I read about 200 manuscripts a year. Most of them don’t get published. That sentence sounds brutal, and I don’t mean it to be, but it’s the truth, and I think aspiring authors deserve the truth more than they deserve encouragement. The publishing industry runs on hope, which is a beautiful fuel but a terrible map. So here are some things I wish every aspiring author knew before they sent their first query letter or uploaded their first manuscript to a submission portal. I’m going to be honest. Some of this will sting. All of it is meant to help.

The first thing, and I cannot say this loudly enough: finish the book. I get emails every week from writers who want to discuss their concept, their outline, their first three chapters, their vision. They want to know if we’d be interested in publishing a book that doesn’t exist yet. The answer, almost always, is that we can’t evaluate something that isn’t written. Plenty of brilliant concepts fall apart at page fifty. Plenty of mediocre concepts turn into extraordinary books because the writer pushed through the difficult middle and found something unexpected on the other side. You don’t have a book until you have a completed manuscript. Everything before that is a wish.

I understand why people want validation before they finish. Writing a book is lonely, exhausting work. It takes months or years. You’re making something out of nothing, with no guarantee that anyone will ever read it. The temptation to seek reassurance partway through is completely human. But the publishing industry isn’t set up to give you that reassurance. We evaluate finished work. That’s the deal. So finish the book first, then worry about publishing.

The second thing: your first draft is not ready to submit. I have never, in my entire career, read a first draft that was submission-ready. This isn’t a reflection on the quality of the writing. It’s a fact about how writing works. First drafts are for getting the story down, for figuring out what you’re actually trying to say. Second drafts are for making it readable. Third and subsequent drafts are for making it good. If you’re submitting a manuscript that hasn’t been revised at least twice, you’re submitting too early.

I know that revision feels less creative than writing. It’s slower, more methodical, less fun. You’re cutting scenes you love, reworking dialogue that sounded great at midnight but reads flat in the morning, tightening prose that sprawls. It’s surgery. But the difference between a published book and a manuscript that gets rejected is almost always the revision. The ideas might be identical. The quality of the revision is what separates them.

Third: get feedback from someone who isn’t your friend or family member. I say this gently, because I know it’s hard to hear. Your spouse thinks your book is wonderful. Your mom cried at the ending. Your college roommate said it’s the best thing they’ve ever read. These people love you, and their support matters, but their feedback is unreliable because they can’t separate the work from the person. You need a reader who doesn’t care about your feelings, someone who will tell you that chapter seven drags, that the protagonist is unlikable in the wrong way, that the ending feels rushed. Writing groups, beta readers, and freelance editors exist for this reason. Use them. The money you spend on a developmental editor before submitting will save you years of rejection letters.

Fourth: learn the business. I’m continually surprised by how many aspiring authors know nothing about how publishing works. They don’t know the difference between an agent and an editor. They don’t know what a query letter is. They don’t know that most traditional publishers don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. They don’t know what an advance is or how royalties work. This isn’t their fault, exactly, because publishing is opaque by nature and doesn’t go out of its way to educate newcomers. But ignorance puts you at a disadvantage. Read about the industry. Follow agents and editors on social media (many of them are remarkably open about what they’re looking for and how the process works). Understand the basic path from manuscript to bookshelf, even if your particular path ends up being different.

Fifth: rejection is not a verdict on your worth as a writer. This is maybe the most common thing I tell authors, and it’s the hardest to internalize. A rejection letter means one person, at one company, on one particular day, decided not to publish your book. It doesn’t mean the book is bad. It might mean the book isn’t right for that publisher. It might mean they just acquired something similar. It might mean the editor who read it was having a terrible day. It might mean the market for that genre has softened. There are a thousand reasons for rejection that have nothing to do with the quality of your writing.

I’ve rejected manuscripts that went on to be published successfully by other houses. I’ve rejected manuscripts that, in hindsight, I should have fought harder for. Publishing is subjective. Every editor and agent has different tastes, different priorities, different blind spots. The book that one publisher passes on might be exactly what another publisher is looking for. Persistence matters. Not blind persistence, where you submit the same unrevised manuscript to a hundred places and blame the industry when it doesn’t land, but thoughtful persistence, where you take feedback seriously, revise, improve, and keep trying.

Sixth: the query letter matters more than you think. I know this seems like a small thing compared to the book itself, but the query letter is your first impression, and at many publishers, it determines whether anyone reads your manuscript at all. A bad query letter on a great book is a tragedy. I’ve seen it happen. The letter is rambling, or it gives away the entire plot, or it spends three paragraphs on the author’s biography and one sentence on the book, or it opens with a rhetorical question (“What if you could travel back in time?”), which is the query-letter equivalent of starting a speech with “Webster’s dictionary defines…”). Write a tight, specific, compelling query letter. There are excellent resources online about how to do this. Study them.

Seventh: platform matters, but not in the way you think. Every aspiring author hears that they need a “platform,” usually defined as a social media following, a blog, a podcast, some kind of public presence. And yes, having an audience before you publish helps with marketing. But I’ve seen too many writers spend so much time building a platform that they never finish their book. The platform is a tool, not the goal. If you have to choose between writing 1,000 words of your novel and writing a Twitter thread about the writing process, choose the novel. Every time. Your future publisher will be more impressed by a completed, polished manuscript than by 10,000 Instagram followers.

Eighth: self-publishing is a legitimate choice, not a consolation prize. The stigma around self-publishing has diminished enormously in the past decade, and for good reason. Some excellent books are self-published. Some authors make more money self-publishing than they would through a traditional house. But, and this is a big but, self-publishing done well requires you to do everything a publisher would do: editing, cover design, interior layout, marketing, distribution, pricing. If you skip any of those steps, it shows. A self-published book with a terrible cover and no editing will sell twelve copies to your immediate family. A self-published book that’s been professionally edited, beautifully designed, and intelligently marketed can compete with traditionally published titles. Know what you’re getting into.

Ninth: comparison is poison. Every writer I know, myself included, spends too much time comparing their career to other writers’ careers. Why did their book get a six-figure advance? Why did they get a New York Times review? Why are they on their fifth novel while I’m still struggling with my first? This thinking leads nowhere good. Every writer’s path is different. Some writers publish their first novel at twenty-five. Some publish at sixty-five. Some never publish a novel and write brilliant short stories instead. The only meaningful comparison is between your current work and your previous work. If you’re getting better, you’re on the right track.

Tenth: read. This should be obvious, but I’ve met aspiring writers who don’t read much, and it always shows in their work. You can’t write well if you don’t read widely. Read in your genre. Read outside your genre. Read books you disagree with. Read books that are so good they make you want to quit writing, and then keep writing anyway. Read nonfiction. Read poetry, even if you’d never write it. Read old books and new books and books from other countries. Every book you read teaches you something about how language works, how stories are constructed, how to move a reader from one emotional state to another. There is no substitute for this education, and it never ends. I’d also suggest reading with a pencil in hand, marking passages that work well and trying to understand why they work. Most writers I know learned more about craft from paying close attention to other writers’ sentences than from any workshop or textbook.

There’s a twelfth thing that rarely comes up in advice columns but matters enormously: know your genre. I don’t mean you have to write within genre conventions, though there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean you should know what already exists in the space where your book will live. If you’ve written a literary thriller, you should be able to name ten other literary thrillers published in the past five years. You should know what they did well and what they didn’t. You should know which publishers released them. This knowledge helps you in two ways. First, it helps you position your book in a query letter: “My novel will appeal to readers of X and Y” is useful information for an agent or editor. Second, it helps you understand whether the market is saturated with books like yours or whether there’s an opening. Ignorance of your genre is not a sign of originality. It’s a sign that you haven’t done your homework.

And one more thing about timing: publishing moves slowly. Glacially, by the standards of most industries. If a publisher accepts your manuscript today, the book might not be on shelves for eighteen months to two years. The editorial process alone, developmental editing, copyediting, proofreading, can take six to nine months. Then there’s cover design, interior layout, catalog placement, marketing setup, and the actual printing and distribution. If you’re expecting quick results, recalibrate. The timeline is long, and patience isn’t just a virtue; it’s a job requirement.

I want to add a final thought that’s maybe the most important, though it’s less practical than the others: protect your love of writing. The publishing process is designed to test that love. Rejection, revision, long waits, conflicting feedback, market pressures, comparison, self-doubt, all of it conspires to make you forget why you started writing in the first place. The writers who survive in this business are the ones who, beneath all the frustration and anxiety, still love the act of putting words on a page. They love the puzzle of a sentence. They love the feeling of a scene clicking into place. They love the weird, solitary, slightly unhinged project of making something out of nothing.

If you’ve read this far and you’re still planning to write your book, good. That stubbornness is exactly what you’ll need. The publishing world is not waiting for you. It doesn’t owe you anything. But if you write something honest and work hard to make it good and learn enough about the business to give it a fair shot, you have a chance. That’s all anyone gets. A chance. What you do with it is up to you.

We publish books at ScrollWorks because we believe there are always new voices worth hearing. If you think you might be one of them, we’re listening. Just finish the book first.