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Topic : How difficult is it to get published? - The Objective Version Possible Duplicate: Does anyone know the average number of times a new author has to submit before acceptance? I've - selfpublishingguru.com

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Does anyone know the average number of times a new author has to submit before acceptance?

I've been looking through this site to understand the difficulty in getting published, and what I see is lots of subjective answers, nothing very objective. Can anyone comment on that?

Here's the deal: Let's say that tomorrow morning 10,000 people wake up with the greatest idea for the novel of the century. What happens next? My understanding is that around 9,000 of them may try to write it but will give up at this stage because they know the odds are against them, and they can put their writing time to better use.

Now we're down to 1,000 people who have fully written and editted (well, according to them) manuscripts that are ready to get shipped off to a publisher/agent. A percentage of these may get read by someone at the publisher who like them enough to pass them on to someone in authority. A (small) percentage of these will warrent an offer to the author. Probably most of those will result in some type of contract, and then a number of those will be purchasable at a bookstore.

Okay, so here're the real question: At each stage in the process, how many authors do we lose? Of those 10k originals, how many will be selling their book at the bookstore?

Any ideas?

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There is absolutely no way to give a truly objective answer to this question, which is exactly why you keep seeing subjective responses. We have determined through other posts that about 1 author in 1000 will be offered a contract for representation from an agent. That still doesn't guarantee even then that the book will get published.

There are just too many factors that can influence the final answer, such as the genre of the book, the hot trends at the time the book is submitted, and the timing in general. If you submit a suspense novel at the same time that three top selling authors in that genre are pushing new works, then publishers may consider the market to be "saturated", which is a polite way of saying you don't have a chance in hell at competing with those three established authors.

The fact that agents and publishers do not keep track of the number of manuscripts they review OR reject makes it virtually impossible to determine a truly objective number. Even the numbers you offer were derived after making certain assumptions, so you are already working with a subjective hypothesis.

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