i cant figure out if youve answered this already so sorry if you already have but what was the process of finding a publisher like ?
it was hard! very hard! which isnβt meant to discourage anyone - if anything, it means that you shouldnβt let rejections bother you.
first off was finding an agent, which meant making a list of every literary agency I could find that accepted books in English (using sites like querytracker and manuscriptwishlist), and combing through them to see if they had any agents currently accepting queries in my genre. I had really shit luck with Canadian agencies, because they skew heavily toward literary fiction, and my book was genre fiction. but eventually, I had a list of 120 agents I stood a reasonably good chance with.
then, the applications! itβs good to do it in batches, because the occasional personalized rejection will give you something to work on. like I completely rewrote the 10 book pages I was submitting, and redid my query letter about fifteen times. I paid editors online to critique my query letter, I won a contest where the reward was commentary on my query letterβ¦..that query letter was my magnum opus. I put everything into it, and it still kinda sucked. one thing I learned along the way is that people really donβt care about your social media following, UNLESS itβs on Twitter or TikTok. if you say βI have a blog on tumblr :)β people will just be like βI thought that site got shut down.β
anyway, after 70+ written rejections (and many more silent rejections), I got an acceptance! a literary agent was interested in representing my book - if I made some changes to it. so I did (added more romance and βcozyβ scenes), and sent it back to him, and then he began shopping it around to publishers.
it took about six months to find an interested publisher. we didnβt have great luck with Americans, but British publishers seemed to really click with the humour, and suddenly we had multiple places interested at once! we went with Titan Books (technically an indie, but with a distribution partnership with penguin), and thenβ¦β¦.back into editing hell because the book still needed more romance.
from start to finish, it took four years from the book being written to it being released! itβs a lengthy frustrating process, and so many people give up because the constant rejection wears you down, but you just have to be incredibly stubborn and have a delusional level of belief in your own work.
good luck!
genuinely, thatβs the most important thing you can have! everything falls apart without it. you might have people telling you that your writing is shit, and that youβll never make it. those people might be friends, family members, partners, peers, professionals in the industry, online trolls, basically everyone but your nonverbal pets. when that happens, you NEED to be like βhmm I dunno, I think I wrote something nice πβ
if you keep writing, and working on your craft, and knocking on industry doors, eventually you will find success. just donβt give up on yourself!
