How long does it take to get published?

How long does it take to get published?

Alexandra Pringle (Editor in Chief) gives expert video advice on: Will writing make me rich and famous?; What makes a good writer? and more...

The length of time it takes to get published can depend enormously. Quite a lot of that is actually luck. One of the most important things is getting a good literary agent because that will be bound to make the time a lot shorter. The most disastrous thing you can do is to send in an unsolicited manuscript into a publication company because it will not get looked at properly due to the volume of manuscripts that are sent in being so enormous, that physically the editors could not read everything. Publishers only read the work that properly comes in from agents. Your luck is really whether the agent finds the right editor quickly or whether is takes a long time. For example: there was a first novel I published, years ago, called Hideous Kinky by Ester Freud, and from when the agent sent me the manuscript to when the deal was done was literally a passage of days. This was because the agent knew that I would be the publishing editor to fall in love with it. I knew that she understood my tastes so I took that very seriously and read it immediately. I was so determined to buy the book that I pushed my colleagues so quickly that it was done in days. Then there are other authors, such as Tim Peers, whose first novel I also published, who sent his manuscript to dozens of agents who then one picked it up and sent it to dozens of publishing companies, and it took years. When the manuscript arrived on my desk, at that point I was working at Hamish Hamilton. It was pretty dog-eared. It had clearly been around the block a few times and I had a reader who worked with me who said, "This book needs a lot of work but this voice is extraordinary. I think you will love it." I will have to say that it sat on my sitting room floor for some time because we publishers all have to enormous amounts of work to do all the time. When I read it, I saw it did have something special. However, it wasn't ready to be bought. I couldn't take it to my colleagues. I then rang the agent and said, "Could I please meet with the author?" I met with him, he went away and did some work, and then we bought the book. It was the most successful first novel that was published that year and so many bought it and gave it fantastic quotes. It won the Hawthorn Day prize. There were a lot of publishers and agents thinking, 'Why did I turn this book down?' That was the passage of that book and it didn't affect his career. He became a best selling writer but it took him a long time to get published.