True Tale of Terror: A 17-year Journey on the Traditional Publishing Rollercoaster
When I saw the subject line from Writer’s Digest in my inbox, “The Writing Rollercoaster: My Journey to Publication,” I expected an inspiring example of an author mastering the craft, overcoming obstacles, and getting a book out there into the world. And in many ways that’s what the article delivered on clicking through.
Until it turned into a horror story. At least for me.
Perhaps I should have been tipped off when debut author Lina Patton opened with:
“You’ve heard it a million times: Writing is a rollercoaster. But like any familiar phrase, it can lose its meaning over time …”
That word, time, was the clue. The farther she rode the rollercoaster, the more I felt the crushing disappointments of multiple rewrites and rejections. Finally finding an agent and then switching to a new one. Abandoning her first novel when her agent couldn’t sell it.
Starting over in a new fiction genre. Three more years of rewrites before they started submitting to publishers again. Months of waiting and considering a different career. Until they got a deal from a traditional publisher.
Then two more years with the publisher before her book was released this past June.
Yes, Patton showed amazing persistence and resilience. And she does say, “it’s worth staying on for the bumpy ride.”
But her story stretched seventeen years, from when her undergraduate creative writing courses convinced her back in 2009 that “writing would be the dream” to publishing her novel this year! Let’s look at some of the details and reasons.
Trad Pub Barriers
We make no secret of our preference for the indie publishing path. Patton’s choice of the trad route likely flowed from her years going through her MFA program, where she notes lurk “many well-known traps.” The notion that a traditional publishing path is the only way to be a “real author” is a big one. Her example zeroes in on three of the major barriers.
Major Barrier #1. After college, her MFA, and working on that first novel through “at least three” full manuscript rewrites, she began querying agents in 2017.
She describes a full year of the “querying slog” this way:
“While I received many requests for the full manuscript, I heard the now-triggering phrase, ‘I’m going to have to step aside,’ again and again.”
A year of rejections went by before she got an offer of representation. That agent, however, “was not prioritizing [her] novel or [her] career,” often taking months to reply. So she parted ways, and went back to querying.
She finally met her current agent in 2020. This one requested “a revise-and-resubmit” of her manuscript and several months of edits before offering representation in January 2021. They did yet another round of revision before submitting the book to editors at traditional publishing houses.
Major Barrier #2. Despite years of writing and rewriting, and the efforts of her agent, the traditional publishers did not buy her first book (which she calls a “dark literary novel”).
Patton did not give up. A few months after the first book failed to sell, she dug out a project she’d started years ago, which she describes as a beach read. Her agent encouraged her, but in her words:
“Nothing that followed was easy. I was also learning a new genre, and I changed points of view, storylines, and structures over and over, rewriting the book in full at least seven times.”
That took another three years. In 2024, she and her agent went back to Barrier #2 and began submitting the new novel to publishers. Finally, in August that year, they got the deal with William Morrow.
Major Barrier #3. Time. Remember how I emphasized that word. You might think that after three years of writing, rewriting, and editing with her agent, publishing Patton’s book would be fairly straightforward, with another round of careful editing, title selection, cover and interior design, and launch prep — six months or so?
Nope. Nearly two years!
Patton does not explain what was going on during that stretch, but let’s just say it’s not unusual for traditional publishing.
Tallying up the time cost of trad pub, starting when Patton first began querying agents in 2017, it took her four years to land her current agent, three years to get a book deal from a publisher, and two more years to get the book out — nine years, in total.
Not Okay, Especially for Nonfiction Authors
While we’ve worked with fiction books, memoirs, even a couple of children’s books, the nonfiction business and professional author is our main client-base. For them, getting their book done and published is just the beginning. They’re creating an asset that displays their expertise, establishes their authority, and opens doors to new opportunities, like paid speaking, consulting, partnerships, and more. (See my post, 10 Ways Writing a Book Builds Business Success.)
That means that time spent getting through those traditional publishing barriers amount to years of missed opportunities. In another post, I labeled that wasted time and opportunity cost as an author’s upfront investment when pursuing the traditional publishing path.
For a business or professional author seeking to publish a book in support of their work, this concept of opportunity cost is crucial. In business, the opportunity cost of a choice includes the revenue and other benefits you would have gained by choosing a different option. For the author, the choice to follow the trad pub path could cost two, three, or more years of lost revenue they could have received from the various business-boosting benefits of having their book published and available to their market.
Even just the time difference amounts to lost opportunities to grow your business or professional practice. And remember you’ll lose creative control over many aspects, including title selection, cover and interior design, with a traditional publisher.
I know we harp on the need for authors, regardless of genre, to adopt a business mindset about their work. As noted above, getting your book to market is just the beginning. The business of marketing the book and choosing which to pursue of the many opportunities it will open actually starts during the writing phase, but can go on as long as you desire.
We don’t think you should waste years trying to hurdle unnecessary barriers before reaching that part. To give a comparison, most of our nonfiction book projects go from writing to publication in nine to eighteen months, depending on where in the writing process the client comes to us. Choose the indie advantage.
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