The Chances of Getting Published

As an unpublished author, the chances of getting published are of major concern.

We’ve just returned from a trip to Tenerife where we lived for more than 13 years. One of the nicest aspects of our trip was meeting up with old friends. On our last day, we visited writer friends. Over a leisurely lunch in their lovely new home, conversation inevitably turned to the tricky business of the chances of getting published and our friend shared some depressing statistics with us.

Why the odds are never in your favour

The rejection percentage of manuscripts submitted by unpublished and non-celebrity authors to agents is widely accepted to be between 95% and 99%.

Although I have yet to find the source data for this statistic, we do know that the average agent will receive between 2000 and 5000 manuscripts a year of which, they may only take on 2 or 3 new authors.

Assuming you’re one of the lucky ones and an agent takes you on, the same depressing rates of rejection apply between agent submissions and publisher acceptance i.e. less than 5% of manuscripts make it to print.

In the publishing industry, the rule of thumb (somewhat optimistically according to the above statistics) is called The 90-90-90 Rule: 90% of manuscripts don’t find an agent; 90% of those that do, don’t find a publisher, and 90% of those published don’t ‘earn out’ their advances.

That last 90% is particularly depressing. The average number of sales for a traditionally published book is 3000. Skewed by the big bestsellers, when you break that number down, the vast majority sell less than 300 copies in their first year and less than 500 in their lifetime. Very few books recoup their advance.

No matter which way you look at this, it’s simply a fact that the chances of getting published are depressingly low.

The good news

There’s only one piece of good news in this demoralising scenario which is that the UK book market remains very buoyant with print still dominating although younger readers (<18 years) are trending towards e-books and audiobooks (Statista.com).

It’s good to know that Brits are still avid readers.

Why bother trying?

With all those negative statistics facing us, why do we still bother trying to get published?

I can only speak for myself. My current work in progress was born of a passionate desire to tell this story, to the point that I simply couldn’t move onto anything else until I had got it out of my head and onto the page.

Now that it’s on the page, I’m still driven by a distracting need to get it into print and share it with anyone who might care to read it. Only then will I be able to move on with my writing.

Whether I take on those odds and try submitting to agents is still, theoretically, undecided although if I’m honest with myself, I’m sure I will submit.

For one thing, if I don’t believe my novel is good enough to be published, why should anyone else? If I didn’t think it was a story that deserved to be told, and that my telling of it is compelling enough to do it justice, I should never have started down this road.

That’s what I’m busy doing now; I’m reviewing the finished manuscript to ensure it’s as engaging as I can possibly make it.

The other reason I think I’ll probably initially go down the agent submission route is the same reason I do the Postcode lottery… you just never know.