I’ve been an aspiring writer of fiction (largely science fiction novels) for over twenty years now, and have yet to publish a book-length work. I have published a few short works, including one poem (free style), but nothing—short or long form—to a paying market. Not a particularly auspicious beginning to a writing career, especially when I read every now and then about someone who writes a book, never having written a book before, and sends it to an agent or two, and they love it right off, and it sells to a publisher in a preempt for 6 or 7 figures and now they’re really well known, and accolades and awards and prizes pour in, and all’s well that ends well. The writing magazines love to do interviews with them. And seriously, my hat’s off to them.
But—and I put myself in this category—for every successful author like that, indeed for any successful author regardless of how long it took him/her to get there, there must be hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of unsuccessful authors who write and write, but whose work is not deemed worthy of publication by agents, editors, publishers and the like. It’s not good enough, they say, or it doesn’t meet our needs at the present time, or we just published/handled/represented that type of story recently, or it needs work/editing/cutting/revision, or nobody’s buying that type of work any more, or it doesn’t have zombies in it, or the undead or Abraham Lincoln, or it’s just plain lousy, or—and this is my favorite—we just couldn’t get past the writing (?). There are a zillion reasons writers don’t get published. Perhaps a different reason for each author.
Only a small number of writers get to the stage where an agent/publisher will pick up their work and decide to give it a go to the extent of a book or series of books; I suppose the vast majority of those who submit are never picked up. What happens to them?
I’ve been to a number of writer’s conferences in my attempts to learn enough about writing to get published the traditional way, and at those conferences I’ve seen many who could be classified as The Great Unpublished. They, like me, submit and submit, but nothing ever comes of it. Some may get a book deal, but I suppose most don’t. I don’t know of any statistics on the subject, so I find myself wondering: what happens to them? Do they eventually quit? Do they go on and on, endlessly submitting and getting rejected? How many unpublished novels are out there that are eventually self-published because no one will take them? In other words, and to put it a little more scientifically, for how many novels, is KDP an endpoint?
I’ve heard it said, and I’ve read it in magazines, that no matter what you write, someone, somewhere out there, wants your work. This is supposed to get you to keep submitting. You’ll find someone somewhere sometime. Don’t give up, they say. Granted, that’s sound advice, but personally, I’ve had little success with it. KDP is looking better and better.
Does anybody know of any statistics about how many writers quit after giving the publishing game the old college try? (Sorry about that.)