Lingua Translations

At 18 I got this idea while waiting for my son to be born that if I wasn’t going to college right away. I needed a skill, so I went to the local book store in my community. I had learned the basics of typing but I didn’t have the speed. As I was walking through the business section, my eyes fell upon a book “How to increase your typing speed in 60 Days or Less,” so I bought it.

I had some knowledge but if I was going to expand what I knew already I had to take the next step. For me it was to read that book and apply the information. Herein lays the key to how to avoid making the biggest mistakes first time authors make.

The first step is to acknowledge you don’t know something. Then you have to assess what you do know. Once you do that, then you work on where you want to go and what you want to accomplish? In my case I knew how to place my hands on the keys and type but I did not have the speed. I had come to realize that if I was going to get a job with promise for promotion after the birth of my son, I needed to at least be able to type with speed.

Publishing is an extremely competitive business. There are three main ways to go about getting your manuscript published; through an agent, directly through a publishing company, or by taking the increasingly popular self-publishing option.

The best way to improve your chances of getting your book published by a traditional publisher is to find an agent who will ‘take you under their wing’ and add you to their list of clients. Publishing companies very rarely read or pay any attention to unsolicited manuscripts (i.e. a manuscript submitted by an author NOT by an agent). Therefore, you are in a much more likely to get your manuscript published if you have an agent.

Unfortunately, getting an agent to agree to take you on as a client is almost as hard as it is to get a publisher to read your work. Agents give your work approximately 20 seconds of time before making a decision to either pursue you or reject you.., and 90-99% get rejected. It is tough!

So getting an agent…

- There are hundreds of Literary Agents in the UK. You need to target those agencies that handle the kind of writing that you do. So, get a copy of the ‘Writers Market UK 2008’, or the ‘Writers and Artists Yearbook 2008’. These list literary agents, telling you what genre of writing each agency deals with.

- You can contact the Association of Author’s Agents (www.agentsassoc.co.uk) or the Society of Authors (www.societyofauthors.net) who should be able to point you in the right direction, and provide a list of suggested agencies that would suit your novel.