‘Hi, I have a manuscript I’d like to send you but I see you don’t accept unsolicited submissions. Please call me back to ask me to send it to you.’ – Actual message on my actual voicemail.

It is really hard to get your MS read by a publisher.

That’s just how it is. Everyone is writing a book. Literally, everyone on this planet, all seven billion of us, with the single exception of an author I contracted three years ago and who still hasn’t bloody delivered, is writing a novel. Getting yours in front of an editor is hard.

There’s no magic bullet. But:

1) Find an agent or a publisher who might be interested in it.

Do your research. Look at the publishers of books similar to your MS. Check they accept unsolicited submissions. Use their website, or the Writers and Artists Yearbook or similar.

Sending your MS to people who don’t publish that genre is a waste of everybody’s time, particularly yours. It is, of course, possible that an editor at Harlequin will look at your poetry collection/history of the Hundred Years War/cookery book and say, ‘This is so amazing, we must find a way to publish it – let’s set up a completely new imprint!’ But it’s only possible in the sense that it’s possible somewhere in the universe there is a planet made entirely of snot: the principles of infinity dictate that it must happen, but I’m not expecting to see it in my lifetime. If the guidelines say, ‘We only publish short books (up to 20,000 words)’, I’m unlikely to change my mind for your 1.5 million word Suitable Boy fanfiction. If the agent says ‘no fantasy’ she means ‘no fantasy’ and if your fantasy is so brilliant that any agent would snap it up despite her seething hatred of all things elvish, still send it to agents who want to see fantasy.

2) Check the submission instructions and follow them.

Just do it, alright? If you can write a 50,000 word MS, you can read six lines of instructions. Or, to put it another way, if you can’t follow six lines of instructions, I’m going to query whether you can take editorial guidance.

If the ed asks for double spacing, then double space*. If it says ‘attachments in .rtf format, then find out how to save as RTF format**. If it says ‘first three chapters only’ then don’t send all of it***, or chapters 4-7****.

* My eyes hurt.

** I’m guessing they work on a crappy old Mac.

*** I suppose this makes no difference with electronic subs but it’s annoying as hell with paper. I have enough paper in my life.

**** …because you might as well say ‘Chapters 1-3 are awful.’

3) Don’t ‘make your MS stand out’ by doing damn fool things like putting glitter in an envelope, printing your work on deep red paper, enclosing topless glamour shots of yourself or pretending to be a rabbit complete with rabbit author photo and letter pp’d for Mr Flopsy.

None of this will be new to anyone interested in getting published. But if I had a pound for every lovingly crafted, sweated-over MS that I drop in the reject pile because it’s just not for my list, or it’s arrived in WordStar and I can’t open it, I’d be able to afford sorely-needed therapy. You may think the guidelines are picky or trivial or pointless; you may have heard from someone on the internet that editors put them there to weed out the people who don’t have the imagination and tenacity to ignore them (this…just…no); you may believe that only the writing matters and your story’s quality will shine through no matter how it is presented.

All I’m saying is, I’m a commissioning editor, and I made it my business to follow the submission guidelines exactly.