it’s wise to prune out the excrescences or at least sort out the logic of the transitions from one bit to another within the section.”

Do I, personally, outline? Not really. I like to know where I’m starting and where I’m going, but as I tend to write about a central question, issue, or situation that interests me, most of the surrounding work derives from that. So for fiction, I write out character biographies and descriptions of settings as they occur to me. For nonfiction, it’s more of a topic list that I shuffle around based on what I think of as I write. (My fiction, with the exception of my mystery novels, is character-centered, so my tendency is to sit back and let the characters show me where the story should be going!)

But many writers (see Wodehouse, above) find outlining very helpful and stick to it religiously.

There’s a third outlining area — writing the outline after the fact. This can happen because the author needs the proverbial “outline and three sample chapters” for a submission … or because something’s gone wrong in the writing process and the author needs a detailed guide to rewrite it into what will make sense to the reader. I’ve been in both camps — not because something has gone wrong per se, but because something has changed and the outline needs to reflect that change. In my current work in progress, I decided halfway through to make the protagonist’s younger brother into an older brother; not only do I have to go back and fix the earlier chapters, but I also have to remember to change the outline to reflect it.

In any case, to outline or not to outline is a question that only you can answer. You need to write in the way you feel called to write, and make the writing conventions work for you, not the other way around. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!