How publishing gatekeepers can boost your craft

The face of every writer who reads the title of this post.

Disclaimer: My opinion is not mandatory to get traditionally published, but I strongly believe it increases the odds. This approach sure worked for me.

Heya, Bookwyrms!

Here’s the thing: When gatekeepers say certain craft choices don’t work, they usually have a point. It’s worth researching why, especially if you want to make sure your choices are the exception to the “writing rules.”

But the Art, Morgan! How dare you say I need to compromise my vision!

Alas, I can hear the arteests popping the lids off their tomato crates from here.

Before you launch your first tomato, hear me out. I too am an arteest. I firmly believe writing is an art form that happens to have the potential to make money and I won’t compromise the heart of my books to make a quick buck. That said, I’m convinced that researching the business side of traditional publishing is the reason I have an agent. 

You sold out to the gatekeepers! I hope you like ketchup, bitch.

My dear Bookwyrm, KETCHUP IS THE BOMB. But let’s back up anyway and define what I mean by “business side of traditional publishing,” at least as it is relevant to craft.

I’m talking about word count, opening scenes, tropes, character archetypes, etc. All of these things impact the salability of a book. For example, a high word count means the book will require more pages to produce, which increases production cost and decreases the publisher’s profit margin. Your book could be the best thing since sliced bread, but that doesn’t matter if the gamble of buying your book isn’t worth the reward. If your book opens with a scene that an agent has seen a million times, it won’t necessarily matter if you spin it differently. The agent might have limited time and reject it before they reach the differentiating elements. Similarly, certain tropes and character archetype combinations might flood the market at any given point, rendering your work redundant to projects that have already sold.

So, how do you identify these business-side pitfalls?

Scour publishing resources. Books, blogs, podcasts, Twitter accounts, YouTube accounts—any free (or inexpensive) resource provided by the people who will pick you out of the slush. These people include agents, editors, and some mentorship programs. Gatekeepers—especially agents—offer free information because they want to increase the odds that they sign you. They want their sweet commissions! So it’s in your best interest to learn to think like a gatekeeper.

Ready to research? I’ll share my favorite resources to get you started.

One of the best resources I’ve found is the Pub Rants blog from Nelson Literary. They share a wide scope of info such as successful query letters, yearly query statistics and trends, common openings, and common manuscript flaws. My favorite posts are their nine openings to avoid and fantasy openings to avoid or to very carefully consider (the latter of which informed the book that got me rep!). Another fantastic resource is the BookEnds Literary Agency Youtube channel. My favorite book for developing entire concepts with the business side in mind is Writing the Breakout Novel: Insider Advice for Taking Your Fiction to the Next Level by Donald Maass. These resources are the tip of the iceberg, so Google as widely as you can to find more resources, and remember to look at the source’s industry record to ensure your information is legit. Writer Beware has tons of posts about red flags and common scams to make sure your gatekeeper sources are legit. 

Once you find your resources, treat research like homework. Take an interest in it. Do it with urgency, as if it counts for so much of your final exams that you’ll fail if you don’t do all of it. And keep up to date! Subscribe to the newsletters and Youtube channels. Follow the Twitter accounts. Study to the point where you struggle to find new information. Find contradicting information and form new opinions. Identify which “rules” are actually subjective gatekeeper opinions. Determine the most likely safe spaces for you and your work. Evolve! Consuming as much info as possible from the perspective of gatekeepers will teach you how to self-identify the reasons your work might get rejected before they happen. They can even help you guesstimate the reasons for those pesky form rejections.

Once you’ve learned your fill, it’s time for the painful part: Strategize and adjust.

Review your manuscript. Do your opening pages fall under the most common openings agents see for your genre? Rewrite them. Is your book full of generic sentences and clichés that any old book could have? Customize them. Does your query letter include common agent turnoffs? Get rid of them. Do you unintentionally practice bad query etiquette? Fix that. Have your dream agents changed their manuscript wish lists over time? Update your query list.

And so on and so forth.

Now that you’ve bomb-proofed your project, does this guarantee a gatekeeper will think your project = money?

Nope.

Morgan, you’re supposed to give us the cheat codes past the gatekeepers, you sunova—

SLOW YOUR ROLL. There’s value here, I promise! The caveat is that so much of publishing will go unseen. I’ve been rejected by “perfect-fit” agents only to learn months later that they sold a book based on the same folklore. This has happened to multiple critique partners of mine, too. Despite the caveat, I noticed a significant difference in my request rates and the positivity of my rejections once I implemented my research into my work. You can’t control when you breach the publishing gates, but why not maximize what you can control? As long as you keep learning and trying, the odds become much better that you get in eventually. And take it from me—as someone who signed with an agent after writing four manuscripts, agents love it when you have a well-crafted backlist. That’s basically easy money in the right market.

Bottom line: Rejection is inevitable. You will make mistakes, and there’s a lot of unknown factors I haven’t mentioned—and can’t know—that will impact you in ways you may never see (unfortunately this is especially true for BIPOC authors, so please support them where you can). But with research into the business side of traditional publishing, you can increase self-awareness, fail forward, and improve your game so that marketability and subjectivity are all that stand in your way. It’s like throwing tomatoes. If you look for lessons in your bad throws, one will strike the target eventually.