Many young writers, like myself, don’t know the first thing about getting published.

Why?

Because, either our writing programs didn’t teach us and/or because even successful writers don’t often talk about the process. And when publishing is talked about, it is often through a privileged lens— a lens that doesn’t help the majority of new writers reach their goals. So how do we help each other get published when we aren’t privileged? We learn by example.

I want to know how today’s writers got published, so that new writers can learn and, ideally, get published too.

When I say “published,” let me specify that I mean “published” by the traditional route— via a publishing house. This piece will not cover self-publishing, unfortunately. But, perhaps another piece will in the future. For now, I will focus on how new writers can break through into the traditional publishing industry.

Before we dive in, here are a few things I will not be discussing in this piece:

Biographies: Author biographies are everywhere. No one needs me to write more of them.
Book Reviews: For each writer I highlight, I will have read at least one of their books myself. But I’m not here to write a review. If you want to hear my thoughts regarding the books themselves, feel free to check out my Instagram account here, where I’ve posted commentary for each text.
Writing Tips: I’m not sharing writing tips, but rather publishing tips, because this information tends to be harder to find. And, who knows, I might dedicate another piece entirely to what some of these writers say about craft. But this is not that piece.

These are the new/young writers we will be exploring:

How did they get published bookshelf.JPG

Marlon James (Black Leopard, Red Wolf, A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Book of Night Women, John Crow’s Devil)
Zeyn Joukhadar (The Map of Salt and Stars)
Tomi Adeyemi (Children of Blood and Bone)
Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing, The Fire This Time, Men We Reaped, Salvage the Bones, Where the Line Bleeds)
Celeste Ng (Little Fires Everywhere, Everything I Never Told You)
Madeline Miller (Circe, The Song of Achilles, Galatea)
Angie Thomas (On the Come Up, The Hate U Give)

I chose these writers to be our examples not simply based on their popularity and their relevance alone. It’s also more than that. I wanted to highlight not just how White men can get published, but how everyone else can get published too, including Black writers, Asian writers, women, non-Western writers/writers who tell non-Western stories, and LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex, Asexual) writers. This is important. White people, especially White men, have owned the publishing stage for centuries. But what about the rest of us?

This post is for the rest of us.

Marlon James

Black Leopard Red Wolf, A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Book of Night Women, John Crow’s Devil

I read Marlon James for the first time just last month with his newest book Black Leopard Red Wolf (BLRW), the first of the Dark Star Trilogy. If you have not heard of this book and want more information before reading on, I recommend reading my dear friend RodKelly’s review here. For further reading, check out Darryl’s review here or Jessie’s review here.

What makes Marlon James such a potent case study in this discussion is not simply that he is perhaps the most brilliant writer of our generation (if such a thing can be said definitively,) but rather it is because Marlon James writes and creates so obviously counter to Western rules for storytelling. Before diving into Marlon James’s path to publishing, I think it is important to highlight why it is so amazing that he got published at all.

Here are a few examples of Western publishing rules, based on what readers “want” and how Marlon James breaks them all.

Readers want short books (between 70,000-100,000 words or 140 pages-300 pages.) BLRW is over 600 pages long.
Readers want to trust the narrator. In Marlon James’s talk at a Politics and Prose event, which you can watch here, he begins by talking about this very thing.
“One of the things that is different, I think, between a lot of African folk stories and a lot of European folk stories is that in a lot of those [European] stories, the very simple act of telling a story sort of gives a guarantee of authenticity— of authority. It is one reason I think we have huge issues when it turns out a person is lying to us. Whereas in a lot of African folktales, ‘the Trickster’ is telling the story… you already know you can’t completely trust this person, even as you are being swayed by the narrative.”
With BLRW, there was a sizable rift between those who liked the book and those who did not. Those who liked the book, normally rated it at 4-5 stars, meaning they LOVED it. Those who did not like the book, normally rated it around 1-2 stars, meaning they HATED it. And after reading many reviews from people who hated it, I noticed a pattern. Those who hated BLRW tended to hate it because they were never sure what to believe; they felt confused by the fact that we aren’t supposed to trust the narrator. Western storytelling rules are so ingrained in us that any other cultural approach to storytelling can feel like nails on chalkboard. This is just one example.
Readers want Good vs Evil stories, where our characters are clearly Good or clearly Evil. This desire is based on Western, Christian morals, as Marlon James argues in his interview with Roxane Gay, written up by Christian Orozco at the LA Times here.
“Where there is the usual black and white between good and evil, James replaces it with gray areas of moral ambiguity,” Orozco writes.
“The thing about a lot of West fantasies is that it’s still following European archetypes,” James said. “Evil is clearly evil. Evil is Sauron. That reflects a Calvinist, Christian worldview.”
But in BLRW, for example, all of James’s characters are both good and evil in their own unique ways. And even for characters that appear to be more evil than the others, it is only true because that is the perspective of the narrator, who we can’t trust. Perspective— in its human form— morphs truth, and therefore, stories should be muddied with personal attachment, memory, biases, culture, and trust. But Western readers have been conditioned to want archetypes they recognize. Marlon James pushes readers to think differently.
Readers want stories that fit into a genre. When you walk into your favorite bookstore, what’s the first thing you do? You probably head straight for your preferred section AKA your preferred genre. It’s natural for us to go where we are most comfortable first, where we know will we find something we like, where we know many of the authors’ names on the shelves, where we know what to expect. And publishers know this. That’s why they need to know the genre of your manuscript before they read it or even consider it. So what about books like BLRW that play with genre in new ways? BLRW, for instance, fits within the Fantasy genre, but it is also Literary, but it’s also an epic adventure, but it’s also a folktale, but it’s also a Detective story, but it’s also… and on and on we could go. Writers who play with genre are playing with fire. They might not get published, as the industry reacts negatively to what it can’t pinpoint in their market analyses. BUT! This is a huge but. But sometimes genre blending can blow readers away. BLRW is my go-to contemporary example. Michael B. Jordan has already bought the rights to BLRW for a movie adaptation. Sales have been high. And the buzz about the book online is staggering. Publishers are a business, meaning they play it safe a majority of the time so that they don’t lose money. But when a book like BLRW comes around, the risk can be worth it.

5. Readers want clear storytelling. This can be applied to many different areas of writing, but I’d like to focus on just one element here: how writers choose to reveal the past— flashbacks. Readers typically want flashbacks to operate like a quick pit stop on a road trip. Your destination is the beach, but you’re going to have to stop along the way for gas every so often. Make those stops as brief as possible. This means not only short, but simple. The main story can divert to one memory at a time; it can’t stop for a memory that turns into another memory that turns into another memory.

But Marlon James’s flashbacks are much more complex. Again, in his talk at Politics and Prose, he says,

“… all the characters, in the midst of stories, keep telling stories. Stories loop on stories loop on stories. Sometimes the reader ends up a drift. I had to tell a critic that was deliberate. I kinda want you lost at sea. Don’t worry, the current will take you back home. But I do kinda want you lost in story.”

Confusion can set in here, especially with readers who aren’t used to being challenged. In order to enjoy and get BLRW; however, you have to trust that the writer (the current) will take you back home again. Simply let the waves carry you where they may. It’s liberating to be able to this. But most readers don’t know how, because Western stories don’t test us. It’s like being asked to suddenly lift a box that’s twice your weight. If those muscles aren’t trained, you will inevitably drop the box and/or hurt yourself. Books like BLRW can train those muscles so that we can continue reading books that tell stories in new, unorthodox ways.

6. Readers want sex ONLY if it fits into our heteronormative ideas about what sex is and should be. BLRW is full of sex— great sex and bad sex and rape. Typically, we expect to find sexy stuff in Romance books and that’s pretty much it. If you find sex in another genre, it will either be metaphorical (in Literary Fiction) or it won’t be sex at all, and instead will be rape (in Thrillers.) Those are your options. And even then it is almost always sex between a cis-male and a cis-female. Rarely do we get to read about sex between men and men, women and women, or mixed groups. And NEVER do we get to read about sex between people who are Trans, non-binary, gender fluid, or Intersex. BLRW presents sex in ways most of us have never seen. It’s Queer. It’s sensual. It’s oral and penetrative and full of touch. There’s great sex between consenting folks. And there is rape and assault and sexual violence that shatters you to the core.

Marlon James, again at his talk at Politics and Prose, says this about sex in BLRW,

“Gender fluidity, sexual identity— all these things— even plural pronouns, Africans have been doing that for 4,000 years. I’m glad y’all just caught up… The origins of homophobia in the Continent [Africa] are actually really recent. And has a lot to do with Evangelical Christianity.”

7. White readers want stories that pander to and center Whiteness. Because publishing (and most media) have been run and operated by White people historically, White stories are the ones being told. Any story that is not about White people, then, must make itself relatable and digestible for White audiences. Today, we are seeing a beautiful burgeoning of writers of color— especially Black writers becoming household names. Marlon James is one such Black writer. But the industry demands many writers of color to make changes to their stories so that White people remain comfortable. For writers of color who refuse, they face punishment— low sales, criticism, silencing, tone-policing, or rejection in general. Marlon James’s writing centers Black characters, stories, histories, and cultures. For his work to even exist is such a gift. But it is often hard-won.

In his interview with q on cbc, “Marlon James on Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce's 'Formation' and pandering to white audiences,” James talks about “the conversation about the book cover,” when writers of color are sitting down with publishers and making decisions about cover art. James discusses how those decisions are all based on what White women, specifically, will buy, which, inevitably, comes at the cost of the story. James says,

“I personally don’t think this White woman exists that they’re pandering to. But it’s selling your own audience short. I face it all the time. For my second novel… the British publisher asked me if I would rewrite it in a distanced 3rd person to basically turn it into Jane Austen whips Negroes. Who is that pandering to?”

In Jia Tolentino’s piece for The New Yorker, “Why Marlon James Decided to Write an African Game of Thrones,” we learn that BLRW was born from James’s impulse,

“to reclaim all the stuff I like—court intrigue, monsters, magic…I wanted black pageantry. I wanted just one novel where someone like me is in it, and I don’t have to look like I just walked out of H. P. Lovecraft, with a bone in my hair, and my lips are bigger than my eyes, and I’m saying some shit like ‘Oonga boonga boonga.’ Or else I’m some fucker named Gagool and I’m thwarting you as you get the diamonds.”

White comfort and White centering has plagued the publishing industry forever, so for writers who push against that— who center non-White, non-Christian, non-hetero communities and experiences— publication can be even more difficult than it already is. But the audience is there. There is an audience for those stories. And I hope that publishing starts to figure that out as more and more writers of color succeed.

8. Readers want easy. This, ultimately, is one of the biggest rules Marlon James breaks. Readers want reading to be easy, recreational, digestible. Some readers particularly of the Literary Fiction arena like to be challenged, but they are fewer in number than the majority who want “easy.” The style has to be easy to read, the characters have to be easily understood and accessible, the plot has to be easy to follow, and the messages have to be easy to swallow. When writers make any one of these elements hard, they jeopardize publication. Marlon James makes ALL of these elements hard. He wants us to grapple with his stories. He wants us to struggle. To struggle is an act of love. To struggle requires patience. To struggle requires endurance. To struggle requires growth. Marlon James wants us to grow.

So how did a writer who breaks all of the rules get published at all?

Basically, when Marlon James wrote his first book John Crow’s Devil, he sent it to agents and was rejected over and over. But when a published writer got her hands on a chapter, she helped Marlon James get it into the right hands. In Alex Preston’s interview with Marlon James, “Marlon James: ‘You have to risk going too far” published in The Guardian, we hear the number of rejections Marlon James received… 78. James explains his reaction to the rejections,

“Marlon James on 'A Brief History of Seven Killings’” by Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-marlon-james-brief-history-of-seven-killings-ent-1102-20151101-story.html

“I remember that somebody said it was the subject matter – that nobody wants to read about the Caribbean, that it was because it was super dark, because there are no white people in it. At that time, dark had to be couched in a certain way. It had to be The Lovely Bones. It had to have a redemptive narrative. I think we’re still in a place where we want a white person to play a part, even in a black story. I briefly toyed with putting my [white] friend Gerard’s picture in my biog and sending the book back out.”

After so many rejections, Marlon James wanted to move on, forget this first book attempt, and leave it in the dust. According to Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker,

“He [Marlon] told friends to delete the copies [of John Crow’s Devil] that he’d e-mailed to them, and ceremonially burned the manuscript on the balcony of his apartment.”

“There was a time I actually thought I was writing the kind of stories people didn’t want to read,” Marlon James told Today, according to The Guardians’ Matthew Weaver and Mark Brown in their article, “Man Booker Winner’s Debut Novel Rejected 80 Times.”

Tolentino writes,

“But, in 2004, he [Marlon] took an old copy of the first chapter to a workshop held by Calabash, a literary festival on the south coast of Jamaica that had been founded just a few years before. The workshop was taught that year by the writer Kaylie Jones, whose novel “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries” had been adapted by Merchant Ivory Productions. She found the chapter astonishingly assured, and asked to see the rest of the book. James located a copy of the complete manuscript in his e-mail outbox. Jones read it, and offered to edit it free of charge.”

She then passed John Crow’s Devil on to Akashic Books in New York and, again, according to Alex Preston, it,

“was published to a warm critical reception in 2005. The narrative from here is often painted as an inexorable rise to literary stardom, but James reminds me that his second novel, The Book of Night Women, a brutal 18th-century slave narrative that takes place on a Jamaican sugar plantation, was also turned down almost 20 times, before being picked up by Riverhead Books and published in 2009.”

After John Crow’s Devil was published, Marlon James went on a small book tour, where, “he felt minor,” according to Tolentino.

“In those years,” Tolentino continues, “there was an active independent literary blogosphere, with Web sites like the Millions and Bookslut dissecting the publishing industry. As James began work on his second book, he created a blog of his own.”

This kept him writing and connecting with others in the industry through the hardship of publishing. Alex Preston continues on to say,

“It was his next book, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which established James as a major literary force. When Michael Wood, the Man Booker chair that year, was asked how long deliberations about the winner had taken, he replied carefully that they’d been in the room for two hours. Someone else who was there tells me – on the assurance of anonymity – that it was barely 10 minutes before they agreed on James’s extraordinary novel. “Even among these enormously sophisticated readers, they had never read anything like this... everyone was blown away.”

“It changed everything,” James says of the prize. “I visited countless countries. I’d started thinking about this novel [BLRW] well before I won the Booker, so I wasn’t consumed with expectations about what I was going to do next.”

“He suggested to his agent a “quiet, literary” novel about Jamaicans in New York. Then he began to speak about fantasy. “There are people who follow the Booker with over-ambitious books that fail. I worried that this –” he taps Black Leopard... – “might just come across as me going bigger, harder, faster. It was more reason for me to choose the quiet, literary, observant, contemporary novel. The mature and wise follow-up instead of a book with flipping monsters in it. But I was still thinking of myself as a kind of underdog writer, someone who’d be able to get away with it.”

And he did, indeed.

How Did Marlon James Get Published?: For Marlon James, the key was finding the right people.

Advice for Young Writers: If you face rejection for a manuscript, and you feel like giving up, try to meet other writers. Go to conferences, go to workshops, try an MFA program. If you can’t afford some of those options, start small and meet the writers in your local community. Libraries hold free events sometimes, so check your local library’s events calendar. Sometimes it isn’t that your writing is bad or that your story is lacking. Sometimes it’s finding someone who can connect you from A to B. If, at first, this person isn’t your agent or editor, don’t stress. That person could be another writer. You have to find your allies, whoever they might end up being.

Zeyn Joukhadar

The Map of Salt and Stars, The Thirty Names of Night (2020)

Disclaimer: I was unable to find much information online about Zeyn Joukhadar’s path to publication, but I found enough to at least begin the conversation. I have reached out to Zeyn Joukhadar to ask for further insight, but I am still waiting on a reply; I know he is super busy. Should he get back to me, I will return to this piece and edit/add further information. I will, of course, notify you should this happen.

But for now, here is what I know.

As luck would have it, I am existing in and am able to write about a special moment in Zeyn Joukhadar’s career. Joukhadar’s debut novel The Map of Salt and Stars was released in May 2018. If you want to read more about this book, I recommend reading S.K’s review here.

I love this opportunity to shout from the rooftops about a debut writer. Especially about a new writer who is doing real work to center Syrian writers and stories in a publishing industry that is so Euro-centric.

I mean, just look at the cover of The Map of Salt and Stars. There is Arabic written on the front cover!

https://www.amazon.com/Map-Salt-Stars-Novel/dp/1501169033

“Other Arab Americans seeing the Arabic on the cover,” Joukhadar stated at an event put together at the Strand Bookstore, “and saying like ‘I have not seen an English language book with Arabic on the cover,’ has been really moving. I mean people have cried and been like ‘I see myself in a way I haven’t seen myself before.’”

When we talked about Marlon James, we broke down just how many Western rules he breaks in his writing style. Zeyn Joukhadar breaks just as many Western rules, but not necessarily in his writing style, but in what he writes about and who he is. I feel that, similar to Marlon James, this makes it even more incredible that he was published in this industry. It is worth talking about these things because, well, they matter.

Zeyn Joukhadar is Syrian American and writes about Syrian American experiences, feelings, and cultures. How many Syrian writers have you read before? Go ahead, think about it. I know I have only read one— Zeyn Joukhadar. No others. Why is that? Certainly not because there is a shortage of Syrian writers. And certainly not because they don’t have brilliant and mesmerizing stories to tell. It’s because the publishing industry excludes them. According to a 2016 article by The Guardian called “Publishing industry is overwhelmingly white and female, US study finds” written by Alison Flood,
“Multicultural children’s publisher Lee & Low Books surveyed staff at 34 American publishers, including Penguin Random House and Hachette , as well as eight review journals, to establish a baseline to measure diversity among publishing staff. They found that 79% were white. Of the remainder, Asians/Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders made up 7.2% of staff, Hispanics/Latinos/Mexicans 5.5%, and black/African Americans 3.5%.”
And yes, there is a correlation between staff demographics and what kinds of books are being published,
“Does the lack of diverse books closely correlate to the lack of diverse staff? The percentages, while not exact, are proportional to how the majority of books look nowadays – predominately white. Cultural fit would seem to be relevant here,” writes publisher Jason Low. “Or at least in publishing’s case, what is at work is the tendency – conscious or unconscious – for executives, editors, marketers, sales people and reviewers to work with, develop, and recommend books by and about people who are like them.”
This is but one reason why The Map of Salt and Stars is so special; it is a story that does not center White, Western comfort. It exists to tell a very real, very important story, and, hopefully, inspire change off the page. Again, at the Strand Book Store event, Joukhadar says,
“This book [The Map of Salt and Stars] is a starting point… I think it is really important to read— seek out and read— the words of people who are born in Syria, who are themselves refugees, because I am not a refugee, right? And I was born here; I was born in New York City. So yeah I have really strong and visceral ties to that place and those people. At the same time… it is important to read the work and words of Syrians, of refugees, of displaced people in their own words… I also really hope that people will take from this a willingness and ambition to then go out and engage with the political system in this country…”
This is the power of stories.
Zeyn Joukhadar is a member of the QTPOC (Queer and Trans People of Color) community. The publishing industry is not just predominantly White; it’s predominantly straight and cisgendered. But things are slowly improving.
According to “Important Milestones in LGBTQ Publishing,” written up by the Hachette Book Group,
“…the number of LGBTQ books on the market has increased. Likewise, more LGBTQ characters are popping up throughout contemporary literature, especially in YA, science fiction, and fantasy. Diversity in YA, a website monitoring inclusion in today’s book world, qualifies these trends by two main criteria. First, a book must have a main character who identifies as LGBTQ or deals with LGBTQ issues. Second, those issues must be overt and central to the plot. While these numbers show progress toward inclusivity, there is room to grow. YA author and blogger Malinda Lo, a co-founder of Diversity in YA, tracks LGBTQ representation in the publishing industry. Here are a few of her findings: LGBTQ YA Novels Lead the Charge. Mainstream publishers released 47 LGBTQ YA novels in 2014. In 2015, that number rose to 54. In in 2016, LGBTQ YA books reached their highest publishing rates ever, at 79 titles. YA novels tend to follow Cisgender Gay protagonists. Between 2003 and 2013, Lo notes, 45 percent of main characters in LGBTQ YA-qualifying books were male at birth and continued identifying as male throughout the story, making them cisgender. In 2015, that number rose to 55 percent of main characters being cisgender males and identifying as gay, bisexual, or queer, respectively. In 2016, cisgender female main characters rose in prominence, representing 43 percent of these books’ main characters.”
For a Trans writer to be achieving notoriety and success with his debut novel is a big deal. This is a moment for Trans readers and writers out there, as well as other QTPOC. It’s a moment to be seen, to be heard, to feel less alone. It’s a moment to celebrate being Trans. It’s a moment to witness the joys that come with success. It’s a moment filled with excitement. It’s human and tender and even a bit scary. It’s big.

So how did a writer who breaks all of the rules get published?

https://picgra.com/user/zeyn_joukhadar/2981816293

Like many writers, Joukhadar had an interest in literature and writing from a relatively young age. According to Joukhadar’s Tweet here, he founded and published a Literary Magazine in high school for three years. But he pursued other interests in college. He received his PhD at Brown University in Pathobiology and from there worked as a biomedical research scientist. But soon enough writing called to him again and he decided to write full time, leaving biomedical research behind.

Community is important to many writers, and Joukhadar is no different. He is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and American Mensa. He has supported emerging writers of color through writing workshops. His work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review, The Saturday Evening Post, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net.

But, interestingly, museums and artistic centers have been an important home for Joukhadar as well. He has been an artist in residence at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California; the Fes Medina Project in Fes, Morocco; and Beit al-Atlas in Beirut, Lebanon. Currently, he is a writer in residence at the Arab American National Museum.

In addition to Fiction, Joukhadar also writes stunning poetry. Check out one of his poetry readings at the Dearborn open mic here.

But how exactly did Joukhadar go from being unpublished to published?

A magical thing called #DVPit.

Started back in 2016, #DVPit is a pitch event hosted on Twitter, where marginalized voices are centered. Because publishing excludes pretty much everyone who isn’t able-bodied, cis-gendered, Straight, White, and Western, #DVPit was founded to make space for the rest of us to connect directly with agents and editors. Here, Joukhadar connected with his literary agent. In the Acknowledgements of The Map of Salt and Stars, Joukhadar shares,

“I am also endlessly grateful to Amy Rosenbaum for finding me via #DVPit and referring me to Michelle [his agent], an act of generosity I will never forget. Thank you to my friends in the #DVSquad for sharing in this journey.”

How did Zeyn Joukhadar get published?: Joukhadar found his literary agent through #DVPit. While I can’t speak to Joukhadar’s other attempted querying methods, it is safe to say that he, like all writers, faced rejection and had to find creative ways to pitch his ideas.

Advice to young writers: Never underestimate Twitter and social media as a means for landing an agent. Pay attention to pitch contests or pitch events online and participate whenever you can. Not only is it a smart way to find an agent, it’s also solid practice for pitching your work to the public, which will come in handy should you get published and go on book tour. Writers aren’t always naturally talented marketers, especially for our own work. So practice in these forms can build new skills that will only serve you in the long run.

Tomi Adeyemi

Children of Blood of Bone

Tomi Adeyemi achieved huge fame at the age of 24 for the first book in her Legacy of Orïsha series, Children of Blood and Bone, which I read earlier this year. When you look at the book today, you might say, “Of course this would get published! It’s a brilliant idea!” But even still Adeyemi had to find her own, unique path to publication, which we can all learn from.

If you’d like to read more about Children of Blood and Bone before I dive in to Tomi Adeyemi herself, feel free to read my Bookstagram friend, Whit’s review here.

Furthermore, if you want to read more about Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone, and what young writers can learn from this magical book’s first chapter, check out my other blog post titled, “What 2018's Most Popular Reads Can Teach Us About Writing Successful First Chapters.”

Adeyemi is the first writer on my list who is a writing coach, which was amazing for me (the researcher) to discover, as it means there are tons of blog posts written in her words that can shed a light on her experiences getting published. In fact, she mentions her blog in an interview with Krista Hutley called “#ALAMW19 Recap: Interviewing Tomi Adeyemi, author of Children of Blood and Bone, 2019 Morris Award Finalist.” Adeyemi says,

“I started a writing blog my senior year of college because someone told me it would help me get published (I didn’t know at the time that they were talking about non-fiction publishing)! But as I continued doing posts I found that synthesizing what I learned about writing was not only helpful to me, but it was extremely rewarding to see how it helped others.”

But writing a blog was not what got Children of Blood and Bone published.

In an interview with Baihley Gentry at Writer’s Digest called, “Nothing Wasted: Interview with Tomi Adeyemi, Author of ‘Children of Blood and Bone,’” when asked what she did to “break in” to the publishing industry, Adeyemi answers,

“I think the most important thing I did right was move from my first book to my second book when I did… I queried about 60 agents over 4 months with my first book, and got 15 full requests. Everyone rejected the book, but 10-ish of those full requests gave me great feedback along the lines of “You’re a good writer, you have something special, but I couldn’t sell this book in the current marketplace.” By the time I heard that from enough agents that I respected, I knew my first book wasn’t going to do it for me, so I pivoted to my second and started making plans. Had I queried 300+ agents just waiting for one person to say yes and take a chance on me, I never would’ve been able to write and revise my breakout book in time. I also wouldn’t have found the agents who were right for me.”

But don’t worry— Adeyemi doesn’t seem to mourn her first book too much anymore (not after the success of Children of Blood and Bone.)

Tomi Adeyemi writes in her blog post titled, “What It’s Like to Work with a Literary Agent,”

“With my first book I sent it to about sixty agents, I got close on a couple of them but all of them were rejections. I’m glad they rejected it because that book wasn’t right for today’s settings. They were able to give me a lot of good feedback, which allowed me to do better in Children of Blood and Bone. That’s another great thing about this process. Every single time you send a query you can learn from it, and if you’re lucky enough to get feedback, you can do better the next time! It’s not necessarily about getting an agent right away. It’s about learning as much as you can because of that your writing is going to be better.”

After becoming inspired to write Children of Blood and Bone, (if you would like to hear the story behind the inspiration, watch Tomi Adeyemi’s interview with Jimmy Fallon here,) Adeyemi decided that she wanted to submit the idea to Pitch Wars. But that took preparation.

According to Katrina Niidas Holm’s piece in Publishers Weekly titled “Spring 2018 Flying Starts: Tomi Adeyemi,”

“Is Tomi Adeyemi the new J.K. Rowling?” by David Canfield, https://ew.com/books/2018/04/13/tomi-adeyemi-children-blood-bone-ya-profile/

“Adeyemi was certain the concept [Children of Blood and Bone] would be perfect for Pitch Wars, but applications were due in 70 days. In May 2016, she traded a full-time marketing career for a part-time teaching gig and got to work. When her submission was accepted, she quit teaching, moved in with her boyfriend, and started writing full-time.”

In Adeyemi’s interview with Baihley Gentry, she says,

“I had about 75 days to outline, write, and revise a 95,000 word fantasy so that I could enter Pitch Wars, which then changed my life and writing career forever.”

Pitch Wars was Adeyemi’s path to publication and it seemed to be a really positive experience for her.

According to Holm’s piece in Publishers Weekly,

“Through Pitch Wars, Adeyemi found agents Hillary Jacobson and Alexandra Machinist of ICM Partners. Though Jacobson and Machinist weren’t the only agents to express interest, they were the first to tell Adeyemi that the manuscript needed major changes, and their vision for the novel convinced Adeyemi to sign with them.”

“Three drafts later, Children of Blood and Bone went out to publishers. The book ultimately sold to Tiffany Liao at Henry Holt in a seven-figure preempt, but Adeyemi’s work was far from done. She and Liao toiled for 11 months, adding 200 pages to the manuscript. “Everything was different. Parts were ripped out in the middle and rewritten and rewritten again. Character arcs were changed. The world of the book was changed so many times with more research and sensitivity reads.” The effort paid off: Children of Blood and Bone received five starred reviews and debuted at #1 on the New York Times YA hardcover bestseller list.”

How Did Tomi Adeyemi Get Published?: She focused on creating the strongest pitch possible and took that passion to Pitch Wars, where she met her agents.

Advice for Young Writers: Don’t be afraid to set aside your first book and move on to the next idea, if your first book isn’t going anywhere. It’s natural for us to be protective of our art. But if you find yourself facing a certain number of rejections from agents or editors and that feels like too many, trust your gut and move on. Mourn your left-behind work, but don’t lose hope. Tomi Adeyemi is not the first writer to abandon ship and find incredible success with the next story. It sucks and it can hurt, but just look at Tomi Adeyemi’s face when the first copy of Children of Blood and Bone arrived in her mailbox! Your pain is valid; feel it and respect it. But don’t lose hope, because your next big thing could be ahead of you, just waiting for the chance to shine.

Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied, Sing, The Fire This Time, Men We Reaped, Salvage the Bones, Where the Line Bleeds

I read Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward in preparation for this blog post, and, (just because I have to share this excitement with you all,) I plan to read EVERY single book she has written and will write in the future. Her writing sucked me in immediately and I’m thrilled her writing is gaining more and more momentum. Our generation is so lucky to have her.

If you would like to hear a bit more about Salvage the Bones before learning about Jesmyn Ward, then check out Tay’s Bookstagram review here. Furthermore, if you would like to read a bit about Ward’s newest book Sing, Unburied Sing, then check out the AMAZING Reggie’s Bookstagram review here.

Remember those Western/White publishing rules I mentioned earlier with reference to Marlon James? They come into play again with Jesmyn Ward, but in a new light. Similarly to Marlon James, Jesmyn Ward centers Black stories in her books. In her interview with Louis Elliott at Bomb Magazine called, “Ghosts of History: An Interview with Jesmyn Ward,” Ward tells us,

“I’ve always wanted to write black characters who are multidimensional, who are complicated, who are sympathetic, who have soul.”

She goes on in her interview with The Millions, “Haunted by Ghosts: The Millions Interviews Jesmyn Ward” by Adam Vitcavage,

“I’m always thinking about how black people survive. How people are marginalized in the South and the way they still survive that oppression.”

By their very nature, these stories and topics are scary to big publishing houses and the industry itself— the industry that centers Whiteness and White experiences. For Ward’s writing to be published and celebrated as much as it is is a huge gift. And, much to readers’ excitement, Ward doesn’t seem to be planning on changing away from who she centers in her books.

When asked about her place in a Black-centered legacy, in an interview with The Guardian titled, “Jesmyn Ward: ‘So much of life is pain and sorrow and wilful ignorance’” by Vanessa Thorpe, Ward says,

“I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to. I’m proud of the fact that the people of the African diaspora fight to survive, to thrive, all over the world, so of course my work reflects this pride, this investment in telling our stories. And I don’t find that problematic.”

But, in the beginning, as Ward sent her stories to agents, she hit road blocks because of her subject matter. Again, in Ward’s interview with Elliot, she explains,

“When I first started sending out work, I kept encountering the idea that people wouldn’t read about the kind of people I was writing about—that this kind of work wouldn’t find an audience. People in power probably assumed that because I was writing about poor black southerners, no one would want to read about them.”

In her 2018 Tulane University Commencement Address, Ward sums up her arduous road to publication by hitting back at a singular message for aspiring writers: persist. (I actually recommend you watch/read the entire speech. It’s gorgeous.) She says,

“I thought I might try to be a writer one day, but in my early twenties, I was no Yaa Gyassi. I didn’t even understand what a plot was. I attempted to write short stories but found myself with pages of extended scenes instead. My characters were flat and unbelievable. My dialogue was painfully fake. While my ambitious, savvy, assertive friends who’d majored in economics and political science were being snatched up for jobs, I was applying for positions in marketing and television and journalism and never hearing anything back.”

So she moved home to Mississippi. But soon after, her brother was killed by a drunk driver.

“The urgency of Jesmyn Ward” by BERNARDINE EVARISTO. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/05/urgency-jesmyn-ward

“I did what I had to do: I applied for holiday work at the local Tommy Hilfiger outlet…I was the only one who’d earned a co-terminal master’s degree. I spoke with friends who lived in NYC, and they encouraged me to move there to search for work. I was desperate, so I moved to NYC and interviewed for a job in publishing. I worked there for two years. I wasn’t a very good publishing assistant. I was too depressed at my brother’s leaving, and too distracted by that persistent need to write, even badly. It was then that I realized completing university was not an ending, but instead was the beginning to finding my way to doing something meaningful. I learned that for most of us, there are no easy, singular ascents. And I realized I wanted to be a writer.”

“So I began to do the work, the work that my dream necessitated. I made an important choice; I took a step. I read widely. I read contemporary writers who were strangers to me, and I read classic writers I didn’t read in school… I made another choice: I took another step. I wrote bad poems that I hid from others, but I didn’t attempt to write any more short stories because I realized I had only a dim idea of the conversation, unspooling through the centuries, that I was attempting to join by writing literature. So I read more; for 2 ½ years, I read. And at the end of that time, I wrote and revised one short story. I made a choice, took another step. I applied for MFA programs, and was accepted to the MFA program at the great University of Michigan. I made a choice, took another step. I studied fiction at U of M; I wrote my first novel while I was there.”

Jesmyn Ward elaborates on this first book in “Jesmyn Ward On Weathering Rejection And Finding Her Stories” by Katie Berrington in Vogue,

"I had a quiet start…Few really paid much attention to my first novel and so no publishing houses were beating down my door to publish the second book."

Through it all, Ward claims, "My top priority is always working on craft rather than building connections."

Ward’s commencement speech continues to say,

“Jesmyn Ward” by Lee Daniels. http://time.com/collection/most-influential-people-2018/5217535/jesmyn-ward/

“…for a decade, I made the best choices I could. I tried not to bow under the weight of rejection. After Hurricane Katrina roared through my hometown, I moved there and worked as a teacher, and I revised my MFA thesis for three years. It took that long before a publisher decided to purchase the rights and publish it as a novel… Sometimes my stories thrilled readers. Sometimes my stories bored my readers and they couldn’t even finish reading them. Whatever the response, I upheld my end of the bargain: I read, wrote, and revised. I chose education, again and again. And I submitted my work to the gatekeepers again and again, and I faced rejection again and again. I made choices, I took steps, and I persisted.”

After winning the National Book Award TWICE, and being the first woman to do so, Ward shares this advice in her commencement speech,

“My years in college and afterward taught me this: success is not the result of making one good choice, of taking one step. Real success requires step after step after step after step. It requires choice after choice. It demands education and passion and commitment and persistence and hunger and patience. And not the easy hunger, like the hunger for sweets, that plagued me so when I was young: for instant success, for a lifetime of reward after four years of effort. Sometimes, this kind of success happens for young people, people like Zadie Smith and Edwidge Danticat, who are incredible gifted writers who bang out beautiful bestsellers in their late teens and early twenties. But for so many others, this doesn’t happen. For many others, success comes after hundreds of hours of work and lucky breaks and study and heartbreak and loss and wandering. As an adult, I learned this: persist. Work hard. Face rejection, weather the setbacks, until you meet the gatekeeper who will open a door for you. Sometimes you are twenty when you stumble upon an open doorway. Sometimes you are thirty. Sometimes you are forty or fifty or sixty… Take a step that will lead you toward the realization of your dream, and then take another, and another, and another.”

How did Jesmyn Ward get published?: Lifelong education and persistence are what guided Jesmyn Ward towards publication.

Advice to young writers: Take one step at a time and read through it all. Ward speaks to the importance of reading to her success often. If you are just on the cusp of admitting out loud that you want to be a writer, then read. Take the first step— whatever that is for you. If it’s applying to a writing program at the collegiate level, then apply. If it’s joining a local writing workshop, then join. If it’s sitting down with a pen and paper and diving in head first, then dive away. But read all the while. If you have your first book’s draft in your hands and you are preparing to revise, then read. Revise and challenge yourself with new ideas that you come up with while reading. If you send out the completed manuscript, and you get nothing but rejections, then read. Revise some more, read, go back to a place that celebrates learning and learn as much as you can. Then try again. Ward tells us to keep trying, keep stepping forward however you can. If you are standing at one end of a vast, rapid river, look for the first stone and step to it. Then look for the next stone that isn’t underwater, that is sturdy enough to hold you, and step to it. It might take years, trial and error, and failures, but eventually you will cross the river.

Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere, Everything I never told you

While I have not yet read Everything I Never Told You, I just put down Little Fires Everywhere and it made me all the more excited to talk about Celeste Ng.

If you want to read a bit more about Little Fires Everywhere, specifically, before continuing, check out Maura Fertich’s review here.

Celeste Ng’s first two novels were published with a bang; readers fell in love quickly with her stories and style and critics were no less thrilled. According to Ng’s website,

“Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the ALA’s Alex Award, and the Medici Book Club Prize, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It has been translated into over two dozen languages.”

“Celeste's second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, was published by Penguin Press in September 2017, and is a New York Times bestseller, Amazon's #2 best book and best fiction book of 2017, and was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications. It was also the winner of the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and will soon be published abroad in more than 20 countries.”

Furthermore, Little Fires Everywhere is also being adapted into a TV miniseries by Hulu starring Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon.

So, to say the least, Celeste Ng is what many of us would deem “a successful writer.” That phrase. It’s a phrase we all use, and we all generally know what it means, and many of us secretly long for the phrase to be attributed to us one day (I don’t see that as a bad thing to confess.) In terms of good role models, Celeste Ng is up there. But, like most of us, Ng’s writing career was not born without hard work, focus, persistence, and creativity. She needed help along the way, both to find the courage to be a writer and to find success in publishing.

According to Ng’s interview with Melissa Hung “Catching Up With Celeste Ng” on Shondaland, Celeste Ng, at first, did not believe writing could be her full-time career.

“[For] a lot of my early years, I didn’t think that writer was something you could do as a job. I always thought I was going to do something else and write on the side.”

Ng received her bachelor’s degree in 2002 from Harvard in English, and then had a brief stint in textbook publishing before focusing on her writing full-time. This was one of the first moments in Ng’s career where her mentors pushed her to pursue writing seriously.

In “Told you: Celeste Ng’s advice for writers,” interviewer Julie Krug tells us that,

“Several of Ng’s teachers acted as beacons, lighting a path to a successful career. One professor cautioned her about embarking on a PhD track in English. Ng argued that she could land a tenure-track job and write on the side. The professor encouraged her to put the writing first, to go for an MFA – and it was just the “shove” she needed.”

Again, from her interview with Melissa Hung, Ng reveals,

“It wasn’t until I started working in publishing and I realized that really wasn’t the job for me that a mentor said, "You keep saying that writing is going to be on the side. Why don’t you try and switch it?" I looked at my savings and I went, "OK, I need to try this." I went to grad school and then I said, "I have this amount of time that I can afford to try and finish drafts of a novel and if I can’t, then I’ll have to figure out something else to do. But I’m going to at least see if I can get a book together." And so I think that was the moment where I was like, "This is the sink-or-swim moment."”

In this sink or swim moment, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan in 2006. There, she met Anne Stameshkin, a classmate who would not only become a long-term friend, but who connected Ng to her first position as a blog editor for Fiction Writers Review in 2009.

From “Everything She Graciously Told Me: An Interview with Celeste Ng” by Erika Dreifus, Ng tells us about this experience.

“As newspaper review sections folded, Anne’s idea was to create a space for reviews of fiction, interviews with fiction writers, and craft essays—all written by fiction writers. In the early days, it was a one-woman show, with Anne soliciting pieces, assigning reviews, and doing all the blogging. Anne asked me to write an essay for the site’s launch, and over the next year I wrote several reviews for FWR, but behind the scenes I kept emailing Anne with tidbits of literary news as blog fodder. I think I was more of a nuisance than a help! After a while, Anne suggested that I write some blog posts myself, and in 2009 I took over as blog editor. I stepped away in 2012 (partly so I could finally finish my novel!) but the site remains important to me. It’s where I wrote my first essays and reviews, and where I first learned to blog. It gave me the chance to work with many writers I’d already admired...”

During this time, Ng also wrote short stories, which gained her important recognition.

In her interview with Julie Krug, we learn that,

“She began her writing career with short stories and won the prestigious Pushcart Prize in 2012 for her short story Girls, At Play.”

“Short fiction will always be a flame of mine,” Ng said in her interview with Dani Hedlund at Tethered by Letters.

“Joshua Jackson has joined the Hulu adaption of Celeste Ng’s ‘Little Fires Everywhere” by Kevin Slane. https://www.boston.com/culture/entertainment/2019/05/20/joshua-jackson-has-joined-the-hulu-adaption-of-celeste-ngs-little-fires-everywhere

As Ng stepped closer and closer to writing the novels we know and love, she was still uncertain as to what would come from all of this.

According to Ng’s interview with Julie Krug,

“I wasn’t actually sure the book [Everything I Never Told You] was going to be published until my agent sent it out and started getting interested phone calls from editors. And I’m not 100 percent convinced this isn’t all a dream.”

But what about that moment before she even had an agent to turn to?

In the same article, Ng recommends writers at this stage, who have a completed manuscript ready to go,

“…understand the overall publishing process: how to query an agent; how submission works, whether you’re working with an agent or submitting to contests; what happens to a book – or should happen to a book – after it’s accepted by a publisher. And it’s important to know what each of the major figures – agent, editor, publicist, and so on—can and should do for you. There are many great books out there explaining the whole process. I definitely recommend reading one before you start. But the most important thing overall is the writing itself: If your book isn’t good, the rest of this stuff doesn’t matter.”

All writers who are searching for an agent or an editor should have certain criteria in mind, so that they find the right people for the work. Ng tells us about her criteria.

“My only real criterion was that my agent and editor and publisher see the book in the same light that I did: that race and culture was part of it, but that it wasn’t just a book about race and culture, that it was a book people of many different backgrounds could relate to.”

In Penguin Random House’s interview with Virginia Smith, the editor for Little Fires Everywhere, we get a sneak peek at what editors look for when they are acquiring a new book.

“It depends on the kind of book, of course, but I love to encounter a fully-realized world. And Celeste does that as well as anyone writing today. From the first line of Little Fires Everywhere, you are dropped into a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, where everything is meticulously planned. And where something is deeply wrong. The gun is loaded, so to speak, and you’re dreading the moment it fires.”

“When it comes to race and idealism 'good intentions are not enough” by Bill Radke and Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong. https://kuow.org/stories/when-it-comes-race-and-idealism-good-intentions-are-not-enough/

All of this gives us a fairly in-depth look at Ng’s publication journey. But there is one final thought I would like to share. I believe it touches deep on something all of us writers need to hear and need to feel for ourselves.

Celeste Ng spoke with Pamela Avila at BLARB in “Disruption for Change: An Interview with Celeste Ng,”

“I wrote this novel [Little Fires Everywhere] from 2010 or so to the spring of 2016 — so in a very different political climate and, largely, an era in which the idea of “President Trump” would have been laughable, or at least more laughable than it is now. So it’s interesting that the novel has such a resonance in our current sociopolitical era, a time when many people are having to face hard questions about race, class, and gender in our country and decide whether they’ll let these problems stand as they are, or if they’ll work to make things better. There’s a moment in the novel where Mia asks: “What are you going to do about it?” That’s a question I ask myself, and others, frequently. Change never happens without action — Newton was right, even when we’re talking metaphorically. Even the most gradual changes — whether we’re talking about changes in opinion, changes in policy, or biological evolution — happen in response to some kind of pressure, often a small one. One of the biggest barriers to change is the feeling that what you can do won’t be enough. But the truth is that even very small actions can ripple outwards and have huge and far-reaching effects. In other words, the fires you start can be little, but don’t think they don’t matter, or that they won’t spread.”

How did Celeste Ng get published?: In a fortunate cocktail of circumstances, Ng had a diverse support system, including mentors who encouraged her to focus on writing and friends who are also writers.

Advice to young writers: Listen to your desire to write. If you are like Celeste Ng and you doubt your ability to write at every turn, don’t let it stop you. If you need a support system, try to find one like Celeste Ng did. If that support system is found in the classroom or in the larger writing community, then find it and let yourself write without doubt. It may sound impossible to totally silence the doubt in your mind. Trust me, I get that. And, if we are being honest, you will never silence it completely. Just never let it stop you.

Madeline Miller

Circe, Song of Achilles, Galatea

I read Circe in preparation for this piece and the process of reading really made me want to better understand its writer, Madeline Miller. Through her tactile, magical, earthy prose, I pictured this delightful nerd— obsessed with Greek myths, Gods, and Goddesses— and I wondered, “How do nerds like us get published?” The simple answer is in the question itself: she let her passions and loves and nerdiness light the way.

Before we go on, if you want to read more about Circe, feel free to check out this Bookstagram review by Kerry, Erin’s review here, Nina’s review here, and/or my dear friend, Kayla’s review here.

“Styled to a T | Madeline Miller” by Liza Nelson. https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/styled-to-a-t-madeline-miller/

Madeline Miller is an exciting addition to this collection, because her path towards publication began much differently than the other authors discussed in this piece.

Unlike the others, Miller got her start in the Classics and Drama— not specifically in writing Fiction. In fact, she actively avoided writing as a study, sequestering it into its own category as a hobby, something done on the side. Miller majored in Latin and ancient Greek at Brown, while doing theater and writing too. According to her interview with Wendy Smith at Publishers Weekly called “It’s All Greek to Madeline Miller,” her writing at this time was,

“all contemporary fiction, and I was mostly doing it on my own; I was so obsessed with classics courses that I didn’t want to waste class time on anything else.”

In her interview with AbeBooks, Miller reveals that she was,

“teaching and directing Shakespeare plays full time, so writing often had to wait for weekends or vacations; I simply didn’t have the mental space for regular days.”

Writing was not Miller’s focus at this time in her career, so let’s honor what was: the Classics and Theater. It was these two loves that bridged the gap between her passion for the myths and for writing. In her talk at the Gaithersburg Book Festival in 2018, Miller tells us about her path towards writing. She began writing stories as a young girl, while, at the same time, being a voracious reader. But she did not write about the myths and classics, despite obsessing over them since childhood. Writing and the Classics were always separate.

“It wasn’t until I was out of college that I made the connection… and what made the connection was theatre…”

According to Miller’s interview with Kira Cochrane at The Guardian, “The Saturday interview: Madeline Miller, Orange prize winner,”

“A friend had asked her to co-direct a production of Troilus and Cressida, which features a scene where Patroclus dies and Achilles is devastated. "Seeing that moment on stage," she says, "I just thought: I want to do more. As soon as the play was over, almost in a trance, I sat down in front of the computer, and started writing Patroclus's story.""

And this was the moment her debut novel, Song of Achilles, was born. What began as Patroclus’s story soon morphed into Achilles’s story. In her same interview with Publishers Weekly, we learn that,

“Miller’s breakthrough came at the New York State Summer Writers Institute—where, ironically, she was working on nonfiction.”

This is where she figured out how she wanted to tell Achilles’s story. Again, according to Miller’s interview with The Guardian,

“she started [Song of Achilles] in her early 20s, in the final year of her undergraduate degree at Brown University.”

https://authorsunbound.com/madeline-miller

But the story wasn’t finally told until ten years later. When asked why it took her ten years to write this novel, in her interview with AbeBooks, Miller says,

"But it wasn’t just about not having time - I was also learning how to write, trying to work through all my new author tics, figuring out how to tell a story. All the practice I was getting directing was a huge help, actually, since it’s hard to find a better teacher of storytelling than Shakespeare. I learned so much from him about pacing and characterization."

While she was writing, according to her interview with The Guardian, Miller completed her MA in Latin and Ancient Greek, and became a high school teacher in those subjects. Those ten years involved many difficult revisions, but in the end, Song of Achilles won readers’ hearts quickly and also won Miller the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction. For a debut author, this is an incredibly high achievement. From there, Miller could basically pursue any project she wished.

This is the part where we all ask, “That’s it?”

Kinda yeah. But I’ll also mention Ann Patchett.

Another important influence for Miller (though not necessarily a path to publication) was fellow writer Ann Patchett. The reason why I don’t believe this relationship helped Miller publish her first book is because the two writers did not meet until after Song of Achilles had entered the publication phase. But it might be fair to speculate that the friendship has helped Miller continue her success, since friends in any industry are strong support systems. If you want to read about their relationship in-depth, Something Rhymed has a piece called, “From Literary Protegee to Competition Rival: Our Interview with Madeline Miller,” written by Emma Claire Sweeney, which lays out their history clearly.

So yeah, “That’s it!”

How did Madeline Miller get published?: She followed her passions, spent ten years crafting the best manuscript possible, and won a prize no one could ignore.

Advice for young writers: Write what you love. And give yourself time (even if it takes ten years). If you let your craft take the space and time it needs, your love will shine through. Like all writers, Miller has a deep, emotional, intellectual bond with her subject matter. Miller writes about the great Greek myths and legends, drawing on not only years and years of academic study and theatrical adaptation, but also from a childhood flourishing under the light of these tales. Ultimately, what makes Miller’s story a special one to me is that she is living proof that if you love your subject enough, if you live and breath what you write about, you can achieve great success. The reason this message touches me so deeply is that oftentimes writers are taught that to be a writer means you must love writing above all else. You must write about anything and everything— take every chance you can get. That idea never much appealed to me, because I feel writing itself is not the end goal. Miller’s love for her subject matter is a firm reminder that writers don’t have to love writing more than everything else. Writers can have many loves and joys and thrills, which writing helps us better understand and share with others. Furthermore, I appreciate Miller’s story because her writing journey was a long, arduous one (like my own.) There are famous writers out there who managed to churn out their manuscript in a year or two years. Those writers can sometimes make us (myself included) feel lesser than for taking longer to produce our craft.

Miller has some advice for those of us knee-deep in revision after revision after revision.

According to her interview with Parnassus Musing, “Her Voice, At Last: Authors Madeline Miller and Victoria Schwab Discuss Miller’s New Novel, Circe,”

“Don’t give up! A bad draft stinks. It’s awful to look at something and realize that it’s not good enough. It’s especially awful if it’s your second/fifth/tenth bad one in a row. It’s normal to feel discouraged (or even despairing). Take a break from it, if you need one. Write a short story, read a favorite book, vent to a loved one, take a writing class. But then go back. Bad drafts are part of the process. You have to get through them to get to the good stuff. My fabulous former Latin teacher has a saying about studying Latin, which I think absolutely applies to writing: the students who succeed are the ones with the highest tolerance for frustration. If you love the story, and are passionately devoted to it, just keep showing up and putting one foot in front of the other and you will get there.”

Angie Thomas

On the come up, the Hate u give (THUG)

On the Come Up is one of those books I didn’t expect to love but LOVED. I read part of THUG before the library demanded I return it unfinished, and I adored Angie Thomas’s voice on the page and the stories she tells.

If you’d like to read more about On the Come Up before we discuss Angie Thomas’s career, feel free to check out Shante’s review here.

Angie Thomas is one of the most popular YA authors today and for good reason. She speaks the language. She gets the culture. And she unapologetically writes the Black-centered stories that Black youth especially need and love. But, as you can imagine, it was no easy feat convincing the publishing industry that it needs Black stories for Black readers. Angie Thomas states in her interview with Nathan Bransford titled “Bestseller Angie Thomas on writing, bestsellerdom, and diversity in publishing”,

“For a long time there was this myth in publishing that black kids don’t read, and THUG along with other great books has proven that to be a lie.”

So how did Angie Thomas do it? How did she get her stories published in a white-washed publishing industry— one that didn’t even believe that Black kids read books at all?

The short answer: Twitter.

But let’s back up and start from the beginning.

Angie Thomas, like many of us, starting writing for fun years before it became a professional career. And for her, it all started with fan fiction. When asked about her “eureka moment”— the moment she realized she wanted to be a writer— in an interview “Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give: 'Books play a huge part in resistance'” by Tim Lewis at The Guardian, Angie Thomas explained,

“My eureka moment came while I was writing soap-opera fan fiction!…I decided to write fan fiction for them and put it up online. So my eureka moment came when I had readers say: “Wow, you’re really good at this””

Angie Thomas studied creative writing at Belhaven University, where she graduated in 2011.

“Deciding to study creative writing, that was honestly one of the best things I could have ever done for myself,” Angie Thomas says in her interview, “‘Even I have my fears’: How Angie Thomas and ‘The Hate U Give’ went from Belhaven U. to the big screen” with Sereena Henderson at Mississippi Today.

She talks about the experiences at university that motivated her early writing in a Q&A with Sarah J. Robbins at Publishers Weekly,

“When I was in college, I, like Starr, [main character of THUG] was in two different worlds: I lived in what was considered the “hood,” but I went to a mostly white, Christian college in an upper-class neighborhood. I was close to my senior year when Oscar Grant was killed [in Oakland, Calif., in 2009]. At home, he was one of our own; at school, he deserved it. I was angry, and writing was the only way I could deal with it.”

“Author Angie Thomas Writes To 'Mirror' Young, Black Readers,” by Sam Sanders. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690391879/author-angie-thomas-writes-to-mirror-young-black-readers

In that same interview with Mississippi Today, we catch a glimpse of the origins of her debut novel, The Hate U Give,

“After having trouble deciding which direction to take her senior creative writing project, it was a pivotal conversation with a professor, her dealings with discrimination and the shooting death of Oscar Grant by a police officer in Oakland, Calif., that prompted Thomas to pen a collection of three short stories set in a neighborhood similar to Georgetown. Each story was told from the perspective of one of three main characters.”

These short stories were the foundation of what The Hate U Give would eventually become. But before her debut novel took off, Angie Thomas also attempted a children’s book, but faced intense rejection. According to her interview with The Guardian,

“Yeah, I had more than 150 rejections for that one.”

Many would think that hearing “no” 150 times would force most people into seclusion. Angie Thomas speaks to how she handled the abundant repetition of “no,” in her The Guardian interview,

“…what helped me was the community of unpublished authors out there on the internet, so you can connect and you can weep and mourn together. And I always had to remind myself that it only takes one yes to change everything. That’s what I tell aspiring writers now. I know writers who had 500 rejections, and more than that – but you just have to keep going and hope that you do get that one yes.”

So how did Angie Thomas finally find that “yes”? Here’s where Twitter comes in. According to her interview with The Guardian,

“Thomas’s break came when she cold-contacted a literary agent who was doing a Twitter Q&A.”

At the time, Angie Thomas worked as a secretary at a megachurch in Jackson, Mississippi. That’s where The Hate U Give finally met its yes. According to The Guardian,

“At nights – and during quiet periods in the day, she furtively admits – she worked on a young adult novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.”

In her television interview with Trevor Noah, Angie Thomas lays out exactly what happened at the critical moment when she landed an agent for THUG,

“A literary agency held a question and answer session on Twitter and I was considering sending the book [THUG] out but I was afraid… I called my mom. Once again, Black moms are like, You gotta ask the question if you want to know! So I asked if it was an appropriate topic for a young adult novel. An agent— he responded and was like, Yeah, I’d love to read that, actually. And I sent it to him. And he signed me.”

“ANGIE THOMAS - TELLING UNCOMFORTABLE STORIES & "ON THE COME UP" - EXTENDED INTERVIEW,” http://www.cc.com/video-clips/5io5d4/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-angie-thomas---telling-uncomfortable-stories----on-the-come-up----extended-interview

Funny enough, according to her interview with The Guardian,

“Her agent now is one of the 150-plus who turned down her first book.”

And that’s really all it took. Once Angie Thomas found an agent to represent her, the doors flew open. According to Mississippi Today,

“Thirteen publishers fought for the rights to publish The Hate U Give.”

The Guardian tells us,

“THUG, published in early 2017, went straight into the bestseller chart in the US and stayed there for a year. It was a hit here too, and named overall winner of the 2018 Waterstones children’s book prize. It has now sold more than 2m copies globally. Last year, a film adaptation was released, which has been a critical and commercial success.”

From there, Angie Thomas could do no wrong. Her second novel, On the Come Up, has furthered the young writer’s popularity and readers want more. Reflecting upon her experience becoming published, Angie Thomas shared with Written Word Worlds in a Q&A,

“It hasn’t been a ‘normal’ path to publishing — it’s been unique the entire time — and I’m amazed.”

How did Angie Thomas get published?: She participated in a Twitter Q&A session with a literary agency and connected with an agent who believed in her idea.

Advice for young writers: Sometimes traditional querying doesn’t work, no matter how brilliant your stories and writing are. When traditional querying leads you to a dead end, don’t give up. Keep your eyes open for other ways to connect with agents, like through social media. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram— they can be pathways to getting an agent’s attention. Ultimately, rejections from queries aren’t the end all be all as we were taught to believe. There are plenty of other routes to find an agent if you know where to look. Take it from Angie Thomas!

Supplementary Info

List of Literary Agents, Agencies, and Publishers:

When searching for a literary agent to represent you, or an editor to work on your manuscript, or a publishing house to sell your book, it’s important to find people out there who have already represented/worked with work similar to your own. That’s a potential intersection. That’s a potential alliance. That’s a potential success story. If you look at any of the writers we have discussed in this piece and see a kinship, a likeness, a similarity with your own work, then maybe it’s worth looking into the teams who brought their work to life, so they can bring your work to life too.

Below, for each writer, you’ll find information about agents, editors, and publishers. I only gathered information for the books I read, not for each of their titles. I have listed the title of each book next to the writer’s name for your reference.

**Marlon James (Black Leopard Red Wolf):**

Agent: Ellen Levine
Editor: Jake Morrissey
Publisher: Riverhead Books

**Zeyn Joukhadar (The Map of Salt and Stars):**

Editor: Trish Todd
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Agent: Michelle Brower

**Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones):**

Editor: Kathy Belden
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Agent: Jennifer Lyons

**Tomi Adeyemi (Children of Blood and Bone):**

Agents: Hillary Jacobson, Alexandra Machinist
Publisher: Macmillan

**Celeste Ng (Little Fires everywhere):**

**Madeline Miller (Circe):**

Agent Julie Barer
Editor: Lee Boudreaux
Publisher: Little, Brown

**Angie Thomas (On the come up):**

Tips for INDEPENDENT Study:

If you liked reading about these authors and their publication stories, and you want to do your own independent research into other writers, here are a few tips to help you most easily find the information you need. This is entirely based off of my experience writing this piece. I’d love to hear any additional tips should you pursue this knowledge too.

Check a writer’s professional website first. Some writers, like Tomi Adeyemi, may also write their own blogs separate from their books. These blogs can contain unique and useful information about publishing. For example, if you know a writer is also a writing coach on the side, they will most likely have a blog you can reference with tips for success. Check these blogs before anything else; they might contain all the information you’ll need.
Reference The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and Writer’s Digest. Over the course of researching for this piece, I stumbled upon a pattern. Usually, these three publications had the best information about how writers get published. If you are staring at a Google Search page full of articles and you see any by these three sources, check them first. It might save you time.
Watch video interviews. Watching writers speak at events can reveal new information that you may not otherwise find in print.
Read the Acknowledgements in the back of the book. There you may find important names for agents, editors, and others.

now, Let’s take a brief moment to pause and breathe after reading

…

Why?

I, personally, am writing my first book and am about to begin my query process. But a huge chunk of me genuinely believes I will never be published. Not necessarily because I think I’m a bad writer. And not because I think my story isn’t worth telling. But because the industry is so huge and I’m so small— why would I be the lucky one to get published out of the millions out there who are also trying?

When I hear that part of myself talking in the back of my head, it makes the idea of publication seem impossible. The advice that I’ve gathered here from these successful writers may make me happy for them— like “Yay, you made it!”— but it almost makes me question even more the likelihood of my own publication.

In that vein, I’d like to admit something: Writing this piece was really hard for me. And so I understand if it was maybe hard for some of you to read.

As I’d sit down each day to write and research for this piece, I’d often find myself wanting to stop and do something else. While I read these stories from successful writers, I couldn’t help but feel jealous. To be clear: I am UNBELIEVABLY thrilled for all of the writers I’ve featured here. I’m so incredibly happy that they got published and that I am blessed enough to live in a time where I can read them and celebrate them. But, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit at the same time that I had to turn away every so often, just to shut up that voice in my head telling me, “You will never be them.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in that feeling.

For those of you out there like me who are reading this piece and can’t help but feel even more so now that getting published is impossible, you aren’t alone. There’s nothing any of us can say to erase that insecurity from our minds. But I can say this: Try. The best any of us can do is try. If we get those rejection letters in the mail, and we can’t imagine trying again, give it a few weeks and rest. Then, if you’re up for it, try again another way.

The biggest take away from this piece for me was the realization that there are many different avenues to get published. If the first way doesn’t get you there, try another. It can be overwhelming to have so many options, so just start where you feel drawn in and go from there.

I can’t silence that voice in your head. But I can tell you that I wish the very best for you. I believe in you.

Your achievements, may they be many. And your slip ups may they be great teachers. I hope your journey from here takes you to unexpected and beautiful places. I hope you take time to rest. I hope you eat all those delicious foods your body craves. I hope you explore a new neighborhood and find home there. I hope your readers lift you up. I hope your agents and editors hear and celebrate your voice, while encouraging positive change. I hope your publishing house (should you choose that route) connects you with the kinds of readers you want to inspire. I hope you teach what you have learned. I hope you can demand from the chaos moments to separate and reflect. I hope your creations are fruitful and delicious. I wish the best for you.

And maybe one day you’ll be able to share your story with the rest of us.

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“How Did They Get Published?”