John Addiego on Getting Published
October 15, 2008
I am one of those people who crawls out of bed every morning at five to write before reporting to the paid work that supports a family. I’ve done it for decades, and I know there are thousands of others doing this, my waking sisters and brothers in spirit, perhaps all of us coming out of one collective dream to write one story we’ll never fully understand.
My path to publication started with poems in literary magazines while I was reading the same. The urge to write books, novels and long stories possessed me, and I learned the morning routine about the time I became a parent. I could have gotten discouraged and thrown in the towel on publishing a book. A saner person would have quit after the years of rejection reached double digits. Not me. There has always been this secret delight in trying to write something good, in discovering something that rings true, and I could no more stop writing than reading or eating dark chocolate. Forget about it.
I tried two literary novel manuscripts with two agents and watched them circulate among big houses and shrivel up. Today I’m glad they weren’t published because they weren’t very good. I kept writing—poems, stories, literary novels, mystery novels, even science fiction. I wrote what I liked to read. I went to conferences to meet agents, I queried dozens of agents, I got unreadable form rejections and pages of other people’s rejected manuscripts and letters addressed to other aspiring writers sent to me by agents. I also got some agent invitations and
close-but-no-cigars, and lots of
I love your writing, but…The big
but I usually experienced had to do with marketing.
I think the idea of an agent cozened my publishing mind until last year, when I read an interview with Greg Michalson of Unbridled Books and decided to try him directly. This is something I recommend now to my struggling brothers and sisters of the dark hours before dawn: find a press, and an editor, who is publishing things you like and craft a careful query with your best sample to send. A dedicated editor with some vision about the mission of his press is a true blessing for a writer. I got lucky: Michalson is a gem among gems. One other piece of advice: read good books. I meet writers who don’t read, or only read what’s popular, or stare at screens. Read the good stuff. There is really no other teacher.
About John Addiego
John Addiego has published numerous stories and poems in literary journals and is a former poetry editor at the Northwest Review. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives with his wife, Ellen, and daughter, Emily, in Corvallis, Oregon, where he teaches students with special needs. The Islands of Divine Music is his first novel.
John Addiego Profile at OnceWritten.com
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