How To Get Your First Novel Published: Grazia masterclass

Last night, I headed along to the Women in Fiction Prize talk at the London Literature Festival for a talk on ‘How To Get Your First Novel Published’, in association with Grazia Magazine.

The session was chaired by best-selling author Kate Mosse (The Labyrinth – which was recently made into a brilliant TV series). Kate held the session well and made sure she was asking interesting and insightful questions to the rest of the panel, who were made up of the following: Rachel Joyce (debut novelist and author of phenomenally successful book ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’, Felicity Blunt (literary agent at Curtis and Brown) and Joanna Prior (Penguin General’s Managing Director).

This fantastic panel made for a very balanced discussion, as we heard from the experience of Rachel as the debut writer, the process from getting an agent to taking it through to a publishing house (who put the spend and the drive behind the book to get it out to the world).

Tips that were garnered from the session were the following:

– All aspiring writers MUST write – just keep going

– It can indeed be a lonely process, but choose one or two people to share it with if you wish, who can act as objective critics of your work

– A novel is usually around 80,000-120,000 words. They can of course be longer (the lovely Kate Mosse’s books are a staggering 240,000 words but this got published!)

– Once you have finished your book (a HUGE achievement in itself, so you should give yourself a ruddy big pat on the back) leave the work for a month. Go back to it and you will see it with entirely fresh eyes, ready for a final edit

– Then comes the research. You now have your book. You need to find an agent who will love it as much as you so DO.YOUR.RESEARCH. Felicity made a great point about how each agent will have a preference when it comes to authors, so look at the list of each agent’s current novelists and if they feel in line with your book, approach them.

– Another great tip from Kate Mosse is to go into a bookshop and browse similar books to yours, i.e where you would see your book fitting should it be on the shelves. Take a cheeky look at the acknowledgement pages at the back and you will no doubt see a couple of similar names crop up as publicity agents are few and far between – those are the people you should write to.

– A final word of advice from the panel when it came to submitting manuscripts to agents, is the absolute importance of the covering letter. This is the thing that sells your book – as Felicity put it ; “Think of when you go into a bookshop and you read the back blurb – you’ll read a few but one will stand out and make you buy it. Make sure your synopsis of your book is going to make the agent want to ‘buy it’ i.e take it home that evening and give it a read over the many others they have been sent.

– It’s also important that you only submit the first 3 chapters alongside the covering letter as this will get their interest.

The session was an inspiring insight into the book world and even though, similar to trying to make it as a musician or an actor, there is SO much competition out there, the overall messaging from all participating panelists was ‘If you have a great story, it’s a great story…and SOMEONE will want to tell it – you just need to find that person and don’t give up on it.’

At the end of the talk, we were also offered the chance to meet with the panel one-on-one and have a book signed, so with the ‘When in Rome’ attitude, I met the delightful Rachel Joyce and had her Sunday Times Bestseller signed. It’s currently number 2 on my ‘next to read’  list so will review on the blog once I’m finished.

Are any of you currently thinking about writing a book?

LMNH x